Politics in Prose

WE’VE ALL BEEN to good parties and bad parties. The best parties have interesting guests, respectful and thought-provoking conversation, and a goodly amount of laughter. The bad parties are filled with awkward small talk. The worse parties are ones where people make asses of themselves. The worst parties are the ones where you are that ass.

For almost twenty years, I’ve been editing literary publications with the philosophy that it’s like hosting a good party, and I thought I had it down pat. For the past five years, I’ve been editing Full Grown People (FGP), an online literary magazine about the thick of life. Twice a week, I publish essays that explore the kinds of moments and experiences that make even adulthood feel like another awkward age: looking for love at midlife, caring for a parent with memory loss without robbing him of freedom, dancing the line between two cultures. Stories about grown-ups navigating the world.

Then came the run-up to the 2016 presidential election, and the election itself, and, well, life ever since. In my personal life, I had heated political Facebook debates with my cousin about the truth in media; I downright shunned others in my life. (I’m liberal in my politics but old-order Mennonite in my grudges.) I shudder to think of the Thanksgiving dinners mixed-politics American families endured in 2016. Given that the right has been growing steadily more extreme for decades,