Writing Post Election
by Chelsea Catherine
Blog 2: 11/12/2020
Most of 2016 is a blur to me. At the time, I was living in the Lower Keys, working full-time at nonprofit while drinking too much and celebrating finally being “out.” I remember the heat and dense lushness of the Keys. The smell of mangrove roots. I remember going for runs in the evenings and watching the sunset branch purple across scattered clouds.
The morning I heard about the Pulse shooting, I was on my way to Bahia Honda State Park with a woman I was in love with. We spent the afternoon in the clear water, reapplying sunscreen lotion and avoiding crabs that crawled under the sand. I tried not to think about it; it was too painful. I didn’t really process the news until months later, when at a writing conference, a poet showed a picture of everyone who was killed. I broke down in tears on the spot.
When Donald Trump was elected in November of 2016, I had the same kind of delayed reaction. I knew it was going to be bad for many people, myself included. But I didn’t really realize the extent of my dread until I started writing.
With a bad presidency comes an onslaught of fantasy and magical realism writing. At least, that’s how it works for me. I’ve never written more fantasy stories than I have in the last three years. I started in 2017 with a novel about a brood of magicicadas that starts attacking local townspeople (Summer of the Cicadas). In early 2019, I began writing another novel about a coven of queer witches working their magic against an evil town bully (Blessed Be). Normally a concise writer, I found myself sinking into these works, spending more and more time with the characters, fleshing out their town quirks, systems of magic, and all their impossibilities.
![](https://creativepinellas.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/caladesi-island-010-300x258.jpg)
In the summer of 2019, I started having dreams about an empty downtown St. Petersburg. I’ve always had vivid dreams, and many of them have influenced my writing. So, in August, I started writing Lone Survivor, a story about a woman who survives a deadly virus by retreating to an island off the coast of Pinellas County. I continued working on the story on and off throughout the year, as coronavirus eventually came to the US and the Trump presidency seemed to do nothing about it.
During lockdown, I worked exclusively on Blessed Be and Lone Survivor. Those two stories were my saving grace as I navigated living alone during the lockdown phase of the pandemic and all the scary unknowns that seemed to be everywhere. The characters in those books were the only people I interacted with for weeks on end.
Books save lives. This has always been true. I began writing as a child to combat fear and loneliness. It is something I still do to this day. As a writer, it has always felt like a massive privilege to be able to sit down in front of a computer and write myself into a world that can pull me away from this one.
– Chelsea