Feb 16, 2026 By Lisa Scherer 4 min read

In times that demand understanding, many people turn to writing to make sense of things. I see it everywhere, and I recognize it in myself. Writing lets us lay bare our deepest feelings and find meaning in a fractured world.

This isn’t new. When I think about accomplished writers like Thoreau, Emerson, Longfellow, or Elizabeth Bishop, I wonder what was unfolding around them that made writing feel necessary rather than optional. They, too, were inspired by the writers who came before them; without reading the work of others, they could not have carried forward the attention and care that shaped their own writing. Thoreau famously went to the woods “to live deliberately,” immersing himself in life itself to pay careful attention. This act of witnessing shaped his writing. What were these writers observing in their personal lives, societies, politics, religion, and environments that compelled such urgency and care? What pressure from the world sharpened their words?

The human brain hasn’t changed, but how we use it has. Grief has always been grief, joy has always been joy. But the world each writer inhabits is distinct. Writing about slavery, war, or other human suffering after having seen it carries a force that imagination alone cannot fully replicate. Words gain weight when they are forged close to the fire.

I’ve seen this truth play out in ordinary lives. I’ve seen people who rarely write suddenly produce work of astonishing clarity in the face of death. I’ve seen language reach its clearest form at the moment of birth. Extreme circumstances strip away pretense. They force clarity. The worst moments, and sometimes the best, have a way of pulling the greatest writing out of us.

Elizabeth Bishop’s work reminds me that urgency does not always announce itself loudly. There is a peace in her writing that stills me. It carries a longing, a quiet reach toward understanding, toward capturing the fleeting. Reading her feels like standing on a prairie, a bird low in a branch, singing in short, clear notes. I watch, listening; for a moment, the song seems meant for me alone. I imagine her as I am now, me at my computer, her with a notebook in her lap, watching the world closely, trying to catch something fleeting before it disappears. In that imagining, time collapses. Her roots extend outward to me.

That sense of connection is why it saddens me that deep, reflective reading seems increasingly rare. We don’t encounter the past only through documentaries or images. If we truly sit with what we read, we can see the faces behind the words and feel the emotions that shaped them. The same is true of a painting or a song. These works are not relics; they are attempts at connection.

Writing, at its best, is an act of witnessing. It carries forward what it means to be human, but only if the words are read. True writing is never surface-level; it carries a deep intention to reach across time, to touch another mind, and to understand what it is to be alive.

Words do not survive on their own. They require attention. They require a reader willing to slow down, to sit with quiet or discomfort, to imagine another mind at work. This kind of reading demands discipline, the deliberate choice to carve out time in a world designed to fragment it. Without that, even the most honest writing becomes a closed notebook.

In an age that prizes speed over attention, I hope we can remember that reading still matters. Reading completes the act of writing. It allows a poet decades ago to reach someone typing their thoughts now. It is how roots extend forward instead of dying in place.

Lisa Scherer lives in Marianna.