As such, I want to help create social change in America. I aspire to do this through the form of the novel, because a) I can work from home, and b) you can still make a serious chunk of change if you hit the commercial-fiction sweet spot.

For my first novel, I am choosing to tackle the subject of trauma. Not mine, of course: other people’s. And so I ventured out, looking as always for stories, but also for community, as I have never felt quite at home in America since suffering my own trauma years ago.

A journalistic assignment brought me to Santa Ana, California. Nowadays, the very name of the place conjures for me a certain trauma, but at the time it was bright, fresh and welcoming. I finally felt at home.

Then came the anti-gentrification protest march. By that time, I knew and was friendly with several of the marchers, but one in particular stood out: Gladys. I’d interviewed her for an article and had found her to be a warm, friendly and smart young woman. Now, here she was, protesting the very presence of people like me, white outsiders, in her town.

It was at that moment that I knew had my story: hers.

She must have gone through some awful trauma, I surmised. I began furiously researching the kinds of trauma that immigrants go through just to get here, and what they continue to experience after they arrive.

I asked Gladys if she would consent to be interviewed for my research. We met at a coffee shop. To my surprise, she wanted to ask me questions.

“What makes you think you can tell our story?” she wanted to know. “What do you know about trauma?”

So I told her a story of a time in my childhood when I had felt powerless, ostracized, hurt, ashamed and acutely anxious for a period of months, and that I’d not had the faintest idea of how to handle the situation.

She listened to my story carefully, nodded, took a moment to consider.

Then she said, “So you’re telling me you’re a wimp?”

Reader, I was floored.

I might even have been retraumatized, although I’m not quite sure.

Anyway, I hope this explains why I don’t write novels.

This is a work of fiction. No one in it is quite real.

Network Delaware’s Emily Artinian will speak about the relationship between art and social justice as part of a panel discussion at the University of Delaware on Thursday, March 1.

The panel coincides with an exhibit of paintings and drawings made by prisoners at the James T. Vaughn Male Correctional Center in Smyrna.

Emily, an artist who is active in the Network’s Strategic Nonviolence Pillar, plans to talk about the Pillar’s work on criminal justice reform and ending the school-to-prison pipeline.

She will discuss ways that prisoners in Vaughn’s Prison Arts Program can expand their repertoires and develop job skills from their creative work.

“I am going to talk about two things — how art is a broad church and social practice art often involves working for social justice, and I’m going to talk about helping participants in the program to know more about that kind of artwork, and secondly I’m going to talk about transferable skills — most people who make art don’t make a living as artists, and so I’m going to talk about thinking about transferable skills you learn from making art,” Emily said.

“The general public understands art as mostly painting and sculpture, but in the 21st century it could encompass anything, even brushing your teeth. If the artist says it’s art, it’s art … So i think it’s important to introduce this idea in programs, including the amazing program at Vaughn.”

The panel takes place Thursday, March 1, from 5:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. at Old College Room 211 at the University of Delaware. There will be a reception afterward in the Recitation Hall Gallery, where the exhibit of prisoners’ art continues through March 2.

Art and Social Justice is panelists’ topic was originally published in Network Delaware on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.