Beyond the Darkness

In the prologue to Natasha Trethewey’s 2020 book, Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir, she describes with startling detail “the last image of [her] mother, but for the photographs taken of her body at the crime scene.” The image is a formal portrait of her mother Gwendolyn Ann Turnbough taken just months before she was murdered at the hands of her ex-husband when Trethewey was 19 years old. Trethewey writes of seeing the photo after her mother’s death and becoming aware of a certain darkness that loomed in the background, as if a warning: “Looking at it now, with all I know of what was to come, I see what else the photographer has done. He’s shot her like this: her black dress black as the scrim behind her so that, but for her face, she is in fact part of that darkness, emerging from it as from the depths of memory.” This searching for a warning is something I, too, have experienced as the family member of a murder victim.

When I was 15, I hid in my bedroom while my grandmother was murdered by my mother in the home we shared. While I do not have a photo of my grandmother taken just before she was killed to show me the looming darkness that I’m almost certain was there, I look for those warnings in other places. Years later, I retrace my steps from the days and weeks leading up to that night, force myself to recreate conversations I might have had with her or my mother. As a nonfiction reader and writer, I’m most drawn to stories that capture the experiences of those who have endured this unique grief I wouldn’t wish on anyone: Sarah Perry’s After the Eclipse, Vince Granata’s Everything Is Fine, Cristina Rivera Garza’s Liliana’s Invincible Summer. As an instructor of creative nonfiction, though, my position as a survivor-witness poses challenges when it comes to teaching such texts in the classroom. 

“This piece is sort of depressing,” said one student after reading Trethewey’s prologue for homework in my undergraduate nonfiction workshop.

“It’s pretty heavy,” another joined in.  

“Why don’t we ever read anything fun?” one asked, emboldened. 

I can admit that I’m biased in that these are the stories I feel matter the most. They are the stories I wish I’d had access to when I was my students’ age, to feel less alone, to know that there was no shame in telling my own story. They are, perhaps more importantly, stories I hope can instill empathy in young people. When I hear negative comments about the kind of readings I assign, I feel a childish need to defend myself, to out myself as a crime survivor so they know these stories aren’t just the stuff of horror movies or true crime documentaries. 

I’ve found that the “depressing” stuff, which is how students might categorize my work, gives students permission to write about the ugly and dark things they might be carrying.

As an educator, I’m an advocate for bringing your whole self to the classroom, but I always fear running the risk of trauma-dumping or crossing a line. I know some of my students have googled me while perusing the course catalog and read my writing about my grandmother’s death. Sometimes they bring it up (usually in private or by email), sometimes they don’t. I’ve found that the “depressing” stuff, which is how students might categorize my work, gives students permission to write about the ugly and dark things they might be carrying. It gives them permission to tell their truths, even if those truths don’t necessarily involve crimes or life-altering traumatic experiences. 

We live in a world oversaturated with images of violence, especially for our students, who have grown up inundated with technology and as such, with unprecedented access to footage of mass and public violence. There is no shortage of scholarship on the harmful effects of growing up with active shooter drills and near-constant access to social media. On the first day of a new semester, when I ask my students to tell the class about a piece of art or media they engaged with over the break, there are always multiple students who talk about the latest viral true crime documentary or television series. In recent years, students have been obsessed with the Menendez brothers, Karen Read, Amanda Knox, Jeffrey Dahmer, and others. 

“Oh yeah, I binged that one, too!” they’ll respond to each other. I love seeing students create those important first-day community bonds, but sometimes those connections can devolve into conversations about TikTok sleuths or which students think the accused actually “did it.”  

Last year, after receiving pushback on the Trethewey excerpt in my undergraduate nonfiction workshop, a question occurred to me: why do students love watching voyeuristic true crime stories—which often exploit the very people involved—but seem resistant to reading firsthand accounts written by the real human beings at the center? The influence of these narratives is something I’ve dealt with over the years with my own writing: in workshop, classmates would compare my experiences to a Law & Order episode or a true crime podcast about a murder in a small town. 

