Can We Find the Voice of Our Better Selves as Trump Takes America Down AGAIN?
How can we still, again, be witnessing and writing about national regression?
The question I’m grappling with is: How do we as writers answer the regression we’re witnessing?
Hello Loreates,
It’s been another hell of a week in Trumplandia. He has singlehandedly tanked the global economy and sent the Resistance into overdrive. Up now is literally down, and down is up, and the reactions seem to hit hourly.
Each shock wave feels utterly new and unprecedented. That’s the “magic” of shock. Like labor during childbirth, it’s too overwhelming for memory to hold the full effect, so each new shock feels like a first time. But with Trump there’s nothing new except the scale of pain and damage he’s inflicting.
I was — shockingly — reminded of this as I pored over the Writer in the World archives to select a post to share with you this week, when one of my own popped up. It was written in 2017, that ghastly summer of the Charlottesville rally and the murder of Heather Heyer. But its focus is not strictly political; its point is the desperate …
