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I found my dead father's house on Airbnb. It looked nothing like it.

Recently, while looking for an Airbnb in my hometown for an upcoming visit, I found my dead father’s house.

Bewildered, I scanned the listing. Could this really be the same house where I’d scrambled eggs for him every morning and watched his favorite movies on TCM every night? The new owners had stripped the place of its shabbiness, though I wondered as I read whether they'd been able to do the same with its termites. Back when I’d lived there, an unusually ballsy mouse had ruled over the kitchen, where one side of the fridge stood on bricks because otherwise it tilted to the left from the warped tile floor. When the mouse startled me one day, calmly eating an English muffin on the countertop when I went to make coffee, my father had rolled his eyes at my scream. “That’s Mister Jingles,” he said with exasperation. “Be nice.”

The house was no “castle,” as the ad’s headline claimed. Each of its rooms was a quarter of the size that the wide-angled photos made them appear to be. Photos of the kitchen diligently cropped out the bottom left corner of the fridge, where the bricks held it up. Yet, brightened by a ring light and stuffed with the same West Elm bric-a-brac that furnishes every Airbnb, it did look like a plausible getaway. “Nobody lives here full time,” bragged the ad. “You can make yourself at home” for $145 a night.

“Nobody lives here full time”—that opposed the entire ethos of Airbnb as it once was, when it presented itself as a cheaper alternative to hotels and a win-win for everybody who used it. Founders Joe Gebbia and Brian Chesky say the idea for Airbnb came to them when they were struggling to afford the rent on their San Francisco apartment in 2007—they crammed in a few air mattresses and charged guests $80 a night to sleep on them. A year later, they turned their “Air Bed and Breakfast” into a business.

Supposedly, the idea was always for the experience to be somewhat personal, on both hosts’ and travelers’ sides. Travelers could see a new place from a lived-in home base that lent the trip some local flavor; hosts could make money off their spare rooms while offering a little hospitality. But as Airbnb’s popularity exploded, so did its problems. Tourist-heavy neighborhoods became Airbnb hubs where long term residents could no longer afford to live. Landlords converted rental units into more-profitable Airbnbs and stopped renting them to tenants. Cities’ attempts to regulate the app’s presence have proven difficult and feeble. And, of course, as more homes became full-time Airbnbs, those Airbnbs got worse.

The average Airbnb used to be friendlier than a chain hotel room. The aggressively anodyne watercolors and unopenable windows of a hotel gave way to the warmth of a real person’s home. But a real home also comes with real hassles. Guests at a hotel can leave the room as messy as they want; guests at an Airbnb have to clean up after themselves and leave the place roughly as they found it, even though hosts collect a “cleaning fee” on each reservation. The hassles were only worth it for as long as Airbnb remained the cheaper option.

And while, in 2022, data suggests that Airbnbs are still cheaper, the gap is closing quickly, and not just in terms of cost. Anecdotally, Airbnbs have been losing all personality for years. My dead father’s house—correction, my dead father’s “castle”—looks just like the “artist’s studios” and “boutique lofts” that proliferate every city on the app. Add some moose antlers to one wall and it could be a “peaceful ski lodge”; throw in a hammock and it could be a “beach house paradise.” But such hifalutin terms fail to justify Airbnb’s skyrocketing prices. When guests pay $145 a night to stay in my father’s castle, do they coo over the brass-plated vases on every surface, or do they scream at the sight of its long term resident, Mister Jingles?

Alongside the spendy soullessness of these units, the annoyances have continued to mount. Because people really did live in most early Airbnbs, they came stocked with cookware and basic amenities. Hosts who actually lived in their units were also intimately familiar with them, and could answer questions about what to do with a sticky key or whether the cat was allowed on the fire escape. The increasingly impersonal nature of Airbnbs has turned them into hotels with none of a hotel’s conveniences and even more pointed surveillance. Paranoid about their liability for everything from accidents at their guests’ family barbecues to long-term guests’ ability to claim squatters’ rights, hosts have cut corners and set unreasonable limits. For example, I am presently writing this from an Airbnb with an in-unit washer/dryer that’s padlocked to keep guests from using it.

Airbnb is still the most plausible option for guests who will be staying somewhere for a while and need a place to cook, or people looking for a place where traditional accommodations aren’t possible. Even towns that are light on tourism and don’t have many hotels usually have at least a few Airbnbs available—like the one where my father once lived. His “castle” is one of about a dozen Airbnbs in his far-flung suburb, and it’s by far the priciest one. In more remote locations like this, Airbnb sometimes retains some of its old charm. But in the case of the castle, I scroll through photo after photo of beige furniture and wonder what’s lost when homes are turned into working sites of capital.

My father died in 2018, and I liked to visit his house on Google Earth in the months after his death. I’d drag the photo of the building in circles with my cursor, trying to peer into windows. Here was where he held my head in his lap after I left my husband, patting my hair until my mucous-inflected sobs dried up; here I botched our meatloaf dinner and he laughed, said we could go to Popeye’s instead. I would imagine that we were in the Google Earth photo, nestled into that sweet dilapidated cottage with our junk food and our mouse, watching a movie, out of sight of the camera but very much at home.

Google posted photos of the place in 2012 when he lived there, a month after he died in 2018, and in 2019. As time goes on, the little pink house looks less and less loved. The vivid azaleas and carefully pruned dogwoods that lined the front walk in 2013 gave way to hostile overgrowth in 2018, all to be abandoned to a completely bare lawn by 2019, when the house’s current owner took over. The dogwoods and azaleas are long gone now, seemingly not just cut down but obliterated by the roots from the earth. The grass is perfect. The house is no longer pale pink, but a whitish color that is no color at all. It has been transformed from a home into a rentable castle.

It could be an Airbnb in Vancouver, Woodstock, or Miami. It could be anywhere, could belong to anyone. Nobody lives there full time. You can make yourself at home.

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September 8, 2022August 28, 2024

What’s Lost When a Home Becomes a Working Site of Capital

by Rax King

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 4418 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2022-09-01 23:30:00 [post_date_gmt] => 2022-09-01 23:30:00 [post_content] =>

A round table with a few members of the Abolitionist Library Association.

In the wake of George Floyd’s murder by then-police officer and now-convicted killer Derek Chauvin in 2020, a large swath of people who’d never paid attention to systemic, anti-Black racism began, for the first time, to acknowledge its existence. Something shifted. Folks who had never spoken out chose to engage; to actually do something. While the Black Lives Matter movement had existed for nearly seven years before Floyd’s death—and abolitionism for many years before that—the widespread protests of 2020 seemed to give these movements new momentum. At the height of a raging pandemic, during a time of mass isolation and fear, hundreds of thousands of people across the world took to the streets, standing up against racist police violence and the prison-industrial complex it fuels.

In the two years since, the greater outrage has waned. Those privileged enough to not have paid attention before largely went back to not paying attention; while the people who had already been doing the work continued to do the work. But that initial uprising—that newfound awareness, and solidarity, and, in some cases, radicalization—was nonetheless significant, and provided necessary support for longtime activists to realize long-held needs, giving community spaces and organizations more resources to work towards collective liberation and even, perhaps, some policy change.

One of those spaces was the library.

In the spring of 2020, the Library Freedom Project published a piece on Medium titled, “It’s not enough to say Black Lives Matter—libraries must divest from the police.” The post set the library world ablaze, and before long, a group of library workers gathered over Zoom to discuss what they could do to further their message and their agenda. From this meeting—and from decades of work before it—the Abolitionist Library Association, or AbLA, was born.

More than two years after AbLA’s inception, we sat down with four of its members*—Lawrence M. (they/them), Megan R. (she/they), Jen W. (she/they), and Les D. (they/she)—to discuss the intersection between abolitionism and library work, the importance of creating safe public spaces, and the power of the collective.

*In respect of their privacy both online and off, we’ve opted to include only their first names and last initials.

Gina M.

To kick things off, I feel like an obvious question, but an important one, is: What is an abolitionist library worker? What does that mean, in action?

Lawrence M.

I think it's important to foreground abolition as a specific political ideology that stems from the Black radical and Black revolutionary tradition. Dr. Joy James talks about the plurality of abolitionism, right? So I'll speak for myself: When I think about abolition, I think about this long tradition that started with the desire and the demand to end Black chattel slavery. Today what that looks like is seeing how carcerality permeates through our social structures here on occupied Turtle Island, or the United States. Abolitionists are committed and dedicated to disrupting and ending the way carcerality works, and really carcerality in general.

Megan R.

That's a really good starting point and really important background that not necessarily everybody is conscious of when they're coming to abolition. Recently, I have been doing a lot of reading around the idea of the carceral habitus, and just the structuring of society in this punitive, carceral way, and how it presents itself as a natural occurrence, or a natural way of being a society when, in fact, it's not. By human nature, we're not necessarily punitive. Our interactions don't have to be based around punishment. So I think that abolition just offers such beautiful possibilities for life outside of this carceral framework, and that's the attitude that I try to bring to my library work.

Jen W.

Yeah—this is work that Black women have been leading for a very long time, and so all the work of our association is really built on their shoulders. That's important to acknowledge. You also might not necessarily think abolitionist and librarian go together. But the library world is not immune from carcerality. I mean, the stereotypical image of a librarian is literally someone shushing people. And I think that there's a lot of ways that people are policed in library spaces, or that libraries play into the prison-industrial complex. There are very practical issues that come up in all library spaces, not just public libraries, where you'll have a security guard be the first person you see when you walk in. Some libraries have security gates that literally beep if you didn't check out a book.

Megan R.

I want to really quickly touch back on the archetypal image of the librarian as shushing or performing some sort of policing behavior. Because I really want to emphasize that that archetype, or that archetypal image, is usually a white woman. So it's really crucial to be aware of the history of libraries as institutions that continue to uphold white supremacy through this policing of behaviors, and their role in the Americanization of immigrants and inculcating the youth. Even if you're not necessarily thinking about it in terms of penal abolition, just thinking about the ways in which social reproduction happens in libraries, especially public libraries, and who is allowed to be in those spaces, and what behaviors are allowed to occur in those spaces.

Gina M.

All of you are touching on something that I was going to ask, which is, if there’s a Venn diagram, right, between library work and library spaces, and abolition work and the prison-industrial complex, what's in the in-between? Libraries, at their best, should be these incredible public spaces and resources for people—but even they have been subjected to the carceral state that we exist in. Which leads very nicely into the origins of AbLA. I would love to hear a little bit more about your origin story. And, out of curiosity, was it a conscious choice to lead with abolitionist in your name?

Lawrence M.

So, Alison, right?

Jen W.

Yeah. AbLA got started in the wake of the George Floyd uprisings. Alison Macrina and some people from the Library Freedom Project had written a piece that was published on Medium. And that was kind of the birth of this association. The reason that it's the Abolitionist Library Association—as Lawrence said, that's what we want to foreground. And also, a little bit of mockery of ALA [American Library Association]. There's also the fact that the Abolitionist Library Association is more inclusive to library workers who might not necessarily be a degreed librarian.

Megan R.

Yeah, we actually spent a lot of time trying to figure out what to call ourselves. Because, like Jen mentioned, not everybody who works in the library is a librarian. I tend to use the term library workers, just to be as inclusive as possible. But we also wanted it to be a space where library patrons and community members can get involved, as well. We jokingly called ourselves the "good ALA" for a while, which was not really sustainable—which is how we ended up with AbLA.

Lawrence M.

We still are the good ALA, by the way.

Megan R.

I feel like maybe [Alison] put out a call on Twitter or something along those lines. I don't remember exactly. But I remember that we all ended up on Zoom.

Jen W.

I think we called it a town hall, to discuss the Medium article, because it had gotten a lot of attention. And there was clearly a need for a space to talk about it.

Lawrence M.

Yeah, no, we can't talk about AbLA without talking about Alison. The call went out on Twitter, and we were looking at this uprising, and everyone was thinking about the field—or, everyone who gave a shit was thinking about the field—and it was like, Okay, well, what the fuck are we going to do?

And that was the first time we all got together, reviewed the statement, and went from there. But I don't know—there's a part of me, a big part of me, that wants to be like, that first meeting was not so much the origin but the culmination of a lot of things. Gina, you brought up the library being a public space, right? Well, just seeing historically how that public space wasn't available for Black people specifically, and Indigenous and racialized non-white people in general—for me, it was a start, but also the apex of what was going on during spring 2020.

Megan R.

On that note, I feel like the town hall and then the subsequent meetings that eventually morphed into AbLA, what also facilitated it, in a lot of ways, was COVID forcing everything to be online. So all of these different organizing projects that have been running parallel to each other in a lot of ways—like Cop-Free NYC and things like that—people all had a chance to connect with each other.

Gina M.

What has the work looked like so far? Or, put another way, what are the biggest goals of AbLA? I’ve read your website, of course, and the four tenets you laid out. But in your own words, what do you hope to accomplish with it?

Lawrence M.

You know, I think first and foremost, AbLA is rooted in a liberatory ideology. That's in our mission statement, if I'm not mistaken. So off the bat, reforms to liberal approaches to carcerality—I won't say we’ll outright reject, but we'll heavily scrutinize.

Megan R.

I really quickly want to backtrack to AbLA’s origins and mention that the listserv, I think, has been one thing that's really kept momentum going. Like, it's being used in ways that I didn't anticipate, including people sharing job openings and things like that. So that's been really helpful. I like listservs—it's kind of old school, but I think it's helpful.

Lawrence M.

About AbLA and the listserv, too: We have “Association” in the name, but we're not an association. Like, I think the term that could best describe us is a political formation, and I’m not even loosely using that term, [that’s] as accurate as I can be. And in terms of listservs, I'm typically not a fan of them, but AbLA is the only listserv that I know in which the conversations that are happening on this listserv—I don't see those conversations anywhere else.

Gina M.

Your listserv is open to everyone too, right?

Lawrence M.

Yeah, it's open to everyone.

Megan R.

Which you know, is a double edged sword in that everything that is happening there is essentially public.

Lawrence M.

It's open to everyone, but not cops. I will say, for sure: If I find out there's a cop on the listserv, they're gone. You can put me on the record for that!

Gina M.

It sounds like it’s this public resource in itself, the listserv.

Jen W.

The listserv is certainly very active. There are probably like 1000 people on our listserv at this time. And I think the listserv has been a great space for people who are dealing with specific in-the-moment issues with policing, to come to our group and be like, I don't know what to do. I don't know how to get my administration to realize this is bad, and to be able to find support and practical advice for how to divest from policing in our spaces.

Megan R.

I mean, this idea of community self determination and working towards liberation is really important. And what goes hand in hand with that for me is rethinking what we mean by public safety in public places. Obviously not just for patrons, but for workers.

