Writing helps us make sense of the world, even when sense-making seems so out of reach. But if there’s anything we’ve learned from people in history, from Ida B. Wells to W.E.B. Du Bois to James Baldwin, it’s that writing matters. If there’s anything we’ve learned from the scientists, doctors, and journalists who are amplifying stories about COVID-19 in newspapers and Twitter, it’s that writing matters. Even if the words we put on paper are never seen by another person, even if it’s just to usher us to a place of understanding we don’t yet have, writing matters.
- Anthony Ocampo and Kerry Ann Rockquemore, National Center for Faculty Development & Diversity I like this quote. In it, the authors don’t shy away from the issue of the social role of the writer. Clearly, they are privileging what we might call public-facing writing: the informative articles and tweets of scientists, doctors, and journalists; the rhetorical essays of Wells, DuBois, and Baldwin.* We should all be as talented, smart, and brave as those three! But, making allowances for the rest of us, I get what they’re saying. Not only that writing matters, but that writing referentially about matters of historical and contemporary social concern for a general audience matters most. And I can’t argue with that. Context matters, too, of course. Ocampo and Rockquemore were writing after a week of outrage over George Floyd’s death. And it took that gruesome killing to galvanize people’s interest and energy around police violence; and it took protests and uprisings to get the powers that be to take police reform seriously (if they have). It took an actual pandemic to get people to take seriously the predictions that epidemiologists had been making for years of a global pandemic. One hopes that people continue to be alert, upset and engaged about these topics, particularly white people, rather than letting them fade from consciousness (“O yes, police brutality and pandemics — I remember: those were really big in 2020. We really ought to do something about those. Sigh.”). This is the challenge for climate activists, too, and writers not least: how to keep people’s attention on a long-term, systemic problem in the era of 24/7 news crawls. Without the kind of public attention generated by marches in the streets and economic disruption, climate change would not have made the headlines in 2019. And now, people are in the streets to protest police violence, so that’s what’s grabbing the lead. Writing about climate change sinks to the bottom of the feed or the deep inside page of the newspaper — for now. How to articulate the importance of fighting both — and the relations between the two, and between them and the pandemic? There are journalists and op-ed writers who are trying to do so. But it’s the sense-making function of writing — even, one might infer, in poems, plays, and fiction — that Ocampo and Rockquemore begin and end with. Writing is valuable even if it is “never seen by another person,” if it provides the author with some kind of understanding. Or, as they say in a subsequent message, joy. Or writing can help the writer “to connect with other people.” In other words, writing is its own excuse for being. They offer “three takeaways”: “Expand your Understanding of What Counts as Writing”; “Be Versatile With Your Writing”; and try writing by hand occasionally, rather than with a computer. I heartily endorse all three ideas. We’ve got to mix it up if we’re going to be equal to these mixed-up times. And with a problem as global, complex, and seemingly intractable as climate chaos, each of us has to start by figuring out what to make of it all and what, if anything, we will do about it. __________________________________________ * Each of these authors wrote in other genres, of course, but are perhaps best known for their essays and articles; and those are surely what Ocampo and Rockquemore have in mind by mentioning their authors in this context.
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June 2021
Kristin Prevallet Author/Editor
I'm a writer & teacher in Lawrence, Kansas who actually believes the scientists. I wrote a book of poems called Of Some Sky that seems to have something to do with all this. |