![]() ![]() You will likewise encounter in these pages a number of poems, essays, and stories that address “what wrote us” as well as “what we translated/what translated us” during the many, many months of social distancing, mask wearing, vaccinations, and, unfortunately, deaths. You will find stories and poems and nonfiction that, as Orwell did, address the new and ongoing wars of our times (Nasser Rabah’s “In the Endless War,” for example), the colonial occupations of our times, and even a work of historical fiction about Stalin’s totalitarianism (Preston Gralla’s “Josef Stalin’s Hurdy-Gurdy Man”). You will find here a number of works directly addressing the “why I write/why we write” question that Orwell posed to himself seventy-five years ago. I have kept this passage from Williams in mind as I discussed my editorial preferences in emails and a number of Zoom meetings-and how Zoom meetings have come to write our lives in these pandemic times!-with the phenomenal staff at MQR and the journal’s gracious editor-in-chief, Khaled Mattawa. The question that we attempt to explore in this issue of MQR is a similar one: How do our times write us as Orwell’s times wrote Orwell? As Williams attempts to describe Orwell’s writing craft and critiques Orwell’s style, he comes to the conclusion that he is most interested not in “what Orwell wrote, but what wrote Orwell.” The history that wrote Orwell, and in which Orwell was not only an observer but also an active participant, included the Spanish Civil War, the late days of a dying British colonialism, the expanding totalitarianism in Stalin’s Communist Party, and much more. One passage from this interview particularly sticks with me. The editors dedicated one of these interviews, eventually collected in Politics and Letters (Verso, 1979), to a conversation about Orwell. Three decades after the initial publication of “Why I Write,” editors at New Left Review conducted a series of interviews with another important social critic from the United Kingdom, the Welsh socialist Raymond ![]() All of these writers, and many, many more, have informed and inspired our selections in this new issue of Michigan Quarterly Review. Similarly, Rebecca Solnit turns to Orwell and ecology in her newest collection, Orwell’s Roses. A vast array of writers over the years have taken up Orwell’s question on writing-from Joan Didion’s “Why I Write” published in the New York Times on December 5, 1976, to Yale University Press’s new Why I Write series that has released books on the theme from Patti Smith, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Eileen Myles, and Samuel Delany. 4) in the summer of 1946, Orwell partitions the engine of his writing practice into four internal combustion chambers: ego, aesthetics, history, and politics. In his classic essay, originally published in Gangrel (No. During this moment, we remember the seventy-fifth anniversary of George Orwell’s self-reflective essay on his writing practice, “Why I Write,” and look to augment its arguments for our current times. I write this introduction in the summer of 2021-the second summer of the global COVID-19 pandemic-as infection rates rise again in the wake of the Delta variant. Mark Nowak introduces our Fall 2021 issue on “Why We Write.” You can purchase the issue here. ![]()
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