Eight Days in Paradise

I’ve spent the last 8 days in Florida, St. Pete’s to be exact, and the view from my room at the Residence Inn Tierra Verde is the metaphor for both the week and Florida. I could see the parking lot, water, palm trees, baby blue houses, and crucially, an osprey nest. All week I watched the osprey pair build their nest with sticks and Spanish moss, and hunker down in strong winds and heavy rain that bedeviled Florida’s western shore. On the Gulf of America, of course.

The view as-metaphor was rounded out by the outdoor performance of the house band yesterday, the first pretty day all week. The set list swung wildly between ersatz reggae and bad pop staples: Wonderwall, Country Road, Bob Marley, The Eagles. It makes no sense, and is also so fluidly Florida that it’s all I would expect them to play.

You can see how the osprey is the best part of this view.

The osprey of my week was the writing conference I attended. Writers In Paradise featured best selling authors teaching writing craft and small workshops for writers who have projects underway. My workshop was led by Ann Hood and I heard talks by Karen Russell (Swamplandia), Lauren Groff (The Vaster Wilds, Florida), Andre Dubus III, and Michael Koryta.

Aside from the great writing insights I got from my time in the classroom, a secondary effect was that I was shielded from the firehose of bad news coming from the Trump administration. Each evening I would check Political Wire to get the top headlines and then I’d go back to thinking about things I find edifying. It offered a toolkit for managing the next four years. Here are my tips:

1. Only check the news or social media once per day, and only visit one of the two. Do not get into a scrolling vertex. Get in and get out.
2. Watch what the administration does and not what it says. Reacting to Elon Musk’s Nazi salute won’t change anything; speaking out against the attack on birthright citizenship will.
3. Look for what the opposition is doing, and support it. After you see something terrible, do a little research to see if anyone’s challenging it. If there’s something you can do to support that, please do. Maybe you are in a position to challenge it, and you’ll need to decide who to respond. Will you fight or will you capitulate?
4. Keep your head in a creative space. Creativity is good for your mental health and creating and consuming new and different art will contribute to building a new and better culture and politics. But mainly, the creative space is a healthy good place to be when the world is terrible.
5. I’m paraphrasing Al Gore (of all people) when I say despair is the same as denial. Make that your mantra and go back to looking for good news.

The Floridians I met at the conference have had more experience than most of us in dealing with a tidal wave of conservatives and their policy agenda. Florida was a blue state! And yet, the Florida writers stick to their principles and their policy beliefs and handle their outrage by writing new stories and poetry.

We spent about half the time at the conference doing critiques of one another’s writing. Getting a critique can be demoralizing at first. We had each spent many hours writing and polishing our private stories and it felt vulnerable to be told that our work doesn’t achieve what we hoped it achieved. But after a good night’s sleep, people’s feedback becomes the fertilizer for making our work so much better. So one last tip for the looming nightmare: Make sure you share your creative spaces with other people. Be vulnerable; build community. Our individual work is only a true success if it benefits us collectively.

Okay, go have a great week. I love you, friends!