tell your stories

We need stories. We won’t survive without them. Our current America is one where a government agent can point his gun in an open car window and shoot someone–a poet, a mother, a woman–at point-blank range, and the administration defends him with claims easily disproven by video evidence. None of this is ok.

And that’s why stories are so important. Words have power. Stories can teach and rally and give us hope. Stories can give us the escapes that make us more resilient.

I’ve had so much I’ve been meaning to write about starting work as a writing mentor and freelance editor, how excited I am to help writers find their process and develop a sustainable writing practice, but that doesn’t feel important right now.

Everyone has a story waiting to come out. The most common response when new people find out I’m a writer is for them to tell me about the story they’ve dreamed about writing, or the manuscript in a box under the bed that they’d like to do something with, someday.

Let that someday be now. Whether your do it alone, or with someone like me, or with some other kind of support, please do it. Write the novel or play or poems enough to shape wings for yourself. They don’t have to be serious–rest and play are also forms of resistance!–but please, please tell your stories.

We need them.