This article was originally published in the November 2023 print edition.
As news coverage of the Israel-Hamas War has increased, so has the number of social media posts I see related to the ongoing deaths, injuries and traumas there. I’m coming to accept the value of witnessing these atrocities in close to real time as a person of privilege. Still, there is also a cost when casual consumption becomes doomscrolling.
The Los Angeles Times’ Mark Barabak defined doomscrolling as “an excessive amount of screen time devoted to the absorption of dystopian news.” Just as other kinds of self-harm are best stopped by replacing them with some other action rather than white-knuckling abstention, I needed something that both occupied my brain and scratched the same “I-need-to-know” itch that doomscrolling did. Doomscrolling also created a false sense of community in me as I indulged in it; between the likes and DMs from friends, I was terribly alone as I took in the bursts of good and bad online. That sense of individual burden was driving me away from wanting to interact with my communities and towards activist burnout. I needed an onramp back to solidarity.
I found it in a book whose foreword by Tillie Olsen described the interviews within as “way-opening”: “Black Women Writers at Work,” edited by Claudia Tate. More than distraction, more than escapism, I needed a way back — a return to form after the ambiguity of emotions social media surrounded me by. I found that onramp many times over between the covers of “Black Women Writers at Work,” which was first published in 1985 and has been brought back to print by Haymarket Books this year.
Avid doomscrollers may be reluctant to pick up a 268-page paperback due to concerns about their shortened attention span, but the collection consists of 14 interviews with Black women writers that do not need to be read consecutively. There are also enough gems here to reward even a quick flip through the pages, though you’ll probably be drawn in as I was and continue on for longer.
What is it about the words of Black women writers taken down in the 80s that makes them resonate strongly with a news doomscroller of the 2020s? Time helps. These women were writing for the people beside them in their current moment as well as for generations to come, sometimes at the same time; urgency with foresight intertwined is another way of saying sustainable.
Gwendolyn Brooks remembered being led to a tavern by a student of hers named Haki for an impromptu poetry reading where she “soften[ed]” the drinking audience by reading her “tight, direct, bouncy” poem “We Real Cool” before moving on to longer ones. “Relevant poetry was the only kind you could take into that situation. Those people weren’t there to listen to ‘Poetry,’ spelled with a capital P,” Brooks said. This intentional building of an intimate moment between listener and poet is echoed in the relationship between reader and the words on the page. Both relationships carefully shape time in a way that social media algorithms discourage.
Brooks then described her work in prisons. Of a writing contest she ran at Greenhaven Correctional Facility in Stormville, New York, she said, “It was effective. The inmates enjoyed it. They were the judges.” What is time and attention to the tired patrons of your local bar, and what is it to the person behind bars? And what is it to you?
It would be easy to think that a book of interviews with writers has an intended audience of exclusively other writers, but I intend to convince you otherwise. Where doomscrolling feels like an endless string of passivity interspersed with rejections as I thumb past the too silly, the too horrifying or the boring, reading “Black Women Writers at Work” allowed me to marvel at what minds and hearts are capable of in the beginning, middle and possibly post-revolution.
Any writer in this book might give a different answer as to where the U.S. Black revolutionary experience was at the time of their interview. But their clarity, fabulously varied in content as it was, felt fully formed and crafted with attention, patience and, yes, rage. If doomscrolling feels like the world shrunk down to a single bright artificial point, reading these interviews showed me how to create and hold space for the specific jumble of experiences and emotions I was going through in the clear light of day. As Claudia Tate states in the introduction to the book, reading Black heroines by Black women writers can teach anyone a great deal about “constructing a meaningful life in the midst of chaos and contingencies, armed with nothing more than her intellect and emotion.”
I know the war and the narratives around it affects people in unfair and uneven ways; this book can’t fix that. But if you’re one of the people who has ever doomscrolled to the point of exhaustion or even just blankness of emotion, I would leave this book by your bedside rather than your phone for a night or two. Let the centuries in this book as well as the right-now immediacy of it fill and shape your time. Let a variety of voices that feels like a chorus rather than a cacophony open you up to new possibilities and remind you of what and who we’re fighting for.
