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This content originally appeared on Gaslit Nation and was authored by Andrea Chalupa.

I had the opportunity to explore many things and countries and musicians, making music and teaching. The last three years, I don’t think my influences and inputs are coming from music itself. I felt very inside my body. My sound is already consolidated. Of course, I’m going to be evolving as an artist, but maybe not in the sound. Now, I’m exploring more the possibilities of performance. But I think 20 years making something in a field, you know what you’re talking about… I started when I was a child. So I think my sound, my sonic statement, is very clear. In order to continue pushing myself, I’m triggering myself in other areas that are nourishing my musical path.

Beyond traveling, teaching, and nourishing yourself in other areas, what have been some other important steps you’ve taken to solidify your musical identity?

I went really deep into different dancing practices within the contemporary dance spectrum, from ballet [to] other areas that I think now I’m more interested in [embodying in] my music. And a lot of sports, like surfing, slackline, biking. I can speak five languages now. I think all these things outside music itself have, in some way, hacked my mind to be able to make more sophisticated music.

How do you decide which new things to pursue? Is any part of this choice about thinking it will affect your music in some way?

No, not at all. It’s things that came to my life in very unexpected ways. When I came back [to Mexico] from Berlin, I was very tired [of the] music industry—not music, but the music industry, which is another thing. So I isolated myself in a beach [area] in Mexico, and somebody invited me to a surfing beach. And I said, “Okay, let’s go,” because I remembered that, since [I was] a child, I always liked to see the surfers, and I believe that it’s a beautiful practice. I was there trying to reset myself, and somebody invited me, and then I went and started surfing from there. It was a practice that helped me maintain my mental health, and I realized [that being] kind of an outsider of music and making things that are not at all related to music helps me make more sophisticated decisions in my creative process.

When I hear you talk about this, it sounds like you’re somebody who takes new opportunities when they arise. You don’t really question it and just go for it.

Yes. I learned that life is about going with the flow, and I refine this concept through surfing practice. I understand that I don’t have control over the results of things, and I need to go with the flow—of course, with direction and intention, but with this openness about, “Let’s see what life brings on.” And this is much more fun, you know? No stress. If you don’t feel the call to go deep, that’s totally okay. But sometimes, these opportunities open doors that you didn’t know you were interested in. So yeah, I’m very curious. I’m a very curious person.

What does your curiosity look like?

Metaphorically talking, it could be kind of like a portal. Just when I’m able to get through this portal, it’s like [getting to] another level of the video game. I realize I need to pass through, even if I’m scared, even if it’s tough, or even if I don’t know what is going to happen. When I’m able to pass through this path is when I unlock the video game level. It’s like, now that I’m learning Asiatic languages—I never thought I would be able to read in Japanese or express [myself] in Japanese.

That’s why I call it biohacking. It’s like, you make another connection in your brain. I’m not that neuroscientific, but I realize that if I’m hacking my mind and my body in several ways, I continue modifying my neurons, my mind.

I want to go back to something you said a few minutes ago, about how when you left Berlin, it was largely to get away from the music industry. What about the industry made you want to get away from it? You’re still putting out music, so it’s not the music itself.

No, not at all. Music will be in my life forever. I think I was tired of ego games. And this is not just particularly in music. I think this is present in all the scenes and industries. The ego games and the competition… I needed a break. And now, I want to be more like an outsider. I’m not somebody that is going to parties and going to the coolest events and these kinds of things. I’m very serious in my music and my [artistic] statements, but by understanding that, for me, everything is a game, I just want to make music and have fun and that’s it.

This makes me think about the fact that you’ve mostly avoided performing live in the past few years. How has that affected how you create music?

I love to perform my music. It’s the thing that I love the most of all. It’s the most challenging and fun and magical to really share the music in a live show. But I’m not a DJ, first of all, so I cannot play many shows. I’m not interested in lots of events. I’m more interested in [fewer] events for high quality and creatorship. If it’s not something that I really feel the call to make, I prefer not to do it. Because when you perform live, you give a lot of energy. I am learning to take care of my energy, so I prefer to do less shows, but proper shows, substantial shows. And to be outside of the music industry for three years, with this new album [HÉMERA Vol. 1], I’m returning totally in another position. [It] allows me to make a proper reset of everything, what I’ve done so far, and get deep into these other universes.

In the last three years, I was hanging around more with people in sports. All my life, I was surrounded by musicians, and last year I was surrounded by surfers and dancers… It was very nourishing to get totally [outside] my scene and enter and explore these other scenes. I realized that there’s a lot of ego in this scene. I just need to maintain my outsider position and my focus on my [artistic] statement, and that’s it.

With HÉMERA Vol. 1, you intentionally allowed yourself to use only a small number of production tools. What does setting limits do for your creative process?

In tech and with AI, always, there’s something new—a new tool, a new software, a new synthesizer. And that’s cool. But with all these tools and technologies emerging, I realized that less and less do we have substantial concepts. I think people are getting too much into, “What’s the new thing [to] make music?” [instead of making] substantial and strong sonic statements, which I’m interested in. [I have used] the same tools for maybe three years. They still give me always unpredictable results. That’s why I love these tools.

I realized that [when I] maintain a line of certain technology samplers and tools I’m using, I’m refining my own sound identity. I’m able to achieve more quickly and more efficiently the concept I have in mind. That’s my technique. I don’t know if it’s the same for everybody, but for me, less is more.

In your interview on the podcast Lost and Sound, you said you always have a concept for your albums. “Concept albums” make me think of music that has words and lyrics, which is not your music. Why do you need a concept to start creating your work, and how do concepts inspire you?

I think making an album is very similar to making a movie. I mean, I’m obsessed with cinema also, and I have friends [who] make cinema, and I realize that this process is kind of the same. When you make a movie, you need a script, and in my case, it’s kind of the same. I need the script, the history, because this allows me to [figure out] which kind of color the sound will have, which kind of vibe, which kind of aesthetic, which kind of atmosphere. I need it for the process and the creative side. I can play around with Ableton and see what happens, but if I want to make an album, a serious project or a concrete project, I need to have this script, which is the same as the concept.

Also on Lost and Sound, you named St. Vincent as one of the few women who produce music. This initially surprised me because I was thinking of production in an electronic sense, but you’re right. I noticed Annie Clark is on your list of Five Things, of artists who inspire you. How does somebody from such a different musical genre inspire what you do?

She plays the guitar and I play synth, so it’s different… But I think there are some lines that connect us. When I saw her live about three years ago or something in L.A., she triggered me in terms of the theoretical essence of her performances. She is performing rock music—I mean, she [defies labels]—but I really [liked] how she embodied her music.

She’s very theoretical, and [I’ve been] very into this way of embodying the music since my beginnings… I think it’s very feminine. I don’t know, maybe this is a particular feminine touch or how the female mind works in terms of music. [Hers] was the most interesting show in terms of performance I have seen. The music is great, but the thing that stands out for me [is] her performance.

I noticed Cate Blanchett on your Five Things as well. You were talking about St. Vincent’s feminine energy as the thing that makes her inspirational to you. Is it something similar with Cate Blanchett? Because that’s not just a different genre, it’s a different medium.

Yeah, definitely. It’s kind of weird to put it in words how these artists, these humans, trigger my creative process. But with her, it’s also something about femininity. It’s something in her work that inspires me to create music, but in this feminine atmosphere. I think she’s very elegant and very deep in her roles.

I remember when she [was] a ballet dancer in this movie with Brad Pitt [The Curious Case of Benjamin Button]. And the way she’s interpreting this ballet dancer with [such] elegance and delicate moves, it was so inspiring. Also, the last role I have in mind is Tár. She’s so deep in this role that you believe that it’s a biographical film, and it’s a total fiction. I’m very inspired [by] the deepness she can achieve in emotions, and I think I’m trying to translate that into the sonic possibilities in sound design. I think that’s my mark: really deep sophistication in terms of sound.

When you mentioned sound design, it reminded me that you’re the only woman in Latin America who’s a certified Ableton trainer. What does training other people in Ableton teach you about how you use it?

Producing other artists, I realized that it’s beyond a technical thing. Teaching people how to use a software, producing an artist, is something more psychological, even shamanical. I think this feedback I received [as a teacher] helps me refine, to make me more sensible, more aware. It helps me have a wider vision about what it is to produce music.

It’s more about humanity and sensitivity rather than technical. I think the technical thing, I already transcend it. I am still learning and I will still be learning… I know there are going to be more technological advancements. But my evolution as an artist is not in that domain. What’s nourishing for me is to have more empathy and more awareness about music, about life, about being a human.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Max Freedman.

Being an illustrator is a super lonesome thing. I’m a super social, extroverted person, so you have to find ways to see people and make your own community. I have always had this vision of a storefront that would be my studio, a gallery space, a place where I had events and gatherings and all these things. It’s been this dream for a very long time. Then, with the political climate, I was like, “Can I do it sooner somehow?” I found a 600-square-foot space and worked there and also led as many community events as I can handle during the month. So, I’ve been leading figure drawing with James Gallagher for close to two years.

Last night, we had people collage exquisite corpses. We’re going to do a speed portrait night twice a month now because it’s been so popular. We’re doing figure drawing. We’re doing a nature workshop, where somebody’s going to talk about seed libraries and artists are going to react and make art about climate. Just trying to do really fun things that people come to. I tried to do a collaborative drawing night, and nobody signed up for it. That was the only thing that didn’t sell out.

Was the vision to have a big sheet of paper and everybody collaborate on a drawing, or would it be more like an exquisite corpse?

It was going to be like you start a drawing and you pass it and you pass it and you pass it. Everybody draws on everybody’s drawing, so it goes in a circle. I have so many regulars now and I asked them why they didn’t sign up for that and they said it was too intimidating to draw. They felt pressure to do a really good job for the next person, which I thought was so interesting because I see it the other way. Nobody’s going to know who did what and we can all just go crazy.

How do you cultivate this sense of community within the space? How do you get people to come back?

People just like drawing and they were like me—working at home by themselves. Now they have people they can talk to about this thing they also like. It’s kind of a nerdy atmosphere because we’re like, “What pen are you using,” and, “Oh, I love the way you made that line.” It’s very easy for us to all chat. It’s funny because in figure drawing, there’s a real bunch of regulars, and in the intermissions, when the model has a break, it’s loud in there because everybody’s talking. Sometimes I can’t get everyone’s attention because they’re all chatting, which is so nice.

A lot of the times when you think about those sorts of classes, it’s silent. The fact that you have that loud intermission is so lovely.

I used to go regularly to a place for figure drawing and it was such a different energy. It was always awkward. A lot of dudes who had a lot of stuff all spread out, and then when they would erase, it’d shake the whole table. I really wanted to make a space where everybody got the same point of view. We can fit 20 people in a circle, so everybody has the same point of view. There’s nobody behind somebody’s head who can’t see. Everybody can see perfectly. That was important to me because I hated when I was a little bit late and I got the worst seat in the house. The vibe is so different than the ones I used to go to and I’m so happy about that.

Have you found that doing these events has given you inspiration in return and changed your art?

Being around people doing all different kinds of things, you get ideas and you want to try things. There was a guy who was always doing oil pastels and he would do these bright colors on black paper. We started chatting because I had bought oil pastels a long time ago, and I was like, “What is it like to use it?” A few of us were interested in talking to him, and then we all met in the studio and just to hang out, the four of us, to try and test what it would be like to do oil pastels, and he kind of showed us what to do. It was very hard, but it was fun to try it.

It sounds like there’s a great deal of play involved.

It’s very playful. I just traded drawings with somebody after an event, so there’s also a lot of sharing, which is cool. When people do speed portrait night, they get to take home the drawings that everyone did of them. So, they get 11 drawings, or however many people are there, of themselves by all different people in different styles.

That’s such a lovely souvenir.

It’s been fun. To be honest, we’re losing money doing this because the rent for the space is so much money. We don’t make very much money because we have to pay a model and buy wine, beer, seltzer. We have to buy all these tables, chairs. But it gives us a studio space during the day and really fun stuff to do three nights a week or whatever. So I’ve been having a great time.

What was your journey of getting into full-time illustration?

It was pretty straightforward. I’m one of the few people in RISD who majored in illustration who did illustration directly after. During my junior year, I did an internship where they let me do my first illustration. My style was completely different. I started doing published work for them in my senior year and then went straight into freelance illustrating after that.

Do you feel like you came up during a time when the world wasn’t as saturated as it is now? Like, right now, there’s this sense of balancing the creation and then creating money out of your creations?

Oh, 100 percent. When I graduated, you were mailing out a postcard to magazines you wanted to work for, and that’s how you were getting jobs. This is 2002. Before that, you were going in and showing your portfolio, like meeting people and they were flipping through it in person. When I graduated, it was postcards and a website. Then, a few years after that, it was blogs and design blogs, where people saw me on blogs and hired me. Now, it’s Instagram 100 percent. That’s where everybody sees your work; that’s where they hire you from.

As far as saturation, for sure. Because now everybody can see everybody, you can work with anybody around the world. So, it was probably a good time for me to become an illustrator. It’s much harder now. Also with AI, forget about it. I feel like it’s the end of illustration, which is really sad. In 10 years, this profession won’t exist anymore. It’s really depressing and there’s so many people graduating from illustration, but I’m afraid that there’s not going to be hundreds of people being hired for illustration anymore because a machine can do it in three seconds and do it fairly well.

It’s a very existential thing facing all creatives right now. It is really bleak. That’s why those in-person community spaces are so important. But when your livelihood is dependent on it, that’s difficult. I hate to ask the question, but do you have a plan for the future?

The plan for the future is to continue using my hands to make stuff because I think AI probably won’t be able to do that for a long time. People will still want things made by humans—art especially. In a magical anything, I want to have a residency for artists to come, possibly in New Zealand where my husband is from, and host them and make art together and live the dream.

Just tend to your animals and wake up and have breakfast with all the artists.

Exactly. And come back to the city often. I was born here and love it, so I wouldn’t leave forever.

So much of your work is tied to New York. It’s where you’re from; it’s where you’ve lived all of your life. How do you still find inspiration in New York?

Oh, that’s so easy. Going to a new neighborhood that I’ve never been to is the best thing ever. If I have to go to a doctor’s appointment and it’s somewhere I’ve never been, I’m always like, “Oh, there’s so much stuff here I need to photograph because I want to make paintings later.” The people, the buildings, the storefronts, all of that, I find exciting still. Sometimes, I go to Manhattan, I’m like, “We did it. We’re in New York City.” It still feels exciting even though I’ve been here my whole life. You look out and you’re like, “The skyline! It’s the skyline you see in every movie.” It’s the most diverse, amazing place. I am still in love with it.

What is your process for any new project?

I want to turn everything into a book all the time. Doing this figure drawing, I was like, “I need to do a book about figure drawing.” I called my agent about it and she was like, “It’s kind of niche. I don’t know.”

Was that kind of how The Exquisite Book came to be? You’re like, “Oh, these exquisite corpses are amazing. I want to get them together.”

That was a crazy, crazy hard organization project. I feel like I was a lot better at confidence when I was younger, where I was like, “I can do anything.” As I’ve gotten older, I’m less like that, though I still get to do things I want. I just can’t believe I pitched that to a room of Chronicle editors when I’d never done a book before, and it was a very hard layout and format, and they were like, “Okay.” That still amazes me that that worked.

I do think if you go in and you believe in your idea so much, other people will believe in it too. That is why things happen. Somebody’s just so excited about something that you can’t help but get excited, too. People are like, “If she’s so into it, we should do it.”

Passion and excitement are so contagious. That’s actually something I noticed within your less/more lists. You want more joy, like physicality, community, and less comparison, insecurity, materiality, and anxiety. So, what are your best antidotes now for that sort of overthinking? How do you still get shit done?

My joy is coming up with the ideas and getting excited about making the thing. I am a person who sits and has 20 ideas at every moment. The finishing is less exciting. The actual making of it is such a long process.

But I guess your question was, how do you not compare yourself? I don’t know. I still feel jealous of other people’s projects that they accomplished and wish I had done them or wish I did more or feel anxious that something’s not good enough. So, I don’t have an answer for that except that it’s less than it used to be.

Something I like to say in private is: No babies are going to die if you don’t do a great job or finish or do this on time. I take it so seriously that I get so worried or anxious or feel the need to do the best I can and I overextend. Then I’m like, “If I don’t do that, no babies will die.” So, you can just relax, the stress is off. Everything’s going to be okay if you don’t finish or you hand it in late or it’s not exactly what you wanted or you have to change the paper stock because they couldn’t afford it or whatever. It’s fine. No babies are dying. Stop taking it so seriously. We are just having a good time.

What are the ideas that you’re percolating on right now?

I’m thinking about doing a book about dogs. I just finished a book about insects and I’m doing one about birds right now. I have this other idea where people get to fill things in themselves. I did this guest check print, where I had people customize what they want inside of it written. So, it could be their favorite order or it could be a memory from a restaurant or anything. People really liked them. I thought a book of things like that would be really cool, like a guest check. I did one about a mix-tape so they can write the songs they want on the thing. So, a book of things where you can fill it in yourself, but it’s prompted by old ephemera.

It’s kind of random. I’ll make something, and then you see the response and then you’re like, “How can I make this bigger?” That happened with Scratch. One of them did really well, which was the one that was during the pandemic where people were talking about how they got by. That was one of the most popular columns. That’s how we were like, “Maybe we should make this into a book.” That became a book with people’s stories.

That’s how you met your husband, right?

Yes.

What’s that story?

I watched a film on HBO called There Is No “I” in Threesome, which was him documenting his past relationship. The ending has this twist and it blows your mind a bit. So, I found the filmmaker and wrote him a message on Instagram. And then we chatted. Then we were like, “Should we chat again?” And then kept chatting. He flew from New Zealand to New York during the pandemic to meet me, which everybody was like, “That’s insane. What if you guys don’t get along?” It worked, and he never left.

It’s like the two furthest places in the world, New Zealand and New York, where two people met and now they have to spend time on two opposite sides of the world together. It just shows how much the world has gotten smaller. People fly places to meet people, which is crazy to me. I used to think, “If you live in Bushwick, that’s too far. I can’t date you.” And now, I’m like, “Oh, you live in New Zealand. That one’s fine.”

Yeah, an inter-borough relationship is a long distance relationship.

It really felt like it. I remember dating and being like, “Oh, God, he lives in the Upper East Side? Forget it.”

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Jun Chou.

One week later, she’s hardly let up. Ellis has spent countless hours helping friends in her hometown of Pikeville evacuate and delivering supplies to people who have lost their homes. “I’ve been here, there, everywhere in the county,” she said. “It’s overwhelming. There’s been a lot of devastation.”

Ellis spoke during a brief moment of rest in the chaos. Her home was spared when storms brought torrential rain to central Appalachia during the weekend of February 15. The water came down so quickly that the Levisa Fork of the Big Sandy River soon inundated houses and a portion of downtown. The torrent prompted more than 100 rescues in Pike County alone and left several neighborhoods and rural communities without running water. The record-setting winter flood, which killed 21 people statewide and two others in West Virginia, was not the first time Ellis has seen a disaster strike, and she fears it won’t be the last.

“We know there’s going to be a next time,” she said. 

More than 8 inches of rain doused Kentucky, Virginia, West Virginia, and Tennessee, soaking already sodden ground. The resulting inundation came less than three years after flooding throughout eastern Kentucky killed more than 40 people and caused hundreds of millions of dollars of damage across 13 counties. Hurricane Helene brought similar inundations to western North Carolina, southern Virginia, and eastern Tennessee just six months ago. The extreme weather fueling these floods will only grow more common as the world warms.

“These unprecedented storms really do represent our new reality,” said Nicolas Pierre Zegre, a forest hydrologist at West Virginia University who studies flood adaptation in the region. “Acknowledging that things have been changing kind of opens up the door on other conversations, like why are things changing?”

The severity and frequency of these floods has accelerated. Climate change brings ever more extreme precipitation, which causes flash flooding as it soaks mountain slopes and narrow valleys. All of Appalachia is vulnerable, and the places at greatest risk are rural communities that can quickly find themselves isolated by landslides, downed trees, and inundated roads. 

Even if help is on the way, it may not come quickly. That has promoted people to step in, an informal response that has grown more organized with each crisis. “We all need to be our own first responders because these things are happening really really fast,” Zegre said. 

Willa Johnson, a lifelong eastern Kentuckian, lived in McRoberts when the 2022 flood overturned her life. She fled rising water, and returned several days later to find her home had been destroyed, along with her church, her son’s school, and the arts and culture center where she worked. And now, this. She wasn’t flooded this time, but seeing neighbors suffer again weighs on her. “These last few years have been brutal,” she said. “It changes the landscape, it changes the people.”

Still, she and others throughout the area feel their experience has prepared them to face future disasters with strength, and, when other rural communities go through the same experience, understand what they face and how best to help them. “It weighed heavy on us here” when Helene hit North Carolina, Johnson said. 

She organized supply drives for Helene survivors and sought donations outside Walmart, where those who endured the 2022 flood offered what they could. “Someone who lost their entire home would hand us $10 out of their pocket and say, ‘We know what it’s like,’” Johnson said. Volunteers loaded cars with medical supplies and water and propane heaters and drove to the remote corners of western North Carolina. They called the initiative It’s Our Turn EKY, as in, it’s our turn to help.

This week, it was North Carolina’s turn to help. Volunteers with the nonprofit BeLoved Asheville drove a truck full of supplies to Perry County. The City of Asheville Fire Department dispatched a its swiftwater rescue team to help pull survivors from homes in Hazard. 

“It’s really exhausting to feel we are just going from one disaster to another constantly and people don’t have time to feel tired anymore,” Johnson said, her voice thick with emotion. “But it’s also really beautiful because these groups that we were contacting and saying, “What do you need? ‘How do we get this to you?’ are now reaching back out and saying, ‘Here’s what we have. Here’s what we can send.’ It’s this system of mutual aid that just keeps crossing state lines and people just reaching out to each other.”

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Katie Myers

Chelsea White-Hoglen, a community organizer in Haywood County, North Carolina, has been helping coordinate runs to eastern Kentucky and west Virginia. She said people through Appalachia increasingly understand the challenges of rural disaster relief, and the difficulties facing communities where much of the population is elderly, disabled, or living in poverty, and tight town budgets struggle to handle aging infrastructure. State and federal officials do what they can, but they often lack first-hand knowledge of what communities need. “These networks and human-to-human relationships are going to be the strongest and most reliable when we confront these kinds of catastrophes,” White-Hoglen said.

These networks grow stronger with each disaster as volunteers like Johnson find better, more efficient ways of bringing together those who need and those who can provide it. They’ve started using Google forms to bring donors and recipients together. They’ve organized donation drop-off locations and delivery caravans. They’ve designated community resource hubs like churches and warehouses where folks can go for help. They create and manage schedules so people don’t burn out. These volunteer-driven efforts have started working with local officials to identify needs and fill them, because they’re in the best position to know.

“I’m glad that we are learning as we go,” Johnson said.

Cara Ellis said the floods have helped her appreciate the solidarity that comes from repeated experiences with disaster across the region. As she’s seen mountain infrastructure buckle under more and more intense storms, she says, neighbors will need to have these networks and supply lines organized and ready to go.

“From my perspective, climate change is very real and we are the brunt,” Ellis said. 

“It’s just what are we gonna do next time to be more prepared, and what does that look like?” Ellis added. It’s out of necessity that ordinary people need to look out for one another.”Because at this point, it feels like nothing’s being done on a global scale or even on a federal scale to prevent these disasters.”

Note: Katie Myers worked with Willa Johnson at Appalshop, a nonprofit media, arts, and education center in Whitesburg, Kentucky, from 2021 through 2023. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline ‘We know what it’s like’: How Appalachian towns are learning to help each other after floods on Feb 25, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Katie Myers.

I grew up in New Jersey as an only child, with parents who were already 40 and 43 when I was born. Their age had a huge impact on my sensibilities, especially when it came to pop culture and entertainment. They introduced me to a world of mid-20th century showbiz that I probably wouldn’t have encountered if they’d been younger. Because of that, I developed this deep knowledge and appreciation for earlier pop culture—it shaped me in so many ways.

Even though we were only 18 miles from New York City, my little New Jersey town felt worlds apart. As I wrote in my memoir A Boy Named Phyllis, it was 18 miles and a world away. It was so small-town and provincial, and I craved glamour and excitement from an early age. Television was my escape.

How so?

I remember this one pivotal moment: I was maybe 12 or 13 years old, and I saw Cher on TV. She was dazzling, and I just thought, “Oh my God, I want to go where she is.”

There was a special Cher did in 1976—I was about 13. It was Cher, Elton John, and Bette Midler, all dressed in these stunning white outfits covered in disco mirror balls, surrounded by silver balloons. I looked at that scene and thought, “That’s where I want to live.” And, in many ways, I feel like I got to go live there. My life now, as much as I dreamed it would be, is full of silver balloons and mirror-ball moments. Entertainment and pop culture shaped me—they gave me an escape and inspired me to build a life that was exciting, vibrant, and glamorous.

Growing up in New Jersey, where home entertainment was such a central part of life, it sparked my interests in fashion, disco, and movies. I always describe myself as this glamour-starved kid in the suburbs, hungry for an urban, electrifying life. And that’s what I set out to build.

So was that special an awakening of some sorts for you?

When I think back to Cher, Elton, and Bette Midler on that TV special, they represented not just an awakening, but a kind of lifestyle epiphany. It wasn’t so much about sexual orientation as it was about the realization that I wanted a bold, colorful, glittering life. They shaped my idea of what kind of gay man I wanted to be—because I’ve always believed it’s better to be colorful than not.

And I’ve been lucky. I’ve actually gotten to meet all three of them—Cher, Elton, and Bette. It’s like life came full circle. Those icons who inspired me as a kid helped me dream of a life I’m now living. And honestly, when I interviewed all three of them, I was like, you know, I never need to go out again. I’ve met everyone I ever wanted to meet and I did live by that, but I really could feel that way for a moment. I was like, what’s going to be better than this?

Your books, especially your latest Disco: Music, Movies, and Mania under the Mirror Ball is certainly a full circle moment for the lifestyle epiphany you talked about. What has your process been like?

I had written a book that came out in 2019 on the history of drag in show business, and one of the things people praised the book for was that it shed light on and gave respect to an art form that people didn’t give enough respect to, didn’t appreciate. And I thought, well, that is kind of my mission as a writer: to excite people about something I’m excited about and to show respect to something that didn’t get what it deserved. I started thinking, what can I say, or what topics do I have something to say about? And I realized that disco was one of only a couple of them that I was really itching to do. So I started researching disco in its many forms and went down every online rabbit hole you could go down—watched clips, listened to music, and watched movies. I just immersed myself for about three or four years in all things disco.

I took the same approach that I took with drag—it’s sort of the kitchen sink approach, in that it’s a little bit of everything, or a lot of everything. I was trying to get as much stuff mentioned and explored as I could in the book. And I think the thing that makes this disco book different from the earlier ones is that I don’t push away the stuff that was silly or bad or kitschy. I embrace all of it.

You show a genuine interest in what we call “bad” movies, which shines through in your work, not just in the Disco book.

I love a bad movie way more than I love a good one. The more I researched disco movies—if we can even call it a “canon”—the more I realized people would say, “Oh my God, you have to see this one disco scene!” The one that always makes me laugh is from a Blaxploitation movie called Abby. It’s basically The Exorcist, but the exorcism takes place on a dance floor. The disco ball explodes, igniting the bar and setting everything on fire. It’s just incredible—pure chaos. That one kills me every time.

Then there’s this horror movie called Jennifer. It’s like a bargain-bin version of Carrie, except her powers involve snakes. She has power over snakes. It’s absurd. There’s a fantastic disco scene in it, filmed at the same club featured in Thank God It’s Friday. The club, Osko’s, used to be in Los Angeles, and the whole thing is just the worst—but in the best way. And Skatetown, U.S.A.—what a terrible movie! But it’s so much fun. It’s pure, delicious cheese. So cinematic, so over-the-top macho—it’s ridiculous and wonderful at the same time.

I fully agree with you, as I have done many genre-specific marathons over the years (most recently, TUBI originals) I think there’s a savant-like quality in those movies that most critics deem “bad.” That’s what makes them cult movies.

That’s a great way to put it. It’s fascinating to me that people would commit to telling a story about a possessed woman spending time in a disco, or about the goings-on at a roller-skating rink. There’s something irresistible about the earnestness brought to such a cheesy topic. I think the key is that nobody sets out to make something bad on purpose. If it’s deliberately bad, it’s not really fun. But if someone tries to create something that’s more fun than it is good, it becomes very appealing—and even heartwarming, in a way. Not every meal has to be a 10-course tasting menu from a Michelin-star chef. Sometimes, it’s a quarter-pounder with cheese—and that can be pretty delicious in its own way, even if it’s not good for you. I feel the same way about art. It can’t all be the most important, groundbreaking thing. Sometimes, it’s about a splendid misfire.

There are things like The Apple that really make you sit there and think, “What the hell am I looking at?” It’s one of those moments where you just can’t look away. It’s so absurd, with its models and out-of-this-world concepts, that you can’t help but be hooked. It’s the worst thing ever—and yet, you’re living for it. That kind of reaction is hard to come by these days, but when something makes your jaw drop in 2024, in a good way, that’s art. It’s rare for something to still surprise you like that, to make your eyes pop out of your head in disbelief. And that’s a good thing, because so much of what we see now feels overexposed and jaded. When something can still tickle you in that way, it’s a real treasure.

Occasionally, someone will try to make something serious, but it’ll turn out all wrong—and in that wrongness, it becomes so deliciously right. That’s the charm of some of these works. But you can’t force that kind of magic. You can try to learn it or recreate it, but if it doesn’t come naturally, you’re not going to capture it. it’s just, if you’re not a cheese, if you’re lactose intolerant, artistically speaking, stay away from the cheese. But if you get it, it’s really great.

Based on how you love to dig deep for treasures (of taste more or less questionable according to standard parameters), how do you know when a project is done?

I think when they start yelling at you, you have to stop, basically. It’s hard to decide when you’ve got it, but I think a manuscript sort of reaches critical mass. You start to think, okay, you know, I’ve got a lot here, and I’ve got enough here. And you just get this sort of instinct thing that you’re there. But honestly, you could keep adding to it until someone yells at you and says, “I need it tomorrow,” you know, and then you’ve got to turn it in.

So it’s somewhere between that awakening feeling of, “yeah, this is kind of it,” and someone screaming at you. I think you do have to stop at a certain point because sometimes, you know, if you turn in something that ends up looking like The Unabomber’s Manifesto, you’ve gone too far. I think I do have a sort of authoritative but fun quality to the writing, so it sounds like I really do know what I’m talking about. And this is, you know, I think it’s also enough material to make people feel smart about disco at a cocktail party—not necessarily where they feel like they have to become an expert on it.

Somebody said to me when I was writing the drag book—and I was getting nervous—they said to me, “Just write about the stuff you find interesting, and if you don’t find it interesting, don’t write about it.” And so I really took that to heart, because you sort of have to be your own barometer of what’s germane to the topic and what isn’t.

So, yeah, and I think that’s what I tried to do, because you don’t want to come off like a crazy person. No, you want to come across as an enthusiast and an expert, but not that crazy person who’s been watching disco movies for the last 30 years in their basement. You don’t want to be that guy either, you know. So, sort of find the happy medium.

As someone who gets overly enthusiastic when researching and has had editors rein me in, I need to know this: how does one avoid sounding like a rabid fan?

I think it goes back to basic rules of writing because when you’re writing a news story, you really do have to say, well, what is the most important information, and in which order should I present it? I think it goes back to news writing. Even though you’re writing these flamboyant features on the Ethel Merman disco album, you still have to approach it like it’s a news story–not exactly like “Two men robbed a bank at noon at the corner of Main and Broadway,” but almost as if you’re doing that.

You have to use your journalism skills. That’s why I think—it sounds like sour grapes—but some of us went to school to be journalists. It’s not just, “Oh, I can write, I’m a journalist.” I guess some of them turn out to be terrific, but generally speaking, it does pay to be a trained journalist who really knows what they’re doing and can write a murder-suicide story or the Ethel Merman disco album story. You have to be able to write all of it to be good at what you’re doing.

Speaking of sour grapes, how do you cope with failure?

I take it extremely personally, even if I had absolutely nothing to do with the failure. I lick my wounds for about seven years, and then I start again. I do know I am not good with failure. I’ve been lucky because there hasn’t been a lot of failure on my part, but I’ve certainly been a part of shows that didn’t get picked up past the initial 40 episodes or a newspaper that went under. On a Friday afternoon, they were like, “Clean out your desk. We’re done.” I’ve been a part of all that.

They canceled not only my radio show but the entire channel on the same day. They got rid of the whole thing. It was like, “Oh good, we’re not just gonna fire you. We’re firing everyone.” I’ve been through that a number of times, and it never gets easy. I don’t like it, and I spend way too much time feeling hurt. I don’t recommend that for anyone. Just pick yourself up and move on to the next thing, because it’s not your fault. However, that’s easier said than done for me. I always come up with something else to do, and you have to. You have to reinvent yourself, or you’ll find yourself with absolutely nothing to do.

Cher famously did it many times in her life: think of all the different genres she embraced, from the duets with Sonny to the leather-clad persona of the “If I Could Turn Back Time” era all the way to the “Believe” Eurodance and Autotune celebration–and the many less-than-stellar periods in between!

Cher is a huge inspiration, but I don’t think she ever bothered as much as I do, I think she’s smart enough to retain her confidence. I mean she was also called an inspiration regarding getting older, and she said “getting older sucks.”

While in the midst of a very disappointing year, professionally, I have to say It’s good to hear someone admitting to how bad it feels, rather than trying to find some profound meaning behind setbacks.

It’s weird, a mentor said to me “what have you ever failed in your life? NOTHING, You never really failed spectacularly in anything, you’ve always risen to the occasion.”

That said, it does not always work out. You can work as hard as you can, and sometimes it does not work, and it’s not your fault; it’s some network’s fault, it’s some publisher’s fault, or some CEO’s fault for closing a newspaper. I heard all these stories. You can feel good about what you bring to it and you should always do that, but sometimes it does not work. The quality of something does not always translate into its success. There are too many brilliant Broadway musicals that never found an audience. It’s not about hiding a light under a bushel, but some stuff is never going to find an audience even though it’s going to be brilliant to a lot of people whose lives are going to be changed. Quality does not ensure success.

So for writers and creatives like you and even myself, someone who treasures reporting on and researching the weird and wonderful but faces grimmer and grimmer budgets, what is one to create and make anyway?

I do admire when someone creates something that is jaw dropping for any reason, whether it’s good or bad: it could be a B Movie or it could be the statue of David, where you’re just your breath is taken away. You know, it could be the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen or the dumbest thing you’ve ever seen but it makes such a strong impression that I do tell people to give it a watch, a listen, and know it’s not a hoax. The important thing for me is just trying to remain valid. That’s really the thing. As you get older and the longer you’ve been doing this, it’s more like, “Well, what else do I have to say, and what can I bring my heart and soul to?” I think you have to ask yourself that question when you’re doing a project that’s going to take as much time as a book does.

I was just in the running to write the eight-millionth book on Taylor Swift, and I was so glad when they went with somebody else. I thought, “Oh, thank God.” I would have done it for the money, but there’s nothing left to say. As much as I love her, there’s nothing I could bring to it that somebody else couldn’t bring even more to. But about disco? No, there aren’t that many people who could say what I can about it.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Angelica Frey.

Since I was a teenager I was obsessed with writing and being creative, the idea of having something published was success enough. It already felt so surreal that I think I had no expectations regarding the outcome or the experience. I was genuinely just in love with the process and open to new experiences. I had zero expectations, and I had no notion as to what a successful release or what a release even looked like. Everything was just a gift, and I did work hard. I mean, I did write everything. We edited everything. I illustrated one of the books. We had a book tour. I was performing music and reading throughout the summer, meeting writers, and going to workshops. I was committed to the process, and the environment in California and the Bay Area if you want to double-click, was so rich for writing and cultural stuff. So I felt inspired and really oblivious, doing whatever felt was exciting and a good opportunity. I was lucky to meet great people who guided me through the process.

You started your writing practice with poetry. How was the process of transitioning to writing songs?

It was pretty natural, but it was different. I always feel like a writer first, and I think words and storytelling are the most important thing. Then, in parallel when I began to write music, it didn’t have words originally. I was doing a lot of music, like jazz-inspired or more kind of contemporary kind of piano pieces. Eventually, it occurred to me to bring them together with more intention. I was always writing songs in parallel to poetry with the guitar more than the piano because I only knew three or four chords on the guitar versus the piano, which was a kind of methodic, classical upbringing. So it was interesting, because with the guitar, I would be playing three or four songs, and I’d write songs imitating other songs. So I’d write songs about love and sunsets and fantasy, and I remember I wrote a song about a lost sock. I lost one sock, and I had the other one. Where was the other one?

I’d write all these songs, and then eventually it made sense to explore with more intention, the piano-songwriting aspect and the idea of making songs. Then, my approach was very poetic. It was very wordy, and I would imitate a lot of the songwriters that I loved. From Alanis Morissette to Leonard Cohen and Mariah Carey, to musicals. I was more attentive to rhythm and repetition. In poetry, I was very in love with the words and with the vocabulary and phonetics. So the silence of the page allows you to build in a certain way that a song doesn’t and vice versa. It was kind of an instinct and a natural transition.

Looking back at your previous work, how do you feel about it? Is there a creative element that has particularly evolved since you started?

There has been a very strong evolution in many aspects. On one hand, there’s an overall process of self-exploration and self-acceptance that helps with the creative process. Everyone creative, unless you are prodigious, struggles with who you are as an artist and who you are as a creative voice, and sometimes the only way through that process is just doing the stuff. On the other hand, there’s an overarching process of, through exploration and creation, coming to my own as an artist, and understanding who I am and my point of view. You see that exploration throughout the different stages, and in more concrete terms, there is an evolution in skills and ability. What I was able to do at the beginning of my career towards what I can do now is a natural progression of someone who’s dedicated time and effort consciously to a craft.

Also, in the process of recognizing and accepting who you are and feeling more comfortable with that, I have been pushing myself out of my comfort zone. Whether it’s with songwriting, production, live shows, and vocally, musically, or performance-wise, there’s a lot of growth there, and I’ve been fortunate enough that even through the darker or more difficult periods of creativity, for me, there’s always an essence and an identity that’s been there throughout, whether it’s in the lyrical aspect, the storytelling, or the song structure, overall, I’m okay with it.

But looking back, there are certain times when you think, “Ah. If I had done differently, or if I only knew then what I know now, or maybe I listened to other people instead of listening to myself,” and all those things that kind of distract you from that creative connection that allows you to be the best version of the time of who you are as an artist or a creator.

You have released six albums and have collaborated on many projects. Is there a specific time when you started calling yourself an artist?

I am always curious as to people who create or are artists when that happens. I’m always asking everyone. There’s always been a feeling of self-knowing that there’s an artistic or just natural, crazy delirious impulse to create, create, create, create, and put yourself out there, and I think, as an adult, it was much harder to accept and give myself the right to call myself an artist. As a teenager, I felt very artistic, and I kind of knew I wanted to be an artist, but in my early 20s, through my work in music, people going off to college, and kind of professional choices, I did get confused.

I was not allowing myself to feel like I was an artist, and it wasn’t until I would say the third album in, where I was like, “Yeah. No, no. This is for real. I think I am an artist.” I wonder if I had that strength and clarity before in the way I told myself the story. I wonder if it would’ve been different in my approach to certain things because there was this constant insecurity and uncertainty that made me feel like I was less of an artist or maybe I was less capable than I was. For most of my career, I was fully committed to it, but at the same time, there was a lot of self-doubt, and I didn’t think I had earned the name “an artist,” though I had been living a laborious, artistic life, working for many years.

When I ask that question people have different answers on when and how it started.

I fully agree. I left Chile and lived in LA for a while, and I think when I was in LA working, doing music for TV shows and doing all other stuff, that was a worker of the arts that wasn’t just for me, I had suddenly this city and new time and a new environment, I began to understand the life of an artist, like a serious, methodical life. It was interesting. I got interested in the creative process and met so many professionals in the arts. And I had never really met, or been exposed to any adults that were artists in any capacity before, so it was interesting when I finally began to meet people that were professionals in art and had careers, and it wasn’t just a hobby that had to end eventually and you had to put on a student’s tie or put on some sort of suit, some grown-up work.

Have you always been this comfortable performing live?

No. I think I always loved the idea of it, but I struggled, for sure. On the one hand, I would get very nervous. It’s very natural, very nervous and flustered, and had stage fright. In the beginning, it was very hard for me to focus. I’d be so just hyperventilated. To regulate my breathing and seeing, it took a while to get comfortable and not only get comfortable, but enjoy, feel pleasure, and understand that the closer I am to feeling good, the better show I can put on. When I started, it was nerve-racking.

Then, I got really into it, because I was really into the fact that I had a live band with me, and it was a lot about performing and playing instruments, but I think it took me a second to feel confident and feel like I could trust myself and trust the show. The exposure to people also is really demanding, like the energy, and opening yourself up. It can be scary. It took me a while to get to that place, but I understood, that if there is a sense of empowerment and joy, you feel pleasure, and you feel like you’ve prepared enough to let go, something happens that makes sense, and you feel it on the stage, and I think you feel that people feel it, hearing, watching, or being there with you.

You released your most recent album Adentro after a breakup, and the lyrics feel very personal. Did you have any hesitations about releasing something so different from your previous work?

I did. It’s interesting because in previous albums I had been personal in one song maybe, here and there, but not in a body of work that was so cohesive and clear with a story. I don’t think, since the first album that came out, I had been so consistent in that openness and that emotional openness, whether it was through lyrics and through music because sometimes you also make songs that have to do with more the style of the song, the production of the song, and not necessarily the story. So I think that it’s probably the body of work that feels most raw and emotional, and I was hesitant at one point.

It’s interesting, I’ve had hesitation through different eras of my music with songs. I’ve trained myself to be like, “This hesitation is not justified. It’s not a logical one. It’s more just a natural fear of exposing yourself.” And what I do in those moments is I trust who I’m collaborating with, so whether it’s producers that I’m working with, engineers, friends, my band, or someplace where I feel seen and I have some sort of reinforcement and some kind of point of reference.

With Adentro, my dear friend, Francisco, said, “It’s good to be embarrassed. If you’re embarrassed, it’s good.”

You founded Ruidosa, a music festival and community platform focused on creating more equity, representation, and participation for women in Latin American music. With a recent edition at the Lincoln Center in New York and eight years since it started, what do you think has contributed to the festival’s sustainability?

I think the idea of creating a space that celebrates female and dissonant voices, while addressing the issues they face, resonated with so many people that continuing the project made sense. Still, it hasn’t been easy, as managing a creative project on your own is difficult enough as it is.

As an entrepreneur, it is difficult to make a sustainable project in a whole different area that is a collective kind of communal, independent thing that’s interdisciplinary and has a social objective. In practical terms, it operates under the label and the production company that I have as an artist, and that I’ve been lucky enough to build to a certain point. The fact that a space like this didn’t exist, and seeing the opportunity to create it, with the unique characteristics of Ruidosa, has allowed it to continue.

