"How Can I Write at a Time Like This?"

Author’s note: Next Monday I’ll be in Philadelphia for my Write The Stories You’ve Never Seen Before talk, a fundraiser for two favorite Philadelphia organizations, Blue Stoop and Asian Arts Initiative. If you’re not in Philly, you can attend remotely and asynchronously—all registrants will get access to a recording for a month after the talk.

“How can I write at a time like this,” a student asked last Sunday in my essay collections class. He was asking from a place of anger and pain. I gave him an answer in class but the question stayed with me. How was I writing. It feels like a storm of horror just to read the news and I know it is on purpose. Bad news without a way to react or meaningfully help out spreads psychic numbing and despair. And yet to not know the news is to live helplessly. But my despair and yours, they are worth everything to Trump and so what can I do but disappoint him, to spite him. He needs our despairs and so I do not give mine, as this refusal, like my writing, is at least in my control. I hope you will do the same.

I have not been taking care of myself lately and it has put me behind on a few projects, for months now. It is not a new lesson: my lack of self-care affects others around me and yet I am someone who was taught to put his own needs last as a way to survive. I remember an Ayurvedic healer telling me, in a consultation, “You have an incomplete love of the world because it does not include you.” I am always trying to help myself get to whatever that place looks like. But it is even more important in this era, where the administration is attacking everything from our ability to care for ourselves to our children to our elders, even our ability to get reliable weather information. We are being hit with what I would call advanced resilience targeting, an attack on our ability to be in community, to be healthy, to make a living, to know our rights, to have a government. This was part of what the last Trump administration was about, this is what DOGE was about, and Project 2025.

I have been thinking about a year ago last April, after reading about the long history of the control Israel exerts over Gaza’s food supply, I remember I wrote to a friend about Gaza saying “Historic change is happening in one way and yet it feels like it won't be enough, won't be fast enough. But giving up feels even worse.” And incredibly a year and four months later that is still what it feels like except so much worse. I had said to her I really only ever listened to the settlers to understand what was going to happen, because they currently operate without meaningful controls over them given the current government in Israel. Much of what they want is basically what happens next inside of Israel these last few years. I subscribe to Haaretz partly just to know what they are bragging about next because they never lie to the press and this is because they have paid no price for telling the truth.

Throughout it all, I try to retain what a yoga teacher I once had called reactiveness, the ability to respond. And so I have done what I can from rural Vermont. I have signed petitions, signed open letters, raised money for Palestinian child amputees, for a Gaza water system, for Palestinian families in need, for a friend’s friend with cancer or a top surgery. A friend’s Baltimore student writer’s group. I have donated clothes to a trans man who relocated out of Tennessee. I have donated money to a trans poet friend fighting his firing. I worry about the Palestinian amputees as I fear many if not all of them are dead, and they require regular new surgeries as they grow to accommodate their amputations or they will be in terrible pain. A few of the families I began donating to are still alive and some send photos of their children or videos with thank yous that feel like too much but in any case, that is my greatest achievement, my activism. I do solicit donations from others for them usually on Bluesky, which does not engage in link suppression like Meta and X, but has cancelled Palestinian accounts for what they call spam. I saw advice last year about donating a percentage of your income that would effectively be your taxpayer share, and now I do that. But I found by the end of the year I gave more than that. I do all of this so I am not just staring in horror at the screen. Which I still catch myself doing.

I have a program, Opal, that kicks me off social media on my phone. Sometimes I delete it from my phone.

And I take a moment for a thought experiment, every so often. As I try to do everything I have to do in this life, I sometimes try to imagine doing it without a job or an income for over 650 days, all while facing down missiles, bullets, starvation, the destruction of my home, torture, the murder of my family and friends, no water or working toilets or medical care, buying food off of a black market and enduring repeated forced relocations in a landscape that has been bombed so much it is a different color from space now than it was even a year ago. And still doing what I can to fundraise for myself online from people outside the country, on social media. Or to stand in lines that might get me shot.

