Katie Kitamura Gives Me One Good Reason To Write

 I think being a raised a Protestant in the Midwest has always given me a feeling that writing fiction is not a worthy act. Non-fiction is useful, but fiction seems like too much play. Now that I am old and have been trying to write fiction, I can say it is hard work, but still there is a lingering doubt about the worth of my own fiction (the rejections do keep piling up) but all fiction. 

Reading the following in Novelist Katie Kitamura: ‘As Trump tries to take away everything I love, it’s never been clearer that writing matters’ (The Guardian) gives me a very good reason for writing fiction.

We meet in late February, and it seems everyone I’ve passed today in New York has been discussing politics. Kitamura has not been sleeping well. She never sleeps well during a Trump presidency, she half jokes. She teaches on New York University’s graduate creative writing programme and says that the day after the 2024 election her students asked her what the point was of fiction: did they not have an obligation to resist Trump more directly? She had struggled with that question herself in 2016, but the second Trump administration has been so extreme that she can now see with greater clarity the urgent importance of writing, art and education. This is, she says, “in part because they are being targeted so fiercely, but also because [Trump and his allies] are trying to take away everything I love and care about. It’s never been clearer to me that writing actually does matter. It’s not a frivolous or useless task.”

In an immediate way, she continues, writers are well placed to respond to Trump’s attacks on language, the obfuscation and doublespeak, the moral panic over pronouns or the renaming of the Gulf of Mexico. More broadly, fiction can act as an antidote to authoritarianism. If authoritarianism thrives when people are isolated, fiction brings people together, she says. “In the most basic way, writing is about opening yourself to another person’s mind. The most intimate thing I do on a daily basis is pick up a book and open myself to another person.” And, while the Trump administration may be forcing one way of life on the world, fiction’s job is, as always, to remind people that there are “other ways of being”.

That is a very good reason - saving our humanity. It makes me think of Thomas Mann. 

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