California Fires and Storytelling

 California Fires and Storytelling by Debra H. Goldstein

I wasn’t going to write a January Writers Who Kill blog because, somehow, I believed the short stories extended through my day – Wrong! Realizing my mistake, I thought about addressing the fact that Birmingham, Alabama had a fifteen-minute snowstorm on Monday, January 6, and a real one on Friday, January 10th. It had amused me when I noticed the blizzard like snow falling on Monday, but my weather app said it would be over in six minutes – and it was.

Then, the fires came in California. Horrific. Pictures can’t begin to convey the misery, fear, devastation, and tragedy. There were numerous deaths (even one was too many), but I can’t begin to comprehend the mental impact. Homes and memories lost. Hopefully, many of us in the writing and reading community have already reached out to help.

Having been evacuated from a spa in Baja California, Mexico during the San Diego fires, I have some idea of the fear of seeing the smoke coming one’s way, of embers stinging one’s skin, of the sky darkening, of grabbing what one needs versus everything one could take, and of surviving. I never wrote about it. At the time, it was too raw. And yet, looking back at the situation I was in, I realize there were high adrenaline moments as well as comedic things that occurred that would make for good storytelling.

I fear, eventually, the same will be true from this disaster. There will be stories from the perspective of survivors, from the viewpoint of destroyed buildings, of being on a road clogged with abandoned cars as flames come from behind, inside the mind of first responders as well as looters, and of occurrences while being sheltered.

Will they be told for profit? Or, simply by the people who lived them to save their sanity? Do you have a story to tell?