Thank you for that gracious introduction. It is a pleasure to be here tonight, with so many writers from such far-flung places. Or, I suppose, that’s what I’m supposed to say, right? We are, for the most part, well-mannered people, so these sorts of talks usually begin with some niceties, some expressions of gratitude, perhaps a land acknowledgment. And let it be said, we are on the lands originally and still occupied by the Tongva, Tataviam, Serrano, Kizh, and Chumash peoples.
We do these land acknowledgments as a gesture of atonement for sins for which there is no sufficient recompense other than undoing those sins, returning these stolen lands, and doing everything in our power to ensure that they are never taken again.
And clearly, there is a grave need for this. Our history has shaped our present and when we lose sight of it, when we choose to forget it, we soften the ground for atrocities to happen over and over again. Right now, for example, Donald Trump continues to talk cavalierly about colonizing Greenland and Canada. He sounds like a madman, but he is deadly serious. And far too many people, far too many writers, are treating these deranged ambitions as legitimate.
As I was saying, that’s how things usually go and then the speaker, in this case me, continues on to whatever it was they planned on talking about. But these are not usual times. And though we are gathered here and this is a time for community, we are yoked with a terrible burden, of figuring out how to respond to the abhorrent path this country is on. How do we resist? How do we fight? And as writers, we have to ask ourselves, what is the work of a writer when it seems like the world is falling apart?
*
On January 6, 2021, my parents were here, in Los Angeles, at the home I share with my wife Debbie. We spend a lot of time with my family, so their presence was not exceptional even though the events of that day were. We were watching CNN, in shock, as the insurrection unfolded. We saw a mob of angry white men and a few angry white women and a few assorted others invading the Capitol building, intent on keeping Congress from certifying the election results with which they disagreed. It was a chaotic, bizarre affair. It was so antithetical to what we’ve long been told are American, democratic values—a tantrum for all the world to see.
In some ways the mob swarming the Capitol seemed well coordinated. But then there were moments where it was clear that this was not, for most of the participants, a particularly well-thought-out endeavor. They wandered throughout the building. They waved flags. They caused mayhem. They made threats. They vandalized congressional offices in very unimaginative ways. They tore and tore and tore at the long fraying fabric of democracy and they did so gleefully. Many of the mob crowed about what they were doing on social media. They were proud. They wanted everyone to know they were part of such a fateful event.
I was disgusted by what I saw but it felt inevitable. An attempted insurrection was the only possible outcome after years of a politician bending the reality of his millions and millions of followers, to fit his narrow and profoundly ignorant worldview, and his many bigotries. This was the inevitable outcome of naming everything that conflicted with that worldview “fake news.” This was the inevitable outcome of a politics of grievance. This was but part of the price we were all destined to pay for one Black president out of forty-five.
But what I remember most about that day was my father, who spent most of his early life in Haiti living under the Duvalier regime. François Duvalier, or Papa Doc, was the president of Haiti for twenty-four years. He was an autocrat, through and through, ruling the country through force. He had a secret police force, the Tonton Macoute, who did Papa Doc’s evil bidding and helped him hold on to power through corruption, torture, sexual violence, and murder. He made changes to the Haitian Constitution to consolidate his power, going so far as to name himself “president for life.” When Papa Doc died, in 1971, his son Jean-Claude, who was only nineteen, became president and would rule for fifteen years until his regime was overthrown. Jean-Claude, or Baby Doc, continued his father’s authoritarian work, continued to wield the Tonton Macoute as his personal death squad, and robbed the country blind so he could live lavishly while ignoring the abject poverty of the very people he was meant to lead.
My father, who was born in 1946, knows, intimately, about the ills of authoritarianism and unchecked political power. He knows about people being disappeared from their homes in the middle of the night or in broad daylight. He knows about journalists and writers and artists being silenced and forced underground. He knows about what it means to live in fear, to be surrounded by corruption and desperation. And what chilled him on January 6 was seeing that all of those things he knows so intimately were playing out here, in this country that always frames itself as exceptional, as a paragon of democracy. “But this is the United States,” he kept saying over and over as he rubbed his stubbled chin. “I can’t believe this is happening.” I will never forget the look on his face—haunted and horrified. It was the look of someone who was looking at this country’s future through the lens of his country’s past.
In the four years since January 6, this democracy has degraded further. This country is unrecognizable. Many of the realities a lot of us assumed only happened in “other countries” are happening right here, in plain sight.
Like I said, these are unusual times.
