Hammer Speech

Last night, I got to stand up in front of the audience at the Locus Awards ceremony. I wound up presenting the Locus Award for Best Short Story (congratulations, Isabel J. Kim!) – but first, I delivered a keynote speech. You can watch the speech here. The full text of the speech follows.

Hello, friends. I’m so thrilled to be here with you tonight, celebrating some of the luminaries of our field. I have the enormous privilege of having been invited to speak to you for a few minutes on a subject of my choosing. “Anything you want,” they said. Last year, I had the pleasure of receiving a similar prompt, and used my time onstage at the Nebula awards to discuss courage and principle, and the way those two ideas can help us change the world.

Tonight, I want to talk to you about my favorite hammer.

It’s a great hammer. About 14” long, wooden handle. The head of the hammer is attached to the haft by a nail, which I like to imagine means someone used a hammer to make my hammer. I think it’s beautiful to be able to see the origins of a tool. 

My hammer is pretty dinged up. It’s scratched and dented. The wood is scuffed and paint-smeared in places. There’s a piece of tape on it that I don’t know how it got there and I can’t get it off. It bears the signs of use, which makes sense, because I get a lot of use out of it. 

I use it to break things that need breaking. I use it to fix things that can be fixed. I use it to build new things, and to make things beautiful and to make things safe.

My hammer is very valuable to me, because I use it. If I had purchased my hammer, and then brought it home and put it in my toolbox, and then left my toolbox in the closet, untouched – if didn’t use my hammer to make my home a safer, more welcoming place for the friends and family and children and elders and criminals and complete strangers who come to visit me – my hammer would be completely fucking worthless.

We have spent a lot of time this weekend talking about the purpose of literature. We have spent a lot of time talking about how important it is for literature to confer hope onto the reader.

But hope is a hammer. It is valuable only if you do something with it.

If we write with the sole purpose of giving people hope, then we are writing ads for hammers. Which isn’t strictly a failure – there’s nothing wrong with inspiring people to buy hammers. People need hammers. But why do we want people to buy hammers?

Why does it matter so much? Why do we want readers to experience hope, and compassion for others, and love for their communities? What is our goal? 

Are we here to provide comfort to the inert? Are we here to reassure people that experiencing a positive feeling is the end of their work? Do our stories exist to pacify an audience that’s on the verge of taking action by telling them they’ve already done enough? Or are we inspiring people to use their hammers to break and fix and build?

I have heard some people say that without hope, change is impossible. That is an outright lie. The truth is that the people whose work you most admire have done that work even in the total absence of hope. The truth is that in the weeks and months and years to come, we will feel hopelessness. We will feel fear. We will feel despair.

It’s tempting to push these emotions away, because they’re not celebrated the way hope is. It’s tempting to try to find a way to get around them. To consider them obstacles. But to do so is to ignore every tool that isn’t a hammer. 

Hopelessness can be an alarm bell, signaling you to connection and action. Fear can be information – ignoring it means dismissing your recognition of a threat. Despair can give you the gift of focus – it can tell you where you are most called to show up to the hard work of creating change. 

Once we have accepted that hope is not the only emotion we can work with – we start to remember that an emotion is an experience, not an action. You can let your emotions move you to action – you can decide to work toward making the thing you hope for into a reality – but you are also powerful enough to act on your principles even when they oppose your emotions. 

You can act with compassion even when you feel disgust. You can act with courage, even when you feel fear. You can act as if there’s a tomorrow worth protecting – even when your deepest, most secret heart is convinced there is no hope to be found. The beautiful thing about being in community with others is that if your hammer breaks, if you lose it, if you never got one in the first place and don’t know where to find one – you can still build new things, and make things beautiful, and make things safe. You can borrow someone else’s hammer for a while, or you can use the tools you have and let other people wield the ones they brought. You can make tools for others to use, and you can teach them how to use those tools.

You can make the decision right now to be part of the community that’s doing the work you hope will get done. 

You can take first responder training and legal observer training and de-escalation training.

You can observe and record state violence to provide evidence that will protect those who are being targeted by authoritarianism. 

You can walk into courtrooms to represent and support the vulnerable people who are being labeled “criminals” and treated as less than human. 

You can call your representatives and political leaders and show up at their offices and interrupt them at dinner to demand that they do their jobs. 

You can attend city council meetings and school board meetings and run for local office. 

You can paint protest signs and distribute flyers and educate people about their legal rights and their human rights and educate people about what protective equipment to wear to protests. 

You can donate to legal aid funds and bail funds and mental health support hotlines like Trans Lifeline.

You can loudly and consistently condemn genocide, and support those who are risking their lives to deliver supplies to people who need them. 

You can join organizations like Authors Against Book Bans to fight book banning legislation on local, state, and federal levels. 

You can push for legal protections for marginalized people. 

Those of us who live here in the bay can drive our asses to Dublin to protest the re-opening of FCI as an ICE detention center.

 We will write and read and reach out to each other and feed each other and help each other rest and tend to each other’s wounds at the end of the day.

Inertia is a choice, even when that inertia includes emotions we didn’t choose – or emotions we think of as action. There are so many other choices you can make instead. There are so many ways to get to work.

There are people in this room tonight who already engage in constant, exhausting, courageous action, even when their emotions are telling them to run and hide and give up. There are also people in this room who are going to wake up tomorrow morning and decide to take action for the first time. Both of you are part of building a better world, and you’re going to be doing it together, and I’m going to be right there with you. Regardless of what we feel. Regardless of what we try to make our readers feel. We will all be united in the work.

We will be doing it all together, in all our hope and fear and compassion and despair. 

Today’s a great day to go out and buy your first hammer. And it’s a great day to start using it.

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In the meantime, remember: Do what you can. Care for yourself and the people around you. Believe that the world can be better than it is now. Never give up.

-gailey