International Dublin Writers Festival --- Why We Write (Excerpt)

…….And now for the real reason, one which becomes more and more apparent every day.

Especially during a time when we’re surrounded by contention, when we cannot avoid the poisons of division, hatefulness, villainization, tribalism and the violence that attends all this, what we do is essential. What we do is more important now than we can imagine, because what we do reaches outward into a society that is increasingly isolated, one in which the individual is defined not by his or her humanity, but by the technology we use and often hide behind, and, perhaps most of all, the tags we wear, It's too easy now to sink into our tribes and convince ourselves that our safety, our security, our identity lies only in the places where we are most comfortable. We wrap ourselves in our prejudices without even knowing it.

There are those who write for the purpose of their own agendas. They write polemics, and diatribes and treatises and tracts whose purpose is to drive us into those tribes. Their work is political rather than humanistic. To me at least, they’re not writers – their propagandists and mechanics who happen to use the written word.

Writing – the best writing – shines a light on our commonality, on the experiences we share simply by being part of the human condition. Writing has the power to bring readers together around the common poles of our humanity. It exposes the core of who we are as writers, and, in so doing, sends forth tendrils of thought and feeling and conditions that can find companion responses within its readers.

One of the saddest realities of our time is that reading continues to decline by a number of measures - time spent, book sales, educational offerings. We spend far more time now with our electronics than we do with our books. In the US last week, it was shown that reading skills amongst secondary school students have sunk to a three-decade low. And as this sad trend has spiraled, we can see rates of violence and uncivil discourse rise commensurately. There are obviously a number of factors involved, and it may just be a natural emanation of a society grown increasingly complex and pluralistic. But when we fail to connect with each other, we lose part of ourselves. We sink into tribalism rather than community.

We write to bring people together around the points that matter most to us. We write to build community, to strip away the pains that plague us and find the purposes, the challenges, and the joys of simply being alive, of being where we are. The underlying condition of our humanity – of simply being human – is a joy unto itself. Too brief, too filled with loss and despair and heartbreak – but always, always worthy of inspection, and reflection, and interpretation.

And it’s that which has, at least in my mind, the greatest potential to bind our common wounds, to soften the harshness and brutality that haunts so many of our days, that repels the darkest demons of our collective souls, and, in the end, brings us to a common place.

That’s why we write.