Nothing More A Writer Can Ask For   

There are places around us so beautiful—long rocky beaches, peaceful benches where the light hits the wood just so. 

More than ever, I need these places.

Places that take me in.

In all the years I’ve been writing, I can’t remember a time so unsettling. Or maybe every generation has felt this way, panicked by certain federal policies and conflicts and unable to come to grips with them.

Because I can’t. I can’t come to grips with them. I am just sick about them. And I need to be well.

It’s staggeringly obvious how history repeats itself. So for purposes of similarity, I want to share a few snippets of history. To help us, to help me, comprehend the present.

Because I am trying to comprehend.

All I want is to comprehend.

All I want is for someone to explain to me in straightforward language why all this persecution makes any sense whatsoever.

In 1887, it was the Chinese who were victimized. Communities across the West drove out their Chinese neighbors on a scale that is hard to imagine. And most of us know that in 1942, Roosevelt authorized the mass incarceration of people of Japanese descent and the first such residents were rounded up on Bainbridge Island, nearly 230 men, women and children, put on a train to Manzanar, California.

I’m looking at a photo of one of the girls ushered off Bainbridge. How small she is, dressed in her Sunday finest. She has a very determined look in her eyes, her eyes are not cast down. As she embarks on a journey that must have felt like the worst of all fates, she reminds me of the hummingbird that likes to visit my balcony garden and last summer when I forgot to close the screen, it flew inside so that I had to spend the next awful minutes listening to the sound of delicate wings striking glass—a tiny but determined will to survive. 

It’s a small comfort that Congress’s apology came to the Japanese in 1988. When I bring up this long-awaited apology to a friend and add, “Why can’t we learn from our mistakes?” she tells me that we are not going to talk about politics at dinner tonight, that there are so many other things to talk about and that is what we would do, talk about other things.

But honestly, I’d only found out about our new war with Iran hours before, so I didn’t know what else to talk about.

Or maybe I did know. That my need to talk and write about things that I love is equaled only by my need to talk and write about things that scare me.

It is just so important to stay true to ourselves and to our work. The work will see us through.

I took my tiny pad and pen into the restaurant bathroom. I wrote quickly, as if my notes mattered in a time when I fear they do not.

But they do. They do matter. It’s the work that always matters in the end. And that is why my appreciation of you, of your reading this, knows no limit. As I write this, I realize how much I care about you, sitting there, reading this.

There is nothing more a writer can ask for.

Mary Lou Sanelli

Mary Lou Sanelli’s latest title is In So Many Words. An Island Called Bainbridge: People, Places, Conversations, is to be published in the fall of 2026. Please join her launch celebrations: Eagle Habor Book Company, October 8, 6:30 p.m and at Elliott Bay Book Company, October 13, 7 p.m. For more information visit www.marylousanelli.com.