Thoughts on Chris Crutcher

This morning I woke up thinking about a different kind of change, the kind that is imposed on us. Sometime's it's bad, sometime's it's good, and sometime's it's a bad thing that clears the way for something positive, or vice versa. Like when your husband leaves you and years later you fall in love with someone who's better for you in every way. Or when you're laid off from a job and, after a financial struggle, land a new one that's more creative and in a more nurturing environment that the position you lost.

Yesterday I interviewed teen-fiction author Chris Crutcher, who has many fans where I live, for a newspaper article, and we talked about empowerment. A few of Crutcher's readers here had mentioned to me that although his teen characters deal with very weighty issues like abuse, abandonment and cancer, there's always an element of hope in the story.

Crutcher related this to his work as a therapist. He said he hopes his books convey "some sense of the fact that we're all responsible for everything we do, not in the sense that we have to take blame but that we're here in the world and we have choices and we make them."

Crutcher said that when he worked as a therapist, "I felt that if someone walked away feeling empowered, they had a better chanced of making it in the real world. My job is to make them feel empowered."

Empowerment, he said, is "a true knowledge and some capability that you can impact your own life, that you can make things happen, that you can stack the deck in your favor by taking charge of your life."

Inspiring words, and timely advice. The country's, and world's, economic crises means less income and a smaller retirement pot for many people, including me. I hope all of us can react in an empowered way, whatever that means. Perhaps by being generous as well as thrifty, by finding joy in nonmaterial things and focusing on today rather than yesterday or tomorrow.

Thanks to Chris Crutcher for his thoughts.