Thinking on the recent news, I don't know if you saw that there was a retired cop that shot and killed a library—what do they call them—a special library police officer, in the DC Public Library during a training yesterday. And I was just seeing so many comments on Twitter, like, Wait, there are cops in libraries? Why are there cops with guns in libraries? And I think it's one of those things that's not even flown under the radar, it's just that, in the United States, the presence of police officers goes so unremarked upon, that trying to foreground the “Abolitionist” in the Abolitionist Library Association is really important in even just becoming aware of the ways in which the carceral has intruded into public space, or shaped public space.

Jen W.

On a practical level, just to give a general overview of some of what the work has looked like: There were a couple of divestment campaigns that really got off the ground in 2020. And as a group, we were able to support those campaigns throughout the country. And then we also have some specific working groups, [which] will have their own meetings and their own agendas. We have a special collections working group that is very active—you might have seen the Ivy+ divestment statement that came out from there. And then we also have our working group focused on information access for incarcerated people. That group was born out of a specific attempt to ban one of Mariame Kaba's books in Washington, but has since become a place for people who are doing work to make information accessible, to come together and talk about the challenges that they're facing.

I think the exciting thing about libraries is that we do have the possibility of being liberatory spaces in a way that many spaces don't. But we aren't inherently liberatory spaces. Because we are state institutions under capitalism, we replicate the same oppressive dynamics as other institutions. But having the space where we can come together, and be real about that, and find other people who have the political goal of abolition, to talk about like, Okay, we're doing this work at my library, how do I do it through this lens? I think especially with prison library work, it can be hard, because you're often doing it through the state library, partnering with the state Department of Corrections. And it's like, how do you do that work in a way that is abolitionist?

Les D.

Speaking to what Jen was saying as far as sharing notes, and that sense of community and support—it especially meant a lot to me when I was in my last position, in western Kentucky. You kind of feel alone out there, and this is a space that I could turn to to get the feedback I was looking for and build some strategies and carry through and such. From my rural organizing background, [I] definitely see the importance of decentralized social spaces on the internet. We have people involved with AbLA who are from all over, and being able to exchange notes has been really crucial. Those of us who've become friends through the work, as well, that's just as important. Because not only are we achieving and winning battles, and pushing for these wins, but we're also supporting one another.

Megan R.

You're [raising] a good point of not just [providing] mutual support for one another, but the idea of joy and play and friendship in this work, as well, because so much of it is really heavy. And a lot of it is done on our own time, as volunteer work—like those of us who do reference by mail for incarcerated people, that's usually volunteer work with PLSN [Prison Library Support Network]. Just being able to—the work itself isn't necessarily fun all the time, but that you can find joy as a result of it.

Gina M.

It’s really interesting to hear you talk about the community aspect of it, which feels so essential—being able to be in community with each other, both on the abolitionist side, and on the library work side. Especially because, all of you keep bringing up this idea of the promise of the public space versus the reality of the public space. Lawrence, I think you were saying, traditionally, libraries were not actually that inclusive at all. You could argue a lot of library spaces still aren't, to unhoused people, and to Black and brown and Indigenous people. And in spaces where the work is very heavy and very difficult, there is—to your point, Megan—value in having people who are in the boat with you, and to feeling like you aren't alone in the work. Has that been a driving force for AbLA?

Les D.

I was going to add to that. Like, some of us have pushed back in ways that did put our jobs at risk. I mean, we are fighting for abolition under capitalism, and health care is tied to employment. So we are building power in this formation to be able to push for things, while still balancing [the fact that] we work for the state. And there's a tension there, right? And it's dangerous at times. So to varying levels, there is some risk, and being able to be in relationship with one another in that strategy and building that strategy accordingly has been really powerful.

Megan R.

Yeah, I think this idea of tension is a really important one, too, because that's working on a lot of different levels. Especially these days, with the current political climate around libraries, and the very real possibility of physical danger, not just job security. Les mentioned the decentralized formation that we use for AbLA. But at the same time, because we have a name now, it validates us [and] our work in a way, in that we have been cited in some academic pieces, or at conferences and things like that. So [there’s] this tension between being a formal organization, but then at the same time, at least for me, this resistance to this formalizing and institutionalizing of the work that's being done.

Jen W.

I want to piggyback off of that. Because we have built a network, we were able to mobilize to support Amy Dodson, [for example]. She had to go before her library board for a hearing to determine whether or not she was going to lose her job, and we wrote a letter that was presented to the board. And, you know, I don't want to give AbLA too much credit here, but we did a lot to really make sure that there was public outcry and that it was very clear that she had a lot of support, and not just in her county or her state, but nationally. Having been able to have that kind of collective influence was very valuable, and we've been able to replicate that a couple of times. Recently, we had some of our members who put together a statement pushing back on the Michigan Department of Corrections' decision to censor language learning books, and not allow Spanish or Swahili language books to be sent to their prisons. And again, I can't necessarily credit AbLA for reversing it. But I think that we did help to make sure that there was a lot of public attention, and that people across the country saw what they were doing and thought it was bad. Thankfully, the Michigan DOC has also walked back the policy.

Gina M.

What’s next for AbLA? How do you want to see it grow? What’s the ideal for you of what AbLA can do and what it can become?

Lawrence M.

Ideally, our way of seeing the political structures that reinforce the library becomes the norm, right? Just in my work alone, I'm seeing more and more people who are new to the field, realizing the same shit we've known. And [I want] AbLA to continue to be a space for new library workers to feel welcomed into. But also, I'm going to do what I always do and quote Fred Moten, because once you get rid of the police, you have to take care of policy, because all the police are is just an embodiment of policy. So in terms of growth, that's what I would like: I would like for more and more people to just be like, No, AbLA is the fucking standard. You're getting into this field. You're committed to making things better for everybody except cops and capitalists and fascists.

Megan R.

I agree with what Lawrence's saying. Even thinking about policy, within the library world—Emily Drabinski winning the election for ALA president is really exciting. Because she's somebody that I know has done reference work with incarcerated people. She's really strong on labor, which, I feel like you can't really talk about safety and library work without also talking about the labor aspect of it. And I don't know, I feel like a lot of AbLA people—not necessarily in the context of AbLA—were involved in [that] campaign. It's hard to say how that's gonna turn out because ALA is such a large organization and pretty conservative, but building power is important however we can do it right now.

In terms of where I'd like to see AbLA go, it feels like a lot of people's energy has become focused on their working groups, which is really good, because when we first started having regular meetings, I think people were really fired up and ready to go, but it becomes an issue of sustainability and burnout. And it seems like it's settling more into a place where people have a better understanding of their own capacities, with the work that they can do in a way that is going to keep the work going. For myself, really just focusing more on the information access for incarcerated people working group has felt really sustainable for me, and encouraging other folks to participate in ways that feel sustainable to them is the best way that I would like to see it grow.

Les D.

Yeah, the sustainable engagement is really important, especially to longevity of the movement and actually making sustainable change. That's how it's looked for me, as well. Also doing some research on deescalation tactics in libraries, in order to avoid calling the police—that's something I've been working on. But knowing everyone's out there doing the work, and that solidarity there, is pretty powerful. Having the support and the tools to do that work is really important. More skill sharing, as we have been doing all along, is a key concept, I think.

Jen W.

My answer would probably just echo a lot of what everyone else has said. [But] I also want to say that, I think we're in a moment where, every day, fascism's stronghold is growing. And we're seeing that in libraries a lot, as well. We’ve seen a lot of push for censoring collections; we've seen fucking white supremacist militias showing up to drag queen storytime and interrupting; and people trying to destroy pride displays or make sure that those books aren't available. And ALA is nowhere to be found.

Often, more bureaucratic or conservative organizations like ALA, or library administrators, the people in power in libraries—their default response to a fascist attack is to be like, Okay, well, we need [more] security, we need police. Like, the answer is basically more fascism. So I hope that AbLA will continue to be a space where people can see that we can push back in ways that are still centering the safety of our Black and brown patrons, that are still keeping libraries a space that is open to everyone, except for cops and Proud Boys. I feel a little corny because everyone quotes Mariame Kaba all the time, but her words are so valuable, and she always reminds us that hope is a discipline. In this day and age, it can be really easy to feel hopeless and to feel like we don't have the power to push back. And having a space that helps us remember that, actually, there is hope, and we can push back, and it doesn’t have to default to carceral solutions—I think that's incredibly valuable. I hope that people will continue to see that value and continue to keep that space alive, so that we can continue to collectively push back.

Gina M.

How can people who aren’t library workers best support your work?

Les D.

I can run with this one because this is what my research work is on. As far as just anyone goes, building conflict navigation skills—deescalation skills—are really important. In [the] public library context, what I'm working on is toolkits for library staff to use to not only deescalate a situation where a patron is having a bit of a mental break, and is being loud or argumentative—being able to engage with them in a compassionate way to then bring down the situation and make sure they're taken care of in that moment, as well as deescalate surrounding patrons so they don't react in a way that makes the situation worse and thus more unsafe, all with the intention of discouraging calling police because we know how dangerous police are in mental crisis moments. All that to say, if anyone wants to engage with this work, learning how to do bystander intervention, learning how to even just breathe through a moment, calm down people around you, and approach tension with compassion [and] patience. If everybody in the space can agree, Okay, we're gonna try to get through this as smoothly as possible, that makes it a lot easier for library staff.

Jen W.

Libraries are institutions that are meant to serve our community. So I think encouraging our community to show up and tell us what they like and what they don't like; white people [especially] have to have a voice in helping us push back on having cops or security in the library. You know, if enough people say, Hey, this doesn't feel great, then maybe administrators will listen and be willing to make a change. Showing up in solidarity—a lot of people have already been doing that—[and] showing that, as a community, we can protect ourselves, we can take care of each other, we don't need the cops. I hope that we, as library workers, can make it clear that the stereotypical power dynamic of that white lady librarian shushing people—that's not how we want to be, that's not what libraries want to be, and we want to know how we can make these spaces better for everyone. We want people's voices to be heard.

Lawrence M.

Yeah, off the top of my head, what can people do? Your library has a Friends of the Library—see what they're up to. If you want to join, it'd be cool to join. I mean, shit, get on the Library Board of Directors, if your library has one.

Megan R.

Run for your local library board if you can. I know that’s not something that everybody feels comfortable doing but if that’s something in your capacity, go for it! Otherwise even just attending the meetings and letting your library board know that people in the community are invested in what happens with the library is really powerful. And give public comment, if you feel so inclined. But I think probably the most basic is learning about abolition and what that means and what it entails.

Lawrence M.

The type of person I am, I just want [people to] study. I think analysis is key in this specific historical moment, because what we know, what informs our ideology, affects how we move [and] defines our praxis. Read Angela Y. Davis's Are Prisons Obsolete? Read Mariame Kaba's We Do This Until We Free Us. Specifically looking at abolitionist texts, and committing to an abolitionist praxis, will help people figure out where they best fit in. So you know, the typical person who's reading this, we can always put out great suggestions, but at the end of the day, figure out where you stand politically and who you want to be in this moment, because you, dear reader, are ultimately going to know where you best fit.

Jen W.

Libraries have lied to you about neutrality being a thing. It's not a thing.

Lawrence M.

Yep. Essentially, pick a side. Going back to the start of our conversation, we are part of a long historical tradition here that is still ongoing. And I think study and analysis is key.

Gina M.

And get those books from the library?

Les D.

Yes, please. I was gonna elaborate as far as tactical, action steps, if you can get something submitted—like good feedback that can go on someone's record, in-house—that's a structural way to have our backs. I've been in those situations where the record comes up, and if you've got good marks [as a library worker], then you have a little bit more wiggle room to push back. So giving good feedback about your library, on paper, is a great move for just regular ol' library users, because it does matter. You do have a lot of power as the user in that situation.

Gina M.

My last question for all of you, just to end things on a joyful note—I imagine you were all drawn to library work for your own personal reasons. I'd love to hear why.

Lawrence M.

I'm just good at it. And I figured I may as well get paid to help people find information. And also, I've seen the consequences. I've seen the consequences when people, especially marginalized people, do not have access to the information that they need. I used to work with teenagers in Long Beach Unified School District, talking about, like, missed deadlines for college applications, or lost opportunities for scholarships. But also, deportations, just because somebody didn't know that ICE needed a warrant to come into somebody's place. I'm good at finding shit (information), and I'm good at communicating it and conveying it to people. So I just figured I should get paid for this. And I am and it's great.

Gina M.

Do you like the work?

Lawrence M.

Oh, yeah. I mean, what I love most is disrupting fascism. It's great. I sleep comfortably at night, knowing that ICE has a few less people to surveil online.

Gina M.

Jen? Les? Megan?

Megan R.

I started library school back in 2011, right after undergrad, mostly because I didn’t really know what to do with my Comparative Literature degree. But I dropped out after a quarter, and ended up working for a while, and then went back seven years later—and I’m really glad I waited, because it gave me a lot better of an idea of what I wanted to do with my degree. I just got really interested in precarious labor in libraries and archives. I considered myself an abolitionist prior to library school, [and] I think library work just has so much potential in terms of realizing, or working towards, a more radical, liberatory vision for our communities and collective liberation. And that just feels like the right place for me to be right now.

Jen W.

So, I don't have my MLIS. I don't even have a bachelor's degree—I'm working on that now. But I tried to get a library job out of high school, because of romanticizing the idea of working at a library. Like Lawrence said, I love information. And once I started working in a library, I realized it was such a perfect intersection of my favorite thing—information—and an opportunity to hate cops. I wanted to stay in it. I've had a lot of jobs, and I always tried to find work that felt like it fit with my values, and was often disappointed. And certainly, libraries can also be disappointing in those ways. But I've been so energized by finding community and having found AbLA because I didn't start working in libraries until 2019. And when I was able to find these like-minded people, that has really kept me wanting to do this work, because it feels like there is possibility—there's opportunity—to transform these spaces. And like Lawrence said, as well, you can really change people's lives by making sure that they have access to information.

Les D.

I got into library work because it was a part-time summer job, and I fell in love with it, took a break to do community organizing for a bit, got burnout. I did a political campaign in western Kentucky, and that was rough. Working in community organizing nonprofits was like, I'll fight like hell, but it just never ends. The burnout was not manageable. So I ended up coming back to libraries. I ended up in outreach, and I realized I could fight like hell but more subversively, especially being able to call shots on how resources are allocated. One of my favorite projects that I was able to push through with grant funding was our reentry toolkits. It was an expansion on our digital toolkits program, [where] people could check out hotspots and laptops that we reworked to meet the specific needs of people who were coming out of jail. We added a phone, added a resource booklet. And it was mostly just a way to respond to needs in our community, and build up that relationship with folks who were impacted by the carceral state. Even though it's a nightmare at times, especially how entrenched neoliberalism's veins are—it's a good lane to fight in. As Lawrence mentioned, [it’s] the very tangible daily ways that people get their needs met: We can keep them out of ICE's claws, get them fed, get them housing, all those daily things. Just little needs met by the community or for the community really keeps me in the game, and is why I fell in love with it.

