I really enjoyed this sentiment here, and so wanted to share:
Tag: fiction
why archie reads – fiction as self help
For some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on Earth.
What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you.
Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean;
they show us how to live and die.Anne Lamott
I have already answered why I began writing fiction, so let me unpack why I read it too.
I think I have always been a bookworm.
As a child, I enjoyed reading stories of other people in other times and other places with other problems.
Why is it that we seek out more problems, about people who we don’t even know, who aren’t even alive?
empowerment through radical fiction
I don’t have to tell you things are bad.
Everybody knows things are shit – it’s a gd depression.
Nobody can find work and if they do they’re scared of being harassed and exploited.
Everybody’s exhausted or too tired to care much, to speak of anything of real meaning.
Governments and Corporations are running wild in the streets.
Hardly anyone anywhere seems to know what to do, and there’s no end to it.
We know the air is unfit to breathe, the waters are unfit to drink.
And we sit inside, on our phones and laptops, scrolling and swiping.
Tweets and Stories telling us about what that shithole 45 has done, said, fucked up, and we can only watch in disbelief, smh as if that’s the way it’s supposed to be.
Yeah, shit is bad – worse than bad – fucking dystopic, catastrophic, apocalyptic.
So what do we do?
We don’t go out anymore.
We hide in our rooms, where we are safer, trying to forget our responsibilities, our privileges.
“Please, just leave me be.
Let me have my iphone and my coffee-maker, and I won’t say anything…
Just leave us alone.”
Well, I will leave you alone but I know that is not what you really want right now.
That’s why you are still reading.
So what is to be done?
I don’t want you to protest, or to write to some official because I wouldn’t know what to tell you to protest about or what to write.
I don’t know what to do about this gd depression, about nuclear war, about the drones, about all the refugees, about the NSA, about the trump nazis, about our dying Earth and her Animals or about the prison industrial complex.
So what, then?
archie writes 