Because the hippocampus and language centers tend to malfunction under extreme stress and trauma memories tend to lack crucial contextual information, reminders of the trauma can have a frightening “here-and-now” quality, and students with traumas related to those in fictional narratives may find it harder to articulate what they know. Additionally, students may find their attentional biases for stimuli related to their own trauma distracting and, as a result, to move away from either-or interpretations. Therefore, teachers of students with PTSD should place a great deal of emphasis on collecting evidence, forming interpretations, and revising evaluations (i.e., analysis) based on that empirical evidence. The static nature of a novel—the immutable quality of the printed word—means the student can review pages of the text, look for clues, and distinguish between the now of their reading and the then of a story. By suggesting that students additionally mine their own experiences for evidence that supports some of the claims they want to make about Out of the Dust and its truthfulness, teachers authorize seeing traumatic experience also as one form of valuable expertise the students can draw upon. Moreover, the poetic form of Out of the Dust may suggest to students that the imagistic, snapshot quality of their own memories might find a satisfying form in poetry. Writing their response in poetic form may enable them both to articulate the implicit knowledge they bring to the analysis and to do so in an aesthetically pleasing way, additionally reframing and validating personal experience and evidence they have long found painfully necessary to avoid.