My writing class meets every Saturday, and they are an extraordinary group of people – gifted, empathetic, intense and generous. I knew that no matter who they voted for, they would feel this week deeply and might need to talk about  it.

I suggested Quaker process for the conversation – each person speaks, then a silence in between, and then the next person if they wished. I wanted people to hear and listen to one another.

I had no idea who people voted for, we didn’t ask, but I reminded the students – this was totally unnecessary for this group, really – that this was not a class about politics, or a place for argument. It was a place to express our feelings, and to recognize the extraordinary opportunity for creativity that occurs when we are opened up.

I thought it would be an opportunity for the class to talk about the election and how it had or had not affected their creativity.

I was not sure what to expect, but it was a remarkable two hours for me, a beautiful and authentic and sometimes very painful outpouring of feeling about our country, our different ideas of democracy, the complexity of women and their lives, and the very deep levels of fear, anger and sorrow that so many people are feeling, even as others feel great joy.

We were all jolted, in deep and continuing ways. We will be jolted for many days and weeks and months and years to come. The creative always needs to keep his or her center intact, no matter what is raging in the outside world. I wanted them to see that.

Everywhere I look, I see, hear and feel grief and loss. Anger, too.

The country seems so dissident and divided it almost seems and we are living in some sort mystical twin reality, a hall of mirrors,  half in one place, half in another. No sense of us, only us and them.

In my lifetime, I said, I had never encountered a happening that seemed to touch people so deeply, or frightened them so much. It was the first story so complex and long-lasting that I am unlikely to live to see its resolution, I doubt I will still be alive when it is ultimately resolved.

Something about us all and the world we live in has changed, perhaps been broken, perhaps been opened up to needed change of a kind. I did not predict the recent past, I cannot see the future. For now, I am staying in the now and listening. I do not pay much attention to people who tell me what will happen. Or who dismiss people who think differently.

One of my students  recently moved to the United States from Canada – she was aware of the irony given that many people are talking of going the other way. She wanted to be a United States citizen, she wanted to vote in this election, and she did. I hope she writes about the week she became a U.S. Citizen.

“It felt like the heavens wept,” she said when she woke up to the news after election day. She is not giving up on the United States, she is not going back to that land, but she felt great grief and loss.

Another student is convinced that a fascistic era is coming to America, she believes there are analogies to the early years of Nazi Germany and the bigotry and hatred she believes has been unleashed by this presidential campaign. She believes that demagogues and monsters must be challenged early on, before they can plot or execute their hateful ideas.

She said she knew I didn’t feel that way, but that she did.

She said she was preparing to work to help protect immigrants, minorities, gay and transgender people from the harassment and terror the said many are already experiencing. Her teenaged son’s girlfriend, who comes from an Asian immigrant family, is afraid to go out alone.

One said it did not feel like an election, it felt more like a coup d’etat, a hostile takeover of her country. There were tears and hugs.

Another very gifted writer in the class is preparing for many years of activism to defend the freedom of women and many others. Another was furious at her fellow office workers who supported a different candidate than she did, she was enraged at her friends who didn’t vote, she could not ease the anger she felt towards them.

I said I felt it was just not enough to see this as only a question of good versus evil, that made it impossible to learn from or understand. The creative mind listens and learns, it must never be closed to the other.

I said I did not believe we were heading for another holocaust or anything like one.

I said I thought my role as a creative person, as a writer, was to explore the boundaries of empathy, and put myself into the shoes of others, not to be a Pollyanna or to promote fear or argument, there are plenty of people eager to sell both.

The room was filled with emotion so palpable I thought it could be touched and surely, felt. Red, ever the therapy dog, rushed over to anyone who sounded upset and put his head on their knee.

One of the students said she was so sickened by the name calling and argument that she didn’t decide who to vote for until she walked into her booth.

I was touched very deeply by the emotion in the room, at the fear and sense of grief and loss.

Without a doubt, these writers were grieving.

They had lost the sense of safety that has always gone with living in America,  at least for some people.

They were deeply afraid for the future, and especially, they feared for the Muslim and immigrant and gay and other students already feeling the awful sting of hatred and fear and exclusion.

Those reports have been all over the news and social media since election day. I don’t know how many have been confirmed.

I sense America is, in many ways, a grievance culture now, people competing to be the biggest victims ever. I don’t want to go there. I said if people wish to use their creativity for change, then they need to speak as one human to another, not as the left or the right. People relate to people. I am not to about to spend years hating and fearing people.

We talked about many different kinds of people who voted for the President-Elect, how many different motives there were, how inadequate and unfair to label them all as racists or haters of women or fascists. It goes so much deeper and as writers, it is our mission to entertain or enlighten or share the complex miracle of being a human being.

I am never feeding the hate and fear machine, it is a ravenous monster.

We all have a different idea of conscience and righteousness. Everyone thinks they discovered the truly moral way.

In my own writing I strive to remind myself that I am not morally superior to anyone, I do not have a lock on one way to see the world or on the idea of righteousness. Good can never lecture evil, nor can evil persuade good. We can never communicate successfully in that way, or so I taught.

There no writing or sharing of writing in the class today, yet I thought it was one of the most powerful classes I have every taught, one of the saddest, most meaningful, and to me, the most hopeful. I believe this week will open many doors and souls in the writing class, I hope some of the explore it. I feel a lot of good stuff coming.

No one in the class wanted to give up on their idea of what America means, or for their  hopes and dreams for it. There was no despair.  No one is fleeing to Canada or any place else. My own idea of America as a generous and compassionate and welcome space for people is bleeding a bit, I  hope it returns in my lifetime, I want my granddaughter to know it.

For me, those days of acceptance were the better times, the good old days.