“I keep thinking, and believing, that if we continue to hear each other’s stories, and to write stories for the world, that we might see each other better. That it is harder to demonize someone if you have walked in their shoes. That stories—small, beautiful, alchemical non-physical strings of words and breath—can have an impact. A small thing, but essential it seems to me.”

Ten years ago, my friend and colleague Micheline Aharonian Marcom wrote the following post about The New American Story Project, a nonprofit she’d co-founded to document the stories of children who were then still coming to the United States in search of the safety, freedom, and welcome that America had advertised since its founding. That advertisement was already going dark under the menace of Trump & Co. Today America’s welcome mat has been pulverized by the regime’s deportation orders, concentration camps, and armies of violent thugs who target new and old arrivals alike. The young people who shared their stories with Micheline are now severely endangered by the government that calls itself “ours.”

New American Story Project

Every word that Micheline wrote a decade ago is still true. Please read and consider all that we’ve lost in these few short years— and all that every one of us must fight to recover and rebuild before everything we love about America is gone.

Thank you for caring what becomes of our vast and fragile world.

Aimee

Seeking Asylum: 100,000 Stories*

by Micheline Aharonian Marcom | Jan 18, 2016

You could say I lost my belief in our politicians. They all seemed like game show hosts to me. — “If I Ever Lose My Faith in You,” Sting

I. Empathy and the Iliad

In 2012 Scientific American published an article stating that empathy had declined 40 percent among college students in the US since the 80s. The University of Michigan Institute for Social Research concluded that college students of the current generation were less likely to agree with statements such as “I sometimes try to understand my friends better by imagining how things look from their perspective,” and “I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me.” The researchers didn’t know what to attribute this decline in empathy to, although according to yet another study sited in the same article, narcissism is on the rise. The article concluded that “the American personality is shifting in an ominous direction.”

When we listen to stories, and when we read, the consciousness of the listener/reader and the consciousness of the story meet in the wild place of the human imagination. In that place, the I is not only the I, she is Achilles as he drags Hector’s body around the castle walls in revenge for his best friend’s death; she is King Priam when he afterwards goes to retrieve his son’s body from his enemy and kisses “the terrible, man-slaying hands that had slain his many sons.” She is the victor’s and the vanquished’s rage and sorrows. She is more than herself and more than her own tribe or nation even.

II. Donald Trump, 1 Fact, 1 Newspaper Comment, 1 US Law

“A nation without borders is not a nation. The border is a disaster…people are pouring in. There must be a wall across the southern border. America will only be great as long as America remains a nation of laws.”— Donald Trump

“Illegal immigration flows have fallen to their lowest level in at least two decades.” — Pew Research center

“I DON’T CARE WHERE THEY CAME FROM OR WHY THEY CAME HERE. IF THEY ARE HERE ILLEGALLY, THEY NEED TO GO ASAP!!!” —Anonymous Comment, Washington Post

“Any alien who is physically present in the United States or who arrives in the United States irrespective of such alien’s status, may apply for asylum in accordance.” — U.S. Code § 1158 – Asylum

III. 100,00 Stories

In the last six months I have been working on a digital oral history project documenting the stories of children who have fled violence in Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador and sought asylum in the US. I’ve been listening to the kids and also interviewing immigration attorneys, policy makers, teachers, gang experts and historians to try and understand the situation better both here and in Central America.

The stories are ominous. As Elizabeth Kennedy, a regional expert told me when I spoke to her:

This is a refugee crisis; it is not just a humanitarian crisis. Children and families are leaving these countries because they don’t have state protection. And gangs and cartels have become far more powerful than what government exists. El Salvador is the second-deadliest country in the world, it is second only to Syria. Honduras is third-deadliest in the world, third only to Syria and El Salvador. That means that people in El Salvador and Honduras are more likely to be murdered than people in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, in Sudan: all these places that we recognize as war zones. Kids in El Salvador tell me things like, “I go to bed every night not knowing if I’ll wake up in the morning.”

More than 100,000 unaccompanied minors surrendered themselves to Border Patrol in the last year and a half seeking protection.

This is an excerpt from an interview with a 17-year-old Salvadoran girl I spoke with last summer in Oakland, California:

My dad came here several years ago because the gangs threatened him repeatedly and they tried to kill him. He was afraid. Every neighborhood is controlled by one gang or another. We moved frequently after that, but they always found us. It was the same guys who had tried to kill my dad.

One day going to school after I got off the bus, a man in a car approached me. He told me to get in the car with him. I got really scared. I kept walking. He kept following me.

“Get in the car,” he said, “I know everything about you and your family and your father.”

The police told us they would give us protection, but they never did. Then gang members started showing up in front of our house and riding by on bicycles to see who was there. They “controlled” the house. Sooner or later they were going to kidnap me or kill me. I couldn’t sleep. I never went out or talked to anybody because of the constant fear. I was so afraid they would force me to be their “girlfriend.” Many young girls can’t do anything about it. And what happens is they are killed or raped or their bodies are left on the road. People don’t have any recourse. The whole country is the same everywhere. There’s no security or help, if you look for help there’s none.

As I continue work on this project, I keep thinking, and believing, that if we continue to hear each other’s stories, and to write stories for the world, that we might see each other better. That it is harder to demonize someone if you have walked in their shoes. That stories—small, beautiful, alchemical non-physical strings of words and breath—can have an impact. A small thing, but essential it seems to me.

Micheline Aharonian Marcom is the author of eight books, including a trilogy of books about the Armenian genocide and its aftermath in the 20th century. She has received fellowships and awards from the Lannan Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, and the US Artists’ Foundation. In 2022, she was a finalist for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature.

