The Fire and the Library

Imagine a village where the only source of warmth in winter is a great communal fire. This fire is fed by logs passed down through generations. Each log holds the memory of how to plant, how to heal, how to build, and how to dream. Some villagers tell stories around the fire so that no knowledge is lost, while others carve new lessons into the wood before tossing them into the flames, ensuring the warmth continues.

Now imagine that one-by-one, certain logs are pulled from the pile. Some claim these logs burn too brightly, that they challenge the old ways. Others insist that some stores make the fire unpredictable and uncomfortable. Eventually, in the name of order, the logs are stacked out of reach, and the fire dims. The village grows colder. People forget what they once knew.

This is what happens when books are banned. 

Carl Sagan wrote that books are "proof that humans are capable of working magic." To him, a book was a time machine, a means of speaking with those long gone, a way for knowledge to outlive its creator. Rebecca Solnit, in her explorations of power and storytelling, has shown how those in control of narratives shape what people believe to be possible. A library, then is not merely a collection of books. It is a kind of fire, illuminating the past and guiding the future.

And yet, in the United States, that fire is under siege.

Recently, more book bans have surged across school districts and libraries, targeting works that challenge dominant narratives about race, gender, history, and power. Many of the books being removed are those that give voice to the marginalized, that ask ask uncomfortable questions, that tell stories some would rather not be heard. The motivations vary from moral panic to political opportunism and fear. The outcome remains the same: a shrinking of intellectual space, a deliberate dimming of the fire.

However, book bans are not the only threat. Even where censorship is not at play, the slow starvation of public libraries has a similar effect. Across the country, libraries face severe budget cuts, staff layoffs, and in some cases, outright closures. A defunded library is, in its own way, a banned library. One that exists in theory but not in function.

Libraries are more than repositories of books. They are community centers, literacy hubs, job-search lifelines, and safe spaces for those with nowhere else to go. They offer free access to knowledge in an era where paywalls and algorithms increasingly dictate who gets to learn. They are, as author and literacy advocate, LeVar Burton has said, "the soul of a community." Burton has long championed libraries not just as places to discover books, but as critical spaces for imagination, empathy, and empowerment. Without them, the gap between those who have access to knowledge and those who do not grows wider.

Sagan warned of a world where anti-intellectualism could take hold when critical thinking was discouraged. Solnit reminds us that stories are a survival tool, that "we think we thell stories, but stories tell us...they tell us how to live, what to love, what to be afraid of." When libraries disappear, so do the stories that shape resilience, empathy, and change.

What's happening now isn't new. Every era has its book burners, its censors who believe that restricting ideas will stop them from existing. But history shows that stories are persistent. They slip through cracks, whisper through time, find new forms. The fire may flicker, but it does not go out easily.

The real question is whether we let it dwindle or tend to it, whether we pass the logs freely, telling stories so no knowledge is lost and the warmth continues. If we are to resist the cold of ignorance, we must keep the fire burning.

Telling Our Own Stories

Stories shape the way we understand ourselves. They give language to what was once unspoken, carving out spaces where identity can unfold in its full complexity. When women and trans writers take up the pen, they do more than document experience. They create a world where gender is not a boundary but a field of possibility, where the truth of a life is not a compromise but a declaration. 

Kate Bornstein’s Gender Outlaw broke open the conversation on identity with humor, sharp intelligence, and a refusal to accept easy definitions. Bornstein does not merely challenge the binary; they step outside it, inviting readers into a space where gender can be playful, defiant, and deeply personal. Roz Kaveney, with her encyclopedic knowledge and poetic precision, traces the way culture has shaped and reshaped gender, writing across genres with an authority that insists on visibility. 

Imogen Binnie’s Nevada stands as a landmark in trans literature. Binnie writes with a voice that is raw and wry, crafting a protagonist who does not ask for approval. She is messy, questioning, and unapologetically present. Kai Cheng Thom brings a different rhythm to the conversation, blending poetry, storytelling, and activism in books like Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars. Her work pulses with movement, embracing the contradictions of being both vulnerable and powerful. 

Rachel Pollack understood that gender is as much about story as it is about body. Her work in fiction, tarot, and myth illuminates the ways identity can be fluid, sacred, and self-determined. In Unquenchable Fire and Temporary Agency, transformation is not a metaphor for trans experience—it is the reality of living in a world that resists change while being shaped by it. 

