Rebecca Solnit will be teaching during Wisdom and Wellbeing Multi-Faculty Week 5: Courage and Stillness – The Path of Wise Action | January 31 – February 7, 2026 about the following topic:
Stories Are Cages, Stories Are Wings (and Stories Are Noise, So Quiet Also Counts)
We are storytelling animals, and we all live with stories that make our lives, our world, our dreams better, our hopes closer, our societies more just—and the opposite, because there are widely circulated stories of our worthlessness, cynicism, despair, powerlessness. In this workshop, we’ll explore the power of stories, the power we each have as storytellers, and the peace that comes when we can pause our stories, or stand outside and recognize the grip of a story, the clamor of stories in competition, the loop tapes of our grievances, and then find the ladder stories that let us step out of our own limited worldview, the collective work to change the stories, the era we’re in as one of foundational narrative change.
Writer, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit is the author of more than twenty books on feminism, western and urban history, popular power, social change and insurrection, wandering and walking, hope and catastrophe. Her books include Orwell’s Roses; Recollections of My Nonexistence; Hope in the Dark; Men Explain Things to Me; A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster; and A Field Guide to Getting Lost. A product of the California public education system from kindergarten to graduate school, she writes regularly for the Guardian, serves on the board of the climate group Oil Change International, and recently launched the climate project Not Too Late (nottoolateclimate.com).