I’ve been conscious of creating something that feels and makes sense in every aspect. It’s not only saying, “Yes, there’s a problem with representation and we need more women, and here’s a show with more women,” but it’s diverse women. And it’s about hearing the stories behind those projects and those journeys. And then it’s looking at the data. It’s also about looking at the opportunity to really empower and create community, not just sit there passively, but feel like you’re a part of something, so I think all that work, that focus, has allowed it to make it sustainable.

You are so articulate and have a lot of clarity in how you describe yourself and your work. Do you think being able to communicate effectively is an important asset for artists? It’s not always easy to talk about yourself.

The idea of being able to articulate a point of view that complements the art or the creation in itself was a learning curve for me because as an independent artist, I had to learn how to do everything, build all the teams, and make my point of view come across. Trying to learn how to see yourself in the environment you work…I think what happens when you create something or are passionate about building something is that you’re always looking from the inside of yourself.

That’s the way you should be doing things because you want to listen to yourself, but there is a point in whatever project, where you go into the outside world, and it’s important to understand who you are or where you stand in that reality and where you want to get to. So it’s like these two brains. You have one of the artistic, flowing, safe, delicate, vulnerable sides, and then the more executive side. Once I understood that that was operating, I began to try to understand how to respect and strengthen, each side. In the beginning, I didn’t know how to do it. I think I also was really intense, and people would be like, “Oh my God. I can’t. I don’t know how to digest all this information that you’re giving me.”

I was super on top of everything, and I was nervous all the time. It took me a while to understand how to navigate, not only music, but the extra-musical stuff and how to communicate, and also how to try to feel like I can present myself in a balanced way with what I want, who I know I am, what I’m capable of doing, and then also what’s really happening in the world outside of myself with who I am or what I’m making. It’s been a trial and error also, but I do think that, at a certain point, I did commit to the idea of being an artist, as we talked about before, and that included thinking about who I am as an artist and what that looks like.

I would add to believe what you’re doing. To also trust your point of view and your authenticity. One of the things that would make me very nervous and would make me shut down before was that I didn’t feel like I was anybody else, right? I think we all go through that. I was like, “Well, I’m not this kind of artist. I don’t talk like this. I don’t dress like this. I don’t say these things,” and so I was all the time trying to kind of fit in. Once I owned, not only my identity, but the way I wanted to work, propose things, and be okay to pioneer or open things and do them differently, that was really liberating and also very effective.

Are there any big creative revelations that have helped you in your creative practice?

One discovery is that the closer you are to yourself, the better it will be. It sounds so selfish and kind of out of place because everything else in the world seems that it’s not that way, but it really is. As an artist, if you are the truest to yourself, the more powerful it can be.

The other one is legitimizing in your mind, the love to live an artistic and creative life. I think it took me a minute to be like, “It’s okay that I’m different, maybe than my family, my classmates, I can choose and be an artistic person, live a poetic life, and choose those things,” and see what does that look like. Then, I can build that, and it sounds kind of maybe specific, but it’s really hard because you do feel like you have to go into a grind of a way things should be in your life or who you should be, so to clear that out and commit to living artistically or having a poetic life or your own rhythm or point of view. The last creative revelation is that there are no shortcuts to your own story. You have to just put in the work, and remember that, between you and the idea is the making of the idea, and that making can only get better the more you work at the idea. Believe in the craft from that sense and not be afraid to put in the work.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Miriam Garcia.

In the middle of the Pacific, Fiji journalists are transforming their practice, as newsrooms around Suva are requiring journalists to become multimedia creators, shaping stories for the digital age.

A wave of multimedia journalists is surfacing in Fijian journalism culture, fostered during university education, and transitioning seamlessly into the professional field for junior journalists.

University of the South Pacific’s technical editor and digital communication officer Eliki Drugunalevu believes that multimedia journalism is on the rise for two reasons.

• READ MORE: Other QUT Project journalism reports

“The first is the fact that your phone is pretty much your newsroom on the go.”

With the right guidance and training in using mobile phone apps, “you can pretty much film your story from anywhere”, he says.

The second reason is that reliance on social media platforms gives “rise to mobile journalism and becoming a multimedia journalist”.

Drugunalevu says changes to university journalism curriculum are not “evolving fast enough” with the industry.

Need for ‘parallel learning’
“There needs to be parallel learning between what the industry is going through and what the students are being taught.”

Mobile journalism is growing increasingly around the world. In Fiji this is particularly evident, with large newsrooms entertaining the concept of a single reporter taking on multiple roles.

Fijian Media Association’s vice-president and Fiji Times editor-in-chief Fred Wesley says one example of the changing landscape is that the Times is now providing all its journalists with mobile phones.

“While there is still a photography department, things are slowly moving towards multimedia journalists.”

Wesley says when no photographers are available to cover a story with a reporter, the journalists create their own images with their mobile phones.

The Fiji Broadcasting Corporation (FBC) also encourages journalists to take part in all types of media including, online, radio, and television, even advertising for multimedia journalists. This highlights the global shift of replacing two-person teams in newsrooms.

Nevertheless, the transition to multimedia journalists is not as positive as commonly thought. Complaints against multimedia journalism come from journalists who receive additional tasks, leading to an increase in workload.

Preference for print
Former print journalist turned multimedia journalist at FBC, Litia Cava says she prefers focusing on just print.

She worked a lot less when she was just working in a newspaper, she says.

“When I worked for the paper, I would start at one,” she says. “But here I start working when I walk in.”

Executives at major Fijian news companies, such as Fiji TV’s director of news, current affairs and sports, Felix Chaudhary, also complain about the lack of equipment in their newsrooms to support this wave of multimedia journalism.

“The biggest challenge is the lack of equipment and training,” Chaudhary says.

Fiji TV is doing everything it can to catch up to world standards and provide journalists with the best equipment and training to prepare them for the transition from traditional to multimedia journalism.

“We receive a lot of assistance from PACMAS and Internews,” Chaudhary says. “However, we are constantly looking for more training opportunities. The world is already moving towards that, and we just have to follow suit or get left behind.”

More confidence
Fortunately for young Fijian journalists, Islands Business managing editor Samantha Magick says a lot of younger journalists are more confident to go out and produce and write their own stories.

“It’s the education now,” she says. “All the journalists coming through are multimedia, so not as challenging for them.”

University of South Pacific student journalist Brittany Louise says the practical learning of all the different media in her journalism course will be beneficial for her future.

“I think that’s a major plus,” she says. “You already have some sort of skills so it helps you with whatever different equipment it may be.”

Catrin Gardiner was a student journalist from the Queensland University of Technology who travelled to Fiji with the support of the Australian government’s New Colombo Plan Mobility Programme. This article is published in a partnership of QUT with Asia Pacific Report, Asia Pacific Media Network (APMN) and The University of the South Pacific.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

I went to undergrad for film and theater. I didn’t walk into undergrad saying, “I want to do film.” I didn’t know anything about film, but I took a film course second semester with a great teacher named Cathy Crane, and I would say that the film department at that time was on the more experimental side of things. We were exposed to a lot of great experimental films. We were taught about cameras, and sound, and all this great technical stuff, but in terms of what a film is supposed to be, that was a more open-ended question. That idea has stuck with me: not what a film is, but what a film could be.

Then I went to grad school and got my MFA, and I was in a film department that was interested in expanded cinema and video art. I didn’t think that it was all that helpful. It wasn’t an actual film school, it was more like an art program. I had gotten a full scholarship, so I didn’t leave with a lot of debt, but I left with this big feeling that it’s just a bad practice to take that much money from people and then tell them to go out into the world and make it as a filmmaker or make it as an artist.

I don’t think there’s a lot of programs that exist like the one that I was at in undergrad. We’re so dominated now by Hollywood and what you are supposed to do with your career, so I’m grateful that I got to do that in undergrad. That’s how I started making films.

From what I know from My First Film, a lot of people who worked on your first movie Always All Ways, Anne Marie were friends from film school. How did having your friends also be your main collaborators impact the filmmaking process?

I want to make films for a lot of people, and because of that I don’t want to make them in a vacuum. I want to make them in dialogue with other people so that someone can say, “Hey, that’s not a good idea.” Or, “Hey, this would be a better idea.” Or, “Hey, oh, this is a great idea.”

Working with good friends is challenging, but it’s also the greatest, because I don’t think a complete stranger would tell me if I was out of line, or if my ideas were bad. I mean, maybe if they had a huge amount of money invested in me and some sort of seniority. But for the most part, I think young artists need feedback, and need to be open to feedback. Having real, true friends around you to give you that feedback, to be that first line, is important to making things that resonate with people that you want it to resonate with.

When you were making My First Film, how much effort was there to replicate as closely as possible the conditions and the costuming of the Always All Ways period?

When it came to casting, we weren’t looking necessarily for people who were one-to-one with their real-life counterparts, but who embodied the essence of whoever that character was. But when it came to the actual art, the mise en scene, everything that you’re seeing in the frame, I worked with a great costume designer and great production designer, both of whom are my age.

The costume designer, Rachel Dainer-Best, and the production designer, Stephen Phelps, had been working in films back then, too. We gathered up all of the photos we had from back then, and went over them to find touch points from that time, whether it be the camera equipment or the exact lighting kit that we were using. I remember looking at these pictures with Rachel and saying, “Man, we all had that one $7 pashmina from Chinatown that somehow we’d all wrap around our necks a million times.”

We got really into the details of the time period. It was this moment right before smartphones just took over everything. There were still a lot of markers that defined that as this actual place in time rather than where we are now, where time exists all at once because the phone is in our hands. We got incredibly specific. What’s so amazing about working with production designers or costume designers is the good ones are going to be that specific. They’re going to say, “Okay, we’re in 2012. Which characters would have a smartphone, which characters would have a flip phone?” I was just honestly totally blown away that we could be that specific and make it feel exactly like that time.

I think 2010 is such an interesting time to represent because it was this time of, as you say in the film, micro-budget filmmaking. It made me think about the material conditions of filmmaking: how crowdfunding, being able to rent a RED camera, and the other particulars of making a movie changes the final product.

I wanted to shoot on a RED camera, but I wanted to shoot with these anamorphic vintage lenses; I think they were Russian and from the 50s. That combination of tools was burdensome. We knew somebody who owned a RED, and Ashley [Connor, the film’s cinematographer] knew that they had kids and said, “Hey, I’ll babysit for you in exchange for this camera package.” The lenses were one of a kind, and we thought it was so special that we were getting them, and they were very expensive, so we had to buy a lot of insurance for them. They were, in fact, one of a kind, but the reason why they were available is that they were incredibly cumbersome. They were enormous. They were hard to use.

With the RED, how far you have to stand away from the camera was much further than I wanted the camera to be from the action. You probably needed a good four-person camera team, minimum, to make something really special on these because it was just so burdensome. But we didn’t have four people, we had two people. In a lot of ways, this equipment that I wanted and needed became the burden of the film, and it became the reason why making the film was so tense, and why I didn’t have enough footage to use when I cut.

In the same way that I thought that crowdfunding and making a certain amount of money to make this film was my key to making this film work, it actually was just a sign of how difficult it is to make films in this day and age. Of course, it was never going to be that easy. Making films is hard. I don’t know any time before my time, so I don’t know what it was like to make films in the 80s or 90s, but I can assume that it’s always been difficult to make films, and there’s always been either equipment or financing schemes that make it seem like it’s an easier thing to do than it is. If you go and you type in “my first film” on either Reddit or on Twitter, what comes up is a bunch of people in the YouTube era posting the first film that they just made and posted to YouTube.

We live in a very individualistic time, and moving images are this perfect place for us to say, “Me, me, me, I, I, I.” I made a film about myself, and it’s called My First Film. I totally get the irony there, and I don’t think anybody should stop making films at all. I think that everybody should be making films all the time, and there’s amazing stuff on TikTok, there’s amazing stuff on YouTube.

I was talking to a college class the other day and I said to them, “I know you’re going to watch my film and you’re going to say, ‘Oh my gosh, I’m going to go out and I’m going to make my film. And I’m graduating, and this is going to be amazing. She got to do it.’” I tried to emphasize that actually, it took me nearly 15 years to do, and I had many lucky opportunities to be able to do that. There was a huge amount of development behind this and a huge amount of money behind this. If you do anything when you graduate, it should be trying something else besides moving images. Because unless you really want to do this, it’s not worth it.

Do you see My First Film as a cautionary tale about filmmaking?

No. I definitely think that people could see it in a lot of different ways, and in one way it’s a cautionary tale. In another way, it’s a story of, if at first you don’t succeed, try and try again. Neither of those things were how I intended the film to be read, but I can’t control that. I see My First Film as a story about moving from seeing yourself as the center of the universe to understanding that every single person around you holds the same amount of importance, and it is only through a communal effort that anything can get made.

Did you keep a diary or a journal when you were making Always All Ways? How did you recall the specific emotional tenor of that time?

We were lucky that we had an email back then. A huge amount of this was in emails to people. My enthusiasm, my total naïveté was just in every single email I put out there into the world. There would be these emails that I would send to the entire eight-person crew. “Hey guys, I’ve just had a radical idea. What if we all get together one weekend and edit the film together?” Which is not possible to do. The greatest part was that nobody would respond to me, except for maybe Ashley, who was the cinematographer back then and is the cinematographer now, and was the character Alexis was based on. She would just write back, “I love that idea. Can you tell by the look on my face?” And then she’d send a photo booth selfie where she’s making a totally ridiculous face in a totally ridiculous felted hat. That alone is the energy of what this film is supposed to be. It’s just people just being incredibly naïve, but also incredibly sincere.

I was wondering about the casting. Obviously it’s not supposed to be exact, as you said, but casting somebody to play yourself must be a very intimate thing. What were you looking for? Were you aiming for somebody who could remind you of yourself at that age?

Odessa Young, who plays the character of Vita, is a fantastic actor. She’s in her 20s, she is Australian, but in every single role that she plays, she does not remind you that she is an Australian in her 20s whose name is Odessa Young. She is just that character. When I cast her, I knew that she was able to shapeshift into characters. Then the challenge was for her not to do “me,” but find whoever this character was. That was not for me to decide, nor did I ever say, “Hey, you should do a version of me.” I just gave her access to whatever she needed access to, whether it was my old emails, old photos, a lot of old journal entries.

We spent a ton of time together. I think from the very beginning, I knew that it was going to work because not only is she just incredibly talented, but the story of My First Film resonated with her. I think what I understood was that she had had a number of disappointing experiences making films, and she was constantly questioning whether or not making films was something that she actually wanted to do, in the same way that I was questioning it. Her experiences were super different than mine, but we found this mirror about what we wanted filmmaking to be.

How did you process the failures that you expressed in the film—Always All Ways was rejected from every film festival you submitted it to. You continued making films after that. How did you move on from those disappointments?

I often process things through energy. For a long time I was angry, and I just started to make a lot of really angry work. Angry music videos, angry short films. That was something that I did for a long time. When I started to do the performance [that would become My First Film], it was really biting. At a certain point, that energy of anger turned into realizing that when I am speaking, I am speaking to a lot of people, and it might be more interesting if I was to find a more interesting emotion than anger.

Not the opposite of anger, I’m not talking about being hopeful. But something that’s just more nuanced, that encapsulates how complicated and how difficult the human experience in general is.

Then, my work started to move into this direction that was more interested in having a dialogue with people, more interested in putting something out into the world and it resonating with people in different ways. I don’t do well when I’m not making something. I have to be putting stuff out into the world. And that stuff that I’m putting out in the world is ultimately to have a dialogue with people, and not just to barf my emotions all over.

How do you think about balancing humor and darkness in your work?

One thing that I’ve learned to be aware of is that I am funny. Not all the time, but I have a sense of humor, and one of the reasons that people like my films is because they’re funny. But I’ve also learned that I can’t think that I’m funny. I can’t sit there and say, “I’m going to tell a joke.”

I have to be sincere in what I do, and sometimes that’s funny and sometimes it’s tragic, but if I’m trying to do any of those things it’s not going to work. With [My First Film] co-writer, Billy Feldman, who I think is hilarious, we would write these scenes and we would read them back to each other. And if he would laugh, or I would laugh, or he would cry, or I would cry, I would say, “Let’s go with that.”

Understanding those steps to my process was important to it being very hilarious, and also very tragic. But those never were the goals. It was just to embrace that we should be making sure people are having those feelings when they’re reading or performing it, or when they’re ultimately watching it.

In the film’s description of Always All Ways, there’s not a lot of dialogue written, and the actors are guided by a broader treatment. It sounds like there was more dialogue for My First Film. How do you balance using conventional scripts with more general guidelines? What works for the creative process?

I hate scripts, and I also think that they are incredibly valuable for your collaborators. I don’t feel like I’m doing anybody a service when I give them a small amount of information. I’d rather give somebody too much information and have them say, “Stop right there. I don’t need that.” Versus the opposite, where people are sitting there and saying, “I don’t really know what to make of this.” Writing a script out fully is probably one of the more painful parts of the process. But in terms of my process, it has become a very, very useful tool to get my collaborators to understand what I’m trying to do.

You’ve made music videos for artists like Beach House, Jenny Hval, and Mitski. How does your creative process differ when you’re working on a music video for another artist, versus a film for yourself?

I feel like music videos are really there as commercials for the artists, and I was not interested in doing that anymore, because you can make a huge music video and it’s never going to help you get to make a film. People just don’t jump from one to the other very easily.

The music videos that I did made me aware of and made me interested in developing the intuition I have about whether something is working or not. The first time I ever felt glee making a video was the first Mitski video I ever did, with these Coachella-people kissing, and then the camera pans over to Mitski and she’s there playing her guitar. I just remember being filled with glee laughing, thinking, okay, this is a really interesting image. If you go and look at YouTube comments—and it’s very hard to look at YouTube comments—people are saying that the image is what works. The thing that I felt when I was watching it does work.

That little intuition I got to build up doing these music videos was important to my sense of knowing if something works or not when I’m making it. I think that’s probably the most generous I could be about my thoughts about music videos.

They made me immune to the idea of knowing that a zillion people will see something, and a huge amount of people will not like what they see. I have read all the YouTube comments. I have looked at all the shit-talking, and I have come to the conclusion both about music videos and about films that opinions are amazing. I am totally fine that a lot of people hate stuff that I’ve put out into the world. Usually if I’m making something that people love or hate, it’s doing something I really wanted it to do. It’s creating an intense enough emotion that somebody is going to post about it, whether they love it or they hate it.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Arielle Gordon.

I had a second grade teacher who made us write poems weekly. My parents were friends with a lot of poets, and I remember they showed one of their friends some of the poems I’d written. He ran a small literary magazine in North Carolina, and he published some of them when I was nine.

Oh my god, that’s amazing.

I was a really precocious nine year old, and I think I just thought, “Oh, I’m a writer.” I asked my dad to help me submit poems to The New Yorker, and they sent back a handwritten note that said, “Dear Ms. Bonner. We tend to publish authors who have at least one book. Best of luck.” I knew I wanted to be a writer, but I also think I wasn’t fully comfortable calling myself a writer until a few years ago.

Oh really? Why is that?

I think because it was always something I did on the side. I taught for four years then I went to grad school for film studies, and I wasn’t getting paid to write, not that you do when you’re a poet. But I felt like I couldn’t claim it or fully own it. When I got into the creative nonfiction MFA program at the University of Iowa, it was a three-year lesson on learning how to feel comfortable claiming that identity. I learned how to treat that identity seriously and to take my writing seriously.

What does it mean to take your writing seriously?

In the past, I always said yes to everything from work opportunities to spending time with friends and family. Melissa Febos, one of my instructors in the program, gave me a piece of advice my first semester. She said, “Treat your writing like you would a doctor’s appointment.” You would never cancel a doctor’s appointment. It took me nearly three years to say to a friend who wanted to get lunch, “I’m sorry, I can’t. I’m writing,” and not feel guilty about that.

It’s a hard lesson to learn. It’s something I’m still working through.

At this point, I feel okay doing it, but it was so hard to get here. Now, I can treat writing with the kind of time and attention I’ve always wanted to.

I was talking to a friend recently about how sometimes we can have difficulty putting our art first.

Yes. For me, as a woman, I’ve always been taught to please others above myself. You’re trained all your life to ignore your body, instincts, and urges. It took a lot of deprogramming to realize I can prioritize myself and my work, and even though it may not be compensated, it is important and it has value. Learning how to do that has holistically enriched my life. Writing has always been intensely personal. I’ll never stop doing it. I realized I need to treat it with the care it deserves if I want to take care of myself.

You were a poet first, right?

Yes. I got my bachelor’s degree at UNC-Chapel Hill for poetry. I wrote a thesis of poems, and afterwards, I felt burnt out with academia and writing. There was a period of a couple of years where I thought I didn’t have it in me to keep writing. Then I reached a point where I made a deal with myself to get a master’s degree in film studies before I turned 30. I ended up attending the University of Iowa for that.

I was on a track where the natural progression would be to get a doctorate, and I worked towards that for three years. But instead of working on my dissertation, I kept writing essays about films that personally resonated with me. I was also writing a little bit of poetry on the side, and I realized that was where my energy was, and to be in academia felt paralyzing. I wound up dropping out of my program a week before Iowa City shut down for the pandemic.

What was that like?

It was the best decision I’ve ever made. I also left a 10-year relationship a few months later. It was a pivotal moment where I realized I really did want to pursue this path and getting an MFA felt like where I needed to be. It was two parallel paths from that point forward, working on both poetry and prose, and it still continues to be.

You’ve mentioned that reading non-fiction helps you generate poetry. Could you expand more on that point?

When I was writing [Another Woman], I was reading Deleuze’s The Fold and Henri Bergson’s Matter and Memory. I was reading about affect, senses of ongoingness, and what Roland Barthes calls “bloom spaces.” All these texts had to do with possibility and unceasingness. All those writings evoked an atmosphere of feeling I wanted to capture through images or through my poetry, because [my poems] were also wrapped up in a sense of continuous spaces or periods of time.

That sense of ongoingness felt really important to the book because grief is unending. It can soften, but it is also unceasing. Those texts felt important, at least during the nascent stages of working on the book.

Where does a poem start for you?

Usually a line or an image will come to me when I’m walking. When I was writing this book—I started it in October 2020—I would take these really long walks in rural Iowa. I would walk for an hour late at night then come home and immediately start to write. I think movement generates rhythm for me as a poet. Also, I never take my phone with me when I go on a walk. And so it allows for a kind of attention to the landscape that I wouldn’t pay it otherwise.

With a lot of the poems in this collection, I feel like the landscape, the external world, mirrors the speaker’s internal world. Do you think that’s a result of those long walks and paying deep attention to the world around you?

Absolutely. Also, the pandemic was a time of intense isolation. I was going through a horrible breakup, but I was also living in a house with friends. There was this sense of being isolated yet having no privacy. The walks allowed me to be totally abject. I could be out at night alone crying or just processing. I think when we’re in heightened emotional states, we’re always projecting onto the world around us, so everything I saw took on the residue of my emotional state.

How do you know when a poem is done?

I had always been a poet whose first draft was the poem. It is not the way I approach my poetry now. I think it was very adolescent for me to think that the first draft was the final draft. So when I would go on these night walks, I would come home and write until two or three in the morning. I was also reading a ton at the time too. And I think that taught me about enjambment, word play, rhythm, intentionality, and how a poem moves. It was a time period in which reading was a great teacher for me.

In terms of how a poem gets written, I always say it feels like a fever dream; the poem just happens. Then there is a really intense revision period. I think what allows for that sense of being possessed by the poem to happen in the first place is all the work I’ve done beforehand. I try to read really widely as much as possible. I think I was also working really hard at the time and honing this practice I’d always loved but hadn’t had time and space for in a real way.

When you say “reading widely,” what does that mean to you?

I like to joke that I’m a promiscuous reader. I have writers and genres I’m drawn to, but I push myself to read books that might not necessarily be “my thing.” I like to read new books that get a lot of buzz, but I also read writers I’d never heard of. I read a lot of contemporary poetry, but I also just finished a book of Robert Creeley’s Collective Poems. With nonfiction, I read a ton of theory, but I also read memoirs and investigative nonfiction. I think all of those different registers feed you as a writer.

You mentioned that late night walks and reading widely helps you enter a creative headspace. Do you have any other habits or rituals that help nourish your creativity?

I was having a conversation with a friend of mine Wyatt Williams, who’s a great essayist, and I was talking about how it’s really hard for me to start new projects. He gave me advice that’s been so helpful ever since. He said, “You just have to sit down and do it because you know how to do this.” When I’m working on pieces now, I get up, make coffee, and immediately start writing. Morning writing is an important ritual for me.

I thought I needed to read, do yoga, or go on a run in the morning before I started writing and I’ve just learned that’s all a distraction.

Do you write every day?

No. I wish I did because I’m much more emotionally regulated when I’m writing. I teach, so there are some days where it’s just impossible. This summer, I’ve gone through waves with my writing. In May, I wrote every day, then I took off June to travel, and now I’m dipping back into it. It feels hard and good.

You mentioned film studies earlier. What drew you to get a master’s degree in that field?

In college, I took an introductory film class with Professor Greg Flaxman, and the way we read and analyzed films changed my life. I had always loved movies, but I had never thought about films as text before. It felt both creatively thrilling and intellectually challenging. I loved that there could be poetry in these really gorgeous shots. Professor Flaxman got his masters in film studies at the University of Iowa. I didn’t do a ton of research. I thought if it was good enough for him, it’s good enough for me.

How does film feed into your prose and poetry?

I really love and mainly write about experimental films. My favorite types of experimental films evoke a mood or a feeling. They have an affective quality that opens up a specific atmosphere I want to be steeped in. So, in that way, they get me to think about mood, voice, and image. Because they’re not typically narrative, it’s not a linear story or film, it feels like a sideways path into a poem.

In a review of Lisa Taddeo’s short story collection, Ghost Lover, you mentioned a summer where you’re working on a collection of poems and not working on your thesis. “Most days I do not get dressed or brush my hair, and yet I still prioritize my pleasure more frequently… I don’t feel vindicated that dating in my 30s has allowed me to harness my own sexual agency, but I’m astonished at how it still shocks me, desire without effort, beauty without pain.” I love that last sentence, and I feel like that’s a theme that you explore in the collection.

When I hear those words, they don’t necessarily feel like a marker of where I was, but of where I wanted to be. I wanted to have that kind of assuredness or certainty within myself. I think those lines resonate more now. This notion of desire without effort feels much more true in my life than ever before. And I don’t just mean that I’m in a good partnership now that is equitable and based in reciprocity and respect, but I think my desire for my life feels a lot less effortful. I’m working a lot, I’m writing more than I ever have before, and there’s labor involved, but it’s everything I want to be doing. There’s personal desire and pleasure, but there’s also desire that is very much wrapped up in my practice and writing.

The beauty without pain feels more complicated. For me, beauty has always felt thorny. I have always wanted to be taken seriously as a person and paid attention to for my thoughts and character and not what I look like. This is salient to the book because I think women and femme-presenting people are accustomed to role-playing. You have to switch in and out of characters or costumes to navigate the world and survive. But the rewards of that survival perpetually feels like oppression. This question reminds me of the beginning of a Linda Gregg poem [“Whole and Without Blessing.”] She says, ‘What is beautiful alters, has undertow.’ I just kept thinking about how beauty is transitory. It doesn’t last. That’s part of why we love it so much, it’s fleeting. But it’s also passive.

I also thought of another poem by Assata Shakur titled “Love,” and there’s a line that says, “Love is an acid that eats away bars.” That’s what I want, something that is active and activates change, and beauty doesn’t offer that to me.

Have you seen the movie Cleo from 5 to 7?

No, I haven’t.

It’s really good. It follows a woman throughout the course of a day. The whole film is about her as this kind of beautiful doll; she’s an object that is looked at and regarded by others. Then in the second half of the film, things flip, and she’s so much more within herself looking out at and perceiving the world. When I’m present to either a film, book, friend, or the environment, I’m fully attuned to the world and feel like a subject within it. That feels beautiful to me. I’m constantly seeking that purity of attention.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Ama Kwarteng.

It was an amazing experience because it felt so personal. It almost felt like, suddenly, the novel was also epistolary, because I was sending it to my mom. And she was in such a hurry to read it: she would be like, “Have you translated any more pages yet?” I read it out loud to her as I translated it, which is not usually how I go about this stuff. And I would tell her, “I still have a lot of editing to do.” But she wouldn’t let me take my time. She was like, “Give it to me already. Other people have read it, and I don’t know what it says.”

Right now, my mom is partially blind. She has a surgery coming up. So there was this added emotional layer to me. I know she can’t physically read anything right now, so even if I sent her a PDF or I sent her a print version of the book, even though it’s translated into Portuguese, it still can’t fully reach her. I mean, talk about distance. So it was also very emotional for me to be reading it out loud and for her to be hearing it through my voice. I know she’s going to read it many times, but not yet. Right now, we can only talk this way.

I wrote the book very much as a love letter to her, even though it wasn’t necessarily for her to read it right away like this. It meant a lot for me to have her read it and feel everything that I wanted her to feel in her bones: how much I love her, and how much I miss her, and also how much I didn’t leave behind, even though I moved countries and languages.

It was also, I think, a very tall order to translate into Portuguese, for the very first time in my life. It helped that I was an experienced translator working into English. I have to find a voice anew, hone it, make sure it doesn’t falter, and deliver the book as a cohesive whole. It was also a book that I knew very well, so it was sometimes easy to read into things that weren’t on the page. I had a little sticky note next to my computer that just said, “Translate the page.” Not everything else that existed in my head or outside of it or my memories or my concerns. When I translate other authors, I have to focus on that, too: on the text as an object, the book as an object of its own. Not the author’s biography, not what I think of them, not what I know of them. None of that is verifiable, you know? So it was interesting to see the book that way, not from the inside of my head, but from the outside, a very new way of looking at it. It allowed me to experience the book as a reader as well, which I hadn’t done yet.

Was there any part of you, while translating for the very first time from English to Portuguese, that wished you’d taken that on with a book that wasn’t your own? Or was it better to begin with your own novel?

As a translator in English, I always had a very strong sense of my own voice, and I knew my own writing, and I knew how to play with the English language. I would experiment with it to reach these other voices and then produce these other texts that are nothing like anything I would ever write.

It was interesting to have the chance to develop my own sense of self and my own voice in Portuguese. I appreciated that side of it. But on the other hand, it was also, I felt, very inadequate at times, and then I did prep. I would do my research and I would do homework pretty much the same way I do with other authors. I’m used to knowing exactly what I want to say, but in this case, I’d think, “Okay, I know that I was referencing these authors, that there was an echo of this other scene that I studied in order to write this one. I’m having a hard time writing it in Portuguese. Let me see how this Jamaica Kincaid scene or this Sigrid Nunez scene sounds like in Portuguese. Then I can triangulate my influences again.”

That’s so interesting.

I do that with authors all the time. Like with Stênio Gardel, who wrote The Words That Remain, it was like, “I know he’s been influenced by Faulkner,” or Jeferson Tenório has been influenced by James Joyce, and then I go look, and I study those authors, and I understand what to do.

When I was translating Moldy Strawberries, which is this very, very lyrical story collection about the AIDS crisis, I read all of this poetry from the AIDS crisis, all of these experimental queer books and watched documentaries. I really didn’t expect that I would have to do that with my own work.

So there are pros and cons, I think, to coming into my own work very much like it was a foreign text. I was working with this language that, of course, is my mother tongue, but I don’t actually speak it every day anymore, and that I don’t read as much in it anymore and rarely write in it.

When you were reading the translation to your mom as you went, did she ever have feedback or suggestions for changes or anything like that? Did she get involved in the process at all?

She was kind of processing real life, finding a way to narrativize her own experiences through the book, more so than she was looking at the writing. For her, it was more like a life exercise. She said, “I’m trying to figure out how we live now, knowing that this story is out there.”

What do you think she meant by that?

I think it’s a little new to her to see a character that people might think is her, even though it is not her. She’s like, “Oh, I’m going to have to tell your aunt that this didn’t happen. She would be shocked.” It was new to my mom to have this gaze and this persona version of her. I think she gets a kick out of it, to be honest. She’s like, “Oh, how interesting. I have this carefree version of me who drinks alcohol,” and she’s very straight edge, doesn’t put a single drop of alcohol in her mouth. In many ways, very, very different from the mother character.

She was really intrigued by how and why I made up stuff. She was like, “I can see how this makes for a better story,” or she’d be like, “We had an outrageous detail. Why didn’t you include it? It was so fun,” and I’m like, “Oh, maybe a little too fun.” We did have this conversation where she was understanding a little bit, I guess, the driving force of the book versus what our lives are like, which are very, very different. Life is so boring.

Blue Light Hours took you seven years to write. How did you see it through?

I am a very slow writer, and I also was a full-time freelancer working with literature and publishing, so I was writing a ton for work and doing other kinds of writing. I found it really, really difficult to do the thing that people tell you to do: just write every day and structure your time accordingly. Instead, I would do these very, very, very immersive spurts. For two weeks, I would do nothing but live in the world of the book, and then I would write. I would close off one chapter. I wanted each chapter to function mostly like a self-contained story. So then when I went to do my other jobs, like translate a book or write readers’ reports, I knew that that chapter was mostly sealed, even though I would do tons of editing and all of that.

I am one of those writers who only moves to the next sentence after the previous one is perfect. Again, a terrible process, to be honest with you. Very paralyzing. Didn’t help me move toward my writing goal that much, but it’s the only process for me. I’m a very obsessive writer and very sentence-driven. I focus on the line as a unit, and I roll the sound in my mouth for a long time, always very focused on rhythm, on sound, on all of that. Sometimes I would hold one paragraph for several days, trying to play with it. I do love a quiet, introspective novel and a novel that gives the characters room to grieve instead of just pushing them forward all the time.

Nowadays, how are you balancing your fiction writing practice with your translation practice? Do you feel like you’re able to compartmentalize and work on both at the same time? Or do you tend to want to be more monogamous with your work?

I am very monogamous with my work. Usually, I will be translating something, and I might take a little break and then focus on my writing, and back and forth, but I can never work on two things at the same time.

Right now, my focus has been very heavily on craft, on rethinking my process and thinking through things like, “Huh, well, how on Earth does a story work, or a novel chapter, or a novel as a whole? Or does the sentence have an arc?” That’s all I’m doing right now. I can’t also be thinking of new fiction. I don’t know why that is. I envy people who can do lots of things at once. Even if I could do that, I would break up my day in very distinct halves and not mix them too much. It might have something to do with immersion or with inhabiting a voice. I need the writing to feel lived in and embodied, and I don’t know that I can do that and be fully present in the text right away. It always takes me a little bit of warming up.

How do you know when a translation project is one you want to work on?

I’ve been wrong before, but for the most part, I know because of the voice. Even if it’s a voice that’s very, very different from mine, if I can play with the syntax, if I understand its rhythms, I feel like it fits my body. It fits the rhythm of my breath. I can do it. I can sustain it for a long time. For the most part, I have to feel a relationship to the character and to the author’s voice.

How have your fiction writing and literary translating practices influenced one another?

I think there are two things that translation has given me. One is confidence. Just by having practiced different styles, different voices, different plots, I feel like I can take on a page. I am not that afraid of the page. I might not know what I’m going to write yet, and it might take time, but I know I’m going to get there. And confidence is everything in fiction, right? It’s the trick that we’re selling.

And then the other thing that translation has given me is, honestly, an opportunity to try on different styles and know how to execute them. It’s also made me think of language very much as a medium. The way that maybe someone working with watercolors has constraints they’re working with, and then if you’re doing oil painting, there are these other constraints. Portuguese is its own medium. It has its own problems and constraints and difficulties, and it has its own drying time. And then the English language also has its own.

The process of translation as meditation on language is so enviable for me as someone who doesn’t speak or write in another language. Do you have any ideas for how a writer might be able to access that kind of meditation in a way that is not translation?

A lot of my students are brand new to creative writing and don’t speak another language, and I’m like, “Oh, I wish I could tell them what it’s like to have an entire book go through you.” When I translate, I can hold that entire book in my body. From beginning to end, the whole arc. And I wish I could share with them how to do that without actually having to write a book, which is a whole other thing. And one way I found is to have them write in someone else’s style completely, and I call it “writing under the influence.”

During your National Book Awards acceptance speech, you thanked your publisher for putting your name on the cover, and you told the crowd, “Translators are not mysterious fairies working in the dark.” In your view, what work is still to be done by publishers on this issue, and what can readers do to support translators?

There’s so much that publishers can do to inform readers that there is somebody putting in all this artistic labor: moving these texts, experiencing these texts, and enacting these texts for this reader. That absolutely starts with putting the [translator’s] name on the spine and all of that. I’ve been lucky to have been included in book tours with my authors and things like that. They really make a difference, I think, in helping people understand, “Oh, this book wasn’t just born like this. There was somebody making choices for every word and for a reason,” as opposed to an attitude I see in publishing often, which is to trick the reader into thinking, “Actually, this wasn’t translated at all.” They try to give the reader this false sense of stability, like it’s a historical text that has never been touched. It was always perfect as is, like there’s a definitive version of the text, and it’s only one. I think it makes for a much more interesting book and process and reading experience to think of the book as something that is unstable and that has been moved and that you too can engage with, and play with, and then have a completely different result. Imagine how much richer people’s reading experiences would be if we read Proust or Tolstoy not as a painting in the Louvre next to a security guard, but as a painting that you can touch and feel the texture for and maybe even mess with a little bit.

I think a lot of artists wonder how an artist’s life may or may not change when they win an award as huge as the National Book Award. I’m wondering if you’d be willing to share some of your experience with that. How has winning the National Book Award made your life better? Are there any ways in which it’s been maybe even a little overrated or not life-changing the way everyone in the world thinks it is?

Thank you for asking that question. I wish someone had answered that question so I could take a look. Right now I’m dying to ask someone else, “Did you have that experience, too, or is this just me?”

The thing is that my brain is just as broken as it was before. Winning this award might have fixed my life on the outside, but it certainly didn’t fix my psychological issues or my sense of self. I am just as insecure as I was the day before I got the award, and just as scared as well, and that part has not changed. I really wish it had because I’m so sick of being afraid, afraid that my career will end, that I will never write anything again: all the fears that I’ve always had. Every time I write a story, I’m like, “I bet that was the last one.” I still feel that way. That part has not changed.

Many things have changed. I mean, I absolutely do not take it for granted. It’s been amazing. I’ve been able to get a good job. Maybe I would have gotten some kind of job anyway, but it’s certainly easier to apply for a fancy teaching job when you can say, “I’ve won this big award.” I know that it’s easier to get in the door. I think that’s the main difference. Being able to advocate for myself a little better, like, “Oh, you can’t underpay me. I won’t allow it.” Before, I might have wanted to say, “I won’t allow it,” but I allowed it fine all the time.

I moved just now to Iowa a month ago, and I brought my award wrapped in a sweater in my trunk, just like with all my other shit, and I don’t know that it’s quite the magical object that it might have seemed when I was unable to touch it. But it’s hollow. It even jingles a little because there’s something loose inside. It’s still very heavy physically. Actually, it’s incredibly heavy. It’s more than 10 pounds, and given it’s so small, it’s always kind of shocking when I lift it, but then I’m like, “Oh, it’s an object, kind of like I have a paperweight.” And then it kind of demystifies. It all falls apart, all the allure. Oh, gosh, I romanticize! I still romanticize these things so bad, but it’s much more human now to understand, like, “Goddamn it, is there nothing that’s going to shine on me and then make my problems go away?” No, that shit doesn’t exist. That doesn’t exist, it turns out, but certainly things can make your life easier. You know?

Thank you for that very honest answer. It’s so helpful to me to hear that, because it does seem like a magic wand that will make all of your problems go away. But of course it’s not. How could it be? That does not exist.

I know. I know. I guess if I could summarize it in one sentence, it would be that it might help your professional standing cosmetically, but it won’t heal your psychic wounds. Thank God I have a therapist.

You shared with me that you have a sleeping disorder that keeps you awake pretty much all night long. How has that impacted your writing practice?

Oh, gosh. I can never write in a coffee shop or do whatever it is that other people do. It’s always been hard for me to hold down a job because it’s so hard for me to be awake during the day. I still nap during the day a little bit like a baby.

For me, writing is always this almost magical activity you do when time is really still and there’s no one else around, and you do it in secret a little bit, so it’s always felt like something really private, and I have a hard time sharing my writing with other people. It’s hard for me to imagine that other people could see me writing. There is something to be said about something that you only do when you’re in hiding, you know? And I’ve always been a little embarrassed about my own writing. Even with my agent: she’s always like, “Please just send it to me,” and I am doing whatever I can to push it off and make sure she doesn’t see it for another six months. I love having a private inner life like this, but then it does mean that my husband is like, “You’ve been writing a story collection?” I’m like, “Oh, yes. I didn’t mention it?”

I have a feeling that the second I am working on a project again, I will want to work on a project and won’t be able to do it during the day. I’ll get overwhelmed, like, “Oh, gosh, there’s sunshine, there’s noise.” Then I’ll stay up all night and do it, and the whole thing will be back exactly to where it was before.

You have a pet rabbit named Tulipa, and I’ve also noticed from Instagram that one of your hobbies is making miniatures. From one outsider’s perspective, it feels like you’ve built this really delightful life for yourself. Does writing feel as enjoyable to you as petting your rabbit or working on a miniature does?

It does. When I’m in the middle of not knowing what the writing is, I hate it for a little bit. But then the second I get to the moment of knowing, which is what I’ve been searching for all along, there’s nothing that can match that high.

And I love all the other things I do. I love translating. I love miniatures. I have so much fun doing all of those things, but there is something about writing that I haven’t been able to find anywhere else, something honestly life-affirming that I’m like, “Everything makes sense. In this one moment, in this one second, everything feels right. Everything makes sense,” that I really do love.

Writing does feel as blissful as petting Tulipa, who is the softest creature I’ve ever touched. She’s a star. She’s absolutely beautiful and very clever, and I do think that she loves that I’m up all night because she’s also up all night.

Were you drawn to rabbits for that reason?

I didn’t know how intensely they slept during the day and how much they were active at night until I had her, but the second that happened, I was like, “I can never not have a rabbit for the rest of my life.” I’ve always felt pretty strange and wrong about not being able to be up during the day. I tried to fix it. I struggled with it and I wrestled with it a ton and slept in a tube at a sleep clinic and went to neurologists who were like, “Listen, there isn’t anything we can do. We tested your brain, and it only comes alive at night.” And I mourned that. I tried to be like everyone else, but then with Tulipa, things make sense. I’m like, “Of course. This is just what we do.” And in the middle of the night, she gets the zoomies, or she’s doing pirouettes up in the air, and so am I. The second it’s 10 P.M., I have a dance party and I want to write up a storm. She makes me feel like things are right in the world, and that’s a very lovely feeling to have.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Hurley Winkler.

I had performed in New York, I was underaged sneaking into bars using drag as a way to get away with not having a good ID that looked like me. I never cracked the scene there. New York is hard, it’s very much like a ladder that you have to climb. When I moved to the Bay, all that immediately just disappeared. There were, especially when I came into the scene, a lot of amateur nights that had slots for new performers. There was a lot of opportunity to just jump in and fuck around. Being part of that, meeting those people, taught me who I was. So, I feel like everything that I’ve done since is just giving back to that community and that feeling and creating more spaces for that to happen. Something like Oaklash, which is a huge festival, [that] we invite everyone [to] but it’s curated, [is] something to strive for and that was important to me after coming into a scene where there wasn’t anything to strive for beyond reality TV.

