Writing About Tomatoes Amidst Crisis

by Nonfiction Editor Steph George

“The Garden of Eden” tapestry panel, British, ca. 1680; MET / Creative Commons

The year my tomatoes didn’t grow, it rained all of June, and their small, new leaves turned yellow and black in the relentless humidity. July was the hottest recorded month in history, beating out the year before, and the year before that. Thin, leggy stalks hung lifelessly against their twine supports. August, which is usually the time when I start trying to pawn off tomatoes onto polite friends and neighbors, was barren. 

In September, amidst unseasonable heat and with any remaining hopes of tomatoes gone, I started an MFA program. In the face of such desperate circumstances, I decided to… write. The pen may be mightier than the sword, but I am not so sure how it measures up to a burning planet.  

Writers of every measure are tasked with understanding where we fit in amidst a catastrophe none of us have faced, and of which we have no idea the full extent of its impact. I am tempted to say that we must throw it all out and only write directly to the cause, that anything outside a fervent call to action is fluff. But I think that is unfair, unrealistic, and a bit of a cop out. 

When I sit down in front of my computer and ask myself that horrible, vague question of what about I should write, I increasingly feel it is irresponsible to write about anything other than the fires or the floods or the ninety-degree October day that people call “nice”, but we all know it isn’t, or my nonexistent tomatoes.  

My students often want to write about the climate crisis in their composition assignments. They want to tell someone, anyone (in this case, an aimless graduate instructor), that they are scared and outraged and that something must be done. Surely someone older and with more power and who knows how the world works, must have some advice on what to do.

Technically fitting the bill, they write to me. But I do not know what to do. I am simply tasked with building them to be strong critical thinkers, and so I speak to their anger and outrage rationally and tell them to “consider counter arguments” and “determine if this tactic is effective in conveying your message.” 

“Look at the way the author addresses their audience,” I’ll say. “Is that moving?”

Yes. It is moving. And they tell me so in their revised and polished essays that I read next to an open window that by this time of year is usually closed so that the heat doesn’t escape. It is laughable now to think that the heat will ever escape. I wonder if this is the correct way to hold their experience and anger, if there is a better approach to putting their passion on the page?

There is the adage that we should write what we know, and something about the specific being universal. We should, also, write about those things and people and places that we love, that mean something to us.

Our world, whatever state it is in, must be written about. Let us write to celebrate the warm sunlight on our faces, to mobilize the masses, to mourn unseen tomatoes, to remember the traditions lost to heat, and to imagine a beautiful, more just future. Let us reach into the depths of our relationship with this small planet and at the very least show that we cared enough to write about her over and over and over again.

Steph George is the Nonfiction Editor of Barnstorm Journal and an MFA Nonfiction Creative Writing student at the University of New Hampshire. She’s a freelance audio producer in Dover, NH.