Wednesday, April 16, 2008
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
Community is Conversation
I like the idea of a noun like "community"(something often presented as a fixed entity) instead being the dynamic result of a million personal decisions. Community is what comes of many, many small investments. People choosing to (or choosing not to) talk with one another, scrape each others' cars out of snowdrifts, share dinner... Those are the small things. And the big things-- like maintaining schools, facing crime in neighborhoods, deciding what businesses are welcome where you live-- grow from the small things having been done.
On Thursday, April 3, I'm putting together a dialogue called "Community is Conversation" at Visible Voice Books in Tremont (1023 Kenilworth). It started off as another "Stewards" reading, but honestly, I'd very much like to move from the point of simply putting the material forward, and instead talk among friends and strangers about some of the ideas the book goes into.
The event announcement follows. If you're into it, come on by...
***
Do you ever think about the role of community in modern-day America?
About what brings people together and pushes them apart?
About what impact virtual reality is having on how we interact with one another face to face?
About the increasingly tentative hold young people have on history and what that does
to our investment in the world around us?
About where hopeful momentum can come from when there seem to be too many reasons
not to care anymore?
Come discuss the kinds of ideas we don’t talk about enough, in a night inspired by ‘Stewards of the Lost Lands,’ a new collection of work by kate sopko about how an American mental terrain can limit the social initiative of people who care.
You don’t have to have read the book to be a part of the discussion. You just have to be interested.
Community is Conversation: A Reading and Dialogue based on Stewards of the Lost Lands
Thursday, April 3, 8:00 PM
Visible Voice Books (1023 Kenilworth Avenue)
On Thursday, April 3, I'm putting together a dialogue called "Community is Conversation" at Visible Voice Books in Tremont (1023 Kenilworth). It started off as another "Stewards" reading, but honestly, I'd very much like to move from the point of simply putting the material forward, and instead talk among friends and strangers about some of the ideas the book goes into.
The event announcement follows. If you're into it, come on by...
***
Do you ever think about the role of community in modern-day America?
About what brings people together and pushes them apart?
About what impact virtual reality is having on how we interact with one another face to face?
About the increasingly tentative hold young people have on history and what that does
to our investment in the world around us?
About where hopeful momentum can come from when there seem to be too many reasons
not to care anymore?
Come discuss the kinds of ideas we don’t talk about enough, in a night inspired by ‘Stewards of the Lost Lands,’ a new collection of work by kate sopko about how an American mental terrain can limit the social initiative of people who care.
You don’t have to have read the book to be a part of the discussion. You just have to be interested.
Community is Conversation: A Reading and Dialogue based on Stewards of the Lost Lands
Thursday, April 3, 8:00 PM
Visible Voice Books (1023 Kenilworth Avenue)
Thursday, February 21, 2008
Teacher/Student
"I have come to believe over and over again, that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood.... My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you.... and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us. The fact that we are here and that I speak these words is an attempt to break that silence and bridge some of those differences between us, for it is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence. And there are so many silences to be broken." (Audre Lorde)
I've never been a natural at social outings...
One of the more unexpected parts of adulthood for me has been the experience of suddenly losing old patterns of behavior-- things, like social anxiety, that always felt permanently embedded in my personality. Somehow, just like snakeskin, the human body knows when to get rid of obsolete psychological functions. They can and often do simply slip out of use when the time comes for them to go.
The funny thing is, it's often our inability to believe something has changed that makes an old pattern end up overstaying its welcome.
Finding your voice means you are then called to use it. Part of the act of finding it, too, means you've been refining its usage, whether you're aware of the fact or not. When we are called upon to speak, we are quite capable of doing it.
I remember the tremendous feeling of power I found in the words of Audre Lorde, when she wrote (in the context of fighting breast cancer) that our silence does nothing to protect us. She was really pointing out that there is nothing for people to gain by drowning out what they know. The truth can not be hidden forever. It floats upward like oil in water. This is not always apparent, since prevailing forces spend much time making sure that critical voices are quieted, whatever it takes. Many countercultural voices of great value have been explicitly given the choice between speaking their truth and having their lives taken or the quality of their lives reduced through violence or threats of violence. Lorde argued that this is a false choice: the underlying truth is we have more to fear from negating our voice, and that whenever we respond to fear with silence, we have handed over the very source of what makes our lives livable to an ill culture.
That's an idea to keep firmly in mind.
My struggle with this now is subtle. It lies in not totally believing my voice works, in being thrust into positions where I am speaking but am not used to having my words publicly received.
