Every morning my alarm rings shortly before sunrise—before it’s time to feed the cats, take out the trash, leave for work. I shake off sleep, and for half a minute (or ten), I debate hitting “snooze” for the seventh time instead of dragging myself out of bed and to my desk. And I ask: Why write?
I work in victims’ services. Before writing this—rather, once I’d teetered so close to my deadline that I had no choice but to write—I received an urgent request from an immigrant appealing for asylum. After being beaten by her husband for ten years, she found the courage to retain a divorce lawyer and to leave him. Her husband called ICE, who informed her that without his green card, she had 100 days to leave the country. I processed her request, and then I pulled up this blank page. And again, I asked myself: Why the fuck do we write?
When I first joined the 12th Street, The Journal of Writing and Democracy, I thought: What do I have to say about democracy? Furthermore, who the hell would want to hear it? As I write this, the Trump administration is in the process of pulling out of the Arms Trade Treaty, and Sri Lankans are reeling from a suicide bombing that left more than 250 dead. Set against the backdrop of cataclysmic political change, how does art contribute? In short: Who cares?
It took me about a month into my first workshop to understand that the act of writing is an inherently political act. Democracy is built through the elevation of many voices, and what better way to capture a voice, in all its complexity, than on the page? Writing calls us to have a dialogue with the world around us, to consider our perspectives, and the cultural and social context that inform them—even if that world doesn’t extend beyond our own living room (or heads, for that matter). As essayist Lacy M. Johnson puts it, writing creates “a way of re-seeing the world in which the world could be changed.”
I am proud to say that the stories we publish at 12th Street this year are as diverse as the students who’ve submitted them. From Chloe Colvard’s relentless head checks in Letter to a First Time Admit to Jamiya Leach’s bitter iron comb in Brill Street Stories, these works encapsulate the subtlety and nuance through which we make sense of the world. “I don’t know the word for wanting to belong/in that which begs to spit you out, but we’ll call it Brill Street,” Leach writes. Though the exterior world may greet us with hostility, writing gives us the opportunity to synthesize that hostility into something different. Maybe it’s as simple as catharsis, or reprieve, or maybe it’s much bigger than that.
We can’t always change the world, but we can change how we relate to it. And that alone is reason enough to keep writing.
With gratitude,
Aly Tadros
Editor-in-Chief
12th Street Journal