Happy Pride month, dearest ones!
It feels a bit strange to say, but this year’s Pride energy feels more meaningful than years past. We hit, I think, a saturation point of corporate pride that shifted the narrative so far away from the original roots of this movement that those of us who brought up the reminders that this shit started as a riot were given the side-eye and told not to be party poopers.
This year is different. We started to see the shift last year, but this year, it’s really started to sink in even for the most privileged members of the queer community: Pride can’t just be a celebration anymore. It’s not just parades and parties, and won’t be for a long time. It’s fierce, resilient, furious refusal not to comply with a fascist administration, not to allow ourselves to be erased, not to go quietly into obscurity.
In one of the articles in this week’s roundup, Scot Nakagawa writes,
Artists, writers, musicians, poets, filmmakers, comedians, performers, dancers, designers — the cultural workers — are the heartbeat of social movements. Not the soundtrack. Not the marketing department. Not the auxiliary support to the real work of organizing. The heartbeat. The thing that keeps the blood moving through the body of the movement.
In moments like this, creating can feel like an act of privilege. After all, shouldn’t there be something more important, more tangible, more impactful you should be doing? How can you indulge in making art, making music, creating something new, when there is so much violence and grief and pain that needs to be healed?
But this is a reminder: Creativity is not extraneous to movements that create change. It is inextricable. I think, often, of this quote by Bertolt Brecht:
In the dark times
Will there also be singing?
Yes, there will also be singing.
About the dark times.
To sing together in the dark times, someone needs to write the songs.
Will it be you?
your friday four 💜
this week’s highlights on creating for good
“‘Sneaking the Scraps Out the Back Door.’ On Black Feminist Traditions of Memory Keeping” (Mali D. Collins for Literary Hub)
One of my very worst habits, when I’m overwhelmed by the sheer amount of chaos and clutter in my house, is to give in to the impulse to just start throwing things away. It’s so easy to argue to myself that I won’t miss things, that I don’t need them, that they’re not useful or important.
When I get into those thinking patterns, I always remember this post from author Foz Meadows, which has stuck with me for almost 10 years:
Watching my toddler figure out how to language is fascinating. […] Just now, he held up his empty milk container and said, “Mummy? It’s not rubbish. It’s allowed to be a bottle.” — meaning, effectively, “I want this. Don’t throw it away.” But to an adult ear, there’s something quite lovely about “it’s allowed to be a bottle,” as if we’re acknowledging that the object is entitled to keep its title even in the absence of the original function.
That was the quote that stayed with me as I read Collins’s piece on memory-keeping, or what she calls scrap theory. She writes,
Radical approaches to what is precious and what is worthless—or appraisal—have always been more than the inversion of that which is useless made priceless, what was originally meant to be ephemeral made timeless. Black feminist approaches to memory work create an intertextual production of memory, time, and space to scale the meaning of scraps as foundational to Black memory work across disciplines[.]
This piece, which is excerpted from Collins’ book Scrap Theory: Reproductive Injustice in the Black Feminist Imagination, explicitly centers the work of Black women and femme creatives in the African diaspora, and engages with the violence and trauma that created this approach to memory-keeping. Much of what she discusses is unique to that community, and I won’t generalize it to creatives as a whole.
But this idea of finding preciousness and pricelessness in what would otherwise be deemed unnecessary, useless, discardable — that, I think, is something we can all understand. Creatives by nature find beauty in find the ostensibly unremarkable, wonder in the everyday and ordinary. No surprise, then, that those of us whose lives are touched by intergenerational and individual and collective trauma see something worth preserving, worth treasuring, in something that others might pass by.
What things do you treasure that someone else might consider scraps? What do they mean to you, and why are they precious? How have you kept them with you, and for how long? Do these treasured pieces of memory find their way into your creative work? How?
Prompt: Choose one of your treasures. Set a timer and write down everything that comes to mind when you sit with it, touch it, hold it, explore it with your senses. What comes up for you? Create about it.
“The Heartbeat and the Builders” (Scot Nakagawa for The Anti-Authoritarian Playbook)
“Free expression,” Nakagawa writes, “is the air inside the architecture. You can build the most perfectly proportioned house in the world, but if there is no air in it, nothing lives there. Strip away free expression and pluralism becomes a tomb that happens to look like a home, but cannot sustain us.”