Normally, I would begin a talk with some funny anecdotes. Put the audience at ease. Put myself at ease. I have lots of funny anecdotes because I am, I must tell you, very funny, and I love sharing my funny anecdotes, but I am struggling. I am overwhelmed. Every hour of every day, we are bombarded by truly horrible news. We are seeing this country and the institutions that serve its populace being dismantled with ruthless efficiency by a figurehead president, a drug-addled billionaire, and all manner of Christo-fascist sycophants and village idiots.
I want to write about it. I want to say something, but I hardly know where to begin. My writing feels . . . so insignificant in the face of brutal authoritarianism, right here and right now. In practice, not theory. But despite this overwhelm, I know that the work of a writer is to not stay silent, to not surrender to despair.
As we gather here, the world is on fire. In some parts of the world, that fire is literal and lethal. In Gaza, the ceasefire has ceased. Let me rephrase that. Using passive voice is a dereliction of responsibility. In Gaza, Netanyahu has ended the ceasefire. This has to be some of the work of the writer—telling the truth, the whole story, as best we can. Since October 7, 2023, Palestinians—tens of thousands of children, women, men—have not merely died. They have been murdered by the IDF, a military with global support, a military force with limitless resources. We can talk about the inciting incident, the act of terrorism when Hamas attacked Israel and took hostages, some of whom they are still keeping in captivity. We can condemn this terrible act. We can talk about the Israelis murdered on October 7, the violence they suffered. We can talk about how antisemitism persists and is a scourge that must be fought, always.
But what we cannot do is pretend that the attempt to eradicate an entire people is a proportional response. We cannot pretend that it is antisemitic to point this out. The IDF have prevented humanitarian aid from entering Gaza, leaving the millions of people who are living under constant threat to starve or die of thirst or endure the injuries of war without adequate medical care. Every day, there are new evacuation orders but even the places to which Gazans evacuate are not safe. Tent encampments are bombed just as easily as buildings purportedly hiding terrorists. The number of journalists who have been killed . . . my god. When you really sit with what is happening in Gaza, when you absorb the horror of a genocide the world refuses to stop, it is suffocating. And it should be. We should not be afforded the luxury of breathing freely when so many lives are being stolen.
But when people protest genocide, when they speak up in defense of the defenseless, and they are on a valid visa or are naturalized citizens instead of birthright citizens, they are disappeared. Their visas are taken away. They are accused of aiding and abetting terrorists. Mahmoud Khalil, taken from his family, for exercising his legal right to protest an unambiguous atrocity. He is being held, indefinitely, likely to be deported. Yunseo Chung, another Columbia University student, was almost arrested and deported and is now suing the Trump administration. She too is a naturalized citizen. She too dared to protest in support of Palestine. Rumeysa Ozturk was walking down the street in Boston and was stopped by a masked, plainclothes law enforcement officer and taken into custody. Several other officers, similarly garbed, show up and she disappears to a Louisiana detention facility. Donald Trump, it seems, has his own Tonton Macoute.
Ozturk was doing the work of a writer; she cowrote an op-ed for The Tufts Daily, articulating demands for the administration, advocating for Palestine, and pleading for change. This was her right. She was doing the work of a writer—standing up for what she believes, exercising her freedom to speak. And now, she is paying a terrible price. Because we no longer have even the semblance of checks and balances, there is little we can do to stop any of this. But as writers, we can refuse to look away. We can refuse to obscure the depravity of crushing dissent through deportation. We can use our voices to speak the truth that none of us are free until all of us are free.
These are unusual times.
But here we are, at AWP. The world is on fire, but life somehow goes on.
*
I first attended AWP in 2010. I hated it. There were so many writers, everywhere, and they were impossibly chic, so that made them even more intimidating. Their eyeglasses were particularly sophisticated, uniquely shaped, as were their shoes, often pointy and heeled. I kept getting lost because the bookfair was in four rooms. I didn’t know anyone, and I spent far too much money I didn’t really have, because let’s be real, this conference is hella expensive for writers when a university isn’t subsidizing your attendance, or you’re not affiliated with a university at all. It was impossible to attend every event, panel, reading, and party I wanted because while time may be a construct, it is also finite. I was too shy to approach the writers I very much wanted to approach and there was a particularly sad incident at one magazine’s bookfair table, where I tried to purchase the magazine, and the sunglasses-indoor-wearing graduate student slouching behind the table couldn’t be bothered to feign alertness or take my money. I saw how writers often looked hungrily past you, hoping to catch sight of a writer who was actually important. Sometimes, I was that writer, too.
This is a familiar story to many of us. We are removed from the solitary confines of our regular writing lives and thrust into a convening of ten or twelve or thirteen thousand of us, sweaty and nervous and wanting to be seen and wanting to be invisible. In those early years, I wanted so badly to feel like a part of a writing community because I had been searching for one my whole life.