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

*The Footnotes

Editor’s Note: At The Conversationalist, we understand that no story exists in a vacuum, and every story is built on the work of others before us, whether in ways big or small. We are likewise dedicated to spotlighting the voices of those who have been or continue to be oppressed, disregarded, and/or otherwise silenced, in an effort to reverse centuries of often intentional erasure. Because of this, we have opted to include “footnotes” on certain stories to give readers additional context and reading material where it feels relevant and beneficial.

Additional Reading: Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Y. Davis and We Do This Until We Free Us by Mariame Kaba
Additional Listening: A two-part episode of Millennials Are Killing Capitalism, Part 1 and Part 2

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September 1, 2022August 28, 2024

Four Abolitionist Library Workers Walk Into a Bar

by Gina Mei

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Pregnancy and parenting will never "just work out” for everybody.

Nine years ago, I told my mother that the man I was seeing didn’t want children. I wasn’t yet sure what I wanted, and at the time his certainty was both comforting and concerning: I appreciated that he knew his own mind but wanted to keep my options open. “Oh, well,” my mom said. “Sometimes certain people meet, and someone gets pregnant, and—BOOM!—everybody's happy.” She was sort of joking, and sort of not. I knew she hoped that he, and I, would change our minds about becoming parents. Nine years later, for a variety of reasons, we haven’t.

Despite her Catholic education, my mother is fervently pro-choice. Having suffered a difficult miscarriage and carried three pregnancies to term, she is not cavalier about the toll pregnancy and labor take on the body and soul. She recognizes what most people—including anti-abortion activists, who get abortions when they need them—intuitively know: that forcing someone to remain pregnant and give birth is an act of brutality.

Yet, like many Americans, my mother also wants to believe that even unexpected pregnancies can sometimes turn out for the best, especially when those involved are ready, willing, and able to become parents.

It’s not wrong to wish this were always the case. It would certainly be better if it were impossible to make a baby unless you were ready and willing to parent, and always possible when you were; if every pregnancy and delivery were complication-free; and if every baby were painlessly ushered into a stable and functional family unit at birth. But that’s not the world we live in, and pregnancy is not the peaceful, glowing, rose-tinted fantasy so many want to believe it is.

Even under the best of circumstances, pregnancy can be grueling. Some people, including celebrities like the comedian Amy Schumer and Duchess of Cambridge Kate Middleton, experience hyperemesis gravidarum, or extreme, persistent nausea and vomiting. In 2019, Schumer, then in her second trimester, estimated that she’d vomited around 980 times since becoming pregnant. The Duchess, meanwhile, described her own experience with the condition as “utterly rotten.” And while hyperemesis gravidarum is relatively rare, around 70% of pregnant people still experience nausea and vomiting.

Pregnancy can also lead to a host of other debilitating symptoms, including depression, insomnia, and/or difficulty concentrating. “My body was heavy, tired from the insomnia that kept me awake from three until seven in the morning, exhausted from the constant vomiting, and bloated from all the eating, which fended off the unrelenting nausea,” writer Miriam Foley wrote in an essay for Parents.com. “I felt sick all day and woke up to be sick or eat during the night. I vomited in public on street corners, at roundabouts, beside parked cars, in the bin, in basins, in the toilet, in the sink…emotionally I was even worse; delicate, jumpy, tearful.”

This was Foley’s second pregnancy, one she and her husband had “very much wanted.” Imagine dealing with those symptoms when you don’t want or aren’t ready to be pregnant, give birth, or raise a child.

In the U.S., we force those who undergo childbirth to choose between solvency and recovery. Because the overwhelming majority of people who become pregnant and give birth are women, and we take women’s pain and suffering for granted, we have largely failed to ease it via public policy. Many see pain and danger as inescapable conditions of women’s lives, particularly Black and brown women, as demonstrated by our maternal mortality rates. In 2015, I wrote a column about the shocking number of U.S. women who return to work just two weeks after giving birth, a decades-long problem we lack the political will to solve. I’ll never forget the stories I heard. Two weeks after giving birth, one mom told me, she still looked six months pregnant and felt like her vagina was “inside out.” A then 34-year-old mother of two said her first baby tore her perineum, anus, and sphincter muscles “badly"; it was 10 days before she could even walk. Her legs and feet were so swollen she thought her skin was going to split open, and she developed mastitis in her left breast, which felt like the “jaws of life” were ripping her chest apart. Pregnancy and childbirth may always involve some degree of discomfort. But they could certainly be easier to endure and recover from than they are in the U.S.

The everyday agonies people who choose to be pregnant are expected to tolerate become a form of torture when those who had no choice are forced to endure them, too. A surprising number of well-meaning but clueless Americans join the right-wing religious fanatics in proffering adoption as a seamless alternative to abortion, despite the fact that the former is far riskier, costlier, and more physically and psychologically painful than the latter. As was true before Roe, and will keep happening in the wake of its repeal, many birth parents in states where abortion is illegal are forced to carry pregnancies to term and undergo childbirth against their will—a trauma with potentially life-long consequences for birth parents, babies, and adoptive families.

Even those who want and consciously decide to become parents know how hard it is to raise kids in an atomized, every-family-for-itself country with no universal health or child care, no paid family leave, and no guaranteed income. They suffer near-constant levels of stress, anxiety, and fear, both about big-picture existential threats and everyday survival. There are only four countries in the world where couples with young children who earn the average wage spend more than 30 percent of their salary on child care, and the United States is one of them—along with New Zealand, the U.K., and Australia. (By contrast, the average couple in Austria, Greece, Hungary, and Korea spends less than four percent.)

The same Republican officials who worked so tirelessly to overturn Roe have also fought tooth and nail against providing basic public goods and services to ease the considerable burdens the U.S. imposes on women and families. The states most hostile to abortion rights have no paid family leave and some of the worst maternal mortality rates in the nation. All except Louisiana are run by anti-abortion Republicans; meanwhile, Louisiana’s legislature is Republican-dominated, and its governor, a nominal Democrat, is staunchly anti-abortion, in defiance of his party’s platform. Earlier this year, the state’s lawmakers tried to classify abortion as homicide under state law and allow prosecutors to criminally charge patients. If anti-abortion legislators wanted to make it safer, easier, and more inviting to raise a family, they would have done so. Instead, they’re busy trying to figure out how to jail pregnant people.

When even the willing feel ensnared by the increasingly unmanageable demands of pregnancy and parenting, no one is free. Not every accident is a happy one, nor can it always be made so through sheer force of will. If individuals and families were not buried, alone, under the crushing burdens of pregnancy, childbirth, and childrearing, more Americans might choose to start families. And others still wouldn’t. As New York Magazine reporter Sarah Jones recently wrote, “I am childless because that’s what I’ve chosen for myself...Congress could pass Medicare for All tomorrow, and paid family leave, and all the other policies I support, and if I became pregnant right now I would still have an abortion.”

And that is her right, whether or not a stranger or a state legislator or a Democratic governor approves it.

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September 1, 2022August 28, 2024

“Happy” Accidents

by Raina Lipsitz

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How McDonald's, KFC, and other American eateries spread around the world.

Even before the war, Aban Pestonjee’s business was doing rather well.

In the 1970s, Swedish and American home appliances were the kind of thing that lots of people in Sri Lanka wanted, but hardly anyone knew how to get. In response to a series of economic shocks, the government largely barred imports, including luxury goods like washing machines and dryers. But Pestonjee had an idea. She bought used appliances at embassy auctions and sold them at a markup out of a corner shop in the capital city, Colombo. Even with the economy largely restricted, business was good on the Indian Ocean island. But when Sri Lanka descended into civil war in the 1980s, it exploded.

Pestonjee started importing appliances from Korea and offering environmental cleanup services. Later, she expanded into tourism and property. Her three children joined the business, making her family a dynasty and her company, the Abans Group, one of the most powerful in Sri Lanka. In 1998, with the war mostly relegated to the north and east of the country, Colombo slipped into an eerie calm, and at the urging of one of her sons, Pestonjee made her biggest move yet.

She opened the first McDonald’s in Sri Lanka.

It’s easy to forget when looking at it through the nostalgic lens that often filters our view of the era, but American fast food was also born in the aftermath of war. When Richard and Maurice McDonald built their namesake restaurant chain in the Southern California desert in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the area was the frontline of a profound economic disruption. The industrial economy that had ended the Great Depression and closed out the Second World War had turned inwards, building prefabricated homes and four-door sedans instead of tanks and planes. In short order, this inverted war economy had also transformed American agriculture: When chemical manufacturers stopped making munitions and started making fertilizer, they supercharged corn production, setting off a livestock explosion which has never abated. As a business that sold meat to car-bound customers in new suburbs, McDonald’s and the industry it launched were ideally positioned to get ahead in an era of chaos.

As the same systems which made it thrive in the United States spread internationally, fast food rushed headlong for the rest of the world. In 1996, the New York Times’ columnist Thomas Friedman argued the industry’s global nature pointed to a deeper trend about the state of the world. As he summarized it, “No two countries that both have a McDonald’s have ever fought a war against each other.” Friedman said his idea was “tongue in cheek,” and as a hard-and-fast rule, it was always a little shaky, before coming apart entirely with Russia’s 2008 invasion of Georgia. But as an observation about the conditions necessary for capitalism, not an axiom of world affairs, Friedman’s “Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention” pointed to a real correlation between a nation’s international fast food offerings and its stability. If a country was at peace (at least in its urban centers, like Colombo in the late 1990s), was prosperous enough to sustain a consumer class, and was integrated with the world economy, it was likely ready to host a McDonald’s or some other global fast food chain. Seen the other way around, fast food was evidence of a country’s stability.

The last few years have made that observation especially relevant, as the global fast food boom has reached countries which were at war in living memory. You can find Burger King in Côte d’Ivoire, Dairy Queen in Cambodia, and KFC in Sudan, a country that was heavily sanctioned as recently as 2017 for committing acts of genocide in Darfur. In these and other nations, fast food’s arrival is nothing if not an indication of peace and a rejoining of the international order.

Yet even as fast food continues to evidence stability, its global expansion has depended on entrepreneurs—like Aban Pestonjee—who sharpened their business acumen in chaotic times, including times of war and occupation.

If you know much about the business of fast food, you’ve likely heard about the franchise system. Since McDonald’s’ early days in the Southern California desert, fast food has depended on independent businesses and entrepreneurs, or “franchisees,” to buy into their system. For a fee and a cut of the revenues, a fast food company (i.e., McDonald’s Corporation, or CKE Restaurants, owners of the Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s brands) gives the franchisee a regional monopoly, allowing them to use its likeness and adopt its methods of doing business. In the industry’s early days in the 1950s and 1960s, franchising allowed fast food companies to expand wildly across the United States on the backs of countless smaller, independent businesses—all with only marginal investments of their own capital. As they’ve plotted expansions around the world, fast food companies have found additional benefits to franchisees, as these local entrepreneurs typically bring local contacts and knowledge to the endeavor which their corporate overlords generally lack.

As an entrepreneur who made her fortune in war, Pestonjee was perfectly suited for the role. She had grown up as a child of an immigrant family and a member of Sri Lanka’s tiny Parsi community. In a war that pitted the nation’s two biggest ethnic groups against each other, she was an outsider. Conflict was little more than minor disruption and background noise as she grew her business.

“You get used to it,” she told a researcher many years after her business first took off. “Knowing that one bomb has gone off here, then everything goes down, business gets slack for a month or two, people forget it and then again it starts.”

Den Fujita, the Japanese entrepreneur who brought McDonald’s to Japan, similarly navigated a messy period in history to amass a fortune. Fujita’s father was an engineer for a British company, and he had picked up some English at home. He studied English in high school, and, at the end of the Second World War, with much of the country leveled and his father and two sisters having been killed in American bombing raids, Fujita left home to translate for the former enemy at the seat of their occupation, the General Headquarters, or GHQ, in Tokyo.

Soon after, Fujita started an importation company. It was a simple business model: He figured out what the American occupiers wanted, and then he figured out how to get it to them. As the Americans left, he expanded his business, importing luxury goods for the Japanese themselves. When McDonald’s first began laying plans for an overseas expansion two decades later, Japan looked difficult, if not impossible, to enter. The bureaucracy was dense, the culture was perplexing. But Fujita was the perfect partner in a country fraught with risk—a bridge between those American corporate executives and the Japanese people, whom they knew nothing about. In 1971, his company, Fujita & Co, became McDonald’s’ first franchisee in Japan. Before long, its first location, in the Ginza district in Tokyo, became the world’s busiest McDonald’s.

There are stories in the rubble of every conflict of shrewd entrepreneurs building a fortune as the nation rebuilds itself. In the early 1990s, as Cambodia recovered from years under Khmer Rouge rule, a refugee named Kith Meng returned from his adopted Australia to take the reins at his family’s company and tap some of the billions of dollars in international aid then flowing into the country. Kith’s Royal Group became a source of basic provisions for UNTAC, the United Nations’ body managing Cambodia while the national government assembled itself. Crucially, for the sprawling, multilingual force inundated with paperwork, Royal also imported copy machines.

As UNTAC packed its bags and left in 1993, Royal invested in a slew of other money-making ventures, some of which, such as a cellular network, a bank, and some TV stations, proved useful to a country getting on its feet, and some of which, such as a casino and a lottery, mostly served to line the budding tycoon’s pockets. Meng’s many ventures put him at the center of a vast network of his own creation, making him an ideal middleman for foreign companies looking to break into Cambodia. In the early 2000s, one of those companies was a Malaysian KFC franchisee. Soon after, Royal founded a separate company with it to bring KFC to Cambodia. The first location opened in 2008.

So, what does war have to do with running an international fast food chain? No matter when or where they take place, wars are times of creation as much as they are times of destruction. When war-ravaged people find that the commercial networks which once supported their purchasing habits have collapsed—because of sanctions, a shifting frontline, or because a manufacturing base was obliterated the night before—their usual consumer preferences evaporate. They don’t care who they bought from in the past. They’ll just go to whoever can navigate the tumult to deliver the goods, now.

When opening in developing countries, fast food’s corporate giants are similarly lackadaisical, if only because they have to be. In countries where industrial-scale beef and poultry production (let alone french fry-ready potatoes) don’t exist, they can’t work within existing systems to meet them, even if they would prefer to. Instead, they have to build new systems, and to do that, they need locals who understand these places intimately. Often, entrepreneurs who cut their teeth in war have exactly the skills they’re looking for.

