Books

Melissa Caruso’s Last Hour Between Worlds (Echo Archives #1)

Vanessa Angélica Villareal’s Magical/Realism

Solace Ames’ The Companion Contract

Kelley Sue DeConnick, Phil Jimenez, Gene Ha, and Nicola Scott’s Wonder Woman Historia: The Amazons

Author: Heather Guerre

I tore through a significant chunk of her back catalog.

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Misc

TV: Dimension 20’s Misfits and Magic S2

TV: Dimension 20’s The Unsleeping City S1

Live: Dorrance Dance’s The Nutcracker Suite

Podcast: Jessica Lanyadoo ~ Energetic Boundaries in Times of Chaos on Modern Witches

On sitting with our uncomfortable feelings in witchy/woo spaces, instead of ignoring them in favor of ~love and light~.

Podcast: Maggie Tokuda-Hall on Kelly Jensen’s Hey YA

Quotes taken from Apple’s autogenerated transcript.

“I think there’s always been a push in [?] and Children’s Literature that we have never really answered in a meaningful way on an industry level about whether or not good children’s literature encourages obedience.”

“And I think adults have always been threatened by children’s autonomy. And that is one of the reasons that book bans have been so effective is because there are so many parents, and I think even well-meaning adults who are in this space, who still struggle with accepting the need for children to be autonomous.”

“As an obedient kid who’s an adult now, I can tell you, it was really hard for me to find as an adult what happiness actually means to me because it was so difficult to distinguish good feedback from obedience from my own pleasure.”

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Music

clipping.’s Keep Pushing

Durand Bernarr’s Unknown (Radio Edit)

Silkroad Ensemble’s Far Down Far, Tamping Song (ft. Haruka Fujii)

Vienna Teng’s We’ve Got You (i – Spark), (ii – Comfort), (∞ – Two Truths)

Third Reprise’s Some Enchanted Evening (ft. Alita Moses)

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Articles

Sanjana Basker’s in conversation with heather guerre

“I absolutely 100% agree that the “nuclear family” as the fundamental social unit only serves to break down communities into socially alienated, emotionally dysfunctional islands. That perspective is probably why a lot of my couples’ happily-ever-afters involve connection to a wider community. It’s hard for me to imagine a romantic happily-ever-after being sustained in isolation.”

“I’m not sure who to credit this to, but it’s been suggested that the romance genre should be categorized under the speculative fiction umbrella alongside fantasy and sci-fi, and I don’t totally disagree with that. I think a major part of the appeal of romance is that it offers a vision of what could be. We do live in a weird, alienated world, but we don’t have to.

For me, the appeal of writing romance has always been about taking characters from a place of alienation and discontent to one of belonging, understanding, and connection.”

Alexander Chee’s This Country Is Still That Country

Wisdom from Chee’s activism with ACT UP.

• “The radical and the liberal. when each thinks they do not need the other, the work usually falls apart and the conservative usually wins. The conservative only needs the liberal as a kind of patsy, branding them a radical as soon as they are not needed.

• There is a violence directed against you when the state does not see you as fully human that begins with the knowledge that this status has been conferred. Do not underestimate then the power of that which returns to you your sense of your humanity and that of others.”
• “Make time to dance. To sing. To do it with others. Feel yourself in your body, feel your voice. The catharsis of dancing after an action reminded me of why I did it.”

Kai Cheng Thom’s How to survive the apocalypse (again)

“If we take queer ancestors as our possibility models, then the capacity to survive the terror and pain of this moment lies not in any individual’s mental fortitude, not in the wellness studio or on the meditation cushion, nor in the bubble bath (though there is nothing wrong with those things), perhaps not even in the therapist’s office. Our greatest power to resist oppression and death comes from our connections with one another, our ability to create community structures through which we can give and receive care, make art, share pleasure and raise our collective voices.”

Margaret Killjoy’s The Sky is Falling; We’ve Got This

“If I were to spit out some suggestions, based on my experience (about 20 years in anarchist organizing and a full-time job learning about and teaching about social movements of the past), here’s what I’ve got:”

• “An awful lot of people are newly disillusioned with status quo politics. The right wing has an easy time bringing those people onboard, and we need to work harder to bring people onboard as well.”
• “Deescalate all conflict that isn’t with the enemy.
• We need to offer an offramp for people on the right wing. We need to offer people the chance to deradicalize away from fascism. This isn’t to say we need to be nice to our enemies, just that we need to make it clear that they have the option of no longer being our enemies.”

Kate Mann’s Broken Bones: America’s Violent Indifference toward Women

“Misogyny isn’t about hating or discriminating against women because they are women and thus attract suspicion and consternation. Misogyny is about exposing women to harm because our gender makes us beneath full consideration. Misogyny is primarily something we face, not something people feel in their hearts.”

Hannah Phifer’s Nikki Giovanni’s Extraterrestrial Adventures

“I was a history major. I graduated from Fisk, and as you think about various times in history, you try to think: Where have we seen this before? Several years ago now I wrote a poem called “Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea (We’re Going to Mars),” and what caused me to think of it was I looked at Middle Passage, because I’m always reading about how Black Americans got from Africa to what was now called America. And of course, I finally realize that that’s space. 

I’ve always liked space. I’ve always enjoyed just looking at the stars. If I could, I would just sit and watch the stars go by. 

But in looking at Middle Passage, I realized, well, that’s outer space. It’s exactly the same thing, because you’re going from someplace you know through someplace you never know. That’s what we do when we put somebody on a rocket. They’re going from Earth into an area that they don’t know— they think they might know, but they’re not sure. You’re going up, up, up, and then you’re going to land, hopefully, on something that you can name. But you don’t know it, because nobody has landed on Mars; we don’t know any of this.

And so I thought, Well that’s what Black people have done. And we have survived and thrived and shared a lot of love. We brought a lot of goodness.”

“I used to say that to my students when I was teaching in a classroom: “There’s no such thing as writer’s block, you [just] don’t have anything else to say at this time.” And my suggestion to any writer who says “I’m having writer’s block” is: Go read a book. Go sit down. If you’re grown, go sit down with a glass of wine. And if you’re not, go sit down with a cup of coffee.”

Lydia Polgreen and Tressie McMillan Cottom’s Democrats Had a Theory of the Election. They Were Wrong.

Technically a podcast, but I read the linked transcript.

“McMillan Cottom: …If you want to feel empowered to do something, know that history actually is only written after the things are settled, and it is our job to settle them.”

Sarah Thankam Mathews’s every day is all there is

“The future of American politics will belong to whoever can make a coalitional majority of people feel like they belong, like their lives will improve, and like the world makes sense.4 The future will belong to whoever can tell a simple and thus powerful story that allows a majority of people to see themselves within it.”

“Something that’s been forgotten by a lot of people is that politics is won and lost over two things: how you impact people’s material circumstances, and how you make people feel.”

Gregory Warner’s A Trust Fall for Food

“GW: How old were you when you started making gursha for your dad?

Bezawit: Oh young. 13, 14. My father would sit on the sofa and say, ‘you have the best gursha. Feed me.’ I understand his proportion of injera and stew, how he likes it. That’s why he favors it. And now I also feed my kids. They say, mom, feeding tastes much better when we eat from your hands. So I’m like, ok, that’s my soft spot, let’s feed each other.”