Curiosity>Fear: Or, The Power of Storytelling in This Moment

Lately I’ve been trying to stay in a place of “information gathering.” Mostly, I’m buzzing around, freaking out about socialsecuritysciencenukestransrightsfascismracismtheenvironmentUSAIDetc. while trying to work and adult, but when possible, I’m also trying to cultivate neutral interest in what is going on. No one knows just what is to come, but I feel better when I know SOMETHING rather than nothing, and now is the time to find the people and resources who are trustworthy. I’ve been ingesting the opinions of Robert Reich, Tim Snyder, AOC, and a host of others over on Bluesky. But once I read more than a paragraph or so about the current situation, panic ensues.

Fascism wants us to panic. It does not want us to process information or think critically or imagine or create. As we’re seeing, it floods us in an attempt to disempower us. Hannah Arendt (someone I studied as an undergrad Poli. Sci major 100 years ago and someone I never thought I’d return to as a beacon in a dark time) knew that societies with the most isolated, disconnected people are the easiest prey for dictators. Technology and a pandemic and the normalizing of work-from-home and income inequality (or the increasing difficulty of earning a living while the few hoard capital) and racism and who knows what else have conspired to fracture Americans as a unified group.

Arendt wrote:

Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow.

British critic and theorist Robert Eaglestone said:

When people are atomized, a movement or a strongman arises and he offers a story or an ideology which claims to explain everything, why people are unhappy. This story becomes more and more powerful. You can’t argue with people who become Nazis or Stalinists because there’s only one way to think.

Fascism uses storytelling to establish one easily understood narrative that blames and dehumanizes and “other-izes” its opponents. Immigrants are stealing our jobs; they are raping women and selling drugs and overtaking our country (and eating the cats and the dogs). Trans people are dangerous to girls and women and children, preying on traditional gender roles and upending the patriarchy. If you don’t personally know any immigrants or trans people (or Jews or Blacks, etc.) and your only exposure to them is online; if you have spent your life working your butt off and still can’t make ends meet; if you haven’t been able to afford college; if you’ve felt rejected by the women you’ve been attracted to your whole life; if you’ve watched people of color rise faster than you have, you are prone to believing this story.

Clearly we need to be listening to and telling other stories.

How, as humans and writers who don’t buy into the above story, do we make any kind of impact and not drown in the flood? Here are some ideas:

1. Use original and truthful words. It’s tempting to join linguistic bandwagons. It’s tempting to reduce sexism to #MeToo and racism to #BlackLivesMatter, but neither sexism nor racism is that simple. Clearly #MeToo and #BLM have been and are crucial and game-changing, but sexism and racism (and income inequality and ableism and zenophobia) remain and we need to continue to tell our own stories of these cancers in new ways. And to read and listen to others. Nuance matters. The best fiction and memoir is not overly simplistic. It’s complex, and real, and surprising. It’s funny and weird and specific. The English language is a massive palette.

   A good source of inspiration for me has been poetry. The Academy of American Poets sponsors Poem-a-Day. Art and new kinds of food and certain Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell songs and my kids’ takes on the world and indie movies and staring at wildlife in my backyard (we have otters!) and museums also help.

   2. And write about true things. This means leaving the screens and the house and being with other people. Experiencing things IRL. Believing that truth is still a thing. Believe your eyes, even when other people tell you not to. Especially when other people tell you not to.

   3. Move beyond the story of Good vs. Bad. No real person is just good or bad (although, lord, I can think of quite a few that qualify for the latter right now). We live in an attention economy. Online platforms, media, marketers, etc. compete for our most valuable asset, which is our attention. They seek to engage us immediately and emotionally, and then pound us with the same quick message again and again. Immigrants are evil. Trans people are evil. DEI is evil. They are bad. We are good. They are bad. We are good.

   As writers, we owe it to ourselves and our country to tell more complicated stories. Yes, we are up against very limited attention spans on the part of our readers, but we can hook them with the truth, with empathy and nuance and surprise and humor. Try to inject your antagonists with some redeeming qualities. Give your protagonists flaws. Big ones.

   4. Don’t forget to write about people being together in the same room. And being different from each other. And kind to each other. And unkind. Sometimes it’s easy to forget to write scenes and to stay interior or expository, to leap through time or skip from place to place. Between tech and the rapid onset of fascism, our brains are overcaffeinated right now. Slow down sometimes and let your characters or people (if you are writing nonfiction) just be together.

   5. Write longhand. Or subscribe to an app like Freedom that will block access to everything but your work on your computer. In other words, try to make writing about writing again, and not further fuse you to your screen and all of the information that comes through this portal.

   6. Avoid AI when writing, as well as overgoogling. I am guilty of the latter. But I also have memories of doing research for 100 Years of The Best American Short Stories at the Houghton Library at Harvard, archives that held decades of editorial correspondence between editors and authors like Hemingway, John Updike, Richard Wright, and so many others. (Richard Ford’s was the most surprising, but that’s all I will say.) Sitting at that table alone in this drafty room, flipping through heavy folders of typewritten letters and forms from decades earlier, coming to understand with amusement and awe that editorial departments were just as impassioned and squabbling back then as they are today, that the author I would have thought would be a diva was in fact deeply kind (at least in this letter), while another was an impatient turd was not an experience I could have had online.

   Of course, it’s not possible to research everything in person, but if you can, it’s worthwhile to try to go places and talk to people, hold objects, feel things in your body.

   I’ll leave off with a poem by Ada Limón, the US Poet Laureate.

   Instructions on Not Giving Up

   More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
   of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s
   almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
   their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
   sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees
   that really gets to me. When all the shock of white
   and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave
   the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,
   the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin
   growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
   to the strange idea of continuous living despite
   the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,
   I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
   unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.