I am not an activist but I believe in movements, changes, thinking and re-thinking the systems and the structures under which we live, but also, what is happening right now is a reminder that talking/writing is only one-third of what I think that it’s my job to do the other two-thirds, and the part that feels like the most useful thing that I can do right now, is the reading and the listening, the paying as close and as careful attention as I can in order that later, I might maybe have something to say. How it can work to help people consider experiences that are not at all relatable, until they are relatable, because the writer shaped them in a way that made the reader better see and understand a life that’s not like theirs. I am though interested in what art can argue for without ever arguing. Mariama Ba, Nadine Gordimer, Nawal El Saadawi were all activists as well as writers. Some are there because I love them, because I read them in an attempt at better understanding, because they were or are voices that surprised or excited me, because I wanted them to be one of the many voices in my narrator’s head as she continues to try to figure out what or how to be. They are the books the character is reading, escaping into. There are twenty books mentioned in my new book and all of them are on purpose. More than ever, I don’t want to write so much as I want to listen and to read. But already our physical presence at the protests has dwindled. It felt scary too, being out there, global pandemic roiling, but also, when our kids asked why we were allowed all of a sudden to be around people, (masked the whole time), when for months we hadn’t been, it felt important to say to them, sometimes there are necessary risks. It also felt important to me, these past few weeks, to put my body in the group of bodies at the protests, to show my children what it is, to be a body among bodies, standing up. Insofar as I have funds to give, I will continue to offer them.

I have and will continue to do the reading. The protests and the actions, the reading lists. More importantly, what will all that reading or that thinking give to anybody else. All that reading by myself, sometimes ignoring or neglecting the people that I love. What will all this stupid angsty thinking get me. There is a quote, in the book I wrote that comes out soon, (and here I am, That Ass Hole, quoting myself) but there’s a quote in the book, when the best friend of the main character says to her, “What in the fuck have you ever done for anyone but read and speak and think.” The main character is not me, but that moment is 100% a self-own.

Lynn steger strong want