One Year Ago and Today: Why Bother Writing?

Happy 1 year book birthday to Litany

I was starting to make a packing list for this upcoming weekend's Boskone science fiction and fantasy convention in Boston when I realized it's been one full year since LITANY FOR A BROKEN WORLD was released. 

 Getting the manuscript from idea to finished novel was a long journey - over six years, in fact. While staying with a project that long can be frustrating, I don't regret the time and effort that went into its creation. Working on this book was, at times, so difficult I tried to abandon it. At other moments, the joy of telling these characters' stories was intoxicating. Ultimately, it challenged me to grow as a writer in ways I had not anticipated. 

The story, itself, shifted and morphed in ways I hadn't planned. My initial notes have almost nothing in common with the completed story. They way I see it, this is not a bug, but a feature of the creative process. 

This week, the writing internet was rife with critiques and hot takes about AI generated novels. (There was a story in the NYT business section about a romance writer using LLM/Generative AI to write whole novels in under an hour.)  My feeling about LLM/generative AI is clear: No. Absolutely not. 

As in no, I won't use it. Not in any part of my writing process.  I won't reiterate all the ways the tech is energy and water wasting, the way it has been trained on stolen work (my own included), the way it cannot be trusted to output correct and factual information to queries, and many many more arguments you probably have already read hundreds of times. 

Could I use LLM/Generative AI tools to write hundreds of novels in the time it took me to complete LITANY? Probably. Aside from any discussion of quality (a loaded word, and one nearly impossible to define), I can honestly say that no LLM could have produced a book as layered and complex as LITANY FOR A BROKEN WORLD. 

Why not? Because this wasn't a story that could have emerged from prompts. Even the questions I grappled with didn't start to become clear until after I had written, deleted, and rewritten the beginning of the story nearly a half dozen times. They continued to deepen and expand all through the drafting process. I literally had to write the book before I could have crafted a prompt to capture even the smallest part of it. 

No sophisticated mad-libs program could have found a short cut to that destination.  

My main reason for writing is to discover the heart of a story. Sure, having my work sell, win awards, be read, be appreciated and enjoyed is all great, but none of that is possible or even of interest to me without the journey. 

And if that journey takes longer than I planned? Well, that's where the journey gets fascinating. That's where all the best adventures and stories come from. 

 If you are looking for a very human tale, filled with emotion and hope, with earnest characters coping with loss and searching for connection, please give LITANY a try. I have always written the books I needed to read. Perhaps you need this story too.  

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"They may think it's a movement"

The first MTI cap fresh off the needles

Like so many of us, I have been watching - bearing witness - to ordinary citizens being subjected to brutality by their own government. Unlike so many times in history, this isn't happening in some far away country while we sit on our sofas in front our our televisions wallowing in smug satisfaction over our democracy. No. This is our crisis. This is our country falling into ruin before our eyes. 

I live in a "blue" state - I put that in quotes because I think that classification of blue vs red states is a false dichotomy. Yes, our nation is fractured, but it's not so easy to delineate where those fault lines are. And it's certainly not purely geography. 

And while there have been incidents of ICE disappearing people here in Massachusetts, we have not seen  the militarization of our state by swarms of masked armed and booted thugs like Minnesota and Illinois and Oregon and Washington, DC and so many more have. 

I feel powerless against this. What can one person do against an impending avalanche except stand there and wait to be swept away? 

So, I write letters and leave messages for my elected officials. I donate to mutual aid, activist, and charitable organizations in places that need it most. I have invested my time, energy, and money into my small community because the old hippie saying "think globally, act locally" is still true. Still critically important. 

It doesn't feel like enough. 

I'm a 62 year old woman recovering from major surgery. I can't put my body on the line in a protest - at least for now. There are stand outs in many of the little communities near me that I have participated in and will go again. Being around even a small group of people who believe as I do that no one is illegal and constitutional rights are granted to all is energizing. These small gathering aren't going to make ICE leave Minneapolis, but they add to the chorus of voices all over the US saying this isn't right. And that's important.

This week, protest has looked like a lot of red yarn on knitting needles and crochet hooks. I attend a weekly knitting group made up of mostly other post-menopausal ladies with white hair. We are just ordinary women. Making items for our loved ones and ourselves. We bring in our works in progress to ooh and ahh over. I am working on mastering cables. Another woman, toe up socks knitted two at a time, Still another, stranded colorwork. 

We are setting aside those projects and making the "Melt the Ice" red protest hat. 

Does it matter? 

