SongWriter is a podcast that turns stories into songs, featuring Questlove, David Gilmour (Pink Floyd), Joyce Carol Oates, David Sedaris, Susan Orlean, and Steve Earle.
Playwright and teacher Patrice Francis had to admit she was a little scared. She had agreed to write a dramatic narrative reflecting the research of Dr. Stephanie Hutcheson about post-traumatic growth after Hurricane Dorian in The Bahamas.
“A piece of prose from a blank page, I mean, you sit there and you’re not sure exactly where to start!” Patrice said. “I was, like, ‘I want to be able to do this justice because this is representing real people, and their stories.’”
Even with that internal pressure, Patrice managed to finish the piece, and performed it live at the Fuze Arts Fair at Bahamar in front of an audience of friends and neighbors. A longtime adherent to positive psychology, Patrice wrote about holding on to gratitude, even in the face of the terrifying death and destruction caused by Dorian.
“When you live life from a place of gratitude and hope, loss is not the end of the story,” Patrice said. “It is a part of the story, but it is a semicolon rather than a period.”
After Patrice’s performance, Dr. Hutcheson took a moment to describe the terrible impact of the hurricane. “We had never experienced anything like Dorian before,” Dr. Hutcheson said. “It was a category five; it sat over Abaco and Grand Bahama for two days. The death toll, I don’t think we still can calculate how many people were lost.”
Still, Dr. Hutcheson did not want to catalog the distress and dysfunction that often occurs after a natural disaster like Dorian. Instead, she wanted to understand the ways people transcended the experience. Several themes emerged from the interviews Dr. Hutcheson conducted with the people who experienced post-traumatic growth: Strength in Spiritual Bonds, Strength in Social Bonds, Personal Transformation, and Openness to New Opportunities. Dr. Hutcheson told the audience that she was amazed at how Patrice was able to seamlessly weave these ideas into her performance.
“You were able to embed all of those themes, and I was sitting there in awe,” Dr. Hutcheson said. “Oftentimes people won’t get to read a journal or an article about research but this was presented in such a user-friendly way that people could connect to it. People were able to hear that research!”
Songwriter and musician Selah Moonie had her own struggle writing her new song. Like many artists who take part in SongWriter, she began by writing one song, only to discard it after listening back to the recording. The night before the live show with Patrice, Selah couldn’t sleep.
“I prayed, I meditated, I stayed up, I waited,” Selah remembered. Finally, a new song started to appear. “You know, the lines started to come, and as they came I just kept recording. I stayed up all night long.”
Reflecting Dr. Hutcheson’s research, Selah wanted her song to be about hope. While this was inspired in part by the stories and themes in the research, Selah emphasized that it is also the message she herself needed to hear. “The entire country was in deep grief, because we’re all connected,” Selah said. “Whenever a tragedy impacts one, it impacts all, as a country, as a nation.”
Season seven of SongWriter is made possible by a grant from Templeton World Charity Foundation.
