Maybe you’ve seen this meme:

If you’re a writer, it’s hard not to be discouraged looking at something like this. Then again, we live in fairly discouraging times. I don’t need to run down the list. Just check your preferred social media platform. It’s a wasteland of doom scrolling. In fact, you’ll probably see that meme.

As a writer, it makes me feel useless. I just write words. I can’t restore funding. I can’t get people out of prison. I can’t restore Constitutional guarantees. I can’t enforce judicial decisions. I can’t eliminate tariffs. All I can do is write poems (of a sort).

And I haven’t been encouraged when I’ve dipped my toe in that water. For nine books, I made Joe Davis’s political views reasonably clear. (Joe takes a shot at Glen Beck in the first book and comments on gun control in the second.) But it was just a mention here and there. Death is the One That Got Away was the series’ most overt dip into politics, as Senator Bill Longston drew a clear parallel to Donald Trump. The result was that I lost a few readers (and I don’t have that many to spare). My proofreader warned me that such a thing might happen, but I chose to go forward. Do I have any regrets?

No.

Let’s address the “feeling useless” thing first. We’re enjoying (?) the five year anniversary of a time when the world seemed knocked off its axis. In February, 2020, the COVID pandemic reached the United States, and by the end of March, mass shutdowns started. People were kept home from the office or school. They were ordered to stay indoors and to wear masks if they ventured outside. Nobody knew a vaccine was only several months away, and that by the end of 2021, we’d start to talk about the pandemic in the past tense. For all we knew at the time, we were at the beginning of the end of days. (We may still be there. Let’s not be too hasty.)

Who did people turn to during this time? They turned to artists. Everybody seemed to have their pandemic binge, be it a TV show, a movie, or a book series. The Mandalorian, Ted Lasso, Tiger King, The Queen’s Gambit, Dune. Old movies, books and TV shows were discovered or re-discovered. Locally, there were artists who innovated. A couple who performed plays in their driveway. A filmmaker who had actors record scenes on Zoom, then stitched them together into short films. An actor who did “morning announcements” for his high school age stepdaughter and posted them on social media. Filmmakers, writers, actors, singers, visual artists, they all found ways of getting their work to the public. Did they get rich in the attempt? No. Because that wasn’t the purpose. 

These were the things that got us through. Did they create the vaccine? No. Did they contribute to its distribution? No. Did they make politicians take the pandemic seriously? No. But they got us through. They were important.

If the arts weren’t important, would people be so threatened by them? If thoughts and ideas aren’t important, why are books banned? Why is arts funding cut? Why is Hollywood pressured to follow a certain agenda? Why does censorship exist? If art wasn’t important, it would be ignored. 

That’s how totalitarianism is allowed to thrive. They come for the opposing viewpoints. They come for the better vision. They come for the thoughts and ideas. They come for what the arts have to offer.

So, what do we do? We carry on. We express ourselves. We comment on what’s going on. Not just on specific events, but what part of the human condition has contributed to it. We share a vision. Point to the better angels of our nature. Provoke thought. Sing. Write. Perform. Create. Inspire. 

What am I planning to do, specifically? On one level, I’m starting the MFA Creative Writing Program at Augsburg. My major project will not be another Joe Davis book. It will be a mystery, but one that allows me to look at, among other things, the arc of American society and politics over the last forty years. It’s intended to be a major work. My magnum octopus as I refer to it.

The Joe Davis books will continue. There is also another overtly political book in the pipeline. But beyond specific commentary, I’ll continue–between murders and dick jokes, of course–to use Joe as a vehicle for my views on society, on politics, on humanity. I’ll weave it into my work in ways big and small. But I won’t stop. I won’t be discouraged. I won’t be cowed. The times are too important for that.

Do you need any poems?