Come Shining: Essays and Poems on Writing in a Dark Time

What is the duty of writers when the shared life of the nation turns toward darkness? In the first days of the new presidency of January 2017, twelve writers met together in Portland, Oregon to share our sense of mute, useless outrage, and ask: What should we be doing, as the nation turns toward lying, racism, and hatred? During an unusually stormy Portland winter, we came to see that reading and writing were a virtual commons, a public space where citizenship was reclaimed. We sought and collected work from writers across the country, essays and poems that asked: What is this darkness? And - maybe more important - What is the quality of light? We gathered them together in this book which we mean to mark our moment and to bear witness: this is how it was to watch darkness coming and cry out in opposition. This is how it feels to be human in a dark time. In dark times, the first rule is to find each other. This book is the meeting-space where we worked on democracy. We learned that if w