Missing Years

Somewhere along the line, I lost a couple of years. I know what happened to 2020: the plague. I am less sure about 2019. The answer may be Donald Trump, a master of chaos. The unending series of crises on the news may have distracted me from writing and maintaining my website. I am used to the ordinary upsets of modern life, but Trump is special.

The crises he created were both malevolent and nuts. The awful treatment of refugees and immigrants, which is against national and international law;  the deliberate  wrecking of government departments, including the national parks and the US postal service. (A lot of people love the national parks, and almost everyone loves the post office. It got a 91% approval rating in a poll last year.) The pointless tariff fight with China, which ended up hurting American businesses and farmers. It’s as if he hated the US and its people and was determined to break the country and make its people miserable. I could go on, but everyone knows this stuff.

Through most of my adult life, writing has been my way of coping with the real world: analyzing it, criticizing it, and escaping it. But this time writing did not work. This was not just due to the Trump Administration, though it was four years of one damn thing after another. I think my faith in myself as a writer has been eroding for some time. I’m not sure why. Maybe age and getting tired. I could no longer see the point of writing.

At the same time, I’ve been having trouble reading. A friend of mine, who is a publisher and has to read many book-length manuscripts, gave up social media because she thought the constant jumble of unconnected short messages damaged her ability to concentrate. I think this may be true. I love facebook. Unlike writing fiction, writing for facebook gives immediate feedback. I block people who bother me, so mostly I get likes or friendly comments. What more could a writer ask for? Photos of cats are always welcome. Landscapes are also good. One of my facebook friends takes lovely photos of Minnesota winter woods: bare trees with their shadows lying on unmarked snow. I even like photos of people’s dinners. If the dinner looks especially good I ask for the recipe. Maybe if I spent less time with facebook I could read and write more.

In any case, I seem to have started writing again. It began this spring with writing poems. I have written poetry most of my life, but never a lot of it; and this time I wrote a fair number of poems in a short period. Then — in the fall — I moved on to short stories. I have finished two and am most of the way done with a third. Why the creative juices started flowing in Trump’s last year as president I don’t know.