War has another effect: It reveals the artificiality of old social hierarchies. Meng, Pestonjee, and Fujita were all ambitious and hungry for opportunity. But they were also outsiders—Pestonjee because she was a Parsi; Fujita, because his mother was a Christian and the Japanese he spoke was actually a dialect of his native Osaka; Meng, because he had spent most of his youth abroad. In an era of peace and stability, determination might have only led to modest success. But the social-leveling effects of war and occupation offered chances that would have never existed otherwise.

It’s fitting, then, that after the bombs and gunfire went quiet in their countries, all three would gravitate to fast food. Even though they promote their goods as luxuries in developing countries, fast food brands still retain the welcoming spirit of undiscerning capitalists wherever they operate. Through their doors, the old hierarchies have no place. Everyone is welcome, just as long as they have the money to pay.

Additional fact checking by Apoorva Tadepalli.

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September 1, 2022August 28, 2024

The Wartime Roots of the Global Fast Food Boom

by Alex Park

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Here's what to read so you can get to know us better.

When I started The Conversationalist in 2018, I wanted to create a platform that amplified the voices of women and people of color with creative solutions and deep insights about this chaotic, interconnected world. There were too many critical stories that weren't getting the attention they deserved. The Conversationalist's mission was to build a feminist media outlet to publish these global perspectives, and to foster a space for readers to connect and engage over shared interests and concerns. We believed, and still do, that people are hungry for thoughtful, engaging journalism they can trust, a natural response to the proliferation of disinformation, propaganda, and equivocation over basic facts and human dignity. Curiosity and empathy thrive when the rage clicks disappear.

In pursuit of our goals, we decided to take a step back earlier this year so we could re-evaluate how to best honor our mission moving forward. And now, we're back. Just like before, we're prioritizing writers who shine a light on underreported stories and trends around the world. We plan to continue only publishing a couple stories a week for the time being, in pursuit of putting out fewer, richer stories rather than chasing clicks. But we're also thinking bigger: Feminism, at its core, is about linking the personal to the political, a critical commitment in times like these that demand human connection and collective action. It’s also about finding moments of joy, and with our relaunch, The Conversationalist aims to inform, connect, and delight. As you've noticed, we've fully embraced a new artistic direction, with the aim of supporting artists around the world, and are more committed than ever to celebrating human ingenuity and building community. I want to give a shout-out here to our Executive Editor, Gina Mei, whose editorial and creative vision for this relaunch has been a joy to witness, and the writers, artists, and countless other people who helped bring this new iteration to life.

As for our readers, we're so glad you're here. And in case you aren't already familiar with us, here are a few stories from The Conversationalist's archives—all hand-picked by the team—so you can get to know us a little better.

‘Bees are like my family’: A female beekeeper is reviving honey production in Kashmir Aliya Bashir / December 9, 2021

If you are looking for a sign to leave it all and start a new life as a beekeeper, look no further than this beautiful profile of Towseefa Rizvi and her family's apiary in Kashmir. It's both an honest look at the profession and the region, exploring the economic and cultural hurdles that keep women from beekeeping, while also showing why honey production can be a surprisingly accessible (and meaningful!) trade. Rizvi's deep love and care for her hive is contagious, and her dedication to sharing her knowledge with others is an absolute joy to read. It's a lovely and empowering piece, gorgeously reported by Aliya Kashir.

—Gina Mei

The fascism is already here, but we can’t see it through the lens of exceptionalism Anna Lind-Guzik / May 27, 2021

It’s maddening to watch a green-headed bird with webbed orange feet fly into your home, quacking wildly and gobbling up all your bread, only to be told, “That can’t be a duck; ducks live outside.” And it’s a relief when someone else notices the same things you’ve been noticing, and confirms that you’re not just being hysterical after all. That’s why I’d heartily recommend this story to anyone who’s worried about the future of U.S. democracy—if nothing else, it’ll reassure you that you’re not losing your mind.

—Nick Slater

Women are people, no matter what the Supreme Court says Raina Lipsitz / December 21, 2021

My picks follow a theme, which is, times that The Conversationalist’s contributors accurately, if unfortunately, foretold the near future.This article ran before Roe fell, and it remains both prescient and a great example of the solutions journalism The Conversationalist exists to elevate. “Anyone serious about defending the rights and dignity of all women needs to stop mourning and start confronting state power,” writes Lipsitz, and she’s right. Now that we’ve seen the full range of absurd Democratic leadership responses to Roe’s demise (Nancy Pelosi’s fundraising emails and Zionist poetry readings, my god) it’s beyond clear that no person of conscience can continue to perform “childlike deference to institutions that have outlived their usefulness, like the Supreme Court.” Americans may remain fundamentally uncomfortable with demanding accountability from their institutions, but this article is a great place to start contemplating what real domestic resistance could look like.

—Brenna Erford

A beginner’s guide to immigration Katie Dancey-Downs / March 10, 2022

Immigration vs. emigration vs. migration. What makes someone a refugee vs. an economic migrant? When it comes to immigration, things are more complicated than they may appear. In this beginner’s guide, Katie Dancey-Downs breaks it all down in a very digestible way. I love how approachable this makes the topic, but also how it answered all of my immigration questions I didn’t even think to ask yet. It includes history from some countries around the world (like Japan, Saudi Arabia, and the U.S., to name a few) and takes a look at where we stand today. This is a must-read for anyone looking to learn more about immigration and the motives behind why people seek out a new home.

—Kiera Wright-Ruiz

Russia as a mirror of American racism Kimberly St. Julian-Varnon / September 17, 2020

White supremacist movements are globally interconnected, which Kimberly St. Julian-Varnon demonstrates in this story on "Russian Lives Matter," a knock-off grassroots movement in Russia that borrowed the language of the American alt-right to promote white anti-Putin protesters and denigrate "Black Lives Matter" protests. American racism is one of our most dangerous exports, and an aspect of US influence that is taboo to mention in most mainstream coverage. I appreciate The Conversationalist's commitment to platforming writers who aren't afraid to take on sensitive, critical subjects with moral clarity and deep insight.

—Anna Lind-Guzik

Why you should continue to wear a mask outdoors, even after you’ve been vaccinated Jillian York / April 29, 2021

Confession: I was ready to hate this story based on the headline. But after a couple paragraphs it became obvious York was making a smart, nuanced point about adapting our behavior (in certain situations) to protect people who are vulnerable in ways we might not immediately recognize. It was a nice reminder to move through the world with more thoughtfulness and compassion. As someone who lives outside the U.S., I also appreciated the acknowledgement that other countries and other peoples exist—and everyone’s lives have meaning.

—N.S.

To stop Putin, grab him by his wallet Natalia Antonova / December 9, 2021

A scant two months before Russia invaded Ukraine and just four months before the US government imposed severe financial sanctions on Russia in response, The Conversationalist ran this damn-near-prophetic article by Natalia Antonova in which she makes a compelling case for the policy path the U.S. and numerous other nations ultimately followed. To defang Putin, Antonova argues that Western powers should leverage ordinary Russians’ contempt for the kleptocrats who comprise his inner circle—“that very justifiable hatred is one of Russia’s greatest vulnerabilities, and one of the saddest elements of modern Russian life, which is dominated by stress and suspicion.“ In service to this end, Western powers should create painful consequences for this circle via economic sanctions that target their opulent, offshore-stashed wealth. Additionally, she suggests targeting Russian private military companies, which the U.S. Department of State just recently moved to do in June of this year.

—B.E.

The Prodigal Techbro Maria Farrell / March 5, 2020

What can I say, I'm a sucker for a good headline, and the very concept of a "prodigal techbro" made me laugh—partly because Twitter has ruined my brain forever, but also because it's genuinely a clever moniker for the type of dude that Maria Farrell is describing. The piece takes a scalpel to the all-too-easy redemption arc of those who have left Big Tech and rebranded themselves as what might best be summed up as "good, actually." It's a nuanced take that acknowledges the importance of giving people second chances and allowing them to learn and grow from their mistakes; while also pointing out the many problems with immediately centering these folks in conversations and work that others have been having and doing for far longer.

—G.M.

Pakistani women are claiming their right to be in public spaces—one cup of chai at a time Anmol Irfan / March 26, 2021

I loved this story about Pakistani women who have started meeting up in public to drink chai, traditionally thought of as a men-only activity. It's a small but meaningful act of rebellion, as these women challenge patriarchal restrictions to their freedom of movement while enjoying a delicious cup of chai. It's also a story about class, as women from middle and upper class families have more opportunities to go abroad and get out of the house. As movement founder Sadia Khatri put it, "It took living in other countries to learn that I had been conforming to a clever scam my whole life, thinking the city belonged only to men."

—A.L.G.

[post_title] => Welcome to the "New" Conversationalist [post_excerpt] => Here's what to read so you can get to know us better. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => open [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => welcome-to-the-new-conversationalist [to_ping] => [pinged] => https://conversationalist.org/2021/04/29/why-you-should-continue-to-wear-a-mask-outdoors-even-after-youre-vaccinated/ https://conversationalist.org/2020/03/05/the-prodigal-techbro/ https://conversationalist.org/2021/12/21/women-are-people-no-matter-what-the-supreme-court-says/ https://conversationalist.org/2021/05/27/the-fascism-is-already-here-we-just-cant-see-it-through-the-lens-of-exceptionalism/ https://conversationalist.org/2021/12/09/bees-are-like-my-family-how-a-female-beekeeper-is-redefining-honey-production-in-kashmir/ https://conversationalist.org/2022/03/10/a-beginners-guide-to-immigration/ [post_modified] => 2024-08-28 21:14:02 [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-08-28 21:14:02 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=4831 [menu_order] => 115 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

September 1, 2022August 28, 2024

Welcome to the “New” Conversationalist

by Anna Lind-Guzik

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In order to gather the people you love, sometimes you have to make a plan.

Listen to this article on The Conversationalist Podcast. | 12:57 min

“Old Friends” is an ongoing series exploring the many ways that friendship changes shape in adulthood.

It started as an aspirational text between buddies: "I want to run away somewhere for a month and just disappear." I'd sent it to my friend Matt in a fit of pique. I was on my fourth daily hour of Zoom fatigue, my twentieth month of consistent burnout. The text was an ice pack to the soul, a delusional light at the end of the tunnel, completely untethered to reality. So I was surprised by the speed of his response:

"OK but yes. Let's do it."

Matt's and my platonic love story was born in proximity, forged in the fires of our twenties and a New York media office. At first, we were just wallpaper to each other's daily lives. It was in the commuter crush of the Q train that real love formed. We'd talk about our flailing twenties, our pasts, and what we were working towards. There was a through line for us both: a steadfast commitment to creativity, to love in its many forms, and to making space in which we could become our best selves. At the time we were young and broke, stealing bananas from the office kitchen for sustenance. But we dreamed of growth, of room to write and play—and of travel. Before long, our commutes turned to regular walks around Gramercy Park, to writing dates, and to my first ever trip abroad: Matt, my roommate Brittney, and I absconded to Paris for the ultimate Friendsgiving.

Eventually, as these things go, I moved across the country. The structure of us shifted. Matt and I would FaceTime, send voice notes and TikToks and check-in texts, but it wasn't the same. Proximity in friendship is a privilege that rarely lasts forever; we were used to this. Distance became de rigueur, especially as the pandemic raged on. Both Matt and I were run down. We felt boxed in. I battled panic attacks that had become commonplace at work. I craved the metaphorical wide open spaces Matt and I had daydreamed about years before on the Q. I needed something.

Luckily, Matt and I were the kind of buds who frequently exchanged travel fantasies. Our long distance love language had taken the form of links to hotels and Airbnbs in far-flung places. These plans were always both serious and unserious—part aspiration, part ambition. It was impossible to tell when a flight of fancy might go through chrysalis, willed into existence. We'd aged a thousand years since that first trip to Paris. The world had changed a thousand times, too.

A month after my text, Matt was in town for a conference, and he and I experienced something rare: the opportunity to sit on a couch together. We binged a season of Bridgerton in one sitting. That night I sat with him and another friend on my balcony, each of us balancing glasses of rosé, knowing very well we only had 48 hours to catch up on each other's lives. There was an undercurrent of energy to this visit, too: Over the weeks preceding it, our fantasies about running away had taken on a tone of reality. On his last day we brought out our laptops. Matt sucked in a sharp breath and breathed out excitement, his octaves climbing: "It's happening." The only way to make this trip real, we'd realized, was to actually book the damn thing. We'd figure out the rest later.

We had until a month before the reservation to change our minds. But we knew once we hit “book” that it'd be done. So we did it.

Our place for August would be a villa in the Chianti Hills of Tuscany, with four bedrooms and five beds. After years living paycheck to paycheck, we were finally at a point in our lives where we could front the initial costs before the details were all ironed out. We were burnt out enough—experience-hungry enough—to just fucking do it already. But we also had our limits: Though Matt and I would have been happy wandering the Tuscan countryside just the two of us, if we were to be financially responsible, the plan would rely on filling the place with friends. People who could cut the costs into thirds, fourths, eighths—but who would also enhance this ambitious escape from our daily realities. The more we thought about it, the more people we wanted to invite into our world away.

We started contacting people. Friends we knew were itching to travel. Friends who shared the same fantasy of disappearing, even if only for a week. Friends we missed, who lived in different states or on different continents. Friends of all economic realities to whom that round trip ticket felt necessary to their very spirit.

It was not an all-encompassing effort, nor one that yielded only positive results. Some passed, some flaked, others yearned but couldn't pull together the PTO or funds. As time to takeoff inched closer, Matt and I weren't sure we were going to have much company at all. Anyone who's tried to gather the whole group chat for dinner knows the feeling.

We blinked and months passed. Three weeks from when our villa would welcome us… and still, almost nobody had confirmed. We worried about the costs. Mentally, I calibrated what this month would be like in relative isolation.

But then, the tide turned. A friend from New York told us she'd be there for one of the weeks. A confidante from college followed shortly. A newer buddy, from Chicago, tiptoed onto the reservation. Her time would happily overlap with the friend from New York—who she happened to be close with from their days in college. Soon we'd hear from a friend in London, and one in Los Angeles. The latter would bring her long-distance best friend from Miami.

We'd wrangled eight people to join us, spread over twenty-four days. Friends from all different eras of our lives, and multiple who were strangers to either Matt or me. Another function of what we were doing became clear as we gathered the confirmations. We had always intended to create space, to go to a beautiful place where we could breathe and recoup. What I hadn't taken into account was the thrill in my chest seeing who'd be there.