When I think of the people still alive in Gaza, I think of how if they can survive this long, how incredible they could be if left to thrive. And yet now even the doctors left are being starved. The reporters too.

I read the news that is considered horrible. I try to take screenshots as a kind of news diary. I do this so I don’t lie to myself about the past, something of an American pastime, and the worst way to end up lying to others. Over a year ago we also learned that Hamas was able to rearm itself meaningfully with the unexploded missiles left in the Gaza landscape, which meant technically the US was supplying weapons to Israel and Hamas both. We learned more recently that more explosives have been dropped on Gaza alone than all of the explosives used in World War II, all on a civilian population with nowhere to go, unable to leave. And I have never forgotten an NPR explainer that said majority of them are children because Palestinians in Gaza don’t often survive to adulthood.

But if you are asking me this question on how to write while all of this is happening, I would say, writing is part of my life and my activism. I write what I am called to write now and if. you are having trouble writing I suggest you try to listen to what is calling to you. My writing is the source of my power and my income. To the extent that I have any influence on what happens in this life it is because I am writer. Because I wrote essays, stories, novels, poems, journalism, reviews. Did it fix the world? Not yet. Who knows? That isn’t in my job description that I know of but I get it, I get it. But maybe it helped someone fix themselves and that is part of the work and if we all do it then great, the work is getting done. Someone just wrote to me today to say that my first novel made him possible. An incredible thing to say, an extraordinary compliment. I am so grateful for the readers who find me whether I hear from them or not, and then among them, the ones who write to me this way move me.

Sometimes someone says “You must get tired of it” and I don’t because in America, we are always taught to doubt the power of writing so it is always nice to hear amid the people spiraling because of some trend piece that is talking them out of their dreams.

In America, we see journalists under attack, also writers, teachers, professors, book publishers, magazines, all subjected to assaults of various kinds. Billionaires spending billions on machines to replace us, instead of paying us, because they can’t control us otherwise, and yet incredibly, the machines they’ve made from our stolen work still fail them too. Another dream they can’t control.

I write and I teach in a life I never dreamed of. I feel at times that I have passed outside of my fate, who knows, and it is at least a relief at least not to disappoint my dreams or fulfill them, but instead to just do my work and wake up with my husband holding me. The best part of every day, no matter what else is happening. Something this government has tried to prevent in ways large and small my whole life.

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Enjoy AZT, 1990, by Avram Finkelstein and Vincent Gagliostro, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum Open Access collection.

An hour before my student had asked this question about how to write now, we had been discussing Close To The Knives by David Wojnarowicz, his 1991 essay collection that included the text of a flier from a 1989 ACT UP protest, the die-in at St. Patrick’s Cathedral protesting the Catholic Church’s message on AIDS, sex, women, queer people. The flyer detailed the Seven Deadly Sins, a list of 7 prominent conservatives, Catholics and politicians culpable in the AIDS crisis. I recognized this as the kind of flyer I used to write up as a part of ACT UP SF’s Media Committee. I think Wojnarowicz was trying to expand the radius of people who saw it and even to send the flyer into the future. He was flyering us from inside his book and each time someone opens the book it is like welcome to this demo, here’s a flyer. Sort of like these flyers and posters I found at the Met Online.

He died a year after the collection was published. In putting the book together he was doing what he did with a lot of his work, which was to take what he could and put it in front of an audience, a way to say this is how we fought, this is how we loved, this is how we died, do not forget us, learn from us, keep going.

AIDS: 1 in 61, by Gran Fury, 1988, courtesy of the Metropolitan Open Access Collection

Now, almost 40 years later, his book of essays is still in print. He is technically still flyering us all after death.

So maybe one answer to how to write now is to teach yourself what you might need to be relentless. To ask yourself how do I tell the truth while I’m alive, and how do I keep telling the truth after I die? How do I keep showing up for what I believe in in ways that cannot be stopped? How can I keep making people feel possible? And so I try every day to live there until the day my books carry on without me.

Until next time,

Alexander Chee