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My career as a writer has changed dramatically in the past year, and I hope it continues to progress as it has. I’ve learned how passionate people are about gender issues, and how excited our society is about all the change it’s facing. Some of that excitement is expressed as fear, only natural when we face so much uncertainty. At the same time, I feel we’re heading towards a critical mass of people concerned about humanity. There’s a new consciousness of empathy out there. I feel like I’m a part of it.
This will only seem unrelated at first: Last week I was having a glass of rum after watching an exciting match of playoff hockey. I was talking with a friend about the sense of community we felt when we were with other hockey fans, especially Blackhawks fans. Both of us had experienced meeting Blackhawks fans while we were traveling some place far from Chicago. We immediately felt kinship, had something to talk about, and we shared a yearning to see our team win the Stanley Cup, something we had felt when only children.
Opposite to this, I used to feel—indeed, I had been taught—that a writer was an island, a lonely person, someone who did his work in the darkness of a basement or the light of a clean café, but always off to the side, in a corner where no one would bother him. Even though he was trying to express something universal to us all, he was still alone in it. Hockey fans and rum merchants could have community. But a writer only had himself and, if he was lucky, an audience, though he would never meet most of them.
Since completing my novel, Finding the Moon in Sugar, I’ve learned that writing is a team effort. I don’t just mean the team of people required to bring a book to readers: editors and designers and sales people. I mean the people who inspire you, the ones you find yourself writing about, the ones you’ve observed in the train or in the bar in Barbados. If you’re drinking a glass of your favorite spirit with a friend after a hockey game, and you choose, as I am now, to write about him, your writing is better if you’ve thought of him as actively giving. He’s giving you time, conversation and gestures, and he’s sharing interest in things you both love.
A writer is, first and foremost, a mindful member of a community, of hockey fans or otherwise. His job is to notice how much he has been given, often by people long since dead: those who built the house where he lives, wrote the laws that give him the right to free expression, the woman who bore his children and supports him when he feels doubt. If I am to continue growing as a writer, and contribute more to our ongoing discussion, our growing social consciousness, I must become ever-mindful of my oneness with all I witness.
There is a time and a place for everything, even in uncertain times. But as our times are uncertain, they are not ordinary. I completed a book about a terribly lonely and confused boy to gain a sense of community and greater consciousness. I hope to continue growing as a thinker, and I hope I can keep sharpening my eye, feel the natural embrace that comes when one sees himself as part of these historical times. So much depends on the decisions we make. I hope I can make wise ones.
This story was previously published by Gint Aras and is republished to Medium.
Photo credit: iStock