SMWC + The Politics of Writing 🧑‍🤝‍🧑

I just got home from Mexico, where I attended the San Miguel Writers Conference. This was the conference’s 20th anniversary, and the team put on a great event, with powerful keynote addresses from the likes of John Irving, Margaret Atwood, and Ruth Riechl, to name a few. I had the privilege of presenting three sold out workshops, and I met so many brilliant writers, of whom many, I’m sure, will become friends.

What struck me most about the conference was the potency of community. At SMWC, there are communities within communities—the Mexican youth, the keynote luminaries, the generous faculty members, the creative and enthusiastic attendees, the different people from different countries writing in different genres. Yet, everyone is bound by a love of words, and stories, and truth—the kind of truth that makes the world a better place for everyone.

In this divided, unpredictable time we’re living in, contentious popular politics were left outside the venue, and a politics of humanity prevailed inside, especially the part that supports everyone to speak and write according to heart-based truth.

Gathering as a creative community, whether in a town in the middle of Mexico or your own living room, requires a significant amount of trust and a belief that creative, heart-based, truth-telling matters. We must agree on some fundamental principles. We can disagree on how we might solve a problem (pantsters and plotters have been debating for decades), and we might even discuss how to define a problem, or if there even is one, but at minimum we must agree to make room for everyone—every member of the body politic—to have a say, if they want to.

Writers make room for each other in much the same way they make room for the words in their lives. This room-making is a fundamental principle of creativity—and for living with one’s humanity intact. Reading and writing has always helped keep humanity intact (even if/when it fosters disagreements). When we stop telling stories, when we stop sharing stories, when we stop listening to humanity’s variety of stories, we lose trust; we lose heart.

Mexican keynote author, Jorgé Hernandez cautioned us to beware of those who don’t read. Margaret Atwood, resisting any label of prophet, reminded us that in any oppressive regime, there’s always a resistance, and poet, Kaveh Akbar, connected our struggles with grief and isolation now to poetry written thousands of years ago, pointing out that this isn’t the first time we’ve been in a place like this, and it likely won’t be the last.

Most writers don’t claim to be political per se. Percival Everett, author of the book Erasure that was adapted to the screen as the film American Fiction, says his books “just come to him,” and yet, his newly released novel, James powerfully yet subtly addresses America’s slave history through story.

The core of politics is rooted in the debates and discourses about how we decide to live together as individuals and members of societies. Stories, in their specificity of time, place, characters, and situations, contribute to this discourse. Writers grapple with questions pertaining to how we, as individuals, can live and thrive together in groups, as societies. Writers don’t necessarily provide answers to the questions, but they keep the conversation going. They play with the possibilities that arise from asking: How do we strike a balance between “me” and “we”? How do we avoid veering too far into the darkness of “us” versus “them”?

So, the act of writing is political whether you think of it that way or not, because it’s part of how you, as an individual, wonder about and grapple with the questions of the time you live in, your personal experiences, and your place—and our human place—in the larger world.

Own your choices as the political acts that they are: to be a creator, a writer, a truth teller who aims to contribute something meaningful that makes the world a brighter rather than a darker place. Then go do it.

"No book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude" 

~ George Orwell ~

“War is what happens when language fails.”

~ Margaret Atwood ~