Dear friends,
Today I’m happy to share with you an excerpt from my forthcoming book, Wilderment: Creative Writing in the Time of Climate Change, which was just published on AGNI’s blog. It’s from the first chapter of the book, “A World Bewildered,” which explores how creative writers and artists can lean into their negative capability—their capacity to be with uncertainty and contradiction without grasping after clear answers—as an approach to both our lives and our work during these bewildering and tenuous times. This particular section reminds us that the writing process is not just about expressing feelings and ideas or causing transformation in the minds and hearts of the audience, but also—if we let it—a process of self-transformation: an opportunity to change our own minds and see previously-hidden truths and connections.
I’m sharing the first bit of it here, then linking you directly to AGNI to continue reading (no paywall!).
As I approach my deadline to submit the book to the publisher and am stepping back to take in the whole of what I’ve written, I’m beginning to think about other venues that may be interested in publishing pieces from it before the publication date in Spring 2027. If you have a connection to such a venue or ideas of places that may be a good fit, I’d love to hear from you.
Best wishes for the new year,
Sarah Rose
You Are Not the Choir - or, Seeing the Matrix
A couple of years ago I co-organized an AWP (Association for Writers and Writing Programs) Conference panel to discuss the bridges between literature and climate justice. During the Q&A portion of the panel, someone in the audience asked a valid question about whether writing literature addressing climate change was “preaching to the choir.” The inference was that those of us writing and reading literature are already aware of and concerned about planetary warming, and therefore reaching this already informed, sensitive, and largely politically progressive audience doesn’t do much to further environmental causes. I’m grateful that one of the other panelists, the poet Roger Reeves, volunteered to respond to the question with an answer whose wisdom and clarity have stayed with me since.
“We are not preaching to the choir,” Reeves said, “because we are not the choir.” He went on to explain that even those of us who consider ourselves to be enlightened on issues like climate change and social justice still have work to do and often have more to learn than we think. He also noted that the purpose of creative writing is not (or not only) to inform or change the reader. Rather, if we’re doing it right, the process of writing changes us.
Some of us have done more inner work than others. Some of us—because of life circumstances, or racial, gender, economic, or other positionalities—have had to develop keen awareness and insights about systems of harm while others of us have not. That is a fact of the world we live in, and whoever you are, wherever you’re starting from, we all have things to teach and room to grow. But just as we must become lost in the woods before finding the golden key, so it is that your willingness to be bewildered and open yourself to what you don’t understand, even to question what you already know, is a prerequisite to transformation. In other words, don’t expect to change the minds of readers if you can’t change your own.
One of the ways that we transform through writing is not so much an about-face on a particular issue, but an experience of deepening or complexifying understanding, or what I call seeing the matrix. In these cases, the writing process reveals the larger systems underlying an issue that initially appears more personal, straightforward, or discrete.
→continue reading here
And, if you’re interested, check out last year’s post where I announced the book and shared an overview:
