by John Simmons

I cannot imagine that anyone reading this blog is a supporter of Donald Trump. The new president glories in the absence of books in his life, revels in his lack of reading. That might be the scariest fact about him, and it’s not an alternative fact. The adapted version of the classic Penguin 1984 cover speaks to me about the times we are currently enduring.

I’ve blogged here before that art and creativity have to be the best counters to dark forces like Trump. I’m just reading Colson Whitehead’s brilliant novel The Underground Railroad set in slavery-era America. It’s impossible to read that novel then support Trump. Fiction really is the most powerful antidote to Trumpism because it nurtures our empathy for other human beings.

Last week I was proofreading my novel Spanish Crossings that will be published in April. The story involves the 1930s rise of fascism, the Spanish civil war and the child refugees from that war. When I began writing it I had not anticipated that it would have such an uncanny relevance to our current times. If I had anticipated that, I might have recoiled in horror and become more polemical. I’m glad I didn’t because the novel – any novel – has first to be a human story not a political treatise. Proofreading has given me this strange experience. I finished writing the novel nearly a year ago and since then I’ve been concentrating on other work (including another novel). So I came to the proofreading task with fresh eyes and open mind, and I read the book as if it had been written by someone else. It’s a very weird feeling. When I came to the ending I had tears in my eyes. Am I allowed to cry at my own book? I remembered Jamie Jauncey’s favourite quotation from Robert Frost: “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.”

Here I had been both writer and reader. I’m pleased to say early readers of proof versions have been very enthusiastic. So 2017, for me, promises to be a creative year, my own antidote to Donald Trump and all his works.

It is appropriate in a way that I will be running the first American Dark Angels course in New Bedford, Massachusetts in October. I’ll be doing that with my good American friend Richard Pelletier. The location has literary links to Herman Melville and Louisa May Alcott, fiction writers who linger in the minds of millions who have read them over the past centuries.