Part of speaking in public and of being received is that Americans are not very used to participatory discussion. We tend to place performer/audience or teacher/student roles upon anyone presenting information. We want to know who's in charge, who is supposed to speak, who is supposed to be listened to, and who we shouldn't bother paying attention to. Imagine walking into a room for a lecture: many people would get automatically anxious, maybe even leave, if it appeared that the room was set up for small-group discussion rather than for a traditional presentation from a podium (something that doesn't demand more from us than our apparent attention...)
This is hierarchy. It is hard to challenge. I have found myself unsure of how to respond to feedback on my work lately, because I keep assuming I am being responded to as something of an authority figure. I know I am not an authority on anything but the glimpses of life I have lived through, and that teacher/student roles are very fluid things. The tricky part is bringing this view to the surface in conversation, asking questions about content and ideas and having discussion allow everyone involved to contribute.
Not much by way of solutions here, just thinking...
I've never been a natural at social outings...
One of the more unexpected parts of adulthood for me has been the experience of suddenly losing old patterns of behavior-- things, like social anxiety, that always felt permanently embedded in my personality. Somehow, just like snakeskin, the human body knows when to get rid of obsolete psychological functions. They can and often do simply slip out of use when the time comes for them to go.
The funny thing is, it's often our inability to believe something has changed that makes an old pattern end up overstaying its welcome.
Finding your voice means you are then called to use it. Part of the act of finding it, too, means you've been refining its usage, whether you're aware of the fact or not. When we are called upon to speak, we are quite capable of doing it.
I remember the tremendous feeling of power I found in the words of Audre Lorde, when she wrote (in the context of fighting breast cancer) that our silence does nothing to protect us. She was really pointing out that there is nothing for people to gain by drowning out what they know. The truth can not be hidden forever. It floats upward like oil in water. This is not always apparent, since prevailing forces spend much time making sure that critical voices are quieted, whatever it takes. Many countercultural voices of great value have been explicitly given the choice between speaking their truth and having their lives taken or the quality of their lives reduced through violence or threats of violence. Lorde argued that this is a false choice: the underlying truth is we have more to fear from negating our voice, and that whenever we respond to fear with silence, we have handed over the very source of what makes our lives livable to an ill culture.
That's an idea to keep firmly in mind.
My struggle with this now is subtle. It lies in not totally believing my voice works, in being thrust into positions where I am speaking but am not used to having my words publicly received.
Part of speaking in public and of being received is that Americans are not very used to participatory discussion. We tend to place performer/audience or teacher/student roles upon anyone presenting information. We want to know who's in charge, who is supposed to speak, who is supposed to be listened to, and who we shouldn't bother paying attention to. Imagine walking into a room for a lecture: many people would get automatically anxious, maybe even leave, if it appeared that the room was set up for small-group discussion rather than for a traditional presentation from a podium (something that doesn't demand more from us than our apparent attention...)
This is hierarchy. It is hard to challenge. I have found myself unsure of how to respond to feedback on my work lately, because I keep assuming I am being responded to as something of an authority figure. I know I am not an authority on anything but the glimpses of life I have lived through, and that teacher/student roles are very fluid things. The tricky part is bringing this view to the surface in conversation, asking questions about content and ideas and having discussion allow everyone involved to contribute.
Not much by way of solutions here, just thinking...
Thursday, February 7, 2008
The Interview Game
This is something I've loved to play with people for a few years now. Simple as hell, but a good way to equalize conversation and to learn a lot about someone in a short amount of time. There are only three rules:
- You take turns asking questions.
- Answers must be 100% honest.
- You may not ask the same question back.
I learned through playing this game frequently that I like EVERYTHING about interviews! Making up questions, hearing answers, finding out what others want to hear about...
Which brings me to how happy I am to have had a couple opportunities in the past few weeks to go on radio shows and talk about ideas that excite me. The next one of these is this upcoming Tuesday night (February 12), from 9:00-10:00 PM on Cleveland's WRUW, 91.1 FM. This is Voices and Choices, a great radio show that's been laying out the facts about threats to and organizing around reproductive rights for years.
Neat! I wish more people got to have intense conversations over the airwaves. I would listen with great interest...
- You take turns asking questions.
- Answers must be 100% honest.
- You may not ask the same question back.
I learned through playing this game frequently that I like EVERYTHING about interviews! Making up questions, hearing answers, finding out what others want to hear about...
