In the first few weeks after the presidential election in November, all I could feel was grief. For myriad reasons, of course: thinking about the millions of people who are going to be hurt is overwhelming. But as time passed and the inevitability of this tragedy sank in, it became important for me to start moving beyond grief

As an artist—albeit writer—myself, living in an artistic community, I’m incredibly concerned about what might happen to the institutions we rely on to reflect our emotions and the world around us.

The federal Institute of Museum and Library Services estimated in 2014 that there were upward of 35,000 museums nationwide. Many of these institutions draw support from IMLS as well as from the National Endowment of the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, which I strongly suspect will be on the chopping-block with the new administration, and private sources of funding may not be able to cover that kind of drop in government support. Even if federal funding isn’t eliminated, a conservative administration could direct support toward projects it deems patriotic or family-friendly.

For all that the technology titans who are rallying to Trump’s side proclaim themselves as defending free speech, based on what we’ve already seen before the new administration is even sworn in, their concept of free speech does not apply to everyone.

Project 2025 proposes censorship in the classroom and elsewhere of speech on subjects like race and systemic oppression, and that’s going to spread to places the Smithsonian and grant-making entities that have fostered language on those subjects. Trump has taken TV shows like Saturday Night Live to task for one-sidedness, classing their gags as illegal campaign contributions and asking whether the Department of Justice should prosecute them. Could museums, artists, or writers who criticize him also be targeted by a Trump-controlled bureaucracy?

Another Trump term means another busy four years for the New York nonprofit Artistic Freedom Initiative, which facilitates free legal representation and resettlement assistance in the US for international artists who are at risk at home of censorship, imprisonment, and worse.

In the face of all that, it’s easy to want to crawl into a cave somewhere and hope the US administration doesn’t blow up the world. And while I’ll not give in to that urge, figuring out how to survive with our ideas and our art intact is going to take a lot of hard work, it’s going to take vision, and it’s going to take determination. “They want you to feel powerless and surrender and let them trample everything and you are not going to let them,” writes Rebecca Solnit. “You are not giving up, and neither am I. The fact that we cannot save everything does not mean we cannot save anything, and everything we can save is worth saving.”

Writer, artist and filmmaker Tanya Selvaratnam urges artists to take a moment “to consider how they can step in to stand up for those who are going to be made to feel more vulnerable and marginalized, because a lot of people are going to be suffering even more than before.”

I don’t know what creative resistance is going to look like. I’m trying to have these conversations now in my little corner of the country, on my radio show and in the coming weeks on this blog as well. The only way we’ll be able to continue the work that needs to be done is by having these conversations, by supporting each other, by listening to our passions rather than the voices of the oppressors.

We’re all targets. They wouldn’t ban books if they weren’t afraid of ideas. They wouldn’t ban books if, as they claim, art doesn’t matter.

It all matters, and we need to be ready to move beyond disaster-think to take on our new role, as conservationists of the paintings and symphonies and books and performances that express humanity’s greatest ideas and emotions, protecting the ones that exist and creating more, no matter what the difficulty, no matter if it breaks our hearts.

Moving Beyond Disaster-Think

Why do the Arts Matter?

The Morality of Crime Fiction