A Fighting Chance With the Chaos of Living

Novelist Keenan Norris on writing into a world that has no regard for us

Often the path into good writing leads directly through territory that, if not for this urge to re-tell the traumatic, we would leave behind in the space somewhere between memory and forgetting.

Another MFA Lore special for Black History Month in 2025

Hi everyone,

As the shitstorm in DC intractably gathers force, I keep wondering how we could have arrived back in the same immoral quicksand that nearly killed the country six years ago, that nearly tanked the world eighty years ago, and that enslaved, tortured, and murdered whole populations before igniting the Civil War. More than 620,000 Americans lost their lives in that war, and now it seems as if we’re doomed to fight the very same war again. Not that it will look the same in the 21st century. Not that blood will be spilled on official battlegrounds. Not that we can even see the weapons being used against us. I’m sure Elon Musk has a plan for that.

But the point is that, on a human level, we’ve been here so many times before that the e…