Mustafa was one of the first young writers I mentored through We Are Not Numbers (WANN), a youth-led program based in Gaza that tells the stories behind the numbers in the news, giving voice to Palestinians and advocating for their human rights. Mustafa is a graduate of Al Aqsa University, and he managed a small convenience store to supplement his family’s income.

Two years ago, I worked with him—virtually, from my home in Los Angeles—as he drafted and refined an essay about 13-year-old Muhammad, a familiar figure in his Khan Yunis neighborhood, who was bullied at school and compelled by extreme poverty to scavenge for castoff bread in the streets. In offering Muhammad odd jobs at the convenience store and extending his friendship, Mustafa awakened a sense of self-esteem in the boy. Through a series of Zoom meetings and Google Doc exchanges, we generated multiple drafts of the essay. And though Mustafa struggled with English, his piece displayed the rich detail and authentic dialogue of a born storyteller. One day, he logged on to Zoom on his phone from the store so that Muhammad and I could “meet.”

Mustafa married this year. In the aftermath of October 7, his wife’s family home in Gaza City was bombed, and the couple has been on the run since. “We are in our fifth place,” he texted me on WhatsApp, “but there is no safe place in Gaza. My wife is pregnant in her seventh month, and she is sick. She cannot get medical care.” My most recent messages to Mustafa have gone unanswered.

Since October 7, I’ve hovered over WhatsApp for messages not only from Mustafa but also from other young writers in Gaza I’ve mentored over the past several years. I leave my ringer on overnight, something I never did before, to seize the rare moments of internet connection and respond right away, even in the wee hours. I stare at the phone, hoping those single check marks will go double, offering me at least the assurance that my message has been seen, even if the writer is unable to respond.

Right now, all the stories published at WANN are about Israel’s current “aggression,” as our writers call it. They have lived through at least five aggressions in their 20-odd years. When the bombs aren’t falling, WANN writers have written essays about the World Cup, the “Hummus Theory,” a foodie blog of modernized Palestinian recipes, the soothing power of the sea, and aspirations to forge meaningful lives in a place where opportunity is scarce and danger abounds, even in the best of times.

Walaa, once a teaching assistant in English literature at the Islamic University of Gaza (IUG), wrote a cogent essay for WANN that drew parallels between the tragedy of Othello and the occupation of Palestine. Last year, she was one of only two students from Gaza to receive the British Council’s Higher Education Scholarships for Palestine, enabling her to enter a master’s degree program at the University of Birmingham. She started her studies in September 2022 and planned to return to a faculty position at IUG in early 2024. The university was destroyed in an October 11 bombing, and she is now stranded far away. “This is putting more uncertainty on me now, because I’ve lost a job,” she texted me. “But it’s 25,000 students who’ve lost their education, meaning even more unemployment.”

My current mentee, Roaa, is a college student from Khan Yunis with a passion for physics. In a fiction story she completed just before October 7, a young woman enjoying life in a free Palestine and another witnessing the rubble of her Gaza home after an Israeli airstrike experience glimpses of the other’s reality by means of quantum entanglement. “It’s mind-blowing!” Roaa enthused on Zoom as we worked on her story. “It literally states that when two particles become entangled, changes in one particle’s state instantaneously affect the other, no matter the distance separating them.”

Roaa spent her first sleepless night during recent bombings writing about what was happening. She said it helped her get through the night. In more recent messages, she has reported that she and her family “had to evacuate our house twice in the past few days,” and that she’s been writing about that, too.

Other messages from writers tell of homes destroyed, and friends and relatives missing or dead. Four WANN writers have been killed in bombings since the “aggression” began, losses that have left this creative community reeling.

Yet amid the devastation, WANNers, as they call themselves, continue to create. When I asked Roaa what she would want readers to know about WANN, she texted, “The main aim is that each soul in Gaza is a whole life, dreams, and memories, not only a number. As long as we are alive, we will never stop sharing our stories with the world.”

These are voices we need to hear, to deepen our understanding of the lived experience of Palestinians in Gaza and gain insight into their yearning for freedom. Only a full and permanent ceasefire will ensure that they are not silenced altogether.