Which brings me to how happy I am to have had a couple opportunities in the past few weeks to go on radio shows and talk about ideas that excite me. The next one of these is this upcoming Tuesday night (February 12), from 9:00-10:00 PM on Cleveland's WRUW, 91.1 FM. This is Voices and Choices, a great radio show that's been laying out the facts about threats to and organizing around reproductive rights for years.
Neat! I wish more people got to have intense conversations over the airwaves. I would listen with great interest...
Tuesday, February 5, 2008
Dense.
This past week, Language Foundry writers Joseph Makkos, Carmen Tracy and me, and tech crew Jose Luna took a trip to New York City under a bad moon. We were heading out to read as part of a Small Press reading done monthly at Greenwich Village's Think Coffee (thinkcoffeenyc.com/cup-and-pen). The reading was sweet, though we rolled in 20 minutes late after a series of unfortunate events-- the kind that come with such severity, whimsy and synchronicity, it's hard not to read some sort of meta-narrative into them. Like, are we supposed to skip this trip entirely, now that the 60 mile-per-hour winds are blowing, and the electricity's gone, and all the male intuition around us has its red alert blaring?
But we made it, and the reading was great. If you're from New York, check out Think Coffee. I was really impressed with the list of upcoming events I happened to see advertised there. Friday night, there was a panel on alternative energy, including staff from Just Food (a great NYC organization that sets up CSA's and urban gardens: www.justfood.org).
I ended up stranded in the city for two extra days after buses into Cleveland were cancelled due to weather. I walked around a lot, saw many different sections of the city... New York's tough. I think I tend to assume that when you have such a density of people, you'll see a lot of interesting social interaction going on: the magic of chance meetings. Instead, I got the feeling that the density has really made people put up invisible auras around themselves to ward off possible conversation or contact. You can be standing a half-inch away from someone on the subway and never make any indication they exist. In fact, that's par for the course, the accepted way of doing things.
I was lucky to get to talk with several people I love who now live in New York-- Angela, Megan and Manuel. All of them had things to say about the social isolation of the city, most interestingly, that they felt cut off as artists and activists from other artists and activists, which is pretty crazy, given how I'd always thought both were alive and very well in New York.
Which they are, just not on the surface. What's on the surface is money, not people. People are everywhere, but getting to see their faces is so very difficult-- so much social expectation to navigate, so much fashion sense to cut through, so many rules about where you can sit and how much it will cost you.
It was good for me to see this particular dynamic, as depressing as it was. I've written about how suburban culture pushes people away from each other, and how I believe urban life in certain forms can combat that, just by people being in proximity to each other. But New York really underlined to me how in the end, proximity can help people get in each others' space, but it doesn't mean people will choose to relate with one another. Relationship really is about making a choice, and we seem to be excelling in America lately at coming up with mores that distract people from doing that.
But we made it, and the reading was great. If you're from New York, check out Think Coffee. I was really impressed with the list of upcoming events I happened to see advertised there. Friday night, there was a panel on alternative energy, including staff from Just Food (a great NYC organization that sets up CSA's and urban gardens: www.justfood.org).
I ended up stranded in the city for two extra days after buses into Cleveland were cancelled due to weather. I walked around a lot, saw many different sections of the city... New York's tough. I think I tend to assume that when you have such a density of people, you'll see a lot of interesting social interaction going on: the magic of chance meetings. Instead, I got the feeling that the density has really made people put up invisible auras around themselves to ward off possible conversation or contact. You can be standing a half-inch away from someone on the subway and never make any indication they exist. In fact, that's par for the course, the accepted way of doing things.
I was lucky to get to talk with several people I love who now live in New York-- Angela, Megan and Manuel. All of them had things to say about the social isolation of the city, most interestingly, that they felt cut off as artists and activists from other artists and activists, which is pretty crazy, given how I'd always thought both were alive and very well in New York.
Which they are, just not on the surface. What's on the surface is money, not people. People are everywhere, but getting to see their faces is so very difficult-- so much social expectation to navigate, so much fashion sense to cut through, so many rules about where you can sit and how much it will cost you.
It was good for me to see this particular dynamic, as depressing as it was. I've written about how suburban culture pushes people away from each other, and how I believe urban life in certain forms can combat that, just by people being in proximity to each other. But New York really underlined to me how in the end, proximity can help people get in each others' space, but it doesn't mean people will choose to relate with one another. Relationship really is about making a choice, and we seem to be excelling in America lately at coming up with mores that distract people from doing that.
Monday, January 28, 2008
Doing It Yourself
The thing I love most about a DIY approach to life (in art-making, in organizing, etc...) is how it forces critical thought. Not being able to depend on an institution to provide blueprints for getting something done, or tech support along the way, DIY means you react to each new stage of a project and the demands it makes on you. You do this with whatever resources you have, the biggest ones usually being ingenuity, passion and adaptability.
