On Monday, Nov. 21, the 51ԹϺ’s Black Mountain Institute will celebrate its 10-year anniversary with talks by six international writers. “The Writer in the World” event examines if literature can be political without being partisan or ideological. Here, BMI’s executive director, Joshua Wolf Shenk, adds context to why you should join the conversation.
For the last several days, when I could steal away to write, I ended up pacing instead, staring at my screen, falling into Twitter holes, eating too much chocolate. I could get purchase on this note only when I conceded that its difficulty should be my subject, that I should speak to my struggle to speak, and the relevance of that struggle to our work.
As a citizen, I was dazed and infuriated by our recent election, and as a Jew, I am more than a little afraid. As a writer, I’m drawn into the fray, fascinated by .
But I need to speak here as the leader of a literary center, as the facilitator of community, and there’s the trouble. Our community includes many points of view. And how do we even draw them out? I do know that many of our supporters also support causes I oppose. But I’ve been a little chicken talking about it, afraid to dig into disagreements — or, more precisely, afraid of what I might say in disagreement. (I often muzzle myself for fear of what will happen when my jaws move.)
A mentor suggested to me that I begin by asking after shared values. Can we agree, for example, on freedom of speech and legal protection for the press, for writers and artists — as for all of us? I hope we can, and I’d like to talk out the implications of that agreement. BMI has long stood for free and open conversation across difference, and, as the first-ever City of Asylum in the United States, we have dedicated ourselves to writers censored or persecuted for their work. What will that commitment look like going forward?
I’m sure freedom of expression is only one of many shared values. But to talk about them, we also have to confront fear. No matter how much common territory we stake out, there will be borders, and across the borders will lie lands of difference, their chimneys smoking.
My psychologist friends tell me that a reluctance to approach these borders is entirely natural — homophily, or love of the same, is a core quality of the human species. Yet, as writers, and as humanists, our work is to resist these limits, to get as close to the fire as we can stand.
And then what do we do in the heat? I’ve been thinking about what literary writing is really good for. First, it can represent subjective experience with precision — by speaking to a human experience, it can speak to all human experience. Second, it can distill complex truths