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Fairy tales come from the oral tradition, a time before washing machines and the internet when women would sit around darning socks and telling tales of romance, danger, and talking animals to one another and their children. Because of the nature of oral tales—they change depending on who is telling them—there are different versions of each story, filtered through the cultural and personal lens of its teller. It’s why in some versions Red Riding Hood teams up with her grandmother to boil the wolf alive, and sometimes the two of them sit patiently in the belly of the wolf, playing cards until a man with an ax shows up.

As a child, I didn’t care much for fairy tales, filtered as they were through the colorful, toothless and sing-song lens of Disney, which seemed at the time to hold a near monolithic grip on the genre. It was not until I was an adult that I was finally willing to hear what the dead and buried had to say—and how their warnings have changed over time. I started to rewrite these stories in college to give them a face-lift, to align the fantasies of our childhoods with the morals and progress we need to witness today. Years later, I’ve continued to suss out their secrets, to learn the wisdom of the past and apply it to the now. Take Little Red Riding Hood’s wolf. He’s no longer in the forest; he’s on our streets, he’s wearing business suits, he has cool hair. But I know to be wary. In place of an ax, I carry mace.

We retell fairy tales in a way that makes sense to us in the present, in the now, and in the way that we imagine our futures. Which is why, in a moment like this, when everything seems like a nightmare, I suggest we revisit the bloody tale of Bluebeard—and the choice Bluebeard’s wife had to make.

Let me tell you the story, if you don’t already know it: At some unspecified time in the past, a woman with a handful of brothers was minding her own business when a man with a beard as blue as the sky offered to marry her. He was renowned for his multiple marriages, all of which ended mysteriously. More importantly, he was known for how wealthy he was—Bezos, if he cultivated hair. So, they married, everyone rejoiced, and he took her to a magnificent castle. He gave her everything she wanted and many things she didn’t know she could want. She had full reign of the household. Shopped all the name-brand catalogs. Wore rocks the color of blood dug from the earth around her neck. Only, there was a catch. There was one room in their home she was not allowed in. Some crusty old broom closet where a bird probably died years ago. A place with a stench. A rotten room. A secret room.

Bluebeard, who handed her a set of keys to every room in the castle, was sure to point out the forbidden room. Made her promise she wouldn’t peek.

Of course, she did. Almost immediately.

She solved two mysteries by opening that door: what had happened to his previous wives, and the manner in which he would slaughter her, as he had done the others.

Don’t worry, though, one of them gets him in the end.

The tale was first written down in the late 1600s by Charles Perrault, a Frenchman with a knack for spelling out the messages of his stories, this one being: “Curiosity… once satisfied … ceases to exist, and always costs dearly.” In other words, he was advising women against their curious nature, and suggesting the wives’ untimely fates in Bluebeard were what they got for disobeying their secret-murder husband. It’s not a message that holds much weight today. Without curiosity, how would children learn about the strange new world they were born into? How else could we have found out that the light of our stars, experienced today, is the past twinkling down on us? Bluebeard’s message is no longer about curious women: it is about all of us facing our reality for what it is.

In any telling, the tension in Bluebeard centers around that forbidden locked room, but to me, the question is not will she go into the room or obey her husband. Someone is always going to turn the knob: doors are meant to be opened. The questions are, what is in the room, and what will happen once the secrets are known?

In the original tale, Perrault describes the forbidden room as being filled with blood, desecrated bodies, and what I would argue is an absurd number of dead wives—the acceptable number of dead wives in any given room being zero. Yet the horror is not only visceral; rather, it is the psychic clarity that the room forces one to confront. The wife faces her history written in red on those bodies piled up and, if she is not careful, her own inevitability. It is a cruel, necessary gift. Does she close the door and pretend she saw nothing? Or does she accept it, horrible though it is, and move forward?

As I look toward our present moment, I can’t help but think that what lies beyond our door is equally, if not more so, overwhelming.

A climate crisis we are running out of time to affect, except as we have always done so, by placing a Band-Aid on the gaping wound of ruined soil and melting ice.

A worldwide pandemic, spread via our mouths, that soft tool we use to build community, overwhelming our hospitals and healthcare workers.

Some claim the pandemic is a hoax.

Some say “fake news” while they are dying in an ICU bed with a tube down their throat.

