Week 5: How to write through the horrors

It’s week five of 2026. How is the writing going? These have been difficult weeks here in the US, where we are seemingly at the whim of a mad king threatening to invade allies and sending out goons who are kidnapping and murdering people who are just trying to live their lives or standing up in protest.

How do we create in the midst of these daily horrors? Where do we channel our anger and our fear? We each have to find our own answers: For me, curtailing my news consumption and especially my doom-scrolling, together with finding concrete actions I can take, has helped me stay balanced, rooted in my values and what I know to be true.

But here is what I know to be true for all of us, everyone reading this letter. As creative people, we are especially sensitive to stories and emotions—this is precisely why we are drawn to writing and why we are good at it. All of us likely have images from these last weeks that we can’t shake, that haunt us when we are trying to sleep or make dinner or hug our kids. These images live inside us now, and we have to write through or around them.

But we must keep writing. We can’t allow our voices to be silenced. Readers need our books, need your book.

That doesn’t mean you need to write directly about the events we are living through, though I know that someday we will have powerful and heartbreaking books that show us something new about what is happening. Every book tells us something about what it means to be human, takes us deeply inside the experience of at least one other person and often many. Books show us how to navigate change and become someone new. Books offer balm and reassurance—they give us the end of the story, a momentary resting place.

Last weekend I had that rare combination of a blank schedule and an empty house. I knew I needed to rest in between two busy weeks, and I decided I would spend the weekend reading The Antidote by Karen Russell. And that’s what I did, curled up on my couch with a changing array of snacks and cats.

I was also listening to music on KCRW, which runs NPR news briefs at the top of every hour. All of those briefs across the weekend focused on the events in Minnesota and the death of Alex Pretti at the hands of ICE agents. With every briefing, I thought about the gap between what I was experiencing and what people in the Twin Cities were experiencing—a gap I could visualize quite clearly because I lived in St. Paul for five years. I felt sorrow though not guilt about our different realities—this very fight was almost at my doorstep here in San Francisco a few months ago, and it could come here any day. I know where my whistle is. I know what I will do if ICE shows up on my block or steps up actions in my city. I know the actions I am already taking. I know I am allowed to rest when I can.

But those briefings did weave their way into my story, my experience of reading The Antidote. The novel doesn’t speak directly to the political events we are experiencing right now. Karen Russell is instead circling around a set of tangentially related concerns: the effects of extractive capitalism, colonialism, and racism and how they sink into the people and lands of the Midwest, becoming embodied in intergenerational trauma, dispossession, and climate change. That sounds grim and abstract, but while the novel is sometimes grim, it’s never abstract, thanks to Russell’s vibrant cast of characters, a found-family assemblage of misfit and broken humans (plus a cat and a sentient scarecrow) who band together to make a stand in a remarkable and uplifting act of bravery.

Along the way, the novel offered me passages that spoke deeply to my feelings of rage and grief about the news briefings I heard every hour. Let me tell you about one, which comes in a letter from a Black female photographer who is on assignment in Nebraska, writing to her boss at the Resettlement Administration back in Washington. It’s 1935, the height of the Dust Bowl. She has purchased a used camera in a local shop that produces images she doesn’t understand, of landscapes she didn’t see: “Firelit and fortressed Nebraskas. The Platte River, bare and dry. Skies so choked with dust I cannot imagine anything alive beneath them. Different tomorrows unfolding on the same land.”

Here’s the passage I read again and again:

The character, Cleo, goes on to write, “What was a time-traveling camera doing in a Dannebrog pawnshop? Why was I the one who bought it? Why me, Roy? I don't know. If you widen the aperture enough, it's a hilarious joke. I promise you that I never intended to betray your faith in my potential. To be very frank with you, a part of me would have preferred to make more conventional work. But I can no more direct the eye of this haunted Graflex than you can from your office in Washington. All I can do is take my pictures, mix the chemicals, and wait to see what arises.”

And that’s all we can do too. We will have to see some things that we prefer not to see. Things that will hurt us and haunt us, even as we count ourselves lucky they aren’t happening to us or to a loved one—or haven’t happened to us yet. But then our job is to “wait to see what arises.” To keep writing whatever stories are ours to tell, and find out how the tincture of what we are seeing, thinking, and feeling at this moment emerges through them. In the end, that tincture might not be visible to readers, but it will be there all the same.

So keep fighting, keep protesting and witnessing and speaking out. But also make time for reading and writing—they are tools of power too. A year or more ago, Karen Russell wrote words that I needed to read, that bolstered my courage and resolve, words that I’ve passed on to you today. This is what words and stories can do. Keep writing yours. There will be a reader who needs them.

I love celebrating publication milestones of authors I’ve worked with and I’m so honored to have been part of the journey.

Congrats, Beth! Learn more and buy the book here. Check out my Instagram post to find out my favorite things about the book.

I love speaking to writers and editors—check out my Speaking page or reply to this email if you are interested in having me speak to your group.

I have a trio of Things of Joy this week because we need all we can get. First is an achingly beautiful “song for healing” performed by Jeff Tweedy and his two sons, sent out to the people of Minneapolis (Instagram reel). Second is an interview with a guy screen-printing resistance T-shirts in Minneapolis (Bluesky link, TikTok link). Finally, here’s a Guardian story about people making DIY resistance zines, and a Bluesky post with instructions about how you can make your own.

Stay well, y’all, and keep fighting the good fights.

Kristen