I wanted to speak to you because you’re an artist with your own creative practice but you also nurture community with Oaklash and balance a day job as a director of programming at a nonprofit. When I reached out, you mentioned you’re leaving your day job to focus on Oaklash and are in the middle of a career transition. Can you talk a little bit more about that and what’s been going on in your heart and mind right now?

Yeah, I’m figuring out a lot [of answers] to questions [of how to live] for myself right now. I like to say that not every party has to be a non-profit. A lot of people are just throwing parties to pay the rent and afford to live in the Bay Area, it’s fucking expensive. And that’s a totally fair way to operate in nightlife.

Oaklash has always had a mission of providing resources to the city of Oakland and of providing resources to the queer and trans community out here. That was built into the first year of the festival, so it made sense for us to become a nonprofit. But of course, we had no idea what we were doing. I had worked in nonprofits, but I didn’t understand what nonprofit management was and how to grow an organization. We just grew really fast and there were a lot of moments in working with Oaklash where I just sort of had to listen to the tides of change and know when to strike. The nonprofit industrial complex is inherently flawed, but there’s a reason it exists and there’s a way for queer people to use it and reclaim it. That’s what’s happening right now, it’s another wind of change and period of growth for our organization and I just need to listen to it. I’ve invested probably tens of thousands of dollars into this festival myself, not just materials but also my time, in the last eight years.

I’ve always had a full-time day job that let me put my time and energy into other things so I’m really glad I did it that way, but it’s also a time for me as an artist to start paying myself for my labor in this and I think Oaklash has the ability to be a much bigger resource. People learn about [us] and it gets bigger and we have a bigger budget and bigger headliners and bigger stages and I want that. But in terms of growth right now, it’s going back to where we started and going back to listening to the community and seeing what is needed out there.

It’s not like any nonprofit is going to solve these problems, but there’s nothing being done about it. There’s no resources in the city of Oakland to invest in it. The state sends the California Police and the highway patrol to mess up our streets and kick people out of their homes. There’s a lot of bigger structural issues that just aren’t being addressed in my specific community of queer and trans folks working and performing in nightlife. We need resources because I want those people to stay here. I don’t want The Bay to be a place that people come [only] for as long as they can afford to. I want to figure out a bigger ecosystem that we’re trying to build here. I think we’ve done some of that, just teaching people how to do what we do, sharing skills, creating networks beyond the also really important work of creating spaces and events and parties that allow queer and trans people to feel like they can be themselves. Central to what we do is celebrating this community.

How has it felt making the leap of leaving your day job and committing to this?

It’s crazy. I’ve always had that nonprofit full time gig backing me up and [now] it feels very vulnerable. Just like the inconsistency of gig work. I feel like I became an arts administrator in order to do the things that I wanted to do. And in the process, [I’ve] had to sacrifice a little bit of myself as an artist. So [I’m] giving myself that space of building a creative practice into whatever I’m about to do [next]. I have no idea what I’m about to do, I truly have no vision for my next six months and that feels crazy because I’m such an organized person, I’m such a control freak who’s been able to do all these amazing things because I had a vision.

I do know what I want out of this, I know where I want Oaklash to get, but how do I as a person and an artist do this? Because yeah, it requires me having a public persona and putting myself out there more and just being vulnerable in a way that having a separation of my home self versus the public figure that is Mama Celeste has to get blurred a little bit. I have to get more comfortable with that getting blurred in order to really get myself, as an artist, to the work.

You’ve described the concept of the party like it’s an art piece. Can you talk about that more? What are the elements that go into a party that make it an art piece?

That’s been a big reframing for me, especially for applying for grants. That’s probably what you’re hearing, a lot of my grant speak coming out. I’ve had to do a lot of work to convince funders that what we’re doing is art, because it looks frivolous, right? I mean, people [think] they know what drag is, right? Drunken old men wearing frocks, right? And to me it’s really so much more than that, like the community that’s being built, the intention that goes into that kind of space from the sets being built, to the design of the street, to the performances curated, and the order of things, and the pacing of time and space between multiple stages, and where the different vendors are, and the way an audience moves from one space to the next. There’s a level of orchestration that goes into it that’s really a creative process. There’s so much thought work that goes into it.

I think the fact that it is a party doesn’t mean it’s not an art piece and the fact that it is an art piece doesn’t make it not a party. It’s our job to toe that line. One piece of advice that Kochina Rude gave as she was leaving–she used to be on the board of directors at Oaklash–is that Oaklash has to always be cool. If it stops being cool, it stops being what it is. It has to stay cool, and [that means] it needs the voice of that next generation. If I’m going to [become] an old fucking white drag queen, I should not be the person making these decisions, I will not be cool, I’m already kind of not cool. But in order for it to feel like a thing that the community needs, the community has to be the one curating it and deciding what it looks like and telling us what they want. I think year one to where we are now, it’s like one consistent art piece that has grown. It’s the same thing with the same ethos and vibe and has continued to amass people, and our job is to make sure it is as cool as it was year one.

When you’re thinking about putting together a performance or putting together an event, what does the beginning phase look like for you?

One of my biggest pieces of advice for people who are starting parties is to never throw a party by yourself. It’s too much work. It’s exhausting. You never want to be the first one there and the last one out and solving every problem. I’m a really strong believer that everything is better with collaboration. So that’s really what I’m excited about, that’s always been a part of my artistic process, finding collaborators and finding people that I want to do stuff with and then just shooting the shit and then just [making it happen]. My problem is I’m a person that people pitch ideas to, and I make them happen. People approach me with projects [all the] time and I’ve learned to say no. I don’t have a lot of capacity to give to every single project. But I’m excited for that, just opening my arms and waiting to receive. I fully believe that something will approach me that will strike my inspiration.

In terms of performance based work, drag for me used to be a very visual-based thing. I started my practice as a visual artist, I was doing sculpture in school and painting and graphic design and that’s how I got into doing makeup and costumes. But I think what’s exciting me more now in terms of putting together performances is listening to the music and letting the music guide the performance. I mean, drag is really like a remixing of pop culture. It’s like the snake eating itself, it’s taking a pop song and then [turning] it on its head. I’ve been getting more into DJing and being on that end of the party, controlling a room with music, and I think that’s reframed the way I do drag now. My focus is on the music and listening to the source material and turning that on its head.

What does collaboration mean to you? I’m curious who your regular collaborators tend to be and what working with collaborators is like?

Oaklash started with me and Beatrix Lahaine. Beatrix is an Oakland born and bred–emphasis on bred–Mexican drag punk clown performer. Bea was doing what I thought was the first cool drag that I’d seen in Oakland, at least when I came on the scene. She was throwing a party called Tragic Queendom which was more punk, more subversive than what was happening at Club BNB or Club 21. [They] were doing more pageant imperial court drag. Bea was doing all the kind of stuff that I love, and is an amazing artist and amazing convener of people and brings together worlds. But she’s not an admin person, I don’t even show her the spreadsheet. I think my role in the community has become utilizing all this nonprofit administrative high executive function brain that I’ve been blessed with and using that in service of the vision of other artists.

Bea is the north star of Oaklash. All creative decisions, artistic direction, promo performers, everything goes through Bea. But someone’s gotta make that shit happen. It’s just a different role. I’m working on such a bigger framework when I’m putting on something like the festival that I love just handing the curatorial stuff [over] and letting her brain do the part of it and be the artist.

I was collaborating a lot more before the pandemic with an artist named Cash Monet. We did a zine project that turned into a production company and now she’s off on her own. That’s a really strong example of someone who’s similar [to me], she had a photo degree and I had graphic design experience and we were doing all these [projects] and created a production house for queer folks in the Bay Area. [I’ve] missed that level of collaboration and visual art collaboration as well. Nicki Jizz is a big collaborator of mine. Nicki and I throw a party called Rollin’ With the Homos down at the Oakland Township Commons, a roller skating drag disco which is just the most fun that anyone can have in a day. It was a party that we started during the pandemic because the two of us were just hanging out roller skating all the time and we were like, wait a minute, why don’t we just invite literally everyone we know to come hang out with us? Again, it’s those sort of bullshit moments in time, because we fully expected that party to dwindle after bars opened back up and the fad of roller skating died after the pandemic, but it hasn’t. It’s as big as it ever was and the crowds we pull are insane for a monthly public show that happens in a park. I love people who plant those sorts of seeds.

How do you define failure?

Controversial question because I love failure. Truly one of my goals right now in this phase of trying to reinvest in myself as an artist is to go out and create more shitty art.

In the role [I’ve had] as an arts administrator, I have facilitated so much shitty art in the world. And I’m someone who also thinks that 90 percent of art is bad, and it should be! Because 90 percent of the time means that the 10 percent is fucking genius. As I’ve built my public persona and grown my influence here, I’ve gotten more reserved again. Drag taught me to really express myself and the more I was in the public eye, I started to draw myself back in and not put things out publicly.

Maybe I don’t need to put things out publicly, but I want to make more shitty art. I love failure, that’s a huge thing that drag has taught me, to love to fail. Get up on stage and fall. [With] Rolling with the Homos, our joke is that if someone does a cool trick, you clap, but if someone does a cool trick and falls, you clap and you laugh. It’s better, actually, when someone falls. Because it’s what you’re waiting for. It’s like a tightrope walker, you’re waiting for someone to fail. That intensity of, “how is this going to fail?” is actually what makes it so interesting. I want to go out and make more shitty art. Probably a lot of it is not going to see the light of day, and even if it does, I need to be okay with it being cringe and putting myself out there and trying new things. I need to give myself that liberty.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Daniel Torres.

I’m working on finishing my second album right now, so it’s nice to be home and to get time to work on it. It’s been a slow process because it’s been amidst touring. That said, being a self-employed creative person, whose job is my art, when I’m at home, I can definitely struggle with self-direction, self-scheduling, and motivation—especially when I’m working on an album, which is just up to me. It only happens if I make it happen.

I find sometimes that toggling between states of being on the road, being very outward and outputting, and coming home and doing a totally different kind of output, can require some transition time.

When I’m on tour, I have a whole set of to-do lists every day that I have to get through. I have such a structure I make for myself as well as one that’s handed to me [by a tour manager], so it’s definitely a different kind of work. It feels almost less like I have to call the shots and more like I’m just doing a job. It’s really relaxing in a way, a bit of a vacation.

You’re thinking about the album while you’re on tour, at least for this latest tour?

I try to put it away because there’s nothing I can do when I’m on tour. Since I’m finishing the recording phase, I can’t really even listen to the songs. I try to put it out of sight out of mind. I know there are people who can finish an album in a few weeks, but I need a lot of time with the songs and then away from the songs, and then with the songs again, to build a timeless relationship with them. I need to make sure that I’m going to like them for a long time.

What is an ideal no plans day for you to recharge?

I was reading some of the other Creative Independent interviews, the one with Anna Fusco who I’m such a huge fan of. She talks a lot about having time where there’s no output and how art should be slow. I find that so validating, especially right now, because it has taken me so long to finish this album, and I feel such a pressure that I put on myself, too, as soon as I get home from tour, to be productive, whatever that means. If I’m recording, then I’m not writing, so I have to make sure I have time to write as well. But also just remembering that all of that is output.

A recharge day for me probably means just hanging out with some friends. I’m a very social person, so I make a lot of plans and sometimes that can also be draining, but probably just spending time in nature with my friends.

What was it like growing up with and being surrounded by musicians?

I feel lucky because I know a lot of people who want to do music for their life career don’t have an example. For me, having so many examples, and being born into a musical community, the path was already something I could see. It wasn’t something I had to carve out for myself or someone had to point out as an option.

Still, I think, societally we’re not necessarily all encouraged to be artists because people don’t make it seem like a viable option. But I had a lot helping me to see it as a viable option when I did decide that’s what I wanted to do. Having a creative family just means it’s something they support, and also know what to warn you about. They’re familiar with the challenges.

Do you feel you had much choice in the journey that you’ve taken? Was there anything else that was pulling you, or music was always what you wanted to do?

It was what I always wanted to do, but I had a roundabout way of getting to it. I almost ignored the instinct for a while because it felt too obvious, and too difficult honestly. I was definitely warned about the challenges and I feel like we’re all kind of told that it doesn’t usually work.

I went to university for a semester because I wanted to prove that I was smart enough to get in. I hated it so much. I just wanted to be writing songs. I dropped out after one semester. Then I got a job as a backup singer for a year… I think my background in singing and music just led me in these other directions, and showed me what other options there were. And I honestly hated that, too.

I think that at that point, after trying things that felt so wrong, it was like nothing was pulling me more than songwriting and making my own music.

Can you remember if there was a defining moment where you were like, okay, I’m going to do this seriously?

Well, it was my community. I was playing shows around Toronto, around my city, just little songwriting circles or organizing shows with my friends and doing things casually. I met a good friend of mine through this who ended up engineering and co-producing my first record. He was in the music community and was like, “Do you want to make an album? You want to record some songs?” And I thought, “Oh yeah, right.” I honestly don’t think I’d even considered it at that level.

Then, I’d started serendipitously playing music with two other friends and pulled together a small band, so that all aligned at the same time. It took other people’s seeing like, “What’s she doing? Just playing these songs, all the same songs at every show. Why don’t we try to make something out of this?”

Is there something you wish you knew when you were first starting to make art?

Something that I’m still working on, that was handy when I first heard it and is handy now, is just to trust myself. Trust and intuition and desire are all things I’ve been thinking a lot about recently. I went to a few art schools growing up, and I feel like it was an interesting way to learn art. I’m really glad I did. But also combining art with academia starts you off in this productive, explaining-your-art phase a little bit early. I feel like something that I had as a kid, and something that I try to foster now, is trusting my instincts and not always having a reason for everything I make or want to make.

I think just listening to the world that wants to be built. I hear a lot of people talk about channeling songs or having songs sent to you from the ether and not being responsible for them, and I definitely feel that in a way. I feel like that’s part of trusting what comes. You don’t always know why you want your album to sound a certain way or why you want to have someone playing on it, but trusting those gut instincts has gotten me everywhere I’ve gone since starting music.

Are there specific things you need in place to record the best way that’s true to you, or what is your process for recording?

I am used to recording with other people around, so I have a lot of brains to bounce things off of… I can definitely sometimes lean on that a little too hard and can be like, “Do we want that there?” “What do you think?” “What do you think?” Ultimately I’m producing the record and ultimately I know I’m going to make the final call, so I’m trying now with these stages of editing and making decisions to just make them and to trust what I hear. But yeah, I need a good balance of working with other people and working alone to not lose sight of my own judgment, but also to have other people there for different opinions.

Is there always a magical moment where you know that the project is finished or how do you typically know when you’re done with an album?

I don’t know. A good friend of mine is sending her album to mastering now and she’s been reaching out to me being like, “Let me know if you need to talk about this because this is the really hard part.” I’ve been very grateful for my community right now, but still, I don’t know. I do think it will get to the point where I just start enjoying listening to the sessions and listening to the songs, and I’m not thinking about what it needs or what it doesn’t. I do think I’m close with a lot of them.

Are there methods that you use to get into a creative flow when you’re writing or where do you draw inspiration from typically?

I’ve been wondering that myself because it does feel totally random. It feels like if I stumble across a rare moment alone, sometimes something will strike me and I’ll be feeling something and it will come out and I’ll be able to write a song in half an hour. Then sometimes I’ll sit with the guitar part for weeks and weeks and not have any lyrics that feel inspiring, and I feel like I’m never going to write a good song again. But every time I write a song, I feel like it’s the last good song I’ll ever write. I would love to have more of a math. I would love to have more of a way to get into the zone of writing. I also do feel like it’s similar for most people, and it’s always sort of like getting struck by lightning.

Can you talk a bit about transitioning from being more of an independent artist to working with a label? What’s that been like for you?

Well, it’s honestly been great because it means that I now have sort of the beginnings of a small career, and I definitely wouldn’t have that without working with a label. So as much as I know there are ups and downs to everything in the music industry, I do think I got lucky in having a group of people that believe in my music and want to put in time and energy to get it out there. Because again, I don’t have really the organizational skills to get that kind of thing together. It took my friends telling me to make an album, and just people who were like, “Let’s do this. Let’s take this really seriously, because you’re good enough to be taken seriously.” I don’t think I knew that or would’ve been able to believe in myself.

What is one surprising thing that you’ve realized along your creative path?

When this all started happening, when I released my first record and got that all together, I realized that it takes a village for sure, but at the same time it’s up to me. If I don’t execute ideas that I have, they won’t happen. It’s not necessarily hard work, but it’s a lot of work.

I know that artists work hard, I’m not saying that being an artist isn’t hard work. But for me, it’s so natural to have this task of make a music video, build a visual world for your album, assemble a group of friends to make a record with. Those are things I’ve been wanting to do and I’ve been doing since I was eight years old. This is fun and games for me, but it’s the actual making it happen and actual organizing, reaching out to that director, sending your music to this person, reaching out to them if you want to go on tour with them… That stuff doesn’t just happen to you, you have to make it happen.

What has your art, your music, and your career taught you about yourself?

It’s put me more in touch with myself in a lot of ways. Something I always said before I started doing this, taking this seriously, was that I just want to be able to keep doing it. People were always sort of being like, “What do you want? What do you see for yourself?” And I was like, “I just want to keep doing it. I love making music so much. It’s like the center of my soul. I couldn’t not do it.”

If I can do it and make a living and have time to do it and do it with my friends and my community, then that means I can do it for the rest of my life, and that’s all I’ve ever wanted. And, I think that is something that has just sort of remained very true.

What is a small piece of advice you’d give maybe an emerging artist who’s kind of unsure about persevering because they can’t really get the momentum, or they’re wanting to change paths? What would you say to them to keep them going?

If they’re struggling with getting going, I would just say, again, listen to yourself and make things that bring you joy and make you excited and feel good to you. And don’t even think about sharing them. I worked in restaurants for years and I still will probably go back to working in a restaurant this summer. It’s super useful to not have to think about how many streams something will get, or if a label wants to sign you before you even make the record. Do it for your inner child or for the joy of it or however you want to put that, and make something that feels very true and that you can really get behind because it makes you excited, it makes you happy, not because you think it’s objectively good, and make something that’s original. Try not to emulate anyone else’s path or anyone else’s sound because you think it will give you a better shot because it probably will give you a worse shot. And then, if you truly think that it’s good, it’s because it makes you feel good.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Hannah Harlacher.

Some days temperatures reach 90 degrees Fahrenheit in her classroom which, like many on the East Coast, isn’t air-conditioned. When it’s hot, she said, kids don’t eat, or drink enough water. “They end up in the nurse’s office because they’re dizzy, they have a headache, their stomach hurts — all because of heat and dehydration,” she said. 

To cope with the heat, her students are now allowed to keep water on their desks, but that presents its own challenges. “They’re constantly filling up water bottles, so I have to give them breaks during the day for that. And then everyone has to go to the bathroom all the time,” she said. “I’m losing instruction time.” 

The effect extreme heat is having on schools and child care is starting to get the attention of policymakers and researchers. Last week, the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank, published a report on the issue. In April, so did the Federation of American Scientists, a nonprofit policy organization.

“The average school building in the U.S. was built nearly 50 years ago,” said policy analyst Allie Schneider, co-author of the Center for American Progress report. “Schools and child care centers were built in areas that maybe 30 or 15 years ago didn’t require access to air-conditioning, or at least for a good portion of the year. Now we’re seeing that becoming a more pressing concern.” Students are also on campus during the hottest parts of the day. “It’s something that is really important not just to their physical health, but their learning outcomes,” she said.  

Last April, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency released its own report detailing some of the effects heat has on kids. It notes that children have a harder time thermo-regulating and take longer to produce sweat, making them more vulnerable than adults to heat exhaustion and heat illness. 

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The kids are not alright: Countries fail to include children in their climate plans

Anya Kamenetz

Kids don’t necessarily listen to their body’s cues about heat, and might need an adult to remind them to drink water or not play outside. Kevin Toolan, a sixth-grade teacher in Long Island, New York, said having to constantly monitor heat safety distracts him from being able to teach. “The mindset is shifting to safety rather than instruction,” he said. “Those children don’t know how to handle it.”

To keep the classroom cool, he’ll turn the lights off, but kids fall asleep. “They are lethargic,” he said. 

To protect kids, schools have canceled classes because temperatures have gotten too high. Warmer temperatures also lead to more kids being absent from school, especially low-income students. And heat makes it harder to learn. One study from 2020 tracked the scores of students from schools without air-conditioning who took the PSAT exam at least twice. It found that increases in the average outdoor temperature corresponded with students making smaller gains on their retakes.

Both Toolan and Girol said that cooling options like keeping doors and windows open to promote cross ventilation are gone, thanks to the clampdowns in school security after 9/11 — and worsened by the threat of school shootings. Students and teachers are trapped in their overheating classrooms. “Teachers report leaving with migraines or signs of heat exhaustion,” said Toolan. “At 100 degrees, it is very uncomfortable. Your clothes are stuck to you.” 

The Center for American Progress report joins a call by other advocacy groups to create federal guidance that schools and child care centers could adopt “to ensure that children are not forced to learn, play and exercise in dangerously hot conditions,” Schneider said. Some states already have standards in place, but they vary. In California, child care facilities are required to keep temperatures between 68 and 85 degrees. In Maryland, the recommendation is between 74 and 82 degrees. A few states, like Florida, require schools to reduce outdoor activity on high-heat days. Schneider says federal guidance would help all school districts use the latest scientific evidence to set protective standards. 

In June, 23 health and education advocacy organizations signed a letter making a similar request of the Department of Education, asking for better guidance and coordination to protect kids. Some of their recommendations included publishing a plan that schools could adopt for dealing with high temperatures; encouraging states to direct more resources to providing air-conditioning in schools; and providing school districts with information on heat hazards.

“We know that school infrastructure is being overwhelmed by extreme heat, and that without a better system to advise schools on the types of practices they should be implementing, it’s going to be a little bit of the Wild West of actions being taken,” said Grace Wickerson, health equity policy manager at the Federation of American Scientists. 

A longer term solution is upgrading school infrastructure but the need for air conditioning is overwhelming. According to the Center for American Progress report, 36,000 schools nationwide don’t have adequate HVAC systems. By 2025, it estimates that installing or upgrading HVAC or other cooling systems will cost around $4.4 billion. 

Some state or local governments are trying to address the heat issue. In June, the New York State Legislature passed a bill now awaiting the governor’s signature that would require school staff to take measures like closing blinds or turning off lights when temperatures reach 82 degrees inside a classroom. At 88 degrees, classes would be canceled. A bill introduced last year and currently before California’s state assembly would require schools to create extreme heat action plans that could include mandating hydration and rest breaks or moving recess to cooler parts of the day. 

Some teachers have been galvanized to take action, too. As president of the Patchogue-Medford Congress of Teachers, Toolan was part of an effort to secure $80 million for infrastructure upgrades through a bond vote. Over half will go to HVAC systems for some 500 classrooms in his district.

And Girol is running for a state representative seat in Pennsylvania, where a main plank in her platform is to fully fund public schools in order to pay for things like air-conditioning. She was recently endorsed by the Climate Cabinet, a federal political action committee. “Part of the reason climate is so important to me is because of this issue,” she said. “I see how it’s negatively affecting my students.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Extreme heat is making schools hotter — and learning harder on Aug 3, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Jessica Kutz, The 19th.

I’ll have an idea or I’ll have–and this is for anything, this is for scripts or for prose or whatever I’m writing–it’s like having a crush on someone, but better because you actually get to make everything happen and come to fruition how you want. But I have this build up in my head for a few weeks or a few months even. Everywhere I’m going, I’ll just be thinking about lines that I really like or ideas I really like for scenes, and let all that keep building up, marinating in my head, until I feel so compelled to sit down and write it. Usually I’ll have some loose notes and ideas. A lot of times I’ll just have a phrase or scenes in my head that I like and then I’ll just start writing it. I don’t really have a ritualistic relationship with writing. It’s just something that’s always felt really enmeshed in my day-to-day life.

Are you the type of person to whip out your phone and write it in your notes app? Or if you have an actual journal, as in physically writing it down?

More so when I’m just thinking on a subway ride or while I’m walking, suddenly something will come into my head and I’ll just keep thinking about it. It usually doesn’t leave my head. Oftentimes, I do think if something leaves my head, it wasn’t that important or special to begin with. A lot of times the things that stick really stick, and then there’s something I just keep thinking, marinating on.

I really relate to that. Especially transportation, I think that’s when artists do a lot of their work. You’re ruminating and these ideas that live with you, they just need to be expelled through your artistic endeavor. I think I read something about how Actual People is not technically a personal film, but there elements in terms of scenes were certain people?

Yeah, of course. I mean, I think something that’s really common, especially for women who do autofiction, whatever you may call it. There’s this idea that everything that they write really happened because I guess people just assume that women lack imagination, I guess. I’m not really sure why.

So I think it is autofiction. I’m in it, just in the way that Rachel Cusk is in a way, in her own literature. Sheila Heti is in a way, in her own literature, Lena Dunham is in a way in her own work. So there is this kind of blurring of the boundary between reality and fiction. Also, my little sister’s really in the film, and plays my character’s little sister. But what I like to say is that if my film were a body, the skeleton would be a part of reality. But the flesh and the fat and the marrow and all of that other stuff that is seeping through it and building the skeleton out are fiction. In another interview I did, I think for Screen Slate, I say that a film is something that I constantly feel like gets resuscitated. It gets resuscitated through the script, it gets resuscitated through editing the film itself, and it’s something you’re constantly breathing new life into. I feel like that makes sense. But yeah, it’s not my real life.

I think you use the word “messiness” and I think that’s such a great word. What does that word mean to you and how did that play into making the films or even thinking about films and your own process?

I think in terms of messiness, a lot of people use “convolution.” Is that a word? It’s almost like a defense mechanism. Simple, straightforward things are really beautiful, but they also lay bare truths in a way that can make them feel more exposed. I think especially when people are young and afraid, they lean into the convoluted methods of getting what they want because I think a part of them is really questioning if they really want it. So you have a convoluted journey, you actually create more obstacles for yourself to get through so that you have more time and more messiness before you reach this goal that maybe you don’t want. I think that so much of young adulthood is wading through these naughty situations that you’ve brought upon yourself. Because that’s actually, in some ways, psychologically easier than just dealing with something straight on. With my character, she really wanted to be with Leo, this guy. It was an easier way to do it, right? For instance, she could just have a frank phone call with him, a discussion with him. I see messiness as a necessary sort of way of learning how to actually be in the world. And that doesn’t mean that I am not messy now or I don’t expect people to be messy now, but it is something I associate with fear, honestly.

Are things quite scheduled or strict?

Well, for one, there’s not really any improvisation in this script, in the film. So everything you’re seeing is baked into the script already. I think I’m a fan of contained chaos in art, but this idea of everyone going off the rails and doing whatever they want terrifies me. I just also think it’s actually such a luxury to be able to let things like that happen, because that just means time and time is money on a film set.

Totally.

Were the methods to get there a little messy at times? Yes, definitely. Which I think is more just in experience and lack of funds. I think I’m a big fan of letting actors take their time. Even though I love shows and movies where people are talking at each other at rapid speed, I’ve always liked when you get to see a thought process behind what a character/actors going through before they say something and having them contend with their own inability to transform thought into language or contend with their inability to be as articulate as they feel in their head. Those are ideas that I really like seeing play out. Maybe that’s another element of the messiness that you’re sensing, but that’s in the writing. I’m trying to translate that failure of thought to language through the writing process so the actor is able to act it out as opposed to actually have to create that whole experience for themselves to get there.

You’re really going through every moment and thinking through these characters. What do you connect most with film in terms of characters or the storytelling in general?

Well, I’m really not interested in any of the duality of good versus evil like–

Like Marvel.

Yeah, I don’t know. Even in a lot of contemporary independent cinema, there’s a lot of this idea of someone we’re clearly supposed to be rooting for, whether that be socioeconomic or cultural or racial sort of signifiers that a character’s putting out. And I find that very boring. People can be poor and shitty, people can be of color and suck. For me, it’s not that interesting if we keep perpetuating these trite notions of what a good person is, what a bad person is. Everyone kind of can suck and also be wonderful and brilliant. It just sort of depends on context and social settings and a lot of other more interesting psychological factors.

I’m drawn to movies where people feel very real to me, and I mean real in the way, that I feel like I walk away from the movie not necessarily knowing more about morality or having this central thesis, but I know more about people. I just understand how people are a little more, and that’s something I really like. I really love Hong Sang-soo’s movies, Marin Aude’s movies. I like movies a lot that are a lot about intimacy and strange interactions. I really love Miranda July’s work. And so for me, that’s really what I gravitate towards the most. And I really also really don’t like when movies feel like they think I’m stupid. Always happens, can happen a lot, especially in American movies.

I find a lot of times women are trying to prove themselves and have to justify their work in ways that are male-approved in a way. Sometimes it’s just nice to tell stories like you said, that just don’t have any of that stuff in mind. Also, it’s funny that you said Miranda July because one of my favorite movies is that movie called–

You, Me and Everyone We Know.

It’s an incredible movie. And it did remind me actually of parts of where you’re kind of like, yeah, you’re seeing the ugliness of the character, but it’s so real and it’s so beautiful in itself and it’s relieving. I know you’ve written books and poetry. Do you have a different approach or is it all coming out of the same place?

I think all my writing will always have to do with what’s going on in my life or just things I’m interested in. Right now I’m working on a novel and it’s honestly such a reprieve in some ways. I go back and forth sometimes and I’m like, “Oh my God, writing a book is so hard.” It’s just so fun tapping away at the interior, the living room. You don’t have to give a shit about what the living room really is, that’ll happen later.

I love writing prose because I think it works with the rhythm of your mind as opposed to the rhythm of a narrative that everyone is going to have to get on board with. It’s different when you’re writing a story, you really get to choose sort of what fixes you and what is happening and what you’re focusing on moment to moment. It can feel much more atmospheric, I think. That’s been really, really fun.

I think all my work as of now, I don’t want to speak about what I’m going to think about in 10 years. That feels a little bit naive. But a lot of my work right now revolves around desire and intimacy, and through the context of being a young woman, obviously, and then also the context of someone who’s really preoccupied with these things, which I think is something people don’t mention. You can be really preoccupied with certain things, but not be a person who in their day-to-day life, day-to-day social life is like… Historians or whatever aren’t necessarily preoccupied with the minutiae of what happened during Stalingrad or day-to-day, who they are.

I think that’s kind of just archiving this natural progression in life that you’re living.

Yeah, I like that word. I think I’m archiving obsessions, archiving desires and archiving my feelings that are sort of happening in real time through the work. And I’m in a privileged position where the work I’m doing is obviously very related to all of that, so I kind of just transferred it over there.

When you find you’re done a certain piece, you finished a script or you finished a piece of work, what are the feelings once you’re done?

I don’t feel much. I think it’s hard just because all of it is actually such a continuation. I shot Actual People a few years ago now, but something I still talk about and think about and I’m associated with. So that’s the beautiful but harrowing part about it, it’s never really over.

Yeah, for sure.

Yeah, that bad Jeff Buckley lyric.

I love the little plug.

But it really is never over. You’re never done with this piece of art. It’s almost like this person that becomes a part of your life and you have a history with it also is the splitting off of a part of yourself that you’re always going to have history with, which is I think beautiful in some ways, but also just means I don’t feel that precious about any of it because I know it keeps existing if it’s meant to.

Do you ever revisit a certain situation? Write about it from a different perspective or a different angle that you’ve kind of, I don’t know, have received some sort of prophecy from, I guess?

I think there are certain dynamics that I find myself in constantly that I like to write about and explore and exploit to a certain extent. I think there’s a very certain way certain men interact with me, which is just always sort of titillating and funny to me to write about. There’s certain archetypes that consistently reveal themselves in my life through different people, and those are the archetypes I keep revisiting. I think there are archetypes, even within my work, I think, sort of a cocky attractive white guy, which is a hard person to not have in your life ever. I also think there are certain other dynamics that I feel come into play. Those are situations that I am constantly turning over, but I don’t think it’s necessarily recycling. Life is not a bunch of random events. There are patterns and you start seeing them and you start reveling in them sometimes and it’s fun to revel in them in sort of an artistic way that feels creative and allows you to see things sort of more macroscopically.

Have you ever experienced writer’s block, and how do you maneuver around that?

I don’t want to sound like, I don’t know, a spoiled brat or whatever, but I really haven’t ever.

I’m someone who’s juggling multiple things at once. So usually if I’m feeling a bit, I just don’t really want to keep working on something, I can switch over to something else and work on it. But I mean, I think the closest I felt is just sort of being frustrated at my ability to translate emotional things, like specificity into language. When I get there, I can feel very frustrated at myself. But I think in those situations it’s helpful to read poetry, to just read something that feels different.

It’s just when things aren’t working, you’re pushing yourself and pushing yourself. I think the thing that imagination really thrives on is distraction. That’s sort of what imagination started off being, right? Everyone is like, it’s a distraction from the real world, a distraction from childhood, I don’t want to call it traumas, but childhood nuisances and anxieties. When I’m feeling just down in the dumps for whatever reason, it’s just helpful to give myself a distraction. I think having gotten better about that in the last few years, it has actually made me a better writer. I think people also have this idea, that feels like a very a masculine idea for me as well. This idea of, oh, you have to be toiling away at your… God forbid you have a typewriter or something, you’re toiling away at your keyboard for hours and hours and are just, I don’t know, not eating, smoking cigarettes or whatever and not drinking water. It’s like, I don’t want to do that. So I think a lot of actually writing is sort of de-romanticizing what people think being a writer is. Honestly, the only thing you can do as a writer to really prove you’re a writer is write.

Being a director, have you learned a lot of things since your first film, into your second film. and now in making your next film?

One crucial thing is just that you’re always sort of expanding your vocabulary of how to talk to people, talk to actors, talk to your DP, talk to producers, talk to everyone, right? I am always just trying to be better at articulating what I want from people, because that’s ultimately what being a director is. It’s just an articulation of ideas that can be followed by talented people who are more talented than you, to a certain extent, individuals who are doing this thing. I think that’s one thing I’m always learning.

I think something that everyone still gets tripped up on is not being attached to things that look cool, but just being attached to the story. I think that’s also brain melt from being an online generation.

I love camaraderie. I love being friends with everyone I’m working with, and that’s something that I’ve been fortunate to be able to carry through. And I think even as I make bigger projects, it’s something I really just want to fight for is for there to be camaraderie on sets. I’m really not interested in working with “divas” or difficult people. Or thinking that being difficult can be outweighed by talent because, I think, in general, making a movie is such a joyful, fun process, and if people are not on board with that ethos, I would find it very difficult to work with them.

As I get older, parts of my personality start to settle down a bit. In Actual People, I mean, my brain was just fried in general, and I was really anxious and sort of jumping out of my skin. Whenever anything fell to pieces for a second I was just like, “Oh my God. Of course, here we go.” Sometimes I still do that in my real life, unfortunately. But I think on set, I’ve just been able to really be like, “There’s no mess that cannot really be cleaned up, hopefully.” I’ve not encountered something so catastrophic that’s not. Really having faith in the universe and other people that everything will ultimately be okay has been helpful.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Maryam Said.

I grew up as a queer kid in Nebraska, so from a very young age, people told me my queerness was wrong and that it was unnatural. That led to a lot of disconnection between myself as a queer person and the natural world. The narrative is often for queer people to run to big cities for acceptance, when in reality, what it often looks like for queer people is to run into the forest.

I took a little while to get there, but I eventually ran into the forest, had a quarter-life crisis, and started hiking and backpacking a lot. Through it all, I started wearing heels in the outdoors and doing this thing called Pattie Gonia. If you would’ve told me then that, now, it would be what it is, I would’ve told you you’re batshit crazy.

Pattie, for me, is a lot about belief in self. Drag is a very healing part of my queerness. I spent a lot of my life trying to change who I was for other people, whether when I was in the closet or when I was out, trying to fit in with a lot of different gay male worlds, and none of it fit me. I feel very lucky to have drag as an art form that lets me express myself and find my people along the way.

Doing drag in this formal way of wearing makeup and a wig and expressing my femininity has led me to see that I’ve been in drag my whole life. I was in drag as a straight-passing closeted queer kid. I was in drag as a young professional trying to make it in the corporate world. Drag has been a continuation of coming out of the closet time and again. A lot of the time, we think about queerness as this before and after, when for me, it’s getting to know pieces of myself, or accepting that nature is nothing but chaos, and I am nothing but change all the time.

It sounds like, when you were first starting drag, it helped you connect more with your true queer self. To what extent is that still happening today, all these years later?

Every day, every time I’m in drag, I’m reminded that my femininity is okay. I’m reminded that there are no binaries in this world. I’m also reminded about the queer concept in nature of camouflage, and how things camouflage and change to fit into, stand out in, or survive in an environment.

Camouflage is a really good analogy.

Yeah. Or should I say glamouflage?

Even better.

It’s totally that, right? Drag is a performance art, so we’re all our own forms of camouflage. At one time, my drag as a straight-passing person was more for my survival than it is now. Now, my drag is more for performance, but it’s also for a deep connection to myself, and to remind myself that shape-shifting is all this world does.

In 2018, your drag videos started going viral and getting you the large platform you have now. How did you lean into those viral moments and decide to build your platform? How did you take it from “I do drag” to “I am starting to be very well-known”?

I had a deep sense of understanding at the beginning that drag, and doing and living life as Pattie, is for me, but it also had this crazy connection to people that I could have never imagined. That was almost from the beginning. And so, it’s the constant artist conundrum of, do I do art for myself? Do I do art for others? What’s for me? What isn’t for me?

Early on, I had great mentors in my life, both people in the diverse outdoor community and other artists, who helped me realize that community-building, movement-building, and leaving a legacy is worth it. I’ve tried every step of the way to use virality to take these opportunities and not fuck it up. I do fuck it up. Life is constantly living and learning.

I want to make space for people, and the through-line of my art is space-making. No matter if it’s drag or music, I want to make spaces where people feel celebrated [and] like they can be themselves. A lot of us don’t have spaces to be who we are, and I want that, and a connection to nature, for everybody. I want my art to lead people outside into a connection to themselves.

When you said you fuck up—we all do, but it’s easy to not talk about. I’m curious what you’ve learned from those fuck-ups.

I’ve done drag at the intersection of social and environmental justice, and you learn so much from so many people about what it looks like to do something rather than nothing. Oftentimes, we’re so afraid to do something and mess up that we do nothing at all. I’ve really learned that—these are big heady words, but inaction is an active choice. I’d rather do something, mess up, own it, and move on than not do anything at all. There’s a lot of people in this world that want to stand by and judge people on the sidelines, but I would rather be doing something and learning along the way.

It’s also, like, this is how the world works, right? Nature tries to grow a branch over here, and then it’s like, “Nope, the sunlight’s over here.” Nature isn’t mad at itself for trying to grow this branch. It’s like, “No, I’m going to pursue growth over here.” There’s a lot we can learn from a tree.

Has the fact that, maybe, for some people, you’re seen as more outdoors and climate change first, then drag queen second, posed any challenges to how you do drag and find success?

Maybe people think of it as a disadvantage, but I’m like, “Babe, drag, at its roots, has always been rooted in activism, deeply.” It’s why I was created. It’s silly to me that people might think that. They have an opportunity to learn about drag’s roots, and I get to honor queer history by fighting for not just people, but this planet, through my drag.

That can get cheesy fast. I don’t think of myself as this Captain America drag queen. I’m just like, this is what I care about. This is what I love. This is my niche that I get nerdy-excited about, and I feel really lucky that there’s other nerds, granola gays, chaotic bisexuals, and straight-through hikers that love it, too.

I’ve learned that everyone does activism in different ways. A lot of people do activism just by living life as an out-and-proud, visible queer person. I want people to see that that’s enough too. I will always want more from late-stage-capitalism America to remember why we’re doing what we’re doing and what there is to fight for.

I love that there’s so many drag queens doing activism in different ways. I feel really thankful for the trans sisters of mine on Drag Race all the way to my friend Kyne who is advocating for math education through drag. There truly is something for everyone with drag, and I want every drag queen and queer person to know that there’s shit to fight for.

Has your focus on the outdoors, the environment, and climate change helped or hindered you exploring other themes in your drag? Because in your music, you’re not necessarily putting the environment first. “Made It Through the Night” is a queer unity ballad. It’s not necessarily about the environment.

Yeah, totally. Or is it? Can we see ourselves and our humanity as part of, rather than apart from, nature? Truly, there’s a lot to be said about the health of our human ecosystems and seeing ourselves as important and equal parts of a meadow, and maybe that song can be about that for people.

A sense of belonging is really important to nature. I want my music to reflect all my human experiences, and a lot of those are climate-based and outdoor-based, but also, a lot of them are rooted in queerness. A lot of them are just rooted in fun. I want there to be an invitation for anyone to pick up and fall in love with my music. That’s why the song right before it, “Won’t Give Up,” the one I did with Yo-Yo and Quinn [Christopherson], is all about climate.

I also just do what feels right to me in the moment as an artist. Sometimes, that’s about climate, and sometimes, I’m fired up to create a project around that. And sometimes, it’s just about writing a song the gays can dance to in the club.

To what extent is your LGBTQ+ hiking group part of your creativity? Is there any way in which it ties into your drag, or is it something else entirely?

It’s completely connected. I’m constantly learning and having my mind open to so many incredible human perspectives, and no doubt, that informs my art. It all feels like a big ecosystem. Sometimes, that ecosystem is very outdoors-based, but it’s very human and natural in the fact that we’re constantly learning, and our little molecules are bouncing off of one another.

A lot of people are like, “It’s crazy that you do drag outdoors.” I’m like, “Why would I not want to perform with Mother Nature as my backdrop?” Or they’re like, “It’s so crazy you take people outside.” I’m like, “People do outdoor concerts all the time. We don’t even question it.” I’m just trying to do my thing my way.

Earlier, when you said you just put your heels on and went hiking, how literal was that? It sounds like it was very literal.

Incredibly literal. I packed these 10-pound high heels into this backpack and went backpacking up on the Continental Divide Trail at 13,000 feet. It was no joke. My drag back then looked very different than the drag I do now. Back then, it was kind of just heels, and now, I have some years under my belt and know how to paint a face.

It was an interesting look at how hard it is to give oneself time to hone a craft or learn new skills when we have the attention of the world beating at our door. I’m really thankful I gave myself time and space to figure it out in my own time. This is the most current iteration of my drag, and I’m really excited, through music, to break down that wall of drag in front of people’s faces.

The way I will perform shows is, I’ll start in full drag on stage, and then number by number, I’ll take off different elements of the drag. There’ll be a number without a wig on. Then, there’ll be a number where I’m wiping my makeup off mid-look. By the end, I’ll end as my different form of drag. There’s some songs that I’m writing where I very much feel Pattie with them, and there are many songs I write that feel very Wyn [name/identity outside drag]. It’s a play on pop culture, how much our pop icons are completely drag queens, and how much life’s a show, babe.