Others eat horse dewormer and hope.

The dead are moved in trucks.

We are witnessing the fragility of our Earth and the social safety nets we built on her bones. Even the slightest nudge is in danger of sending us careening off into climate disaster, healthcare collapse, and the terror that those we love believe lies.

The door is open, and it cannot be closed. Now we have to decide what, if anything, we will do.

The question before us is: which of Bluebeard’s wives are we?

Bluebeard, after all, had many wives. The final wife feels the ax on her own neck, on the necks of the daughters not yet born, and if she desires a future for herself, for those she loves, she cannot close the door and forget. If she does, she will be like the other wives, the ones whose stories are never told, and if she stands still she risks being reduced to a gory prop in someone else’s story, or forgotten entirely. The final wife calls upon her kin—her community—to hold Bluebeard accountable for what he locked behind the door. Once the cruel root of the man is dug out, the final wife now can gather this community around her to reckon with what we now know is our new reality.

Are we a wife who sits in front of that opened door and thinks, “my neck is still attached,” and sighs in foolish relief? Are we a wife who sees the truth of her world in decimated bodies, and stands frozen, gaping in horror? Or do we choose to be the final wife, the one who survives?

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Only a couple of days earlier she had been playing with my children, hiking in Northwest Arkansas, dyeing Easter eggs, and—as my mom tends to do—talking non-stop. Now, in the hospital, she sounded like she was in another world. Her normally sharp mind became fanciful and her sentences slipped away into empty pauses.

My mother didn’t have COVID, our initial fear. She had developed sepsis, an extreme and life-threatening physical response to an infection in the blood or other bodily tissue. According to the CDC, each year approximately 1.7 million Americans develop sepsis, and 270,000 die. It accounts for one-third of in-patient deaths.

I am a scholar of religion, sickness, bodies, and medicine, and over the last 15 months I have often been asked to reflect on COVID-19, vaccines, and quarantines. But in early America, the period which I study, the common experience of illness was less like COVID, and more like the run-of-the-mill health crisis my mother experienced: utterly mundane and yet intimately terrifying.

It took the experience of being over a thousand miles away from my mother, unable to do anything but talk to my dad over the phone and hope to catch her briefly awake, to gain a new perspective on how my work relates to the current pandemic. Suddenly, in an immediate and personal way, I saw the parallels between routine illness and epidemic disease. In my mother’s quiet, I became uncomfortably aware of the silencing power of coronavirus, the grievous separations, and the challenges of storytelling.

Early Americans actively responded to sickness and disease through narrative—seeking to find God’s providential power and mercy in their suffering. They worked out these narratives in their day-to-day encounters with illness, and they applied them to experiences of epidemic. As I tried to work out my own story in the midst of the pandemic, I was at a loss. And yet, I am convinced that, as in early America, stories are still necessary. They offer solace, they allow us to see both mistakes and good fortune, they invite us to reorganize and reimagine the disturbed plot of our lives, and they give us a path forward.

Individual, local, and familial accounts of sickness were widespread and important in early America. In my research, I’ve found journals, memoirs, and letters of these sickness stories. They are all shaped by Protestant teachings that pushed followers to understand illness and pain providentially. This was instilled not only in church, but also through stories shared among families and communities.

Early Americans had been trained in such personal accounts by the importance of conversion narratives, which they heard testified in church or read in popular books like John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress or James Janeway’s A Token for Children. Sickness narratives mapped onto the cadences of conversion narratives, with their emphases on repentance, faith, and salvation. In describing sickness, early Americans were to look back and reflect, to admit their failings and their frailties, and to turn with dependence to God.

Sickness accounts were published and distributed widely, especially when they were written by well-known religious leaders or mission communities. Frances Asbury, the Methodist itinerant minister often wrote of sickness in his journals, which were published in the Arminian Magazine beginning in 1789. In the German Pietist Lutheran community of Ebenezer, Georgia, the minister Johann Martin Boltzius wrote in detail about sickness in his family and the wider community from 1735 to 1753. His journals were published in Halle and Augsburg for a wide audience of coreligionists and financial supporters.

