Who Needs Your Stories?

A little pep talk.

This sculpture of mourners bearing away a casket I photographed recently in a cemetery in Caravaggio, Italy. The painter Caravaggio is not buried there, but we were looking for evidence of him.

The pandemic caused a lot of damage to human community. It caused us to distrust, shun, and hide our faces from each other. What we really distrusted was a virus, but the virus got confused with people. We became more fearful.

The devolution of democracy causes some folks to shun politics.

Now the climate chaos is upon us—we know the climate emergency can enter our own homes at any time, and that causes us to think about survival.

Threat can make us close off, lay low, be careful. Threat can keep us from doing the lovely things that have been part and parcel of a good life, like having parties, joining softball leagues, volunteering. Going to book readings, attending book club meetings, dressing up and going out to cultural events.

(Threat, of course, is not the only reason humans are more isolated than ever. There's technology always jitterbugging around to steal our attention away from community.)

Given the pandemic, politics, climate chaos, and the weirdness of digital life it’s easy to want to stay small.

I am going to ask a huge favor. In any way that you have begun to close off, give up, not care, lay low, and isolate yourself—I ask you to rethink this. This is not the time to stay small. This is the time to get big.

You’re a writer. Writing is hard. Your work gets rejected a lot. You get passed over for awards and grants. You go underpaid or unpaid.

I’m asking you to keep telling the stories you’ve been given.

Once I heard a chaplain pray at a commencement at Warren Wilson College, a college in the mountains of western North Carolina that asks its students to Think deeply. Care fiercely. Work hard. This chaplain said that there’s a lot of work to be done; and much of the work is to be done in far corners of the world, with little fanfare or acknowledgement, and with limited resources. He offered a new crop of graduates to God.

"Put them in hard places," he said.

Much of the work of art is to be done in far corners, daily, invisibly, with little succor and with limited resources.

But…

Only by telling stories—connecting people, offering epiphanies, imagining new narratives that are just, replacing destructive narratives—can we create a world that helps us lead more meaningful, sensible, functional, and fulfilling lives.

The violence in Israel and the Gaza Strip is gutwrenching. I imagine people trying to lead sensible, functional, fulfilling lives with rockets flying, limited food, and no electricity. The narrative in the Middle East is an old, useless narrative. It is beyond time for a new narrative.

I cast my lot with those who—with few extraordinary powers, with hearts full of love—continue the work required to reconstitute and heal ourselves, our relationships, and this wild, beloved, broken, beleaguered world.

All this to say, Do the hard work. Do it bigger than ever.

Who needs your stories? You do. We all do.

The same sad sculpture in Caravaggio from a different angle. Notice the wooden sandals the mourners are wearing.