For me, the trip had originally been a haggard Hail Mary, a desperate attempt to escape burnout that had stopped me in my tracks. Those texts with Matt had been a temporary escape; now we were building a tangible one. My therapist's grin spread to her eyes when I told her: This was a chance to rebalance, she said, to center myself. That I could be some small part of helping friends find their space to recoup, as well, only aided in that journey.

I know I'll see these friends in other places eventually. I'll see two of them at upcoming fall weddings, if only for a few hours here and there. If we're lucky, work or family will take us to each other's neck of the woods within the year. We'll have dinner, or spend a night on each other's couches. Then, inevitably, one of us will get on a plane and disappear back to their own time zone.

This trip will have a similar ending, but the very body of it will be different. Realizing the kind of time I'll get with these people changes the shape of the whole experience. Our time, now, is a kind of summer camp, an adult friendship retreat—for some a recreation of a time where we were all living in the same space, and for others the first ever opportunity to do so, with fewer deadlines and pressures to boot. We will find space for ourselves. We'll take our breaths. We'll also commune with each other in ways we haven't before, reshaping our friendships in a whole different kind of proximity.

In preparing for the trip, I scoured the aisles of Target. Into my cart I dumped a pack of Uno cards and 2009 favorite Cards Against Humanity. I bought a watercolor kit and a sketch pad. As I was checking out, I made a mental note to gather recipes that worked for groups; ones we could cook together while drinking and yelling and laughing.

Friendship changes shape in adulthood. They don't warn you about that. "Your friends will move away!" they should say as they pass out caps and gowns. "They'll scatter, find new partners and jobs and put their roots down far away from you." They should tell you that when you do see these people it’s likely to be at a wedding, or at a funeral; through elusive FaceTimes or on brief holiday breaks. They should warn us early so we can shield our hearts. So we can know the reality: that in order to see these people you care about so much… you’ll have to make a plan. A deliberate, unfortunately expensive, frustrating, ever-shifting plan. But if you can make it happen, it will be worth it.

There's a dull ache that comes with realizing you've lost track; the intricacies of intimate friends' day-to-days become, at some fuzzy point, no longer automatic knowledge. It's just natural. But in that villa forty minutes outside Florence, Matt and I will be roommates for a month. One friend will be there for fourteen days, another for nine, another for six. There'll be plenty of bickering, plenty of long nights holed up in our individual rooms, the craving of quiet time. Alongside all that, though, will be friendships that have lived and changed over years—and friendships that haven't even yet begun—colliding and congealing into something new.

As I write this, most of us are packing. Here are a few things I'm looking forward to: the drifting of eyelids as someone I haven't seen in two years falls asleep before the movie's over; the crick of a brow as they judge the cheese I chose for dinner; long, long walks, talking till we're hoarse, finally saying out loud the nuance of a feeling we had months ago but are just now working through. The effort, financially and physically, that we all made to be there, and the ache I already feel for when it will be over. Friendship, when done right, is not fleeting. Time, however, is. What a relief then, to have made this space.

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August 31, 2022January 15, 2026

The Healing Power of the Friendship Retreat

by Alanna Bennett

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Making friends in your 20s is one thing. Making friends as a mom in my mid-30s felt nearly impossible.

“Old Friends” is an ongoing series exploring the many ways that friendship changes shape in adulthood.

You wouldn’t know it to meet me now, but as a child, I was deeply, almost paralyzingly shy. I struggled with new situations, always anxious that everyone around me knew something I didn't—what to say to boys, what to wear, how to act. It was the '90s, so I was often alone, in the benign neglect style of parenting that was so prevalent back then. I spent most of my days riding my bike around, making up games for myself, finding comfort in the solitude. I felt woefully unequipped for socialization of any kind, something that wasn’t helped by the fact that my family moved a lot, and I changed schools often. I wish I could say this was because of something practical like work, but really, my parents were just bohemian and broke. My mom once moved us across the country because she had a dream about the mountains out West, mountains she’d never seen in real life. So I retreated into myself, choosing to focus on making a small number of very close friends, rather than a wide social circle.

But it wasn’t quite enough, the way nothing really is in adolescence. My younger sister was always the social butterfly in our family: People were (and still are) attracted to her warm, joyful nature and eagerness to include everyone in on the joke. She’s thoughtful and funny and kind, and watching her make friends has always been a pleasure, even when I was jealous of her ability to do it. You can’t imagine how difficult it is to admit to your younger sister that she’s better at making friends than you, but I was stuck and she was the one to set me free. I finally asked her outright one day, in the safety of our shared bedroom, full of Tiger Beat posters and Barbies, how she did it. She told me I needed to adopt a “fake it till you make it” approach, not just to friendships, but with my shyness in general.

And it worked. I pretended not to be shy long enough that I actually became less shy. I cultivated a more open and less guarded approach to friendships and social scenes, and slowly, I became more comfortable meeting new people. In my early 20s, this led to a solid group of close friends and a large network of acquaintances that made the first half of that decade so exciting and fun—though not without its own drama and heartache.

Then, halfway through my 20s, I left my hometown of Vancouver, Canada and moved to Toronto. At the time, it was a little uncomfortable having to make a new group of friends in a new city, but I was going out, I was meeting people at work, and there didn’t seem to be a huge barrier to recreating the social life I’d had in a different city. I settled deeper into the relationships I had: Some friendships got better, some faded away, some ended very painfully. With no need to make new friends, my skills atrophied.

When I met and married my husband, things shifted again. His friends and my friends became our friends. Merging our lives in the biggest, most important ways necessarily meant bringing together how and with whom we socialized, and I embraced it. I loved seeing this disparate group of people become a community that we took care of and who took care of us. This was made abundantly clear when we had our first child, and this big group of people came together to feed and look after us in the painful postpartum phase.

But the cruelty of finally leaning into the friendships you’ve cultivated over decades is that you start to feel like you don’t have room in your life for new ones. In my early 30s, I closed rank. I shed acquaintances, avoided making new pals at work or when going out, and focused on maintaining a very close inner circle of friends, a lot like I had when I was a kid. On the one hand, that meant easy, comfortable friendships where we’d developed a rhythm that was second nature. On the other, I can admit I also took a lot of those close relationships for granted, picking some friends apart when they irritated me, or not putting in the kind of work either of us used to when we were first becoming friends.

And it probably would have gone on like that for many more years, until my husband and I, along with our five month old son, moved to the UK in 2018.

As far as relationships go, it’s an accepted truism that the older you get, the harder it is to make new friends. Whether it’s a lack of time for the friends you already have, feeling overwhelmed by the rigors and responsibilities of life, work, and family, or just plain old apathy about chatting up fresh faces—“no new friends,” as Drake more aptly put it—it can seem not just impossible, but unnecessary to open up your world of acquaintances after, say, your 20s. I readily accepted, even embraced this idea myself, up until we moved to a new country and I was forced to start from scratch.

Making friends in a new city in your 20s is one thing, starting over again as a mom in my mid-30s felt nearly impossible. It took me right back to elementary school, to feeling like there was a shorthand that I was missing, a piece of the puzzle I’d dropped on the way to the playground. I found it hard to meet people at work because I had to rush home at five for daycare pickup and it was tricky to meet up on weekends because I was still breastfeeding every few hours.

Yet, paralyzing loneliness is a good motivator—at least it was for me. I forced myself to be as open and willing as I had been as a child. This meant reaching out to fellow parents for play dates as often as possible, including strangers I met in the park near our house, painful as that was to do. It was like rebuilding my atrophied muscle: I had to do friendship rehab just to make one or two new friends.

But it was also invigorating. Forging a close relationship with a stranger for the first time in almost a decade reminded me of how necessary it is not to cut yourself off from the world. The relief of having someone to call on for a walk or a vent or both was incalculable. Working on that part of myself after so many years not only led to making new friends, but also made me appreciate the friendships I had back in Toronto, the community I’d spent years building.

When we decided after a couple of years to move back, I was determined to bring this energy home with me. Being curious about people, making an effort to see the good and work through the bad, especially after the pandemic, felt (and feels) like radical self-care. It was precisely because making friends in London was so difficult, that has made making friends in Toronto so exciting—I want to make the effort. I love stretching my sense of community in a place I’ve always called home, where it would be so, so easy to just coast and take all of it for granted. It seems so obvious now, once you’re on the other side, but it really is true that no one knows what they’re doing; some of us are just fumbling a little less.

And after nearly twenty years, I think I’m done faking it: I may have actually made it.

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August 31, 2022August 28, 2024

No New Friends

by Amil Niazi

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No, I'm not joking.

Sitting on the front porch on a summer afternoon, in a straight back chair on two legs leaned against the wall. Iced tea or Aperol spritz in hand, Dolly on the record player. We’ve just gotten back from work or visiting elder neighbors or distributing hygiene kits and we’re looking out over the garden, where we grow tomatoes and kale on land returned to and rented from its local Native communities. Some of us will turn our harvest into a vegan vegetable lasagna, while others will do the dishes so no one doubles up on chores. After dinner, we’ll sit around a fire and wax optimistic about the rise of leftist governments in Latin America or the latest rom com, and dance with the kids and pets to Beyoncé until we all get sleepy and retire to our own quiet, comfortable quarters.

… I don’t know, I’m just spitballing here—but it sounds pretty idyllic to me.

For the past few years, I’ve been pitching friends, my girlfriend, and pretty much every person I meet on the idea of starting a queer commune. To me, it’s an easy and perfectly logical sell. Built-in relationships buffered by solitude? Not having to do all the chores (or buy a whole house) yourself? A spirit of chosen family and anti-heteronormativity? I’m not sure what more a millennial queer could want.

Often my audience goes along with it, affecting enthusiasm as if placating a child who’s playing pretend. “Let’s look in the desert!” one friend offers, then later sends me a Zillow listing for land outside Palm Springs. (I guess we’re building.) An ex-girlfriend tells me she and her fiancé joke about buying a multifamily house with her cousin and his boyfriend and raising kids together. A good friend from college and I discuss the animals, activities, and ethos of “the compound” we’ll one day end up on.

What these people fail to understand is that I am not playing—and whatever surface interest they show barely conceals their endgame. Because for every feigned “Fuck yeah” and “We’ll host art shows in our yard!” is another friend, another queer couple, lost to the decaying Xanadu of the American dream: individual homeownership. As they’ve been socialized to see it, they’re not just buying a house, but also buying into the promise of safety, stability, and comfort that can apparently only be secured with a mortgage. I watch, melancholic, as they succumb. This could be us, I whisper, painting pastorals of home-cooked meals you didn’t have to make unless you wanted to make them, and someone always there to take you to the airport, but you and your girlfriend would rather sink a million dollars into an 800-square-foot single-family.

I got my first glimpse of communal living in college. I had recently found queerness, and with it, a community of other queer students and alums who lived in double- and triple-deckers where they cooked together, learned from one another, and formed all kinds of relationships—living, laughing, loving, as it were. They probably would have identified this as “intentional living,” more than “commune living,” although both are essentially a group of people sharing space and resources. But semantics aside, they showed me a configuration that felt more loving, more normal, than the purported ideal of a suburban nuclear family. (Admittedly, I was also watching a lot of Big Love at the time.)

Particularly appealing about these spaces was their foundation of queer ethics. The residents were queer, yes, in sexuality, gender, or both, but beyond that, their politics resisted assimilation and oppression and were rooted in inclusive feminism. Many were activists and organizers in other leftist movements; the houses were an experiment in mutual aid, honest communication, and non-punitive measures for addressing harm. They were environments that allowed a multiplicity of relationships and intimacies to bloom. If you were poly, if you didn’t want kids, if you didn’t aspire to anything but being a kind person, if you were just a freak—you could feel at home.

It made sense not just theoretically, but also practically. As someone who prizes privacy and interdependence—and as an Aquarian who loves humanity but not always people—I was taken by the concept of having one’s own space with friends close by, all of us contributing skills and goods and relying on one another. I’m incapable of house maintenance, for example, but I’d happily do the group laundry. I don’t want to raise my own human children, but I think I’d thrive as a weird aunt.

Some might call this immature; a failure to properly adult. In dominant U.S. culture, there’s an expectation of ascending from living with parents or roommates to living alone or with a spouse. But we’re somewhat of a minority there: Around the world, the most common living arrangement is the extended family household. It tracks, then, that we’ve been fed classist and racist notions of communal living as unhealthy, unproductive, and un-American. After World War I, the U.S. government conceived and propagated the aspirational narrative of individual homeownership as a direct response to communism. Later, the Public Works and Federal Housing administrations socially engineered segregated public housing and underwrote the white (wealthied) suburbanization of the U.S. We want to own our own homes because—surprise, surprise—the idea was marketed to us.

If sharing a home with extended family or non-relations is antithetical to this country’s identity, it’s not just about forgoing individual property ownership. Communal living demands and facilitates a way of life that’s inherently anti-capitalist. Six people on one piece of land don’t need to buy six lawnmowers. Cohabitating with housemates from different backgrounds and life experiences gives way to social and political alignments that threaten the dominant paradigm. And if we didn’t have to do everything ourselves—if we weren’t solely responsible for keeping our lights on and our kids fed—what freedom might we know, both collectively and as individuals?

The pandemic, for all its hellishness, has blown illuminating holes through our picket fence individualism. Many of us who’d been relatively comfortable minding our own were suddenly confronted with the reality that we’re vulnerable without each other. We started getting to know our neighbors, trading toilet paper and sourdough starter. The number of multigenerational homes increased, and roommates—whether platonic or romantic—looked after one another when we fell sick. Covid (re)introduced us to communal care.

It also demonstrated and continues to demonstrate how profoundly our neoliberal systems have failed us. From fractured supply chains and healthcare infrastructure to insecure housing markets and wages continually eclipsed by the cost of living, instability and scarcity have blanketed the collective. Rent and inflation increases are knocking more people out of their homes, while more than 3 in 5 people in the U.S. are in debt. After so many mothers left their jobs to care for kids at home in 2020, there are still 1 million fewer women in the workforce two years later.

Why not abandon the road once laid out for us, now all buckled pavement and gaping potholes, and take a detour down the less trodden path of communal living? Why not create our own, ever-expanding social safety net? It’s been made clear that traditional structures of power aren’t going to save us. We are all we’ve got. And when we’re not on our separate, self-reliant islands—when we have more robust immediate support networks of people who may not share our surname—we’re better able to help others in our communities and ourselves. And it works: One recently founded commune, the Tenacious Unicorn Ranch, was explicitly developed as a safe haven for queer and trans people trying to survive the previous presidential administration, and continues to grow today.