While the practice of narrating sickness gave sufferers and their witnesses, most basically, something to do, the providential tones—which often followed well-worn patterns—also provided an answer to the disorientation of sickness. They insisted that there was an as yet unknowable, overarching plot that their suffering was part of and that it would, someday, make sense. Such narratives consoled early Americans deeply, and became opportunities to express a trust and hope that the suffering might yet mean something, despite the limitations of human perspective. This helped sufferers and their witnesses to the other side of strife and grief.

These patterns also connected early Americans to generations of Christians before them and to biblical figures like Job, who found in his suffering a great faith and meaning—through the support of community and witnesses. In his darkest hour, Job’s friend Elihu reminds him that, though mortals might be “chastened with pain upon their beds,” God also can “bring back their souls from the Pit, so that they may see the light of life” (Job 33).

The importance of narrating sickness for early Americans becomes most apparent in the accounts where an individual was silenced by their suffering. When narratives broke down due to pain, others filled in the blanks. Sickness stories needed endings. There are many examples of this. In 1784, Mary Maccarty, a woman in Worcester, Massachusetts, could leave no final words with her family, as her speech was impaired by intense pain. Her husband, Thaddeus, a Congregationalist minister, wrote a memoir of her life for their daughters. While he grieved that he could not reflect on her final words, he wove a beautiful story of her last visit to church and ended with trust in her final triumph over suffering: her reunion with previously deceased family members and her divine savior.

Sickness stories also offered space for those in need of private reflection. When Justus Forward’s father died in 1766, he had been suffering intense delirium. In a journal account of his father’s final days, Forward—also a New England Congregationalist—struggled to reckon with his father’s sickbed shouts of fire, robbers, and murderers. And yet, Forward went back, to previous months, to give an account of his father’s spiritual hope.

Forward does not mention a specific audience for his account; it is likely that he, like many Protestants who journaled at this time, wrote their journals with their own future spiritual reflection in mind. Entries were often re-read and revisited to allow for new reflection. Forward’s description of his father’s death shows marks of such revisiting. Where he wrote that his father “left us exceeding good ground to think he was prepared for Death & that it will be well with him,” Forward at some point crossed out the future tense “will be” and replaced it with the more certain “is.”

These sickness accounts of ordinary suffering and loss also shaped and conditioned early Americans’ responses to epidemics. In those cases, too, disease and its alleviation were often attributed to God’s providential judgment and mercy.

While readers today might find such epidemic tales of a powerful God disturbing and irrational, they become more comprehensible when we recognize how widespread this framing was in the individual and mundane accounts of suffering shared throughout early American Protestant communities.

Like early Americans, our understanding and response to epidemics is still shaped by our experiences of sickness in our private lives. With my mom’s sickness—in the intimate encounter with her vulnerability—the full weight of this long pandemic year finally hit me.

As in sepsis, severely ill COVID-19 patients are silenced—not by delirium, but through intubation and strict restrictions against visitors. While those who can, may avail themselves of FaceTime or Zoom or messaging, these have limitations. You cannot hear the timbre of a loved one’s voice through Zoom. You cannot touch their pallid forehead or brush hair from their eyes over the phone. You cannot feel the tension in their hands.

Unlike early Americans, few of us today understand sickness and epidemics in providential terms. We may hear phrases like “everything happens for a reason” or “God has a plan,” but such consolations are not widely shared and too often lack the work of individual reflection and repentance that accompanied early Americans’ providential commitment.

I am reluctant to offer a universal story for COVID, but if I did, it would likely call on that tradition of reflection and the intimate experience of silencing sickness. Where did we do wrong? How did we fail the vulnerable? How can we commit to doing better in the future? How can we best serve and love our fellow humans? This process is not necessarily to assign blame. Perhaps the best part of providential narratives is that they insist on the limitations of human perspective. The narrative form is designed to push tellers to lament—to grieve—but also to imagine a new and better path.

Such stories take time. In my week of uncertainty this spring, all I felt was an all-encompassing silence and nauseous anxiety. I thought, briefly, that I should write or journal, but the words didn’t come. My father, a retired physician, wrote lengthy emails, explaining each test, diagnosis, procedure, medication. But I was mired in silence. And this gave me a new appreciation of just how hard it is to tell sickness stories. How hard it is to find meaning in suffering. While early Americans may have had more refined tools, more shared narratives to work with as they struggled through sickness, I started to wonder if their words came any more easily.

