Writing at the Edge of Eruption

We keep writing, not because it fixes the world, but because it saves something in us.

Writing at the Edge of Eruption

It’s hard to write when the world is burning, breaking, drowning. When cruelty is televised, and justice feels like an echo in a collapsing canyon. This is the moment we wake up, not as children, but as stunned preteens realizing, oh god, "they were drunk the whole time." The family jokes weren’t harmless, the jokes were racists, misogynistic, homophobic as were the father, mother, the pedophile uncle. The system isn’t fair, dominate culture has its own agenda. Democracy isn’t promised without Due Process.

There’s a deep, raw grief that comes with these recognitions. We’ve been here before: each generation invents a metaphor to match the crisis. During the Great Depression, when jobs vanished and hope dried up, the common phrase was “I’m paralyzed.” It meant more than fear. It meant there were no choices left. People couldn’t move because the world had stopped moving around them. And at the same time, polio surged through the country, literally paralyzing children and adults alike. The metaphor and the physical reality bled into one another.

Decades later, in the rise of internet fame and digital hustle culture, “going viral” meant success. It was the goal. A program or product that "went viral" was celebrated. Until 2020, when a real virus swept across the globe, locking down cities and isolating families. The metaphor had become reality again. Viral wasn't a dream anymore, it was a nightmare.

Now, we hear the word flooded. The world is flooded with information, with war, with economic collapse, with heartbreak. And it’s not just a feeling. From Pakistan to Vermont, Germany to Brazil, entire communities are underwater. Floods are no longer symbolic. They’re swallowing lives and landscapes.

Words feel useless. Sentences fall apart under the weight of the news cycle. But we keep writing, not because it fixes the world, but because it saves something in us.

We write to feel human. We write to not look away. We write as witness, as resistance, as prayer.

We hold tenderness in one hand and fierce boundary in the other. We meet strangers’ eyes and we stay. We choose beauty when nothing feels beautiful. We create, still. We say no to brutality. We say yes to presence, to kindness, to breath.

And now, we are erupting. The volcano stirs. The lava rises. Across the globe, dormant volcanoes are rumbling awake—Mount Etna, Mauna Loa, Popocatépetl. These are not just geological events. They echo the rising heat inside us all. The smoldering truth. The pressure that can no longer be contained.

Let us take our cues from Pele, goddess of fire and transformation. When the earth splits, it makes new land. When the magma flows, it burns what cannot survive, and births what is yet to be.

May our words crack open something new. May they flow wild and hot, uncontainable, necessary.

This is not the end.

This is the beginning of something we will not look away from, and we will definitely feel.

Narrative essay written by Brenda Littleton

Tin Flea Press c. 2025

Photo from National Park Service, public domain Kilauea, Hawaii. 2023.