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Hello, dear ones!
I’m coming to you all after yet another Week of Fresh Hell (please light a candle for me if that’s your thing) but I’ve missed compiling actually timely articles for our Friday Fives, so we’re getting back to it!
That said! A few months ago, I centered my newsletter on the offering my yoga instructor gave to “do less” — which includes, sometimes, not letting perfection be the enemy of showing up, and balancing accountability with realism. In the interest of practicing what I preach (to my therapist, if you’re reading this: See!!! I can do it too!!!!), there are two updates to this Friday format, starting with today’s email:
Friday Five ➡️ Friday Four. At least as a new baseline! I suspect (and hope!) there will for sure still be times when I have five fun things to send you, but I’d rather promise you four and actually get it to you than stress myself out looking for five and end up sending out another meme-based newsletter, fun as it was.
See you on the 2nd and 4th Fridays of each month! See above re: baseline! Between the author gig, the day gig, the family gig, and The Horrors, I haven’t been able to send y’all a proper Creativity for Good or Creativity Q+A in what feels like an eternity, and a lot of that is because of the bandwidth of sending this guy each week. And I miss them! Hopefully, a decrease in Friday emails will also translate to an increase in Creativity for Good newsletters. :)
That’s it for housekeeping! Let’s dive in!
your friday five four!
this week’s highlights on creating for good
”A brief history of instant coffee” (Benjamin Stubbing and Oscar Sykes for Works in Progress)
One of my very favorite lines about the many ways people express love comes from a play by Sarah Ruhl:
"There once was a very great American surgeon named Halsted. He was married to a nurse. He loved her immeasurably. One day Halsted noticed that his wife's hands were chapped and red when she came back from surgery. And so he invented rubber gloves. For her. It is one of the great love stories in medicine. The difference between inspired medicine and uninspired medicine is love.
When I met Ana, I knew: I loved her to the point of invention."
This article about the history of instant coffee isn’t about the love of people for each other (though I do suspect at least some of the people working on that centuries-long evolutionary project probably did do it for a loved one who was caffeine-dependent), but it is about the love that people have for something almost as important as other people: Coffee. But more importantly, it’s about the ways that human ingenuity and creativity never exists in a vacuum.
Whether we’re inventors, engineers, authors, artists, or any other kind of creative, we do our best work when we learn from those who came before us. From craft and technique to experimentation and research, every creator working today is, in some way, following in someone else’s footsteps. Maybe we’re taking their work further. Maybe we’re challenging it. Maybe we’re just playing in the sandbox. Whatever we’re doing, we’re participating in something that goes all the way back to cave paintings — and maybe even to whatever came before that.
What are the ancestors of your body of work? What creators, works, or communities have influenced you — not just in what you create, but in how you create it? (Think about negative influences as well as positive ones!) How do you engage with those past works or creators? What might your work look like without them?
Prompt: Think of a creator whose work has informed yours. Draw a map from their work to yours, noting what technologies, connections, or other factors had to exist in order for you to access their works enough to tie them into your own. Go as broad or as microscopic as you’d like. What do you discover? Create about it.
“The world’s first nonviolent municipality” (Stacie Freasier for Waging Nonviolence)
Coffee, as noted above, has been a source of inspiration and innovation for centuries. But partly because of that, its production has a long and violent history, ranging from human rights abuses to environmental destruction.
Freasier’s piece for Waging Nonviolence explores the story of Caicedo, a coffee-growing community in the Antioqua Mountains of Colombia. She writes,
Something incredible takes place here. The people have chosen peace. Not once, in a moment of hope. But over and over again — through decades of terror, through kidnapping and murder, through grief so deep it could have swallowed them whole. They chose it at the ballot box. They chose it in their schools. They chose it in the way they grow their coffee and raise their children and remember their dead.
[…]
Not because someone told them to. Because they chose it.
Caicedo was and is the site of a nonviolent revolution, a community that decided not just to take a stand against the guerillas and paramilitaries attacking coffee caravans and extorting, kidnapping, and murdering coffee growers but to entirely transform the way their community functioned, collaborated, supported its young people, and showed up. What started as families and neighbors walking with caravans to provide literal human shields turned into something immensely powerful that continues today.
These coffee caravans were not protests in the traditional sense. They were something quieter and more radical than that. They were people saying, with their bodies and their labor: We are still here. We are still growing. We will not let you take this from us.
[…]
While the adults were organizing caravans and rebuilding their bombed temple, they were also waging a quieter battle — one for the hearts and futures of their children.
In a region where guerrillas and paramilitaries routinely conscripted teenagers, Caicedo’s elders surrounded their young people with something stronger than a gun: music, art, collective memory and a shared language of peace. These weren’t after-school programs. They were survival strategies — deliberate, fierce acts of love designed to keep the next generation from being swallowed by the conflict.
The story of Caicedo is incredible, and if I tried to capture it all, I’d end up just copying and pasting Freasier’s entire article. So rather than give you my own questions and prompts, I’m going to pass along the invitation offered at the closing of the article itself, because the people of Caicedo can tell their stories and share their wisdom more beautifully than I ever could:
On April 1, in a bilingual webinar that moved many of us to tears, Pace e Bene Nonviolence Service officially welcomed Caicedo into the Nonviolent Cities Project — honoring it as the first nonviolent municipality in Colombia and a living example for communities everywhere that another way is possible.
[…]
Watch the webinar. Listen to Omar, Edilia, Daniel, Fernely and Danna Yalena. Listen in both languages. Let their words settle.
Then ask yourself: What would it look like to bring this spirit to my own community?
Caicedo reminds us that nonviolence is never finished. It is a practice — renewed each morning like the mist over the coffee fields.
