A week when journalism trumped fiction

It’s been tough to concentrate on fiction this past week, what with the tragic and riveting events in Boston. I lost way too many hours of sleep following the Boston Globe and its reporters on Twitter, and could not be more grateful for their thoughtful and accurate work. 

Today on NPR’s Morning Edition, Dennis Lehane – who sets many of his novels such as “Mystic River” and “Gone Baby Gone” in his home city of Boston – reflected on the week, in words as eloquent as any he’s written: “The thing that I’ll never forget from any of this … those civilians who in the first 10 seconds of the first explosion ran toward their fellow human beings, ran into absolute danger … just one of the finest examples of human grace under pressure I’ve ever seen. Then you extend that to all the members of law enforcement and the way they handled that. And then you extend that to the way the city didn’t rush to judgment, the city didn’t have any sort of reaction against Arab-Americans, which I think was an early fear. There was none of that.”

This morning, he said, “I wrote for the first time in six days.”

I don’t know that I believe that people, or by extension an entire city, ever completely heal from something like this. But resuming the motions of normalcy – that’s a great thing. Tomorrow I’ll join hundreds of people in Missoula on a benefit run for those in Boston. And then I’ll look away from Twitter and back to the blank screen and get some writing done.