Janet Mock’s memoirs, Redefining Realness and Surpassing Certainty, are intimate and unflinching. She writes with a journalist’s clarity and a storyteller’s grace, refusing to separate the political from the personal. Her life is not framed as an exception or an inspiration; it is a life fully lived, shaped by choice, love, and ambition. 

These writers do not simply describe gender and sexuality. They live it on the page, in voices that are fierce, tender, unrelenting, and true. Their books are more than accounts of identity. They are proof that identity is not something to be argued or explained. It is something to be lived, written, and read. 

The Steady Hand of History

History is not a river that rushes in great waves only to subside into stillness. It is a constant tide, pulled forward by the steadfast hands of women—women who have woven societies together, held nations upright, and bent the arc of justice with their resilience. From the ancient past to the present moment, their stories are carved into the foundations of civilization, though too often, they have been left out of the history books.

Yet the record exists, and the books that honor them tell a story of power, persistence, and unshakable presence. 

The Classics: Foundations of Women’s Strength

To read The Women’s History of the World (later republished as The Whole Woman) by Rosalind Miles is to recognize a truth often ignored: women were never in the background. They were warriors, healers, queens, and revolutionaries, not passive observers but active architects of history. Similarly, A Distant Mirror by Barbara Tuchman reminds us that in times of plague and war, women’s labor and leadership did not waver. They were the ones who stitched the fabric of survival while history raged around them.

We see this in The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir, a book that refuses to let women be defined as "other," instead tracing how their intellectual and political contributions have shaped the world. We hear it in Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, in her quiet yet defiant demand that a woman must have space—both literal and figurative—to write, create, and think freely.

The Contemporary Echo: Carrying the Flame Forward

The same stories continue, written in bold new hands. In The Woman’s Hour by Elaine Weiss, we walk alongside the suffragists who fought, starved, and persevered for the right to vote. In She Came to Slay by Erica Armstrong Dunbar, we meet Harriet Tubman not just as a conductor of the Underground Railroad but as a Union spy, a nurse, a suffragist—a woman whose courage reshaped a nation.

Good and Mad by Rebecca Traister captures the power of women's collective anger, showing that from the abolitionist movement to #MeToo, fury has been a catalyst for change. In The Radium Girls by Kate Moore, we witness young factory workers poisoned by their own labor, yet refusing to be silent, forcing corporations and governments to acknowledge their worth—not just as workers, but as human beings.

A Legacy That Refuses to Fade

The importance of women is not in their ability to move mountains in a single day but in their refusal to stop pushing. It is in their insistence that they belong not just in the margins but in the heart of history. These books remind us that women’s contributions are not anomalies. They are the backbone of progress.

To read them is to understand that the world has always been built by women’s hands, moved by their voices, and held steady by their strength. As we turn each page, we do more than remember—we carry their stories forward, ensuring they are never erased again.

The Lies We're Dying For

digital art, Truth Reckoning, by T. Reid, 2023

Lessons from Wonder Woman

In Wonder Woman (Rebirth) Vol. 1: The Lies, amidst the shifting sands of her own story, Diana speaks plainly: "The first casualty of war is truth." It is a line that lingers, less as an epiphany and more as a quiet recognition of something we’ve already suspected. War, whether waged between nations, within communities, or across the contested territories of identity and belief, requires distortions. It thrives on revised histories, selective memories, and the relentless erosion of what is knowable.

When The Lies opens, Wonder Woman stands in a landscape where her past has been tampered with. Competing versions of her origin pull against each other. What was once certain is now obscured. The facts of her own becoming, her home, her mission, her nature, have been rewritten. She finds herself, like many of us, caught in the confusion of narratives, aware that something essential had been taken or hidden away, but with no clear path back to it.

This is not merely the predicament of a superhero within a comic book. It is the condition of life in a world saturated with conflicting accounts. We are surrounded daily by the mechanics of distortion and erasure. In current events, we see the consequences. When facts become flexible, justice becomes fragile. Accountability falters when a populace is taught to distrust its own perception of reality. The ongoing violence in Gaza, the destruction and resilience in Ukraine, the recursive battles over the narratives of January 6th, the deliberate targeting of trans lives through legislation and media--these are not only conflicts of policy or territory, but of truth itself. Who controls the story controls the stakes.