“We Don’t Know Most Things”: Chanda Prescod-Weinstein on Curiosity and the Cosmos” (Chanda Prescod-Weinstein in conversation with Kelly Hayes, for Organizing y Thoughts)
You ever read the opening paragraph to an author interview and figuratively sprint so fast to order the book they’re talking about that you almost trip over yourself?
Well:
Do you ever feel like your imagination is being pummeled by an endless churn of bad news? Depressing headlines, hateful rhetoric, and dire predictions can leave us locked in a cycle of painful reaction. How can we envision a way forward without minimizing the harsh realities of the present? Chanda Prescod-Weinstein's new book, The Edge of Space-Time: Particles, Poetry, and the Cosmic Dream Boogie, offers an unexpected answer. On its surface, this is a book about physics—quantum mechanics, black holes, and dark matter. But it's also a profound exploration of how we think, and the possibilities that emerge when we reject the limits imposed on our imaginations.
Prescod-Weinstein is an associate professor of physics and astronomy at the University of New Hampshire and core faculty in women’s and gender studies, whose first book, The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey Into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred combined physics, racial justice, Black feminism, and Star Trek with some truly spectacular science communication skills. This interview with activist and organizer Kelly Hayes (a favorite in this newsletter, as we know) touches on some hard science, but it really centers on what’s makes science possible: curiosity.
I’m writing against despair. A sense of the big, of the wonders of the cosmos, and also the strange, like quantum theory, reminds us that the universe still holds curiosity and possibility for us. My thinking about cosmic science in this particular moment is shaped by something my mom told me, that people need to know that the universe is bigger than the bad things that happen to us. My mom, Margaret Prescod, has spent her whole life organizing, but as she said to me while I was starting work on The Edge of Space-Time, “Without joy, what the fuck is the point?” Joy is part of how we refuse the totalitarian function of dystopian politics. I was on a panel recently with Kate Marvel, who trained as a cosmologist but is now a climate scientist, and she said that cosmology helps her remember why Earth is worth saving. Every other planet we’ve found with astronomical observation is a trash planet compared to Earth, at least when it comes to habitation. I thought that was a good point, too.
Wonder and curiosity are, at least in my mind, the antithesis to anxiety and despair. Anxiety and despair assume an outcome, often spiraling around the worst possibilities and potentials. In contrast, wonder and curiosity require a willingness to take a truly open-minded look at what could be, limitless and without constraint. (Consider the community of Caicedo, above — could what they accomplished have been possible if they met those moments with despair, rather than curiosity?)
Prescod-Weinstein, at the close of her conversation with Hayes, says something similar.
I hope people will allow themselves to be curious about all kinds of things. Don’t say, “Oh well, I’m not smart enough to be curious about that.” Let yourself be curious, including about what rhetorical choices political actors are making. Be curious about hope and the function of despair. Ask questions when someone says things are natural or the way that things just have to be. Push on those boundaries and look past those edges to see if there’s something else, something better on the other side. And get worried if you stop being curious. We don’t know what 96% of the matter-energy content of the universe is. So let’s take that as a proxy, the suggestion that actually, we don’t know most things. If you’ve gotten to the point where you think you’ve got it all worked out, you’re probably wrong.
We are in a fucked up situation right now. It’s been bad for a while, and the circle of people it is bad for has widened. And the ways in which it is bad have broadened. It is easy to give in to despair, but now more than ever, we have to be curious and imaginative about how we might get out of this.
What is your relationship with curiosity? How do you feel when you find yourself not knowing something? What does that realization spark inside of you? Discomfort? Embarrassment? Excitement? How does curiosity play into the way you create? The way you interact with the world? The way you’re feeling at this moment in history — and what you’re doing in it?
Prompt: What was the last time you said to yourself, as Prescod-Weinstein says above, “Oh well, I’m not smart enough to be curious about that”? Let yourself be curious about it. What do you learn? Create about it.
”We Mapped Out Where the Best Spring Blooms Are In NYC” (Lilly Sabella and Haidee Chu in THE CITY)
My grandmother was a springtime baby (in fact, yesterday was her birthday!) and one of her favorite things about the season was always watching the natural world come back to life. When I was little, she lived in a house that backed right up onto some woodland, and I used to sit with her on her back deck, watching the first new deer peek out to investigate the wildflowers growing in her yard.
Grandma wasn’t a particularly tech-minded lady (shout out to my dad, who made multiple five-hour round trips several times a year to troubleshoot her ancient router, son-in-law of the year for real) but she did love any tool that helped her learn new things. In the early days of the pandemic, one of the things she was so excited about was how many museums and gardens opened to virtual visitors, offering online exhibits and video tours. It opened so many doors for her, and every time I called her that first spring and summer, she would tell me about some new piece of art or natural wonder she’d been able to see.
All this to say is that Grandma Harriet would have fucking loved this interactive map from THE CITY — not because she’d be spending any time in NYC anytime soon, but because she delighted in seeing the myriad tools people use to help others explore or discover something they’ve never experienced before.
If that’s not creativity, then what is?
The flower buds will get really big, and you’ll start to see a sliver of color. Then, in the afternoon, they were open.
How do you see the relationship between technology and creativity? (Go broad here — remember that the printing press, the telephone, the wheel, and even the very first twig turned into a tool are all forms of technology!) What form of technology has had the greatest impact on your creativity and your personal form of creative expression? Is there a form of technology you’ve always wanted to incorporate into your work, but haven’t? Why or why not?
Prompt: Go back to the first prompt in this newsletter, and circle one example of a technology that made your work possible. Make a commitment to learn three new things about it. What do you discover? Create about it.
See you soon!
💜Shelly
