So I promised you exciting news...
So I promised you exciting news...
And here it is: the cover of my new book, and a preorder page.
Currently just available for preorder at The Bad Place, but should be updated links on the Hachette page linked there soon enough for other less-awful places you can order from!
This has been the last two years of my life, plus the previous, I don't know, ten? of reporting on workers and the workplace, thinking about my own experiences, and reading all of the Marxist feminist (and some other) thinkers on the idea of work, what it's good for (cue: absolutely nothing!) and why and how we've invested so much in it.
I tweeted the other day, "turns out drowning all your emotions about coronavirus lockdown in your work means your sense of self gets even more wrapped up in work, who could have predicted? (me, the person writing a book titled Work Won't Love You Back, I should have, that's who)."
And it's true--I have been drowning my feelings in work. Wrapping myself up in other people's struggles and telling myself that mine aren't that important, anyway. It even feels strange to say "Look, my book! You can buy it!" because I just keep thinking, other people have other things going on, how can you think about selling books at a time like this.
Yet even in the darkest moments of the past few years, I have loved when friends reach out to share good news with me. I have toasted people's book deals and launches, marriages and couplings and babies and things that don't fit so neatly into capitalist heteropatriarchal ideas of "good news." We need to find the things that bring joy and pleasure and even ache into our lives right now. I felt some pleasure at the feeling in my chest of missing someone so deeply and not even knowing how to tell him, this morning, because things have been strained. Because I have been deliberately trying to shut off my heart for fear it would explode with all the longings I just can't have right now.
But today I felt human again, after a day of birthday wishes from all the lovely people in my life, calls and videos and chats and even some socially-distanced in person visits, and so I allowed myself to remember what it was like to be open to the hurt that loving people brings even when you haven't lost them for good. The thousands of ways your heart can hurt but not break. They're beautiful too, along with the joy. The thing I hate the most about the grief-driven anxiety that I have struggled with these past two years is the way it shuts off all feeling but just leaves me keyed up and ready to fight or flee. I don't want to live like a hunted thing. I want to feel what I feel even when it's hard.
And the book...well, you know about it, if you've been reading this newsletter a while. You know how wrapped up it is in everything that's gone on in my life, and how I wrote it in part to remind myself to let my sense of self be wrapped up in other things. The people I love (even if the people I love most are also the people I am most excited to have read this thing that I have written) and my ability to figure out how to bake a brown butter cornbread for myself and my housemates and what it feels like to dance with friends even at a distance. The memories I have of walking along the Regents Canal with my favorite humans or lounging on a rooftop or staying in bed past noon. Listening. Noticing the changes.
Life. It's so much more than what we do for a living. And even as we are distanced from so much of it right now there is something strangely beautiful, as a person with whom my friendship is being rebuilt said to me the other day, about the way the distance has been collapsed too between the friends I have right here and the friends I have an ocean away. How we are all sharing versions of this same distorting and strange experience, and being shaped by it, and refusing to let it break us.
Thank you, all of you, for reading this and everything else I write. It's an honor, and at the best of times it doesn't feel like work.
Writing
Michelle and I have started a new series since there are more labor stories than you can keep up with going on right now--to supplement the biweekly Belabored podcast, we're doing short workers' stories at the website. You can find them all here. I'll link mine below. I've also made a tag on my website for all of my coronavirus coverage, so you can find it all here.
Belabored Stories: Cramped at the Call Center
Podcasting
I can't believe we're almost at episode 200 of this damn podcast.
Belabored #196: How the Pandemic will Change Labor, with Bill Fletcher Jr.
Troublemaking
The lovely thing about doing everything on Zoom is that I can be in so many places at once! Like this week, I was on TyskySour with the lovely Michael Walker and Aaron Bastani of Novara Media and it was great to see their faces virtually while we talked about Trump telling people to drink bleach.
I was interviewed a while back (as in, before lockdown) for Lilith Magazine about tipping, and though you aren't going to restaurants anytime soon, tipping is even more important right now if you're relying on delivery workers who are risking their health to bring you things. TIP. (Also, I always find these conversations interesting when they are framed with the assumption that the audience reading aren't the tipped worker themselves, but always the customer. I was a service worker for nearly a decade, well after having a college degree and being a freelance writer, and I'm sure many of my readers are still!)
And next week, THREE video chats! Monday, with Clive Priddle of Hachette, whose input you see before you in that lovely book cover and the Necessary Trouble cover too, on his new web TV series. With Stephanie Land, the author of Maid--and I bet we'll get to some of what I just mentioned above.
Wednesday, on MY new series launch:
7pm on Crowdcast, talking with Joanne McNeil about tech in crisis. How did the 2008 financial crash shape the tech giants that are now shaping our lockdown lives? Which tech companies are gearing up for more surveillance? How are our social lives being subtly manipulated by social media now that we're stuck using it to communicate? All this and more.
And Friday is May Day and I'm hosting a conversation between two of labor's most impressive leaders:
Stacy Davis Gates of the Chicago Teachers Union, Sara Nelson of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, and your humble writer...5pm, register here, it's a fundraiser for Labor Notes and Haymarket Books so if you are still making money, donate please! If not, don't worry, you can still tune in.
AND if you haven't had enough of me (lord knows I have had enough of me after all this lockdown) I recorded an episode of LaborWave radio and it's also dropping May Day and there's a listening party.
This is gonna be a good week, in other words.
And my dog...