I want to lean into all the different forms of drag in my life and identity and not feel confined to just performing [as Pattie]. I have a song that’s about to come out called “That’s God” about my deconstruction of a broken Christianity and reconstruction of faith around nature. That song, I completely perform out of drag. So who knows?

At what point do you realize a song is Pattie or Wyn? Is it an intentional choice, or does it just come to you?

I’m stumbling through life in six-inch heels. It reveals itself along the way. I have no problem performing songs in drag or out of drag. What feels important to me is to never feel like I’m hiding through drag. If anything, I’m revealing through drag. I think the time I can’t hide is when I’m in drag, but I don’t want to be stuck…as a performer [who] looks this one way. I want to chop and screw all of it. I want to do what feels right in the moment. So yeah, there’s no definitive moment. The trail reveals itself. You’ve just got to walk down it.

When did you start writing songs?

I went to school for vocal performance. I studied in college and grew up singing, and music was my first passion. I played saxophone growing up. I feel like I’ve been writing songs [and] been around songwriting culture my whole life. I’ve been really fascinated by how songs form. I formally started writing songs last year when I started the music project under Pattie, but I feel like I’ve been writing melodies or thinking about words forever, in a way.

What is the value of collaboration to you? Where does it play into your work?

Collaboration is everything. There is no worthwhile piece of art I make that I do alone. I don’t think that art is made in a vacuum. I prefer collaboration.

Nature is the best collaborator in this world. I view art and projects as meadows that you get to nurture together with the people involved. I want to create healthy ecosystems, healthy meadows, and then, good art comes from it.

How do you choose the folks in the meadow? Or are they already there?

I’ve been lucky throughout this music journey to know good people who know good people, and trust is a really hard thing to do in this world. We very rarely move at the speed of trust in this world. Capitalism wants us to move so quickly and to just produce, produce, produce and not build relationships first. Call me old-fashioned, but I want to know you before I’m going to make art with you. And I think that’s paid off.

That was everything I wanted to ask you today, but if you have anything more to say about creativity, the floor is yours.

We need more queer art in this world, and queer people have always been at the forefront of art. I feel really excited for the challenge of doing music with drag in a way that hasn’t been done before, in a way that feels true to me.

I look at the intersection of music and drag nowadays, and I love it. I’m glad the girls are out there doing their thing and making music for the club or for people to strut their stuff to. I have no doubt I’m going to write some music like that. But for me, drag is this campy, clowny expression, and it’s so vulnerable and real and human, and I want to make music that covers that gamut and doesn’t feel confined to a box.

When you do music, you get slotted into, “They do this kind of music.” Our brains are designed to categorize things. A lot of the issues with our world are because of binaries and categorization. I want the freedom to make the music that feels right in the moment, to always make it queer and true to Pattie and Wyn.

There’s so many people that have told me, from the music industry perspective, that no one will ever take drag seriously in the music world. And I’m like, “Alright, game on.” I’m doing this for me, and I’m excited that other people love it. I’m excited to have a whole new creative world where I get to learn. That’s what was so exciting to me about drag. I want that to be my life for music as well.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Max Freedman.

I’m excited and I’m a little bit nervous. I feel like I am trying to give up anticipating how I’m going to feel. Releasing the single “Same Risk” felt like a relief to put out. And then “Don’t Do Me Good,” a single with Kacey Musgraves, was fun to put out because it was with a friend, and then the last single, “Everything Almost” was much more emotional for me than I had anticipated feeling. It’s a pretty personal song and it knocked me sideways and put me in a headspace that I wasn’t ready for. So I’m just walking forward because I’m ready to do it.

How has your songwriting process changed over time? Or is there a particular ritual or technique that has remained constant?

With touring so much and traveling again in my life, I think I’ve had to be more flexible with chasing ideas and trying to keep that part of my mind ready to catch whatever is coming to me. That can be difficult. I can fall out of that routine or that way of thinking and I’m a super routine-based person, so the more routine I can add to my life, the better I am. But the most helpful and the most elasticizing technique I’ve found is when I wake up in the morning and just do a free form, a word vomit for 10 minutes. Or there’s this thing called object writing, where you pick an object and you stream of consciousness right to that object for using all of your senses around that object. That’s been the most helpful thing to me. As for the writing, the process is about the same, but the ways that I get to it have had to be a little bit more fluid.

You write songs for yourself and other artists. How do you know when a song is finished or when it is good?

It’s so weird. I feel like that’s so tough. You just know, you do. I feel like if I could explain that, I’d probably be better at writing songs or something. If I knew the trick to it, then I would just do it every time and just always land the dismount. I don’t think that every song I write is the song, but it’s part of the practice of staying in your expression and your expressiveness and just trying to find the nerve and hit the nerve well every time. You know when you hit the nerve, it’s like hitting a funny bone or on your knee when they’re doing the reflex thing at the doctor. It’s like you just know when you hit it and you know when you’re not hitting it.

Is your songwriting process different when you write for other people than for yourself?

When I’m writing for other people, I just try to make sure that whatever’s on their heart, whatever practices that they’re in or life situations that they’re finding themselves in, I try to make so much space when I’m writing for other artists. And just try to be a guide rail more than anything. And I can be as big or as small as required of me in any of those rooms. But I love it when an artist comes in with a thought, something that they’ve been excited, a way of thinking, something that they’re trying to describe, or a complex emotion. And I like trying to concentrate on that the most and make that the purest and find the arrow and the bullseye with them. That’s the most exciting thing to me. When you can communicate with one other person and the other person understands when you’re saying it just right and then you hit that thing together, that’s the best. It’s such a fun feeling.

Is there a particular process that you like when you are collaborating with another artist on writing a song?

Typically it comes out in just getting to know each other. And getting to know where they are in their lives at that time and where I am in my life at that time. And if we’ve both been through something similar that we’re trying to process through, I think that that’s usually where the song always comes from.

Your album History of a Feeling it’s about a specific time of your life and what you were living back then. And this is also the same case with the new album Weird Faith. Are the albums connected in any way?

I think History of a Feeling feels like turning the page completely, if not even just the last chapter of my life. I feel like Weird Faith is just the next chapter in the book. History of a Feeling was so much about grief and really being present in that grief and sometimes being present in that anger and being present in that heartbreak. And then Weird Faith is still processing the last page, the last chapter to some extent. And how History of a Feeling has almost shaped me to prepare myself for this next chapter of my life where I’m meeting a person and falling in love again, or I’m trying to trust myself.

Because when you love something and the thing that you love inevitably breaks your heart, because it always does, and that doesn’t mean that it’s over. But I feel like you can suffer lots of little heartbreaks in a relationship. But when something hurts, you’re always going to try to learn how to not do that again, and if you can, avoid it at any cost. I think that Weird Faith is a lot of trying to figure out how to not step on the potential landmines, and looking at that and being like, “How do I do this?”

I wonder if in the process of releasing something so personal, there was a part of you that was hesitant or that said something like don’t go there?

My only hesitation was releasing it. I knew I needed to write about it. I knew that I needed to do that for myself, and that was going to happen no matter what. I think my hesitation was to include certain songs that were so personal. And even still playing them live depending on what’s going on at the moment, can still hit me in that way that it’s either so transporting and it’s time travel and I’m back in that head space again. Or it’s weirdly speaking to something that’s going on in my life at that current moment, and I’m going, “How am I still talking about the same thing?” That’s been my only hesitation, just knowing that once you put a record out, it becomes part of your story no matter what, and you’re going to continue to have to face those parts of yourself.

Also when you release something what happens with the material after that is out of your control.

Out of my hands. Completely out of my hands for better or for worse. And I think that’s been such a beautiful experience. I didn’t know that by going through something so difficult and so painful I was making so much space for receiving so much love and joy and thanks and connection with people that I just don’t even know. Strangers that resonate with the lyrics or they just feel like it’s talking them through a similar place in their lives. That was special. That was the gift on the other side of that, as hard as that was.

You have collaborated with some of your friends on your songs. For example, Kacey Musgraves. How do you feel about bringing someone to sing something with you that is personal to you?

That to me just felt like such an obvious special moment. I feel like the whole record is so inward-facing and so reflective and internal, and that’s not always how I’m processing things. I am a pretty verbal processor. I rely on my friends to talk through some bigger things with me. And so for me, having Kacey sing on “Don’t Do Me Good,” it was so wonderful to not be so alone in that feeling of like, “God, man, I keep going back.” Having somebody on the other end of the telephone line while I’m trying to work through this feeling felt important to illustrate in the song.

How are you preparing to also sing all of this live for the first time on your tour?

One step at a time. It’s been really fun to go back over these songs and start singing them. The melodies are really fun. I am proud of the record and I’m excited to sing it live because so much grows even beyond what we made in a record sense when you’re playing it in a live sense. I’m excited to see what it becomes out on tour. Hopefully, it becomes even melodically bigger or structurally bigger than the record. Hopefully, it takes us somewhere totally different.

You’ve mentioned that Weird Faith tells a story of you falling in love and having all this hesitation. Was this an intention that you had from the beginning? Did it just start unfolding little by little?

It’s so funny. History of a Feeling is all looking backward. It’s very much looking at a thing that happened. And Weird Faith is very much in the present moment and talking about what is actively happening for me in a visceral [way]. It’s walking into the future and I’m terrified. I’m walking into the future and I’m terrified and I’m just talking about it the whole time. I was lucky enough for it to become what it is. I do think that it captures just a lot of really vulnerable moments within a relationship and learning how to trust myself and discovering and unearthing these desires that had been living in me for so long that I didn’t even know were there, but [realizing] that this person [in me] is inspiring.

You just mentioned that History of a Feeling was more about looking into the past and now Weird Faith is the present and what you’re looking for. Creatively speaking, what’s the difference between looking back and reflecting on that and writing about what is happening at the moment?

History of a Feeling is just pretty much talking about what happened. I’ve experienced it so I know what it was. And I’m just trying to open the box and go through what’s in the box and go through what’s there. As opposed to Weird Faith where it’s like, “Well, the box is empty again, and I don’t even know… I could try putting this in here. And what does it look like when the room is arranged like this? And how do I feel when the room is arranged like this? And how do I feel when this color is on the wall?” And it’s so much more maybe emotionally experimental than the last record is. Because grief is grief and healing is healing. And this is just like, I don’t even know what the future is going to bring.

So it’s almost like bracing for impact and playing out all of the ways that it could go right and playing out all of the ways that it could go wrong and playing out all the things in between. And additionally, I’m just trying to talk myself out of that space and just be present. This is why there are mantras almost in the record where it’s like I have to have weird faith about it, and nothing is a waste of time. Trying to tell myself that it all is happening and I’ve learned so much and I know so much more about myself than I ever have, and I feel closer to myself than I ever have, and that’s the reason for all of it.

You live in Nashville, a city where so many of your artist friends live. When you are working on something new, do you share it with your community right away or do you prefer to work on your music by yourself and share the work until it’s done?

There are certain songs that I’ve written that I’d get really excited about and I’ll share with my friends. But I’m pretty private about that stuff, not because I feel secretive about it, but because I don’t know, it’s not all about me. Everybody’s got their things going on. But every once in a while, if I’m excited about a song, I’ll share it with a close friend that either I know loves the art of melody or song structure, or maybe appreciates production and will think that we’ll just have thoughts on what we did. And then sometimes I don’t want to hear anybody’s thoughts, and so I won’t.

Sometimes feedback can be a bit overwhelming or distracting.

Sometimes it gets out of hand. I try to keep things to myself because I know at the end of the day, I know I’m proud of it, that’s the most important thing to me. I don’t want to get caught up in what my friends think, versus me knowing that I really did some good work and hopefully, it doesn’t suck.

In the past few months, you were the opening act for Harry Styles and were part of his band. You’ve also had your daytime and nighttime debuts, and you’re about to release a new album and go on a national tour. Is this how you envisioned success?

I just feel like every time I make it up one mountain there’s another one to climb right behind it. It’s that elusive peak that you’re just ever climbing and reaching. I don’t consider myself successful. I consider myself absolutely fortunate as hell. And I mean, I can’t believe that people want to talk to me about this stuff. This is so crazy. I think the success thing changes all the time, every day. Honestly, if I can get a good night’s sleep, that’s successful for me at this point.

So singing at Wembley Stadium with Harry Styles does not count? [Laughs]

That was a crazy [laughs]. I don’t think I’ll ever feel whatever that feeling is ever again. I had never played a stadium by myself before Harry asked me to open for him, and it was so cool. I didn’t realize that he had the kinds of fans that would just be so encouraging and so loving. From the second that I walked on stage, I felt like I had already won.

For your new album, you mentioned that you wanted to explore also how anxiety-inducing falling in love can be. Did you learn anything about that process?

When I was writing Weird Faith, there was a lot of shallow breathing. With the love that I received for History of a Feeling, even that was anxiety-inducing. I’ve had so many things that weren’t good in my life. So it’s a crazy moment when you have a good thing happen to you because you’re terrified immediately that it’s going to stop. I’ve found myself so many times, whether it was something was going well in the music world or something was going well in my personal life, where my friends were like, “Oh my God, this is so amazing. Are you having the best time? Aren’t you enjoying yourself? Enjoy it.” And I’m like, “How the fuck am I supposed to enjoy this when I’m terrified?” It’s like I have this thing and I’m already grieving losing it. This is so fucked up.

I can relate to anticipating the loss or ending of things.

And how to not numb out and just go, “Well, whatever’s going to happen is going to happen.” And have some aloofness. I don’t want to be an aloof person. I don’t want to be a cold numbed-out version of myself just so I can protect myself from things feeling good and bad. That’s not the idea either. The record is struggling with that all-or-nothing feeling. It’s how to hold all of it at the same time.

What do you think life is asking of you in this phase of your life?

Right now, I’d say my life is asking me to prepare, and I am almost prepared. And I also think that at some point you just have to accept that you’ve gotten as far as you can get and that you have everything that you need, and that now it’s just time to show up.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Miriam Garcia.

Photo by mauro mora

Do living beings learn and pass on to future generations some behaviors or predispositions more easily than others––and if so, how? So-called prepared learning is a question psychologists and other scientists have studied for decades, developing a series of new hypotheses about learning and experiments to test them.

The concept of prepared learning is also known as “biological preparedness” or “associative conditioning.” The basic idea is that living beings evolved a predisposition to more easily learn the kinds of behavior that help them survive and reproduce in their environment. Thus, humans and other animals learn responses to some environmental stimuli, such as dangers, more readily.

These survival-favorable behaviors are thought to have been passed on to future generations by natural selection. This is the evolutionary process whereby organisms that adapt to environmental changes are the ones more likely to survive and reproduce successfully.

Just as humans gradually developed bipedalism to aid their survival, they have innate responses to circumstances and tendencies that guide their behavior. Exactly how the learned behavior becomes incorporated into the genome and thus heritable is a mostly unanswered question.

Because most of the research on prepared learning concerns fear and phobias, there is also the question of how other kinds of behavior evolved that are not related to fear reactions.

From Unicellular to Multicellular Organisms

What is the mechanism of prepared learning, and can it be passed on?

Recent research has found that unicellular organisms such as amoebae can respond to associative conditioning and modify their behavior in response to specific changes in their environment. In a set of laboratory experiments reported in Frontiers in Microbiology in 2021, three species of freshwater amoeba cells were conditioned to move in a new migratory pattern in response to environmental changes.

The researchers studied the movements of more than 2,000 different cells of Amoeba proteus, Metamoeba leningradensis, and Amoeba borokensis “under three external conditions.” All three species were able to develop a new migratory pattern that lasted about 40 minutes and was remembered for long periods of their cellular cycle, although it was ultimately forgotten.

The researchers suggest that their findings could represent an evolutionary mechanism for these organisms to increase their fitness to their environment, and may “have essential implications in the origin of primitive forms of cognition and the role of convergent evolution in biological cognition.”

Similar experiments with fruit flies demonstrated that prepared learning—in this case, responses associated with where eggs were deposited and reliably hatched—could be tracked over successive generations. In a 2014 paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), researchers describe how they modeled the evolution of prepared learning in different lines of Drosophila.

Female fruit flies were exposed to the color-quinine or the odor-quinine before being given a choice between two places to lay their eggs.

The researchers found that the fruit flies “learned” over 40 generations to lay their eggs in the places that were associated with pre-exposure to the odor-quinine or the color-quinine and egg survival. The flies laid their eggs in the place that proved most reliable for success.

Reliability is the key factor in prepared learning, the researchers suggest.

Pavlov’s Influence on Preparedness Research

These unicellular amoeba behavior studies and many multicellular experiments follow the experimental conditioning concepts established by the Russian-Soviet researcher Ivan Pavlov (1849-1936).

Pavlov’s theory of learning, however, is broader than conditioned associations. He proposed that trial and error was also part of learning, and that behavior learned through this process was longer lasting. Pavlov thought that organisms follow innate instincts, such as hunger, stimulating neurons in the brain to form associations. These associations, between an action and its consequence, take shape over time to become knowledge.

Subsequent prepared learning research tried to test and quantify how this process of association works. Most experiments focused on fear and phobias, such as fear of snakes, wild animals, or heights, which are considered important in helping both animals and human beings survive in the world. They addressed two main questions: Are animals and humans prepared to learn some behaviors, particularly phobias, more readily than others, and what does this process have to do with evolution?

Phobias and Preparedness

Theoretical and experimental work on phobias blossomed after a 1971 article by psychologist Martin E.P. Seligman titled “Phobias and Preparedness,” which suggested that phobias connected to evolutionary survival, such as fear of dangerous predators, are more quickly learned in the laboratory, are very “resistant to extinction,” and are noncognitive.

The laboratory tests of Seligman’s theory over the years studied how quickly human subjects could be conditioned to fear spiders, snakes, and faces of angry men, and how these fears could be undone. For the most part, however, the results were not conclusive.

Harvard psychologist Richard J. McNally has a useful review of the prepared learning research in the decades after Seligman in a 2016 article in the journal Behavior Therapy. McNally reviews critical elaborations of prepared learning put forward by other researchers, such as selective sensitization, expectancy theory, and nonassociative theory, along with the experiments to test them.

The evolutionary aspect of how this learning might be inherited is also investigated. McNally describes the “evolved fear module” theory, which holds that early on, primates developed a neurocircuitry in the brain’s amygdala shaped by evolved fear of predators that was outside of “higher cognitive processes.” In other words, fear is an automatic response.

Experiments to test all these theories are ongoing.

Research Beyond Fears and Phobias

Providing an interesting perspective on human behavior is Stanford neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky, who is the author of the book Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will (2023). Sapolsky writes that it is a result of “the cumulative biological and environmental luck, over which we had no control, that has brought us to any moment,” according to an article on his work in Stanford magazine.

Sapolsky says that we have no choice in how to react and respond to a situation. According to him, there is no such thing as free will, Sapolsky argues that “Put all the scientific results together from all the relevant scientific disciplines, and there’s no room for free will.”

The lack of free will, he says, means that people are not accountable for their good or bad behaviors, a perspective that has attracted some skepticism.

“If we ‘freely’ choose to do something but there was never a possibility of choosing something else, we’re not free. And if we’re not free, Sapolsky says, there is no more reason to castigate a killer than to punish a broken machine. Killers should receive medical and psychological treatment to address the larger issues that caused the problem,” Stanford magazine states about Sapolsky’s concept of the absence of free will in humans.

Human Responses That Challenge Prepared Learning

Does this mean that humans have no control over their emotions and how and when we express love, anger, hate, etc? A 2017 research article in PNAS suggests otherwise: “[E]motions aren’t a response to what our brain takes in from our observations, but, rather, are intrinsic to our makeup.”

Another interesting example that challenges the principles of prepared learning is of deaf children who have not learned sign language but have found a way to communicate using gestures. “The properties of language that we find in these gestures are just those properties that do not need to be handed down from generation to generation, but can be reinvented by a child de novo,” a 2010 study proposes.

What Does It All Mean?

How humans learn––and unlearn–– is an important subject today in psychology and psychiatry, and all areas of education. Panic disorder, anxiety disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and other crippling emotional conditions all require an understanding of how they developed in order to treat them. Making education effective and interesting for students is important for a functioning society. How are positive associations with school best fostered?

Outside of the clinical situation, the concept of prepared learning affects people in many ways. Advertising can use aspects of preparedness and association to promote a particular product or a person; it can target information to influence specific groups of people. Cults and political groups can use this kind of learning as a way of controlling a group of individuals. Brainwashing can also use conditioning methods for unsavory purposes.

In the laboratory, after decades of research, the jury is still out on why some behaviors are more easily learned than others, whether human beings have an inherited predisposition for certain phobias, and how much of human behavior is attributable to nature and how much to nurture.

Experiments are now more sophisticated than Pavlov’s conditioning of dogs, but there is still wiggle room. We can see the experimental results, but much is still assumed and not yet proven. Human beings continue to surprise, despite prepared learning.

This article was produced by Human Bridges.

The post Prepared Learning: What Are Humans Hard-Wired for at Birth? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Marjorie Hecht.

We were coming out of the pandemic, and at the time, I was one of the co-directors of [Girls Rock Philly], a nonprofit music mentoring organization for girls, trans youth, women, and transgender-expansive adults. We’d cleared the lockdown iteration of the pandemic. I poured a lot of energy into that work, into the community that made the work magic, but there was this sort of noticing in me of a moment of departure.

Over the course of the same timeframe, from the beginning of lockdown, I was carting around a rolling speaker and a microphone and playing songs to people coming out of their windows so we could do karaoke where people were singing from their homes. Music in the street, in a way that we could still be connected to each other, that same rolling speaker became this tool in this moment of uprising where it was like, we need every megaphone, every way to amplify ourselves, not just to chant and demand justice, but to sing together and remember ourselves in a really powerful musical moment. I think a lot of artists found ourselves in a position of actually really remembering how essential our work is. What it is to stitch people together, have the tools to honor our grief, transition, imagine new ways forward.

After a couple of years trying to hold both those spaces—the nonprofit element, and getting engaged in a more concentrated way in direct organizing in Philly—I just felt like there were lots of ways I could commit and contribute support to the world. It felt like time to pursue all the tools I have that I’d been putting on the back burner as someone who always wanted to be a performer but sort of [found my way] through all these other paths. I’m delighted in this window to be saying yes to art and yes to music. And it seems to be saying yes to me, which is the magic feedback that makes me want to keep moving.

I’m curious to hear more about it saying yes to you, because I talk to musicians pretty often, and it seems difficult to make a living off a career in performing.

Local artists and local creatives are local businesses. Local musicians are local businesses. It’s strange to me that we’re always having to justify or fight for the resources we need when I don’t know how we’d make it through impossible moments without art and music. It’s something we’ve commodified or relegated to buying when it should be integral to everything we do.

I was so nervous about trying to work full-time as an artist because it had been years since I’d done that, not since after college, but it’s been pretty amazing. Within a year of committing to making music full-time, I was accepted into this fellowship program, the Black Opry Residency, which was such a delight—specifically the amplification and reinforcement that Black Americana, country, roots, and folk music must be amplified, centered, and resourced. That I got to be part of that pilot here in Philly was such a gift and a delight.

Some of these projects combine more off-the-wall, wildly imaginative thinking alongside social justice issues, like work with the Bearded Ladies Cabaret and its Cabaret on Ice, what we did at the beginning of the year, talking about climate change, but making music while doing that skating in February when it was 80 degrees outside. That work has been really resourced and has been resourcing me, which is wonderful.

Most recently, being nominated and awarded a Pew Fellowship…in a moment where 12 people are chosen from a city with such rich and vibrant arts culture as Philly, to be one of those people is pretty extraordinary. I have a lot of complicated feelings around institutions and how philanthropy works, but I also feel really grateful for the opportunity to have been nominated by my community and be part of such a beautiful constellation of creatives. That resource doesn’t have to go to a project. It can just be to make sure that I’m cared for while I’m trying to make the work I want to, which is no small thing.

It’s so difficult to center and prioritize the vision and hope we have for the world as creatives when you’re also trying to make ends meet, when your attention is stretched in different directions. Everyone has a benevolent side hustle. We’re all working on each other’s projects and passing around the same $20 bill at shows and readings. I want to keep working for and advocating for a world where artists are fully funded as a city service, as a resource.

When you’re in community with other creatives, having a fellowship where you can just nurture your creativity, how does it shape your creative process?

With the Opry residency, we lived together for a week here in Philly, so it was a home game for me, but everyone else was coming from different parts of the country. We also met online for months in advance. Getting to check out each other’s music and talking to different music industry professionals about what resources were available to us was really interesting. Connecting with people who we don’t have perfectly overlapping, homogenous stories, but there’s power in the places where we overlap. Being able to connect with each other, whether through things we’re celebrating or challenges we’re navigating, is a really beautiful opportunity. Each of us had a different stake, a different style, or a different approach.

Being able to hold different facets of the same gem was a beautiful opportunity and a challenge because I used to write my music in secret. I love performing, but I studied jazz music, and I performed with bands as a collaborative piece. It wasn’t until the end of college, in my early 20s, that I had an opportunity to perform my original music with a band. I’d written it, but I never really shared it. A friend of mine was like, “We should play a co-bill. We’ll have the same band and we’ll feature our songs.” It was the first opportunity I’d ever had to play my music, and those musicians sort of became my band. I write and arrange for the musicians that I work with, but I rarely accompany myself.

In the Black Opry tradition, a lot of the time when you’re performing, it’s in writer’s rounds where, sometimes, people have an accompanist behind them, but on the whole, the artists are accompanying themselves. While I’m used to writing or practicing guitar at home, or making a little video here and there, holding myself up and supporting myself in a community project was a really tall order. I was pretty nervous and scared about it.

It was so beautiful to have this year of putting my weight down in my music, really resting into what I can do, where I support other projects and practices. With something like the Black Opry Residency, you’ve got to have a practice of trusting yourself. I learned a lot in that window of time about what that would look like.

As we talk about creative environments, I wonder: You’ve lived in Philly, Wisconsin, Wyoming, all kinds of places. How has your location shaped your creative process?

I’m definitely a product of my environment. I love to learn, notice, and listen deeply to the places where I am. I talk about songwriting more as song-catching. Just having a practice of noticing, awareness, or presencing means things arrive, want to be known by you, and want to be shared with other people. Plenty of practice goes into that process. Being prepared to hold or articulate something is skill-building. Most of the places where I’ve lived have absolutely shaped and informed the direction my music has taken.

I first moved to Philadelphia to study music from Wisconsin. The city radicalized and surprised me. The fingerprint of Philadelphia jazz, but also Philadelphia organizing and mutual aid, is really interesting. The participatory, collaborative devising that happens in this city is so unique. It really resonated with me as someone who longs to collaborate. There are people interested in being singular artists and having a team that articulates their vision. For me, it’s much more about, how can I create a conversation that’s improvisatory, or that we’re moving through together, these different elements that are set out for us to explore.

Wyoming puts the fear of god in you. It’s pristine wilderness but culturally so different from anywhere I’ve ever been, especially during the time I lived there, which was the run-up to the 2016 presidential election as a Brown queer person and partner to a white man. I was watching what was happening in Ferguson, Missouri and in New York, the advent of the Black Lives Matter movement, and I was feeling really isolated and [then] recognizing that’s not ever actually true. What is it to amplify and name what liberation looks like wherever you are?

There was a little bit of musical isolation in that place. There’s a really small committed community of songwriters and artists. There was a scene that existed there, but it was different than institutionalized jazz on the East Coast. You have to make your own fun. You find the songs that everybody knows or the three chords that everybody knows, you learn each other’s music, and you hold each other up. That really fed the part of me that [wanted] to find my way into folk music and Americana. I don’t think I would’ve connected as deeply as I do with country music if I hadn’t lived in Wyoming. I don’t think I would’ve found my place inside that music if I hadn’t had to make my own fun, set up a gig, or play these different venues.

Everywhere I go, I gather a little piece of that place. It gets integrated into what I’m making. I always learn a lot about a city by the songs I write about that place. Even the music I’m writing right now in Philly is so different than the music I was writing when I first moved here as an 18-year-old.

A recurring thread here is social change, and I knew you as an organizer before I knew that you make music. How does your creative work power your political work, and how do you think creativity can power political movements?

When I think about the lineages I want to study and be a continuation of, whether it’s social justice organizing, direct action organizing, mutual aid, radical resistance, Black feminist legacies, and the musical traditions that I love—jazz music, avant-garde, folk, country music—all those things are bound to each other [via] the ways that relationships organize us inside those worlds. They’ve always fed each other.

Toni Cade Bambara said that the work of the artist is to make revolution irresistible. Many other teachers in various phrasings have said music is our birthright. It belongs to us. It’s one of the primary tools we have for connecting to each other. It’s not something that’s the icing. It’s our bread and butter. It’s the everyday thing we need, or the rice and beans. It’s a staple. The more urgently I felt the need to participate in world-building through relationship-building and community organizing, the more powerfully I felt the need to make music to sing together.

In 2020, one of the most powerful moments I can remember [happened] in the housing encampment on the Ben Franklin Parkway when police had scheduled a sweep of the camp. This would happen all the time, where they would call a sweep and everyone would mobilize to protect that space. There was a tense, almost frenetic energy of fear. To the surprise of no one, the [cops] had shown up as puffed up as they could get. But we sang and chanted together. The feeling of connection…we found with each other [created a] literal, but also figurative, resonance and harmony. Everyone in that space felt unstoppable.

When we make music together in a fraught time, we say we’re not disposable to one another. We’ll move through our anger, we’ll move through our grief, we’ll move with our joy. We’ll honor it all. The more my heart breaks inside the world and in relationship to the great unraveling that we’re seeing right now, there’s also this demand to bring our art, our radical imaginations, to it. That’s the one tool that I have, but it’s a powerful one. It’s one that works. It’s hard for me to imagine a world without it.

Sometimes, in my mind, when I’m practicing music or writing or feeling nervous about accompanying myself on an instrument…there’s this little voice in my head that says, no one wants to hear that. The self-saboteur. Everybody’s got that imposter or self-deprecating thing, but I feel like it’s loudest when it’s the most important. When I can quiet that voice or not let it drive the bus, those are sort of the watershed moments when I find the most connection with a broader community.

A lot of voices would like us to think that business as usual will have to suffice. No one wants to hear that. “We want troubleshooters, not troublemakers.” Creatives are born to trouble everything, rattle things, or point to something different. I’m just so compelled to that.

Circling back to when you worked at Girls Rock Philly, what have you gained for your creative process from teaching others?

I learned more there than I taught there, and I think that’s true of any interaction with young people. The young are at the gates. It’s our responsibility to build a world worthy of them, not the other way around. Creating spaces that are youth-centered instead of youth services where it’s like, I’m here to fix you, or I’m here to shape or mold you, is what the world needs. [Young people have] the brightest ideas with the capacity to imagine and the energy.

[At Girls Rock Philly], I was a glorified keyholder. I opened the door, I got pizza, I watched [the kids] do incredible things and made sure they had the resources to do it, and I was always in the front row cheering them on as loudly as I could. They also taught me about my transness. They taught me more about my queerness than I knew.

By holding the door open for people who knew themselves and knew that centering their curiosity was the most important thing they could do, by modeling behavior and action that made the most room for them, I ended up carving out space for myself. I think that’s something the world really needs. We’re so convinced as we get more calcified in our ways of being and seeing that marginalized voices are on the periphery because they’re nonessential. It couldn’t be further from the truth. When we bring those voices and those perspectives into the center we imagine a world where all of us have everything we need.

From a musical perspective, young people are the most fearless, the most creative. They’re not afraid of feedback or breaking things. They’re figuring it out. They’re going to play the drum as hard as they can or strum as loud as they can. If a string breaks, we cheer.

I spent so much of my life trying not to have needs and trying to get it right so that there’d never be a reason not to keep me in the fold. We all lose a lot of time in learning ourselves and how we can care for each other when we’re afraid of messing up. Our capacity-building happens when we make mistakes, so creatively, I’m more of a risk-taker.

I think there’s a road away from pursuing my own music that would’ve been possible if I hadn’t had that infusion of connection with young people in that program. They’re everything. Those are my mentors.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Max Freedman.

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres – Public Domain

Let this be a lesson to you students. You are now coming to the end of another semester, arbitrarily designated as having an even number of weeks, crammed with a range of objectives that no doubt most of you have not met. For one thing, you did not read. But my, did one try to encourage you. You will have a chance to punish your teacher with absurd course ratings and meaningless criteria. You will be able to “rate your professor” in the worst sense of the practice.

Modern education, if nothing else, is the elevation of admired, if predictable failure, over heroic, diligent success. The latter are always seen as the tossers of the classroom, because they let the side down. Let’s face it: the mediocrats will always get top billing from the managers, largely because the mediocrats are the managers.

Do not, however, despair. To have you, dear students, in the classroom, is to feel vitality and strength, to find a sense of purpose. Despite every attempt by the educational commissars to hack, diminish and denude the worth of a university education, some of you have realised that a love of the word and the feeling for learning is a love like no other. It is orgiastic in release, and cathartic in cleansing: to be able to wash, bathe and cleanse in a text, and leave it invigorated. To be able to feel glorious cerebration.

Ultimately, you are the only reason the academic functions, why the university breathes in its staggered, desperate way, escaping the shot that will end it. The only reason the teacher or instructor has any calculable worth, can turn up on their hindlegs and brave a sea of faces in the muddled search for knowledge, hoping that a message might mind find its mark in the dark recess of a journey.

That student-teacher relationship is almost more important than a love affair or conjugal union. It is an admission of unadulterated trust, a conveyance of one being’s wonder into another’s quest to shape it. For in that union, the mind plays with thoughts expressed, the assignments and papers submitted depictions of an inner self, a vulnerable being held up for the most intense questioning. The instructor reads the student’s work as a full statement of effort, defect and all, weakness displayed, error prostrate.

It is the task of the instructor to show a way to best understand such defects, to warn of the potholes in the learning life, to issue caveats over those gnarly points where you might be caught out. Make sure you do not trip over a source with origins that may compromise its worth. (The opinion of a law company website can hardly rise to the level of a court opinion, as much as the authors might think it does.) Make sure you state a claim clearly. Avoid the clunky, the waffly, the syntactically vicious. The savagery of conciseness will set you free.

In recent years, you can even say decades, that sacred union between yearning, curious student and profound, eager pedagogue has been assailed, if not destroyed altogether. The bureaucrats have decided to mock and ridicule the academic as ornately irrelevant, a clown in the front of a room who deserves nothing but contempt. Somewhere along the line, a number of risible morons decided that students and teachers were somehow equal in their possession of knowledge, presuming that all opinions have equivalent weight. That bastard beast known as the lectorial was born – or was it the “flipped classroom”? Some academics have turned into bureaucrats, the Vichy-Quisling class who have sold out their own in an effort to rise up that greasiest of poles: middle management. In such desert spaces, ideas, and learning, go to perish in horrible ways, most commonly by means of the spreadsheet.

A relentless pushdown, even pulverising of the beauty that is abstract learning, complex form, Platonic ecstasy, has been taking place across teaching institutions, largely in the hope of securing more students who are best treated as dunderheaded gullible consumers than learning vessels filled with wonder. The advent of the coronavirus pandemic simply added a drug-filled impetus to the measure, a nightmarish fuel to the fire of isolated despair. Get online everyone: you know you want to.

On this day, we are engaged in that most glorious of occasions an instructor, a lecturer, a pedagogue can ever have with their students: break bread and reflect sweetly upon the weeks passed. It is a most solemn yet deeply felt occasion. It is the end of the semester, and when you leave this classroom, a vestigial thought might stir on what you learnt. At an opportune moment, it might comfort you, even save you.

This is unlikely to happen in the future. We are now at a terminus – of sorts. Universities may be liquidated (in some cases, deservedly) by the gibbering hordes and minions of the Artificial Intelligence revolution. Lectures and seminars will become programmatic spouts and spurts arranged and organised for delivery, leaving academics to suicide in libraries without books. Essays will be derivative, machine products, tested on the quality of the AI function, rather than the quality of the human endeavour. The idea of a crafted essay with all its beautiful, unintended faults: the misplaced colon, the split infinitive, the tormenting tautology, will pass into an anodyne, textual sludge called technological perfection. When that happens, we all best take leave, and depart this earth. But even then, it could be artificially generated.

Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He currently lectures at RMIT University. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres – Public Domain

Let this be a lesson to you students. You are now coming to the end of another semester, arbitrarily designated as having an even number of weeks, crammed with a range of objectives that no doubt most of you have not met. For one thing, you did not read. But my, did one try to encourage you. You will have a chance to punish your teacher with absurd course ratings and meaningless criteria. You will be able to “rate your professor” in the worst sense of the practice.

Modern education, if nothing else, is the elevation of admired, if predictable failure, over heroic, diligent success. The latter are always seen as the tossers of the classroom, because they let the side down. Let’s face it: the mediocrats will always get top billing from the managers, largely because the mediocrats are the managers.

Do not, however, despair. To have you, dear students, in the classroom, is to feel vitality and strength, to find a sense of purpose. Despite every attempt by the educational commissars to hack, diminish and denude the worth of a university education, some of you have realised that a love of the word and the feeling for learning is a love like no other. It is orgiastic in release, and cathartic in cleansing: to be able to wash, bathe and cleanse in a text, and leave it invigorated. To be able to feel glorious cerebration.

Ultimately, you are the only reason the academic functions, why the university breathes in its staggered, desperate way, escaping the shot that will end it. The only reason the teacher or instructor has any calculable worth, can turn up on their hindlegs and brave a sea of faces in the muddled search for knowledge, hoping that a message might mind find its mark in the dark recess of a journey.

That student-teacher relationship is almost more important than a love affair or conjugal union. It is an admission of unadulterated trust, a conveyance of one being’s wonder into another’s quest to shape it. For in that union, the mind plays with thoughts expressed, the assignments and papers submitted depictions of an inner self, a vulnerable being held up for the most intense questioning. The instructor reads the student’s work as a full statement of effort, defect and all, weakness displayed, error prostrate.

It is the task of the instructor to show a way to best understand such defects, to warn of the potholes in the learning life, to issue caveats over those gnarly points where you might be caught out. Make sure you do not trip over a source with origins that may compromise its worth. (The opinion of a law company website can hardly rise to the level of a court opinion, as much as the authors might think it does.) Make sure you state a claim clearly. Avoid the clunky, the waffly, the syntactically vicious. The savagery of conciseness will set you free.

In recent years, you can even say decades, that sacred union between yearning, curious student and profound, eager pedagogue has been assailed, if not destroyed altogether. The bureaucrats have decided to mock and ridicule the academic as ornately irrelevant, a clown in the front of a room who deserves nothing but contempt. Somewhere along the line, a number of risible morons decided that students and teachers were somehow equal in their possession of knowledge, presuming that all opinions have equivalent weight. That bastard beast known as the lectorial was born – or was it the “flipped classroom”? Some academics have turned into bureaucrats, the Vichy-Quisling class who have sold out their own in an effort to rise up that greasiest of poles: middle management. In such desert spaces, ideas, and learning, go to perish in horrible ways, most commonly by means of the spreadsheet.

A relentless pushdown, even pulverising of the beauty that is abstract learning, complex form, Platonic ecstasy, has been taking place across teaching institutions, largely in the hope of securing more students who are best treated as dunderheaded gullible consumers than learning vessels filled with wonder. The advent of the coronavirus pandemic simply added a drug-filled impetus to the measure, a nightmarish fuel to the fire of isolated despair. Get online everyone: you know you want to.

On this day, we are engaged in that most glorious of occasions an instructor, a lecturer, a pedagogue can ever have with their students: break bread and reflect sweetly upon the weeks passed. It is a most solemn yet deeply felt occasion. It is the end of the semester, and when you leave this classroom, a vestigial thought might stir on what you learnt. At an opportune moment, it might comfort you, even save you.

This is unlikely to happen in the future. We are now at a terminus – of sorts. Universities may be liquidated (in some cases, deservedly) by the gibbering hordes and minions of the Artificial Intelligence revolution. Lectures and seminars will become programmatic spouts and spurts arranged and organised for delivery, leaving academics to suicide in libraries without books. Essays will be derivative, machine products, tested on the quality of the AI function, rather than the quality of the human endeavour. The idea of a crafted essay with all its beautiful, unintended faults: the misplaced colon, the split infinitive, the tormenting tautology, will pass into an anodyne, textual sludge called technological perfection. When that happens, we all best take leave, and depart this earth. But even then, it could be artificially generated.

Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He currently lectures at RMIT University. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres – Public Domain

Let this be a lesson to you students. You are now coming to the end of another semester, arbitrarily designated as having an even number of weeks, crammed with a range of objectives that no doubt most of you have not met. For one thing, you did not read. But my, did one try to encourage you. You will have a chance to punish your teacher with absurd course ratings and meaningless criteria. You will be able to “rate your professor” in the worst sense of the practice.

Modern education, if nothing else, is the elevation of admired, if predictable failure, over heroic, diligent success. The latter are always seen as the tossers of the classroom, because they let the side down. Let’s face it: the mediocrats will always get top billing from the managers, largely because the mediocrats are the managers.

Do not, however, despair. To have you, dear students, in the classroom, is to feel vitality and strength, to find a sense of purpose. Despite every attempt by the educational commissars to hack, diminish and denude the worth of a university education, some of you have realised that a love of the word and the feeling for learning is a love like no other. It is orgiastic in release, and cathartic in cleansing: to be able to wash, bathe and cleanse in a text, and leave it invigorated. To be able to feel glorious cerebration.

Ultimately, you are the only reason the academic functions, why the university breathes in its staggered, desperate way, escaping the shot that will end it. The only reason the teacher or instructor has any calculable worth, can turn up on their hindlegs and brave a sea of faces in the muddled search for knowledge, hoping that a message might mind find its mark in the dark recess of a journey.

That student-teacher relationship is almost more important than a love affair or conjugal union. It is an admission of unadulterated trust, a conveyance of one being’s wonder into another’s quest to shape it. For in that union, the mind plays with thoughts expressed, the assignments and papers submitted depictions of an inner self, a vulnerable being held up for the most intense questioning. The instructor reads the student’s work as a full statement of effort, defect and all, weakness displayed, error prostrate.

It is the task of the instructor to show a way to best understand such defects, to warn of the potholes in the learning life, to issue caveats over those gnarly points where you might be caught out. Make sure you do not trip over a source with origins that may compromise its worth. (The opinion of a law company website can hardly rise to the level of a court opinion, as much as the authors might think it does.) Make sure you state a claim clearly. Avoid the clunky, the waffly, the syntactically vicious. The savagery of conciseness will set you free.

In recent years, you can even say decades, that sacred union between yearning, curious student and profound, eager pedagogue has been assailed, if not destroyed altogether. The bureaucrats have decided to mock and ridicule the academic as ornately irrelevant, a clown in the front of a room who deserves nothing but contempt. Somewhere along the line, a number of risible morons decided that students and teachers were somehow equal in their possession of knowledge, presuming that all opinions have equivalent weight. That bastard beast known as the lectorial was born – or was it the “flipped classroom”? Some academics have turned into bureaucrats, the Vichy-Quisling class who have sold out their own in an effort to rise up that greasiest of poles: middle management. In such desert spaces, ideas, and learning, go to perish in horrible ways, most commonly by means of the spreadsheet.

