Staying Put

On Writing, Resistance, and the Temptation to Withdraw

Earlier this week, in response to the continued pressure of our current political and cultural climate, I found myself in detailed budget planning for an expat life in France, or Italy, or Belize, or whatever “Walden” I could retreat to so I could escape the current pressures of American life, so that I could write and live in expat bliss.

As writers and creators, I believe we have a deep and natural commitment to personal liberties and to the broader scope of human rights. Pair that commitment with strong empathy muscles, and we have a personality type that can feel pummeled when personal liberties and human rights are violated with the specific cruelty and cynicism that seems so prevalent today.

I certainly have.

Hence the budget, the long-term rental research, the visa-requirements digging, the “how do I talk to my wife about this plan” scheming, and the Google searches on how to move a piano overseas, and then…I paused.

Is this the best response to the current situation?

Is this the best way for me to help make things better?

Will my writing suffer?

Am I a coward for wanting to leave?

Am I an idiot for wanting to stay?

But the question that stopped me dead in my tracks was clearer and much harder to answer than simple logistics.

What kind of response is withdrawal, really?

Not politically, or ideologically, but practically, and in my case, poetically. I tend to reach for distance when pressure increases. Maybe you do too. I can’t tell you how many schemes I have come up with over the years to leave my job and find a little cabin in a “name-your-bucolic-setting.” My wife can, because she has had to listen to them all in excruciating detail and urgency. It became almost a habit of thought for me to believe that clarity lives elsewhere, and that my attention would improve once I stepped outside the noise, conflict, and compromises of the day-to-day.

Withdrawal offers real things. Distance can steady anxiety. It can restore literary attention, enliven imagination, and give language room to breathe. Stepping away, whether into the woods, another country, or simply a quieter life, can feel like an act of care for oneself and one’s work. There are moments when retreat is not indulgent but necessary, when staying put would mean only numbing out or repeating murmurs of “to hell with this.”

I don’t want to dismiss that. I’ve relied on it myself, and I know how seductive the promise can be to have fewer collisions, fewer compromises, fewer voices arguing back. Retreat has a long and honorable history in literary life, but as a habit, almost a reflex when the world becomes too loud or too cruel? Oh, how we imagine that our work will be better if we just remove ourselves from all that. But even Thoreau needed help with the groceries out at the pond.

Over time, I’ve noticed what withdrawal removes. Distance thins the field of real contact. It simplifies the world in ways that feel clarifying but are also limiting. When the pressure eases, so does the resistance that forces language to sharpen, to hesitate, to revise itself in public. Without friction, our work risks knowing too quickly what it thinks. It becomes cleaner, surer, less interrupted, and often less surprised. What retreat gives in clarity, it can quietly take away in consequence. The poem, the essay, the story no longer must negotiate much of anything.

Staying put, then, begins to feel less like passivity and more like a choice to remain in contact when disappearance feels tempting. I don’t mean staying put as stubbornness or denial, and certainly not as moral superiority. I mean staying inside the language, the systems, and the shared pressures of the moment long enough for the work to be tested by them. Staying put means accepting that clarity will be partial, that attention will be interrupted, and that writing will have to negotiate rather than pronounce. It is not a refusal of care. It is a refusal of vanishing—of self-erasure.

I don’t know if staying is always braver than leaving. There are moments when withdrawal is necessary, even lifesaving. But for me, right now, staying put keeps the work honest. It keeps me in contact with other people, with compromised language, with the resistance that comes from not disappearing.

I’m not staying because I’m certain it will make things better. But, I have never believed that I am writing poetry to make the world better. I am writing poetry to create a real and true experience in the reader, and in that small way, maybe change begins. And to create that experience, I need to live within the pressure. The alternative feels too much like abandonment. For now, staying is how I remain answerable to the work, to the moment, and to the possibility that attention itself still matters.

ship sailing away off into the distance