It’s a new day
To escape the noise of the political madness we’re living in, I decided to make my writing public again. I never stopped writing. Even as an educator, it’s how I navigate the chaos of the world. But I’ve stayed silent longer than I should have.
Eight years ago, I stepped away from the industry to become an educator. From the outside, it might have looked like a detour. It wasn’t. I was at a crossroads. I needed to connect with a different community, find new stories, be of service, and deepen my own education, not just academically, but personally. I needed to discover other things about me. Teaching writing taught me more about craft than writing alone ever did. I come back to this industry not just with more experience, but with more intention. Then we got a new President who made me go quiet.
Living in a fascist society forces you to evaluate what is most important to voice. And creativity is the opposite of what fascism does. Fascism kills hope. It needs lies to survive. Creativity insists on the specific human being the lie is trying to erase. That is why the first move of every authoritarian is against the artists. Ban the books. Defund the theaters. Mock the writers as elites and the work as useless. They understand something we forget when we are tired. A single honest story about one real life does damage to a lie that took years to build.
So the work is not a distraction from the fight. The work is the fight. A poem outlives an administration. A film gets watched in twenty years by someone who needs it. The human experience we protect on the page is the same experience they are trying to erase in the world and we need to fight to keep it.
If you have gone quiet, I understand it, because I did. But I am telling you what I had to tell myself. Take your writing public again. Make the thing. Not because art will save us on its own, and not because a single essay stops the cruelty. Make it because the alternative is the silence they are counting on.
Pick up the pen. You are not doing it alone. We’re all in this together.