Remembering Toni Morrison, (1931-2019), who said:
“I am staring out the window in an extremely dark mood, feeling helpless. Then a friend, a fellow artist calls to wish me happy holidays. He asks, “How are you?” And instead of, “Oh fine—and you?” I blurt out the truth. “Not well. Not only am I depressed, I can’t seem to work, to write: it’s as though I am paralyzed, unable to write anything more in the novel I’ve begun. I’ve never felt this way before, but the election…” I am about to explain further but he interrupts shouting, No! No, no, no! This is precisely the time when artists go to work—not when everything is fine, but in times of dread. That’s our job!”
I felt foolish the rest of the morning, especially when I recalled the artists who had done their work in gulags, prison cells, hospital beds: who did their work hounded, exiled, reviled, pilloried. And those who were executed.
The list—which covers centuries, not just the last one—is long. A short sample will include Paul Robeson, Primo Levi, Ai Weiwei, Oscar Wilde, Pablo Picasso, Dashiell Hammett, Wole Soyinka, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Lillian Hellman, Salman Rushdie, Herta Muller, Walter Benjamin. An exhaustive list would run into the hundreds.
Still, I remember the shout of my friend that day after Christmas: No! This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilization is held.
Joanna Biggar's Blog 
This is good, Mom. Is this something a friend said to you or a quote to/from Toni Morrison? I remember in college learning that women are the keepers of the culture, and I thought of that phrase quite a bit but chewed over what it meant. Until I became a mother. And how many endless nights of culture do I perpetuate, through our holidays, our dinners, our thank you notes, our unspoken codes, our rituals, our admonishments? I see it all the time now. So writers are the keepers of civilization and women are the keepers of culture, and sometimes you and I are both. love,Heather
Love this eloquent reminder; thanks, Joanna!