Two Feet In | Writing and the Institution

First, this: Amnesty International - Pens from Troublemakers.tv on Vimeo . That message -- that somehow the act of writing changes the world. I'm not wholly convinced, yet, though I suppose my students and colleagues believe that's what I think. I do, fully, believe that writing changes us, changes our world, changes the way we see the world, changes the way we make the world. But there are other writers, writers in the dark. Writers with law degrees and political appointments and writers who are the result of a sperm and egg of powerful males and females before them. They write too. Or sometimes they only speak, and someone they own writes for them. So my writing is against their writing; my words against their words; my letters against their letters; my comma against their comma. The belief that writing changes the world for the better -- that a signature, for example, will somehow validate the democratic experiment -- is ultimately naive. My signature cannot move ...