I’m the only writer in my family. Until my books were finally sold in Barnes and Noble, my writing career was largely theoretical to the people closest to me. They don’t know Black Warrior Review or Passages North or Ninth Letter. They don’t know about micropresses. They understand wanting to be published but don’t really understand how futile an endeavor that feels like when you’re just a girl from the Middle West who doesn’t know anyone in New York that she isn’t related to.
And so, AWP was not about networking or peacocking or any of that kind of stuff. I was just trying to find other writers, like myself, who were ambitious and lonely and had things to say but weren’t sure anyone was interested in listening. And fortunately, I found those people, who have been the cornerstones of my writing community both then and now. In many ways, we grew up as writers together, learning about the work of a writer through trial and error and the occasional success. What matters most is that we persisted. And when we got an acceptance to a small magazine or a fancy magazine, we celebrated these victories with equal excitement. We had the most epic Google Reader group that I think of nearly every day because it was such a powerful touchstone.
In ensuing years, as I started publishing pieces in some small magazines and writing for this and that website, AWP became more enjoyable. I grew more realistic about what I could reasonably accomplish across three days of literary debauchery. I tried a bit harder to actually talk to people instead of staring into my phone as if I was conducting very important business anytime someone else was in my vicinity. I sat on panels. I shared work in countless off-site events, where five or eight or ten writers stood in a small square of space in a cramped bar and tried to impress our peers and there was always a lanky, bearded man who understood seven to eight minutes to be fifteen to twenty minutes. I discovered the dance party. Oh . . . the dance party, a delightful spectacle of people dancing awkwardly and sweatily to popular music, not a care in the world. I learned that most of the really good and really bad stuff happens in the hotel bar well after the official events have ended.
AWP became less a place where I could try and crawl through a crack into the writing community and more of a convenient place where I could see friends and acquaintances and the occasional nemesis and crushes and regrettable exes ambling around the convention center and hunched over damp beers at bars, or smoking cigarettes in dark alleys. I learned more about what the work of a writer should be and, sometimes, what the work of a writer shouldn’t be.
*
During graduate school, I wrote more than I ever had before. I learned that the work of a writer is to be relentless and to write and write and write. We lose sight of that sometimes. Social media is great and then it is terrible. You are connected to so many other writers, and yes there is fellowship and fun, but if you spend too much time online, it makes you covetous. It makes you bitter. It makes you forget that writing isn’t what people talk about online. That’s only the great stuff—the residencies and conferences and book deals (that I promise aren’t your book deals). You aren’t seeing the real work of a writer—the hours of staring at a blank screen, the wrestling with how to make a plotline work, the searching for the right words to express, the reading and reading and reading, the scribbling notes in the middle of the night and then trying to decipher what you meant the next morning, the researching some small fact and getting lost in details that won’t ever find their way into your work but will still matter anyway. You aren’t hearing about the endless rejections, and the editor of a magazine you’re dying to publish in who tells you to maybe wait a few days between submissions after you receive his rejections. True story. You don’t hear about the books with disappointing sales that somehow fall through the cracks despite all the work you put into them. You don’t hear about the critical reviews where you memorize particularly stinging lines, and start to doubt yourself and wonder if you’re really as terrible as the reviewer suggests. But these things happen to every writer and it is part of the work, this recognizing that writing isn’t always easy and failure happens more than success and sometimes, it’s incredibly lonely but you do it anyway. You write and write and write, especially in unusual times like these.
*
These are unusual times. These are bitterly cruel times. In Gaza, a genocide. In Haiti, gang violence, concentrated in the capital, the country’s most populous city. In Sudan, war and displacement. In Ukraine, war and displacement. In the United States, fascism, rank incompetence, unfettered bigotry, the people in power targeting the most vulnerable communities—immigrants, trans people, people with the good sense to recognize how ugly those stupid Tesla trucks are.
Conflict, violence, authoritarianism, these are not new things. When I’ve sat down to write this year, I’ve been plagued with this sense of futility. I have no idea what to say about most of the world’s problems. I am rendered speechless, not out of apathy, but out of fear and grief and humility. But I also know that art matters. Our poems and essays and short stories and novels matter whether we’re writing about oppression or cold plums or a shape-shifting werewolf with a heart of gold. One thing you’ll notice about the current administration is that they are targeting the communities they think they can erase or torment into submission. They are targeting the communities they think no one will stand with.
As writers, we have the power to prove them wrong with every word we commit to the page. Even when confronted by futility and fear, we must do our work.
There’s a reason why the Trump regime is trying to ban the words that shape and represent most of our lives. There’s a reason why so many of his sycophants are trying to ban books that reflect our lived experiences. They know what we know. The pen is not mightier than the sword. The pen is the sword.