A relentless pushdown, even pulverising of the beauty that is abstract learning, complex form, Platonic ecstasy, has been taking place across teaching institutions, largely in the hope of securing more students who are best treated as dunderheaded gullible consumers than learning vessels filled with wonder. The advent of the coronavirus pandemic simply added a drug-filled impetus to the measure, a nightmarish fuel to the fire of isolated despair. Get online everyone: you know you want to.

On this day, we are engaged in that most glorious of occasions an instructor, a lecturer, a pedagogue can ever have with their students: break bread and reflect sweetly upon the weeks passed. It is a most solemn yet deeply felt occasion. It is the end of the semester, and when you leave this classroom, a vestigial thought might stir on what you learnt. At an opportune moment, it might comfort you, even save you.

This is unlikely to happen in the future. We are now at a terminus – of sorts. Universities may be liquidated (in some cases, deservedly) by the gibbering hordes and minions of the Artificial Intelligence revolution. Lectures and seminars will become programmatic spouts and spurts arranged and organised for delivery, leaving academics to suicide in libraries without books. Essays will be derivative, machine products, tested on the quality of the AI function, rather than the quality of the human endeavour. The idea of a crafted essay with all its beautiful, unintended faults: the misplaced colon, the split infinitive, the tormenting tautology, will pass into an anodyne, textual sludge called technological perfection. When that happens, we all best take leave, and depart this earth. But even then, it could be artificially generated.

Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He currently lectures at RMIT University. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres – Public Domain

Let this be a lesson to you students. You are now coming to the end of another semester, arbitrarily designated as having an even number of weeks, crammed with a range of objectives that no doubt most of you have not met. For one thing, you did not read. But my, did one try to encourage you. You will have a chance to punish your teacher with absurd course ratings and meaningless criteria. You will be able to “rate your professor” in the worst sense of the practice.

Modern education, if nothing else, is the elevation of admired, if predictable failure, over heroic, diligent success. The latter are always seen as the tossers of the classroom, because they let the side down. Let’s face it: the mediocrats will always get top billing from the managers, largely because the mediocrats are the managers.

Do not, however, despair. To have you, dear students, in the classroom, is to feel vitality and strength, to find a sense of purpose. Despite every attempt by the educational commissars to hack, diminish and denude the worth of a university education, some of you have realised that a love of the word and the feeling for learning is a love like no other. It is orgiastic in release, and cathartic in cleansing: to be able to wash, bathe and cleanse in a text, and leave it invigorated. To be able to feel glorious cerebration.

Ultimately, you are the only reason the academic functions, why the university breathes in its staggered, desperate way, escaping the shot that will end it. The only reason the teacher or instructor has any calculable worth, can turn up on their hindlegs and brave a sea of faces in the muddled search for knowledge, hoping that a message might mind find its mark in the dark recess of a journey.

That student-teacher relationship is almost more important than a love affair or conjugal union. It is an admission of unadulterated trust, a conveyance of one being’s wonder into another’s quest to shape it. For in that union, the mind plays with thoughts expressed, the assignments and papers submitted depictions of an inner self, a vulnerable being held up for the most intense questioning. The instructor reads the student’s work as a full statement of effort, defect and all, weakness displayed, error prostrate.

It is the task of the instructor to show a way to best understand such defects, to warn of the potholes in the learning life, to issue caveats over those gnarly points where you might be caught out. Make sure you do not trip over a source with origins that may compromise its worth. (The opinion of a law company website can hardly rise to the level of a court opinion, as much as the authors might think it does.) Make sure you state a claim clearly. Avoid the clunky, the waffly, the syntactically vicious. The savagery of conciseness will set you free.

In recent years, you can even say decades, that sacred union between yearning, curious student and profound, eager pedagogue has been assailed, if not destroyed altogether. The bureaucrats have decided to mock and ridicule the academic as ornately irrelevant, a clown in the front of a room who deserves nothing but contempt. Somewhere along the line, a number of risible morons decided that students and teachers were somehow equal in their possession of knowledge, presuming that all opinions have equivalent weight. That bastard beast known as the lectorial was born – or was it the “flipped classroom”? Some academics have turned into bureaucrats, the Vichy-Quisling class who have sold out their own in an effort to rise up that greasiest of poles: middle management. In such desert spaces, ideas, and learning, go to perish in horrible ways, most commonly by means of the spreadsheet.

A relentless pushdown, even pulverising of the beauty that is abstract learning, complex form, Platonic ecstasy, has been taking place across teaching institutions, largely in the hope of securing more students who are best treated as dunderheaded gullible consumers than learning vessels filled with wonder. The advent of the coronavirus pandemic simply added a drug-filled impetus to the measure, a nightmarish fuel to the fire of isolated despair. Get online everyone: you know you want to.

On this day, we are engaged in that most glorious of occasions an instructor, a lecturer, a pedagogue can ever have with their students: break bread and reflect sweetly upon the weeks passed. It is a most solemn yet deeply felt occasion. It is the end of the semester, and when you leave this classroom, a vestigial thought might stir on what you learnt. At an opportune moment, it might comfort you, even save you.

This is unlikely to happen in the future. We are now at a terminus – of sorts. Universities may be liquidated (in some cases, deservedly) by the gibbering hordes and minions of the Artificial Intelligence revolution. Lectures and seminars will become programmatic spouts and spurts arranged and organised for delivery, leaving academics to suicide in libraries without books. Essays will be derivative, machine products, tested on the quality of the AI function, rather than the quality of the human endeavour. The idea of a crafted essay with all its beautiful, unintended faults: the misplaced colon, the split infinitive, the tormenting tautology, will pass into an anodyne, textual sludge called technological perfection. When that happens, we all best take leave, and depart this earth. But even then, it could be artificially generated.

Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He currently lectures at RMIT University. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

Modern education, if nothing else, is the elevation of admired, if predictable, failure over heroic, diligent success.  The latter are always seen as the tossers of the classroom, because they let the side down.  Let’s face it: the mediocrats will always get top billing from the managers, largely because the mediocrats are the managers.

Do not, however, despair.  To have you, dear students, in the classroom, is to feel vitality and strength, to find a sense of purpose.  Despite every attempt by the educational commissars to hack, diminish and denude the worth of a university education, some of you have realised that a love of the word and the feeling for learning is a love like no other.  It is orgiastic in release, and cathartic in cleansing: to be able to wash, bathe and cleanse in a text, and leave it invigorated. To be able to feel glorious cerebration.

Ultimately, you are the only reason the academic functions, why the university breathes in its staggered, desperate way, escaping the shot that will end it.  The only reason the teacher or instructor has any calculable worth, can turn up on their hind legs and brave a sea of faces in the muddled search for knowledge, hoping that a message might find its mark in the dark recess of a journey.

That student-teacher relationship is almost more important than a love affair or conjugal union.  It is an admission of unadulterated trust, a conveyance of one being’s wonder into another’s quest to shape it.  For in that union, the mind plays with thoughts expressed, the assignments and papers submitted depictions of an inner self, a vulnerable being held up for the most intense questioning.  The instructor reads the student’s work as a full statement of effort, defect and all, weakness displayed, error prostrate.

It is the task of the instructor to show a way to best understand such defects, to warn of the potholes in the learning life, to issue caveats over those gnarly points where you might be caught out.  Make sure you do not trip over a source with origins that may compromise its worth.  (The opinion of a law company website can hardly rise to the level of a court opinion, as much as the authors might think it does.)  Make sure you state a claim clearly.  Avoid the clunky, the waffly, the syntactically vicious.  The savagery of conciseness will set you free.

In recent years, you can even say decades, that sacred union between yearning, curious student and profound, eager pedagogue has been assailed, if not destroyed altogether.  The bureaucrats have decided to mock and ridicule the academic as ornately irrelevant, a clown in the front of a room who deserves nothing but contempt.  Somewhere along the line, a number of risible morons decided that students and teachers were somehow equal in their possession of knowledge, presuming that all opinions have equivalent weight.  That bastard beast known as the lectorial was born – or was it the “flipped classroom”?  Some academics have turned into bureaucrats, the Vichy-Quisling class who have sold out their own in an effort to rise up that greasiest of poles: middle management.  In such desert spaces, ideas, and learning, go to perish in horrible ways, most commonly by means of the spreadsheet.

A relentless pushdown, even pulverising of the beauty that is abstract learning, complex form, Platonic ecstasy, has been taking place across teaching institutions, largely in the hope of securing more students who are best treated as dunderheaded gullible consumers than learning vessels filled with wonder.  The advent of the coronavirus pandemic simply added a drug-filled impetus to the measure, a nightmarish fuel to the fire of isolated despair.  Get online everyone: you know you want to.

On this day, we are engaged in that most glorious of occasions an instructor, a lecturer, a pedagogue can ever have with their students: break bread and reflect sweetly upon the weeks passed.  It is a most solemn yet deeply felt occasion.  It is the end of the semester, and when you leave this classroom, a vestigial thought might stir on what you learnt.  At an opportune moment, it might comfort you, even save you.

This is unlikely to happen in the future.  We are now at a terminus – of sorts.  Universities may be liquidated (in some cases, deservedly) by the gibbering hordes and minions of the Artificial Intelligence revolution.  Lectures and seminars will become programmatic spouts and spurts arranged and organised for delivery, leaving academics to suicide in libraries without books.  Essays will be derivative, machine products, tested on the quality of the AI function, rather than the quality of the human endeavour.  The idea of a crafted essay with all its beautiful, unintended faults: the misplaced colon, the split infinitive, the tormenting tautology, will pass into an anodyne, textual sludge called technological perfection.  When that happens, we all best take leave, and depart this earth.  But even then, it could be artificially generated.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

It wasn’t the first summer Justin Guay went outside and choked on smoke. Or the second. But by the time wildfire season seemed to last year-round, he decided to move his family away from California and back to Utah, where he’d grown up. 

In 2020, Guay bought a house in Wasatch County near the jagged mountains, where he thought the worst climate impacts would be warmer winters with higher snow lines. An avid skier, Guay thought that was bad enough. But this spring, a letter arrived from his homeowners insurance company, brokered through Progressive. “They were dropping us because they would no longer be providing insurance — period,” he recalled. 

As they scrambled to find new coverage, Guay and his wife were shocked when their first inquiry was rejected. “They said, ‘We no longer provide insurance to homes in your area.’” Other companies at least provided quotes, though they all offered rates at least double his previous policy. Returning to his home state, he hadn’t considered fires as a risk. They were never a major issue while he was growing up. Shortly after he moved back, however, 5,000 people were evacuated from a neighboring town during a large burn.

As climate risks upend the insurance market, homeowners like Guay are being caught off guard. Losing his coverage really highlighted “the limitations of your individual ability to cope or deal with these impacts,” said Guay. It’s a nationwide problem he’s now turning to at work as the director of global climate strategy for the Sunrise Project, a climate justice nonprofit.

Climate change is now the main driver of the increase in fire weather in the western United States. As conditions get warmer and drier, blazes are burning over larger areas and scorching places once thought of as low-risk. This summer, around 100 people died as flames tore through Maui in one of the deadliest wildfires in American history, leaving behind $3.2 billion in property damage. Across the Western United States, existing dangers are getting worse: Four of the five largest wildfires in California’s history have occurred since 2020. Meanwhile, close to a quarter of the Americans now at risk of catastrophic wildfires live in the eastern half of the country, in places that may not be prepared to respond.

All this damage has racked up quite the bill. Nationally, wildfires caused more than $22.5 billion of losses in 2017, a record surpassed in 2018 when blazes burned through $29 billion, while 2020 and 2021 took third and fourth place in the echelon of damage. Those are just direct costs; a 2020 study found the indirect costs of 2018’s wildfires alone — things like health care costs and disruption to the broader economy — cost almost $150 billion. 

Compounding all this is the boom in people moving to fire-prone places. Between 1990 and 2010, more than 25 million people relocated to areas known as the wildland-urban interface, where human development abuts wilderness. As inflation spikes the costs of rebuilding, those decisions are increasingly expensive: In the last five years, wildfires cost the United States $68.4 billion.

These losses are contributing to the destabilization of the homeowners insurance market. The insurance industry argues that attempts to control pricing — like California’s regulation that required insurers to set their rates based on damages over the past 20 years, rather than looking ahead at future hazards — have backfired. Many companies have chosen to stop selling new policies in California, while others have dropped existing policies, causing an additional 50,000 people in the state to lose their coverage just this summer. 

Yet as Guay found, simply relocating wasn’t a solution. Insurance, the financial mechanism that has underpinned the global economy for the last 400 years, is no longer guaranteeing most people’s largest asset. “There’s nowhere to run,” Guay said. 

In California, many residents find themselves on the leading edge of this crisis. Rural areas were the first to be affected. But now, even people in suburban areas and across a broad spectrum of society — including politicians themselves — are seeing their coverage vanish. 

The problem itself is pretty simple: Nearly a quarter of Californians now live in areas at risk of catastrophic fire. Knowing what to do about it is a much thornier question.

After several close calls with nearby fires, Beth Pratt decided to refinance the mortgage on her home in Midpines, outside of Yosemite National Park, and spent $100,000 — all the equity in her home and all her savings — to reduce her risk. She installed a metal roof and built a water storage tank with a fire hose hookup. She completely sided her house in metal, replaced her decking and railings, and cleared brush. Most of these measures went far beyond the basic tree trimming that Allstate requested during her last home inspection. She will now be paying off her mortgage till she is 80. Despite her efforts, she got a letter this July canceling her policy. 

In 2018, Governor Gavin Newsom announced a moratorium on homeowner policy cancellations for one year in ZIP codes near wildfires, a condition which applied to Pratt’s community after a fire in July 2022. Pratt’s cancellation arrived this summer almost exactly when that grace period ended, right in the middle of wildfire season. Last year, the state’s insurance commissioner required insurers to give discounts for the kind of steps Pratt took, but rather than adjusting her rates, Allstate chose to drop her coverage. (Allstate made a quiet decision last fall to stop writing new policies in California. State Farm followed suit this spring.) “I feel like I did everything right. But it didn’t matter,” she said. 

Pratt’s mortgage requires her to have homeowners insurance, putting her at risk of eventually defaulting. She tried to find another private insurer to no avail. Eventually, she turned to the California FAIR Plan, a state-backed policy that covers people who have been denied private coverage at least three times. Its budget comes from levies on insurance companies operating in the state, but these coffers are shrinking: The FAIR Plan itself announced that it was seeking permission from the state’s Department of Insurance to hike premiums by nearly 50 percent. 

Most of Pratt’s neighbors in Midpines have also lost their insurance. Some may still qualify for private policies, but can no longer afford them. “What you’re talking about in an area like mine is not rich people or second homes, but working-class people, people who have lived here their whole lives, losing the ability to insure their properties,” she said. 

Nationwide, approximately one in three houses is located in the wildland-urban interface. But even documenting the hazards has been contentious: The Oregon Department of Forestry tried to issue a map in 2022 showing 80,000 homes were at risk. But homeowners worried this would decrease their property values and raise their insurance rates protested until the state rescinded it. Or take the 2018 Camp Fire, which began when a spark from an electric transmission line owned by the utility Pacific Gas & Electric blew into a firestorm near the town of Paradise. In its aftermath, insurance companies sued PG&E, reclaiming around $11 billion — or about 85 percent of their claims. The utility later declared bankruptcy.

There’s a long history of insurers going after the entities that caused expensive claims, a process known as subrogation. Empire Blue Cross and Blue Shield, for example, won $18 million in 2001 from Philip Morris and other tobacco companies to cover the medical treatment of smokers. Advocates suggest insurers could take a similar approach to the fossil fuel industry, whose product has helped worsen wildfires. Rather than individuals, or even insurers, said Peter Bosshard, the coordinator of the Insure Our Future campaign, “it should be the polluters who pay.” 

Multnomah County, Oregon, took its first step in this direction in June, suing several multinational oil companies for the heat dome that smothered the region in June 2021, killing at least 69 people in the county, which includes Portland. (The death toll across the Pacific Northwest was much higher: at least 250 in the U.S. and another 400 in Canada.) In addition to $50 million in damages, the county is also seeking $50 billion for research and to implement “weatherproofing” to help handle future extreme heat.

“What we’re staring at now is a situation where everything is going to get more expensive,” said David Pomerantz, executive director of the Energy and Policy Institute. Homeowners aren’t the only ones finding they’re priced out of the insurance they need. Utility companies, for example, are also struggling to find wildfire liability coverage to protect them from lawsuits like the ones PG&E faced. That makes upgrading utility infrastructure even more important — but that ultimately costs consumers money, too. PG&E is currently improving its transmission network and asked California regulators for a $3.2 billion rate increase this year, or an average bill increase of around $450 a year. Perversely, utilities themselves primarily profit by making these kinds of capital expenditures, so “every utility in the West is doing this to some degree,” Pomerantz said. 

As this system breaks down, everyone’s feeling the pressure to guess the future correctly. In most states, the industry standard has been for insurers to use catastrophe models to estimate wildfire or other disaster risk in a region over time, then use those predictions to make decisions about their overall risk, like how much reinsurance to purchase as a backstop. 

Technological advances have made it possible to predict hazards not only in your part of town, but also for the exact parcel of land you call home. “We’re entering a new era where you can get at the root cause of mitigating risk, as opposed to just transferring that risk,” said Attila Toth, co-founder and CEO of start-up ZestyAI, which uses artificial intelligence to assess properties. The eight-year-old startup has collected satellite data, building permits, and two decades of historical losses to train its AI, developing a model called Z-FIRE. The company claims it can now spit out a wildfire risk score for all properties in the Lower 48, based on specific information about your home, such as what type of roof it has or what vegetation is nearby. 

ZestyAI’s wildfire model has gained regulatory approval in seven states, including as part of a rate filing by the California Department of Insurance. Among the many high-profile companies now using ZestyAI’s model is Amica Insurance. After the 2017 Tubbs Fire, which destroyed 3,000 homes and killed nine people in Santa Rosa, California, Amica realized that it had mistakenly underpriced high-risk properties, leaving it on the hook for major losses in several counties. The company now uses Z-FIRE, a move Amica says “leverage[s] the power of AI to generate a clear picture of not only how likely it is that a home might be exposed to a wildfire, but also the probability of its damage.” The system has also allowed Amica to “offer coverage for homes that may have previously been declined.” Farmers Insurance says thanks to Z-FIRE’s fine-tuned analyses, it expects to add 30,000 new policies in California. 

Helping both insurers and homeowners get a better sense of their actual risk is long overdue, says Roy Wright, a former director of the Federal Emergency Management Association’s insurance administration. He now leads the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety, a nonprofit organization that tries to “translate science into action” for insurance companies and homeowners. It conducts research to provide information on how to prevent damage during disasters. “We show people what actions make a difference,” Wright explained. The institute has spent decades testing construction design, like intentionally setting siding and roofing materials on fire in the lab to see what helps prevent embers from catching. He is lobbying regulators to add the institute’s construction standards to states’ building codes. 

Wright’s organization is now collaborating with ZestyAI to improve its models’ accuracy and to better understand new hazards. But some are leery of these kinds of proprietary datasets, saying that nontransparent pricing decisions may increase discrimination. Unless regulators step in, Madison Condon, a corporate and environmental law professor at Boston University, predicts an obvious consequence will be “huge differentiations in the cost of insurance that could have demographic effects.” 

California currently has some of the most transparent policies, requiring companies to publicly disclose when they won’t renew a policy and to provide homeowners their risk assessments and an opportunity to appeal them. Washington state, in contrast, does none of the above. But the Golden State is also facing some of the highest losses: Insured claims have outpaced premiums in the state since 2016 by more than $4 billion. Insurers, like banks, have to have a certain amount of money on hand, so to sell more policies, they have to increase their capital. Many private companies turn to reinsurers for this, paying them a fee for their financing. But now that risks have increased, reinsurance prices have too: In July, reinsurers increased the cost of U.S. property reinsurance by as much as 50 percent. 

Unlike most other states, California’s insurance commissioner prohibits insurers from passing on these reinsurance costs to the consumer. The goal of measures like this, according to Harvey Rosenfield, an advocate who founded the nonprofit group Consumer Watchdog, was to make insurance available and affordable. During the last insurance crisis in the 1980s, the industry claimed that higher losses and a spike in lawsuits were responsible for rising premiums, which Rosenfield alleges led to discriminatory practices in minority neighborhoods, an issue researchers have identified nationwide. To address these issues, Rosenfield wrote California’s Proposition 103, which passed in 1988. It aimed to rein in costs and increase transparency in the country’s largest market, establishing a review process for rate increases and electing a state insurance commissioner. 

The insurance industry argues Proposition 103 keeps the market from reflecting true risk and forces companies to offer insurance at artificially low rates. Since 2009, California has seen a 335 percent jump in buildings destroyed by wildfires, along with a 270 percent increase in associated costs. But Rosenfield notes homeowners insurance companies in California earned an average annual return on net worth of 8.8 percent over the last 20 years, compared to 6.2 percent nationally. 

Consumer Watchdog says what’s needed to address the lack of affordable insurance is to enforce existing laws. For example, it says its advocacy challenging consumer rate increases has saved homeowners $2.2 billion since 2002. Long-term, the organization thinks the government should be helping homeowners afford to fortify their property, as well as instituting policies that require companies to sell insurance to all owners who meet certain mitigation measures.

In early September, the president of Consumer Watchdog’s advocacy group, Jamie Court, happened to be on the same morning flight to Sacramento as an insurance lobbyist, Michael Gunning. When Gunning began bragging about his efforts to push through a multi-billion-dollar bailout for the industry through California’s state legislature at the end of its session, Court started recording their conversation. “We are trying to jam a bill in the last three weeks,” Gunning can be heard saying. 

The bill, which would have absolved companies of responsibility for covering fire claims under the state’s FAIR plan, failed to pass. But several weeks later, California’s insurance commissioner, Ricardo Lara, announced he would expedite changes to allow companies to use catastrophe modeling and artificial intelligence to take into account projected impacts of climate change in their pricing. He also signaled he would “explore” allowing companies to pass on reinsurance costs. In exchange, insurers will be required to write at least 85 percent of their market share in “distressed areas,” although those have not yet been identified. Governor Newsom supported the changes, immediately issuing an executive order authorizing the Commissioner’s “emergency regulatory action” to bolster the faltering industry. 

Consumer Watchdog says these changes could increase premiums by as much as 50 percent overnight. “Insurers are leveraging a real climate crisis with a false crisis of affordability in order to line their pockets,” said Carmen Balber, executive director at Consumer Watchdog. “If trends continue, and insurers are allowed to continue making those choices on their own, we could be seeing a much more serious crisis for homeowners.”

When these cascading effects hit, it’s going to cost those who can least afford it the most. While insurance is ultimately about managing risk for a single business or person, the escalating nature of the climate crisis can only be addressed by action society-wide. Homeowners insurance is increasingly at the crux of this mismatch: Buying a home is one of the biggest financial decisions in someone’s life, and it’s a long-term investment. But even if you can get — and afford to pay — for insurance when you buy a house, companies reevaluate their policies and premiums every year. “It’s not like we need more information,” Condon said. “We need better ways to think about how to adapt in the face of uncertainty.”

As the stakes rise, the house seems to always win. “I looked up the revenues of some of these big insurance companies,” Pratt says. Their profits might be declining — after making 32 cents on the dollar in 2023, Allstate’s credit dropped for a second time in 2023, to BBB+, a middling rung on S&P’s rating scale — but it’s still “a lot more than I make,” she said. She paid into a policy with Allstate for 32 years, but never made a claim. “What’s fair about that?” she asked. 

Last winter, Pratt’s property was without power for a week, and she stayed warm hauling wood for her stove in a sled over record snowfall. Last summer, she was sweating in an extreme heat wave, watching a woodpecker gasp for breath at her bird bath. She watched, helpless, as a fire burned 127 homes nearby. 

“We are learning to adapt to what it’s going to take to live in this time of climate extremes,” Pratt said, noting that while she ultimately found a California FAIR plan, it doubled her cost. “Rethinking the insurance industry — in this new regime of climate disruption — is going to be needed.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline In wildfire-prone areas, homeowners are learning they’re uninsurable on Oct 12, 2023.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Lois Parshley.

Not everybody who reads Refuse to Be Done is doing it because they’ve ever read any of my fiction. A big difference in promotion that was interesting to me is that Refuse to Be Done has this direct applicability to the reader. The people who read it are trying to learn how to write a novel. Promoting an actual novel, that sort of urgency is less evident. Readers might ask, “Why is this the novel that I need to read right now?”

I really privilege the conversations I had around each book, which were obviously different. With Appleseed, we talked a lot about climate change, about some of the intellectual ideas about the book, things about manifest destiny and other topics that are interesting or fun. To be in conversation with someone who was thinking on top of that kind of work with me was enjoyable.

Events for Refuse to Be Done were more teacherly events. That book grew out of a lecture I’d been giving for 10 years, so it was sort of interesting to have that lecture go back out in that form. It’s been interesting to watch both books find their audiences. I think both have done similarly well, though the Venn diagram of people who read both books is smaller than it might be if I’d come out with two novels in the same year.

Did you find that you enjoyed talking with audiences about one book over the other?

In some ways, the novel is the thing that means the most to me—my own words. You never know who’s going to be interested in your novel. The conversations that happen around a novel aren’t always the things you think as you’re writing it. With Refuse to Be Done, I knew the questions people would ask because I’ve been teaching novel-writing for a long time.

If money wasn’t a factor, do you feel like you would still be a writer who teaches? Or would you focus more on your own creative work?

I really like teaching. I get a lot out of teaching for my writing. I’ve been teaching for 15 years or so, and I often think, if all things were equal, if I didn’t have to teach, I would still want to, but maybe I’d do it entirely on my own terms. The thing I would quit from academia is not teaching, but administrative meetings. I love the teaching. And one of the things about being in a good MFA program is that every year, a new group of smart, interesting young writers moves to town and talks to me about writing. It’s restorative and interesting. Even in the short time I’ve been teaching, I’ve observed that different eras of students have different concerns and different interests, and that’s invigorating. There are certain things in my own writing that I would not have thought about if I hadn’t been in these sorts of conversations.

Also, I was a reasonably poor undergrad student. I graduated undergrad in eight years at three schools. But I liked being on campus and I liked being part of the university life. I like that there are events and lectures and different things happening all the time. The university has given me access to lots of other people’s ongoing thinking in a way that’s great, especially as someone who doesn’t live in New York City or Los Angeles or San Francisco. Phoenix is great on its own, but it’s obviously a different cultural space.

Being a novelist doesn’t always feel super useful, either, and being a teacher does—even if I’m teaching other people to be novelists, which is not useful! I totally believe that a life of making art is super useful, but it doesn’t feel like it every day.

Since Refuse to Be Done was released, you seem to have taken on a beat as “the novel revision guy.” Some folks have called you “a writer’s writer.” I’m wondering how you feel about a term like that.

Oh, I’m not going to argue with that. You can become an expert in something by deciding you are one, to some extent. You can publish a book on novel revision, and then people ask you questions about novel revision. That feels good. It’s been great to see people find the book useful and to see people achieve things that they want to do through it. Refuse to Be Done has helped people I admire finish their novels, and I think that’s just great. Anything I can do that makes things more achievable for other people seems fantastic.

I feel the same way about the craft books I love most. There are books that help me think about things or show me the way or clarify. And there are lots of ways to be in community with people, and one of the ways is the ways in which you’re helpful or useful or adding something to your community. And it does feel like Refuse to Be Done achieves that in a way that’s different than my own fiction does.

What you’re saying about community is interesting, because you’re one of the more extroverted writers I’ve met. I don’t know if you identify as an extrovert, but you’re certainly a lot more bubbly and outgoing than most writers.

[laughs] Sure, yeah.

And it makes me wonder, thinking back to when you first started writing, if you felt like you wanted to utilize that part of your personality as someone who also helps other writers, or if you were more focused on your own writing and teaching somehow found its way into that.

I like talking about writing. I know there are writers who are like, “That’s, like, the worst thing.” There’s sort of a false modesty thing, and we live in a culture that considers the claim that you want to be an artist or that you care about art is somehow verboten—even among other writers, which doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. You’re in a room full of people who are all writing, and you have to pretend that you have no ambitions and you’re not trying hard? That seems a little silly to me.

I’m enthusiastic, and I do think that’s part of it. If writing was miserable, I wouldn’t do it. If I didn’t enjoy talking about this, I would talk about something else. I write because I think it’s fun. It’s an entertaining thing to do. It’s an interesting problem to wrap my head around. Talking about those things is useful.

Plus, it’s amazing how often just talking about what you’re doing is helpful to other people. Some of it’s just making the way the thing is done visible. I feel like the way creative writing used to be taught was like, there was a genius in the room and you just spent time around that genius, who didn’t necessarily ever teach you anything directly or talk about how they did things. And that seems a little ridiculous to me. It seems like it can be more direct. It doesn’t diminish my process to share my process. In fact, talking about writing has made me a stronger writer.

Is there anything you find challenging about being open about your process with students and other writers?

There are two things that are hard to teach. The first is the stuff that you do most naturally, because you don’t have to think about it. So then you go to teach that part of the process, and it’s often very challenging to put it into language. The second is the stuff that’s hard for you, that you can’t talk about because you don’t know how to do it yet.

There are things that I realize I teach poorly just because they’re hard for me. For example, I don’t think I’m the most natural dialogue-writer. I work hard at dialogue, but it doesn’t come naturally to me. And when I first started teaching creative writing, I’d think, “Well, it’s probably time for a dialogue lesson.” But then I’d show good dialogue and ask my students, “Why is this Denis Johnson dialogue good?” I couldn’t even explain it.

You said earlier that being a novelist doesn’t always feel useful, but being a teacher does. How do you manage that feeling in terms of your approach to your own creative work?

When I’m writing long-form fiction, the book is mostly bad the entire time I’m working on it. The big satisfaction comes very, very late for me, but there’s daily pleasure in surprising myself and playing with language and writing a sentence, trying to get seen and making a thing that is well-constructed, indulging in my weirdness. A huge part of the daily process for me is creating a space in which to think my own thoughts. That’s incredibly gratifying.

A lot of the satisfaction from teaching is watching people take these sorts of leaps in their work, and it’s fun to be around that. It’s fun to be around their enthusiasm, to feel the kinship of a bunch of other people who are trying to do the same difficult thing. When I teach novel-writing, I teach it in a generative fashion. Students usually start from scratch and write forward together. The idea is that they go through the stages at the same time. They hit similar problems. For example, first chapters have similar issues when they’re in a generative phase, and I have enough experience to lead students through those stages. But it also is good to be reminded, “This is what everybody’s first draft looks like.” Teaching keeps me from getting discouraged in my own work.

Speaking of students, I recently heard you speak on a panel with the writer Allegra Hyde.

Oh, she’s so good.

She’s so good! She’s had marvelous success over the past couple of years, and she happens to be a former student of yours. I’m wondering how it feels to watch a former student achieve in that way.

It’s always exciting to see students go on to succeed. The best students, of course, just keep getting better after grad school. I think it is reasonably hard to guess who those students will be, though I’m not surprised that Allegra turned out to be one of those people—she was publishing extraordinarily well as a grad student, and it was sort of obvious that she was on the path. I do think there is a sort of Venn diagram of ambition and drive and raw talent, and you just have to make that whole thing come together.

The early career’s an exciting place. They’re really more interesting at the beginning than they are in the middle! The middle is actually the hardest part. Most people who want to publish a book can eventually, as long as they have a certain baseline of talents and work at a certain level. I really do believe that. I think a lot of people have the talent to write a book, but I think fewer people have the long-term persistence to publish, like, five books, which is half marketplace stuff and half—well, they’re hard. You finish a book and you’re like, “Am I going to do this again?” I’ve had some of those checks in my own career, which has gone as well as I’d wanted it to, where I’m just not sure if I have it in me to do it again, because it is so much.

It interests me to hear you say that, because I notice that you tweet a lot about long-distance running. I saw a tweet of yours a few months ago that was like, “Heading to the airport, just ran 20 miles,” and I was like, “What?!” I would just never, ever do that. You’re clearly someone who is really accustomed to endurance, and I’m curious how you became that way both on and off the page.

I’m hard to discourage, so maybe that’s part of it. I don’t know that I feel overwhelmingly confident, but I do believe that effort over time adds up. Every novel is just a certain amount of effort expressed over a certain amount of time. I didn’t become a runner until my mid-thirties, but it does feel fairly similar in mindset to writing books.

I think the writing is the part you can control, and running is the same way. There’s a book on ultra-running called Relentless Forward Progress, and that’s all you have to do: continue to move forward at pace for a long time, and you can run any race. I think there’s something similar in the writing light. It’s not about who writes a book fast. It’s not about who publishes first. You just continue forward in your practice over time. That seems to me to be the real goal in my own work.

What is your writing schedule like during the teaching semester? Are you the kind who packs in more writing time during the summer and winter breaks, or do you try to keep a fairly steady pace throughout the year?

It depends. Ideally, I write from breakfast to lunch, five days a week. Even during the semester, I do that a lot. I’ve been lucky to teach in the afternoons and evenings and do a lot of my other work there. And so I do, more often than not, have that time, though that doesn’t mean it doesn’t always get lost to catching up or something else.

When I’m drafting, I think I can only productively draft two or three hours a day anyway. That’s the farthest I can see to the book. My brain gets sort of sloppy after that. I’ve had some experience at residencies and stuff where I can write really long days, but that requires all of the rest of life to be cleared out of the way. In the summer, I might do a little more, but not a lot. I just read more and things like that.

At the end of a draft, and certainly in deep revision, I work really long hours. That’s the phase where I need to be able to see the whole book. In late-stage revision, I can work eight to 12 hours spread over different parts during the day, but only for a couple of weeks. That’s the phase where I’m most like a writer in a movie. I look a little haggard. I’m not fun to talk to. I’m drinking and eating too much. I don’t want to do that all the time.

Mostly it’s a couple hours a day, and then I do everything else. That way, I don’t spend the rest of my day going, “I wish I was writing.” I don’t resent being in the classroom. I don’t resent being with my students or doing errands around the house or doing other things. I don’t need all day to write, but I do need my time. And when I’m not getting that time, I feel pretty frustrated. But it doesn’t have to be eight hours a day. And I don’t even think that would be useful most of the time.

Aside from that privileging of creative time, what advice do you have for artists who help fellow artists? How can they keep their own projects afloat while helping others with their work?

I think you have to be sure that you’re doing what you want to do, and you have to be willing to say no. One of my own guides for that is imagining when it comes time to do the thing that I’m being asked to do and asking myself, “Will I resent doing this? Would I rather be writing? Would I rather be doing something else?” I think I’m a little wiser about knowing which opportunities are okay to let somebody else do. It’s easy to fill your life with service to other people, and I do a fair bit of that, but I try to do it in a way that helps me finish what I want to do.

That’s always an ongoing balance, and I get it wrong, of course, all the time.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Hurley Winkler.

The center, officially named His Holiness the Great 14th Dalai Lama Library and Learning Center, opened on Friday, Sept. 8. It includes a digital audio archive with 40,000 hours of the Dalai Lama’s teachings, about 4,000 books with translations of ancient texts on the evolution of Buddhist thought, and Buddhist artifacts from India and Tibet. 

“It’s been more than 60 years since His Holiness the Dalai Lama arrived in exile and he has contributed immensely in promoting the basic human values of compassion, forgiveness and tolerance to this world,” said Ven. Thamthog Rinpoche, abbot of the Namgyal Monastery in Dharamsala, India, who attended the inauguration. 

“So, this learning center will serve across all ages, faiths, and education levels to understand His Holiness’s teachings on secular ethics and human values.”

The center’s opening comes at a time of intensified suppression of Tibetan Buddhism, culture and language by Chinese authorities, who view them as a threat and are trying to erode Tibetans’ beliefs and way of life. 

Authorities have restricted Tibetans’ access to religious sites, banned religious gatherings, destroyed Buddhist places and symbols, and subjected monks and nuns to political reeducation, according to the 2023 annual report of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom.

The Namgyal Monastery Institute of Buddhist Studies, a Tibetan Buddhist monastery near Ithaca College, hosted the opening ceremony. Founded in 1992, the institute serves as the North American seat of the personal monastery of the Dalai Lama and offers Westerners the opportunity to study authentic Tibetan Buddhism in a monastic setting.

The institute chose Ithaca, about 282 kilometers (175 miles) northwest of New York City and where Cornell University is located, in 2016 as the location of the new center, approved by the Dalai Lama.

'Peacemaking center'

Ven. Tenzin Choesang, president of the Namgyal Monastery in Ithaca, said the learning center will be a physical space and virtual repository of all the works of the current and previous Dalai Lamas. 

“It will also offer free and low-cost classes, meditations, and talks,” he said. 

The Dalai Lama, who resides in exile in Dharamsala, did not attend the opening ceremony but sent a recorded message.

“Buddhism is not just a matter of routinely reciting prayers,” he said. “It has to do with using intelligence and wisdom to bring about a transformation in the way we think based on the three types of understanding drawn from study of scriptures, that conviction comes about through reflecting on the meaning of what you have learned and experienced of that gained through meditation.”

HOLT Architects of upstate New York designed the two-story, 9,230-square-foot library and learning center. Its exterior colors of red, yellow and white are reminiscent of the colors of Potala Palace, the traditional winter home of the Dalai Lama since the 7th century and a symbol of Tibetan Buddhism.

“We started working on this in 2016 and it has been a long and interesting process,” Steve Hugo, principal architect and the company’s vice president told RFA. 

“I am overwhelmed, and I think the building was always a combination of reflecting Tibetan culture, but also recognizing that it was built in the United States.” 

Speaking at the opening ceremony, donor Diane Brandenburg said she and her late husband first met the Dalai Lama in California in 2009 and that he “turned our lives around in so many ways.” 

“His Holiness, the 14th Dalai Lama, has taken a huge step to create this sacred space, a meditation and peacemaking center, a teaching center for anyone who wants to come and study to learn about Buddhism and other religions,” she said. 

Translated by Tenzin Dickyi for RFA Tibet. Edited by Roseanne Gerin and Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Tenzin Dickyi for RFA Tibet.

The center, officially named His Holiness the Great 14th Dalai Lama Library and Learning Center, opened on Friday, Sept. 8. It includes 40,000 hours of the Dalai Lama’s teachings, about 4,000 books with translations of ancient texts on the evolution of Buddhist thought, and Buddhist artifacts from India and Tibet.

“It’s been more than 60 years since His Holiness the Dalai Lama arrived in exile and he has contributed immensely in promoting the basic human values of compassion, forgiveness and tolerance to this world,” said Ven. Thamthog Rinpoche, abbot of the Namgyal Monastery in Dharamsala, India, who attended the inauguration. 

“So, this learning center will serve across all ages, faiths, and education levels to understand His Holiness’s teachings on secular ethics and human values.”

The center’s opening comes at a time of intensified suppression of Tibetan Buddhism, culture and language by Chinese authorities, who view them as a threat and are trying to erode Tibetans’ beliefs and way of life. 

Authorities have restricted Tibetans’ access to religious sites, banned religious gatherings, destroyed Buddhist places and symbols, and subjected monks and nuns to political reeducation, according to the 2023 annual report of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom.

The Namgyal Monastery Institute of Buddhist Studies, a Tibetan Buddhist monastery near Ithaca College, hosted the opening ceremony. Founded in 1992, the institute serves as the North American seat of the personal monastery of the Dalai Lama and offers Westerners the opportunity to study authentic Tibetan Buddhism in a monastic setting.

The institute chose Ithaca, about 280 kilometers (175 miles) northwest of New York City and where Cornell University is located, in 2016 as the location of the new center, approved by the Dalai Lama.

Ven. Tenzin Choesang, president of the Namgyal Monastery in Ithaca, said the learning center will be a physical space and virtual repository of all the works of the current and previous Dalai Lamas. 

“It will also offer free and low-cost classes, meditations, and talks,” he said. 

The Dalai Lama, who resides in exile in Dharamsala, India, did not attend the opening ceremony but sent a recorded message.

“Buddhism is not just a matter of routinely reciting prayers,” he said. “It has to do with using intelligence and wisdom to bring about a transformation in the way we think based on the three types of understanding drawn from study of scriptures, that conviction comes about through reflecting on the meaning of what you have learned and experienced of that gained through meditation.”

HOLT Architects of upstate New York designed the two-story, 9,230-square-foot library and learning center. Its exterior colors of red, yellow and white are reminiscent of the colors of Potala Palace, the traditional winter home of the Dalai Lama since the 7th century and a symbol of Tibetan Buddhism.

“We started working on this in 2016 and it has been a long and interesting process,” Steve Hugo, principal architect and the company’s vice president told RFA. 

“I am overwhelmed, and I think the building was always a combination of reflecting Tibetan culture, but also recognizing that it was built in the United States.” 

Speaking at the opening ceremony, donor Diane Brandenburg said she and her late husband first met the Dalai Lama in California in 2009 and that he “turned our lives around in so many ways.” 

“His Holiness, the 14th Dalai Lama, has taken a huge step to create this sacred space, a meditation and peacemaking center, a teaching center for anyone who wants to come and study to learn about Buddhism and other religions,” she said. 

Translated by Tenzin Dickyi for RFA Tibet. Edited by Roseanne Gerin and Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Tenzin Dickyi for RFA Tibet.

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The scene outside Fairfield Court Elementary School in Richmond, Virginia, at 7:40 last Thursday morning was so festive that one might have assumed it was the first day of school. Upbeat music blared from a speaker on the sidewalk. Sgt. Edward R. Gore II, the school’s “climate and culture specialist,” the district’s term for its school resource officers, opened his arms to the kindergartners and first graders who came running toward him, as well as to some who wavered. Also on hand to greet children and parents was the principal, Angela Wright.

But in fact, the first day of school was receding in the distance: Fairfield Court was one of two local schools that had started the year on July 24, as part of a hotly contested trial: adding 20 days to the customary 180, to help make up ground lost after Richmond kept schools closed to in-person learning for 18 months during the pandemic. Families had only six weeks of summer vacation — closer to the European norm than the American one — before kids returned, and Wright and her staff were doing everything they could to make early-August school seem welcoming. Thus, the daily embraces and music, with a track list chosen by Gore.

“It brings a smile to put on their face every morning,” he said. “I’m out here every day.”

Beneath the good cheer of the greetings were weighty implications. The results of the 200-day academic years at Fairfield and Cardinal elementary schools will help determine whether Richmond adopts a similar approach at more schools across the 22,000-student district. For nearly three years, district leaders have been proposing to add days to the school calendar for some or all students or keep the same number of days but with a shorter summer break, to reduce what educators call “summer slide.” But, as ProPublica recently reported, that plan ran into stiff resistance from some school board members, teachers and parents. In the end, only two of the district’s 50-odd schools adopted the extended calendar for the coming year.

The pilot is being watched more widely too, as one of the highest-profile examples nationwide of schools taking aggressive action to address the unprecedented declines in student achievement since the pandemic’s onset.

The first big test has been simply seeing whether students show up. To qualify for the pilot, Fairfield Court, which has 217 students this year, had to demonstrate backing from its families, who are almost entirely African American and many of whom live in an adjacent public housing development. But a survey was one thing, warned skeptics of the proposal; getting kids to come to school in midsummer was quite another.

