Someone at the Narrative Impulse Festival said, rephrasing Kristeva," If fascism is a single narrative, its opposite is not no narrative, but many narratives." If this is so, then the news is pretty good on that score. The writers gathered for the festival made clear that passionate was is being waged against the fascism of a single cultural story.

When I introduced the festival, my thoughts were on another view of narrative. Joan Didion shows us a woman standing on a ledge, high about the city, about to jump off. What has happened to this woman, she says, is that she has fallen out of the story; she no longer sees herself as a character in anyone's narrative, including her own. This woman on the ledge may be an objective anecdote or a headline ("Woman leaps from ledge") but in her own consciousness, she has given up connecting things; her life has stopped, as we say, "making sense."

This woman on the ledge, about to leap out of narrative forever, functions as a symbol, and a warning. It is important that many stories are told, but it is more important that we include these stories in an expanding context, rather than walling ourselves off from each other. The sense of narrative isolation that feeds fear and anger (and finally seals us off from each other) may establish territory, but that territory teeters on the ledge. I feel the same way about the "authorless text" of the Internet and poetry and criticism that deny the author. Of course, there is no single "authentic" story, no single engendering narrative, but I believe the primary movement of language is away from chaos, away from isolation, divisiveness, away from self-conscious fragmentation.

Voices "in extremity" cling to the narrative like a life-raft. For many years, I taught poetry in the prisons in New York--every inmate who put pen to paper wanted to tell a story, and thus reconfirm her existence, her human-ness, by the narrative. I myself am attention-deficient, my mind jumps like "a long-legged fly on a stream." Learning to order my thoughts as a writer caused me consternation (and I still keep parts of my composition process "chaotic") but learning the art of connection in language saved me. That process of "rescue" (different than, as Eavan Boland describes it, "a strategy of possession") is, for me, the true revelation of writing. I am word-haunted, like most poets, I love nonsense and philological anomalies and Gertrude Stein, "non-hierarchical" flow. But I believe I must send a message to that woman, alone out there, a message that makes sense to her.

That woman still stands, trembling, on the ledge. Let's slip out this nearby window, let's stand up beside her (trying not to look down!), let's hold out a hand to her. Let's begin telling her a story, one that she will listen to in spite of her terror and despair, one that begins here, as we inch toward her, hand held out here...