"It's up to authors to spark the imagination of their readers and to help them envision alternatives to how we live.”

Ursula K. Le Guin shared these words in 2014 as she accepted the National Book Foundation’s medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, and we’ve been sharing it in almost all of our writing workshops and storytelling gatherings this past year. While she speaks specifically of authors, we know that this sentiment extends to any and all creatives who are telling stories in their own magical ways.

The past year has continued to awaken us to a heightened sense of harm and violence across the globe. From the devastation of living through a climate crisis to the despair of witnessing multiple genocides unfold before our eyes, we at Living Hyphen feel the immense weight and urgency of our times. We take seriously our role and responsibility as storytellers to push for justice. And we know the power of our stories to heal relationships, to resist systems of oppression, and, as Ursula K. Le Guin urges, to envision and create alternatives to how we live.

Throughout the last few years of doing this work, I’ve noticed that much of the conversation is still centered around whiteness. When mainstream conversations address racism, the discussion is often – as most things always are – centered around white people. So much of our discourse today is still very much trapped in binary thinking – white people against all non-white people.

Contrary to the world we live in that prioritizes fast and exponential growth at all costs, we lean into and luxuriate in the slow and meaningful process of building relationships, creating reciprocal partnerships, and collaborating with like-minded people, organizations, and institutions who strive to do things differently in a world that so desperately needs new approaches and new systems.