The turnout lagged initially, with about 80% attendance in the first week, below Fairfield Court’s average rate of 91% last year. The school’s “attendance engagement team” made repeated calls and even some home visits to absent students, trying to discern why they were out. In some cases, it was simply a matter of lacking money for new clothes or a haircut. With these targeted efforts, which included Wright herself offering to pick up kids whose parents weren’t able to walk them to school, they lifted the rate to an average of 87% by last week. “We’re down to the ones that aren’t here, we know exactly why they aren’t here,” Wright said.

The other school in the pilot project, Cardinal Elementary, which is three times larger than Fairfield Court and has a heavily Latino population, had strong attendance from the very start, 95% in the first week of the pilot, according to district data.

Not that everyone at Fairfield Court had needed cajoling. Several parents said their kids had been eager to return, a judgment buttressed by the alacrity with which the kids ran toward the music and into the building, where free breakfast awaited all. “They like going to school,” said Kay Brown, after her sons, a first grader and kindergartner, had dashed in. “Some kids give their parents a hard time. My kids love it.”

Renarda Bacon’s daughter, who is in third grade, had spent most of her summer break at a day care program, but Bacon was glad to see her back at Fairfield Court, where she would be getting more actual instruction. “I’m all about progressing,” she said. “If they’re going to get in a couple more days of learning, it’s not going to hurt them.”

Ashley Martin had driven her own two kids, a third grader and kindergartner, as well as three others from the neighborhood before heading to her job in a call center. She had been a staunch supporter of an extended school year from the get-go, she said, after seeing the news about Richmond’s plunging test scores during the past two years. She also thought that adding instructional time could help reduce the city’s high levels of youth violence. (Last year, a 17-­year-old boy was fatally shot and found in a garbage can in the adjacent housing development, and the school year ended two days early in June after a graduating senior and his father were shot and killed outside one high school’s commencement ceremony.)

“I definitely love this program,” Martin said. “They should keep it, and hopefully the school board expands it, so we can get these kids back on track.”

Inside school, veteran teacher Philip Canady started the day with math lessons for a dozen fifth grade boys. (This year, for the first time, the school had decided to separate fifth graders by sex, thinking it might improve outcomes.) Canady, regal-looking with a trim gray beard and wooden bowtie, moved back and forth among the desks, coaxing the boys through worksheets on identifying place value in numbers ranging to the millions.

“How many hundreds in that number?” he asked one boy. “Five? OK, put five in the hundreds column. How many tens do I have? OK, add two tens. No, no, that’s not tens. Put a two there. How many ones do I have? Four ones. Now I want you to create 2,034 for me. Do you have any hundreds? No. So what are you going to put there? Zero. You got it.”

And so on, on and on around the room, with only a few interruptions to address some minor squabbling at one table. If any calming was needed, a YouTube video waited on the big computer screen at the front of the room: “3 Hours of Amazing Nature Scenery and Relaxing Music for Stress Relief.” Nearby, some small fish swam in a tank.

For this extra month in the classroom, Canady and his fellow teachers were receiving an extra month of salary — roughly 10% of the usual annual sum — plus a $10,000 incentive and the chance at an additional $5,000 if the school met certain “accelerated learning goals” set by its leadership team. The district was paying for this, a total of a couple million dollars between the two schools, out of its slice of the $190 billion in pandemic recovery funds that the federal government has sent schools since 2020. (District Superintendent Jason Kamras has said that if the district chooses to expand the initiative, it could apply for special state funding for innovative programs or other outside funding.)

To qualify for the pilot, Fairfield Court also had to show support for it among its staff; only two employees had opposed it and transferred to other schools. In a room across from Canady’s, the operational base of the school’s academic dean and the instructional leaders for math and reading, the three educators said that they were liking the pilot. It had meant adjusting their vacation plans, but they had made good use of their five weeks off (faculty had started school a week before the kids, for professional development and classroom preparation), including going to a conference in Las Vegas with some R&R attached. And now, they were getting the satisfaction of seeing students get a head start on the year.

“I know there were a lot of naysayers, but I see a lot of happy children every morning,” said the academic dean, Nsombi Morrison.

It was time for one of the trio’s regular check-ins with the teachers for each grade level, this time with the third grade team. The three teachers came in, and together the six women reviewed tables with each student’s progress toward grade-level metrics in math and reading, and discussed upcoming assessments to gauge whether the school was reaching the goals it had set for the extra month. The educators were so fully into the stride of the year’s instructional march it was hard to believe that nearly all of the district’s other schools remained closed, with some 21,000 students not returning until Aug. 21.

Back in the principal’s office, Wright said she was keenly aware of the responsibility the school bore in showing the rest of the district that the extra time can make a difference. She had recently attended a meeting with other principals, she said, and her message to them had been this: “My whole goal is for this to run so effectively and to see that data increase so much that when two or three schools come on board next year, that here’s a blueprint. Here’s what you need to do to make it.”

She added: “I would love to hear, OK, this has now gone so well at these two schools, we’re bringing in four more schools next year.”

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Alec MacGillis.

With sawdust and the smell of fresh resin filling the air, I turned toward another fir and paused, wishing I knew a ritual to make its death easier. Within minutes, bits and pieces of seven trees lay strewn around me. I separated limbs from trunks and stacked them, hoping that orderly piles of firewood might alleviate my guilt.

I live in coastal Sonoma County, California, where Douglas firs grow faster than most other native trees, eventually shading oaks from sun and often killing them. The trees near my cabin are valley oaks, the largest of American oaks, found only in California. Each of them can live up to 600 years and will drop as many as 3 million acorns during its lifetime, making valley oaks the most important source of food and shelter for wildlife. I wanted to protect these ecological linchpins, but I also picked up that chainsaw three years ago to repay a childhood debt.

I love all trees, but I’m especially moved by oaks. One of my earliest memories is of hiding in the roots of a particularly majestic one as my parents fought and neighbors called the police. I remember its large, sturdy trunk protecting me from the wind, rain, and fear of violence. That tree still stands in southeastern Latvia, where I spent most of my life until my mother and I moved to San Francisco in 1994.

Eight years ago, I returned to my rural roots and found a home in the coastal range 70 miles north of San Francisco, on the unceded land of the Kashia Pomo people. The few remaining oaks here are surrounded by a sea of Douglas firs stretching to the Pacific Ocean.  

For over a century, the American environmental movement has been animated by an intuitive and simple idea: Protecting trees means leaving forests alone. This stance — championed by men like John Muir and based on their belief that any alteration, including thinning or intentional burning, of wilderness harms it — was once key to stopping timber companies from wiping out old-growth forests entirely. And it was an approach that I embraced; for most of my life, I was categorically opposed to felling trees. 

But that ethos created an unintended outcome: An expanding body of research shows that the West’s overgrown forests are fueling unnaturally severe wildfires that can cause irreparable ecological damage and massive economic loss. Living in rural areas during this period of catastrophic fires driven in no small part by climate change has forced many people — myself included — to look at tree cutting, and forests, differently. 

My perspective began to shift in August 2020 when I attended a class led by Clint McKay, the Indigenous education coordinator at Pepperwood Preserve, a research station in eastern Sonoma County on the traditional homeland of the Wappo people. That summer, the region reached a record 115 degrees Fahrenheit, and two devastating wildfires, which together killed six people and destroyed 1,491 homes, came within a few miles of my home. I joined McKay’s popular Indigenous forest stewardship class expecting to master the use of prescribed burns to defend the forest. Instead, he spent much of our time explaining why people must become more comfortable with cutting down some trees — a necessary intervention in many dense forests before beneficial fires can be reintroduced safely.

The Indigenous people of what is now California have always used fire and thinning to promote mosaics of large trees interspersed with shrubs and grasses. They also developed some of the most complex and sophisticated land stewardship practices that increased the density of rich crops of nuts, seeds, vegetables, and fruits — on a scale that is “unimaginable today,” writes Enrique Salmon, the author of Iwígara: American Indian Ethnobotanical Traditions and Science. This array of species and surfaces reduces fire intensity and promotes biodiversity. Salmon, who is Rarámuri and leads the American Indian Studies Program at California State University, East Bay, calls these practices “land gardening.”

But beginning in the early 19th century, as colonists settled the region, the Wappo were forced from their ancestral lands, and the intentional fires they and other Indigenous people used to tend forests were outlawed. The U.S. Forest Service was founded in 1905 with fire suppression as a key policy. Thirty years later, it tightened that approach, striving to extinguish all fires by 10 a.m. the next day, fundamentally changing the composition of the forests across the West. 

Before European settlers arrived, the land Pepperwood now stewards sustained around 100 trees of varying sizes and species per acre. Today, that same acre supports 1,000 smaller trees that are less fire-resistant and starved for nutrients, water, and sunshine. Most scientists increasingly lament the overcrowding found throughout Western forests and call for ecological thinning — the selective cutting of smaller trees and undergrowth — typically followed by intentional fires to reduce the fuel load and recycle nutrients. 

Since 2014, Pepperwood, which is not an Indigenous organization, has worked under the guidance of a Native advisory council, chaired by McKay, who is Wappo, Pomo, and Wintun, to implement such practices. The approach proved itself when the 2017 Tubbs Fire burned 95 percent of the preserve and the 2019 Kincade Fire scorched 60 percent. In the areas that had been thinned and prescriptively burned, few large trees died, and most wildlife soon returned and thrived. Since then, Pepperwood has provided a model of how combining science with local Indigenous research, knowledge, and practices can restore forest health and resiliency while mitigating the growing frequency and severity of fires. 

The benefits of thinning coupled with intentional burns are widely accepted in the scientific community for helping to maintain the health and resiliency of Western forests. But a small group of vocal environmentalists and researchers argue that this approach is misguided, that forests must be left largely untouched. These critics argue that thinning is a ploy to increase commercial logging and that severe wildfires are critical for forest health and biodiversity. 

Their opposition comes even as warmer, drier weather contributes to larger, faster, and hotter fires. Fourteen of California’s 20 largest conflagrations on record occurred in the last decade, burning some 5.3 million acres, destroying 11,393 structures, and killing 35 people. Suppression costs continue breaking records, hitting $1.2 billion in 2021 alone. Modern megafires in the West are eight times more severe than those that burned when Indigenous people stewarded the land, often killing entire stands of healthy trees and making regeneration difficult. Researchers fear that over the next two decades, severe wildfires could turn huge swaths of forests into scrubland and destroy critical habitat.

The implications extend nationwide. Between 2001 and 2019, the U.S. ranked third globally in forest cover lost to fires. Wildfires now account for nearly half of the fine-particle pollution in the West. All that smoke can shroud distant places like Boston and New York, and it sends ever more people to hospitals with cardiac issues and asthma attacks. Catastrophic Western fires increasingly contribute to extreme storms and hail as far east as Nebraska. 

The Golden State highlights a challenge facing states throughout the West. The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, or Cal Fire, estimates that roughly 15 million forested acres need restoration — mostly thinning and burning — but state and federal government agencies treat at most 325,000 acres each year. 

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That slow progress follows unprecedented government investment in wildfire resilience. The reasons are complex, but the impediment most frequently mentioned by fire and forest researchers, tribal leaders, park managers, prescribed-fire practitioners, and others is public opinion. While the support for beneficial fires has grown significantly in the past two years, many people still resist them or the smoke they generate. Others staunchly oppose tree cutting, or fear being vilified by those who do. Until that changes, these experts see little chance of making headway on an escalating problem.

“The view of forests as primeval, untouched nature still resonates strongly among the conservation-minded general public,” said Cristina Eisenberg, who is of mixed Rarámuri and Western Apache heritage and works as the associate dean of inclusive excellence and director of tribal initiatives at Oregon State University College of Forestry. “As a result, many people don’t trust Indigenous forest stewardship yet.” 

It’s spring at Pepperwood Preserve, and the lush grasslands burst with color: golden poppies, cream buttercups, purple lupins. A group of 28 of us — a preschool teacher, several park managers, two musicians, a few retired couples — are climbing a narrow footpath. The gentle midmorning sun warms us as we follow McKay toward a ridge. 

Considerate, composed, and generous with his knowledge of Wappo culture, McKay enjoys making frequent stops to show us plants important to his people and the health of the forest — soap root, Indian potato, and wild strawberries. Two of McKay’s relatives have joined him today, which seems to inspire lighthearted jokes about his family. Raised in a traditional Wappo and Pomo household, McKay spent much of his childhood gathering acorns, redbud, and willow for basket-weaving. The Indigenous people of this area are renowned for the artistry of their baskets, and McKay’s family includes two cultural icons: Works by his late aunts Mabel McKay and Laura Fish Somersal appear in museums and galleries around the world. 

While growing up, every trip to the forest offered McKay a lesson in where each plant loved to live, what it needed to thrive, and how humans could read them to know if the land was out of balance. Plants and animals were considered kin and teachers. Observation of forests taught Wappo people the importance of open space and of viewing trees in terms of their needs and role sustaining humans, animals, and other plants. 

For at least 10,000 years before Europeans arrived, the Indigenous peoples of what is now California benefited from and shaped a landscape that teemed with an incredible array of flora and fauna. As authors Otis Parrish and Kent G. Ligthfoot described in California Indians and Their Environment, their stewardship increased the diversity of plants and wildlife habitats, and it was this abundance that supported one of the most densely populated and culturally diverse areas in the world. Before colonization, about one-third of all Native peoples of what became the United States lived in the Golden State area, where they gardened forests spanning immense landscapes. 

Small, frequent, and intentional fires were the main practice they used to promote biodiversity and reduce the severity of fires. In some forests, they also cut Douglas firs to increase the number of oaks and madrones that provided food and shelter for wildlife, cultural resources, and building materials. Weeding, tilling, and irrigating landscapes promoted edible grasses, herbaceous plants, and native vegetables and fruit. 

As we reach the ridgeline, McKay has us survey a vast landscape with densely packed spears of blackened Douglas firs. Although the forest was thriving before the fires in 2017 and 2019, we see few signs of regeneration.  

McKay then leads us to an oak woodland that had been thinned and burned before the fires. First, a crew with chainsaws cut the firs growing through the canopies of oaks. Brush and smaller trees were removed to prevent a blaze from reaching the crowns of mature trees. Then another team built hundreds of small “burn piles” and set them alight, clearing the slash. Today, lush, green clumps of black and coast live oaks and bay laurel dot verdant meadows. It is hard to see any sign of those past wildfires. 

Oaks don’t burn as hot as firs, they cause less destruction of neighboring plants, and they provide crucial protection for animals and birds during conflagrations, says McKay, who researches black oaks and has contributed to studies about them. As we take in distant peaks and silver rock outcroppings dotted with oaks and bay laurels, someone asks, “Was every acre here managed when the Wappo people lived on this land?”

McKay pauses before answering. “We cared for every part of this forest, but living with the land is different than managing it,” he says. “I don’t believe we have the right to control nature. We work with it from a place of responsibility, respect, and reciprocity. This means that every time we do something in the forest, we ask, ‘What is in the best interest of animals, plants, soil, water, air, and humans?’ Humans are in that circle, but we are just one of the spokes in the wheel.”

When humans begin to view themselves as part of the land, he says, they can learn how to become thoughtful participants in nature, share obligations, and express their gratitude by tending landscapes for the benefit of all species. 

When the U.S. seized control of what is now California in 1850, the federal government signed 18 treaties in which tribes ceded about 90 percent of the land in return for 7.5 million acres of reservations. The U.S. Senate, at the request of state officials, rejected those agreements without informing the tribes, leaving them without land of their own. That same year, California legislators passed a bill that allowed the enslavement of Indigenous children and indentured servitude of adults, and banned intentional fires. The new government then funded militias to remove Native people from their traditional lands and killed thousands of people — something Governor Gavin Newsom called genocide and formally apologized for in 2019.

At the beginning of Euro-American contact, between 200,000 to 300,000 Indigenous people lived in what became the Golden State. By 1870, that number — driven by forced removal, violence, and disease — dropped to 12,000. As immigrants flooded the West Coast, many often described the depopulated forests they found as parks, but as researcher M. Kat Anderson notes in Tending the Wild: Native American Knowledge and the Management of California’s Natural Resources, settlers assumed California’s rich biodiversity was born of untouched wilderness, not Indigenous effort. They also believed that they had a God-given right to profit from those resources, which they viewed as limitless.

During the Gold Rush, trees became extremely valuable as construction materials and fuel. By 1900, 40 percent of California’s 31 million acres of old-growth forest had been logged in what historian Hank Johnston called “the greatest orgy of destructive lumbering in the history of the world.” 

Into this destruction stepped John Muir. 

Raised in a devout Christian family, Muir grew up with a strict father who forbade all distractions from Bible studies. He found refuge in nature, which sparked an interest in geology and botany. But it was while hiking in the Sierra Nevadas that he first saw “sparks of the Divine soul” in its trees and rocks. Muir, who co-founded the Sierra Club in 1892, spent the rest of his life trying to bring city dwellers closer to the presence of the deity he perceived in the mountains and forests. “God never made an ugly landscape,” he wrote in 1897. “All that the sun shines on is beautiful, so long as it is wild.” 

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More than anyone else, Muir galvanized public support for the protection of nature against ecological degradation, but he didn’t believe that Indigenous people and their stewardship had a place in what he saw as pure wilderness. He supported the removal of the Miwok from their homelands in what became Yosemite National Park, and the government pursued a century-long policy of pushing them out of the area. Like other well-known environmentalists of his day, including Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, Muir believed that wildlands existed to help “tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people” suffering from “the vice of over-industry and the deadly apathy of luxury.” He promoted the idea, still resonant today, of nature as a refuge separate from human civilization.

Around the time that Muir was hiking and preaching the gospel of untouched wilderness, burgeoning Midwestern naturalist Aldo Leopold was getting hunting lessons from his father. In 1909, Leopold earned a forestry degree from Yale University, which launched the nation’s first graduate school focusing on the subject. Initially he approached forests as human-centered projects: sustainable tree farms grown for the benefit of people and cattle. Over time, he changed his mind. Co-founding the scientific ecology movement and, in 1935, the Wilderness Society, he became a leading environmentalist — the “most radical” in the estimation of conservation activist and novelist Wendell Berry. 

A lifelong outdoorsman and hunter, and later the owner of a small farm, Leopold shared little in common with Muir. While he advocated for the creation of parks and protection of sensitive habitats, he didn’t view preserving the land and using plants and animals sustainably as mutually exclusive. Instead, he believed the land was improved by ethical and sustainable management.

Leopold did not believe that the environmental movement should prioritize the preservation of celebrity trees, parks with epic views, or charismatic animals. Rather, he argued that humans must promote the health of the land everywhere, including nature in urban centers and degraded farms — and that the requirements of doing so were specific to each place. “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community,” he wrote. “It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”

Years later, his successor, restoration ecologist William Jordan, argued that treating wildlands as exotic trophies or using nature solely for extraction of resources are essentially different sides of the same coin: Both worldviews promote alienation from nature. And both continue to shape modern environmentalism and forest management tactics, often to the detriment of the very land they are meant to protect.

The Western U.S. is a home to some of the most beautiful landscapes on earth, but California’s iconic trees — among the world’s tallest, largest, and oldest — in particular have long inspired passionate devotion. It’s no surprise that the Golden State has been the epicenter of the American environmental movement. 

The idea behind Earth Day originated in California in 1969. It helped launch the second wave of the environmental movement, a response to the degradation of nature wrought by the post-war boom. Between 1945 and 1960, timber harvests in the national forests of the Pacific Northwest more than doubled to 5 billion board feet as the U.S. Forest Service allowed the clear-cutting or razing of entire stands of trees, often ancient redwoods, to accommodate rapid suburban growth. 

As pictures of barren land proliferated, environmental activists filed lawsuits that effectively stopped large-scale clear-cutting and helped people see forests as sources of biological diversity, not warehouses of lumber. In tandem with these changes, the federal government enacted a variety of historic bills to protect the environment, and California passed the Forest Practice Act of 1973, which to this day is recognized as the most comprehensive forestry regulation in the country. 

Thanks to this activism and regulation, today, nearly 33 million acres — about a third of California — remains forested. All that land is home to nearly one-third of the plant and animal species in America, making it one of 34 global biodiversity hotspots in the world. The Golden State remains a national leader in conservation, but climate change and increasingly severe droughts present unprecedented challenges. 

“About 80 percent of bishop pines are either dead or dying here,” Matt Greene, a forester who works with the Kashia Band of Pomo Indians of the Stewarts Point Rancheria, state parks, and private landowners in Sonoma County, told me while pointing toward a coastal ridge blanketed in cinnamon-brown canopies. These pines are among the hardiest of trees, but the worst drought in 12 centuries coupled with 100 years of aggressive fire suppression made this forest vulnerable to an unprecedented onslaught of pests and diseases. As we drive east, Greene shows me another forest in which around 90 percent of tanoaks, a culturally important tree for the Kashia Pomo people, have died in the past decade from sudden oak disease. 

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All this wood, often left standing or where it falls, helps create high-severity fire patches. Such areas, in which a conflagration kills 75 to 100 percent of the trees, are larger and occur more frequently than at any time in recorded history. Some level of fire intensity is essential to maintain biodiversity, but prior to European settlement, such patches typically covered a few acres. Today, they can range from hundreds to thousands of acres, creating an alarming impediment to the ability of conifer trees to regenerate.

When the Wappo and other Indigenous peoples tended the forests, their mosaics of trees, shrubs, and grasslands promoted biodiversity and “pyrodiversity” — fires with greater variation in unburned and low-, moderate, and high-intensity areas. A wildfire traveling through patches of mixed vegetation tends to be less severe, because openings in the landscape create areas with less fuel. In some woodlands, Indigenous people “weeded” fir seedlings and saplings by hand to prevent their encroachment on oaks or grasslands, as the ethnobiologist M. Kat Anderson has documented. 

I remember the day I read about this in 2021, because that summer, I began to feel a change of heart. Like many Californians, I’d long believed that planting and protecting trees was the only way to save them, and the sight of anyone with a chainsaw created feelings of intense judgment. But the image of humans meticulously tending these forests long before Europeans arrived, and the reality of entire stands of dead Douglas firs and tan oaks, helped me accept that my categorical beliefs were contributing to this damage; so too was my view of the lush, mostly homogenous blankets of Douglas firs surrounding my home as a “natural” forest.  

Through the early and mid-20th century, timber companies and the U.S. Forest Service managed many Western forests like farms growing single crops. Here in coastal Sonoma County, loggers first took out the largest and most fire-resilient redwoods and Douglas firs. As Indigenous people were forced from their lands and fires were aggressively suppressed, many forests gradually converted to dense stands of fir. Less economically valued varieties, such as tanoaks, were often killed. The vast tracts of Douglas firs covering much of coastal Sonoma are largely the result of these industrial methods and fire suppression. While the species vary with different ecosystems, such tactics were the norm across the West.

When fire and forest researchers talk about forest restoration, or ecological tree thinning, they’re typically describing the need to embrace selective cutting coupled with prescriptive burning that results in larger, healthier trees and forests more resistant to drought and climate change. A large body of research from at least two decades, along with evidence from recent megafires, shows that this approach, implemented thoughtfully, reduces the severity of fires and the pollution they produce, and protects mature trees.

After more than a century of mismanagement, and given the challenges of climate change, forest restoration for wildfire resilience presents an unprecedented and complex task that requires diverse tools and tactics tailored to each site. A growing body of research shows that the most biodiverse and resilient forests are often located on protected Indigenous lands where people make a sustainable living from it. Providing funding, legal support, and more rights to Indigenous communities to manage their land is key to climate conservation goals. McKay believes that collaborative stewardship through Native advisory councils, created with the right intentions, can serve as a meaningful step in that process.

In recent years, other nonprofits, public agencies, and private individuals have been finding ways to restore Indigenous ownership in other innovative ways: In 2016, a private family in coastal Sonoma — with the support of the county and philanthropic dollars — worked with the Kashia Band of Pomo Indians of the Stewarts Point Rancheria to return 688 acres to the tribe.

Meanwhile, many studies that examine the success of specific wildfire-resilience practices in forests managed by diverse public and private agencies show that the most efficient and ecologically beneficial approaches typically involve at least some thinning or brush removal, followed by prescriptive or Indigenous burning. Effectively managed wildfires, mostly in remote forests, also can reduce the size and severity of future conflagrations while promoting biodiversity. 

At this time, prescribed fires face many barriers in the West, including obtaining the necessary permits, the fear of liability and public backlash should something go wrong, too few people to do the job, and the small window of optimal weather conditions for safe burning. Given these obstacles, many public and private land managers, especially near urban areas, opt to thin without burning, typically followed by chipping or mastication (reducing leftover slash into small bits). While some studies show that such methods alone can increase wildfire resiliency, most research and field experience indicates that thinning coupled with beneficial fires is the most effective. But thinning without fire rarely brings additional ecological benefits, such as regeneration of fire-resilient trees and plants and promoting soil health.

While commercial logging of large trees alone does not lead to wildfire resiliency, in some forests ecological thinning can include that as one way of reducing density, promoting the diversity of species, or creating fuel breaks that allow for safe prescribed or cultural burns, said Scott Stephens. He is the principal investigator of the UC-Berkeley Blodgett Forest Research Station, which led a two-decade study evaluating various forest treatments. Stephens told me that fire, wildlife, and soil ecologists at Blodgett sometimes recommended removing large white fir trees. This, researchers found, resulted in faster growth, vigor, and diversity among the remaining trees. It also improved pyrodiversity and resilience against bark beetles. The revenue from saleable logs helped offset restoration costs. 

But some environmentalists consider thinning a ploy to commercially log forests. One of the most vocal opponents is Chad Hanson, director of the John Muir Project. Hanson, who holds a doctorate in forest ecology from University of California, Davis, and his wife, Rachel Fazio, an attorney and co-lead of the John Muir Project, have filed dozens of suits against the U.S. Forest Service to block various plans to remove trees deemed a fire hazard. 

In his research and articles, Hanson and his colleagues argue that the density of historical forests varied, and that high-severity wildfires do not harm forests but rather promote biodiversity and should be allowed to burn with minimal intervention. He fiercely opposes any tree removal beyond 100 feet of buildings and evacuation routes. Hanson argues that thinning removes a natural wind barrier to fire, and can increase its speed and intensity. He concedes that land managers should occasionally use prescribed or cultural fires, but insists the preferred approach is to manage wildfires. “Fire alone is what we need,” Hanson told me. “Thinning is not needed. … And you don’t have to remove any trees before you do a prescribed fire.”

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Most fire ecologists and practitioners disagree and believe removing small trees and brush, especially near residential areas, is essential to protect mature trees or reduce the risk of fires jumping over control lines. In recent years, in a rare effort within the scientific community, dozens of them came together to publish a series of rebuttals to efforts by Hanson and others who they believe are advancing “agenda-driven science.” 

Susan Prichard, a fire ecologist at the University of Washington who has taken a leading role in the campaign, told me the benefits of ecological thinning coupled with prescribed burning are settled among fire ecologists, but the boisterous claims of a small group often receive equal weight in the media and courts. She compares them to the academically credentialed climate deniers who once got equal attention in the news despite volumes of data about the effects of global warming. 

Hanson calls such criticisms “character assassination,” and this year published a study arguing that the data Prichard and her colleagues use contain a “broad pattern of scientific misrepresentation and omissions.” Hanson counters that wildfire resilience is best achieved by a focus on “hardening” homes with fire-resistant roofing and other tactics. He also calls for tree pruning and removal of brush and saplings near buildings and evacuation routes. 

Research supports these practices and shows that even small upgrades can have a big impact on wildfire resilience. But protecting property and leaving forests alone overlooks the interdependence of wildlands and people. Forests store carbon. Trees capture rainfall and contribute to rivers that, here in California, deliver water to 25 million residents and businesses, including the farms that grow about one-third of the country’s vegetables and three-quarters of its fruit and nuts. When large patches of severe wildfires cut through dense, drought-parched forests, the ground starts to repel water. The runoff can pollute watersheds with ash and harm water-treatment facilities. Damaged forests also threaten important plants and wildlife and the Indigenous communities that depend upon them to sustain their culture. 

Elected officials understand what’s at stake. In 2022 and 2023, the federal government sent $3.3 billion for forest management treatments in 10 Western states with 21 “high-priority landscapes” — forests and rangelands near communities, powerlines, highways, water supplies, or endangered species. Despite these unprecedented investments, progress has been slow across the West: Since 2012, only about 1.8 million acres of the estimated 50 million acres in need have been treated. 

One factor is a chronic shortage of forest workers. Until recently, funding for restoration and wildfire resiliency was extremely limited. Permitting for thinning and burning poses big challenges, as does fear of litigation. But the impediment that forest and fire ecologists and others in the field mention most frequently remains public opposition to prescribed fires and, particularly in California, the removal of trees. 

“There are many people who don’t like seeing vegetation removed, especially green vegetation,” John Melvin, the assistant deputy director of resource protection and improvement programs at Cal Fire, told me. “The 2020 wildfires began to change these attitudes, but we still have a lot of public education work to do.” 

Surveys of public perceptions of resilience efforts are generally small, but overall, most people support mitigation efforts — yet opposition to them can appear more widespread than it actually is. A 2019 study in Colorado found that although just 27 percent of respondents opposed the thinning and burning proposed in their area, highly organized resistance to the effort received outsized attention during public hearings and was reflected by the media as being a broad sentiment. 

Still, there are valid reasons to explain why people might oppose prescribed burning and strategic thinning. Studies show less than 2 percent of intentional fires jump their borders, the vast majority of those that do are contained, and few of them cause damage to homes and property — yet those that do draw intense news coverage. Deforestation is a key contributor to climate change and calls to plant more trees, regardless of the needs of a given ecosystem, are often (and inaccurately) portrayed as the best solution to the crisis. A legacy of resource exploitation by the U.S. Forest Service and timber companies doesn’t help.

Despite these deep and long-standing divisions, the fights over forest restoration are going through a radical shift, Cristina Eisenberg of Oregon State University’s College of Forestry told me. Since 2017, Eisenberg, who also directs the university’s Traditional Knowledge Lab, has been working with the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management to help public agencies strengthen partnerships with tribal nations on forest restoration projects. “The momentum is tremendous,” she said. “Finally, there are Indigenous people in the positions of power to help make sure this work is done right. We are at the very beginning of this change, but I’ve never seen anything like this.”

It’s a chilly morning at Pepperwood, and I start my day pulling non-native bull thistles. The thick, green stems glisten atop jet-black patches of soil. These areas, called burn scars, indicate where past volunteers burned the wood left behind by tree thinning. 

The oak woodland where I’ve joined about 30 volunteers is one of many restoration sites Pepperwood has been thinning and burning since 2014. We are removing invasive weeds that without human intervention often displace indigenous plants. 

When colonial settlers outlawed intentional fires, they removed an important process native grasses need to thrive, Devyn Friedfel, Pepperwood’s assistant preserve manager, tells us. Friedfel is warm and personable, and his intimate knowledge and passion for this land is infectious. The grasses settlers brought from Europe produce more seeds, which allow them to spread rapidly. These transplants are more fire-prone and poorly adapted to regrowth after a conflagration. Purple needlegrass, one of the native species my group is planting, can live over 200 years, and its roots can grow as deep as the oaks are tall. These long tendrils support oak seedlings, especially during droughts, by maintaining moisture in the soil and promoting the transfer of carbon and other nutrients to trees.  

We break up into groups of three. After removing the thistles, I dig slender holes in the soil, while the two women in my group — a nurse and a copyright specialist — gently remove the grass seedlings from their nests and place the footlong shoots in the soil. 

This restoration project, like most stewardship decisions at Pepperwood, was designed with the guidance of a Native advisory council. Five years ago, Michael Gillogly, who manages Pepperwood Preserve, and Clint McKay walked through this forest to discuss the council’s priorities, research, and the traditional Indigenous practices that could be incorporated here. Gillogly, who has been caring for and living on this preserve since 1994, also consulted a staff ecologist, wildlife specialist, and a forester before writing a detailed prescription for this area. 

In 2019, a crew with chainsaws came through to prune large trees, take out every Douglas fir less than 10 inches in diameter and some bigger ones crowding out oaks, and remove brush growing alongside large trees. Volunteers then built and burned piles, learning how to work with beneficial fires and return nutrients to the earth. 

Community engagement and education is an important aspect of the work. Nearly every week, Pepperwood guides lead hikes or workshops with landowners, urbanites, park managers, environmentalists, and young people. “You don’t change people’s opinions by preaching or hitting them over the head on social media,” McKay, whose workshops almost always sell out, told me. “I believe in small steps: Come and visit. See how we thin and prune to prepare for fire. See how we work after the fire.” 

McKay brings Indigenous perspectives to nearly every aspect of programming: research, thinning and native plant uses, public education, and making Pepperwood more welcoming to Native people. Last year, for the first time in over 100 years, the council returned cultural burns to Pepperwood. Currently, the focus is on repopulating the land with more of the edible and medicinal native plants essential to sustaining Wappo culture.  

Today, most researchers agree that addressing a catastrophic wildfire problem requires a new path — one rooted in both modern science and Indigenous knowledge and practices. Pepperwood provides a promising model of what this work looks like when organizations hire and actively engage Indigenous communities in their work. The nonprofit serves as a research hub where scientists, land stewards, and Indigenous members collaborate; it’s also a public education venue and a place that works actively to restore the connection between the land and its original inhabitants.

As a result of this approach, Pepperwood receives relatively little pushback against its thinning and burning. It also offers an unusually high number of hands-on workshops focused on forest stewardship and Indigenous culture in addition to the traditional approach of hikes focused on appreciation of animals and plants. 

“How can we begin to move toward ecological and cultural sustainability if we cannot even imagine what the path feels like?” Robin Wall Kimmerer asks in Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. A member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, Kimmerer is also a professor of environmental and forest biology at the State University of New York, where she has found that most students who grew up confronting the loss of biodiversity struggle to find examples of positive interactions between nature and humans. 

Weeding, planting, pruning, and using beneficial fires — in preserves like Pepperwood, our favorite parks, urban community gardens, and suburban yards — can help us develop a positive relationship with nature, Kimmerer writes. Tending forests and grasslands can help transform us from consumers of nature to stewards who express gratitude for the clean air, water, biodiversity, and beauty it offers in exchange. 

Later that afternoon, the three of us plant our last seedling. We stand up to take in the gradual change happening around us. It’s a small project, but the effect on our psyche is immeasurable. For a few hours, we contributed to building a healthier, more resilient forest. As our workday comes to an end, I settle in the roots of a black oak. Its trunk is warm and stable, and, like every oak since that distant tree in Latvia that has ever provided me with shade and comfort, it renews my sense of endurance and possibility. As people gather their tools and begin to leave, I linger, asking for this oak’s continued guidance on how to pay closer attention to its needs and the well-being of the entire forest community. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Why loving trees sometimes means cutting them down on Aug 17, 2023.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Kristina Rizga.

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We’re investigating the cause of viruses spilling over from animals to humans — and what can be done to stop it. Read more in the series.

The bright spots on the map struck us like a lightning bolt.

We had spent months teaching a computer about the Ebola virus –– feeding it information about the landscapes and populations in places where the disease had previously emerged, showing it how to analyze those outbreaks for patterns, and then instructing it to flag other areas that looked similarly perilous.

Some of the highlighted spots were predictable; the virus had repeatedly ravaged one of those countries.

But we didn’t expect our model to light up Nigeria, the most populous country in Africa. The West African nation and international travel hub has never seeded an Ebola outbreak, but just a year ago, it served as the springboard for another virus to travel into Europe and the Americas and spread across the globe. However that virus, mpox, originally known as monkeypox, is rarely fatal.

What if it had been Ebola, which kills about half of the people it infects?

We asked Nigerian public health officials whether they were concerned.

“Ebola is not part of our top concerns any more,” said Oyeladun Okunromade, the director of surveillance and epidemiology at the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control.

In the aftermath of the 2014 West African Ebola epidemic, the worst on record, Nigerian officials were on high alert. But last year, they took the virus off the list of the top infectious diseases the country needed to prepare for, downgrading Ebola in relation to threats like mpox, which Nigeria was actively fighting.

The disjoint between how our model sees Nigeria’s risk and how the nation’s health officials view it reveals a weakness in the way that governments and public health experts are preparing for future pandemics. The methods many countries use to rank threats focus mainly on factors that occur after an outbreak has already begun, such as the potential economic impact of an epidemic. Or they rely on past cases, looking at where a pathogen has previously struck.

Neither approach considers the root causes.

We’ve spent more than a year digging into the question of what causes outbreaks and what the world can do to prevent them. And we’ve learned that while science has advanced so we’re starting to understand the complex factors that trigger an outbreak, the world is not doing nearly enough to try to head off the next big one.

Most emerging infectious diseases come from wildlife. Those outbreaks require two essential elements: animals that carry a virus and opportunities for those animals to infect people.

Many of these fateful jumps, known as spillovers, have happened in forested, but populated, areas where trees have been cut down. Researchers have found that when people cut trees in patches, leaving the landscape dotted with holes like Swiss cheese, that creates more pockets and edges where humans and infected animals can collide. That world-shaking Ebola outbreak in 2014, for example, started in a Guinean village surrounded by a ring of forest.

Models that incorporate these environmental drivers could help countries look forward instead of backward as they determine how to allocate resources. Solomon Chieloka Okoli, an epidemiologist who works for Nigeria’s field epidemiology and laboratory training network, said his country, like many others, tends to react to outbreaks after they’ve started instead of trying to prevent them. That isn’t enough, Okoli said. “Being proactive is the best line of defense — if you wait, a lot of people will have died before you can get yourself together.”

Our model, created in consultation with scientists, was able to identify ecological factors that were common to past Ebola spillovers. The resulting risk map should be enough to prompt action, according to Christina Faust, a fellow at the University of Glasgow, Scotland, whose research focuses on how human activities like deforestation affect disease transmission.

Ebola often starts with a fever, so governments should invest in surveillance systems that help health authorities track patients with fevers, she said. “We should be watching these areas.”

Models are not crystal balls; they can’t say exactly when or even whether a place will be hit with an outbreak. But they are great for understanding risk — where it is growing and where it may be shifting to.

“I love these as advocacy tools, because they’re meant for action,” said Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, an infectious disease epidemiologist at the World Health Organization. “We just want these types of maps to inform and say: Make sure you’ve considered what might be circulating that you haven’t yet detected.”

We were curious to see where risky deforestation patterns are happening today. So we turned to a machine learning technique called “random forests” (no relation to actual tree-filled forests!) that can be used to spot patterns that might explain how some previous Ebola outbreaks happened. We limited our analysis to the geographic area where wildlife that can transmit Ebola is most likely to be found. This area covers 27 African countries from Guinea to Uganda.

We started with seven locations of past Ebola outbreaks that researchers have linked to forest loss. Then we selected 23 parameters, including demographic characteristics like the change in population from 2019 to 2021 (the most recent available data), as well as forest characteristics like the amount of tree loss and the patchiness of the surrounding forests.

We pulled data from satellite imagery and online population databases, fed it to the model and asked the computer to examine these factors across the seven known Ebola outbreaks. The model digested all this information and determined the relative importance of each parameter.

We also asked it to compare the outbreak sites to a set of places that were in the area where Ebola-carrying animals could live but had not seen an Ebola spillover.

Then we gave it a list of 1,000 candidate villages that had at least the same population size as previous Ebola spillover sites. (The 1,000 candidates were a random sample of all the villages that met our criteria; we weren’t able to run our model on the full set because of the amount of time and computing power that would have been required.) We asked the computer: Are there places that look very similar to past outbreak sites?

The model identified 51 locations with patterns of tree loss very similar to the seven previous Ebola outbreaks. The Democratic Republic of Congo had 16, which made sense; the country has recorded more than 10 Ebola outbreaks since the 1970s. The model highlighted additional spots in Ghana, Burundi and Benin.

More than half of the locations of concern, 27, were concentrated in Nigeria.

(If you — like us — are a nerd and want to read about our model in more detail, here is a comprehensive methodology.)

We were initially surprised to see the cluster of flagged locations in the southwest region of Nigeria, since the nation has never been the starting point for an Ebola outbreak. (The country has dealt with Ebola patients before, after an infected traveler flew to Lagos from Liberia during the West Africa outbreak in 2014.)

But we came to learn that Nigeria has experienced rapid deforestation over the past two decades. According to Global Forest Watch, the country has lost over 3,800 square miles of forest since 2001, and the rate of that loss has been accelerating. Nigeria has cleared the equivalent of nearly 170,000 football fields every year since 2017.

This is in part because energy prices have risen, making conventional fuel sources like kerosene unaffordable for many families, said NwaJesus Anthony Onyekuru, a professor of resource and environmental economics at the University of Nigeria. “They don’t want to use kerosene to cook, so they use wood,” he said.

Our model showed that this rapid forest clearing has happened in the dangerous, patchy pattern that researchers say leads to more interactions between humans and wildlife, and therefore increases the chances of spillover.

Scientists have found that bats can shed more virus when they’re stressed, such as by losing their habitats. That means that hunters may now encounter wildlife that is more likely to transmit a pathogen. Some Nigerians eat bats. Hunger has driven other residents to hunt for monkeys and rats in the forests, according to the epidemiologist Okoli. He said that consumption of large rats in the country’s southern region may have spurred the recent mpox outbreak.

Local deforestation has contributed to an increase in Lassa fever cases, said Dr. Charles Akataobi Michael, a senior technical officer at the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention. Lassa fever can cause bleeding from the mouth, nose and gastrointestinal tract in severe cases, as well as neurological symptoms like hearing loss. The virus is carried by rodents, and people can be infected when food or household items are contaminated with the rodents’ urine or droppings.

The virus has been circulating in areas where people burn trees to create farmland, said Michael, destroying the rodents’ habitat. “They go to human habitats as a result of bush burning and deforestation to find food,” he said. “As we continue to alter the environment, the risk of disease outbreaks are increasing significantly.”

As the country’s population continues to grow rapidly, residents are chipping away at the forests to make room for farms. This land-use change is another way that risk may be increasing: Many outbreaks around the world have started when a virus jumped first from wildlife to a farm animal and then made another leap to humans. That includes deadly forms of bird flu and the brain-inflaming Nipah virus, which was immortalized in the movie “Contagion.”

Though we were initially surprised, we’ve since learned that Nigeria has appeared in other academic models as a potential Ebola hot spot. A 2019 analysis, published in the journal Nature Communications, identified Nigeria as a country at risk for an Ebola outbreak based on both current conditions and future climate and socioeconomic drivers.

In 2014, a different group of scientists used human and animal data to map locations most at risk of an Ebola outbreak. Among countries that had never reported an Ebola spillover before, Nigeria was at the top of their list. We know that Ebola isn’t constrained to country borders — after all, the worst Ebola outbreak to date started in Guinea, where the virus hadn’t previously been thought to be a threat. And this year, Marburg, Ebola’s cousin, has spread in two countries that had never before recorded an outbreak.

David Pigott, who led the 2014 analysis, said looking at prior cases isn’t the best way to evaluate risk: “The conversation of preparedness should not just be a function of what happened in the past.”

But that, we learned, is exactly what Nigeria is doing.

The Nigerian experts we interviewed all acknowledged the importance of environmental factors in increasing outbreak risk. But many said that not much has been done to try and mitigate dangerous deforestation.

Okunromade, from the Nigeria CDC, helped create its One Health Strategic Plan — a national action plan based on the “one health” principle that the well-being of the environment, animals and humans are deeply interconnected. She said the government has brought together experts on human and animal diseases so that they can share information about pathogens such as mpox, Lassa fever and bird flu.

