On not being alone

more new projects, spring in the south, and more.

It’s May 7 in the morning and I’m just back from walking a friend’s dog, the dog you have seen if you have been reading this newsletter for the past year or so, and it is already hot at 8am in New Orleans this time of year so I am sweaty and the dog is panting on the floor.

I am surfacing from paging through Instagram to see overnight how much destruction Israel wrought in Rafah and closer to home, how many weapons of war were turned on student protesters demanding the violence stop. The image of a tank, a rifle, a bomb turned on a tent is the image of 2024.

Learning to live with horrors is the lesson of my adult life.

I was listening to the ACFM podcast on my walk, talking about reactionary democracy and the ways that the threat of the far right is not just that they might take power but that their ideas take power even without them, they move into power through the nice liberals who think that pointing a rifle at a student in a tent is maintaining some vital order. Well, it is a vital order, in that it is the order of their own power, but that order is crumbling.

Here I am, a journalist in her 40s, constantly on the road and sleeping in beds not her own. Fresh from London and then Philadelphia and then a day in New Jersey for a conference that wound up utterly transformed by the student protests and the administration at Rutgers’ decision to try to clear the camp. By the number of participants who said we would not let that happen without a fight.

I am old enough now that my peers on these campuses are no longer the students but the faculty who are stepping between their students and the cops. I landed in New Orleans to texts from a comrade at the University of Virginia that the police were marching onto her campus, videos of the lines of riot cops that were not called, notably, in 2017 when white supremacists chanted “Jew will not replace us” on that same campus. (In case you still somehow believed that this was about antisemitism.)

It has been a clarifying year, in that we have been called to decide which side we are on and to put our bodies on the line to affirm the choice we have made. I marched in London with someone I love utterly on the one beautiful day on the month I was there and I kissed someone else that night and I remembered an old love writing the National Lawyers Guild number on my arm at Occupy and later I fielded a text from my ex who was facing down yet another line of riot police at SUNY New Paltz, because we are everywhere. I text people I love on four continents. This is 2024.

And through it all we have to figure out how to live in the rubble of liberal democracy, of neoliberal capitalism, of a heating world. I met two friends’ babies this month and knitted presents for three more, I held a two-month-old and my side cramped from my fear of breaking her, another friend’s tween threw his arms around me when I arrived for a visit, I surprised my niece at her school play. What to tell the kids about the world they are growing up in? My inability to imagine doing this is why I never had any of my own, I suppose. But I am more committed than ever to being a part of these other children’s lives, to being another adult who isn’t afraid of their feelings even if I am, always, a little afraid of breaking them.

I have said nothing new here, I know. Nothing groundbreaking. (I save that for the books, she says, mostly joking.) How do we live the one precious life we have and hold on to joy when we know that the horrors are all around? How do we throw ourselves into loving when the losses are constant? How do we know what to do to block the machines of empire?

It is perhaps because I have no clear answers to any of this but I doubt most of all the people who pretend that they do that I started an advice podcast with the friend to whom I send my most pressing questions, my occasional breakthroughs, my hurts and fears. (Sometime last year I realized I was not journaling anymore because instead of journaling I just sent voice notes to Craig.) It is, as he says in that very first episode, a wager on shared experience: that there are many of us out here trying to live up to our politics but finding it so fucking hard.

I believe that in this world there is so little we can control but we can choose how we show up for other people. We can choose honesty and solidarity, we can choose to maintain ties when it’s hard and we can choose, sometimes, to walk away. We are all we have, after all. I wrote a book about movements and then a book about work and now a book about grief and they are all, at the bottom, books about how we show up for and care for one another, they are about what it looks like to decide that other people are more important than our personal brands and our individual wallets.

So, Heart Reacts. We hope you like it. For now, it’s unpaywalled and there will be more episodes very soon. If you want, you can kick in a little to help us make it better. (This newsletter is and likely will remain free forever.)

Thank you to everyone who has preordered From the Ashes. (I can see, anyway, that a bunch of you did from my Bookshop page, and as always I want to encourage ordering from your favorite local bookstore.) There will be book tour news forthcoming but for now: I will be at the Socialism conference in Chicago and the Printers Row Lit Fest and then there will be more. I hope to see some of you on the road.

Also, if you’re a journalist or critic who wants to make sure you’re on our list for galleys/preview copies, write me here and I’ll pass on to the publicists. They’re going out very soon—I got my hot little hands on mine last week!

(Also I made a book list of titles that shaped my thinking on From the Ashes, in case you don’t want to wait for September and need some good reads now.)

I leave you then with some work and some wishes for peace in your heart as you live through the horrors, the peace that comes from knowing which side you are on. I wish you such friends and comrades as I have, who show up wholeheartedly for the struggle and for you, who trust you with their vulnerability as you trust them with yours.

Writing

In addition to the book and the podcast, another little announcement: I’m rejoining In These Times as a contributing writer, meaning that at least once a month I’ll be over there with a piece on organizing. Because I am where I am these days, I’m focusing on organizing the South—which means I’m leaving in a few days to head to Alabama to cover the Mercedes workers’ union election, which runs May 13-17. In the meantime, you can read me on the importance of the UAW’s demand for a 32-hour week, and on the Minnesota organizing ecosystem and the lessons it should teach all the rest of us.

I remain a columnist at The Progressive, and my latest there feels dated because in the interim since I wrote it there are two Boeing whistleblowers who’ve died in, shall we say, strange circumstances. Nevertheless, it is a piece about Boeing, and about organizing the South, and about which politicians we see as dangerous, and how union busting remains mainstream.

Podcasting

Heart Reacts! An advice podcast for those of us trying not to get cynical during collapse. Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the feels. Link goes to Patreon, but you can also find it wherever you get your podcasts (and if you can’t, let me know and we’ll see what we can do to change that).

Troublemaking

Planning book tour, as noted, but in the meantime:

I had a chat with the Talking Writing podcast, which was a good time.

I spoke with friend and comrade Edna Bonhomme for Silver Press’s website, which was, as always, rewarding in so many ways. (Edna has a forthcoming book that you should keep an eye out for!)

These are technically conversations about Work Won’t Love You Back, but because it’s been years since that came out and I’ve been working on From the Ashes for that time, obviously you’ll see hints and traces of what that book will be like in these conversations.

And someone else’s dog

This is Lu. He is no more a fan of summer in New Orleans than I am.