Early in my career, I joined a writing group with the word change in its name. When friends asked, “What kind of change are you writing about?” I responded, “Whatever kind of change is happening in my life”—whether that change occurred by chance or was initiated by me.
Changes occur daily in all our lives: moves, aging, illness, death. As a writer and public speaker and citizen, I’ve always been especially interested in the way we can use these shifts in our personal landscapes to bring about change in the world. In 2018, for example, a mishandled 911 response led to the asphyxiation death of a sixteen-year-old boy trapped in his minivan, leading his parents to push the Cincinnati City Council to overhaul its emergency measures. Author Nadine Gordimer, a South African writer whose body of work centered on apartheid, argues that “a writer has to reserve a right to tell the truth as he sees it,” and calls this the writer’s “unique contribution to social change.” I’ve written about blood cancers and the death of my first husband with the goal of inspiring people to register as stem cell donors. I’ve spoken about grief with the goal of providing people with a
