As per my previous posts, one of the aspects of socially-conscious fiction I want to explore is the relationship between writers and their social views. Does one bring it to the page, and if so, how? What about writers with overtly socially-conscious day jobs? What does the wrestling and balancing act feel like?

Melissa Mills-Dick responded to my request, and I’ve posted her essay below. What moved me most was the author’s surprise at how it felt easier to write an op-ed than fiction, that moving into fictional narrative felt somehow riskier and less safe.

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Let’s Not Make a Big Marxist Deal About It — Writing, politics and attempting balance

by Melissa Mills-Dick

I have two writing lives. In one, I get paid to write about sex and politics. In the other, I give up my free time trying to put one scene in front of another. After eight years of writing about women’s health and rights at work every day, I put the word abortion in a story. When it was done I called a friend who is a writer and a friend who runs an abortion clinic. I told them both I would send them the story, so they could tell me if it was okay. But I never sent it. I had no problem sharing a blog post I wrote about international access to safe abortion on Facebook, which I’m sure encouraged several people to hide my posts forever, but the idea of someone else seeing that story was too terrifying.

I started an MFA program thinking I would figure out how to leave one identity behind in favor of another. I wanted the kind of writing life where my morning routine involves coffee, stumbling to the computer, and writing as much as I can before the day interrupts me.

My current routine involves coffee, but I have to carry it past the protestors who are outside my office every morning. When I check my email it’s rare not to have an update about some group of lawmakers who are trying to restrict or de-fund or obstruct the work we do. That’s life at Planned Parenthood.

It sounds dramatic, but the work isn’t scary, although the potential future of women’s rights in this country sometimes is. The worst thing those protestors have done to me is ruin my favorite Christmas carol last month. (It’s easier to ignore someone accusing you of killing babies every morning when they’re not accompanied by a crowd singing Silent Night.) I’m lucky. I get to make a living writing about something I care deeply about. I get to connect activists and donors to a cause they are also passionate about. This year, I heard the President praise my organization, and I got to stand next to Senator-elect Elizabeth Warren while she accepted a congratulations letter from our activists.

The biggest problem with having a job I care about is how to let it go as a writer. I’m sure my worries are familiar to many writer/activists. I think and read and talk about this one issue all day long and then I get home, sit at my computer, and find a million reasons to run away from it. What if I can’t do the subject justice? What if I head down a path I don’t expect? The writing world will see my story and cry propaganda. The activists I work with will accuse me of being frivolous — or worse, off-message.

I’ll get my MFA this month, but I’m no closer to choosing one writing life over the other. In reality, the journey has been all about balance, like a long, painful yoga class. What I’ve realized is that for me — and I suspect there are many of us out there — the desire to work for a better world and the drive to write come from a common source, from a place of resistance and empathy. Literature resists a complacent, static world view in favor of a revelatory, dynamic perspective. It offers us an imaginative look at what could be, and an empathetic view of what is beneath the surface.

In her essay collection, The Essential Gesture, Nadine Gordimer says, “It is in [the artist’s] nature to want to transform the world, as it is a political decision for those who are not artists to want to transform the world.” As I try to navigate my way toward balance, I have looked for a blueprint in the work of Gordimer and Grace Paley, both highly lauded and engaged throughout their lives as writers and activists.

The concerns of race, gender and society are omni-present in the work of both writers. Their characters consistently interact with the very pressing concerns of the outside world. Whether they go looking for the political, or it comes looking for them, the women and men that populate these stories offer us their particular view on the world.

In an interview with Poet’s and Writers, Paley described what drives her to write: “I struggle to be truthful to myself. I think that’s what literature is about; it’s the struggle for truth. It’s the struggle for what you don’t understand.”

It sounds lovely, the stuff of my writerly dreams. But again one identity struggles against another. When it comes to being part of a political movement, there’s not much room for uncertainty. When I’m writing a call to action, or an Op-Ed, or a fundraising email, I’m trying to convince someone else to join me, not explore new territory for myself. How do I go home at night, lock all my message training and talking points in the closet, and follow my characters through their story?

It seems to call for a freedom that I don’t feel, what Gordimer calls the writer’s freedom — the “right to maintain and publish to the world a deep, intense, private view of the situation in which he finds his society.” She also has special advice for writer/activists, warning us against straying too far from the literary truth in service of a cause and its leaders. “The jargon of struggle… is right and adequate for the public platform . . . it is not deep enough, wide enough, flexible enough, cutting enough, fresh enough for the vocabulary of the poet, the short story writer or the novelist.”

I’ve been reading and re-reading Gordimer’s words for the past year, and it’s finally sinking in that freedom isn’t something we inherently have as writers — it is something we must create for ourselves. We can achieve that freedom by being more devoted to seeking truth than to staying on message. In my fiction writing life, I have to replace my social-political cause with the cause of creating empathy in order to freely engage in that struggle to understand.

My favorite example of these principles in practice is Paley’s “Somewhere Else,” one of several stories where both Paley and Gordimer use humor and a remarkably detached eye to portray activists. “Somewhere Else,” from the 1985 collection Later the Same Day, follows a group of American activists on a trip to China, drawing from Paley’s own experience of visiting the communist country just as more American visitors were starting to be allowed. Paley illuminates the literary truth, rather than the political, by keeping her focus on the activists, characters she clearly knows well, rather than the issues. She forgoes loyalty to the cause in favor of affectionate, mocking humor. (One of my favorite lines is this description about one of her fellow activists: “His politics was based on staring truthfully into the cruel eye of power.”)

Paley’s humor and deft familiarity allow us to see both sides of these characters and their cause — the noble and the naïve, the valiant and the absurd. Thanks to her lack of rhetoric, to her honest struggle to be truthful, Paley even gets to deliver a message at the end of the story. The activists are reunited in New York, and Joe recounts a story from his day that echoes the trouble they got into while in China for taking unauthorized photographs. In response, Martin says, “I know why you told the story. You wanted to show that just because a person owns the camera they do not own the whole world and you understand it.” Paley diffuses the earnestness of this statement in the next line. Joe shrugs it off — “That’s what you think… I told it to you because it just happened. Don’t make a big Marxist deal out of it.”

The beauty of this exchange is that both characters are right. Martin accurately encapsulate the message of “Somewhere Else”, and at the same time Joe’s statement is true — the story is simply what happened. Paley has achieved the balance I’m searching for.

There is much to learn from in this story, and throughout the work of Paley and Gordimer. Deft use of voice, particular attention to language, a sense of form. A lesson in avoiding sentimentality and sensationalism. Both authors allow their characters to speak — they tend to be willful, Paley notes — and showcase an impressive ability to remove the author’s hand.

Ultimately, what I hope I can learn from these two writers is that balance. To maintain, as Gordimer says, my specific view of the state of our society, without falling into rhetoric. To not be afraid of sharing that story, the one with the word abortion in it, because I’ve made it more about character than politics.

I’m terrified, but if I keep reading Paley and Gordimer, it feels like they’re in my corner. I’m not alone in this search for balance. So, to my people, the writers and the activists — let’s tell our stories, because they happened, and trust that if we struggle to understand, the truth will come through, without even having to make a big Marxist deal about it.

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