“Otherwise We Are Lost”: A Farewell from NaNo Intern Freddy

Every year, there comes a point when we have to wish our amazing, talented interns good-bye as they move on to share their awesomeness with the rest of the world. Here’s some reflection from the wonderful Freddy Cleveland, Editorial Intern Extraordinaire:

“Dance, dance, otherwise we are lost.”

What Pina Bausch meant by that, as far as I can tell, is that if we cannot make art, if we can’t express what is true to each of us through creative means, humanity and all of the good it brings into the world is doomed. Without art, we will fade and fade. Like, yeah, humans are sometimes terrible, but also: look at how far we’ve come. We’re monkeys with anxiety, but we’ve done all right.

People are impatient, they don’t know how to wait,
People are selfish, and people are prone to hate,
But God, I love some people sometimes,
Because people are the greatest thing to happen. 

NaNoWriMo is one of the greatest things to happen. The people behind the scenes are the greatest (which seems self-serving, because I was behind the scenes, but I also mean everyone else). The people who participate are the greatest. And because of that, NaNoWriMo is going to save the world.

Wait, no, not really. At least, not the organization itself, and almost certainly not the event itself, which (as I’m sure we all know) is something sweaty and desperate and defined as much by failure as it is by success.

What I mean is that NaNoWriMo’s mission is conducive to a framework of praxis that will help us change the world for the better. Which doesn’t roll of the tongue as well as “NaNoWriMo is going to save the world.” Our mission is weird, it’s abstract, it’s hard to quantify, but we believe in one thing above all else: the power that comes from the active pursuit and consistent exercise of imagination.

NaNoWriMo is trying to advance the cause of storytelling. And not just storytelling from the elite cabal of established writers that we’re used to. It’s about the stories of every person who cares to write: the stories we’ve heard a thousand times before, the ones that have never been told, the ones we need to be reminded of, the ones we need to hear in this precise moment of time.

There are things wrong with the world, and we can find people to blame, but what really drives the world’s injustices is certain narratives. Certain pieces of diseased imagination that have crystallized into reality. And if a few people imagining bad things created this world, a few more people imagining something better can get us out.

I’m keeping it vague to avoid any specific political calls to action. That’s not on me to preach, that’s on you to decide for yourself. But I will say this: Imagination is the first step on the road to a truly utopian world—and utopian imaginings are precisely what our world needs right now. Somewhere along the line, things went wrong. The status quo is unsustainable. Change needs to happen. It can not and will not happen unless people start dreaming of better things, and telling stories about them.

When NaNoWriMo says that every story matters, please don’t take it lightly. Put it in all caps. Let it guide you, even when it leads you down difficult paths.

EVERY STORY MATTERS.

So write for yourself, to remind yourself where you’ve come from, or to outline a path of where you want to go. Tell stories about what needs to change, and what they should change into. Write for everyone, to show them things they couldn’t dream of themselves. Tell stories about what you hate, but never forget to write about what you love.

Speaking of which, I love you all, and now, for however brief a time, I’ve written about you.

Write, Write, otherwise we are lost.

-Freddy

Top image licensed under Creative Commons from Cinema City on Flickr.