Yet when we asked what the country was doing to address environmental risks, she wasn’t aware of any initiatives, though she said it may be possible that other agencies were telling the public about the dangers of deforestation.

Okunromade said that experts used a tool developed by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to assess the risks of dozens of diseases that come from animals. The process has local experts select five criteria, commonly including epidemic potential or a country’s diagnostic capacity, and answer questions about different diseases for each criteria. Based on the answers, the diseases get scored as having a higher or lower priority.

When Nigerian officials ran this exercise in 2017, the devastating Ebola epidemic was fresh in their memories, and Ebola made the top five. “Looking at West Africa, at the countries surrounding us, looking at Sierra Leone, looking at Liberia, they were the worst hit. So that was why it made the list,” she said.

Ebola is a disease that would typically rank highly using the U.S. CDC’s tool because it gives more points to pathogens with a higher fatality rate. In 2022, Nigerian officials re-did the ranking exercise and initially, Ebola was still in the top five, but the officials felt it was more important to look at recent cases. Since there hasn’t been an Ebola outbreak in neighboring countries in recent years, the disease fell off their priority list, according to Michael, from the Africa CDC, who participated in the ranking process.

The CDC’s tool, which has been used by more than two dozen countries, does not require consideration of environmental causes like deforestation when ranking threats. Dr. Casey Barton Behravesh, the director of the U.S. CDC’s One Health Office, said that the process does not mandate which criteria should be considered and “it’s up to the country or region to decide on the criteria of greatest importance to them.” In examples she provided, two workshops, conducted in Alaska and the Economic Community of West African States, included a question about whether climate change would impact a disease. Some other countries considered the environmental impact of a potential outbreak, but they did not look at environmental factors that could increase the chance of a spillover. None of the examples included a question about deforestation.

There’s hope that new tools will evolve. The WHO is currently working with Pigott, who is an assistant professor of health metric sciences at the University of Washington, and other academics to develop risk maps for 16 different pathogens. Their model will incorporate data on environmental drivers of outbreaks. They aim to publish their work in a journal in future months, according to Pigott.

Pigott acknowledged that it can be hard for governments to prioritize a rare event like an Ebola outbreak. Still, he said, preparing for a disease like Ebola can be incorporated into plans for other pathogens. A malaria test may be the most logical place to start in a patient with a fever; if that is negative, health workers should be ready to test for Ebola, he said. But that only works if they are aware of the potential threat.

Ultimately, putting a disease on a priority list is only the first step. True prevention will need to address people’s lives, said Okoli, the Nigerian field epidemiologist: “If you say, ‘Don’t cut the bush to make charcoal,’ then you need to provide gas. If people are saying, ‘When I’m hungry, I get wild game,’ then you need to make it easier to get meat from the shops. You need to provide an alternative.”

Preventing the next outbreak from starting, Okoli said, should not be that hard. “It’s just about the political will and the willingness of the government to do something.”

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Caroline Chen, Al Shaw and Irena Hwang.

Abdurusul Memet, 71, from a village in Kashgar county was sentenced for learning the Quran from his father when he was 12 years old, praying and having a beard, he said. 

Memet’s situation came to light after the Xinjiang Victims Database tweeted last week that Memet had been sentenced to 13 years and 11 months in jail for learning the Quran between November 1964 and March 1965. The database is a platform that collects records of Uyghurs and other Turkic minority peoples detained in northwestern China’s Xinjiang region.

Following his arrest, authorities jailed Memet in a prison in the regional capital Urumqi to serve his sentence, according to the tweet, which reached an audience of 67,000 people within one week.

When Radio Free Asia began making inquiries by phone about Memet’s current situation, a police officer in Kashgar county said Memet died in mid-July while serving his sentence in a prison in Urumqi. 

“Yes, there is a person named Abdurusul Memet who was arrested for learning the Quran when he was 12,” said the officer. “He passed away in prison.”

The officer went on to say that Memet was arrested in 2017 for “illegal religious activities” and has been serving his sentence in Urumqi. 

“The reason for arrest was that he usually prayed namaz, had a beard, and learned the Quran when he was 12 years old,” he said, referring to the prayers performed by Muslims.

The police officer also said Memet died of hypertension, though he previously had been in good health, and that authorities had returned Memet’s body to his family. 

Memet’s name and police information also appear in the Kashgar police archives, part of the “Xinjiang Police Files,” confidential documents hacked from Xinjiang police computers that contain the personal records of 830,000 individuals. 

The files were obtained by a third party and published in May 2022. They provide inside information on Beijing’s internment of up to 2 million Uyghurs and other Turkic peoples in northwestern China’s Xinjiang region in 2017 and 2018, the height of one of China’s “strike hard” campaigns. 

The records are further evidence of Beijing’s human rights abuses in Xinjiang, which the Chinese government has repeatedly denied.

The Kashgar police subset of records does not include a photo of Memet, as do some of the other files of detained Uyghurs, but they indicate that he had no previous criminal record prior to his 2017 arrest.

Omir Bekali, a Uyghur of Kazakh descent who spent nine months in three “re-education” camps in Xinjiang on allegations of terrorist activities and now resides in the Netherlands, said Chinese authorities have routinely accused Uyghurs like Memet of made-up crimes and coerced them into admitting that they committed them. 

“The fact that Mr. Abdurusul was arrested for studying the Quran at the age of 12 illustrates how the fascist Chinese government is willing to engage in any unlawful actions and employ any means to eradicate the Uyghurs and Kazakhs of East Turkistan,” he said, using the Uyghurs’ preferred name for Xinjiang. 

“China is detaining them on fabricated charges and killing them. This is an evident and alarming issue,” he said.

Translated by RFA Uyghur. Edited by Roseanne Gerin and Matt Reed.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Shohret Hoshur for RFA Uyghur.

Abdurusul Memet, 71, from a village in Kashgar county was sentenced for learning the Quran from his father when he was 12 years old, praying and having a beard, he said. 

Memet’s situation came to light after the Xinjiang Victims Database tweeted last week that Memet had been sentenced to 13 years and 11 months in jail for learning the Quran between November 1964 and March 1965. The database is a platform that collects records of Uyghurs and other Turkic minority peoples detained in northwestern China’s Xinjiang region.

Following his arrest, authorities jailed Memet in a prison in the regional capital Urumqi to serve his sentence, according to the tweet, which reached an audience of 67,000 people within one week.

When Radio Free Asia began making inquiries by phone about Memet’s current situation, a police officer in Kashgar county said Memet died in mid-July while serving his sentence in a prison in Urumqi. 

“Yes, there is a person named Abdurusul Memet who was arrested for learning the Quran when he was 12,” said the officer. “He passed away in prison.”

The officer went on to say that Memet was arrested in 2017 for “illegal religious activities” and has been serving his sentence in Urumqi. 

“The reason for arrest was that he usually prayed namaz, had a beard, and learned the Quran when he was 12 years old,” he said, referring to the prayers performed by Muslims.

The police officer also said Memet died of hypertension, though he previously had been in good health, and that authorities had returned Memet’s body to his family. 

Memet’s name and police information also appear in the Kashgar police archives, part of the “Xinjiang Police Files,” confidential documents hacked from Xinjiang police computers that contain the personal records of 830,000 individuals. 

The files were obtained by a third party and published in May 2022. They provide inside information on Beijing’s internment of up to 2 million Uyghurs and other Turkic peoples in northwestern China’s Xinjiang region in 2017 and 2018, the height of one of China’s “strike hard” campaigns. 

The records are further evidence of Beijing’s human rights abuses in Xinjiang, which the Chinese government has repeatedly denied.

The Kashgar police subset of records does not include a photo of Memet, as do some of the other files of detained Uyghurs, but they indicate that he had no previous criminal record prior to his 2017 arrest.

Omir Bekali, a Uyghur of Kazakh descent who spent nine months in three “re-education” camps in Xinjiang on allegations of terrorist activities and now resides in the Netherlands, said Chinese authorities have routinely accused Uyghurs like Memet of made-up crimes and coerced them into admitting that they committed them. 

“The fact that Mr. Abdurusul was arrested for studying the Quran at the age of 12 illustrates how the fascist Chinese government is willing to engage in any unlawful actions and employ any means to eradicate the Uyghurs and Kazakhs of East Turkistan,” he said, using the Uyghurs’ preferred name for Xinjiang. 

“China is detaining them on fabricated charges and killing them. This is an evident and alarming issue,” he said.

Translated by RFA Uyghur. Edited by Roseanne Gerin and Matt Reed.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Shohret Hoshur for RFA Uyghur.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

For the nation’s schoolchildren, the data on pandemic learning loss is relentlessly bleak, with education researchers and economists warning that, unless dramatic action is taken, students will suffer a lifelong drop in income as a result of lagging achievement. “This cohort of students is going to be punished throughout their lifetime,” noted Eric Hanushek, the Stanford economist who did the income study, in ProPublica’s recent examination of the struggle to make up for what students missed out on during the era of remote learning.

For the burgeoning education technology sector, however, the crisis has proven a glimmering business opportunity, as a visit to the industry’s annual convention revealed. The federal government has committed $190 billion in pandemic recovery funds to school districts since 2020, and education technology sales people have been eagerly making the case that their products are just what students and teachers need to make up lost ground.

“We’re huge in learning loss,” said Dan DiDesiderio, a Pittsburgh-area account manager for Renaissance Learning, a top seller of educational software and assessments. He was talking up his company’s offerings in the giant exposition hall of the Philadelphia Convention Center, where dozens of other vendors and thousands of educators gathered for three days late last month at the confab of the International Society for Technology in Education. For DiDesiderio, who was a school administrator before joining Renaissance, this meant explaining how schools have been relying on Renaissance products to help students get back on track. “During COVID, we did see an increase across the board,” he said.

Renaissance is far from the only player in the ed tech industry that is benefiting from the surge in federal funding, and the industry enjoyed a huge wave of private funding as the federal tap opened: The annual total of venture capital investments in ed tech companies rose from $5.4 billion to $16.8 billion between 2019 and 2021 before tailing off.

The largest chunk of the federal largess, $122 billion that was included in the American Rescue Plan signed by President Joe Biden in March 2021, requires that schools put at least 20% toward battling learning loss, and companies are making the case that schools should spend the money on their products, in addition to intensive tutoring, extended-day programs and other remedies. “The pandemic has created a once-in-a-lifetime economic opportunity for early stage companies to reach an eager customer base,” declared Anne Lee Skates, a partner at venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, in a recent article. (Her firm has invested in ed tech companies.) The federal funds “are the largest one-time infusion of funds in education from the federal government with almost no strings attached.”

Five days before the convention, the National Center for Education Statistics had released the latest devastating numbers: The decline in math scores for 13-year-olds between the 2019-20 and 2022-23 school years was the largest on record, and for the lowest-performing students, reading scores were lower than they were the first time data was collected in 1971.

But the mood was festive in Philadelphia. The educators in attendance, whose conference costs are generally covered by their district’s professional development funds, were excited to try out the new wave of nifty gadgets made possible by the advances in artificial intelligence and virtual reality. “For a lot of us, it’s like coming to Disneyland,” said one teacher from Alabama.

One could also detect the slightly urgent giddiness of a big bash in its final stages. Schools need to spend most of their recovery funds by 2024, and many have already allocated much of that money, meaning that this golden opportunity would soon close. And summer is the main buying season, with the fiscal year starting July 1 and with educators wanting their new tools delivered in time for school to start in the fall.

Hanging over the proceedings was an undeniable irony: The extent of learning loss was closely correlated to the amount of time that students had spent doing remote learning, on a screen, rather than receiving direct instruction, and here companies were offering more screen-based instruction as the remedy. Few of the companies on hand were proposing to replace the classroom experience entirely with virtual instruction, but to the degree that their offerings recalled the year-plus of Zoom school, it could be a bit awkward. “A lot of people don’t like us, because we can do remote-school stuff,” said Michael Linacre, a salesperson for StarBoard Solution, before demonstrating one of the cool things a StarBoard whiteboard could do: He jotted 1+2= with his finger and up popped 3. “There’s a mixed feeling about that now.”

Most of the vendors were not about to let that awkwardness get in their way, though, as they cajoled teachers to listen to their pitch, often with the lure of free swag.

“I love the shirt — I’m a huge ’N Sync fan,” said a library technology specialist from a New Jersey elementary school at the booth for BrainPOP, a group of educational animation websites whose display included a T-shirt that nodded to the 1990s boy band. The vendor praised the teacher for getting the reference — the union guys setting up the expo had totally missed it, he said — and told her that all one had to do to get one of the shirts was attend one of several pitch sessions during the day. “Students who use BrainPOP two or more times a month show measurable gains toward grade-level proficiency,” asserted a large poster listing the various sessions.

Nearby, a Microsoft salesperson named Mike had a full audience sitting on white settees arrayed in his zone as he launched into his demonstration of the company’s new AI tools for helping kids learn to read aloud. He showed how a program called Reading Coach captured video of a student reading a passage aloud and flagged mispronunciations, with an automated voice declaring, “These words were the most challenging for you.” There were even more features in the offing, Mike said; the program would soon produce comprehension questions to ask about whatever passage the teacher gave the students to read, and it would soon be able to gauge students’ level of expressiveness, too.

One might wonder what all this would leave to the actual teacher, but Mike assured the audience that Reading Coach would simply allow educators to focus on other tasks. “It’s a time saver,” he said.

In fact, education technology is replacing teachers in another sense: A large share of the vendors on hand were themselves former educators who had left the classroom for jobs with tech companies, where they could still feel like they were involved in education, but without the stresses of the classroom and often with higher pay. One former first grade teacher who had made this transition herself two years ago said she had seen the trend accelerate among her colleagues during the pandemic, when the challenges of juggling hybrid online and in-person instruction and managing students who were struggling with learning loss and delayed socialization had made jobs in ed tech seem especially alluring.

Remote learning “flipped the field on its head,” she said. “We were getting a lot more responsibilities than before, a lot more hours, a lot more stress.” At the first of the two ed tech companies she has worked for, she said, “almost everyone was an ex-teacher hired the past couple years. Ed tech is a good space for teachers to go to: It’s a corporate job, but they respect the skills that teachers have.”

Knowing that the ed tech sector was not only seeking a large share of federal recovery funds for schools but also playing a role in the teacher shortage gave the proceedings an extra edge. The profusion of inventively named vendors was overwhelming: Beanstack, Impero, Bluum, Archangel, Teq, Ozobot, Nuiteq, Vivacity, Figma. Kami and Hāpara sounded more like Ikea furniture, but no, they were here, too.

Among the rookie attendees wandering the hall was Joseph Tey, a Stanford computer science major. He was there with a classmate to ask teachers how they felt about the rise of AI. Were they worried about students cheating? Were they going to incorporate AI into their instruction? “Tech adoption in education is tough,” Tey said. “Do you adopt something only when the fire is under your ass? COVID was one fire. This is another fire.”

The COVID-19 fire had been great for one vendor, Wakelet, a website that allows users to pull together videos, images and text files into a single webpage, for use by individuals who want to to promote a resume or body of work or by teachers seeking to present information on a given subject. Its use by teachers had boomed during remote learning, said co-founder Rick Butterworth. “The pandemic was really a benefit for us because we had so many users who came on board,” he said. “2020 was an interesting year for us.” The site has been free to use, with the company funded for several years by angel investors, he said, but it was now about to start offering tiered paid plans for schools, ranging up to $6,000 per year. Among the features available to paying customers: “bespoke professional development.”

Across the aisle, a vendor named Whitney, a former elementary school librarian, was corralling passersby for her next pitch session for MackinMaker. “Have a seat! We’re about to have a demo. It’s really fun. Just fill out the card for the giveaway.” The giveaways were T-shirts that were waiting on each chair.

“It’s all about the giveaway,” said one teacher, with gentle sarcasm, as she took her seat.

Whitney gave her pitch for MackinMaker’s online e-book marketplace. After she was done, her colleague Ethan told the teachers, “If you need a different size T-shirt, let us know.”

Luring teachers into pitches was easiest at the various sellers of virtual reality headsets, some of which had long lines of educators waiting their turn. I tried a headset from ClassVR that was playing virtual reality programs from Eduverse. The first scene was a pastoral landscape of fields and stone walls whose context was unclear until the vendor explained that it was a scene from the Civil War. She clicked over to another of Eduverse’s 500-odd options, this one featuring men building railroads in the 19th century, where I accidentally got myself hit in the head, virtually, by a sledgehammer.

Schools could buy eight of the headsets for $4,299, or 30 for $16,999, the vendor said. Sales in recent years had been “amazing, in terms of rapid growth.”

The afternoon of the convention’s opening day was wearing on, and the conference tote bags were already getting overstuffed with all the free swag. Conveniently, Kahoot (an Oslo-based operation with the slogan “Make learning awesome”) was giving out tote bags as prizes for those who won in demonstrations of its AI-generated quiz games. I participated in a game with questions about the Fourth of July and was frustrated to accidentally input the wrong answer on my smartphone in response to a question about the size of the U.S. population in 1776. (The correct answer was 2.5 million.)

The Kahoot vendor handed out the three tote bags to the victorious educators, who would have two more days of conventioneering to fill them up. “Did you learn something about Independence Day?” she said.

A few weeks later came a reminder that the stakes for the ed tech sector went far beyond tote bags and T-shirts: Kahoot announced that a group led by Goldman Sachs’ private equity division was buying it for $1.7 billion.

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Alec MacGillis.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

For the nation’s schoolchildren, the data on pandemic learning loss is relentlessly bleak, with education researchers and economists warning that, unless dramatic action is taken, students will suffer a lifelong drop in income as a result of lagging achievement. “This cohort of students is going to be punished throughout their lifetime,” noted Eric Hanushek, the Stanford economist who did the income study, in ProPublica’s recent examination of the struggle to make up for what students missed out on during the era of remote learning.

For the burgeoning education technology sector, however, the crisis has proven a glimmering business opportunity, as a visit to the industry’s annual convention revealed. The federal government has committed $190 billion in pandemic recovery funds to school districts since 2020, and education technology sales people have been eagerly making the case that their products are just what students and teachers need to make up lost ground.

“We’re huge in learning loss,” said Dan DiDesiderio, a Pittsburgh-area account manager for Renaissance Learning, a top seller of educational software and assessments. He was talking up his company’s offerings in the giant exposition hall of the Philadelphia Convention Center, where dozens of other vendors and thousands of educators gathered for three days late last month at the confab of the International Society for Technology in Education. For DiDesiderio, who was a school administrator before joining Renaissance, this meant explaining how schools have been relying on Renaissance products to help students get back on track. “During COVID, we did see an increase across the board,” he said.

Renaissance is far from the only player in the ed tech industry that is benefiting from the surge in federal funding, and the industry enjoyed a huge wave of private funding as the federal tap opened: The annual total of venture capital investments in ed tech companies rose from $5.4 billion to $16.8 billion between 2019 and 2021 before tailing off.

The largest chunk of the federal largess, $122 billion that was included in the American Rescue Plan signed by President Joe Biden in March 2021, requires that schools put at least 20% toward battling learning loss, and companies are making the case that schools should spend the money on their products, in addition to intensive tutoring, extended-day programs and other remedies. “The pandemic has created a once-in-a-lifetime economic opportunity for early stage companies to reach an eager customer base,” declared Anne Lee Skates, a partner at venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, in a recent article. (Her firm has invested in ed tech companies.) The federal funds “are the largest one-time infusion of funds in education from the federal government with almost no strings attached.”

Five days before the convention, the National Center for Education Statistics had released the latest devastating numbers: The decline in math scores for 13-year-olds between the 2019-20 and 2022-23 school years was the largest on record, and for the lowest-performing students, reading scores were lower than they were the first time data was collected in 1971.

But the mood was festive in Philadelphia. The educators in attendance, whose conference costs are generally covered by their district’s professional development funds, were excited to try out the new wave of nifty gadgets made possible by the advances in artificial intelligence and virtual reality. “For a lot of us, it’s like coming to Disneyland,” said one teacher from Alabama.

One could also detect the slightly urgent giddiness of a big bash in its final stages. Schools need to spend most of their recovery funds by 2024, and many have already allocated much of that money, meaning that this golden opportunity would soon close. And summer is the main buying season, with the fiscal year starting July 1 and with educators wanting their new tools delivered in time for school to start in the fall.

Hanging over the proceedings was an undeniable irony: The extent of learning loss was closely correlated to the amount of time that students had spent doing remote learning, on a screen, rather than receiving direct instruction, and here companies were offering more screen-based instruction as the remedy. Few of the companies on hand were proposing to replace the classroom experience entirely with virtual instruction, but to the degree that their offerings recalled the year-plus of Zoom school, it could be a bit awkward. “A lot of people don’t like us, because we can do remote-school stuff,” said Michael Linacre, a salesperson for StarBoard Solution, before demonstrating one of the cool things a StarBoard whiteboard could do: He jotted 1+2= with his finger and up popped 3. “There’s a mixed feeling about that now.”

Most of the vendors were not about to let that awkwardness get in their way, though, as they cajoled teachers to listen to their pitch, often with the lure of free swag.

“I love the shirt — I’m a huge ’N Sync fan,” said a library technology specialist from a New Jersey elementary school at the booth for BrainPOP, a group of educational animation websites whose display included a T-shirt that nodded to the 1990s boy band. The vendor praised the teacher for getting the reference — the union guys setting up the expo had totally missed it, he said — and told her that all one had to do to get one of the shirts was attend one of several pitch sessions during the day. “Students who use BrainPOP two or more times a month show measurable gains toward grade-level proficiency,” asserted a large poster listing the various sessions.

Nearby, a Microsoft salesperson named Mike had a full audience sitting on white settees arrayed in his zone as he launched into his demonstration of the company’s new AI tools for helping kids learn to read aloud. He showed how a program called Reading Coach captured video of a student reading a passage aloud and flagged mispronunciations, with an automated voice declaring, “These words were the most challenging for you.” There were even more features in the offing, Mike said; the program would soon produce comprehension questions to ask about whatever passage the teacher gave the students to read, and it would soon be able to gauge students’ level of expressiveness, too.

One might wonder what all this would leave to the actual teacher, but Mike assured the audience that Reading Coach would simply allow educators to focus on other tasks. “It’s a time saver,” he said.

In fact, education technology is replacing teachers in another sense: A large share of the vendors on hand were themselves former educators who had left the classroom for jobs with tech companies, where they could still feel like they were involved in education, but without the stresses of the classroom and often with higher pay. One former first grade teacher who had made this transition herself two years ago said she had seen the trend accelerate among her colleagues during the pandemic, when the challenges of juggling hybrid online and in-person instruction and managing students who were struggling with learning loss and delayed socialization had made jobs in ed tech seem especially alluring.

Remote learning “flipped the field on its head,” she said. “We were getting a lot more responsibilities than before, a lot more hours, a lot more stress.” At the first of the two ed tech companies she has worked for, she said, “almost everyone was an ex-teacher hired the past couple years. Ed tech is a good space for teachers to go to: It’s a corporate job, but they respect the skills that teachers have.”

Knowing that the ed tech sector was not only seeking a large share of federal recovery funds for schools but also playing a role in the teacher shortage gave the proceedings an extra edge. The profusion of inventively named vendors was overwhelming: Beanstack, Impero, Bluum, Archangel, Teq, Ozobot, Nuiteq, Vivacity, Figma. Kami and Hāpara sounded more like Ikea furniture, but no, they were here, too.

Among the rookie attendees wandering the hall was Joseph Tey, a Stanford computer science major. He was there with a classmate to ask teachers how they felt about the rise of AI. Were they worried about students cheating? Were they going to incorporate AI into their instruction? “Tech adoption in education is tough,” Tey said. “Do you adopt something only when the fire is under your ass? COVID was one fire. This is another fire.”

The COVID-19 fire had been great for one vendor, Wakelet, a website that allows users to pull together videos, images and text files into a single webpage, for use by individuals who want to to promote a resume or body of work or by teachers seeking to present information on a given subject. Its use by teachers had boomed during remote learning, said co-founder Rick Butterworth. “The pandemic was really a benefit for us because we had so many users who came on board,” he said. “2020 was an interesting year for us.” The site has been free to use, with the company funded for several years by angel investors, he said, but it was now about to start offering tiered paid plans for schools, ranging up to $6,000 per year. Among the features available to paying customers: “bespoke professional development.”

Across the aisle, a vendor named Whitney, a former elementary school librarian, was corralling passersby for her next pitch session for MackinMaker. “Have a seat! We’re about to have a demo. It’s really fun. Just fill out the card for the giveaway.” The giveaways were T-shirts that were waiting on each chair.

“It’s all about the giveaway,” said one teacher, with gentle sarcasm, as she took her seat.

Whitney gave her pitch for MackinMaker’s online e-book marketplace. After she was done, her colleague Ethan told the teachers, “If you need a different size T-shirt, let us know.”

Luring teachers into pitches was easiest at the various sellers of virtual reality headsets, some of which had long lines of educators waiting their turn. I tried a headset from ClassVR that was playing virtual reality programs from Eduverse. The first scene was a pastoral landscape of fields and stone walls whose context was unclear until the vendor explained that it was a scene from the Civil War. She clicked over to another of Eduverse’s 500-odd options, this one featuring men building railroads in the 19th century, where I accidentally got myself hit in the head, virtually, by a sledgehammer.

Schools could buy eight of the headsets for $4,299, or 30 for $16,999, the vendor said. Sales in recent years had been “amazing, in terms of rapid growth.”

The afternoon of the convention’s opening day was wearing on, and the conference tote bags were already getting overstuffed with all the free swag. Conveniently, Kahoot (an Oslo-based operation with the slogan “Make learning awesome”) was giving out tote bags as prizes for those who won in demonstrations of its AI-generated quiz games. I participated in a game with questions about the Fourth of July and was frustrated to accidentally input the wrong answer on my smartphone in response to a question about the size of the U.S. population in 1776. (The correct answer was 2.5 million.)

The Kahoot vendor handed out the three tote bags to the victorious educators, who would have two more days of conventioneering to fill them up. “Did you learn something about Independence Day?” she said.

A few weeks later came a reminder that the stakes for the ed tech sector went far beyond tote bags and T-shirts: Kahoot announced that a group led by Goldman Sachs’ private equity division was buying it for $1.7 billion.

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Alec MacGillis.

The post Learning From History, If We Dare appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Gary M. Feinman.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Allen Forrest.

Yatú: We believe that work is a feeling that emerges from an activity. For example, sometimes people like to listen to certain types of music that gets them in the mood to work.

Norm: Work isn’t just one feeling. There are different types of work feelings. We recommending first figuring out how you want to feel when you work, or when you’re being “productive.” Then, you create an infrastructure or environment that supports that work feeling.

How does Teal like to feel when it works?

Norm: I like to feel “open and a little lost.” We believe you have to not know where you’re going in order to find somewhere new. A lot of the things we work on take a while to find themselves. So, it’s normal that we’re lost for a while.

Yatú: Personally, I like to feel “cozy.” Traditional time systems do a good job of making sure you don’t feel cozy. That’s why we had to invent our own time and space.

That reminds me of your clocks. Why do you cover all the clocks in your house?

Norm: We believe you shouldn’t have to watch the time. When we allow ourselves to be sensitive, we believe every human can innately feel time and space.

I equate covering the clocks up to a social media detox. In the same way you detox yourself from the habit of checking your phone, you can detox yourself from the habit of checking the time. After I covered the clocks up, I would catch myself looking for the time and realizing, “I don’t actually need to know the time after all.”

How did you begin questioning time?

Norm: We moved into the apartment we share in 2020, at the beginning of the pandemic. We put a lot of time, energy, and thought into our physical space, which was new to us then. Eventually, we realized time was just as important as space — the two are completely intertwined to create an environment.

Yatú: When the days of the pandemic felt blurred together, we would say, “This all feels like one day.” We began by defining our own “paragonday” — our ideal sense of time. “Paragon” means ideal, so “paragonday” is an ideal day.

So your time system, “Paragonday Systems,” is about feeling time?

Yatú: Yes. It’s important each person defines paragonday for themselves.

For me personally, paragonday feels like there’s a sense of abundance. People sometimes call this vacation, but I believe most people plan their vacations too much. Paragonday is whatever you want it to be. It can be a massage. It could be you going to visit a waterfall. It could simply be you closing your eyes and thinking peacefully. Whatever it is, it’s important to intentionally decide an ideal environment for you to enjoy time.

Paragonday sounds dreamy. What are the other ways to pass time?

Yatú: In Paragonday Systems, NP1 stands for “Non-Paragonday 1” which is a period of time that’s often filled with obligations. For a lot of people NP1 maps onto the work week, or Monday through Friday. Then there is NP2 or “Non-Paragonday 2” which is a period of time that isn’t tied to the obligations of “work.” The unplanned space of NP2 typically maps onto the weekend.

You can “parachute into Paragonday” from NP1 or NP2. Parachuting is the transitional period. It’s a mental parachute; you do it in your head. You land whenever you’re ready. You grab both handles of the parachute and you go, “pshhhhhhuuu”! The parachute is our way of making an intentional choice to enter your ideal sense of time.

Norm: Our date format goes like this: “Season Day, Year”. For example, the theoretical artifact we made for Paragonday Systems, accessible at http://www.paragonday.systems, was created on Spring Paragonday 3, 2020. Each time you enter a new Paragonday, you increment the count.

How did you two meet?

Yatú: We went to the same school. Our relationship became strong when we worked together on a hackathon for our college.

Yatú & Norm: We bonded over a shared mission to inspire other students to organize their own hackathons to create a broader educational network.

For the record, what’s a hackathon?

Yatú: Hackathons are those events where people quickly and collaboratively create something, usually technological, over a short period of time like a weekend. Eventually, our goal became broadening the idea of what hacking is.

We wanted to give people the opportunity to explore things. Eventually, we organized hackathons that allowed people to come together to create anything they wanted — with less tech focus. At our university, we didn’t have design classes. And there weren’t many designers who showed up to the hackathons at first.

Norm: Eventually, more designers popped up. We also brought in local professional designers to give workshops.

Yatú: It was a funny moment — people were writing articles about diversity — using a photo of our hackathon as an illustration. But we didn’t even try to be that.

We simply tried to create an environment that welcomes anyone to explore anything — focusing bringing in all the disciplines. We did this by attracting a wider audience and fostering an encouraging environment towards building. The rest followed naturally.

Norm: Yatú and I had tons of conversations about why we were doing the things we were doing, and that’s how we were able to mind meld and grow.

Shortcomings in your educations have been extremely motivating to both of you.

Norm: Yeah, we learned a lot. One week, we both almost dropped out. I basically failed out of my major. It’s funny because we were working with administrators at the school to organize hackathons. We talked often with heads of departments but were simultaneously failing out of their classes.

Yatú: We ran multiple organizations on campus. We truly believed in the motto, “learn by doing.” Our groups bonded through friendships, travel, and the desire to learn. We created an environment where anyone could appoint themselves to lead any exploration.

Norm: We did a lot of work for anyone to have supportive educational infrastructure because we knew what it’s like not to have that.

How do each of you define Teal?

Yatú: We have a shared understanding that Teal is always an open question.

Norm: Yeah. In trying to describe it to people, it can also be called an “art group” or … But once you start trying to define it in any kind of way, it loses the vastness. The vastness is hard to communicate.

Yatú: At first, I didn’t want to define Teal. But Norm said it was important to define it.

The vastness is Teal’s character. Teal is sometimes considered “the gray of color.”

Norm: We added “Process & Company” to the name because we wanted to communicate how things came to be through documentation (“Process”), and we also wanted it to be real and legitimate (“Company”).

Yatú: The other meaning of “& Company” is the “company you keep” — being intentional about the people you share time with.

It gets easier to describe the things inside of Teal.

One of Teal’s concepts I’m especially curious about is “careering.”

Norm: Yeah! We like to talk about how the word “career” is both a noun and a verb. Most people know about “career” the noun, which means “an occupation undertaken for a significant period with opportunities for progress.” But “career” is also a verb.

Yatú: As a verb, “career” means “to move swiftly and in an uncontrolled manner in a specified direction.”

Norm: Thinking about career as a verb helps introduce a more fluid way of exploring throughout one’s working life.

A career doesn’t have to be a finite ladder, with roles predetermined that you fit into. Instead, a career can be more like a map you draw that ties together your interests, what roles you play, and what environments you want to inhabit, so that you can move around it fluidly over time, maybe even continuing to draw the map as you go.

Careering sounds fun and natural, but also scary due to the uncertainty …

Norm: There is a lot of privilege in the ability to have time to think freely about the roles you’d like to create and play. We often wonder how to give more folks this opportunity.

We believe organizations need to empower individuals to explore roles. If people have the ability to switch roles, play more roles, and discover completely new roles, we ultimately believe it will benefit both organizations and individuals. If an organization doesn’t allow for inward mobility, they can both lose talent and lose money. Recruiting and onboarding new individuals is expensive.

Careering goes hand-in-hand with lifelong learning. We believe more educational moments should happen in our lives, especially in the workplace. Currently education in the US is bucketed from kindergarten through 12th grade and sometimes university, which can make it feel like learning ends then.

If someone says, “I want to change industries. But it’s actually a difficult thing to do!” — what actionable advice can you give them?

Yatú: Relationships allow for mobility. If more people are thinking that things are possible with you, and you surround yourself with people who believe in the possibilities of things, that’s a different potential future. The advice I’d give someone is to find and surround yourself with people who believe in you, who are honest, who are optimists — people who are willing to try things that haven’t been done before. If we look to architecture, every good architect has good relationships.

Norm: With design, it feels like if you can learn how to design one thing, then you can learn how to design anything. So start somewhere. We like to think about every work experience as a “careering waypoint” — it gives you a direction but doesn’t imply a final destination.

Which reminds me that back in our hackathon days, we would encourage people to “learn whatever language your best friend knows.” In order to pick up technical skills like computer programming, we believe it’s about finding folks, building those relationships, and learning whatever tools are available and shared to get started.

I noticed in 2022 you published this “Careering Theory” as a website: https://www.careering.life. It’s exciting to see everything together here.

Norm: Yeah, one other thing about Teal is that we have a lot of concepts. But whatever theories we have, it’s important we work through them by creating, such as publishing Careering as a theoretical artifact.

How has Teal explored careering?

Norm: As we were graduating, we started thinking about life after university and asked, “What are ways of living?” We were coming out of the tunnel that was the hackathon scene. We started finding other ways people were operating, such as having residencies. We also liked the idea of apprenticeships, or finding someone to work and learn with.

This is actually how one of our projects called “Leave Room for Thoughts” started in 2018. I found out about the concept of an artist residency, told Yatú, and our minds were completely blown —

Yatú: Yeah. We found out about residencies and said to ourselves, “Let’s do it.” I took a loan out to finance the project. We said, “We’ve got to find a space.” We only had one month before starting our full-time jobs, so we met up with our friend Benji in NYC and found a space within a week.

Norm: We had no plan other than spending a month together in a space.

Yatú: We didn’t know what we were doing. We were careering before we even defined it. The only thing we knew was that we wanted to do a residency.

For the residency, we hit up friends saying, “We have a space. You can come by and create whatever you want and we’ll help you make it happen.”

We had five people come in during that month. We documented it.

Like we did in our hackathon days, we did a lot of work simply for someone to have the supportive infrastructure because we know what it’s like to not have the infrastructure. When you’re no longer a student at a university, it’s easy to appreciate access to space and certain facilities, now that they are no longer available.

One other interesting thing to note is that every artist who came to the space was experimenting with something for the first time. They all ended up continuing whatever creative pursuits they began at the residency into their ongoing practice.

Norm: It was the last couple of days we were in New York and were reflecting, finishing things up and working with the artists. We were like, “What just happened?” And then we asked outselves, “Is this an institution??”

Yatú: Afterwards, we packaged the narrative of what happened as an online artifact: https://lrft.institute. Something happened in real life. It’s not just a website.

Norm: Four years later, we created a new program under the “Leave Room for Thoughts” umbrella called “Campus Complex,” a month-long educational experiment that unfolded across New York City.

Originally, we wanted to design a new physical campus for ideal learning, with beautiful rolling hills and all. But we soon realized the potential by utilizing existing infrastructure within NYC, so we brought together local organizations to create our own “Schoolscape.”

Yatú: We encouraged learners to freely explore the Schoolscape and document their journey along the way. In creating the theoretical artifact for this program, https://cc.place, our “Leave Room for Thoughts” institution was intentionally put to rest, or as we like to say “composted,” because we don’t believe that institutions should exist forever.

Can you tell me more about how Teal approaches publishing on the web?

Norm: We’ve always believed that websites can be more. Or that websites can just “be.” Generally, anything that people try to put in a box … it can be something else.

Back in our hackathon scene days, everyone was generally into startups and building digital products. In that sphere, websites were very functional. We realized we could play with the web in a way where we could still use what we learned from digital products. That’s why most of our online artifacts have special attention put into the navigation, for example.

All in all, we believe the purpose of websites can be just to exist. I would love to see more people creating and publishing things for the simple purpose of them existing. Websites can also be works of art.

On a more holistic level, we’ve been applying this lens of viewing websites to make beautiful tools more broadly. We call this “Couture Software” — or, bespoke tools for us and friends. An example we use internally we call “Concept Trust,” a tool that helps our process of creation.

Speaking of websites, the first project Teal did, “Gassed Up,” resulted in an online artifact you can explore: https://tealprocess.net/gassed-up.

How did this website begin?

Yatú: Gassed Up started with a space. Everything always comes back to space. We used to work out of this co-working startup incubator. They had a room that could be used for events. We asked if we could use that space for one day to do a photoshoot. I had a vision.

Norm: The day before the shoot we were looking through a book of Norman Rockwell paintings I had. There’s one with this guy looking at the balloons and mess he has to clean up, feeling defeated. There was something nice about the exciting party and the sadness simultaneously. I’m imagining early us, getting into art and design for the first time, thinking to ourselves, “Yeah, the contrast! The dichotomy!” So, we decided there had been this birthday party.

Yatú: We did the photoshoot, then did video. That’s when I first did web design.

Norm: As we were putting together the site, we wondered, “How do we weave this together?“ We realized we needed a story. What if we introduce the characters first? We had a nice photo of a ladder. We realized the ladder had to be the star!

Yatú: This ladder was called Giraffe. It was yellow.

Norm: We named the ladder first. Then we needed to identify the other characters — a couple humans and the balloons. We wondered, “Are we creating a universe here? Do these characters exist in a broader world?” So we chose names for ourselves. I chose “Norman” from the book that inspired some of the vibe.

Yatú: My character’s name was Xavier. I thought it was a cool name at the time. My mom actually wanted to call me this before I was born. For some reason “Xavier” never stuck for me. After a while, my friends started calling me “Yatú Sabe.” It had a nice ring. In Spanish, “ya tú sabe” means “you already know.” It’s a way of acknowledging someone’s inherent knowledge.

So, we started exploring names in our first project. And that’s how our names came to be. We sometimes call them our Teal names, but they’re the names everyone calls us now.

How do you work so well together?

Yatú: Trust is the most important thing. As long as we trust each other and we’re honest with each other, then problems are just opportunities for us to think things through.

We also have a lot of complementary traits. Norm is a pretty encouraging as a person. His encouragement enables me a lot. And I have the audacity to try things. We build on each other. We ladder each other’s thoughts.

Norm: It all comes back to the ladder.

One reason we’re able to ladder each other’s thoughts so well is that we take each other’s very ridiculous ideas very seriously. We’re like, “Okay, if that was a thing, then…” We build on each other’s ideas by validating and extending them further.

Somehow, Yatú and I are able to align on something that feels grand and wonderful to go explore. And then we go explore it together.

What’s Teal’s operational model?

Norm: Ideas start as concepts, get nourished into experiments, and then are published as artifacts. Yatú came up with this funnel. There are way more concepts than there are artifacts. And it takes a long time to even go from experiment to artifact.

Yatú: This operational model isn’t perfect, but it’s been working for us.

Norm: It helps us align on strategy. Questions like, “How much time are we trying to spend on this?” or “What level are we trying to take this to?”

We also landed on three formats: digital, physical, and theoretical. We work at the intersection of those, which is everything.

Note: This conversation was originally conducted in 2021, edited in 2022, and published in 2023. As Teal Process & Company says, “sometimes time finds us rather than us finding the time.”

Currently, Norm & Yatú are careering as Artist-Founders by playing with USBs and the world of hardware connectivity.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Laurel Schwulst.

Coming from a background in writing and stringing together odd jobs and kitchen work, it offered a tactility in a creative professional realm I thought I would never have. It afforded me patience, both with learning from mistakes and the tediousness that comes with that type of work, which led me to explore how to manipulate an image or animate on film. Now I have knowledge that led me to work as a film projectionist where I handle precious prints and could even lead me to restoration or archival work. The experience gave me an understanding of how to take care of film. I used to let projects get dusty (physically or figuratively), and now I’m much more meticulous and keep my film, cameras and files in an organized and controlled space, which I never would’ve done previously. It helped me grow up and take myself seriously.

When it comes to your filmmaking, you’re extremely open to working within limitations and letting them influence the end project. Having worked with restricted and sometimes no budgets, you’ve always made something out of nothing. Can you explain?

I’ve always naturally leaned toward a sustainable, small-scale approach to filmmaking because if I was loftier in how I wanted to make films, I would talk myself out of it. By working with limitations, there’s more structure and ironically more room for creativity. Working at the lab in Toronto offered me an opportunity to explore a medium that not many people have access to because of its prohibitive expense. When I was unable to purchase film, I often used leftover expired film and even made music videos under these circumstances. 16mm also has a limited capacity (you only get three minutes or 10 minutes for one roll) so this offered me this opportunity to think about time: “What is possible within that time? What can be felt in that time?” When I process the film myself, it is time-based as well. There’s an anticipation where you’re in the dark then the negative is revealed to you in the light. It’s exciting but contained into one complicated medium which I find so enchanting.

When making a video for a musician, establishing the limitations with the person that I’m working with allows us to play and negotiate. I don’t like to assert very much control over performances when I’m making music videos. Offering the same limitations that I have to the person that I’m working with, I think frees them a little bit as well to understand that there’s only so much that you can do, but we do our best. On top of that, I feel like I’ve never really directed somebody. I’ve maybe directed where to stand or where to look or how to hold their body, but I’ve never tried to tell someone how to feel. I don’t necessarily know how to craft a perfectly exposed image or a perfectly in-focus image, but I let my body do the work in the same way that I want whoever I’m filming to have their body work. You don’t know exactly what the image will look like when you’re shooting film, understanding the degrees of mistakes that can occur from start to finish. In knowing that, I allow myself this spontaneous production, where every step of the way is an unconstrained risk.

From my perspective, you are very spontaneous when you shoot and during the editing process, you become very meticulous.

That’s true. Editing is my favorite part of the process because I black out and become scatterbrained when I’m shooting. I also work by myself which is, in many ways, a lot harder. If I had at least a couple of people on my team when I was shooting, I could direct or be on the technical side. But when I’m doing both, I can’t really be as present for a performance or as present technically and so there is a sacrifice on both accounts. I enjoy being meticulous when it comes to the edit because that’s when I really am able to control the space more.