There is nothing abstract about this. The distortion of truth precedes real harm. A policy built on false premises, a vote cast in fear of imagined threats, a life endangered because someone's existence was recast as ideology- all of these begin with the manipulation of what people believe to be real.

Each of us may be Wonder Woman. We, too, must navigate the labyrinth of altered histories and weaponized language. We are tasked, as she is, with the work of discernment. Not to find "the one truth" as if it waits buried and whole, but to piece together enough of the real to act with integrity. Diana is not paralyzed by the loss of certainty. She moves forward, aware that truth must be pursued, defended, and sometimes even rebuilt from the wreckage.

This is the quiet, enduring labor of those who refuse to accept falsehood as the price of survival. It is the work of journalists who continue to report under threat. Of historians who insist on preserving records that others would erase. Of individuals who choose, every day, to live openly in societies that legislate against their existence.

Each of us is positioned in this same responsibility in ways large and small. The fight for truth is rarely dramatic. It happens in conversations with neighbors, in the careful reading of headlines, in the refusal to share what feels convenient over what is accurate. It happens when someone decides that history is worth preserving and when another chooses to tell their own story despite the risks of being disbelieved.

If truth is the first casualty, it is also the most necessary restoration. Not as an abstract ideal, but as a living practice. One that we create and sustain together. Diana's example is not in her invincibility, but in her refusal to stand aside as the ground shifts beneath her. She reminds us that to persist in seeking what has been hidden or distorted is, itself, an act of defiance.

In this way, Wonder Woman remains a figure for our moment, perhaps movement, as a symbol of resilience and a companion in the shared struggle to remember, to question, and to repair what has been broken.

 

Void of Digital Writing

For months, I lived in the tactile world of pen and paper, sketching out my thoughts longhand. Something was grounding about the process—the pen's weight, the paper's texture, the rhythmic flow of ink. It was slower, yes, but deliberate, and it gave me time to sit with my thoughts. Today, though, I returned to my computer, ready to draft again on the keyboard. And it was strange.—unsettling even.

As I sat down and opened a blank document, the screen felt glaring and intrusive, as though it was imposing itself on my thoughts rather than inviting them. The endless potential of the blinking cursor didn’t inspire me; it paralyzed me. I’d grown accustomed to seeing my words form in my own handwriting, immediate and intimate. Now, those same words were caught in the back-and-forth of my mind, hesitant to leap back into pixels.

For a while, I stared at the screen. The blankness mirrored my uncertainty. My fingers hovered over the keyboard, stiff and uncertain, as if they’d forgotten the choreography they once knew so well. Typing felt foreign—a mechanical task I couldn’t fully connect to.

But then something shifted. Maybe it was muscle memory; maybe it was patience. Slowly, I started to type. At first, the words were awkward, and disjointed, like pieces of a puzzle that didn’t quite fit. But with each sentence, the rhythm returned. My fingers moved faster, more sure of themselves. The hesitance gave way to momentum. Before I realized it, I was drafting fluidly, the hesitation dissolving with each keystroke.

I hadn’t anticipated how visceral this adjustment would feel. Writing, in any form, is intimate. Whether it’s ink on paper or text on a screen, it’s about translating thought into form. The medium shapes the experience. Longhand, I’d felt connected to the physical act of writing—the slowness that allowed for reflection, the deliberate commitment of pen to paper. At the keyboard, though, the pace was faster, the connection less tangible but no less real. The words came quicker, sometimes tumbling out too fast for me to consider them fully, but they came nonetheless.

Recently, I’ve returned to my fountain pens and notebooks, rediscovering the joy of their familiar feel. There’s a quiet magic in the scratch of the nib against the page, in watching ink dry into permanence. Yet, I’ve also committed to working in both formats, recognizing the value each brings to exercising my mind and creativity. The duality keeps me engaged, challenging me to adapt and remain flexible in how I approach my work.

As I finished my first session back at the computer, I felt a quiet sense of accomplishment. There’s something valuable in adapting, in rediscovering a skill you thought you might have lost. Returning to this way of writing wasn’t easy, but it reminded me that process matters less than the work itself. What matters is showing up, whether with a pen in hand or fingers poised over a keyboard, ready to transform thoughts into something more.