Cultural Diary, July 2024
Naomi Kanakia, Emmett Rensin, the upper peninsula of Michigan
The Default World (novel; 2024; written by Naomi Kanakia)
When I tell people about the work that I do (or, now, used to do1) as the editor of the Michigan Review of Prisoner Creative Writing, I often end up having a conversation about the problem “How should we as a society handle people who have done terrible things?” I have to confess that, for as many hours as I’ve spent opining about it, this problem doesn’t hit me that hard. I see my membership or non-membership in that group as 5% Me and My Effortfully Great Choices and 95% moral luck.2 And that’s being very generous to myself.
We all know — I think — that any person’s life and choices are the result of a complex alchemical mixture of happenstance and, yes, something that either is choice or feels so much like it as makes no phenomenological difference. We vary our emphasis on these things opportunistically.