Her first novel, Three Apples Fell From Heaven, was a New York Times Notable Book and Runner-Up for the PEN/Hemingway Award for First Fiction. Her second novel, The Daydreaming Boy, won the PEN/USA Award for Fiction. In 2008, Marcom taught in Beirut, Lebanon on a Fulbright Fellowship. Marcom now directs the Creative Writing Program at the University of Virginia.

Loreates’ Corner

Each week I try to introduce you to a few of the wonderful stacks by writers in our community. This week I want to share two stacks with a similar mission to Micheline’s. Please read and support all these important projects.

spearheads :

All-American Story

All-American Story celebrates the beauty, strength, & wisdom of ALL Americans and our shared humanity by sharing our stories.

Tony Hernandez writes :

The Immigrant Archive

Filmmaker, Storyteller, Oral Historian, Author CEO - Latino Broadcasting Company Founder, Immigrant Archive Project

*Originally published in The Writer in the World, Jan 18, 2016.

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"I refuse to let my heart and brain be polluted or hijacked... I just refuse and resist." — Elena Georgiou, on protecting her creative capacity during political crisis

Thank you , , , , , and many others for tuning into Writer in the World: Create to Survive, with , , and ! This is a special presentation from , where is a weekly section featuring essays on the writing life by MFA faculty and alumni.

Here’s who’s talking:

• is the award-winning poet and fiction writer who formerly directed Goddard’s MFA in Creative Writing Program and currently teaches in the PhD program at the Rubenstein School at the University of Vermont.

• is an award-winning author of fiction, nonfiction, and graphic novels for young adults and kids, and a faculty member of Hamline University’s MFA in Children’s Writing. www.sherrilsmith.com

• , author, publisher of the Substack MFA Lore, and former colleague of Elena & Sherri in the sorely missed Goddard’s MFA program.

Scroll down for key quotes, takeaways, and more info about the Two Trees Writers retreat that Sherri and Elena will be leading this summer.

Retreat Info

NEXT Wednesday, February 18 at 6:30 pm PT

Telling Family Secrets Author Panel

Does your writing suffer from Fear of Family (FOF)? If so, you won’t want to miss this free online panel with , , , and .

Free! RSVP

Create To Survive

A few highlight & takeaways from the video

1. Writing as Medicine in Crisis

Our central premise is that creative writing serves as an essential survival tool during times of political and social turmoil. Engaging with creative work isn’t self-indulgent escapism but a necessary practice for maintaining mental health and capacity for activism.

2. Balancing Art and Commerce

Sherri shared a particularly revealing struggle: her climate-focused and American mythology projects—conceived as “medicine for the world”—were rejected by publishers as either “too pedantic” or unsellable. This highlights the tension between creating work that addresses urgent social issues and market demands. She noted having to balance “healing the world with making a living.”

3. Finding Your Writing Community

It’s critically important to have a supportive writing community. Sherri credited her recovery from creative paralysis to meeting with a writer friend who could see clearly what she couldn’t. The discussion repeatedly returned to the value of shared creative space, whether through MFA programs, retreats, or informal writing groups.

4. Documentation as Resistance

Elena’s experience teaching after 9-11 demonstrated how urgent the need for creative expression becomes during crisis. She taught a poetry class in New York then, and students were desperate to complete assignments—”chomping at the bit”—because they needed to document what they were experiencing. One student wrote poems about her brother’s death. Elena emphasized: “Creativity was their survival strategy.”

5. Strategic Retreat and Renewal

“Step aside so that you can breathe.” A Hedgebrook retreat gave Sherri space to dream new ideas, even though market forces later rejected them. Sherri and Elena, with , are organizing a Two Trees Writers retreat at the reimagined Goddard College campus (now “Creative Campus at Goddard”) specifically to provide writers this restorative space.

Retreat Info

6. Permission to “Lean into the Woo-Woo”

The retreat will incorporate tarot readings and other less conventional creative practices to help unlock creative work. Sherri recalled ’s tarot readings “helped me turn messes into successes with my own novels.” Non-traditional methods can break through creative blocks.

7. Using Creativity as Empathy Practice

Elena argued that if we don’t use creativity as a form of resistance and self-care, and don’t use “our own empathy and sympathy, community to help one another, then what are we going to be doing instead?” The implication is that creative practice keeps us emotionally healthy enough to sustain whatever activism we choose.

8. The Goddard Legacy

Throughout the discussion runs a thread of grief and gratitude for the closed Goddard MFA program, which created a lasting community of support. We are committed to continuing this community through , , and the Two Trees Writers retreat to preserve and extend what the Goddard MFA in Creative Writing created.

Practical Wisdom

• When overwhelmed by current events, don’t try to write around them—either address them directly or create work set in a stable time frame

• Seek outside perspective when a project feels tangled; sometimes you need someone else to identify the “dotted line” between multiple stories

• Protect dedicated creative time even (especially) during crisis

• Find or create community where “your ideas will be taken seriously and nourished and moved forward”

• Take care of yourself “so that we can help take care of each other”

The overarching message: creative practice isn’t a luxury during difficult times—it’s essential infrastructure for survival, resistance, and maintaining the capacity to care for ourselves and our communities.

Would you like MFA-level feedback on your work?

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• Aimee’s written feedback on both your query and up to 5 pages (1250 words) of creative work, plus an optional follow-up phone call. Your “Take 5 Packet Letter” will highlight both the Strengths and the Opportunities in your work, helping you determine whether it’s time to “press send” to agents or to reorient your revision.

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