Current Conditions: The Writerly Edition

Here we are: a new year, a new day. It has been an eventful few months with the U.S. election, and the new administration settling in. Sometimes it feels like there is nothing that we, collectively, can agree on except that we are all living in a time of great change.

Change. I find that people generally love the idea – but hate the reality. Yet, change isn’t only necessary, it’s inevitable and constant. We have always lived in an ever-changing world. And it’s this belief that brings me back to the page, to the stories that will show us the world as it is, and the world as it might become.

When I think about what it means to be a writer in America today, about ways to create something meaningful in these current conditions, I realize that in the face of such monumental, wrenching change, it falls to the writers and artists to look at the confusing welter of reality and to report back. Our work is to tell the stories of our future survival, even when the shape of the world eludes our grasp.

How impossible. 

I make peace with this by telling myself that it is not my job to succeed only to #persist.

So again this year, like that most persistent man from La Mancha, I will tilt at the great American novel. What I thought I wanted to write before November 8 no longer feels relevant, so I am sifting through the ashes of half-finished projects. I’m working ideas, playing with characters, settings, and stakes. I’m gathering tinder and striking the flint on the rock and watching for sparks.

In the meantime, I have a new flash fiction out. You can read, “An Accounting of the Sky,” in the latest issue of The Colored Lens.

And my review of the Nottingham Review on The Review Review.