In the past, I haven’t been good at daily. But I’m making a public commitment.

And I’m making another one: if Trump is still in office in one year, on May Day, 2018, there will be a massive protest, and I will help organize it.

I thought there should be one this year–and there was, the Day without Immigrants. Also, the Democratic Socialists organized traditional May Day workers’ rallies. But, in a year–if it’s necessary, which I think it will be, since solutions to this emergency move slowly–I envision something much different: I envision all of America pouring into the streets, and life coming to a standstill, and the entire country saying with one voice that must be obeyed, NO.

But before then, much work.

I’m not a memoirist. Definitely not a regular blogger. I’m a novelist and poet and occasional tortured essayist–writing that is nonlinear and/or capacious comes most easily to me. My hundred days here will be a hodgepodge. I might shift into free verse, for instance, because

the internal rhythm of sentences
is sometimes holy,
the intimation of order
a balm.

Being consciously disjointed here. Appreciating a different kind of order.

Because one of my barriers, always, is fear of imperfection. So it will be a discipline to leave this imperfect (although of course that’s actually the case with everything). I’m gonna get this on the page and online.

I should include a stroke of red to remind us all of the inevitability of imperfection.

Imperfection will be one aspect of my resistance.

I just read a piece by historian Timothy Snyder and among several dozen extraordinary and galvanizing things, he said this about living in the midst of an authoritarian regime change: “You have to change your protocol of daily behavior now. Don’t obey in advance because you have to start orienting yourself against the general drift of things….You have to set your own habits now.” He is talking about developing a habit of resistance.

Remarkably–to me–he is also describing the life of the artist. An artist, by definition, orders herself against the general drift of things, because an artist’s primary duty and skill is to see clearly, which can only be done from a position–even if it’s just a mental one–outside the mainstream.

Our national crisis was obviously not designed by God for my personal growth. And yet. This habit of resistance is something I’ve been striving toward (artist, pilgrim) and yet shrinking from (female, good little girl, ordinary human) my whole life. Could this, all of this this, be a path to real courage?

(For those of us who are just now woke. For those of us who have been trying and trying to see, but have had the good fortune to not be forced into vision until now.)

My sister-in-law said I should keep a journal. I always have, but sort of consciously avoided it being too daily, mostly because I couldn’t maintain my own attention recording things that way. But this is different, a different kind of obligation. It’s for myself, my children, my grandchildren, and for whoever else, in this age of sharing, wants to read it. Because none of this is believable, and all of it should be remembered.

Children, grandchildren, greats and great-greats, I’m sorry for my language here, but there exists, in this moment, a website called www.whatthefuckjusthappenedtoday.com, and we need it.

On this latest day of Trump:

On his day 100, Trump talked to President Duterte of the Phillippines and invited him to the White House. Duterte is an authoritarian criminal.

Yesterday he said Andrew Jackson was very upset about the Civil War and could have stopped it. Andrew Jackson died in 1845. He also said, re the Civil War, “Why could that one not have been worked out?” Why indeed?

Today he said he’d be delighted to meet with the North Korean dictator. 

I sense a shift in the country, a slight one. Maybe the 100 days are important, psychologically, in more ways than one. People are beginning to realize they’re not dreaming. People are beginning—very, very slowly—to realize the shit is not going to stop, that it’s not their imaginations, that they’re not overreacting.

That’s no kind of ending, but nevertheless enough for now. Stroke of red. Day One.

When I published The Swimming Pool, I wanted to repay some of the generosity that had been shown to me, and I specifically wanted to find a cause dedicated to literacy. When I found Raising a Reader, I knew I needed to look no further.

RAR’s approach is basic and deeply effective: they train parents, many of whom were never read to as children themselves, about the importance of reading to children, and lend books to these young families on a weekly basis. They are even able to give illiterate parents tools to expose their children to books and reading. The results of early childhood reading are well-documented: children continue to reap the educational benefits all the way through high school and beyond, showing higher literacy rates, test scores, graduation rates and college attendance, and lower poverty rates.

At the same time, RAR gives each parent in their program something priceless: the simple joy of snuggling with their child and a book for a few moments of peaceful interaction. Every parent needs these experiences when she knows, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that she is doing the right thing. This kind of parenting confidence has effects that reach far beyond story time.

Yes, books are powerful.

Thanks so much for considering this wonderful cause. I am involved with RAR Massachusetts, but it is a national organization as well. Please check out the links below for more about how you can help in your community.

• Raising a Reader in Massachuetts
• Raising a Reader National

A few years ago, not very many, I remember telling someone that if I ever started a blog they should just go ahead and shoot me. I was trying to find the time and space to write my first book, and at the same time the internet was inconveniently growing, becoming a massive distraction. I was aggrieved, peeved, humbled and overwhelmed by the rapidly-reproducing content out there: overwhelmed at the volume of it and at the thought that I should be adding to it; humbled by the sheer output of other writers I knew; peeved by the quality, or lack thereof, of all these dashed-off thoughts; and most of all aggrieved by the idea of regularly making my private thoughts public.

Since what you’re now reading is, in fact, a blog, this would be a good time to refute all those objections. I can’t. I think often of something Nabokov once said, that showing around one’s first drafts is like passing around samples of one’s sputum. (Sorry.) I can’t get over the idea that blog writing will be messy, sloppy, and unfinished. However, I am coming around to the idea that it’s supposed to be that way.

I’m starting this blog mainly because, despite my long-standing aversion, I can no longer count the times that I have started writing imaginary blog posts in my head. Often it’s because Twitter and Facebook are deeply unsatisfying as venues for substantive thought and argument, and I just need more room. In the same vein, I often have thoughts I’d like to work out about an article or event long after it has passed through the approximately 10-minute news cycle we now endure on social media. If nothing else, this blog will be the land of ICYMI.

 “The role of the artist is to ask questions, not answer them.” – Anton Chekhov

As a fiction writer—or, maybe, just as a person—I hold on to things for a long time. (Nabokov has done his damage.) I don’t like to show drafts until they’re polished, or at least readable. Sometimes that’s a good instinct, and sometimes it’s not; polishing something that turns out to be a dead end is a frustrating waste of time. Some writers are able to be very free, but one of my goals is to be more free. Letting things go when they’re only days, or even hours, old will be a good discipline.

Chekhov said that the role of the artist is to ask questions, not answer them. I just recently learned of this quote, and not a minute too soon. I spent much of the time writing my last book worrying that it was a book only of questions and no answers. When I finally decided I had no choice but to accept this half-enlightenment, along came Chekhov, in the universe’s beautiful way of synchronicity, to confirm it. Of course he was talking about fiction; however, I happen to think also that the lion’s share of nastiness in our public sphere today comes from the imperative to come up with answers quickly. We must be pithy, we must be punchy, we must give no quarter, we must take no time to weigh things carefully, passing them from one hand to the other, and we must not decide that the truth is somewhere in the middle, because that will not fit into 140 characters—even though that is where the truth often lies. Especially for fiction writers, whose job is empathy, not judgment.

So consider yourselves warned, dear readers: I will ask questions, probe, look at things from all angles; I will waffle, wiggle and waver (pace Bill Bradley); and then most likely I’ll slink away, leaving the rest to you. We live in fearful times. We want certainty, but the best antidote to its absence is the earnest whirring of our brains, and hearts.