I’m doing good work on Majestic Seventeen, my current project. Creeping forward 500 words at a time. “The End” has assumed the nature of the horizon: an abstract concept that recedes before you, never attained. It’s a big book!

But I write because I don’t know what else to do.

When the World Feels Like It’s Burning

It’s hard to articulate even to ourselves how bananas and terrible everything is right now. Oligarchs crashing the entire world economy to enrich themselves further. Law-abiding people being detained and disappeared. A dipshit narcissist tech nerd chainsawing the federal government for no good reason as far as I can see. Meaning and reality themselves totter under the weight of lies and conspiracy theories. And that doesn’t even touch on the endemic problems that fester in the background — climate change, inequality. The wheels are just coming off our civilization.

This is why I write speculative fiction. To try to imagine something different, something better. Hope arising in the ruins, from lost Atlantis, from America. I have personal experience with that, rising from ruins. Hurricane Katrina. This year is the twentieth anniversary. It always shows up in my work and it will show up in a big way this year.

I watched this ruination for a while. My entire career. Public librarianship gives you a raw faceful every day of the structural injustice and endemic heartlessness of our society. You work with people who have been failed by society in every possible way. Deliberately, methodically. Then kicked when they’re down. The “digital divide” just exacerbated that over the last thirty years. Requiring computer literacy and expensive technology from people who were functionally illiterate, the first of the many ways society failed them. Having to go online to apply for a job at Walmart. It isn’t right. The public library has been the finger in the dike of that flood of injustice all along.

The year of the pandemic, I had a health crisis of my own, and when early retirement was offered as a cost saving measure for city government, I took it. So I could turn my attention to writing. Before I died.

Art Is Not a Luxury. It’s a Spell.

I pulled an Oracle card today, from the World Shamans Oracle, and the card was Orpheus. The tragic, mad poet-sage who could move the stones to weep with his song. Appropriate since I was going to work on this very blog post. The guidebook says, “Poetry is a form of shamanism that takes place in language; each word acquires value in the verses and has the power to re-enchant the world.”

That’s what I’m trying to do, why my writing feels as much a spiritual practice to me as creativity. Re-enchant the world. Western culture is absolutely desperate to re-enchant the world. I state that in my Artist’s Statement: I write “pulpy, entertaining speculative fiction that also advocates progressive values, and interrogates structures of power and belief. My goal is to entertain people by telling tales of other worlds, which help them think how we could manifest a better world here and now. ”

In times like these, art is not just entertainment or a luxury. Not an escape. It is resistance. It is survival. Do you remember how desperately we clung to art through the Covid pandemic lockdown? It was the only thing that got us through. Shows, comedy, music. Even baking bread like it was a blessed sacrament. That is what I learned from the pandemic: art is non-negotiable.

Art is life.

The Power of Naming

If shamans are healers, I’m not a healer of bodies, but of meaning. Telling stories that help bind up the wounds of civilization. The Pono Way is about solarpunk, DIY resistance to imperialism and the dangers of xenophobia. Even people who don’t like the book get the message. Daughter of Atlas is about the collapse of imperialism and the danger of ecological destruction. Majestic Seventeen is turning out to be about facing down systems of power, control, and belief. Yes, they’re all adventure speculative fiction, but I hope they’re more than just that.

My Lane is the Highway

I reference this more in my post My Lane is the Highway. I don’t need to write to put food on the table. I can let my ideas expand, experiment with different forms, different shades in the prism of speculative fiction. I write to entertain people but also make them think. Before anything new arises in the world, someone has to imagine it. I can do that.

The world we have now didn’t arise from natural selection or the invisible hand of the market. It was deliberately made, and it is working as intended. Extracting wealth and blood from the masses to gorge the billionaires. It can be unmade. All this suffering isn’t necessary. We can do better.

A Closing Incantation

So I write, because it is one thing I can control, and contribute, when the world is collapsing around me. Even at the end of empires, life still goes on. People still work and earn money. They still need entertainment. Spec Fic has always been a Trojan horse to sneak in new ideas, on the pages of pulp magazines and the panels of comic books.

My pen is my wand. My book is my spell. I sing for a better world. Creating something when the world is falling down is an act of defiant hope.

So what do you sing? What is your spell? How are you going to re-enchant the world? It needs you to dream a new dream, now more than ever. Join me.

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