By Tabassam Shah, Member, Poets Against Racism & Hate USA
“Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.” —Mary Oliver1
“…poetry is a force for community light, community resilience, and community health.” —Tess Taylor (Poet Laureate Fellow, Academy of American Poets)2
In her February blog post, Debbie Allen, cofounder of Poets Against Racism & Hate USA, called on poets to meet the moment. She encouraged us to revisit tools in the PARH USA social justice poetry workshop to help us sift through the battery of injustices coming out of the Trump regime, emphasizing the research component and how it can help us approach a difficult subject, allowing us to switch modes temporarily from emotion to thought. Allen says, “The facts we uncover, in turn, can fuel our emotional fire.”
The world indeed is on fire. The more intense the newsreels, the more we need art to help center, calm, and heal us. The temptation to numb and scroll and feel helpless is often easy to fall for in the face of fire. But creativity takes us back to the feeling of purpose, intention, and control and when we write we become the maker of our own realms. We must fill our lives with the creative process and let meaning and purpose flood in. We need to regain agency and our time to focus on our creative cores as writers; writing is an act of rebellion against Big Tech which wants us on our phones every waking hour. We create art that shapes us, encourages empathy, provokes humanity, and demands connection. Art is the thing that makes people think deeply and moves people emotionally. Art can provide the cool water to temper the flames, reminding us what is worth fighting for. When we create, we are building the tools to withstand all the fire.
We can all agree that these days writing can often default to a solitary pursuit and it is easy to withdraw to allow for the soul-searching that this moment requires. Yet in times of tumult, writing in community can provide opportunities for inspiration and tremendous growth. In his book Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation, Steven Johnson explains how everything that happens in your brain is, technically speaking, a network, and that good ideas have signature patterns in the networks that make them. He writes:
…to make your mind more innovative, you have to place it inside environments that share that same network signature: networks of ideas or people that mimic the neural networks of a mind exploring…. Certain environments enhance the brain’s natural capacity to make new links of association.3
Community provides the networking we need to thrive. I contend that in-community writing is the tonic for a poet’s wary soul. The power of support in a writing community such as PARH USA lies in the safe space it provides and the opportunities to connect with people. Connection allows us to feel safe, supported, and secure—helps push us out of our comfort zones to achieve goals that would otherwise seem beyond us. All of us—and perhaps especially those writers who allow themselves to be vulnerable on the page—need safe places where we can reach out for support, celebrate the art of words, and share opportunities.
It is Pauletta Hansel’s and my hope that the PARH USA workshop we are hosting—Fighting Firehose with Fire: Writing Epistolary Poetry in Response to the Political Maelstrom—provides that safe space for an engaged in-community writing experience where our act of gathering empowers our diverse voices. By focusing on the epistolary form our hope is that we can provide structure to our writing. Structure is a great tool that can help us ground our work as we attempt to handle, as Debbie Allen calls it, the “roar-gush of abuses” that pours forth from the regime in power. Structure provides a focal point within which we can more confidently handle heavy topics, peeling away at the layers of overwhelm we often feel these days. I must say that there is a generative energy that is particularly stimulating in a gathering when all present are engaged in writing letters in poem form. Letter writing is a practice that humanity has lost the art of doing. The epistolary poem reinvigorates the power of connection as the form serves as a communication link between the writer (or speaker) and the addressee. Perhaps the last time some of us participated in letter writing as a community activity was back in those grade school days when teachers tasked us with writing letters to our future selves. The communal objective to communicate is a powerful act as all are committed to the agency and urgency of the moment.
My own curated community is a combination of different writing groups and workshops that span the virtual and in-person worlds. Some writers have become my trusted critique partners and helped bring my writing to a higher level. My community is helping me shape my world, cheering me on and inspiring me. A strong community is a place that creates opportunities and offers encouragement. Poetry and the various manifestations of the arts in general help us survive adversities, but this moment exposes how both the writing community and associated in-community writing events provide the space where we can also thrive. From community you can get a sense of belonging, but you can also clarify your sense of self. You can get motivation from community, accountability, and support. I do know that whenever I’m in community, either writing with others or attending a reading, I feel a part of something larger than myself.
A stimulating community is the perfect example of an environment that promotes creative thinking. A community allows for connections among writers and their ideas and observations. Interacting in a community sometimes pushes us deeper into our projects and goals. Community can provide emotional support, educational exploration, and camaraderie. For some writers, that feeling of validation, of support and community is crucial because many social, political, and literary institutions have failed to expand their missions to provide space for those who increasingly face censorship and marginalization. Organizations such as PARH USA can provide a much-needed space for underserved groups.
Community can mean different things to different people, but for everyone it’s a vital source in the writing life. It’s sometimes easy to say that writing is all about placing yourself in front of a page and duking it out with the words in solitary fashion. But there also is a need to share, commiserate, question, discover, inspire, and be inspired WITH others. When you find the right people, it can be a beautiful thing and the thing you didn’t know you needed. Your world gets wider and you no longer feel alone. Without other writers around to encourage you, support you, and sometimes hold you accountable, it can be easy to lose sight of your goals. Seeing what others are working on, especially when participating in in-community writing sessions, provides extra inspiration and motivation. For me, watching fellow writers grow in their craft is a wonderfully rewarding feeling. Having a writing community means that you have a place of belonging. Writers from all walks of life come together for a common goal: to write and make their mark on the world. Having a connected, empowering, inspirational, constructive community is essential for writers of every genre and level of expertise, and belonging to something greater is invaluable. In this way, as a network of poets, PARH USA functions as a supportive community.
Whether it’s found in library meeting rooms, shared document folders, social media threads, or virtual workshops, community is as necessary to a writer as is reading. We can benefit from other writers’ perspectives, their understanding, and their camaraderie. Community offers opportunities for the exchange of ideas, for inspiration, and sometimes even functions as a lifeline. We become better literary citizens when we spend more time in community. While it is tempting to only resort to internalizing the chaos around us and write in isolation, this path should not be the only way to tread through it. I encourage you, wherever you are on your writing journey, to jump at opportunities to read the work of others. To write together. To listen to poets read their work. Even if you think your voice does not matter, everyone has stories to tell and the power to tell them, and poets will listen. Making sense of the senselessness should not be a lonely endeavor. Rather, we should reclaim the space to write, express, document, defy, or attempt to make sense of the senselessness in supportive community settings. I hope to meet some of you in-community for the next PARH USA epistolary workshop on June 7. Email poetsagainstracism.usa@gmail.com to secure your spot.
1“Sometimes,” Red Bird, Mary Oliver, Beacon Press: Boston, 2008 p. 30.
2“Gardening in the Public Flowerfest: On Poetry and Civic Repair,” Tess Taylor, May 15, 2025, https://poets.org/text/gardening-public-flowerfest-poetry-and-civic-repair
3Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation, Riverhead Books: New York, 2010, p. 47.