I’m not too proud to admit I Zillow as much as the next person (though I remain disturbed by how soothing it can be). There are some things I value more, however, than four beds and two baths to myself. In my 20s, I lived with three other queer people who taught me how to change my oil and reminded me of the simple joy of passing an unplanned joint after work. In my current fourplex, we count on one another for emergency pet care, for “Are you home? I think I left my oven on,” and for an unexpected, genuine conversation when passing in the yard. (Not to mention the loaves of bread one of my neighbors regularly bakes for the rest of us.) It’s experiences like these that trigger the spark of connection, the comfort of knowing someone’s close by, and the familial warmth of being cared for and taking care.

The American Dream was never imagined with everyone in mind. At its best, individual homeownership evokes feelings of stability, safety, and attachment. At its worst, it embodies exclusionary consumerism and white-hetero tribalism. The queer commune offers all of the former without the latter, instead gifting collectivism, kinship, and the potential for social transformation. And probably some good homemade dessert.

Y’all coming?

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August 31, 2022August 28, 2024

I Want to Start a Queer Commune

by M.E. Savard

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Summer doesn't officially end until September 22. Here's what to read before then.

Whether or not it's factually true, I have always been of the belief that September feels like the hottest month of the year. This could be because I live in Los Angeles, where there is rarely a meaningful difference in weather once we cross the threshold of August. (A problem that only gets worse each year.) Or maybe it's just some latent, adolescent part of my brain that associates September with school and, therefore, with fall, thus making the heat feel like a punishment—the sun taunting me, the same 80-degree day sitting differently with my body than it did in July.

Either way, early September has always felt like purgatory to me; and while I like summer just fine, come September 1, I often forget it isn't technically over yet: This year, the fall equinox begins on September 22—another three weeks away. With that in mind, I asked a few cool folks to tell us what they're reading until then. (But I think it's a list worth devouring year-round.)

—G.M.

Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson

This is my favorite book to bring to the beach. Many books have tackled reimaginings of the classics, and it’s been interesting to see a hearty subgenre emerge within that category of same-sex romance. But for me, Anne Carson did it best with this poetic take on one of the labors of Heracles: Instead of slaying the red monster Geryon, he breaks his heart.

The story is told from Geryon’s perspective. He is soft, sensitive, and insecure. So, you know. Gay. I found that relatable to begin with. The most beautiful parts to me are the passing mentions of Geryon’s wings, which exist, but most people don’t seem to pay much mind to. Love, flight, Greek mythology, being different, the erotic—it’s all here, rendered so splendidly and with such tenderness. It’s an incredibly quick read. It will only take you an afternoon or so to fall in love.

— J.P. Brammer

All This Could Be Different by Sarah Thankam Mathews

I’m a bit burned out on media about women in their early 20s living their messiest lives—but when I started Sarah Thankam Mathew’s debut, I felt excited by its fresh approach. In a coming-of-age that considers capitalism, queerness, and cultural identity, recent graduate Sneha lands in Milwaukee during the Great Recession thanks to a corporate job that offers free rent and enough money to support her family in India. As funny as she is frustrating, with that naive mix of knowing nothing but believing everything deeply, I saw a lot of my younger self in Sneha, and I appreciated the chance to spend a rainy weekend in the world of her and friends, knowing I’d return to the stability of my late 20s after I finished it.

—Bettina Makalintal

Misfits: A Personal Manifesto by Michaela Coel

Personally, summer tends to either be a blossoming time of creativity, or I feel like a raisin withering on a vine. The fact that I’ve mostly spent the summer reading screenwriting guides, I can say this one was the former. One memoir has become the center of my practice, however: Misfits: A Personal Manifesto by Michaela Coel. A quick read, Misfits refuses to sit firmly in any genre. Coel shares stories from her life, explores her creative ambitions, and provides guidance for Black people trying to survive in the entertainment industry. Reading about Coel’s process and life has inspired my own work and the risks I take.

—Ashley Ray

Counternarratives by John Keene

The linked stories in John Keene’s Counternarratives took me a month to read and will take years, I’m sure, to weave through my thinking. This is the kind of book that makes me return to what Toni Morrison and Stephanie Smallwood have said about imaginative literature as a necessary part of the history of slavery (and, I would add, indigenous genocide and survival). How else? In these pieces of the quilt we have an interior monologue from Huck Finn’s Jim (who now belongs to himself), we have a deckhand from Hispaniola on the uncolonized shores of Manhattan, we have conversos in 17^th century Brazil. We have Langston Hughes in bed with his translator, Xavier Villaurrutia. We have so many forms and their wild reformations. I was already a fan after reading John Keene’s experimental memoir Annotations, but now he’s a top five fave.

— Carina del Valle Schorske

People Person by Sam Cottington

I find summers to be catastrophic for reading, but recently it's been a nice salve. Mostly I have a hard time reading when it's too hot, and of course, the world is the hottest it's ever been. The heat in Toronto has broken just a touch, so I can sit in the shade and finally enjoy a few pages. I'm very lucky to be able to get sent novels all the time, and recently I've been reading the novella by Sam Cottington, People Person, and Allie Rowbottom's new novel Aesthetica. If you know me, I am always buying out of print books and trying to find certain titles. I just got the novelization of the film The Way We Were by Arthur Laurents. I think the story of The Way We Were is one of the best portrayals of romance, ever! I'm hoping reading the novel will be instructive...

—Marlowe Granados

Anna: The Biography by Amy Odell

When I think biography, I think dense. I was delighted to find Odell's bio of Vogue Editor-In-Chief Anna Wintour to be the opposite. It flows nimbly through decades of media, culture, and fashion history, all told through the lens of one powerful, embattled, iconic, often deeply contradictory woman. Perhaps most impressive is that despite Wintour's fame, Odell manages to neither valorize nor villainize the notorious editor. Her reporting is fair, the book's voice compelling. It's a fascinating look behind the scenes of what makes Wintour a powerhouse—the privilege, the skills, and above all the survival instincts that may make or break her in the years to come.

—Alanna Bennett

Patricia Wants to Cuddle by Samantha Allen

I just finished reading Samantha Allen’s Patricia Wants to Cuddle, a novel that somehow manages to pack horror, queer romance, and comedy elements all in one book, perfect for readers who love reality dating shows (whether ironically or not). This fun read follows the contestants—and producers—of a Bachelor-like reality show called The Catch as their experience filming on a remote island in the Pacific Northwest turns more Stephen King than Nora Ephron, all because of an uninvited guest lurking in the background. The relationships between the women vying for the attention of the titular “Catch” created legitimate laugh-out-loud moments, only to be followed by suspenseful twists and turns that kept me turning the page. Those who watch reality TV will truly appreciate the way Allen has written these characters, though you don’t have to be a devotee of dating shows to appreciate this book. It’s honestly just so much fun, and a great summer read.

—Rosemary Donahue

Boom Town by Sam Anderson

I must start off this recommendation by admitting that I am not a sports guy in any sense of the word; as a Philadelphian, I will defend the Birds and all of our other rambunctious sports teams until my dying breath, but that is only because to do otherwise would be deeply unwise in terms of my personal safety (and would severely piss off my neighbors, who own a meat smoker and like to share its bounty). However, Sam Anderson's sprawling, ingenious, lovingly crafted narrative nonfiction debut about Oklahoma City, its messy frontier history, and its oft-beleaguered basketball team not only got me to care about sports, it made me want to look up the (living, breathing, balling) characters in his book to find out more about them. It scratched my eternal itch to learn about places that seem overlooked and written off, the way that Oklahoma City and its Midwestern brethren often are; it made me consider listening to the Flaming Lips, and taught me a hell of a lot about tornados and the benign cult of the local weatherman. I really cannot recommend it highly enough. Even if you do not care about any of the things I've listed here, trust me—Sam Anderson will change that, and teach you a thing or two besides.

—Kim Kelly

Nevada by Imogen Binnie

A cult book is a bit like a cat, in that it has many lives, and you never know when you might encounter it. For Imogen Binnie’s Nevada—a squirrely novel about a slacker named Maria—a close friend told me it was absolutely her favorite book, then emailed me a PDF. I read it quickly, as one tends to do with anything on their computer screen, and found it to be the rare, actually-funny New York novel, more possessed by the grime of the city than its glitz. But it’s the book’s surprising second act that takes place in the state of—well, you can guess—and the way it swerves past the obvious ending that has stayed with me.

Nevada was reissued this summer by FSG, giving it a new audience and me a reason to read it again. This time, as a handsome paperback, I told myself I would consume it more slowly. No such luck. The book is too funny! I read the whole thing in a single afternoon at the park.

— Kevin Nguyen

High-Rise by J.G. Ballard

I just re-read J.G. Ballard’s 1975 novel High-Rise. As the story opens, a hyper-modern tower block welcomes its new tenants. The building offers them every imaginable convenience, from an onsite supermarket and swimming pool to automatic trash chutes and a rooftop children’s garden. Well-heeled women walk pedigreed poodles across the building’s pristine elevator concourses. By the end of the novel their feral husbands are hunting those same dogs for food and roasting them on improvised spits over pyres of burning furniture. The housewives, themselves, have turned to cannibalism. The most alarming thing about this calamitous fall is that absolutely everyone in the building sees it coming—which makes this novel an unsettling read in the early days of our climate apocalypse. It’s easy to call Ballard prophetic, but he was just attuned to the human subconscious and fascinated by the ways in which our desires could be set loose by architecture and technology. In High-Rise, the building itself gives shape to the worst of humanity. I can only hope we imagine some new shapes to avoid such a fate ourselves.

— Claire L. Evans

Oh! by Mary Robison

I believe summer reading calls for books that either tap into a refreshing deep freeze or enhance the heat and entropy of the season. Mary Robison’s first novel, Oh!, mixes these effects—it’s the ice in your tea on a blazing afternoon, a pristinely funny account of a Midwestern family, the Clevelands, who seem dysfunctional to outsiders but may be living more authentically than the rest of us. Underneath the booze and bickering is a love strong enough to sustain them through the disasters that, besides the tornados, are mostly of their own making. I felt right at home.

—Miles Klee

Homer's The Odyssey, translated by Emily Wilson

I spent the last year researching, writing, and promoting a book. It’s been transformative, exhilarating, and frankly exhausting. My goal this summer was to be as lazy as possible. My tolerance for holding a book, as well as my attention span, are at an all-time low, so I turned to audio books (yes, I realize I am decades behind!). Listening to Emily Wilson’s lively, lean, and rhythmic translation of Homer’s The Odyssey, narrated by Claire Danes, is the perfect soundtrack to lying down, on my bed or warm grass, my preferred summer activities. It’s a fun reminder of the physicality of words and storytelling, and Wilson’s accessible language lets me focus on all the human drama—like I’m eavesdropping on some hot, ancient gossip!

—Angela Garbes

Less by Andrew Sean Greer

I feel like I read Andrew Sean Greer’s Less whenever I’m traveling or trying to write—which, I suppose, is all the time. The book follows Arthur Less, a “minor author” and “magniloquent spoony” pushing fifty years old, who skips his ex’s wedding by going on a round-the-world trip where he writes and teaches and meets a sparkling cast of life lessons masquerading as humans. I have four big trips this summer (Manila, London, Sewanee in Tennessee, and Tuscany; writing through all of it), so I’ve kept Greer’s Pulitzer Prize-winning baby in my carry-on this whole time. It’s been nice having a friend with me for the long layovers, for the writer’s blocks, for the reminders that this burning world is something to love.

—Matt Ortile

The Morning Star by Karl Ove Knausgård

I regret to open my first ever blurb for this wonderful publication by triple-bypassing its single instruction and recommending a book that I actually read in the dead of winter, but I devoured The Morning Star by Karl Ove Knausgård, and you should, too. I had never read him before but, based on the man’s healthy ego and reputation for excruciating minutiae, I half expected to give up almost immediately. Instead, this haunting, imaginative, at times philosophical, and at times humorous collection of loosely interconnected stories gripped me from the first page. What can I say, Knausgård can write!

—Vanessa A. Bee

Ada, or Ardor by Vladimir Nabokov

This is a book about being Vladimir Nabokov and wanting to flex with language. Some would say it’s a book about love, or that it’s a family chronicle, but really it’s Nabokov dancing giddily across the page. There’s wordplay galore, with the title itself being an example—”Ada,” the author notes, when pronounced with a “long, deep Russian a” sounds like “ardor,” and so a person can be construed as a tribulation.

There’s a plot to be traveled down, should you need one. But the point of reading the book, to me, is to remind the reader that prose can be pursued so rapturously and with such confidence. It’s a great book to read if you’re experiencing writer’s block. Watching Nabokov shape language like a master ceramicist is inspiring, if you can push past the confusing names (there are two different “Van Veen”s) and, well, the incest. There are plenty of beautiful descriptions of bugs to distract you, at least.

The whole thing also takes place on an entirely alternate Earth called Antiterra, for some reason, which to me gave the austere trappings of the book an alluring sci-fi sheen to it. It’s truly an imagination, run amok.

—J.P.B.

Honey & Spice by Bolu Babalola

This new adult contemporary romance is the debut novel of the author of Love in Colour, a master of the love story. Set at a university in the UK, with an exclusively Black cast of characters, Babalola's crafted a world with such care and attention to detail that it rises from the page to greet the reader. You are invited in, summoned to come play with some of the best romance tropes in existence (Enemies to lovers! Fake dating!), and also to bear witness to their reinvigoration.

I devoured this book beachside, taken over by rich characters who by book's end settle into your heart like old friends. Most incisive, to me? This book is ultimately about how hard it is to open your heart: the pits that form when you fear hurting or getting hurt, and the rewards that come when you do the work to do better and be open. A tribute to the "babygirls" and "babyghels" of Babalola's life, the novel's a love letter to all kinds of love, not just the romantic.

—A.B.

The Hidden Case of Ewan Forbes And the Unwritten History of the Trans Experience By Zoë Playdon

This book is an absolute must for anyone interested in trans history, queer history, or any kind of history at all, really. In 1912, Ewan Forbes was born to an old aristocratic family in Scotland; assigned female at birth, he was nonetheless very clear about his identity from a young age, and that resolve (and his mother's love) led him to seek out an early version of gender affirming care. All Ewan wanted was to become a family man and live a quiet, decent life; he achieved this for a while, until a grasping younger brother came knocking, and Ewan's entire world—and identity—was turned upside down. What happened afterwards led to a pivotal, precedent-setting legal ruling that was summarily buried and kept secret for decades, until now. Ewan's story intersects with many different moments and movements throughout his long and eventful life, and as Playdon deftly illustrates (backed up by years of intensive research), the roots of the UK's current abysmal plague of transphobia do not run nearly as deep as its hateful proponents would like us to think. Her thrilling, warm-hearted excavation of Ewan's life and legal battles unravels a fascinating tale that challenges modern ideas around gender, healthcare, human rights, the British legal system, and even the aristocracy. Read it.

—K.K.

