George Saunders began a letter addressed to his MFA Students at Syracuse University by recounting an episode earlier that week, in which he found himself chastising a bee for existing so happily in the time of coronavirus. 

 

“Moron! If you only knew!” Saunders scolded the bee.

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At another point in the letter, he calls the universe a “stinker” for bringing it to our attention that this new normal could be our daily lives. 

 

Saunders read the letter on Cheryl Strayed’s new podcast "Sugar Calling", where she probes authors about their tips and tricks for surviving the coronavirus pandemic. This podcast assumes two things. First of all, it assumes that these authors are surviving. The second assumption is that the author possesses insight that may be of value to a particular subset of Podcast listeners. I’m not sure what it is about humans, but we often make the flawed assumption that just because someone excelled in one area (writing), that they are somehow qualified to give advice about living your best life. Generally, I reject this notion. However, I am happy to take advice from George Saunders any day of the week. I am convinced that if anyone is able to provide answers in a time ridden with questions, it is George Saunders. 

 

I pictured George answering the phone from somewhere deep in the woods: yes, he was definitely a woods-dweller. Was he writing? What did he think about it - the whole colossal mess of it all? Surely he would have wisdom, insight, perspective about what it means to be a conscious human being during a time as peculiar as the present. 

 

George answered from Corralitos, California, where he and his wife are quarantined, at their home surrounded by redwoods (I was right), a berry field, and the ocean. Saunders’s voice, somehow, sounded exactly how I expected it to. His a’s and e’s are vaguely Canadian (he’s actually from Chicago), and his voice sounded like it was from the 1970’s, straight out of “The Rockford Files".

 

Right away, Cheryl asked George to read letter, where he chewed out a bee and the universe within the first 100 words. George reminded his students that it will be up to them, the artists of the world, particularly the writers, to help subsequent generations make sense of this moment. What will it mean to fictionalize an event like this? He urged them to keep track of the texts they're sending, the feelings they’re having, the things they are witnessing - it is those records that will best help them later. What will convince people that this actually happened will not be the numbers - how many lives we lost, the rate of infection, how quickly it spread. In the stories told about this time, an opportunity exists to relay the emotional gravitas of it all to future generations. 

 

George apologizes for perhaps sounding a bit preachy - to which I wish I could have chimed in and said “No, please preach to me!” He admits that he isn’t quite taking his own advice about writing and reflecting diligently.

 

What came next stuck with me: 

 

“The world is like a sleeping tiger, and we tend to live our lives there on it’s back. We’re much smaller than the tiger, obviously. We’re like Barbie and Ken’s on the back of the tiger. Now and then that tiger wakes up, and that is terrifying. Sometimes it wakes up when someone we love dies, or someone breaks our heart, or there’s a pandemic. But this is far from the first time this tiger has come awake. He/ she has been doing it since the beginning of time, and will never stop doing it. And always there have been writers to observe it and, later, make sense of it, or at least bear witness to it. 

It’s good for the world, for a writer to bear witness, and it’s good for the writer too, especially if she can bear witness with love and humor and, despite it all, some fondness for the world, just as it is manifesting, words and all. All of this to say, there’s still work to be done, and now more than ever.” 

 

Funny, because that last line is basically word for word what the Law School Admissions Council emailed me (and hundreds of others) after cancelling my scheduled LSAT for the third time, just replace writers and artists with legal professionals. 

 

As someone who may be referred to as a modern-day “young person” or “Gen Z’er” - I made that one up, I hope it sticks - I’ve noticed that we, my fellow Gen Z’er’s and me, are constantly being called upon to pay attention, because we’ll be the ones in charge one day, and we better be effing prepared. The problems that we will deal with - the problems that will inform our career paths and ultimately shape our ideas about the world and about each other - are not problems that we had a heavy hand in creating. Cue, “We Didn’t Start the Fire”.

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Especially as a graduating college senior, waiting readily to enter the world and decide in what capacity I could have an impact - or, alternatively, do as little damage as possible - these questions have preoccupied my mind, and partly, inspired this project. Writing is a medium that allows us to speak to each other intergenerationally. We have the profound ability to warn each other - to warn future generations - about the evils that we observe. We can also give each other a heads up about where we think the most good can be done. 

 

I didn’t listen to this interview with George until I was halfway through my semester long immersion in George's work, specifically his collection of short stories, In Persuasion Nation. My goal was to reverse engineer George’s work and produce my own work of satirical fiction. At the beginning of the semester, I planned to do something explicitly political. I wanted to explore the political realities that divided us, sparked hatred, and seemed to rarely, if ever, lead to any sort of tangible conclusion about how American democracy was supposed to work. I wanted to probe the role of feeling in politics, and feeling’s ability to trump - pun intended - what we know or what we think we know. Soon, though, I realized reality did not provide me with the necessary angle to approach these topics with fresh eyes. Without a clear road ahead, I turned to fiction. 

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I am drawn to satire, specifically satire with political and social relevance, for its license to criticize. The author of satire basically has a go-ahead to create a world in which everything they dislike most about themselves and the world around them is exaggerated and made into absurdities. 

 

​​​​​​True to form, I didn't understand my motivations fully until the semester was three-quarters over: writing workshops turned into happy hours from our bedrooms, the world looked a bit different, and I had a chance to hear, indirectly, from George himself. 

 

George's words helped me understand why I was so drawn to his work in the first place. He reminds me that even in our harshest critiques of the world, and of ourselves, we must center kindness. I could not believe that a man who writes such scathing, pointed, and merciless satire could be as jovial and light-hearted as Saunders seemed. I could not believe that the same man who expertly humorizes all of the ugliness that makes us human could be the same man who refers to the universe as a "stinker" and calls a bee a moron and then feels bad about it. 

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Saunders’s gift to the world is his ability, in his writing, to remind us that it is quite possible to exist in the world as someone who looks particularly hard at the unhappy realities of being human, while simultaneously appreciating all of the beauty that comes wrapped in our shared experience of existing on Earth together. Throughout this project, my admiration for Saunders and other satirists like Alissa Nutting, has grown tenfold. I used Saunders's In Persuasion Nation and Nutting's Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls to put myself through a small-scale crash course in satirical fiction. Imagine if someone who had never driven on the highway before was your driver's ed teacher: 

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Here you will find a narration of my encounter with a choice few of these works, and some general takeaways. I used these works as reference guides, inspiration, and relief. 

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I then took my musings and the little I know about what it takes to be a writer and tried my hand at their craft.

 

I won't link that here. Find it yourself.