Writing While the World is on Fire

A wall mounted coat rack with a baseball cap and a black canvas tote bag that reads, “Feelings can be art.”

I used to run a workshop called “Writing While the World is on Fire.”

The idea was to bring together people who were working for a better world (activists, organizers, worriers of all kinds) to tell their stories and move their passion onto the page.

This morning I was trying to remember why I stopped. Clearly, the world could still use that workshop. But somehow, around the time we moved most of our programming to Zoom, it stopped feeling right.

I think it had to do with care, and the limits of online workshops. In the last few years, the collective rage and grief of our time has grown so much, the losses and heartbreaks so many, that when I look back at the prompts I used to offer, they don’t feel responsible anymore.

At least, not without a big blue sky above us.
At least, not without a ton of space and time to process and weep and feel held.
At least, not without a therapist nearly.

Twenty years ago when I started this work, I thought my job was to help people write everything, to be endlessly brave on the page. But the years have softened me. Now I’m much more careful in my choices. Yes to courage, but yes also to discernment, to choice, to holding as sacred one another’s quiet boundaries.

And actually — isn’t all writing “writing while the world is on fire”?

I think so. Especially when we’re doing it in compassionate community.

No matter where you sit politically (it’s not up to me to know), these days are full of things to grieve and fight for. Gathering with strangers is a radical act of hope. Listening to one another is a radical act of generosity. Asking to be heard is a radical act of courage.

So today I’m just sitting in compassion for all the hurt around and inside me. At the root of the word “compassion” are two smaller words — "con," which means together, and “pati," which means pain. To feel pain together. Writing in community lets us do that. And of course it also lets us feel and share our joy, silliness, celebration too. It’s all connected.

Let’s close here.

In her book Remembered Rapture: The Writer at Work, bell hooks wrote:

“We write because language is the way we keep a hold on life. With words we experience our deepest understandings of what it means to be intimate. We communicate to connect, to know community.”

Yes, the world is on fire. Maybe it always has been. And, there is still so much to make and celebrate together.

In it with you,