I think it does. I think seeing a handful of woman walking around town wearing tasseled peaked red hats is a symbol. And when each of those women make several more hats (I'm on number 3) and more and more people walk around wearing them? Well, in the immortal words of Arlo Guthrie from 'Alice's Restaurant' well, "they may think it's a movement." 

I understand why there are some criticizing this as merely performative. But for one thing, the pattern has been purchased by thousands and thousands of yarn artists with all the proceeds going to support immigrants in Minnesota. (You can buy the pattern here.)  That's not nothing. Several hundred thousand dollars and going strong. But mostly, here's what I think: We need to show who we are and what we believe. Staying silent in the face of evil is evil. And if one person stops me and asks, "hey, what's with all the red hats," maybe that's a chance to divert the avalanche. 

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Radical Empathy; Fierce Kindness

Gigi - our dog who, like Aloka, brings peace to our hearts

 

The contrast between my internal life and the external world is stark. Painful. It's not as if I don't know what's happening in places like Minneapolis and all the other cities where innocent people are being terrorized by uniformed thugs. It's not as if I don't write my elected officials, make calls, go to local rallies, provide money to mutual aide. It's not as if I don't witness, horrified, as executions are taking place on our streets and we are being lied to at a scale that feels apocalyptic. 

I live in a tiny, rural town on 50+ acres of woodlands. It is a place of profound quiet. The chatter of birdsong and rushing water. The wind through trees. The call of coyotes. On clear nights, the stars are intensely bright. 

It's hard to reconcile that peace with the horror. How can both of those things exist at the same time in the same world? And yet, it has always been so. That is the terrible irony of being human - that we are capable of such beauty and such cruelty. 

During the same weeks as Renee Good and Alex Pretti were murdered, I have been following the journey of a group of Buddhist monks  as they walk from Texas to Washington DC spreading a message of peace. One of the aspects of their walk that has captured my heart is the story of Aloka, the Peace Dog. Aloka was a stray dog in India that began to travel with the monks, adopting them as his charge. The photos of him and the Monks caring for him illustrates some of the best of humanity. There is power in the simplicity of caring. 

I weep for Renee and Alex. For their loved ones. Their friends. The lives they touched. She was a poet. He was an ICU nurse. Decent people trying to make the world around them a better place. Their passion and caring didn't protect them. It makes me want to rage in fury at the unfairness of it all. It makes me afraid. 

I have two sons who are kind and lovely people. The type of people like Renee and Alex. They, too, have spoken out against fascism. They, too, have been to protests. I could see either of them doing what Renee or Alex had done - witnessing and protecting because it is the right thing to do.

Doing the right thing will not save us. 

Empathy and kindness are not shields against bullets.  

And yet.

And yet. 

Without radical empathy, without fierce kindness, we have no humanity. 

I don't want anyone's child or partner or parent or friend in harm's way.  

Doing the right thing will not save us. 

And yet.

And yet.  

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"What is Essential is Invisible to the Eye"

 

 

“What is Essential is Invisible to the Eye”*

Lisa Janice Cohen
January 14, 2026 

The road curves. It leans into hillsides shaped

by the ghosts of trees long since felled to make

way for hardscrabble pastures, stone walls, dour

farmers who believed in progress until the day

it flattened them beneath its broad wheels. Houses

ground to rubble and sticks, moving the dead

expedient. Only the living left to complain.

In the end, we are the ones owned by geography.

What grows is changed by sunlight and soil

until we rarely recognize ourselves outside

of the places we were first planted. We are all

interlopers here. Even those who count lineage

through faded headstones and common names.

I am still new enough to be struck silent by the ice

coated glitter of a bare maple. A white birch

glows against the leaden sky and I want to weep

with the futility of explaining why

you should care about a single ordinary tree

when the world contains forest after forest.

It would be easy to blame the first miner

who carved coal from a seam deep in the earth.

Or the first roustabout who drove a drill

through the ground for oil. But we have always

been remaking the world, deciding this mountain,

this lake, this town means little in our abundance.

Trading our futures for gold as if joy and sorrow

both were fungible assets. The sky spits

rain and snow, unable to decide the season.

I return to the road, now cut through a farm

on the valley floor. Horses in winter coats

graze, incurious about the ribbon that divides

their pasture. None of the beauty that undoes me

is ancient or original. Everywhere, everything

is built on loss. Not far from here, a farmer

discovered a single elm sapling growing

straight and true toward the sun, splitting

the rotted stump of what we were certain

had already died. Maybe the universe

isn’t finished with us yet. I choose to believe

this is a promise, not a threat.

* Title is a quote from The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

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