How to keep going in the dark

The vital significance of struggle

How lightly we learn to hold hope, with a cautious care that it may turn and bite us, disappoint us. And yet we do hold it, carry it the way a mother would, and we do it from one day to the next. May you be reminded to carry your own hopes lightly, carefully, trusting in possibilities even without certainty." — Danusha Laméris

I used to write with young girls who had experienced extreme trauma: trafficking, abuse, violence. Despite being victims, they’d often been charged on criminal counts too—drug use, shoplifting, assault, and they had incurred additional trauma from being incarcerated at a young age. 

I’m not a therapist or a social worker, but every Tuesday, I’d schlepp a backpack full of notebooks and my favorite Maya Angelou poems into a residential facility and we’d write together. After the girls wrote, I read their poems aloud. I’d use my best mama voice and the girls would hug their knees and close their eyes. For a second, they'd soften and still. Once, a girl (who had just fallen in love with the metaphor) named us all shining peaches. 

There was one survivor (let’s call her Jesse) who had been trafficked by her own mother in exchange for opioids. After our weekly workshop, she confided in me that she’d been summoned to give crucial testimony the next day. Jesse was scared— she’d have to stand in a courtroom and look into her mother’s eyes for the first time in over a year. In workshop, she’d recently written a poem about courage and why she wanted to tell her story. I typed up her poem and tucked it into her pocket so she could have it on the stand. 

But Jesse never testified. Instead, she panicked, stole a staff car, and fled the facility. AWOLING meant she’d forfeit her spot at the rehab center, wrack up criminal charges, and face further time in juvy. 

When we’d lose girls like this, especially after seeming “breakthroughs,” well-meaning friends used to tell me: Don’t give up. You’re making a difference! You’re changing lives. 

I know they meant well. That they hoped to soften the sharp edge of my grief. I understand the sentiment, but their niceties felt like nihilism. If I only equated action to success, I couldn’t have kept going. 

I didn’t write with those girls under the illusion that my workshops could fix them or change their lives or maybe even matter at all. If I believed poetry could somehow undo or reset the enormity of their trauma, I’d be a fool. If I attached action to outcome, I would have burned out immediately after Jesse ran, or Imani relapsed, or Peyton returned to the man who previously chained her to a radiator like a dog.

Instead, I’ve always remembered the words of Nigerian author, Chinua Achebe: 

This is the importance of struggle—no one is going to guarantee us the outcome. Nobody's going to say if you struggle, you will succeed. It would be too simple. But even if we are not sure how it is going to end, what success will attend our enterprise, we still have this obligation to struggle.

When faced with the unflinching reality of how horrible the world can be, we can’t use optimism as a metric. We’re not promised outcomes. We act in the interest of justice because that is our holy calling and human dignity. The rhetoric of capitalism teaches us that action must equal success, but the language of struggle compels us to act regardless of results. The way women cover their dead with flowers. The act alone is significant. The mark of love, always worth bearing. 

So we struggle. We donate and protest. We strike and write. We carry poems into prison. We call for peace. We don’t know if it helps, and it doesn’t matter. We act even without certainty. We reach for justice though she hides her face. We move in the direction of hope, even in the dark. 

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Upcoming workshops

Sustenance Writing Community

My writing community, Sustenance, will be closing its doors once we reach 200 people, and moving to a waitlist. If you’d like to join us before doors close, you may do so here. 

November Sustenance Workshop W/ Poet Danusha Laméris

Title: Writing Into the Unknown

Wednesday, November 15th, 5 - 6:30pm PST

$40 (limited outside tickets available, free to Sustenance members)

Writing is a way of knowing. It asks us to examine memory, certainty, and the possibility of revelation. In this workshop, we'll explore how to use the pivots of gesture to complicate our work, layer certainty with uncertainty, knowing with not-knowing.

Let's learn how to engage ourselves and our readers by unraveling what we've just said, asking a question, correcting ourselves. All right there on the page. You'll see how this brings work to life and can lead us to our own epiphanies. While I will be sharing sample work from poems, this can be applied to poetry and prose. We'll have time for a writing prompt as well as a Q and A.

As the days darken, let's delve into the rich darkness of the unknown together.

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December Sustenance Workshop w/ Poet Ellen Bass

Title: The Image: The Heart of the Poem

Tuesday, December 12th , 5 - 6:30pm PST

$45 (limited outside tickets available, free to Sustenance members)

Join us for a special Sustenance craft talk with legendary Ellen Bass. We'll have a class on image, followed by a time of Q+A.

The image is the heart of the poem. Ezra Pound defined it as “that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.” That instant is when we take in the physical world and give back our response. It’s also our greatest opportunity to connect, to deliver the physical, sensory world so vividly that the reader experiences something new. The image is the opposite of the explanation. It operates beyond argument, beyond reason. In that way it’s like falling in love. In this craft class, we'll focus on images in exemplary poems and learn how to make our poems come alive with what Tony Hoagland calls “thingitude.”