Why I’m Writing

Written by Ginger Wolfe-Suarez

I write because I believe the human act of writing is a kind of resistance. Not just resistance to technology, but also to the idea of cognitive and creative labor and limits- or even the idea of limitlessness. My perspective is of a woman and mother with a multi-racial family living in the South. Writing is both infinite and precarious to me. I’ve always been drawn to the fantasy author Ursula K. Le Guin’s essays on building worlds. Many feminist fantasy writers write about liberating places and spaces and outcomes. I think about this as I imagine and see people around me working towards or shaping a positive future my children can grow up in. Even though I write in another completely different form and style, the concepts of limitlessness and potential stay with me. I write because, on some deep personal level, I am just trying to disentangle my own humanness as it relates to grief, inspiration, and possibility. Feminist historian Moira Roth who I was close with in my own life, used to talk with me about the camera not as a tool but as a weapon against war and violence over her life. Writing, too, is a quiet blade cutting through cultural and ecological erasure. I do have some traditional journalism training, and part of that structure lives within my writing, even here and now. But more often my writing is sometimes, or at best, a process for me to reclaim moments of love, nature, and care outside of the everyday pulse of capitalism or other extractive systems.

So, I write to document and share human experiences. My perspective, my voice, and where I come from shapes how I see the world and the things I notice. I believe this perspective is vital and that it goes unrepresented in a culture that rewards loud and chaotic descriptions, rushing through the reflective observations that critically shape how we go about our lives. I am also an adoptive parent. I can with all honestly say, I don’t know how much I thought or even cared about the future until my son was born. Then I immediately understood the future as being a kind of place he would be within. To be a parent in this moment is to guide and nurture a future to be imagined amid environmental and cultural crisis.

I traveled a lot and moved throughout different parts of the world, and experienced other cultures. This further shaped my identity and voice. My father took me to Ecuador, where he had lived as a child, when I was a teenager. I still to this day have such strong memories of the busses and the way the rain fell there. The feeling of the sweep of the roads and the way the rain wrapped around me didn’t return until I lived through a rainy season in Central and South Florida. I can sit in Florida with my door open, marveling at the rain. That kind of sensorial experience, intertwined with cultural memory feels central to my writing practice. The lived experience as it relates to art, nature, and even growing food is something I constantly work at. For the past several years, I have interviewed farmers and documented small-scale agriculture. I’ve often stated these stories are not small, even though they live outside the surface of public attention. In my opinion, this population of farmers and eco-entrepreneurs reflects the major issues of our time, from the flow of water and habitat loss, to labor, precarity, immigration, the gig economy, gentrification, and strategies of survival across our society.

What if observation is a kind of power? I think it is. Observation is a quiet strength or skill. I was taught to take notes by hand in every setting. I was challenged to try to learn more about myself though understanding patterns in my note-taking. Observation is a powerful skill as a journalist and writer, but also to people who observe nature or grow food. In an article about cultural memory and farming, I recently wrote that the process, “…involves watching the moon appear and recede as cycles come and go, and how the sun hits your body and then dances beyond it within a few minutes. It also has to do with learning about how the humidity and rain mixes in with the air we breathe…” My writing shares information about lived experience with readers who may or may not live here or may not have much time with nature or even people who otherwise have no connection to this region at all. Sharing stories about land, and culture is a kind of responsibility I take seriously. When I interview small-scale farmers across the state, I generally ask some open and close ended questions. But if I pause to let the person continue to speak, they often will tell their stories honestly and more completely in those open-ended moments of pause. When I talk to this population, I typically ask them what they notice about seemingly obvious facts like the weather, or the rain. In this way I have collected valuable information and stories about topics such as the flow of water and the shifting ecological corridor of the state.

When I started writing professionally, I had just graduated an academic program that taught students a modernist writing framework. I still love the moment one stands in awe of a thing and it reminds us of our own humanness. Learning about criticism specifically sharpened my ability to describe what I see and to understand context. As many dominant systems of learning at the time, critical thinking about capitalism was stressed. So, this way of learning about writing was helpful in some ways and also limiting in others. Initially I was writing reviews for art and literary magazines and over time I began writing for weekly newspapers and food journals, in addition to curatorial museum work. Even as a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley and a recipient of an Eisner Prize, my most valuable life experience I learned just from being a mom. That taught me how to show up with empathy and how to hold space for complexity.

These are the kind of skills that remain essential when I’m reverse-pitched stories about food insecurity, gentrification, or other complex cultural issues. These stories and larger writing projects require standing in complexity. When writing about borders, I wrote that these discussions often center around confronting a binary as it relates to opposition; however, borders and boundaries could also function as spaces for potential connection. It is intriguing to think of Florida in this way: not just a place for contrast, but as a space for cultural connection that can happen in unlikely ways. This is the space and place I fight for. Writing, for me, requires being comfortable with nuance, to resist essentialism, and to believe there is meaning and beauty in that space too. I show up every day. Sometimes I fail. Sometimes I create. But always, I try to tell the stories that shape and impact our lives.