Tag Archives: Books

Authoring a life under authoritarianism

Posted on August 12, 2025 | 6 comments

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

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It’s been a year + …

Posted on February 11, 2019 | 18 comments

… since I’ve posted a blog. My silence due to a combination of overwhelm logistically, personally, professionally, with a dollop of self-doubt on all fronts.

My last post, about being kind to ourselves and giving ourselves permission to disengage from situations and individuals that damage us, received an ugly anonymous response (I don’t allow anonymous and/or hate-full comments). Since then, I’ve heard that some experience my reflections about my difficult experiences as “white woman tears” and thus not worth considering.

And I bought into that. I thought: I’m a person of privileged social, economic and educational class. I don’t really suffer. I don’t have anything to offer to the unfolding bedlam. I put my head down, finished my MFA, quit blogging here, and prioritized family and personal matters.

That withdrawal put me back in a headset that I’ll call “juvenile,” reflecting that stage of development when we have inklings of our gifts, but not much mastery over them, or power in the world.

Reading Women

As when I was an actual juvenile, chronologically, I’ve spent a lot of this withdrawal reading. Muriel Spark and Zora Neale Hurston and Mavis Gallant; Deborah Levy and Penelope Fitzgerald and Zadie Smith. All writers who happened to be women, all writing despite bedlam of various degrees, all writers who tell Truth and truth.

I’ve been reminded by their Truth and truth that it’s not what others think that’s important, it’s the showing-up-and-writing that’s important. Maybe my stories will be meaningful, maybe they won’t; maybe they’ll be beautiful, maybe they won’t. But it’s not for me to say: it’s for me to write and publish.

Why have I needed to go through this cycle of self-doubt and -awareness, again? I don’t know. I wish it didn’t suck up so much of my time. But it has, and so far as I can tell, there’s nothing to be gained by lamenting what has been.

So I’m taking my own advice and sitting down and writing. Trusting the stories will show up if I do. Remembering these words from Alexandra Stoddard (note hole at the top: I’ve pinned this card to many bulletin boards in front of many writing desks):

Slow down calm down

May it be so.

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Rome is burning.

Posted on April 21, 2015 | 4 comments

Warning: a bit of a rant follows.

Do you have a Big Kroger Store in your neighborhood yet? These massive 100K+ square foot stores boast about the hundreds of thousands of items they contain. They post their mission statements, which invariably refer to “providing a pleasant shopping experience.” They forget they are a grocery store. People come for food. If customers need an alphabetized index to find eggs and milk, the store is too big.  But wait! On aforementioned index in the last Big Kroger’s I visited (in Lexington, KY), milk and eggs aren’t listed. There’s “dairy” and that area of the store has both milk and eggs. Yet last I checked an egg is essentially an unfertilized embryo and not, uh, dairy. These stores are like a Work of Art that requires an interpretative talk. Does it touch my heart? Yes? Then it’s Art. No? Then it’s an academic pursuit. Can I find what I need for supper in 5 minutes or less? Yes? Then it’s a grocery store. No? Then it’s another reason to re-up my membership at the human-scale co-op. I don’t want to study an index when I go grocery shopping. I want to load my cart with the necessities* and get the hell out of there as fast as possible.

Not on this board: Eggs. Milk. Flour.

Not listed on this grocery-store index: Eggs. Milk.

If the store is so large as to require a PhD in index-reading, the employees need to be paid Top Dollar so they can provide topnotch directions to the confused shoppers. Do not confuse topnotch direction-giving employees with topnotch costumed employees: putting an employee in a rabbit outfit and having them drive around the store in a golf cart decorated as an Easter basket, the day before Easter, saying hullo to the confused shoppers, is not topnotch customer service.  It’s an attempt to distract shoppers from their mounting frustration at having to walk a mile for bread and milk (located at opposite ends of the store). I put this type of distraction alongside the gorgeously designed book covers that hide their texts’ sloppy writing, worse editing, and sagging plots.

Really?

Really?

However, thousands of badly-written, badly-edited gorgeous-cover books are published every year, and huge Kroger’s are popping up in cities across the mid-south region, so somebody’s buying. (“We have met the enemy, and he is us.”) Depending on my mood on a given day, I experience our apparent willingness to be distracted by rabbit-dressed employees and glossy covers as symbolic, as ironic, as disheartening, as hilarious. On my worst days, I believe we are burning like Rome burned, and fiddling around on our screens like Nero fiddled on his violin.

Silver lining: there is a novel or twenty to be had by observing the fuel of our flames.

And so my wish for you, dear writer friend, is that the sublimely ridiculous may inspire you today.

* condoms used to be a necessity for me, but (thankfully) Engineer Hubby and I have eliminated the possibility of more kids. That said, part of the reason, IMO, that we are burning is that there are, simply, too many of us. We suffer from our species’ reproductive success. And *that* said, wouldn’t it make sense for us to support, nay, encourage!, those among us who don’t want kids?

Making it difficult to not contribute to the problem of overpopulation. Again, really?

Making it difficult to avoid contributing to the problem of overpopulation. Again, really?

But at this Kroger’s the condoms are LOCKED UP like they’re ammunition or prescription drugs. Again, really? If I were running the store, I would not only leave these unlocked, I’d place them beside the door. Perhaps with a little sign: “Donations accepted but not required.” Really. Because by the time shoppers get home from hiking through this store, they’re gonna need a foot rub from their partners, and that can lead to, y’know, mashing the potatoes … ah! If only tubers were included on the index.

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