The horrors continue unabated and how, exactly, are we supposed to practice writing, or any art form? There are many brilliant creatives who have answered that question—check out the Writing CoLab’s collection of essays for starters—but that doesn’t necessarily provide any of us with an answer on a horrific day. Which they are all seeming horrific.
Today I noted that the word authoritarian has as its root AUTHOR. How had I missed that?
Author: … the originator or maker of anything ….
Which I am, which we all are, of our own lives, yes? Yes, with caveats.*
But before we are authors we must be writers. And writers are just human beings, tender and funny and broken and hopeful, putting words on the page one after another. No better and no worse than anyone else.
We get hurt, we giggle, we grieve, we pull practical jokes, we dance around in our underwear to Taylor Swift. We have therapists and limited diets and gym routines and we’ve lost parents and children and friends and beloved pets.
We make coffee in the mornings when we’ve gotten up at 4:30 because we can’t sleep, we watch the sun rise, we watch the mist burn off under that magnificent sun, then we stare at the blank page and decide maybe we should be poets, we write a few lines, those sound like the start of a story and on a good day we manage several paragraphs. We eat supper and sit on the back porch and wish we still smoked while the sun sinks.
I’m fifty-NINE, y’all, and I’m pretty much OK being a regular person who’s a writer who’s not gonna have a Glorious Writing Career (not enough years left). But I have made a decent novel I’m revising, and I have some short stories I want to see published. Sitting down to the empty page remains one of the best parts of every day. I am lucky ‘cuz when I step away from the horror I notice I have several best parts of many days—the coffee part is pretty awesome, and my partner is a delight, and the big bluestem in the front yard makes me crazy-happy with its giganticness.
And here’s a blessing of living as a regular-person-who’s-a-writer in this decade of my lifespan, under this would-be authoritarian administration. I’m able to align my choices for action with the wisdom that pleasing others, “winning” at anything, writing Great Literature—none of it matters when you gotta dance, when you gotta weep, when you gotta organize to manifest the promise of democracy in our imperfect Constitution.
The folks who were impossible to please won’t show up to boogie or offer consolation, and you wouldn’t want their judge-y in the room anyway. The people you worked so hard to be better than—they won’t either. You might have accidentally hurt them too badly. Books actually cannot dance or weep.
But the people who love you, who forgive you, who ask how your day was and don’t freak out when you mumble about the muse being on strike? They will show up. They will want to dance and to grieve with you.
BONUS WISDOM! These folks will also help you attend to your writerly soul, if you let them. And the world needs our writerly souls, people! As Ursula LeGuin said:
… hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries–the realists of a larger reality. [bolded by Lesley]
So during these authoritarian times, let’s author lives full of the folks who support us, and whom we support in return. Let’s author lives of mutual respect, of mutual aid. Of the hilariousness inherent in dancing in your undies. Our dear sweet soft human bodies, dancing! Be one of the authors that imagines a better world.
May it be so.
*Those of us who are under direct physical threat because of paperwork or skin color do not have the same level of authorship as those who are currently free of physical threats.
One way to be such an author: engage with Indivisible, and/or their Truth Brigade #bebrave #dissentispatriotic
the Art of Practice 
Well said. Well said. Lisa
Thank you, Lisa.
What a bright spot this was in my day! I’ve been thinking of you and was excited to see you’d posted. I’ve been saving it for the evening after everything is done so I could read it in as one of the best parts of my day. This made me feel the same way Mary Oliver’s poetry makes me feel: alive, drenched in the small beauties in the world, and not wanting to waste a moment of life.
Andrea, thank you for these kind words and being drenched in the small beauties–words that prove you are a poet yourself!
Lesley, this is just right. Jennifer Cooper sent it to me after a conversation last night, and it touched a spot I need. Thank you. It makes me think of Ferlinghetti’s Populist Manifesto.
And here are the last few lines.
Poetry the common carrier
for the public to higher places
than other wheels can carry it.
Poetry still falls from the skies
into our streets still open.
They haven’t put up the barricades, yet,
the streets still alive with faces,
lovely men and women still walking there,
in the eyes of all the secret of all
still buried there,
Whitman’s wild children still sleeping there,
Awake and walk in the open air.
Charlie–I did not even know Ferlinghetti had a Populist Manifesto and am glad to see it. Thank you.