Nakagawa defines free expression as “the unconstrained ability of people to speak, to hear each other, to argue, to refuse, to mock, to mourn, to organize, to imagine otherwise.” This, he argues, is why authoritarian regimes begin their work by focusing on institutions of free expression:
They begin by emptying the air. They go after journalists, teachers, librarians, artists, comedians, religious dissenters, and then anyone whose work depends on speaking the truth about what they actually see. […] Once enough of the air has been pumped out, the architecture starts to look exactly the same on the outside while becoming uninhabitable on the inside. The forms of pluralism remain. The substance is gone. This is why every serious catalog of authoritarian backsliding leads with the closing of expressive space, not with the dismantling of formal institutions. The institutions usually come later. The air goes first.
People need air to survive — literally and physically; body, mind, and soul. The creatives who show up to keep our movements going aren’t extraneous, aren’t a “nice to have” while the “real” activists and organizers do the “real” work. Rather, Nakagawa writes,
Authoritarian consolidation depends on a felt sense that the new arrangement is just how things are now — settled, inevitable, beyond effective contestation. Cultural workers, when they’re doing their actual job, keep that construction from solidifying. A song mocks what is supposed to be feared. A poem treats with seriousness what is supposed to be dismissed. A novel imagines what is supposed to be impossible. A comedian says the obvious thing the talking heads have agreed not to say. Each of these is a small puncture in the wall of this is just how it is now. Enough punctures and the wall comes down.
“The heartbeat,” Nakagawa concludes, “is what they will try to stop first. We keep it beating.”
What are the creative offerings you can bring to the movements of this moment? Who are the ancestors who previously brought the same form of creative work to the movements of their times — the musicians, the artists, the writers, the photographers, the filmmakers, the stage artists — and how do you see your work in conversation with theirs? Are you bringing your creative energy into the organizing and activism happening around you? If so, how? If not, why not?
Prompt: When you think of “protest art,” what is the first thing that comes to mind? Is it a song? A poem? A mural? Something entirely different? Whatever it is, look it up and spend some time learning about its history, its context, its story. What do you discover? Create about it.
“Restorative justice is nonviolence in practice” (Jonathan Bailey in conversation with Stephanie Van Hook and Michael Hagler for Nonviolence Radio)
In Emergent Strategy, adrienne maree brown writes,
Science fiction is simply a way to practice the future together. I suspect that is what many of you are up to, practicing futures together, practicing justice together, living into new stories. It is our right and responsibility to create a new world.
Whenever the topic of restorative justice and other non-punitive approaches to criminal justice comes up, this is often the first quote I think of. Systems of justice rooted in punishment and retribution are so deeply ingrained in social memory for so many of us that any challenge to those systems leads to a knee-jerk snap of well, what would you do instead?
Stephanie Van Hook, one of the hosts of Nonviolence Radio, turned that question back around in her introduction to this interview:
I think a lot of the work of restorative justice is deeply embedded into the work of nonviolence. […] You can study nonviolence and think about it and practice it. But when you start going beyond retributive thinking in your mind, so then you have to heal from that. And then you start noticing all of the retribution and all of the vengeance that’s part of our culture. You start to realize that all of this is feeding into the violent structures that we have. And so one of the most radical things that we can do is then to reject that kind of media, to reject that kind of thinking, whether you want to use the word reject or transform or whatever, but distance yourself from it and start to find other ways, get curious about other ways of solving our problem because if we want to end the structures of violence that are part of our world, they thrive, or, they don’t thrive, they run on retribution; everything from the prison system to punishing children to immigration reform in this country to war.
For practitioners and teachers of restorative justice, like Jonathan Bailey, part of that shift starts with reframing. Restorative justice, he says, is not a system so much as a practice — and a practice that needs to keep being practiced, because with the culture we’re steeped in, it is very, very hard for that shift in thinking to become automatic. “You have to practice,” he says. “I’m practicing all the time every day. It’s just like practicing anything else like language or walking.”
He went on,
One thing that you have to understand as a practitioner; we don’t utilize the language of punitive justice. The language of punitive justice is “it worked” and “it didn’t work,” that’s always within punitive justice. And so when someone tells me that it works, or let’s say someone tells me [restorative justice] doesn’t work, my reply, rebuttal to that is “are you working it, do you understand how this works and have you been using it, have you been practicing it?” It’s a practice: you have to not only think, it’s got to start here in your head then it has to flow through your body and you have to walk it, talk it, breathe it, and all those other things that you do with things like that.