What story will we tell of COVID-19? While scientific and medical narratives are becoming clearer, the costs of all our loss, all our silences, remain unaccounted.

My mom is recovering now. We have long talks again and are making plans. In ways, it all seems like a nightmare, but then I scroll through my camera roll, and for a week in mid-April there are only the photos of lilac and dogwood blooms that I texted her every day, when all my words failed.

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So I didn’t grow up learning about Daniel Boone and his exploration of the frontier around the time of the American Revolution. If I’d heard of him at all, I probably thought, like many people, he was fictional. But go back to my British Columbia elementary school and there he is, in a 1985 copy of National Geographic on the shelf of improve-yourself reads. That year I was 10, permed and brace-faced and not terribly happy, often sniffing around for something more alluring than modern life. The crusted hull of the newly found Titanic on the cover caught me. But when I parted the magazine with my thumb, it fell open to a pen-and-ink drawing of a man carrying a body, open-eyed and loose-jointed, a spill of blood pouring from its mouth. The caption said it was Boone, who turned out to be an actual person, holding his dead son. Every day at free time I read that article, gawking at the pictures of Kentucky and the westward trails Boone helped open in the 1700s, and at that illustration. I didn’t know why.

Certainly America had a kind of mystique, even in 1985. Crossing the border into Washington state was a palpable change. The landscape was no different, but the licence plates and the slightly elongated vowels were. The unapologetic motel names (The Apple, The Deep Water) and the chatty gas station signs (Come on in! Canadian dollars at par). Baby Ruth chocolate bars and Chuck E. Cheese restaurants, known only from TV commercials on the U.S. stations we got. The gigantic Paul Bunyan statue looming out of the redwoods in Klamath, California, which was cloaked with a kind of glamour in spite of its splintery edges. As we made a pit stop during a childhood road trip to Disneyland, a woman there told me Bunyan was a real person; then my parents said he wasn’t. The U.S. seemed built out of legendary things. It seemed built for travel and for looking.

I didn’t think about Daniel Boone during these childhood trips, or once I moved into the next grade. I can’t remember thinking of him again at all until I was pregnant for the first time, lying on the dusty carpet of my study, which was soon to morph into the baby’s room. My first book, a story collection, was about to come out, and I was trying to figure out what to write next. Maybe it was the horrible dread of losing a child that made it surface, but that National Geographic picture snapped back into my brain. I asked the library to dig up the magazine, and once I saw it again properly, I realized I’d remembered it as a photograph, which of course it wasn’t and couldn’t have been. I knew then what I wanted to write about was Daniel Boone—Dan to me now—and 18th and early 19th century Kentucky, and what happens when legend is mapped onto actual people and places.

My novel, All True Not a Lie In It, is about Dan’s life and family. It tries to get at how it felt to believe in a paradise just beyond the mountains, to be full of an urge to pick up and move on, regardless of the wreckage chained to that desire. The journey is of course the American narrative, from Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to Lolita to Road Trip. Travel and its aftermath seem to me the root of America’s story about itself—colonial exploration and immigration, slave ships and escapes, Native American seasonal movement and the eventual reservation system.

An 1874 lithograph titled “Daniel Boone Protects His Family.”

Dan grew up an immigrant’s son in a Pennsylvania Quaker community, close to several Delaware and Catawba native communities, and when the family was booted out of the group, they left the area to look for more freedom and land. Dan never really stopped, exploring through North Carolina and the Blue Ridge mountains, and later taking his wife and children into the Kentucky wilderness of his fantasies. Those fantasies and the travel that fulfilled them led to his son’s death, his daughter’s kidnap, and his own capture and adoption by Chief Blackfish of the Shawnee. He was heavily remorseful for the damage to his family, but rarely stopped moving them on in search of something better.

