As we feel our way into how to adjust to our new circumstances, wherever we are in the process, I’m appreciating the pieces that writers are sharing to help us look after each other. One of the writers in my current advanced novel-writing class told us that Toni Morrison’s essay “Peril” had helped her through a very hard time right after the election. It’s an intensely useful reminder of how authoritarian governments respond to artists, as well as a reminder of why we have to keep reading and writing: “…stillness can be passivity and dumbfoundedness; it can be paralytic fear. But it can also be art. Those writers plying their craft near to or far from the throne of raw power, of military power, of empire building and countinghouses, writers who construct meaning in the face of chaos must be nurtured, protected.” Another writer then shared a Vaclav Havel poem that led me to his writing on hope (as quoted in Rebecca Solnit’s Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities, currently available as a free e-book from Haymarket Books) not as “an estimate of the situation” but “an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart.” So as a way of reclaiming our minds and, yes, the hope Havel describes, I want to share some delight with you, from Ali Smith’s first novel in her seasonal quartet, Autumn, about friendship and mortality, bureaucracy and Brexit, “arty art,” time, loss, and the real-life artist Pauline Boty.