I have long been a fan of Rebecca Solnit, and her books are prominent on my shelf. Men Explain Things to Me, published in 2014, is dog-eared and read repeatedly.
Solnit has a wisdom that comes from having been a witness to and victim of domestic violence as a child. She clad herself within a feminist-based armour that fed her appetite for knowledge, fed her quest to make a difference, fed her determination to play a role in righting the wrongs of her time and fed her action for change.
The Guardian (Zoe Williams March 2026) published an interview with Solnit regarding her new book The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World of Change. In these times of uncertainty and chaos, I find Solnit’s words grounding and hopeful. “We’re living through a political revolution, but it’s not the one you think,” explained Solnit. It is the “slow revolution that’s been happening since the 50s, seismic changes to our attitudes to everything. A government can take away your rights, but no one can take away your belief in those rights.” We challenge fascism with “memory and history.”
Many of us struggle with change. I cling to the past as though it is my life preserver in angry seas, but change is necessary. Sometimes the planets align, or whatever one prefers to think of as fate; I stumbled upon three different writers with a similar message regarding the current state of world affairs and the concept of change.
Lessons in Chemistry, a Bonnie Garmus novel, is set in the 1960s. Its characters are all dealing with change, change that is uncomfortable and requires defiance. Elizabeth Zot, the protagonist, is a scientist working in chemistry research while battling sexism. The very nature of chemistry is the study of matter and the ways in which substances interact, combine and change. Change is the central premise of the story, chemistry the metaphor. Elizabeth refuses to accept the limitations placed on women and in demanding change for herself, she provides an example for others.
Gillian Deacon was recently interviewed on CBC Radio, her workplace for decades before Long Covid changed her life. Deacon stepped down from the CBC while she was navigating a diagnosis and hopeful treatment for unrelenting fatigue, nausea, and severe pain. She wrote a book: A Love Affair with the Unknown: Leaning into the Uncertainty of Modern Life (January 2026). In it, Deacon ponders the uncertainty we all live in. She learned to embrace the unknown; her illness demanded it. Many feel destabilized by the rapid change, with “atrocities constantly exploding”, but uncertainty is a catalyst for change. A familiar thread in Garmus’ book.
Solnit has been referred to as the “most important public intellectual” of the past few decades. She has been a long-time activist in environmental justice, climate, human rights and anti-war movements and women’s rights. She reminds readers that hope is not naïve and occupies the space between optimism and pessimism.
Uncertainty is exactly what makes change possible. One of the first thing she mentions in her current book, explains The Guardian, is a ceremony in October of 2024 where 466 acres of ranch land north of San Francisco were granted back to the Indigenous people from whom it had been taken.
“This restitution was the fruition of resistance campaigning, activism, poetry and memory since the land was taken over by white settlers in the 19th century,” Solnit said. Essie Parrish of the Kashaya Pomo tribe had spoken in the 1950s that “one day the white people would come to us to learn how to take care of the land”. Solnit grew up in the same region and when anyone spoke of Indigenous people it was as if the story was over, was told in the past tense. That change, that shift in the return of the land to be
