The writer & the organizer

A week from now, I’ll be leaving 80% of my worldly possessions behind and moving to a new country. I’m living out of a carry-on suitcase, and my closet is empty except for a hand-bedazzled outfit for the Renaissance tour. My best friend and I are leaving each other daily 6-minute-long voice notes trying not to cry. All summer my husband and I have been traveling up and down and across the Northeast and Midwest saying goodbye to our family and friends. In other words, everything is beautiful and heightened and fleeting and vivid and strange.

There’s something about saying good bye, about having so many people in your life taking the chance to tell you exactly what you mean to them — something a lot of us don’t do until someone’s funeral, tbh. On my last day of street outreach in DC, I arrived to find that almost everyone I’d ever organized with — even folks from the very earliest days — had shown up to say goodbye to me. They circled up and each told me what they appreciated about me, described how they saw me. It was wonderful, and profoundly loving, and practically shook my foundation: to be mirrored back to myself so vividly, to understand myself as a community had received me.

I don’t write about community organizing that much, in part because I believe you work through the most important questions of how to fight for justice on the ground, in a shared site of struggle. I don’t have much patience anymore for people (namely many of my fellow whites) who are still “listening and learning” and sharing IG posts but somehow haven’t ever been activated enough to actually go to a community meeting, or get connected with local organizers to find out what (sustained) support is needed, or get into the streets in any meaningful way — and so I generally save these discussions for the people I’m organizing with in-person. There’s just a lot you can only learn when you’re in the work — I remember Alicia Garza talking about wanting to organize with people who (I’m paraphrasing her) are interested in working in the real world, with real people — not theoretically, or with ideological purity, or whatever — and that has really resonated with me for years.

But! Here I am writing about my organizing on the internet. Because I’ve been thinking more and more about how my organizing experiences are knit into my writing experiences — or maybe more precisely, that the way I see the world because of organizing pours life into the way I see the world because of writing, and vice versa.

I don’t usually consider this, in part because I don’t believe organizing is an “interest” of mine or something I do because of a particular bent or personality trait. I think it’s simply what everyone who possibly can should be doing. Like Shirley Chisholm said, “service is the rent that you pay for room on the earth,” and for me, to be white at this moment in American history, it’s simply a moral imperative for the fight for racial justice to be at the center of your life, period. Not because you’re “the organizing type” or have inordinate free time or whatever. Just because you’re here, and benefiting from a fucked up system.

However, there’s no way to deny the ways that organizing & writing are intertwined for me, personally. I go back to Grace Paley a lot to understand this. Her life, and the lives of almost all of her characters, were textured with the details of activism so familiar to me — running to the shop to get posters copied before the march, talking to strangers to get petitions, holding someone’s baby in the back of the community meeting when it’s dark outside and you had a long day at work. And in between all of that, Grace was sitting down on the park bench or at the kitchen table and sketching out short stories, vivid with life and fire. The two things were connected for her. I’ve read her so many times over the years, hungry to understand that connection.

In an interview, Grace once said (about writers), “If you’re not interested in listening to other people, then go find another job. It’s not your voice that’s important at this point. You have to really care about others. I don’t mean you have to be sympathetic to everybody, but you have to be interested. Interested is a different thing. You have to be curious and interested about how people live. And even how they speak.”

She could easily be talking about organizing here — about a posture and a rhythm to your days that remains steadfastly interested in others, that understands yourself as part of a knit-together, interdependent world, that cares about your neighborhood and the school system and your no-good elected official and the cops harassing someone on the corner and whether the public pool is open to everyone and how soon the city can build more affordable housing, that cares enough to get good enough to actually fight for those things.

It’s the listening, I think, that I practice in both writing and organizing. Being interested in how people speak. In how we hurt and help each other. In how we see or refuse to see each other. Interested without judgement, a lot of the time, and sometimes with plenty of judgement, because that’s human, too, and sometimes with a sudden, sharp clarity that illuminates you, too. You can’t do any of it alone. You need your friends to remind you, to push you, to lovingly nudge you back. You even need strangers, the ones you have something in common with, and the ones you don’t.

As I move away from an organizing community that has meant more to me than any other political home I’ve ever had, and simultaneously revise a novel that I feel more immersed in and tied to than any other I’ve written—that interest and listening have swirled together for me, fed by two springs. Even as I head into a completely new season, I know I’m carrying both with me.