The actual events of his life are dramatic enough to seem invented, as many writers have realized, and embellished, over the years. For instance, many people think he was at the Battle of the Alamo in Texas, which occurred after his death, confusing him for Davy Crockett (unhelped by the fact that actor Fess Parker played both Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone in different 1960s TV shows). This seems an American tendency, too: the capacity to reinvent the self (we see you, Madonna), but also to reinvent someone else in a desired image (JFK as King Arthur). People in the 20th and 21st century want to see Dan in a coonskin cap, though he never wore one and in fact hated them. And white Americans in Dan’s time wanted a recognizable national hero, a man fighting for the newborn country against its royal oppressor, a crack shot, fair but firm in dealings with so-called “Indians.”

This desire to create a legend attempts to paint over any dullness or ugliness in a life, but different shades of ugliness sometimes get painted on. Twenty-five years after Dan’s death, just as westward expansion into native territory exploded, he was re-buried, with a new monument featuring “Indian-fighter” carvings placed on his grave. I think this twisting of his life would have discomfited Dan, who seems to have felt deep closeness to his adoptive Shawnee parents and sisters, avoided fighting as much as possible, and was likely most comfortable with the native way of life in the wilderness. But again, this is a matter of seeming.

I know I call him Dan—and I know Dan is my invention, this figure already imagined again and again and re-created one more time. As a child traveling south, I thought being American meant having a built-in expansiveness, a sense that there is always somewhere else to go. I see that now in Daniel Boone. But after writing this book, I also think it means an ability to see double, to perceive, even dimly, that a person actually lived while overlaying that life with wishes, ideas, the stories one wants. For Americans, the exact details of Boone’s life have always seemed to matter less than his suitability for legendary status. The stories that surround him helped people in his time and for centuries afterwards smooth over the cost of relentless expansion. A gift and a blindness. My version of Dan has both.

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The songs I hear in my local drugstore and on the radio tell me over and over again that Christmas is about joy. And, of course, it is. But that’s only half the story. The Christmas tale, which appears in only two of the four Gospels—in two very different versions—is a lot richer and more challenging than we generally choose to remember.

Every year around this time, I try to get my head and heart prepared for the holiday season. I ask myself what I should think about as Christmas approaches. What do I want to learn? How do I want to grow? I guess you could say it’s my personal version of Advent.

A year ago, I was so ill prepared for the season that I went to visit my good friend Frank McRae, who has studied the Old and New Testaments, to request guidance. He considered my question, went silent for a moment or two, and suddenly slammed his palm violently on the table. “He was born in a manger!” he yelled. “And yet they found him! Those three wise men didn’t let the humble surroundings distract them. They knew greatness when they saw it. It helped that they came from the East, from far away. They didn’t share whatever local prejudices there may have been against a child of humble parents in such humble surroundings.”

In one fell swoop, my friend turned my Christmas into a meditation on discernment, the need to see clearly, and to recognize goodness around us, in whatever shape or form.

In their wonderfully insightful book, The First Christmas: What the Gospels Really Teach Us About Jesus’ Birth, New Testament scholars Marcus J. Borg and John Dominic Crossan encourage us to understand the Christmas story for what it is: a parable, a metaphorical narrative whose truths lie not in its factual details, but in the multiple meanings we can find in it.

Of course, Jesus himself was famous for his parables, the best of which subverted conventional ways of seeing the world. These parables, Borg and Crossan write, “invited his hearers into a different way of seeing how things are and how we might live.” In other words, as invitations from Jesus to see differently, they were also opportunities for people to change their lives and circumstances.

Today’s popular Christmas stories are often sentimental and viewed through the gauzy lens of warm and fuzzy childhood memories. Unlike Easter, which more clearly invites believers to meditate on notions of sacrifice, repentance, and transcendence, Christmas is more likely to be focused on gift-giving family togetherness than on individual faith and transformation.

But the story of the birth of Jesus is clearly more than sentimental. It’s about the weak and the wise outsmarting the powerful. It’s about the humble and faithful turning the world upside down. As Borg and Crossan argue, these are not tales designed to safeguard the status quo.

So this year, as I celebrate the birth of Jesus with the ones I love, I will also be thinking about where exactly I stand in a world that clearly needs fixing, and whether I’m doing my part to help turn it upside down.

Because whether or not there has ever been a war on Christmas, the Christmas story is itself about conflict. And each December 25, we are given an opportunity not only to welcome joy into the world, but to declare which side we are on.

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