How to Read Now by Elaine Castillo

I loved Elaine Castillo’s novel, America Is Not the Heart, but I wasn’t sure what to expect from her first nonfiction release. Ostensibly a critique of reading and how we, as readers, can do it better, it sounded esoteric. But Castillo makes a strong argument that reading isn’t just for books, but also the reading of the world: the broader consideration of other people, and ourselves in relation, using topics like Joan Didion, Watchmen, and the films of Wong Kar-Wai as a lens. Her essays are so honest, funny, and sharp in their criticism that after just a few of them, I felt like some of the stuck gears in my thinking had come loose and I felt immediately motivated to write.

—B.M.

When You Get the Chance by Emma Lord

This contemporary young adult novel is a Mamma Mia remix of the finest degree—and it knows it. The book's main character, an eager Manhattan theater kid, makes frequent reference to the musical, but somehow the novel is never bogged down by its origins. It's a fun read, gripping and gratifying. I found myself looking forward to the end of my workday so I could keep going and find out what happens in both the novel's winning romance and in its mystery. And here's a non-spoiler: That end is as gratifying as you'd hope.

—A.B.

[post_title] => What a Bunch of Interesting Humans Are Reading This Summer/Fall Purgatory [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => open [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => what-a-bunch-of-interesting-humans-are-reading-this-summer-fall-purgatory [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2024-08-28 21:15:12 [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-08-28 21:15:12 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=4258 [menu_order] => 119 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

August 31, 2022August 28, 2024

What a Bunch of Interesting Humans Are Reading This Summer/Fall Purgatory

by Gina Mei

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 4775 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2022-08-31 17:45:00 [post_date_gmt] => 2022-08-31 17:45:00 [post_content] =>

Meet Cole Bush, the shepherdess battling fire season with goats and sheep.

One morning last summer, Cole Bush was high up on a ridge in North Los Angeles County, shepherding her “flerd”—a mixed flock of sheep and herd of goat—from one paddock to another. Normally, this maneuver was routine; but something was wrong. When she turned around, in the distance far below, she spotted a hundred of her goats and sheep: They had slipped off into a high school parking lot and were eating the median. People were already gathering around them. Bush and her team ran down the steep hillside as quickly as they could and found a football coach surveying the scene. She began to explain what was going on: Her animals, now munching away on tufts of grass, weren’t just a prank gone awry. They were there to protect them from fire.

This answer likely surprised him, but Bush—who goes by BCB—explained that the animals were on the clock. Based out of Ojai Valley, in Ventura County, California, Bush’s business, Shepherdess Land and Livestock Co., is a for-hire grazing outfit that focuses on fire prevention and vegetation management. The work they do is tantamount to creating protective force fields; shepherding the flerd to eat brush, weeds, invasive plants—would-be fuel—so that fires won’t move as quickly or get as hot. The grazing is not to eradicate fires, but to ensure they’ll be smaller, more manageable, and to create defensible space.

Of course, the animals have no idea they’re rushing against time to prevent the destruction of property, livelihoods, and a potential great extinction. They’re just animals doing animal things; curious, hungry, and content to roam. They have good days and bad depending on the elements; on a hot day they might move more slowly. If there are interesting landscaped yards—or football fields—nearby, they might wander over to get a taste.

Still, they’re highly effective. As they roam, their hooves aerate the soil, making it healthier. They digest plants and turn them into food for the soil when they shit. “Their bodies know so much,” says Bush. From the womb, their gut biomes are prepared as their mothers introduce them to the local weeds and brush. From birth, they begin learning what they need and how to exist with the land; and when they stray, their shepherdess guides them home.

If it seems like an underreaction to employ goats and sheep to combat an ever-expanding fire season, that’s part of the point of Bush’s project. “We have a culture of fear around fire,” she says, when we need to feel empowered against it. And to feel powerful against an element that turns us into shut-ins, that paints the sky otherworldly colors and sends residents fleeing from their homes every year, Bush says, requires us to first re-examine our relationship to the land it ravages.

“A lot of our work is this idea of bridging, of the translation piece,” she says. “We’re at war with the earth when in fact we need to see that we’re a part of it.”

Bush grew up in San Diego, the chaparral region of California, a fire-prone ecosystem. In middle school, her family moved to a house in Elfin Forest, just north of the city, which they could afford because the forest itself had burned down.

In the barn, a young Bush could see the smoke stains on the stucco walls. “We lived in the shadows of the aftermath of fire,” she remembers. Even then she understood on some level, despite the ash and the charred remnants of trees, that fire was not a combative element. “How [the ecosystem] has evolved with fire is so important. But the way that we have not actively stewarded or tended to our landscapes has created the devastation of mega wildfires.”

It would be a long road before Bush would realize her place was among the “flerd.” Raised in the Church of Latter-Day Saints, she knew two things by the time she was 20: that she was queer, and that she had to leave the church. Still, she remembers an idyllic childhood. Her family would cross the border to Rosarito almost every Sunday, driving workers from her dad’s LED business home. In Mexico, they’d join them for community dinners, where Bush remembers not wanting to go back to the suburbs, back to the States, where neighbors lived close, but seemed to be strangers to one another.

As Bush began breaking away from the church, she became increasingly hungry for understanding what made groups—and cultures—cohere and thrive. She thought that built environments were the answer. She’d dropped out of college, but returned to school to take classes on the history of civilizations. “All of them c[a]me down to the same demise,” she learned, “which is lack of resources or depletion of resources.” Pivoting her focus, Bush began to gravitate towards agroecology and environmental studies. It was there that she learned about what would later be called regenerative agriculture. Now it’s a buzzword—a shell for many things, often conflated with sustainability—but for Bush, regeneration was tied to the idea of “ancient futures,” of taking lessons and traditions from the past and adapting them to a future sorely in need of change.

And then she met Becky, a border collie who worked at Star Creek Ranch in Santa Cruz County, California. When Becky’s owner had to leave town, Bush adopted her and started working at the ranch alongside her, taking photos of the goats and sheep Becky herded. She began to see the animals’ personalities emerge. The goats were the “bad kids on the block,” and the sheep did, indeed, prefer to stick together. They were also surprisingly sweet with their young. Bush was hooked. The ranch opened a grazing business, called Star Creek Land Stewards, and when it landed its first big contract in 2012, Bush became the project manager. She was 27, in charge of organizing thousands of acres of prescribed grazing.

When the owner wanted to retire and sell the ranch in 2014, Bush helped track down a family that traced its lineage back to European Basque shepherds to buy and run the business. Through them, Bush was helping to reinvigorate a shepherding tradition that had waned after WWII, when demand for wool and mutton fell, followed by another decline in the '60s, as synthetic fibers continued to gain in popularity. In addition to grazing, she started selling high-end hides—repurposing waste from the lamb industry—and began calling herself “a modern-day urban shepherdess.” She had found her calling.

Soon, she took off for Spain and France, where she studied not just shepherding but also the systems that allow young people to become shepherds. She was following in the footsteps of a tradition that had existed long before her; exploring what makes a shepherd a shepherd, and what might attract more people to the work—questions posed by respected researchers like Fred Provenza and Michel Meuret in books she’d studied. She was now certain that she had “sheep and goat in her blood,” and dreamed of a grazing school in California. She created a curriculum and developed a project called The Grazing School of the West despite having no students yet. Someday, she thought, it would be a place where people could work the land with each other, with a community supporting them as they experimented with a vocation that might end up being a life calling, like it was for her. “This ancient vocation somehow persists in contemporary times and will always be a part of humanity,” explains Bush. “Domesticating animals and agriculture is what allowed us to grow as a species on Earth.”

Now, she hoped those same tools might be used to help the species survive.

In 2017, the Thomas Fire raged through Southern California, burning nearly two-hundred and ninety-thousand acres of land over the course of a month. The city of Ojai was surrounded by flames, and though they never fully breached its perimeter, they destroyed more than seven-hundred and fifty homes in nearby Ventura and Santa Barbara counties. At the time, it was the largest fire in California’s history—and for Bush, it served as a wake up call.

Ojai Valley was a place Bush felt close to; she’d visited often and found herself more connected to nature there. She saw, too, that Southern California was in need of a new approach to fire, one that would not perpetuate the tropes of fear and flight, losing and winning, burning and rebuilding. It needed something different, something radical but not experimental, something reliable and time-tested. It needed goats, sheep, and shepherds. So, when she opened up her own prescribed grazing outfit in 2020—Shepherdess Land and Livestock Co.—she did it in Ojai.

At the time, she knew she was choosing to “be a part of this crazy capitalist system, go out and make money and create jobs for people so that I can pay them.” It was a risky path, but the goal was always to use the grazing company not only for fire prevention but also to subsidize training for a new generation of shepherds. Bush thinks that there is a boom coming in the U.S.; a wave of people who will be eager to dedicate themselves to the land. But they won’t have the same social safety nets, like shepherds in Europe, to help them as they learn. They’ll need to get paid. Last year, The Grazing School of the West welcomed its first cohort of eight trainees. This year Bush is training six, paying them a livable wage. She hopes to continue to expand the program to include twelve shepherds each year.

When trainees see the flerd for the first time, there is a high-frequency buzz of excitement in the air. When the first goat or sheep wanders off, they panic, thinking they’ll lose the animal. And at some point, the weight of being responsible for so many lives washes over them and the true nature of the work becomes clear. In her letter preparing interested would-be shepherds for the job, Bush warns that the work “will be the HARDEST work you could possibly imagine.” It’s mostly fence-building in one-hundred-degree heat and practicing patience with people who sometimes don’t know the difference between a sheep and a goat. Since it’s rare to be grazing far from private property, Bush has to invest in liability insurance for her flerd—in case they destroy landscaping or wander into the wrong yard or, in the worst case scenario, onto a highway. Not everyone is cut out for those realities, which Bush admits don’t appear on her social media, and leads to a swath of applicants who have never done manual labor but have done a lot of Instagramming. “I made it look way too beautiful and cool,” she says. “And I'm looking at some applicants, and I'm just like, Oh, no, this is an issue.”

Still, Bush is also turning away applicants who would be good fits. “[Prescribed grazing is] a huge burgeoning industry, and the biggest bottleneck is a skilled and trained workforce,” she says. She doesn’t have the resources to expand her program, and no one else seems to either. In Bush’s experience, young folks do want to become shepherds. But she’s left wondering, “What is the barrier to getting these people trained for more businesses and more hands on the ground?” The David vs. Goliath framing, made so common by climate change, leaving smaller actors feeling impotent, weighs on her. “I would say pretty regularly I am overwhelmed with emotion because I just wish I could do more faster,” she says. Twelve new shepherds a year is not going to solve the chaos that’s already happening. And it’s frustrating when there are plenty more than twelve people who want to and could become shepherds.

Lately, with a team she can trust on the ground, Bush has been taking more time away from the day-to-day operations and focusing on education. Usually, and especially with fire, we wait for a fight to make itself plain and then send out the troops, sparing no expense. But there is another way—and Bush is trying to build bridges to decision makers who can help push structural change. In order to scale ideas, it’s all about getting funds from the state level to specific, grassroots level grazing projects, she says. One of her most radical ideas would be to bring goats into prisons, instead of sending inmates to go out and fight fires, a dangerous and grueling task. “Why don't we train inmates to learn how to manage and work with livestock?” Bush asks. “To do the same work that we're doing and also have such incredible healing components with working with animals?” These are the types of ideas she hopes to bring to the table; to prioritize prevention over fear and connection over combativeness.

The numbers don’t seem to be in Bush’s favor, nor does time, as fire season continues to expand; 2.5 million acres of land in California burned in 2021 alone. But that’s the thing about a calling: Once you answer it you have to find your way forward. If a few meetings with assembly members go well, if a few more shepherds learn quickly, then Bush might be able to shift just a few more people’s perception of fire, of animals, of the land. In turn, the path might open a bit wider for the boom of ecological doctors and modern-day shepherds that she sees coming.

With every successful connection made and bridge built, Bush stays hopeful. In the high school parking lot, as she handed the football coach her card and talked to the observers, she quickly diffused a potentially fraught situation. By the end of the day the onlookers were spreading the word that the “flerd” was in the neighborhood with a purpose, and that if anyone found animals suddenly roaming alongside them, they didn’t have to panic; they were exactly where they needed to be.

In the end, Bush considers herself a herder of humans as well as animals. And if nothing else, humans need to figure out how to give ourselves more time, so we might have more chances to adjust. As she writes in her closing line of the letter she sends to prospective shepherds, “It's a daunting world in society these days and the Earth is throwing out all kinds of loud cries for humanity to get a grip. We can do our part even if small and maybe we can herd on together for some time.”

Additional fact checking by Elizabeth Moss.

*The Footnotes

Additional Reading: The Art & Science of Shepherding, edited by Michel Meuret and Fred Provenza

[post_title] => Fighting Fire with Flerd [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => open [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => fighting-fire-with-flerd-cole-bush-goats [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2024-08-28 21:08:25 [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-08-28 21:08:25 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=4775 [menu_order] => 120 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

August 31, 2022August 28, 2024

Fighting Fire with Flerd

by Allison Keeley

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 4229 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2022-08-31 17:30:00 [post_date_gmt] => 2022-08-31 17:30:00 [post_content] =>

The women of color writing new narratives in perfumery.

When I travel, my souvenir of choice comes in olfactive form: a TSA-compliant bottle of perfume that embodies the spirit of the place I’m visiting, so that I can return to it later in my mind. One cherished example, from a trip to Tokyo, smells like a cup of green tea enjoyed in the cooling clarity of a shaded garden. To someone who grew up surrounded by tea rituals, it also smells like coming home. At its heart is a photorealistic green tea accord—soft yet assertive, bright and smooth at once, bitterness and sweetness in an entangled dance until the end. The scent was composed by someone who understands tea in all of its kaleidoscopic facets: Satori Osawa, a licensed Japanese tea master and one of the country’s few recognized perfumers. She was also the first East Asian perfumer I’d ever met.

Perfumers, admittedly, are hard to come by. They work in chemistry labs sheltered from the public eye and, for the most part, anonymously. But they also tend to hail from the same small pocket of the world, even though their work caters to audiences all over the globe. Looking at headshots of famous perfumers feels like playing a difficult game of Guess Who: From Jean Claude Ellena (Hermès Terre d’Hermès, Bulgari Thé Vert) to Olivier Cresp (Thierry Mugler Angel, YSL Black Opium), the creators behind some of the biggest household names in perfumery are all born in France—often into perfumer families—and trained there, too.

