How to Live in the Aftermath

And what we can do on the way there

Welcome. Truth & Dare is a monthly post that offers one Truth (a writing prompt) and one Dare (an artistic gesture in the world). You might also find: thoughts on writing, art, books and paying attention. You won’t find: a paywall or a thicket of hyperlinks taking you someplace else. Just a clean read, a cup of herbal tea poured over your frontal lobe. No noise. No distraction. Thanks for being here.

Welcome, new subscribers! A couple of quick announcements:

• Loaners: The Making of a Street Library is an audiobook now!¹ Hodge and I really enjoyed recording it — find it wherever you listen to books, (thanks to Ken Jones and Honna Veerkamp for the stellar editing work).

• I’ll be teaching another Memoir class for the Attic, beginning in April²

• I’d like to offer some version of my Art of the Letter workshop again, in preparation for April letter-writing month. If you’d like to be a part of whatever scheme I hatch, email me at laura@ideacog.net to get on the list.

There’s a lot of noise out there right now and vulnerable humans and animals under threat and plenty of things unfolding that we can’t control. I’ve been trying to engage in various ways to help in my community, but in order to stay steady myself, I’ve been trying to be more selective about what I read or otherwise ingest, in the spirit of curating good words for my mind. If reading the news is the equivalent of the shriek of train brakes, then reading a book, a good essay or a poem is the sound of much needed silence. And silence feels hard to come by right now.

Every New Year’s Eve, my family builds boats made of found materials like wood, paper and sticks. We decorate them, write or draw on them, imbue them with everything from the year we want to leave behind, as well as new fresh things we want to usher in with the new year. Then we go down to Cathedral Park under the St. John’s bridge, light them on fire and set them on the river where they bob out into the future, burning brightly (or sinking immediately - it’s hard not to attach too much symbolism to years when our boats have flamed out early). A few years ago, I was recovering from surgery (and newly cancer-free) and I felt like I needed a prophet to steer me into that new year. I made an Octavia Butler boat and watched her burn brightly for a long time into the horizon.

There is nothing new under the sun…only new suns

The writer Hanif Abdurraqib has a beautiful essay³ in the New Yorker about the fires in LA, about his admiration for the poet Nikki Giovanni, and about how prescient Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower feels now, with systems breaking down, the fires in Los Angeles and the tumultuous political time we’re in. But Abdurraqib makes the point that Butler didn’t have to weave fiction to imagine an incendiary future. She simply looked around herself to see what problems already existed and were being neglected. And there is a larger truth we can pull from her work, Abdurraqib writes:

People are not incorrect about Octavia Butler predicting the future, but they’re not always clear about what kind of future she was envisioning. It’s not the fires or drug use or tumbling literacy rates that she invented—all of those problems were simply there for her to see. What “Sower” imagines, rather, is a future in which surviving the seemingly unsurvivable requires people to show some emotional dexterity, some ability to surrender whatever selfishness they’ve been harboring and see if they have something that someone else needs. This is the starting point of mutual aid: What do I have that someone else may need? Butler’s work is outlining a future where posing that question is a requirement. “Sower” isn’t just about a time and a fire and a place; it’s about people deciding what kind of apocalypse they are going to have, and then deciding how to live in its aftermath.

What kind of apocalypse shall we have? And how shall we live in the aftermath? In the meantime, what do we have that someone else may need?

I’m going to turn to our Truth and Dare now, but I’ll leave a couple more resources in the footnotes, (Eddie Glaude Jr.’s Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own⁴ plus a conversation between Ben Rhodes and Adam Davis⁵ from Oregon Humanities about what future country we build together).

Truth: Make a list of everything that’s getting you real down right now. Everything you’d like to leave behind: Fears for your safety, or that of others’ insomnia, illness, lost job, broken relationship, uncertainty. Write it all down.

Dare: Shred it into paper-tinder and burn it in some ritual of your own design, (in a boat, on a goat, in a chair, in your hair). Sprinkle a bit of ash into an envelope and mail it to a friend who can sprinkle it somewhere else. Or: skip the burn altogether and write 3 notes of solidarity to leave on nearby porches. It’s your call. Do what you most need. Thank you.⁶

1. You can find it at Libro, (where a portion of the sale goes to the independent bookstore of your choice). Also available on other platforms, like Apple Books and Overdrive and dodgy places like Audible.

2. AM Memoir Workshop

3. Here’s a pdf of the essay

4. Eddie Glaude Jr.’s Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons For Our Own examines the lie America has told itself forever, that some people are worth more than other people. It’s a bit surreal to be reading about the first presidency of Trump while living in the second one, but it’s essential reading for understanding how we arrived in the politics of today.

5. Ben Rhodes says There will be no going back to a way things used to be for the United States, but that’s just as well, since we have a broken, janked-up history built on the backs of others whose lives we convinced ourselves weren’t as valuable, whose stories weren’t as important. We may not have had a say over what happened in our history, but we can control what we build next, inside the present moment, the communities we cultivate and tend, the people we reach out to and support. Rhodes says our country has frayed at the edges, that it’s showing signs of an empire before the fall, but it’s not inevitable, and there’s plenty yet to be done. And anyway, I’ve been thinking that if it turns out to be true, that we’re on the Titanic right now, I want to be in the dance band on the way down.

6. (thank you) For reading all the way to the end. It’s been hard to hang words on this new year, and I went quiet on myself, blew past my usual self-imposed deadline of the 7th of each month for this substack. But I’ll get back into the rhythm and see you on a future number 7. Such a lucky number.