This past weekend, I attended AWP (Association of Writers and Writing Programs) in Portland. With 12,000 participants, it was its own city of writers, editors, and agents communed within the walls of the Oregon Convention Center. Long lines for coffee and food trailed into the passageways. People sat on the floor for the one-hour-and-fifteen-minute panels that dealt with every aspect of writing from censorship to the struggle of finding the story and the dreaded heartbeat of every writer: searching for the right word. One message repeated itself over and over. Writing is hard.
Although, technically it isn’t. The act of writing is simple. You put your hand to the keyboard or pen and release words across the page. Why is it so difficult, then? The constraints writers face make writing hard. Every time a writer puts her opinions and creativity into the world, she faces her fears of rejection, judgment, and shame. She tosses aside the current flow of pedestrian life and dares to counter the socialized manner of thinking. She is an outcast.
Why bother? Because it is a must. At an early age, something told her she would be a writer. She read a book that changed her life. Or she lived through something horrible that she wants to prevent from happening again and again and again to innocent girls. A writer seeks amelioration.
The page offers a voice. Humanity is brutal in its censorship of the world beyond the privileged status of white men. It squelches many voices, especially the wounded. It silences a girl from announcing her identity, her sexuality, her worth, by not only dismissing her opinions, but her cries to the abuser to just stop. Now.
We convened under one roof, these girls and women, boys and men, and everyone in-between who have experienced the trivializing and traumatizing impact of shame. We united in one force of commonality: the quest for resurrection.
Writing is hard because we fail to believe we deserve the right to own our ideas. It is hard because we believe our efforts are futile, that we have nothing of value to offer, that we are so small nobody will hear us anyway. This is what we’ve been told, and the story we have once told ourselves.
En masse, we were not small. 12,000 writers dared to believe in the power of story. We communed with an internal drive to create a narrative, sometimes fiction, sometimes true, of human conflict, rife with struggle and compassion, torture and resurgence, grief, and a hard-won lesson of perseverance.
Stories fight the internal whisper of worthlessness and shame. Well-known authors took to the stage to uplift and encourage, to reaffirm that the struggle of voice is real. The unspoken message echoed through the walls and beneath the footsteps that raced from room to room, validating the power of every pen in the building. Keep going, it said. We were there. We are here.
With you.
You have permission to voice your struggles and to author your own life. The story you were told is not the story you need to believe. It begins with a word, not on the page, but in the core of your heart. Love. Honor. Cherish. Choose one word. You are not alone.
BARBIE BEATON 
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