What a writer can do, what a fiction writer or a poet or an essay writer can do is re-engage people with their own humanity.
An essay is not an op-ed that tells its reader what to think. An essay is a complicated working-out of one's own contradictions and complicities.
Katrina silenced me for two years. I wrote a 12-page essay on my experience in Katrina, and that's it. I didn't write anything for, like, two, two and a half years after Katrina hit because it was so traumatic.
