Welcome to the inaugural post of my new website!

On the cusp of Trump’s ‘accession’ all aspects of life have come to feel different. Not an hour goes by when I don’t think about how things will be in a month, how things have already changed, how they began changing months ago with the acrimony and fact-denying of the campaign.

In the midst of the current maelstrom of rage and anxiety over what a Trump administration may bring, I’ve begun to see one small—or maybe not so small—positive change: people are forming alliances that might not have been forged six months ago. As a writer, I was particularly interested to read today that Authors United (a group that came together two years ago to resist Amazon’s stranglehold on writers and the writing marketplace) has joined forces with the Authors Guild which has been supporting and advocating for authors for over a century. I am inspired by such collaborations, the acknowledgment that we need each other for strength.

But writing novels, as I do, is a solo activity. What does it mean for me to operate responsibly in the Trump Era? I feel an urgency to figure this out. I have never felt that my work was frivolous, but I especially don’t want it to be now. In this ‘post fact’ world I want more than ever to use my imagination truthfully and even morally. I don’t mean being didactic or polemical; I have never wanted to write novels that are instructive. But I also see how easy it can be to pretend one’s stories are devoid of moral or political content. That is never the case. Writers are merely people writing from whatever perch in the world we occupy, with all that corner’s attendant attitudes, assumptions, values, hopes, judgments, etc.

What feels most important now is to make sure that I remain aware of those assumptions and judgments, and that I question myself and my work rigorously to make sure I don’t, even in writing imagined stories, succumb to the new prevailing meme that truth does not matter.