France is hardly the only place in the world with a rich cultural scent heritage; nevertheless, the traditional perfumer’s mold continues to be cast in the French man’s image. For those who try to challenge this convention, the barriers to entry unpack like nesting dolls: gender, race, nationality, lineage, and, at the heart of it all, access. “When I first started out and wanted to establish my brand name, it was incredibly difficult,” says Chavalia Dunlap-Mwamba, self-taught perfumer and owner of Texas-based fragrance brand Pink MahogHany. Whether it was finding other Black perfumers in the industry to reach out to, or bulk manufacturers and compounders to scale her business, helpful information proved to be scant and elusive. She found herself bootstrapping as a complete outsider.

For many, the barriers to perfumery are also profoundly financial. From minimum order quantities to the price of raw materials—250ml of jasmine absolute, for example, can retail for over a thousand dollars—every aspect of the industry comes with a price tag to choke on. “Perfumery is an expensive hobby, and historically, only the very privileged have been able to partake in it,” says Loreto Remsing, creator of artisan brand LAROMATICA. Learning the tricks of the trade is equally prohibitive, and usually involves moving to France to study at one of its prestigious fragrance institutions. For Remsing, an immigrant to the United States who faced poverty growing up and ended up putting herself through college, a formal perfume education was never an option; and even if it had been, she would have felt out of place. This exclusionary feeling is shared by Lula Curioca, an olfactory artist and perfumer based in Mexico City, and also pushed her to pursue the self-taught route. “[It was] like going against water all the time,” Curioca admits. “I was like, ‘That gate, at the moment, I can’t cross it.’”

In conversations about the industry, this image of gates comes up time and time again. “[Historically,] women of color haven’t been given the opportunity to come up in perfumery,” says Yosh Han, self-taught perfumer and creative director at Scent Trunk, a fragrance publishing house. “Many have been in marketing or sales roles only.” Disregarding the rules of convention, she launched her eponymous perfume brand in 2004, as an Asian-American female with no formal training. She recalls the industry reception being one of shock: “Everybody was like, ‘Who the fuck is this girl?’” Han, who now champions other independent and self-taught perfumers by commissioning their work for Scent Trunk, is a vocal advocate for doing things the untraditional way. She likens it to good cooking: talent can come from any kitchen, not just Le Cordon Bleu’s.

Access through the well-trodden pathways, too, comes with asterisks and caveats for those who do not fit the profile. “It’s really guarded. And still, despite what a huge industry it is,” says Anne Serrano-McClain, founder of independent perfume brand MCMC Fragrances. She’s what the industry dubs “classically” trained, through a year-long professional degree offered by the Grasse Institute of Perfumery (GIP), a rarefied and renowned perfume school located in the South of France, that only accepts 12 students a year. When she enrolled in 2009, most of her fellow students were from Europe, with familial ties to the industry; one of them was the aforementioned Olivier Cresp’s son. “You are expected in the industry to follow a very particular path,” she says. “I walked away with the technical skills, but I also walked away with this understanding that made me passionate [about] breaking that mold a little bit.”

Dana El Masri, a Lebanese-Egyptian-Canadian perfumer who launched her line Jazmin Saraï shortly after graduating from GIP, recalls clashing with her French teachers and classmates throughout her time there. Often, it came down to cultural differences as a person of color in a traditional Euro-centric environment. In one instance, while working on a group project for a perfume that she was leading—inspired by a luxury hotel in Siwa, an oasis in northern Egypt—her unusual choice of fragrance materials was called into question as being “too oriental.”

Here, “oriental” is accompanied by emphatic air quotes. Until recently, the term was a part of the perfume industry taxonomy—a fragrance family that encapsulates scents with warm, resinous, spicy facets, featuring materials such as vanilla, labdanum, and tonka bean. The classification has always played an othering role in perfumery, used to describe scents that represented fantasies of foreign places. “It means nothing from an olfactory perspective,” El Masri explains. “You can eliminate it entirely and break it down into balsamic, ambery, powdery, and gourmand.” In school, she was praised for being skilled at making “oriental” perfumes—until those compositions started to smell too foreign. “We were playing around with materials that you find in ancient Egypt. So I was using myrrh, I was playing with papyrus. Palm frond. Carob. Jasmine,” she recounts. “So yeah, it was going to be a little ‘oriental.’”

Today, due to growing pressure from industry advocates—including many of the perfumers featured here—a term that was once deemed part of perfume tradition is now understood as terribly outdated and offensive. In 2021, the perfume database Fragrances of the World updated all instances of “oriental” to “amber,” as did the perfume encyclopedia Fragrantica. Some brands and retailers followed suit. Still, many haven’t, and the industry remains riddled with disparity and ripe for change. “If a [fragrance] company cannot acknowledge a word description because they’re upholding colonial white supremacist beliefs,” asks Han, “how is a woman of color ever going to get to leadership positions?”

To amplify and uplift the presence of BIPOC creators within the industry, Han, El Masri, and their network of advocates have assembled resources like Decolonize Scent and the Diverse Talent in Fragrance & Perfumery Database. It is, after all, in perfume companies’ best interests to expand their pool of talent; diversity begets innovation and creativity. And when perfumers are hired from all over the world, not just the microclimates of the South of France, they distill their experiences and unique olfactive associations into their work. “When you bring in women of color, you are bringing in unique cultural experiences, traditions, history, heritage, and stories,” says Remsing, who attributes the inspiration for some of her creations to a childhood of living on isolated farms, surrounded by herbs, plants, and folk medicine.

Before I had the chance to visit Satori Osawa, I had smelled a dozen green tea scents—all pleasant and lovely, but none that hooked me by the heart. When I smelled her specific translation of green tea—with the sparkle of a portrait painted by a person who loves the subject—the rest of them dropped out of qualification.

Perfumes have always been prized for their transportive properties, how they allow us to return to a beloved memory, or armchair travel to new surroundings. This is why fragrance marketing copy is saturated with references to fabled worlds and exotic destinations, to odysseys and adventures. But as the olfactory terrain of fragrance becomes more and more diverse, those responsible for creating these concepts remain the same.

To the brands who capitalize on the allure of the unfamiliar yet default to working with the old guard, El Masri presents an alternative perspective: “Don't you think you're going to get more of an accurate and potentially even more soulful, passionate, connected interpretation of what you're trying to express,” she asks, “if it was made with a local [perfumer] or someone who understands the culture on a much deeper level?” This is not to say that only people who’ve lived those experiences should get to tell their stories, El Masri clarifies. “I’m just saying that we need to give those people that chance.”

For the women who’ve plodded their own paths in perfumery, a shared belief is the moral imperative to create more opportunities for the scent-curious, whomever they may be. Dunlap-Mwamba, who also works as an educator, sees it as more than a DE&I concern—it’s the missing representation that helps close gaps for the next generation. “My mission is to create more visibility for perfumers of color,” she says. “Because what happened with me is that I didn’t know this space existed until I was grown.” If fragrance became incorporated into elementary school curriculums alongside electives like art or dance, she suggests, students would be exposed to the different facets of the fragrance industry at a younger age—which broadens their avenues in the job market.

Serrano-McClain has a similar mission: to pass on her technical training from the GIP to those in less privileged positions. “We don’t treat perfume like it’s accessible art,” she says. “And we could do more of that.” She had previously taught a perfume class at a local youth engagement center, and recalls being impressed with the wealth of olfactive ideas that her teenage students brought to the table—evidence that good ideas in perfumery can come from anywhere, at any age. But what is understood for other artistic mediums—that capital and institutional training are not prerequisites to great art—still pushes the boundaries of this one.

One of the silver linings of the pandemic is how it has normalized and democratized online education—and that includes more remote perfume courses, previously rarely offered. Organizations dedicated to accessible scent education and experimentation, such as the Institute for Art and Olfaction (IAO) in Los Angeles, make it easier than ever to dabble in the art and science of smells. Curioca, who herself learned to make perfume through sessions at the IAO, offered advice for other outsiders with interest in the industry who are unsure of where to begin: “If you want to, you’ll find a way. Maybe it’s slower. Maybe it’s different. Your own path will find you—you just need to let yourself be guided.”

As they say in the industry: Just follow your nose.

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August 31, 2022August 28, 2024

Follow Her Nose

by Tracy Wan

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A story of two deaths and an engagement.

“Old Friends” is an ongoing series exploring the many ways that friendship changes shape in adulthood.

“My friend Rachel is getting married.”

I say the words in my head, and out loud, and marvel at the way the syllables align; laugh a bit at the obvious joke about the 2008 movie; pull my mouth into a half-smile as I imagine Rachel as I knew her best, someone I sat with during tenth grade biology and who gifted me so many of the foundational touchstones of my personhood now. Rachel, goofy and unguarded and easily earnest, who spurred me to be my weirdest and wildest self. Rachel, who introduced me to Britpop; who introduced me to a lot of music, actually, including the artist Annie, whose song “Heartbeat” is a top five for sure. Rachel, who taught me to be funny in the exact way that would make her giggle, an expression and sound I can picture without any dimming over the distance of space and time.

The thing is, I haven’t seen Rachel in person in over a decade. Before this past year, the last time I’d spoken to her was back in 2017, when our friend L, who’d sat at that same bio table, passed away, and knowing that she and L had been as close as sisters, I’d reached out to Rachel over a flurry of texts. We made the kind of promises that happen over death, to be more present and ready for each other in the now. And I thought I’d meant it, but I couldn’t follow through. When everyone descended back on our hometown for the funeral, I demurred, citing life and time and work—and did I mention life?—letting the memory of who I was to them attend instead.

There were real reasons why I didn’t go back. I was in the throes of an internal gender crisis as I assessed and tried to repress my rejection of womanhood, a bridle bit that was carving a waterfall of blood from my metallic mouth. I was still reeling from a big move—out of Los Angeles, my home for seven years, and into a domicile with the man who’d become my spouse—and hadn’t quite found my footing, financially and otherwise, in this new place. But the most elemental reason I didn’t go back to New Jersey was that I didn’t know what to say to the friends I’d essentially left behind when I moved to California and decided to become the person I couldn’t be back home. Back where I knew and loved them. Back where I maybe not loved, but at least thought I knew, myself.

Four years later, death is what brings me back to Rachel again. She’d always been attuned to what one might call the “pop girls,” and in the early 2000s, that included Girls Aloud, the British girl group whose impact and influence never quite crossed the Atlantic like their most popular predecessors the Spice Girls' had. Rachel had made a hagiography out of their music and careers—as a group, as individuals—with the expertise of a stan, which she was. And then, last fall, one of the members of Girls Aloud passed away suddenly, at an age where your first reaction is, “That’s too young.”

I read the headline on the music blog I’ve been reading since high school and felt the impact in two waves: first, a sharp kick in the throat, and then, a dull pang tunneling through my chest cavity and into my gut, where it settled into the heavy, heady ache of guilt. I needed to tell Rachel. Did she already know? Did she still care? Would she want to talk about it with me, and could this transparent bid for reconnection actually in turn open the door for us to discuss everything I now knew about myself and everything I didn’t know about her?

We fell out over a boy, or at least that’s how I framed it. After my high school ex and I broke up, he’d stayed on the East Coast for college like most of the people I’d gone to school with and made plans with them and reached out to them and made them feel wanted and seen, and that included Rachel. Meanwhile, I’d crossed the country and immediately began my free bitch makeover montage, seeking nothing less than sublimation, to seem cooler, smarter, more self-possessed than I’d ever felt in the town where I’d grown up, to leave my body behind and diffuse into a sun-baptized spirit. I quite literally tried to shed my body of its mass, its baggage, its racialized cocoon, to cultivate the effortless, weightless glow of success and satisfaction that’d make people look at me, want me, and maybe even accept me. No wonder my ex broke up with me over a video call right before Halloween our freshman year; no wonder my attempts at conversations with my once-best friends became buckshot in sparse forests, doves with clipped wings released to their doom, cursory “happy birthday”s and then merciful silence. It didn’t matter that our high school friend group started to break apart on its own, that many of the friends my ex had “won” in the breakup custody battle didn’t stay friends with him or each other. I surrendered my past completely, and more than anyone else, I surrendered Rachel.

Honestly, the loss of most of those friendships was for the best. And eventually, I figured out how to become the kind of person I wanted to be without brutalizing myself for the achievement of that want. But I never got over Rachel, who was one of the only people I knew from back then who went on to work in the entertainment world, too; whose influence in my life goes down to my marrow.

I went alone to a Robyn concert and thought, “Rachel would’ve gone with me.” I went to parties and wondered what she’d think of their soundtracks, because she was the one who’d taught me how to listen to—really listen to—and contextualize music. In many ways, she was my shadow sensei and my twin, not in the biological sense but in the Hilton Als essayistic way. A mirrored soul, someone who knew how to draw the best of me out of myself.

I’d never told her any of this because nobody we grew up with talked about friendship like that. But maybe we’d always picked up a singular frequency from each other. When I heard through the grapevine that she’d come out in college, I yearned to tell her that I understood even though I hadn’t come out in my own way to myself then. When I did come out, I’d often imagine, unbidden, how I would break the news to her. How she’d process it; whether she’d recoil from or reach for me, whether she’d still recognize our similarities despite the new difference between us.

I stared at the headline and imagined a world where I took my regret to the grave, and texted her something that, between the lines, simply said: I miss you, I miss you, I miss you.

We talked for what felt like and actually was hours. Her girlfriend-now-fiancée had to remind her of the life outside our impassioned recollections and brutal revelations. Our mutual admirations and jealousies and drafted but scrapped overtures. She asked me what happened back then, and I told her with no shame or fear or gloss, the kind of honesty we’d never achieved as friends.

And really, we’re barely friends now. I don’t know the rhythms of her day-to-day life and she doesn’t know mine. We haven’t talked at length since that first outpouring, but we both agreed that all we could do was keep placing stones in the river that’d grown between us. I text her every time I think of her and she does the same. She’s back into British girl pop again and told me when she sang Little Mix at karaoke. I asked her for her address to send her flowers for her engagement though I’m not (and didn’t/don’t expect to be) invited to whatever ceremony she’s got planned. I won’t be in New York for a while and she won’t be in California anytime soon, but the door is open if/when one of us crosses over the same expanse that’d once divided us.

I want to shake my younger self by the shoulders and tell her/them that the only thing that ever kept me from rekindling these kinds of connections was my own damn ego, so fixated on the idea that something was broken that I couldn’t imagine reforging it into not the thing it was, but the thing it could be. I want to leap across the country and shake Rachel’s shoulders and promise, really promise, that I won’t let our friendship become a memory again. I want to watch her face morph with indescribable emotion as she sees me and I want to know she sees my face go through the same.

Maybe I’m coming on too strong. It’s true, whirlwind courtships have slimmer odds than ones that grow from deeply planted roots. So here I am, enriching the soil; soon, though, I hope to have more flowers for her.

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August 31, 2022August 28, 2024

How Do You Reconnect with Someone You Haven’t Spoken to in a Decade?

by Lio Min

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