The Tender Work of Telling

There is a misconception that writing about history requires distance. But I have found the opposite to be true. The closer I get to the lives I am researching—the letters, the hands that dug graves, the women erased from footnotes—the more careful I must become.

Telling someone’s story is a responsibility. It asks us to listen longer than we speak. To verify. To contextualize. To hold complexity instead of smoothing it away for comfort. Even when I write fiction, that same tenderness guides me.

Stories are powerful not because they are loud, but because they are handled gently. The work of telling is not performance. It is stewardship.