Writing because of Silence and against it.

Here’s a revised, cleaner version with grammar, structure, and repetition tightened up and tone made more professional:

Why write, and why help others to write about their past and their present? Across communities shaped by political violence, forced migration, racism, and structural inequality, writing becomes a lifeline. It offers people a space to name their pain and imagine possibilities for justice where institutions have failed to provide it.

Since the 1980s, psychologists have studied “expressive writing”: brief, structured writing about stressful or traumatic experiences. In many studies, people are invited to write for 15–20 minutes on several occasions about events that still trouble them, while comparison groups write about neutral topics. Those who practice expressive writing often show better physical and psychological outcomes, including fewer visits to health centers and modest improvements in mood and immune function.

Research has also expanded beyond private journaling to creative writing in many forms: poetry, narrative, fiction, and hybrid texts. One hospital-based study with children and adolescents, for example, found that a single poetry session combining reading and writing reduced self-reported fear, sadness, anger, worry, and fatigue immediately afterward. Taken together, these findings suggest that creative writing can support emotional regulation, perspective-taking, and connection with others, especially in communities living with chronic stress.

For many in Latin America, however, these conclusions simply affirm long-standing practices. Long before psychology developed the term “expressive writing,” communities relied on testimonios, letters, diaries, and poetry as tools for survival, remembrance, and political struggle. In Peru, the Bay Area, and throughout the Latin American diaspora, storytelling has functioned as a cultural backbone for communities whose histories are often undervalued or dismissed. When states erase evidence, when archives disappear, and when public discourse minimizes or denies harm, notebooks, digital self-testimonies, poetry circles, classrooms, and kitchen tables become a counter-archive.

Writing to build

Writing is not only a way of looking back; it is also a way of building forward. On the page, survivors and communities can try out new words, new forms of relationship, and new images of justice that do not yet exist in law or policy. Draft by draft, people learn to trust their own voice again, to speak to others, and to imagine themselves as part of a shared story rather than as isolated cases.

In this sense, writing helps to build at least three things at once. First, it builds inner structure: a narrative that can hold experiences that once felt chaotic or unspeakable. Second, it builds community, as stories circulate in workshops, reading groups, and informal spaces, and people recognize themselves in one another’s words. Third, it helps build pressure for change: creative texts and testimonies can document injustice when legal and political systems fall short, reclaim agency in experiences rooted in powerlessness, and transform private pain into shared knowledge and collective resistance.

Why, then, help others to write? Because trauma isolates, and writing reconnects. Each time a survivor writes—even a short sentence—there is an act of reordering the world, of asserting meaning where violence imposed chaos. Writing cannot change what happened, but it can change how a person relates to the memory and help transform it into a call for change. In Latin America and the diaspora, written testimonies have shaped human rights work and transitional justice processes, allowing those most affected by violence to speak in their own words and to challenge official silence.

Group-based writing spaces add another dimension. Collective workshops can reduce shame, offer solidarity, and build trust. They help participants see that their experiences, while deeply personal, are also linked to broader histories of racism, classism, colonialism, and gendered violence. Extensive reviews of arts engagement show consistent links between participation in arts and creative activities and outcomes such as reduced loneliness, stronger social ties, and greater civic involvement, suggesting that arts-based spaces, including writing circles, can foster belonging and participation in public life.

At Urpi Collective, these insights guide our practice. We reject the idea that writing belongs only to a professional or academic elite. Survivors, migrants, workers, caregivers, youth, and elders all have the right to name their experiences and to be taken seriously as authors of their own histories. Through workshops, community events, publishing initiatives, and cross-border collaborations, we work to create spaces where trauma can be voiced without ridicule, creativity is recognized as a healing tool, intergenerational memory is protected, and justice is imagined and sustained through story.

This is why we write, and why we help others to write: so that memory does not disappear into silence, and so that those most affected by violence remain at the center of the stories that shape our collective future.

Urpi Collective

Works Cited

Díaz Facio Lince, Victoria Eugenia. La escritura del duelo. Universidad de los Andes / Editorial EAFIT, 2019.

Fernández, Nona. La dimensión desconocida. Random House, 2016.

Lira, Elizabeth. “Testimonio: trauma, verdad y reparación.” Desacatos: Revista de Ciencias Sociales, no. 62, 2020, pp. 18–35

Restrepo, Luis Carlos. El derecho a la ternura. Arango Editores, 1994

Pennebaker, James W., and John F. Evans. Expressive Writing: Words That Heal. Idyll Arbor, 2014.