Another world

Joyce Carol Oates reminds us that when you open a book you open the possibility to be anybody.

You can be anything. Any gender. Any nationality. Any age. The colour of your skin can be any hue you imagine.

It’s truly a wonder. A magic portal that transports you through time and space into another place, another world. Simply by sprinkling letters into words that gather into sentences and roll a story forward.

Oates is one of our most phenomenal and prolific writers. With the uncanny capacity to slip in and out of characters, often misunderstood and misjudged and mistreated. To seek out and recalibrate injustices. To turn the wheel towards what is good, what is true.

To remind us that the use of language is all we have to pit against death and silence.