Writers matter in a society to the extent that we can help that society hear its unvoiced longing, encounter its erased and disregarded selves, break with complacency, numbness, despair.

Whatever happens with us, your body will haunt mine

Despair, when not the response to absolute physical and moral defeat is, like war, the failure of imagination.

A decade of cutting away dead flesh, cauterizing old scars ripped open over and over and still it is not enough.

We can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.

There is the falsely mystical view of art that assumes a kind of supernatural inspiration, a possession by universal forces unrelated to questions of power and privilege or the artist's relation to bread and blood. In this view, the channel of art can only become clogged and misdirected by the artist's concern with merely temporary and local disturbances. The song is higher than the struggle.

Writers matter in a society to the extent that we can help that society hear its unvoiced longing, encounter its erased and disregarded selves, break with complacency, numbness, despair.