Friends, it’s been too long since I’ve posted! In Minnesota, winter lasts from October-April, so my apologies! I’ve been reading a lot and have so much to share!
Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds by adrienne maree brown! Get it! Read it! Live it!
I’ve been heavily invested in new, liberation models for storytelling, and brown gave me many many many excellent ideas. No, it’s not a book about writing, per se, but it’s a book about liberation and what that looks and feels like and how it starts with each of us.
brown recently came out with Pleasure Activism, and I RAN to my local bookstore to grab a copy. I’ve only just begun reading and am delighted.
The world is on fire, we all know that. There is a way forward rooted in love and compassion and healing and feeling good and doing good. We can leave despair at the door and be the change we want to see. Like Alice Walker said, “We are the ones we have been waiting for.”
From the website:
In the tradition of Octavia Butler, Emergent Strategy is radical self-help, society-help, and planet-help designed to shape the futures we want to live. Change is constant. The world is in a continual state of flux. It is a stream of ever-mutating, emergent patterns. Rather than steel ourselves against such change, this book teaches us to map, assess, and learn from the swirling structures around us in order to better understand and influence them as they happen. This is a resolutely materialist “spirituality” based equally on science and science fiction, a feminist and afro-futurist incantation to transform that which ultimately transforms us.
adrienne maree brown is the author of Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good and co-editor of Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction from Social Justice Movements. She is also a social justice facilitator, healer, doula, and pleasure activist living in Detroit.
harmony is a witch 