One Hashtag Reminds Us All Why Writing Really Matters

Claire Fallon

Good writing is like running water; it’s easy to take for granted, but when it’s not present, you really miss it. These days, however, it feels like we're mostly taking it for granted.

Leave it to826 Valencia, the original chapter of the national nonprofit founded by Dave Eggers to promote writing skills, to bring sexy back to the under-appreciated art of putting words on the page. After all, they’re the brilliant people behind those quirky storefronts that double as homes for writing workshops and classes, like San Francisco’sPirate Supply Store.

On Aug. 26, the organization asked its Instagram and Twitter followers to share posts about what writing meant to them, with #whywritingmatters. The responses powerfully captured the myriad ways in which writing can elevate our lives.

"It was great to see how writing has touched the lives of so many people with all sorts of different paths in life, and was a powerful reminder of why we do this work," Molly Parent, programs and communications manager for 826 Valencia, explained in an email to The Huffington Post, "to make sure that all students are given the chance and the skills to express themselves and to make their voice heard."

At a time when our educational system seems to be geared toward promoting the advantages offered bySTEM fields, thearts and humanities are too often deemed frivolous. The personal stories and testimonials shared for #whywritingmatters show they’re anything but: writing skills can be a pathway into a great career, a way to profoundly touch other people’s lives and a real tool to effect change in the world.

Meanwhile, 826 Valencia will be expanding soon to a second San Francisco location in the historically underprivilegedTenderloin district. "We're excited to be ... bringing our services where they're greatly needed," said Parent.

If you're interested in helping kids strengthen their writing skills and find confidence in their self-expression, check out volunteering opportunities with826 Valencia.

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Marita Golden

My marriage has become a prison. I am seriously considering divorce and find myself reading Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert's ode to illusion, fleeting romance, marriage, and adultery. Because I love life much more than the novel's heroine Emma Bovary does, and I have a child to live for, unlike Emma, there will be no suicidal exit from my dilemma. Still, Emma Bovary knows more about me at this moment than any one else. She alone knows the perimeters of the tomb my life has become. In this, my darkest hour, this fictional character is my best friend.

Faith Adiele

Yes, it was books that taught me that Blacks could be powerful princesses and abolitionists and civil rights leaders and scientists. As a child I was obsessed with the Amistad Rebellion and the Haitian Revolution. I wanted to become a warrior, someone who fought for the rights of her people. For me the big breakthrough was reading about Igbo characters, first in Chinua Achebe and then in Buchi Emecheta. But I think I read these characters more as missing family members than as reflections of myself. I don't know that I would have traveled if I hadn't read, would have known there was an entire world outside of the godforsaken small town where I was raised. Or known that I could be a writer.

Edwidge Danticat

Reading is important--although we can so easily go into platitudes here--because it expands your mind, your life. It extends your world. It's traveling without a passport. I feel like there are people in my life I will never know as well as the people in the books that I've read. I believe that it's the duty of every truly free citizen to read, especially to read beyond your borders, to read and read extensively. Writing is our footmark in the world. We're still looking at cave writings of centuries ago and are asking, what were they saying? It's one of the most important gifts we leave the world.

Nathan McCall

Most of the best books I've read were not introduced to me in school. So I would encourage young people to go out and find literature that speaks to them to supplement what they get in school. That way they will really get a so- called good education. I was fed a lot of Shakespeare in school, that while useful, primarily reinforced White supremacy and did not speak to my experiences as a young Black man. And so that's why one of the reasons that prison becomes a place that so many Black intellectuals discover themselves, is because it is enforced, imposed aloneness.

Mat Johnson

Sometimes I think, if not for books and all that reading I did, I would have ended up as the bitterest person at the customer service office at Philadelphia Energy Company. I was destined for it. That's where I was supposed to be. I was supposed to be answering phones at PECO smoking Newports, and living a life of monotony. The nice thing about books is you get to see the possibility of other realities. And that's really exciting.

Wil Haygood

Magazines and the newspapers gave me a real sense that I could escape my surroundings someday, and not that my surroundings were out of Charles Dickens. It was just that reading gave me a sense of adventure. The ideas and lives of other people from books helped me move past the fear and anger of my brothers and sister. I read my way into opportunity. The more I read, the more I realized the world was big and I could find a place in it.