D is for Dear America

From Simmons Buntin, co-editor of Dear America, a collection of personal essays, narrative journalism, poetry, and visual art from more than 130 contributors:

     "Dear Reader,
          "When Alison Hawthorne Deming sent me her letter to America a week after the 2016 U.S.
     presidential election, I had just hung up the phone with my daughter, a college sophomore,
     biologist-in-training, and young woman who had just voted in her first presidential election --
     and now found herself devastated. It was the fourth or fifth time we'd talked since the election,
     and as her father I felt that I was in the position of talking her down from a ledge. A ledge on
     which we both teetered.
          "Alison's letter arrived just in time. A response to the shaken American landscape so
     vividly illuminated by Donald Trump's win, it was written -- she told me in offering the letter
     for publication in Terrain.org -- to encourage herself and others as we reeled with the dis-
     ruption in our sense of national well-being."

Terrain.org is a nonprofit literary magazine published online since 1997. It continues to accept submissions for publication -- including for the ongoing Dear America project.

I attended the Association of Writers and Publishers Conference in San Antonio during the first week of March. I, too, had "teetered" on that ledge. When I heard the first panel of writers from the Dear America I was reassured that I was not alone. Reassured that we need not acquiesce to the anti-American policies of the Trump administration. I was inspired. I was braced for action. And I spent my book budget on copies of Dear America so I could lend or give it to people I love.

The essays and poems in Dear America are not diatribes against Trump and his cronies. In fact, they are celebrations of the America I remember and still believe in. Celebrations of escaping urban noise and motion while fishing off the end of a pier. Of immigrant dreams. Of not racist treatment.

I have been afraid of how far we were falling away from our American values. The goal of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" for all people regardless of and respecting our individual differences. But not dividing ourselves into us and them.

Where once I thought of America as being the Leader of the Free World, I have watched in fear as we were led away from the Free World toward the oligarchies, and the tyrannies of the world.

And now America is experiencing a greater danger. One that is without national boundaries, without politics, without any concern for any individual or group of individuals.

We are being schooled by Covid-19 in just exactly how much good it does to "go it alone" -- as a person, as a demographic, as a nation.

And again, this book, this collection of writings from more than 130 people, this Dear America reassures me. That woman's letter which steadied Mr. Buntin from "teetering" on the ledge back in 2016 continues to steady us and call us to action.

"Think of the great spirit of inventiveness the Earth calls forth after each major disturbance it suffers. Be artful, inventive, and just, my friends, but do not be silent."  -- Alison Hawthorne Deming