A few years ago, a friend who was into astrology did a birth chart for me, then we met for coffee to talk about what she’d discovered. It was fun, and I loved her for it, but honestly don’t remember much of what was predicted, except this: just at the end, she pointed to one part of the chart and said that I would have a 14-year “fantastic” period during one phase of my life. I nodded and said something along the lines of “that’s nice.” She shook her head, put her hand on my arm, and said, “No, listen, I mean fantastic -- like win-the-lottery fantastic.” At the time, I smiled and said “Well, then, could it start now, instead of five years from now?”
That day, the day the 14-year ‘fantastic’ period of my life is supposed to begin, is now 31 days away. I was making some plans with friends for that day when the memory hit me - the beginning of my own personal “golden era” about to begin, if we believe the prediction.
I’d like to believe it, but it’s a tough call. The reasons why it’s a tough call are a little hard to explain, because I’d like to be an optimist, really I would, but feeling my optimism under seige lately.
I used to say that I taught for a living, and wrote for my life.
That has, for the majority of my adult life, been true. I love teaching, but writing is oxygen. It is the air I breathe into my soul. And it’s been tough, lately. A number of things contribute to that - a series of injuries (I’m clumsy, apparently) took both energy and time. I started a new job that requires both emotional energy and time, and….. Well, there’s the state of the world.
I had been working for months on the third book in a series I began some years ago, and had begun to get a handle on the main character, and the story arc, when….. November 8th. I’ve been, with a few brief periods one way or the other, a lifelong moderate. I read and research issues and candidates, ignore the ads placed by campaigns, and follow their promises and claims. I keep politics out of my professional life, and avoid discussing it with others.
Or, I should say, I used to do things that way.
I believe in approaching my civic duties with rationality and research. While neither of the available candidates passed the “smell test” coming out of my research, one was far and away worse than the other - mountains of verifiable lies, encouraging violence at his rallies, and advocating racist and xenophobic policies. And he won.
I have tried to keep politics out of this blog - it’s about writing, not about social issues, not about candidates, not about left vs right or conservative vs liberal, or the GOP vs the DNC.
But what happened was this - while I engaged in (and continue to) voicing my opinion about proposed policies from DC, I tried to keep it as I always had - a thing separate from my life, separate, specifically, from my writing. But I couldn’t.
In working on the manuscript, I had characters who did not live in isolation, who live in a world that has a government, has people who disagree, has police who abuse power, has corruption that impacts the lives of ordinary people like my characters. As I’d sit to write, the “ghost in the room” became the day’s headlines, the next onslaught against civil liberties and freedoms. It all swam in my mind and ran over into the scenes and dialogues I was writing. I tried to stop it, tried to ignore it, tried to crumple those scenes and reinvent the validity of the world my characters inhabited, as opposed to the one I inhabit.
It didn’t work.
Eventually, I put that story away for a while to give me time to consider how to go forward. What I realized is this - I have always believed in fiction that speaks the truth about the way the world really is, and while my characters (and their story) has little to do with politics, it does have to do with a group of people who are different, who discover their shared differences and form a community, and whose existence as a community frightens those on the outside to the point where they are both ostracized and targeted. All of this makes it extremely relevant to the world around us, and I needed time to think about how I want that to proceed on the page. So the drafts went in a box and went on a shelf while I consider, and I turned my thoughts to some shorter works and editing of other manuscripts to ready them for submission.
Each day, as I sit down to work on these tasks, or sit down to journal/brainstorm about the direction of the boxed manuscript, one thing becomes clearer to me: keeping politics, social issues, etc out of my thoughts about writing is and has been one of the greater mistakes of my life.
If writing is about pursuit of the truth (and I think it is) then can there be anything more relevant than the state of our country, of our government, of our leadership, when our country is so thoroughly divided? How can characters live separate from that and live in truth?
So, I’m out. The lifelong moderate has gone radical, and she’s writing about it. That is not to
But as for leaving my political position in the closet, I can no longer do that, neither as a human nor as a writer. I am part of the resistance. I believe in a country dedicated to freedom that we welcome refugees rather than fear them, that we help the sick and the elderly, rather than taking away their benefits to offer tax cuts to the rich, that we nurture freedom of the press, hold them accountable, and protect their right to full access to public officials and to air both video and audio of those encounters as well as to write about them. I believe in a country where our leaders work for us, not for their own pursuit of power or partisanship.
We don’t have that country right now, but we can. There are things all of us can do to help protect our freedoms and ensure our rights. If you spend twelve seconds on social media in any two -day period, you know what those things are. I believe that the absolute best thing each of us can do is to protect the truth. Playwrights and actors bring it to the stage, artists and dancers and musicians let it shine from your work, and writers write the truth. Not all truth is political, not all those works need to be about politicians and the powerful to enrich the lives of those who enjoy the arts rather than create them. But if we ignore that part of the truth, the political part, we are not being fully honest. Whatever you do, do it with a heart and mind dedicated to it being truthful. That is, for my part, how I am moving forward. I think, in spite of the violence, the police brutality and killings, the oppressive legislation, the lies and the assaults on freedom, it is this that will bring about my fourteen years of fantastic living.
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