Zoom Link: Writing for Change January 2025
A session about keeping creativity alive in strange and difficult times.
Hello everyone from here in a very waterlogged Somerset. Last week was Blue Monday, the day of the year we are all supposed to feel the most miserable. Although I’ve had my birthday to distract me, it now feels absolutely bleak here. We are surrounded by floods. The fields where I walk my dogs not there any more - they are lakes. At least knee deep in water and inaccessible. That line you can see to the left of the flood waters is actually a fence that is almost completely submerged, which gives you an idea of how deep it is.
I can barely get in and out of my village without taking extensive detours via roads that are passable but still wet and full of debris and potholes. My kids school buses cannot get to us; so much of the day is taken up by long school runs. Aside from the inconvenience, it really fills me with anxiety for the future. It seems like climate change could creep up on us fast and transform our lives overnight, just like the pandemic did. With just a bit of rain, life as we know it is gone. It’s so worrying.
Elsewhere there are changes that feel concerning. Trump is back in the White House. Yes some of us feminists liked his executive order on gender but that doesn’t mean we don’t wonder what else his leadership will bring, for women, for America, for the world. Then there is Musk. Twitter was often a place where ‘writing for change’ felt most alive for me, and yet now I don’t feel I can support that platform, in spite of the fact I have over 40 thousand followers there. Others are leaving instagram and facebook too over Zuckerberg’s seeming support of Trump AND his new ‘free speech’ policies. Familiar stuff is getting submerged or washed away.
It all feels a bit dystopian, and in some ways, as if there is too much change rather than not enough. It can be hard to stay motivated or even present, and yet these are the times that writing is needed more than ever.
So my proposal for this month’s Writing for Change is that we gather and explore this. We will take our usual format: space to think, space to write, space to talk. We often take a seasonal theme in W4C, and this week’s meeting will be very close to Imbolc (1st February), the mid-point between the winter solstice and the spring equinox, and usually the time when we begin to see the first signs of Spring, such a powerful symbol of hope. How can we, as writers, find the optimism and the hope we need to keep creating, even in tough times? Because the act of writing does actually signify a belief in the future - a time, further down the track, when people will read the ideas that are currently in our minds, and be changed by them. And creativity relies on our not giving up.
Here’s a poem for you that I like. After that, the zoom link follows for paid subscribers. I hope to see you all on Thursday evening at 6.30 - 8.30pm UK time. Please bring a pen and paper, and light a candle in the background if you are able. See you there!
Sometimes, by Sheenagh Pugh
Sometimes things don’t go, after all,
from bad to worse. Some years, muscadel
faces down frost; green thrives; the crops don’t fail.
Sometimes a man aims high, and all goes well.
A people sometimes will step back from war,
elect an honest man, decide they care
enough, that they can’t leave some stranger poor.
Some men become what they were born for.
Sometimes our best intentions do not go
amiss; sometimes we do as we meant to.
The sun will sometimes melt a field of sorrow
that seemed hard frozen; may it happen for you.