Walking with Ghosts
Hello from Chattanooga, Tennessee, where I am speaking at the Southern Labor Studies Association conference alongside UAW members from the Volkswagen plant, my dear comrade Chris Brooks and Nelson Lichtenstein. Where they’re honoring the amazing Tera Hunter and displaying the art of the brilliant Tabitha Arnold and generally it is good to be surrounded by labor nerds in this lovely place.
I am feeling all of the things, and also a little bit sick of my own feelings and certainly of having them in public, but them’s the breaks when you write a book about grief. Even though I would and do argue that grief is not a feeling so much as a state of being, that it is all the feelings, rather, sometimes all at once. I’ve been in and out of grief time, I think, in the last couple of weeks leading up to and after book launch, feeling sometimes quite alone in a room full of people.
It’s been a week of new horrors since the book dropped and I am reminded once again that if I had waited for the horrors to stop in order to declare the book finished I would never have been able to be done with it and it really needed to end somewhere. So it ends in the middle of things, as it begins, and I think that’s always how stories go. Beginnings and endings always somewhat arbitrary and unsatisfying.
Maybe that’s why I like labor stories: the narrative arc is there. The union drive begins, it builds, there’s a win or a loss, a regrouping, then bargaining, then a contract (we hope) and concrete wins or losses to point to. Yet part of me still loves a broader, more horizontal movement; I love to be in the streets with a mass of people. Collective joy and collective grief. The feeling amplified through many bodies or, by being distributed through the crowd, made easier to bear.
Writing is, by contrast, too lonely.
But here we are. Israel demonstrating new ways to kill, rigging consumer electronics to blow, telling us once again that if you got hit by the shrapnel you must have been Hezbollah. The NYPD firing so wildly into a subway station they hit one of their own as well as two bystanders, one in critical condition with a head wound, over one man jumping a turnstile. The casual disregard for human life, not something you would think I’d be shocked by, having written the book I wrote, but still. Shocked, but not surprised. It’s a common affect for me these days.
But it is so tiring.
And speaking with factory workers reminds me yet again of the slower ways that the world around us kills, the ways that the machines still run on bodies and blood. I passed an Amazon fulfillment center on the way to scope out the VW plant and thought of Mohamed Mire, telling me that working for Amazon felt like trying to hold back an 18 wheeler with his hands. The exhaustion that chips away at a life. Mire drives for Uber now, a different kind of extraction of his hours. We first spoke during lockdown, and then again for From the Ashes.
I appreciate everyone who speaks to me for any reporting I’m doing and particularly those who talk to me when the promise is the nebulous thing that is a book, people who probably forget me before the book hits shelves. But Mire is one whose story has stuck with me. I find myself quoting him over and over, recalling the way he always says “my beautiful wife” every time he mentions her, his story of his children running to hug him and having to tell them to wait until he washed his hands, changed his clothes, to keep from getting them sick while he was an essential worker. Essential, as I have said so many times, nearly as many as workers said it to me, meaning expendable.
I don’t want to live in a world that treats us as expendable anymore. And it’s as true in my industry as any other.
But. For now, I am in a place where I am not expendable, and all of you continuing to click and read and buy remind me that slowly, slowly, we are pushing back the 18 wheeler that would roll over us. That in insisting on caring, we are refusing the death-making that the world system dishes out.
It’s been so lovely to see your faces in person for this book. I didn’t get to do that much for WWLYB, so I appreciate you and those of you who have told me your grief stories, especially. Francesca Nava told me she felt like a pain collector, covering Covid in Bergamo in the first wave of the virus, and I too feel like one so often, but I remember that it is an honor to hold it all, and that so many of you are willing to share the load.
Thank you.
Troublemaking
The book lives, out in the world or at least in the US and Canada, in your social media posts, in the beautiful emails and texts and comments you have sent me about it, and I am so…happy was never going to be the right word for this book and how it would make me feel, but my heart is full and it feels good to know that this book is finding its people, that it is landing with you.
You can get it wherever books are sold. I highly encourage buying from your local bookstore—ask them to order it if they aren’t carrying it, buy it if they are. Local bookstores are the reason authors like me get to keep doing what we’re doing, not The Bad Place. If you need to order online, I recommend Bookshop.org and you can order from my page here. There’s also a book list that I made of the books that I read in order to be able to write this thing. Buy books! Books are good!
You can also get it as an ebook and an audiobook, if either of those are your preferred medium, and the audiobook is in my very own voice. See if you can guess the bits that made me have to get up and take a walk.
You can still get the beautiful art prints made by Nicole Manganelli of Radical Emprints — Pilsen Community Books in Chicago has some (and also has some signed copies of From The Ashes, or at least they did when I left Chicago), and I will have some with me at future events. You can also get them direct from Nicole very soon—keep an eye on her website, and sign up for her newsletter, and if you have a bookstore or other distro, she has a new wholesale page!
If you’re in Britain and Ireland, you can preorder HERE and she’ll be with you October 10!
If you’re reading this on the 20th or early enough on the 21st, I’m at the Southern Labor Studies Conference and you can come see me at 3:30 tomorrow with the plenary session on the UAW.
And then it’s home to New Orleans where we’re throwing a party (and still doing a book talk, too). Thanks to my old friend Thomas Adams for making both SLSA and this happen: we’ll be at the Saturn Bar on September 26th at 6pm!
And Minneapolis, October 1, at Magers & Quinn! Joined by Rod Adams and Cat Salonek, two of the many brilliant organizers in the Twin Cities who spoke to me for this book.
Then it’s back to sunny England (and Scotland) to launch the book!
First stop, Housmans in Kings Cross, London on October 12! 7pm, register here, I’ll be in conversation with K Biswas, critic, thinker, editor, and reporter extraordinaire and a generous reader of my work since my first book.
Next, Lighthouse Books in Edinburgh! 7pm, October 17, with Emily Kenway, whose book Who Cares overlaps with so much of my work, I can’t wait to be in conversation with her.
You can preorder From the Ashes from both of these bookstores, by the way, either with your registration for the events or just on its own if you can’t make them.
And back to London for October 23 at Pelican House! More details on that and the very very special guests who will be there soon.
If you want to host me at your organization or bookstore, please do get in touch!
A couple of interviews about the book are out in the world now, as well! I mentioned Ordinary Unhappiness last time, and since then I have been on Novara FM with the lovely Eleanor Penny, and Victor’s Children with David Camfield. Many more to come. And if print interviews are more your thing, you can read my conversation with Hannah Proctor at The Baffler.
You can also read the early reviews at Kirkus and a starred review at Bookpage.
Writing
You can also read excerpts from the book at In These Times and Truthout! ITT excerpted chapter one, on state violence and the movement for Black lives, and Truthout chapter two on migration and the border.
Podcasting
We took a short break from Heart Reacts to launch our books but we’ll be back with you soon! Also, send us questions!
And someone else’s dog
This is Olive. She belongs to Anne and John who hosted me in Chicago, and she is very good even when she is practicing passive resistance. Love a dog who knows how to just go limp when being repressed.