And this is where we come back to the idea of science fiction, right? Sci-fi, as a core concept, is about engaging with and twisting around the systems and structures and practices we’ve been taught to think of as immutable laws. That kind of engagement is encouraged in fiction, in art, but in real life? Oh, no no no.
But what Bailey and other teachers of restorative justice want us to remember is that we don’t have to wait for some mystical distant future to make those new worlds. They’re already being built, all around us. We just have to join in the work.
What are the societal-level (institutional, industrial, ingrained) systems that have shaped your life, and how does your creative work engage with those systems? How have those systems impacted the way you see the world — your beliefs, your values, what you take for granted as part of the “social contract”? Does your creative work operate within those systems? Does it contradict them? Do you?
Prompt: Choose a system, institution, or norm that most people — including or not including yourself — take as unchangeable or without alternatives. Consider: What could an alternative system look like? How could it be built? What would be different? Create about it.
“You Just Had to Make Something: An Interview with Harry Dodge & Silas Howard” (Payton McCarty-Simas for Bright Wall/Dark Room)
It obviously wouldn’t be a pride month email without at least one piece specifically about queer art, right? Right. Obviously.
Twenty-five years ago, Harry Dodge and Silas Howard released By Hook or By Crook, a film that somehow managed to combine a buddy comedy with an investigation of gender, literary theory and poetic language, and community dynamics within marginalizations. It is, and I say this as someone who is extremely picky about my media: a fucking banger of a film.
Part of what makes the movie so unique — and I think also part of what’s contributed to its staying power over the years — is the way Dodge and Howard approached the script. Dodge and Howard got their start not in screenwriting but in music and spoken word poetry respectively, and it’s something that doesn’t just translate on screen but also in their willingness to break some rules and conventions that still shape the way films are made today:
[Silas Howard]: There was very little improv. Harry’s work—and I’ll let you speak for yourself on it, but—Harry was doing these plays, and people were reading the skits that were supportive, but they were like, “You can’t have a character talk like this.” We were just like, “Well, we want to, and we’re going to just do it.” I knew Harry could pull it off. Not many people could!
[Harry Dodge]: Both of us had been reading a lot and appreciating things a lot. I’ve really enjoyed Tennessee Williams, like I said, or Virginia Woolf. I really, really enjoy a book where people are taking liberties with language. I don’t necessarily enjoy a plainspoken text at all, whether it’s philosophy or fiction or whatever. I’m like, “Just kind of make me confused” you know? Straight up. I want to be like, “Well now, what?” and go to read it again. That’s my favorite thing. Language can be beautiful and blow you out of the water, so the fact that a lot of film language is kind of these grunts and squeaks, while mainly they’re doing everything visually, is wonderful, and that’s what all the script books told us to do, but there was another thing that we were curious about, and that was like, how much of this more literary language can we fit into the movie?
Queerness is rule-breaking by definition, and queer art often even more so. Queer artists (and artists from other marginalized communities), I’ve noticed, take a particular delight in not just breaking conventions by the content or subjects of their work, but also in the form and structure and construction. Novels written as epistolaries or time loops, poetry that takes patterns over and around pages, mixed-media art that plays with every material it can find. This isn’t to say that non-marginalized creatives can’t or don’t do those things, but there’s a different type of approach to it: It’s craft, and it’s work, but is it play? Is it another form of expressing being the other and taking joy and satisfaction in breaking molds, or is it just about flexing a creative muscle?
Both are valid forms of creative work, but it makes a difference — especially now — to know when something is intentionally created as an act of resistance and rule-breaking.
After all: Weren’t rules made to be broken?
Do you like to break, play with, or challenge the conventions of the medium where you create? What are the rules — spoken or unspoken — that you have the most fun (if it’s fun!) engaging with, twisting, or otherwise exploring? Are there others who have done that same challenging whose work you admire (in your same creative field or a different one)? How can you bring this same approach of challenging rules and making space for something new and adventurous to the way(s) you show up in community?
Prompt: Consider Harry Dodge’s words in this article: “I’m like, ‘Just kind of make me confused’ you know? Straight up. I want to be like, ‘Well now, what?’ and go to read it again.” Think of a creative work that confused you. Go back to it and watch, read, study it again. What do you discover? Create about it.
That’s all from me this time around. Stay queer, stay weird, stay you.
💜Shelly
