Writing the Urgent

How might one writer’s call become another writer’s response?

By Beth Kephart

A word is a choice. A sentence is a story. Consonants and vowels are strike and extension, collision and hush. Every single letter we place upon a page, every mark of punctuation, says something about our writerly selves, about what sparks the urgent within us.

I think of urgency as the tale we must tell, the one that wakes us from our dreams and also permeates them. When we are urgent with a story, we do n...