Cash and time tend to be the resources most out of reach for DIY projects. There's a lot of us scrapping out here. It's one reason I really like Cleveland. There are a lot of people out here carving out lives for themselves by pitching in as much energy as they possibly can for their art or social vision and not demanding anything in return.
Where it gets difficult is in striking a healthy balance: how do we sustain energy over lengthy projects? How do we start new projects without jeopardizing the always precarious DIY ecosystems we already belong to?
I've been confronting the reality of my limited energy lately, and am a little sad about how there are bounds to how much can be accomplished-- that certain visions will fail if the people involved get distracted by new visions. That's an energetic economy hard to grapple with.
Several weeks have passed since the book release, and despite much list-making and a couple of readings, I am far behind on getting books into the hands of the many people and stores they are intended for. Just another illustration of how when you do it on your own, all the work is also your own, and each task take its allotted time, and that time may take up time allotted for something else.
It's becoming more and more crucial to me that people working as artists and visionaries of the ground-up variety pool our resources innovatively, lend hands to each other's efforts, live together, feed each other, raise each other's kids, and take turns taking out the trash. Each of those things take time, so each of them, whether little or big means so much to how well our visions take shape.
For a great forum on striking the balance between making a life and making a living, check out: www.passionsandsurvival.blogspot.com.
Cash and time tend to be the resources most out of reach for DIY projects. There's a lot of us scrapping out here. It's one reason I really like Cleveland. There are a lot of people out here carving out lives for themselves by pitching in as much energy as they possibly can for their art or social vision and not demanding anything in return.
Where it gets difficult is in striking a healthy balance: how do we sustain energy over lengthy projects? How do we start new projects without jeopardizing the always precarious DIY ecosystems we already belong to?
I've been confronting the reality of my limited energy lately, and am a little sad about how there are bounds to how much can be accomplished-- that certain visions will fail if the people involved get distracted by new visions. That's an energetic economy hard to grapple with.
Several weeks have passed since the book release, and despite much list-making and a couple of readings, I am far behind on getting books into the hands of the many people and stores they are intended for. Just another illustration of how when you do it on your own, all the work is also your own, and each task take its allotted time, and that time may take up time allotted for something else.
It's becoming more and more crucial to me that people working as artists and visionaries of the ground-up variety pool our resources innovatively, lend hands to each other's efforts, live together, feed each other, raise each other's kids, and take turns taking out the trash. Each of those things take time, so each of them, whether little or big means so much to how well our visions take shape.
For a great forum on striking the balance between making a life and making a living, check out: www.passionsandsurvival.blogspot.com.
Tuesday, January 15, 2008
A Beautiful Night....
This past Saturday was the book release and dance party. Turned out to be a gorgeous night--- I was basically overwhelmed by the warmth and receptivity of those who came to the reading and the way people opened up in discussion afterward. It seems like there is something in the air lately: a larger willingness in people to stand exposed to each other and talk about the things we want to transform in ourselves and the world around us. At least, that has been my experience, and I'm happy to feel the opening. It bodes well for things.
I'd like to thank the very large group of people who made Saturday so amazing, including all those who came out for both events, plus the remarkable readers Carmen Tracy, Angela Beallor and Katie Daley and super-host deb. Everyone who carted things around, cleaned, played host, worked the table, THANK YOU!
"Stewards of the Lost Lands" can be found online at: www.alternaqueerbooks.com/stoflolakaso.html or in the flesh at Suspect Thoughts Books (Clark & West 50th.) New locations TBA soon.
I'd like to thank the very large group of people who made Saturday so amazing, including all those who came out for both events, plus the remarkable readers Carmen Tracy, Angela Beallor and Katie Daley and super-host deb. Everyone who carted things around, cleaned, played host, worked the table, THANK YOU!
"Stewards of the Lost Lands" can be found online at: www.alternaqueerbooks.com/stoflolakaso.html or in the flesh at Suspect Thoughts Books (Clark & West 50th.) New locations TBA soon.
Thursday, January 10, 2008
Book Release This Weekend
'Stewards of the Lost Lands' will have its official release Saturday, January 12 at a reading at C-Space (4323 Clark Avenue.) With poets Carmen Tracy, Angela Beallor, Katie Daley and host deb~:, it's shaping up to be an amazing night of words and discussion. The reading starts at 8:00 PM, and is followed by a DIY dance party at Tremont's Language Foundry.
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