Why do students love watching voyeuristic true crime stories—which often exploit the very people involved—but seem resistant to reading firsthand accounts written by the real human beings at the center?

Now that I was on the other side of the workshop classroom, my students presented me with an opportunity to reframe our assigned readings—not as part of the true crime tradition necessarily, but as worthy of the same attention they give that genre. 

“What are some tropes of the true crime genre?” I asked, grabbing a marker to make a list on the board. “What do most of the documentaries tend to do?”

The students had so many answers ranging from dramatic reenactments to “cringey” interviews to images like yellow caution tape and handcuffs. One answer that kept coming up was photographs. Photos of the crime scene. Photos of blood spatter. Photos of the dead before they died. Photos of body bags. Photos of loved ones at the scene. Photos of the accused in the form of mugshots or pictures from before the crime. Students talked about how the documentaries show the audience seemingly mundane photos from the accused’s life: their childhood school portraits, family photos, smiling selfies from vacations. 

I connected their observations back to the passage I’d chosen for the class assignment, Trethewey’s prologue about the portrait of her mother. I put the excerpt back on the screen, and read aloud the part where Trethewey writes:  

There’s a video recording of my arrival [to the crime scene], made by a local news station, and so the image is not only of those few moments, but of watching myself—from a distance—entering my former life for what I thought to be the last time. In the footage I walk up the stairs to the door and step in, shutting it behind me. When I think of it now I don’t hear any words, the volume on mute. Perhaps the reporter spoke our names; or perhaps she did not, calling my mother victim instead. And in my mind’s eye a caption fills the bottom of the screen: it identifies me as daughter of the murdered woman. Even then I felt as though I were watching someone else—a young woman on the cusp of her life, adulthood and bereavement gripping her at once.

Here was Trethewey speaking in terms of photo and video—the language of true crime—but from the position of a very real daughter who’d lost her very real mother. The energy in the classroom was almost electric even though everyone was completely still. Even the most vocal students sat back in their chairs, simply looking at the words on the screen. One young woman—who would go on to write about her own loss of a loved one at a young age—wiped a tear from her cheek. 

“How would this be different if we were watching it in a true crime documentary?” I asked. 

“It wouldn’t be as powerful,” a student said. 

“It wouldn’t capture her raw emotion, just the way she looked,” said another.

“It wouldn’t tell us what that moment means now.” 

I was heartened by their responses, especially those who had complained about the reading at the beginning of class. From there, I asked students to pull out their smart phone camera rolls and find a photo from a moment that seemed mundane at the time but felt significant now. A photo at a precipice, a moment they didn’t know would stick with them the way it had. Next, I had them write ekphrastic essays based on their selected photos. I told them they should begin the piece, like Trethewey did, with the line, “The last image of [blank] . . .” and craft a scene with concrete detail and dialogue. 

In just 80 minutes, we went from questioning the purpose of the homework to discussing true crime stereotypes to crafting our own stories of transformation.

At the end of the class session, several students volunteered to read their drafts. One student wrote about the last trip with his parents before being diagnosed with a learning disability. One wrote about going to her town’s Dairy Queen and running into her ex-best friend for the first time in years (the photo, interestingly, did not feature any people, just a Blizzard in a blue cup). One wrote about her first time on an airplane at the age of 21. Students applauded each other’s work and offered supportive feedback. 

In just 80 minutes, we went from questioning the purpose of the homework to discussing true crime stereotypes to crafting our own stories of transformation. The conversation allowed me to see a new kind of value in the true crime genre that I hadn’t recognized before. What had started as a low-energy slog through required reading became a pathway of genuine connection and discovery. As a teacher and a crime survivor—two undeniable and inextricable parts of my identity—I was gratified to have found a way to plumb my experience to get my students to see beyond their initial reaction to Tretheway’s story.  Beyond the darkness, they were able to find an unexpected place to connect with others, one that encouraged them to interrogate what makes a story worth reading.

Featured photo by Alexander Lunyov on Unsplash.