Through stories, we change our worlds on scales large and small.
Years as a working journalist have taught me the power of an individual’s story to move a larger community. Even when writing about complex topics – the poisoning of a town by asbestos, or the wreckage of a storm, or the inner workings of bureaucracies like the mental health or criminal justice systems – it’s always someone’s story that lingers in the reader’s memory. It’s a person’s story that makes people care enough to reach out, or relate a little differently to the world around them. It’s a person’s story that makes others take action.
![SJ-Carey[1].jpg](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5cc5e03e11f78442fefbb7a9/1556591675089-370MKD6Y203BSMWOEIJX/SJ-Carey%5B1%5D.jpg)
Literary Nonfiction
I had the dream again last night. I am in my bed and feel the floors begin to slope, the whole house sliding -- furniture, books, shelves, skittering, and plunging from their moorings -- while I cling to the ceiling. I wake up sweating and lie there as the adrenaline ebbs, running through what I would take, if I had to leave. The mental cataloging starts: what I have lost already; what I have yet to lose; an inventory of what matters.
From Object Lessons, Hippocampus
Journalism
Mary Anderson is fading, as surely as a forgotten Polaroid.
Her case file has been archived, a thick stack of dead ends and unanswered questions, shut in manila folders and buried in the county's morgue.
Records of the police investigation have been destroyed.
The man who retained the institutional memory of the case resigned from the King County Medical Examiner's Office four years ago.
This is just the way Anderson apparently wanted it.
from The Cipher in Room 214