Acknowledge the chaos, make art

It’s been a minute, after I said I’d try to show up in this space more regularly. Then things happened, a member of our household was injured in a way that impacted their mobility (they are better now), multiple wars waged in horrific ways (that’s still happening), there was an election, there was a long holiday season far way from my larger family and my circle of friends laced with the dread of what might be coming, then friends worrying about their house burning down, then an inauguration, and an unraveling with friends losing jobs, queer and trans friends fearing for their safety and that of their children, immigrant friends worried about their standing and safety, and foreign friends asking me, are you okay, should you leave?

And I’ve had a lot of mornings where I sit at my desk, staring out the window at the crows on the power lines, the neighbor’s cypress trees blowing in the California winter wind and rain and at the slowly greening Diablo mountains in the distance, wondering who could possibly care if I finish this book that isn’t suppose to come out until 2026? Who is going to listen to a podcast about writing when their world is collapsing around them? I use to remind myself of the meaning of art with a story that Neil Gaiman told about women reading secreted books in the Nazi concentration camps of WWII. The story still stands but the source of it has been another loss, another disappointment, another ally who turned out to be anything but.

That story has been joined by reminders from other writers and creators—friends and strangers—that art matters. It is often the thing that gets us through the hardest times and the collapse, and gives us something to look forward to on the other side and ideas about what to build on the remains. Even writers whose work is full of warnings like Octavia Butler in the Parable of the Sower (* affiliate links for Bookshop . org) and the Parable of the Talents*, weave hope about our adaptability and survival in the face of catastrophe. If you haven’t read those books, they might be hard slogs right now but they are also worth a read or a listen. Kim Stanley Robinson is another far-seeing author with provocative things to say about where we are and what the future* could look like. I think often now of Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash* and how tech oligarchs have seen it as a blueprint and not the caution I took it as when I read it thirty years ago and again last year. I know there are more. If you share yours with me, I’ll share them next time.

A friend asked recently (was December recent?) if I had read Drive Your Plough Over the Bones of the Dead*, a quirky murder mystery by Polish Noble Prize Laureate Olga Tokarczuk. I listened to it last year and it was undoubtedly my favorite read of 2024. Yes, people die in it, but it is still escapist in a way that British village murder mysteries are, and I always think now about washing my feet before I go to bed. So share your escapist reads or podcasts or music, paintings too. Art may be what gets us through, but community is what helps us survive. We save each other.

I hope you have community and I hope you are safe and have what you need and can help those around you feel safer and have what they need. I am currently safe and have what I need, and despite my brain’s willingness to doomscroll and catastrophize every thread of news, I am writing. Because it does matter and because it is its own escape for a few hours a day. There is something oddly comforting about research-reading 17th century herbals and Samuel Pepys’ account of the London Fire, or Pliny’s of Pompeii. We have always been adapting and surviving and what that looks like changes as we know more and encounter new delights and horrors.

Thank you for sticking around through the quiet times and continuing on this journey with me. I won’t make promises about any regularity of this missive, but you’ll hear from me here or there will be another book, written in hope if nothing else.

<3 V

Some places in time and space seem to be cauldrons of creativity and I was lucky enough to swim in the soup of one as an undergraduate at the University of Tennessee in Chattanooga. I’ve mentioned that this book was on the horizon but it is out now and I could not be more honored and humbled to find my words among those included in this anthology. If poetry is a joy or an escape for you, I highly recommend it. Available to preorder from Press 53.

Objects in This Mirror: An Anthology of Legacy edited by Danielle Hanson & Julia Beach, cover collage by Kari Harrison