above photo by Kyle Lin

Many years ago, like Joe Biden, I was suddenly widowed in my twenties and tasked with raising two young children on my own. Unlike Joe, though, I didn’t stay in the town where my husband was killed in a car accident. I didn’t stay, because, unlike Joe, I was bereft of mandate, purpose and voice.

I did, however, have a vision. It was a small vision, foggy, illusive, and easily drowned out by the voices of others. Somewhere in my heart, I realized that the normative Catholic marriage I’d latched onto had no center without the normative Catholic husband I married. I’ve written about this before. This post isn’t about that, though. It’s about what happened next.

In the tight cocoon I built around myself and my two children, I hatched a plan that would give that fetal vision the nourishment it needed to grow, and, after a slew of false starts, I wound up in Portland, Oregon. This was 1989, well before the cultural moment, and back when you could buy a house for under 100k, which, given that I’d just sold a house in a bedroom community of New York City, worked well for my bank account.

Fast forward a year. Fully moved into a comfortable house at the edge a park, I began to have anxiety attacks. These attacks came along with cul-de-sac ruminations of doom peppered with questions like: What have I done? I am a stranger in a strange land here. No family. No support. What if I get sick? What if I die? You know how that goes. By the time I finally got the okay from my health insurance company to get tested for a variety of disorders, it became clear that my panic attacks were impinging of my ability to be the parent I needed to be for a toddler and a preschooler. Back in those days, private health insurance didn’t cover mental health (thank god for Obama Care, by the way). So, I dipped into my dwindling savings and booked a few appointments with a shrink.

After a few introductory getting-to-know-you sessions, I worked up the courage to relate my worries. On the fourth or fifth appointment, the what ifs at last came tumbling out, escalating to a crescendo of full-blown panic. The counselor calmly helped me navigate the narratives, prompting me with questions, such as, “And then what?”

He, and-then-whatted me to my deepest, darkest shame. That perhaps I had made choices that were putting my kids in danger. “And what if I die? I’m all they have!”

“And?” he asked.

“And? Well, clearly, they’ll be fucked up for life?”

“How do you know that?” he asked. “How do you know that if you die, your kids will be fucked up?”

“It’s obvious,” I said. “Isn’t it?”

He just looked at me while I wrestled with my assertion.

As 2020 (and the four years of the Trump presidency) comes to its ugly close, I return to that very session with that shrink often: pushing chaos, division and fear to their projected endpoints, and for me, that process is rooted in art. Specifically, in creating stories.

As Bruno Bettelheim posits in his oft-quoted THE USES OF ENCHANTMENT, “In order not to be at the mercy of the vagaries of life, one must develop one’s inner resources, so that one’s emotions, imagination, and intellect mutually support and enrich one another.”

It is why, after years of pondering the likely possibility of a catastrophic earthquake in the Pacific Northwest, I set out to write a book which eventually became FAULTLAND, due out next year. My obsession with “the vagaries of life” found purchase in a narrative that pushed me fully into “what if” and took me out the other side.

Likewise, I’m now NaNoing my way into a new project, set in a speculative dystopian future, only my obsessions have built on the themes in FAULTLAND (the physical destruction of earth as we know it, the exacerbation of white supremacy, the degradation of justice and democracy), and have taken them into a new level of doom. The central question I’m exploring in my new novel is this: At what point in the evolutionary road to extinction will we be forced to abandon personal freedom in favor of salvaging the species? Who will be chosen to make the biggest sacrifices, and who makes that call?

I realize that I’m getting into THE HANDMAID’S TALE territory here, but, returning to Bettelheim, my exploration of these questions is not just an intellectual exercise. It’s an active way to amalgamate my emotions, imagination and intellect with the end result being enrichment and agency. And just like thirty-two years ago when I had to move across the country after I was widowed in order to find a path to my voice, I turn to creating dystopian landscapes so I can wrestle the monster into something I recognize and can then vanquish.