The following hit all the marks. 

I’m certain you know about Dr. Pipher’s public stand.

AMY GOODMAN: Mary Pipher, clinical psychologist and acclaimed author. I asked her to talk about her latest book, Writing to Change the World.

MARY PIPHER: You know, how Pete Seeger always said about music: it isn’t whether or not it’s good, it’s what it’s good for. And I didn’t come at writing as an academic or as a poet or a creative writer. I came at writing as a social activist, and I want every one of my books to have a very powerful effect in changing the culture. And so, I have spent a lot of time figuring out how to do it. And the way to do it is have a deeply personal voice, my own authentic voice that comes from deep within myself, and my writing and speaking voice are virtually identical. And then, the other way to do it is through stories, because you can’t argue with a story. You know, people can argue with you if you stand up and say what you believe or don’t believe, but if you tell them a story and tell them a story that opens their heart, they will change. So that’s what the book is about, is writing in a way that we can effect change.

And I talk about this idea that the point of my kind of writing is to empower the powerless, to give voice to people who have no voice, but also to educate readers in what I call the moral imagination. And that is the ability to understand the world from other people’s points of view. And that’s an extremely big problem in America right now, is people don’t have much moral imagination, so that when they talk about, say, “illegal aliens,” they don’t have a story, they don’t have a face, they don’t have a picture of a real person. They have almost no empathy with the person they’re talking about.

I remember when Sensenbrenner was talking about gaming the asylum system and how we had to go after those terrorists gaming the asylum system. At that point I had just happened to have been back to Bellevue in New York City to visit their unit for victims of torture. The people on that unit that were seeking asylum were Buddhist monks from Tibet. And I just thought, “Man, Sensenbrenner hasn’t been here. You know, he hasn’t been to Center for Victims of Torture in Minneapolis.”

And so, the job of the change writer, from my point of view, is to say I respect you as a reader, and I know if I tell you the truth, as I see it, having spent some time listening to people and asking them — you know, Simone Weil had that question, “What is your experience?”– asking people, “What is your experience?” which I did when I wrote Middle of Everywhere, my book on refugees. I spent three years asking people that. And it greatly enhanced my own moral imagination to listen to all those stories. You also have a good job for enhancing your moral imagination. But that’s the job of the writer: to help other people’s moral imagination grow, basically.