That’s where I start getting influenced by the filmmakers I love, who like to expand the notion of space. I like to move a frame around or make an optical illusion or layer images on top of each other and surprise the audience. I feel like it’s a cop-out to say that it’s all intuitive, but I do kind of get into a meditation when I’m editing where I don’t know where my mind is going. I was editing a video for my friend Olivia Kaplan recently and I felt stumped and didn’t know what it would end up looking like. During the edit, I noticed an interesting pattern in the images I had gathered and let them dictate a “narrative.” It might be the case where nobody sees the intention behind my editing, but it’s so satisfying because I really like playing with illusion and creating continuity, but from more of an abstract place.

You touched on working alone, primarily. Why do you favor this way of working?

My pace is slow. I’m very much still learning, I like learning alone, and I unfortunately at this point don’t trust anyone to manifest what I have in my head. Any vision I have is kept in a tight caged. But that’s to my detriment, obviously. It makes me disorganized and I am in the process of letting that go and growing up and away from being so precious. I think I’ve just always been inherently uncomfortable with the designations in the film industry, of what different positions are and what they mean. Of course, there’s power in having a role of expertise on set, but I think I’ve always been stubborn to commit to a single role.

I like the idea of being fluid and having both creative control and technical control. But more importantly, in my learning process, I want to know how to do everything. If I want to be an editor, I still want to know what lenses or lighting to use for a particular shoot or how to color grade. My aspiration, or guised ego, is to possess extensive knowledge even if I don’t use it, so perhaps I can eventually be able to communicate that with a team.

So it’s about having the language?

Yeah, it’s about having the language, and I think it will make me a better collaborator in the long run. Me working alone is me learning, it’s not me thinking that I can only do things by myself.

Do you feel like you’re married to film as your primary medium or will you move away from it?

Definitely not married. With film, I’m mostly interested in innovating with as little money as possible and using the resources available to me. If the camera I have right now is my partner’s Sony PD150 with a broken microphone or my Arri SRI that sometimes turns on and sometimes doesn’t, I’ll risk it. Luckily right now, I go to a school where I can rent beautiful cameras so I can explore what it feels like to shoot with advanced digital technology. I’m learning how to actually craft an image in my aesthetic, but I find I seek and go after the imperfect image.

I aim to create something that can be understood by an audience. If an image is pixelated in a way where I’m shooting a landscape that kind of looks like Google Street View, I am comfortable because it’s digestible, the audience has a literacy in how to approach it. In addition, I like shaking the camera and making my presence known. I like the audience to feel that I’m leading them, otherwise, the experience is immersive in a manner I am not comfortable with. Some people can get away with it, but I don’t think I can.

Do you like including yourself in your own work?

For me it’s necessary. There are many discussions happening around documentary ethics and participatory documentary that are essential to any discussion around filmmaking. When you are relaying a story, whether it be yours or someone else’s objectivity does not exist. Anytime a camera enters a space, there is a power dynamic and a subjective gaze. And so, to create an illusion that illustrates an idea where self-reflexivity is absent can be read as manipulation. I think what I enjoy is the idea of mediating that manipulation with the acknowledgement of the filmmaker. I want people to understand how I’m making it, which is why I often expose a camera being seen or a set, or how I’ve done something. I don’t want there to be any sort of illusion that can’t be penetrated.

You’re currently working on a documentary. Would you talk a little bit about that?

I’m exploring the cryptic mortality of fish and ocean mammals as it relates to the maritime industry along the Canadian West Coast. For instance, I’m currently working with this one man who disentangles and performs autopsies on whales and teaches classes to civilians on how to save beached whales.

I was originally drawn to this topic because a couple of years ago, in the fall of 2020, there was an accident that occurred on the Capilano River next to where I grew up. A bunch of people, predominantly men, would recreationally fish for salmon just below a fish hatchery. One day the dam, which usually has an alarm when it opens, opened without warning, and the water came rushing down and killed two people. It was a tragic moment in the community and obviously was very affecting. I found myself thinking about how it could have been avoided, how the accident happened due to human interaction that was placed on the river in the first place due to the dam. I started contemplating infrastructure that interrupts nature, and how this fish hatchery on a river would ordinarily have had a natural reproductive salmon ecosystem.

Do you feel like as a filmmaker, having the position to share this story is a way that you can help repair as well?

I think it’s not so much about the act of trying to repair, for me, as filmmaking is an act of reveling in or creating dialogue on a subject or simulating reality and not trying to pretend it’s reparative. Even if I’m trying to tell the story, it doesn’t mean I’m doing anything to change the narrative. Though that’s bleak, I do feel like filmmaking itself is sort of a hopeless act. But that just could be my imposter complex and my preoccupation with failure and death right now.

Is there anything in your practice that makes you feel hopeful?

I guess when I’m talking about hopelessness I’m talking about trying to capture something that’s uncapturable, trying to capture a moment that’s already gone. But I think the chase is what’s exciting, and that’s what I’m interested in pursuing. Even though I know it’s not possible to capture something like the ocean or the water if I could, what would it sound like? What would it look like? It’s such a privileged space because it allows me to explore. It’s hopeful because I get to do it.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Lauren Spear.

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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Laurie Marhoefer.

For this last record, a lot of things went wrong, including, but not limited to, the mic that I recorded everything on being broken. We had to re-record all of the vocals, and then there were some major issues with mixing. My instinct when things go wrong is to start again. But obviously you can’t start a…Well, you could start a record again, but better to not do that. So we just started stripping everything back to the absolute core essential parts—building every song back up from rerecorded vocals and just acoustic guitar and starting kind of bare bones.

When I’m tidying my house, I almost make it worse before I make it better. If there’s clothes on the floor, I’ll just put all my clothes on the floor and then I’ll start from there. I’m really bad at asking for help with everything, hence why I didn’t not have wifi in my old house because I didn’t want it. I didn’t have it because I didn’t know how to get it, and I didn’t know who to ask, and then I didn’t ask and I didn’t have it. So yeah, Making more of a mess, making everything smaller and gradually growing it, and asking for help when you can’t do it are all pretty good [approaches when things go wrong], I think.

Is there anything that you think is a little better for the mess, on the latest record?

There’s a song called “Henry” on the record that was initially a guitar song, and I had a bunch of layered tracks on it, and it was almost like…I don’t know, if Cocteau Twins were less cool. It was just a lot going on. It got to the point where I was like, “This is so cluttered that I don’t remember how this song began. This is a lot.” And my instinct was to do what I said, where we took everything away and just left it as a guitar song, but we actually did the opposite. We chose the messiest parts and kept those. You know when you’re just throwing stuff at the wall being like, “Let’s just see if the least logical conclusion is the one that will work.”

No one should ever put reverb on a snare is my hot take, but we did that and we kept it. Then we kept this really janky piano that was definitely out of tune, and we kind of tuned everything to the dodgy piano. Then that’s the version that worked. It sounds great. It’s one of my favorite songs now.

Another example is there’s a whole song that isn’t on the record. When I wrote it, I thought this would be the linchpin of the record. Thematically and sonically and structurally, I thought this is the one that will inspire the decision making on the rest of the songs. We recorded it three separate ways over two months, and it never was right, and it was a mess. I cut my losses and decided to just not put it on the record, and I’m really glad that I didn’t, because thematically and sonically and structurally, it actually wasn’t the focal point for the rest of the writing. It was almost like an outlier from the start, which made me think it was better, but I actually think it derailed the message of the record and the sonic decisions that were made on the record would’ve been undermined by this song being on it.

So I think that that’s a positive thing to come out of a mess that actually couldn’t be solved. Not everything can be fixed and that’s equally fine. I think that that’s sometimes good to remember, too.

The philosophy of tuning everything else to the out-of-tune piano is an interesting lens for creativity and changing direction. Does that feel like something that has happened in your career often?

Altering everything to fit around the thing that can’t be changed? Yeah. I never had guitar lessons, I’m not a great guitarist. So to work around the simple fact that I actually cannot get my head around putting my fingers in many different positions, I just tune it differently. I keep the same shape basically, but I tune the guitar to a different tuning. I feel like when you see someone doing extensive tuning at a show, you’re like, “Wow, they must really have their shit together. They’re so good at guitar that they can’t bring themselves to play in a regular tuning anymore because they’ve run out of ideas.” No, it’s probably what I’m doing where they just don’t want to think about another workaround for being kind of skill-less.

What about while working through the dregs of the industry, with labels or publishing or touring?

I mean, my first record was self-released due to the fact that nobody wanted to sign me. That actually turned out to be a really cool thing that gave me a sense of independence that is still useful now that I’m not independent. I think that, “Oh, there’s nobody in the office for this long weekend to make this piece of visual material, me and my manager will do it. There’s not enough budget to get this certain thing for a music video, I’ll just ask anyone and everyone I know for ideas around it.”

I just made a music video and I was being given loads of suggestions for directors and studios to shoot it in and all this stuff, and it started to sound and feel a little bit too professional for the way that I like to do things. I was being asked about wardrobe and what kind of makeup ideas I had. And I was like, “This is making me into somebody that I’m not,” so me and my roommate decided that we would do it, and he produced it and I directed it and we got a team of friends together and we shot it. I think the immovable problem was the fact that I didn’t know what I wanted and I also wanted complete control, and we just fit everything around to those two facts and it worked.

You recently moved to Brooklyn and have been navigating being a working musician between two countries. I’m curious about what that’s been like for you–your inspiration behind the move, practicalities, if you have any suggestions or wisdom for someone looking to do something similar.

The main reason why I left England is I lived in Bristol for five years and I loved living there and the music scene there is non-competitive and grassroots and everyone’s just doing their own thing and helping each other up and it really feels like a community. Having said that, it’s a community of music genres that I’m not involved with, and I always felt a little bit out of place. Not in the way that I was doing things, but simply just what I was doing.

I moved because everything I listen to was made here. I started a radio show in lockdown just for something to do and I found so many small labels and artists that were based here in the states and now some of my friends here are people that I played on the radio show. It just felt like if I was here, I wouldn’t be thinking about being anywhere else. Which is something that I’ve always struggled with, trying to be happy somewhere, but thinking potentially there’s somewhere where I would feel more comfortable or more understood or more supported or whatever. So that was the main reason, and so far it has absolutely lived up to what I thought it would be like. Which is great because that usually doesn’t happen.

I honestly wish I’d done it sooner. I don’t think I’m in a position to give anyone advice about anything, but I’ve wanted to move here since…we did an Andy Shauf tour, I think, in 2019. Maybe it was in 2018, I don’t know. But as soon as I got home to England, I was like, “I don’t want to be here.” But I stayed three more years and I wish I hadn’t. I never regret leaving a movie that I don’t like. I never regret leaving a relationship I don’t like. And so far I’ve never regretted leaving a place that I have outgrown. But I do regret the time that it takes for me to get to that decision. And it feels like a big thing, but it’s really not. I can go home at any time. It’s a six-hour flight, it’s not a big deal. So yeah, things are scary until they’re not anymore.

Has being in New York changed your creative practice at all?

I see things in a seasonal way. So right now I’m in the “getting ready for the record to come out” season and talking about and reflecting on it. I don’t feel like I’m necessarily in a writing headspace. Having said that, I was living in a house share since September where I felt really invaded by that room. Not by the other people, just because it was on a busy road and I always felt like I wasn’t still or focused and I felt stressed out there. We moved into this new house a week ago and for three nights this week I have chosen to stay in, which is not something I usually do, and sit on the floor and play guitar, and that is so exciting to just subconsciously want to be back in my instrument with my voice, with my thoughts, at a time where it doesn’t feel pressing.

I think I work off the idea that if I have to do it, I will do it, and if I don’t, I’ll put it off. That is always my attitude, which is a bit bad. But I feel inspired by light, this house is very light, quiet, and having trees nearby…at least a tree. I’m not a hippie. I really actually actively hated living in the countryside.

I grew up in the countryside. But just seeing something else growing that isn’t a person is very comforting and makes me feel small in a nice way. New York’s great because everyone is neurotic and busy and ready to have a big conversation all the time. Or they’re not and they’re honest about it. I love that. I felt crazy when I was living in Bristol because I couldn’t be alone around people. I was either completely alone or around people. In New York, you can just feel like a small piece of a big puzzle and still not be lonely. It’s really good. It’s good for my brain.

I’ve followed you on Twitter for the last few years and have always found you as someone who is in equal measure very intelligent and well-spoken, and then really good at cracking a joke and finding levity. I wonder if there’s any art or media that inspires you when it comes to humor?

I have said this on multiple occasions privately and I never thought I would say it and it be documented forever, but I know I was raised by my parents–but I feel I was partially raised by Broad City. Those two women are a perfect example of people that are every kind of intelligent and have such a good grasp of what is funny and what is appropriate. It was also a really cool example that I hadn’t seen before of a show where the main characters are women and it’s not competitive. There’s no real dating stories. It’s purely about them trying to get by and be kind to each other and it’s so funny.

That crossover between being able to take yourself and other people seriously while also recognizing that everyone is stupid and you are also stupid and you have a lot to learn feels important. I started listening to Sarah Silverman’s podcast in lockdown and she has this perfect way of giving an answer–an enlightening take or a rude, dismissive take on something–and then being like, “But I’m talking out of my ass.” It’s so relaxing to be around someone who is clearly sharp and leads a…what’s the word that she uses…“an examined life,” while also kind of being like a child.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Emma Bowers.

I don’t know if there was any specific thing that inspired me to start making art, but as a kid, I think making art was definitely an outlet to create narratives. I was definitely a kid that played pretend a lot or had a lot of ideas about what I wanted to be or what I wish I could be—a lot of dreams. I think making art was definitely an outlet for that, to make what I had in my head solid on paper.

Do you feel like your art helps you discover more about yourself as a person?

Yes, absolutely. I think without art, I wouldn’t have discovered or had the outlet to really introspect that much about myself. A lot of the art that I made growing up was drawings of entwined friendship between girls, very similar to the subject matter that I have now. Basically, a world that I really wanted, but I guess I didn’t really understand the compulsion at the time and what that meant to me. Over time, and even now, I still learn so much about myself, and as I grow to understand more things about myself, I feel like my work also informs that, and it feeds into one another. I learn about myself through making work, but as I learn about myself, my work changes.

mottled peach skin, crushed spider eye, do you know the smell of your own skin?

face full of hurt, bonneted hag, do you know the touch of your own hands?

Yeah, that makes sense. Art is definitely a good tool for that. At least for me, I don’t know any other way.

Exactly. To explore those things. To process those things.

You said you started off with drawing, but you explore so many different mediums [illustration, printmaking, animation, sculpture, candlemaking and, most recently, tattooing.] Is it important for you to have a variety, depending on what’s going on in your life? How do you decide that you want to explore certain things at certain times?

Drawing has always been the foundation of where I came from, but a lot of what I’m interested in is world building and a more holistic approach to storytelling that’s immersive. Going through art college really helped expand that by giving me space to experiment with fibers or sculpture or stop motion. Having different outlets to build that world is important to me, but also the specific things that I use to create those worlds are also important to me. Fibers and crafts, and pulling from things that are more accessible to domestic spaces is really important to me—like candlemaking even. I’ve never really explored painting, for example, because it just didn’t seem right for my work.

tender house

ritual punishment 2

Fiber art and candlemaking allow you to use the resources you have around you?

Exactly. Certain things that I gravitate towards are very domestic or considered traditionally feminine works and I think that adds to the tapestry of my work in some ways.

A world is a combination of so many different things, so it makes sense that using all that you have around you lends itself to building an entire world and narrative.

Escapism was always very important to me as a kid, so being able to fulfill that as an adult is kind of cool for me. Even in my space, like in my apartment, it’s like me fulfilling the fantasy of that.

Would you say that the idea of playing and allowing yourself to explore things in an uninhibited way is something that’s important to you?

Oh man. I wish I could explore things uninhibitedly. In some ways I want to have fun with my work, and candles are a great outlet for that because they’re more craft-based and more fun for me to do. Same with baking. Baking is a fun activity for me that I can be a little bit more loose with. So in some ways it’s important for me to have certain things like that, but with really meticulous things like drawing or sculpture, and especially with tattooing, I’m pretty strict about the process. I’m strict about perfectionism in my work, which is something I try to break out of and question myself about. Having certain outlets and crafts that are more fun for me is important. Candlemaking and baking and playing with polymer clay. That’s super fun.

birthday candle for Aki

birthday candle for Mort

I feel like it kind of massages your brain or something, and resets you in a certain way.

Yeah, exactly.

You mentioned you’re very meticulous about your tattooing, and I have gotten a couple tattoos from you, so I know the amount of detail you put in is amazing. How do you feel the relationship between your illustrations and your tattooing fit together? Was it hard to translate one practice to the other?

I thought it would be harder than it was. I mean, it’s still a really difficult process, of course, not to be like, “Yeah, it’s super easy,” but it reminds me a lot of printmaking in the way that everything has to be done in a certain way, but then you have the added pressure of doing it on somebody’s body and there’s no way to go back. It’s really important to understand the tools that you’re using and also to accept that things are going to look different on skin than it’s going to look on paper, and having your expectations managed in that way.

You tattoo a lot of queer and trans people, how does that feel for you? I’m sure it must feel good as a queer person.

It does feel really awesome. Well, I started tattooing myself, and the feeling of having agency over my body and having something on my body that I know I wanted there, and that I put it there, feels really good. Being able to give that to my community is really nice. It feels really good that other people feel that way about my work and that it makes them feel a little bit more at home in their bodies.

I feel like the time and care that you put into making the whole session comfortable is another form of art in itself.

That was also very important to me. When I decided to start tattooing people, I didn’t want to recycle the same sort of sterile, awkward experience. Tattoo bros can be a little bit rough and uncomfy and I wanted to make people feel like they can say, “I want to move the stencil one millimeter.” or “Oh, I want to have a snack now.” or “Oh, can you give me a blanket?” I want to be able to be like, “You good? You want a blanket? You want a snack? You want different music?”

I’m curious if you have an ideal world in mind when it comes to the queer art-making community? What would you like to see?

Honestly, in some ways, I feel like I am living in a very ideal queer community, or in my mind, ideal within my friend group. We take care of each other and we support each other in our different interests. We are able to be there for each other. Obviously my friend group doesn’t represent the larger queer community, but it would be cool to extend that to people. I want the whole queer community to have that, just people supporting each other and calling each other out on their shit. That’s one of the reasons why I insist on keeping a sliding scale for the trans community, because I want to be able to extend that care to other people. If they want to feel good in their bodies just for a second with a tattoo, I want that for them.

Queerness is a major theme throughout your work. The girls that you draw are very specific and very intimate, and I know a layer of your work is in the context of anti-LGBTQ attitudes in Malaysia. How does your lesbian identity inform your work?

The anti-LGBTQ attitudes where I grew up in Malaysia was definitely the reason why I felt a need for escapism throughout my childhood. The current gender structures are put in place by our white colonizers, but that has been forgotten, so we just continue this violence thinking it is part of our own history and Malaysian identity.

Let’s talk about the girls. They have been a constant, and throughout my visual language, they’ve always been there. For me, one of the ways of processing my identity and the way that I want to present myself, or how I feel internally, or how I present myself in my gender—I process that a lot through the girls, and I think that’s why they all have similar faces, because I do base a lot of their expressions on pictures of my face.

With my lesbian and gender-fluid identity, I guess I think about these girls as hags. The hag imagery is so important to me because with lesbians, or I don’t know if I’m allowed to say dykes. Honestly, I have a hard time with the word lesbian, but I do strongly identify with the word dyke or hag because it’s sort of this feral, primal being, who lives outside of expected gender chores. But also she’s sexy and sexual, but it’s selfish and devious, but also she’s not sexy, which makes her a hag. Being selfish about your own gender and sexuality, is very haggish and devious, and I like claiming that alongside being a dyke.

worry

Strange Harvest show title piece

I’ve never really heard “hag” as a descriptor for a dyke, but I have an image in my head of what that looks like. How would you describe a hag?

In my mind, the word lesbian feels like it could still be expected to follow cis/heteronormative beauty standards or whatever, but a hag and a dyke—that’s true sexiness to me. Because she’s a fucking hag, she is unafraid of looking however she feels most fully realized. I don’t know. She dresses and presents herself as whatever she wants, regardless of whatever is expected of her. She could wear a lace bonnet and she could wear a little fucking negligee, or she could wear fucking anything.

She’s just a hag.

She’s a fucking hag. She doesn’t care. She’s here to fuck, but also to make candles. Yeah, so they’re hags to me because they are still sexual beings, but they keep that to themselves almost in a selfish way. They are selfish.

Do you feel like that’s an inner power type of thing?

It’s an inner power, but it’s also this grotesque beauty. Selfishness is synonymous with haggish-ness because a hag extends care and pleasure to herself without the intention of continuing the cycle of reproduction.

it was humid and you smelled of palm oil

I feel like the way that you describe the girls that you draw makes a lot of sense, and coming from a place where that wasn’t always accepted, it makes sense that you naturally went down that route.

I think when I was drawing them as a kid, they were very much how I would think a sexy person would present themselves, not conventionally pretty, but pretty in a way that I find interesting. The hag imagery is really important to me.

Forever Friend

You moved from Malaysia in 2014, and you went to school in Kentucky, and then you moved to Chicago, where you live now. Do you feel like your work has changed being in situations where that might not have always been accepted? How do you feel having that sort of freedom to explore more changed the way that you make art?

Yeah, it’s definitely changed a lot. I think looking back at my old work from middle school and high school, it’s definitely more repressed lesbian, “Oh, this poor girl, what are you doing?” But since then, obviously my skills have improved. I’m able to draw things that I actually want to draw and edit myself better. Those are things that just come with growing up as an artist. The subject matter has definitely changed, because it does reflect my understanding of myself almost.

Earlier on in my illustration work, you can tell that I was more concerned about drawing things that are subjectively pretty and beautiful. I like beauty in my work and I love ornateness, but I think now I am more interested in depicting things that are pretty, but also still representative of things that are unconventionally pretty—facial hair or bodies with bruises or mottled faces and being okay with deviating from the very illustrations that I started with earlier on in my artistic career.

Perempuan Minyak

That must be cool to see the progression of you changing as a person, and how your art has also changed alongside that.

Being more confident in my own body allowed me to be more confident in depicting things that aren’t conventionally pretty.

I think hags are so beautiful and sexy, but they’re not conventionally beautiful and sexy, but I don’t even know what that means anymore. What is conventional beauty? Maybe my mind is so warped in thinking that old saggy, sexy bodies are cool and awesome.

What has been the most rewarding part of your creative process and getting to the point where you are right now?

There’s so many. One of the things is being able to know myself better and being able to have an outlet to introspect. But another thing is being able to tattoo people and making them feel more at home in their body. That makes me feel really, really good. I mean, it feels good to tattoo myself, but it feels amazing to be able to give that to other people. Getting to that point, being able to have the confidence to say, “Yeah, I want to tattoo myself, and other people, and feel good in my body, and unencumbered, and have agency over my body, and allow other people to have that too,” is the most rewarding thing.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Jess Shoman.

Title screen for the HBO series, Succession.

In ancient Rome, at one point, they wanted to make all the slaves wear something so they could identify them. Like a cloak or whatever. But then they decided not to do it. And do you know why? Hmm? Because they realized if all the slaves dressed the same, they would see how many of them there were, and they’d rise up and kill their masters. But the point is, if-if we wanna survive, you and I, then… we need a hell of a lot of little folks running around shitting us data, you know, for the eyeballs, for the revenue, for the scale.
— Succession S03 E09

Introduction

The popular series Succession is nearing its final episodes as the battle for control of a conglomerate heats up. The story centres around an ageing father and his children who are in a battle for succession. The series is well made with sharp dialogue that demonstrates the ruthless attitudes of the Roy family. The use of deception in their struggle for power is straight out of the Sun Tzu and Machiavelli playbooks of old. However, differences arise over who should have access to these playbooks when we examine the political ideas and philosophy of Leo Strauss who has a very different perspective on what the public should know and not know.

Tom: Greg, this is not fucking Charles Dickens world, okay? You don’t go around talking about principles. We’re all trying to do the right thing, of course we are. But come on, man! Man the fuck up! (Succession S02 E02)

Succession

Brian Denis Cox in 2016 who plays Logan Roy

Three of Logan’s children, Kendall, Roman, and Siobhan (Shiv), are employed by the company, Waystar RoyCo, a global media and entertainment conglomerate.

There is also Connor, Logan’s oldest son; Marcia Roy, Logan’s third and current wife; Tom Wambsgans, Shiv’s husband and Waystar executive; and Greg Hirsch, Logan’s grandnephew who is also employed by the company.

The family has an extraordinarily rich lifestyle with ‘PJs’ (Private Jets), helicopters and fast boats taking them to their meetings, offices and houses around the world. They have their every whim catered to and take it all for granted as they maneuver and jockey for position to be the next leader of the company.

Their emotional and physical distance from ordinary people and their own workers is shown by their callous attitudes and obnoxious language that is demonstrated repeatedly throughout the series. The other characters of this series Connor, Tom, and Greg, are shown to regularly vacillate from greed to obsequiousness as they also try to retain their powerful positions in the constantly changing battle scenarios of the corporate wars.

Thus, none of the main characters of Succession are sympathetic. The audience may briefly empathise with some of the personal aspects of their lives but then their egoistic behaviour and ruthless attitudes soon destroy what little pity and care they may have aroused in the viewers.

The Roy kids have learned every trick in the book on how to manipulate, deceive, and use divide and rule tactics from their merciless father.

The rich dialogue of Succession is full of the language of the one-percent. For example, Roman tries to impress his father in a meeting with a combination of the latest jargon and his familiarity with the methods of elite maneuvering for profit:

Rom: I actually do have a pitch on this, Dad. Financialization. Float hot. I mean, keep news for political power, for market manipulation capability. But the rest, we play the markets with you and me up in a little pod above the city, fucking start ups and shitting on pension funds. Highly maneuverable, highly mobile.

Logan: And in terms of getting rid of Sandy and Stewy?

Rom: Oh, fuck ’em. Scare ’em off.

Logan: As in?

Rom: As in, you know…Scooby Doo it, Dad. You just dress up as ghosts in the theme park. Um, you know, we just use the lawyers, the PIs, the honey-trap hookers, all the unpleasant people at our disposal. Call in all the favors. Fucking President Raisin, all the Senate cock sucks who owe us. Fucking kill, kill, kill.” (Succession S02 E01)

The professionals and unprofessionals that they have ‘at their disposal’ are due to the use of unlimited wealth to determine a positive outcome for their ambitions.

Apart from the obvious bully boy tactics, deception is a major element in their strategies to maintain and grow their influence and power.

For example in the case of Vaulter, a media website that is acquired by Waystar RoyCo, Kendall and Roman are tasked by their father to review Vaulter’s performance. They use different types of deception to learn about the company. Roman ‘slums’ it and goes drinking with some of the staff:

Rom: Speaking of hiding shit, I took a couple of their staffers out, I got them shitfaced, and apparently, they’re looking to unionize, and fucking soon.

— Oh, yeah?

Rom: Pay transparency, bargaining rights. Just nasty, tangly shit. And it’s not a body pit, whatever the fuck a body pit is. It’s a fucking muesli pit, and doesn’t fit with our core, you know… values. So now I’m thinking we just shutter the fucker.

Ken pretends all is fine to Lawrence Yee, the founder of Vaulter, but then suddenly announces to the floor his real intentions:

Ken: Yeah. You’re… You’re all fired. So, if you can leave your laptops where they are, and hand in your passes, security will be coming around now. I’ve been through everything you’ve shown me. Food and weed, those are the only two verticals driving revenue, so we’re folding them in and, uh, yeah, you’re all free to leave.

— This is a joke.

Ken: You have 15 minutes to gather your belongings and exit the building. Separation agreements will be handed around shortly. One week of severance per year served, with full non-disclosure. Post your little videos. You get three days.

— What the f…

Ken: Unused vacation days will not be reimbursed. Health benefits will be terminated at the end of the month. That’s it. I’d like to thank you all for your hard work.

Yee: : What the fuck is going on?

Ken: Yeah, sorry about the, uh, cloak and dagger. I just needed some time to untangle all your shit, find the profit centers, keep the union off our back. We’re already fully operational on seven.

Yee: Why?

Ken: Because my dad told me to. (Succession S02 E02)

Suddenly the real side of Kendall is exposed as his familiarity with the language of corporate tricks and laws  rolls off his tongue. The patriarchal, hierarchical aspect is interesting to note as he tells Yee he did it because his dad told him too.

Reporting his deed back to Logan, he discusses his deception of the Vaulter staff and dealing with press coverage:

Ken: Okay, it’s done. Vaulter’s dead. Four-hundred and seventy-six off the payroll, full-timers, freelance… I, uh, negotiated an early break from the lease and hired an editor and five interns for the two remaining verticals, the rest will be user-generated, reviews, upload pics, all that stuff.
Also, I harvested a ton of ideas from the Vaulter staff before they left. IP and start-up ideas. Most of it’s, you know, bullshit but… you never know.

Logan: We’ll say you tried to keep it alive. Valiant efforts, et cetera.

Ken: I’m good. I’ll wear it.” (Succession S02 E02)

All in a day’s work, with very little consideration of the disastrous effects that sudden unemployment could have on the Vaulter staff. The consolidation of profit and power is primary, and the ruthlessness of the process does not enter into the minds of Logan and Kendall.

Thus, we are shown how the one percent operate and any empathy with the characters is pointless. Some reviewers criticised the series because there were no sympathetic characters, missing the point that Succession is a kind of exposé of contemporary elite behaviour, similar in some ways to Machievelli’s sixteenth century book, The Prince (1513).

“In his loafers made from the skin of… I don’t know, what is that? Human rights activists?” (Succession S02 E06)

Niccolò Machiavelli

Portrait of Machiavelli (1469-1527) by Santi di Tito

Machiavelli’s advocacy of fraud and deceit in the process of gaining power ensured his fame as a ruthless advisor to the elite classes. However, while many would see Machiavelli as a self-serving immoral opportunist, this may not have been the case. Erica Benner writes:

Just a year before he finished the first draft of his “little book”, the Medici swept into Florence in a foreign-backed coup after spending years in exile. They were deeply suspicious of his loyalties, dismissed him from his posts, then had him imprisoned and tortured under suspicion of plotting against them.

She notes that “Machiavelli’s writings speak in different voices at different times” and that “Francis Bacon [1561–1626)], Spinoza [1632–1677] and Rousseau [1712–1778] – had no doubt the book was a cunning exposé of princely snares, a self-defence manual for citizens. “The book of republicans,” Rousseau dubbed it.”

Machiaveli emphasized the importance of deception in the tactical toolbox of the power-hungry elites. He urges never to “attempt to win by force what can be won by deception” and that the “vulgar crowd always is taken by appearances, and the world consists chiefly of the vulgar.”

But deception is only part of the strategy, it is also important that “people should either be caressed or crushed. If you do them minor damage they will get their revenge; but if you cripple them there is nothing they can do. If you need to injure someone, do it in such a way that you do not have to fear their vengeance.”

In Succession, the careful planning of the Roy boys is climaxed with a sudden coup de grace ensuring that the Vaulter staff are reeling and have no avenue left open for action.

Logan: Will you sit out front today, Kerry? I need to know what the temperature is amongst the shit-munchers.” (Succession S03 E05)

Sun Tzu

Qing-era representation of Sun Tzu

Sun Tzu was a Chinese military general, strategist, philosopher, and writer who lived during the Eastern Zhou period of 771 to 256 BCE.

He is traditionally credited as the author of The Art of War, “an influential work of military strategy that has affected both Western and East Asian philosophy and military thinking. Sun Tzu is revered in Chinese and East Asian culture as a legendary historical and military figure.”

While there has been much debate over the historicity of Sun Tzu, there is no doubt over the influence of The Art of War over the centuries on generals and theorists like, for example, the influence it had on Mao’s writings about guerrilla warfare.

Sun Tzu’s advice on deception is comprehensive: “Hence, when able to attack, we must seem unable; when using our forces, we must seem inactive; when we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far away; when far away, we must make him believe we are near. Hold out baits to entice the enemy. Feign disorder, and crush him.”

Whoever Sun Tzu was, he was writing at a time when knowledge was pretty much the monopoly of the elites. Machiavelli, on the other hand, lived during a revolutionary time for knowledge dissemination. For example, “before the invention of printing, the number of manuscript books in Europe could be counted in thousands. By 1500, after only 50 years of printing, there were more than 9,000,000 books.”

This was why the philosophers of the The Scientific Revolution (c16-c17) and the Age of Enlightenment/Reason (c17-c19)  saw The Prince as ‘a cunning exposé of princely snares, a self-defence manual for citizens’.

However, this exposé did not go down well with Leo Strauss, the most popular twentieth century philosopher of the new conservative elites.

Connor: Oh, no, no, no, no. I can pull out the old megaphone anytime I want and I can say, “Hey! Guess what? I recall my father was a nasty, racist, neglectful individual. What was it that they used to say around here? No Blacks, no Jews, no women above the fourth floor. (Succession S03 E04)

Leo Strauss

Leo Strauss (1899–1973) was a German professor who emigrated from Germany to the United States where he wrote many books on philosophy, and taught classical political philosophy, mainly at the University of Chicago. His conservative ideas struck a chord with many public intellectuals, politicians and think tank professionals, some of whom were ex-students of his. His work has been the subject of much debate on his ideas and intentions.

For example, Shadia Drury, analyses his work and style of writing as intentionally obscure to ensure that his ideas on political power would only be understood by the few. In The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss, Drury writes that Strauss was “an atheist and moral nihilist who advocated the use of religion, morality, and family values as useful political tools by which to placate and manipulate the masses [and] believed that the best form of government is the absolute but covert rule of a ‘wise’ elite independent of the law”. (The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss by Shadia B. Drury (Palgrave Mcmillan, 2005) p. ix)

Photo of Leo Strauss (1899–1973)

Drury notes that Strauss is critical of Machiavelli because “by abandoning the esoteric nature of philosophy, Machiavelli undermines philosophy itself” and turns “it into an object of mass consumption”. (The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss, p. 130)

This opened the way to the Enlightenment which Strauss is critical of because enlightenment leads people to think for themselves and this is not good for the powers-that-be. Drury writes:

Machiavelli’s dissemination of philosophy to the masses opens the way to the Enlightenment, nay, it is identical with the Enlightenment. Enlightenment is ‘the project’ of modernity par excellence: its goal is to fight against the Kingdom of Darkness. It believes falsely, that mass enlightenment is the solution to man’s political dilemmas. Moreover,this modern project is conceived as a conscious and heroic effort on man’s part to take control of his destiny and to master Fortuna. According to Strauss, Machiavelli replaces the biblical God with Fortuna, and the Christian idea of providence with the modern idea of not trusting to chance, and taking one’s fate in one’s own hands.” (The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss, p. 131)

Even though Strauss rejected revelation he did not want to undermine religion because “religion is necessary to maintain order by ensuring that citizens obey the laws”. (The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss, p. 52)

For Strauss religion and philosophy are two opposites with very different aims:

[I]n Strauss’s view religion and philosophy are opposites that cannot and should not be reconciled. The life of faith is the life of blind unquestioning surrender, whereas the life of philosophy is that of free enquiry. The faithful are steeped in delusions whereas the philosophers rejoice in the truth. Religion prohibits contemplation because it knows as soon as one reflects, one will recognize that religion is a fraud. However, if one reflects further, one will realise the necessity of such swindles and the wisdom of the prophets who create them for love of mankind. Realizing this, the philosophers must keep their atheistic truth hidden; they must live a dual life endorsing publicly what they know is a noble fiction. […] [T]his dual life causes them no grief; on the contrary it fills their life with laughter, inside jokes, subtle winks and pregnant pauses. (The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss, p. 60)

Thus, it seems that while Machiavelli wrote to reveal power, Strauss wrote to conceal power. Strauss criticises Machiavelli for making public the strategies of the elites, risking the enlightenment and possible revolt of the people.

Strauss liked to keep it simple. Adam Curtis shows in his documentary, The Power of Nightmares, that Strauss liked the TV series Gunsmoke because: “The hero has a white hat; he’s faster on the draw than the bad man; the good guy wins. And it’s not just that the good guy wins, but that values are clear. […] Good and evil.” [Professor Stanley Rosen, Pupil of Leo Strauss 1949]

Strauss also liked Perry Mason, the TV series about a lawyer: “The extremely cunning man who, as far as we can see, is very virtuous and uses his great intelligence and quickness of mind to rescue his clients from dangers, but who could be fooling us—because he’s cleverer than we are. Is he really telling the truth? Maybe his client is guilty!” [Rosen]

Therefore the masses could be taught to unite “against a common evil, and set about creating a mythical enemy”, which in the USA, for example, under Reagan was the Soviet Union, while at the same time never really knowing if what they are being told is the full story.

Drury argues that Strauss teaches that “perpetual deception of the citizens by those in power is critical because they need to be led, and they need strong rulers to tell them what’s good for them”.

The creation of myths that divert the anger of the masses away from their own elite perpetrators is balanced by positive myths that puff up the nation’s pride in the very same elites. This is the rule of the wise, and revealing its inner workings was frowned upon by Strauss.

Rom: Hail, my fellow toilerman. I have returned from real America, bearing the gift of sight.

Shiv: How was summer camp?

Rom: Hmm? What’s that? Didn’t catch that. I’ve been down in the salt mines so long with my fellow Johnny Lunchpails, I no longer speak One-Percent.”
(Succession S02 E05)

Conclusion

Succession is one story about the real America. It shows the workings of a society at its highest levels. It is self conscious in that it has no illusions about the American Dream. Instead it shows a society that is brutalised by its own successes that are leading to a greater disparity between wealth and poverty. It shows the growing distance between the masses and the elites that has developed over the last few decades, the contradiction between the idea of the nation and its reality. The ideal nation promoted by the elites is being split apart by global agendas that are consuming more and more of the nations resources to the detriment of its citizens:

Shiv laughs: Okay, big picture… we’re at the end of a long American century. Our company is a declining empire

— inside a declining empire.

— Amen, brother.” (Succession S03 E02)

Nobody knows where this is all leading but one can be sure that the wise men are working on it in a race to stop the masses from becoming completely fed up and taking matters into their own hands.

The verdict on Succession? Machiavelli would probably have loved it; Strauss would most likely have hated it.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Caoimhghin O Croidheain.

I’m terrible at routines, normally. I feel like I have no routine except for my one therapy session each week and when that doesn’t happen, I’m totally out of whack. Specifically for this, it felt really important to get into a routine because I wanted to train the muscle and to make it feel like I was showing up each day. I’m not looking for some divine inspiration, I’m not looking for some wild things to happen, I’m just showing up and doing the work, and I was just trusting myself. In getting rid of my demons in the morning with the morning pages, I could then actually do work and show up properly rather than being plagued by negative thoughts which sometimes happens to me. I’m doing transpersonal psychotherapy at the moment and I’ve been in it for two and a half years. So it’s been really nice actually seeing the way that things have changed. Also, as far as routines go, it’s quite useful for your body to know when you’re hungry, when you’re going to wake up, when you’re going to go to sleep. I’ve never had a nine-to-five job, but part of me thinks that I would love it just for that aspect of having a well-trodden routine. Also, because it makes breaking routines so much fun.

Your album In|FLUX seems to act as a reprieve from negative self-talk. Aside from the morning pages, what tools have you put in place for yourself?

One of the most important things I’ve realized is that I can’t leave that kind of negativity behind. It’s not a linear path where I start at the beginning with all the negative thoughts, and I go through therapy and I come out the other end and I never have to see them again. When I started therapy, I thought that’s what was going to happen. Now, it’s about learning that it’s a part of me and a part of what happens, but also learning to be very gentle with that part; sometimes it will overtake me a little bit. Initially in my therapy journey I’d be like, ‘I haven’t been therapized enough, I’m not fixed.’ I thought I was fixed, I thought I was fine. But the longer I do it the more I’m like okay. It’s an influx, it’s the movement from one to the other and knowing that there is a movement and it will pass.

Are there things that you put in place while you’re working on a project to watch out for your mental health?

I will do something for a while and then it will taper off, and then I’ll feel a little bit guilty. I used to be like why can’t I keep anything going? Why can’t I sustain anything? This feels like I’m failing repeatedly. But I think I feel so much less guilty now. I have kept a diary since I was 11; I don’t keep it every day and I’ll go through phases of keeping it for three months and then not looking at it for months. I think up until I was about 25, I was like what is wrong with me? Why can’t I just write in my diary every day? Then I realized that I’ve kept a diary since I was 11 which means that I’ve been keeping a diary for 14 years. Just because it’s not each day, it didn’t feel like that and I think that really helped me to just be gentle with myself. So putting things like morning pages in place, I know they make me feel better. When I do them, I feel really proud of myself and I give myself a pat on the back. But I don’t always manage to do them and when I don’t… I think it’s as important learning to do them as it is being okay with sometimes not doing them.

Your career has been very nonlinear, it’s really cool to see you crafting your own path in that way and doing things at your own pace. You didn’t release anything for five years after your 2015 EP. Were you creatively stuck? What do you do when you are?

That was a really strange time because I’d released this EP and it had loads of nice things said about it. My life didn’t change but it felt like it was doing really well but I also had the lowest self-esteem of my entire life. I was in this weird moment where I thought well that I’ve tricked everyone into thinking that this is good when actually it’s not. Or I’ve made one good thing and I’ll never be able to recreate that. There’s also that pressure where you’ve just started that you’ve got to get more stuff out as quickly as possible. I think the combination of those, and also hearing other people’s voices about the songs. I don’t need to hear everyone else’s opinion on my stuff that is about me, and I think it took me a really long time to realize that. Those five years were a completely unintentional hiatus. I was slowly building the courage and the resilience and the power in myself to be able to be like, ‘okay, I’m just going to try this out and I’m going to try and push away all of those tweets or Instagram comments or emails or reviews or things that I’ve read other people saying about me.’ I tried to pretend I didn’t have an audience. I wrote my first album A Common Turn and then it took me ages to get it recorded because I’d burnt basically all except one bridge in the industry. I didn’t really know how to go about any of it, and I didn’t really have any money so it was hard to record it. It was super useful because that felt like the biggest hill I will ever have to climb. I also didn’t read any reviews from that point on. It’s one of the best lines in the sand that I’ve drawn for myself that I haven’t moved from.

What’s your relationship with criticism like now?

Well it’s that thing, isn’t it? You can hear 10,000 nice things and one bad thing and the one bad thing will be basically etched into the back of your eyelids. Every time you close your eyes you’ll hear that, but the good things will just wash over you. That’s my relationship with criticism. I’m stupidly sensitive. But the more I learn about myself and the more I build myself, the less those comments mean and the more I realize that everyone has an opinion about everything.

I really love the music video for the lead single, and how the album artwork continues this theme of exploring different facets of ourselves. Do you see a differentiation between Anna B Savage, the artist, and Anna B Savage, who I’m talking to right now?

I do feel like I differentiate myself from Anna B Savage. That middle initial is really useful, even though it is my middle initial. I don’t use that in my day-to-day life, because I feel like if you don’t differentiate yourself from your music, especially now when on Spotify you see literal quantitative numbers of how many people like you––how many people have listened to that song, how many people listen to you per month, how many people are listening to this other band who’ve also come up at the same time. There’s too much data around for you to not take that on. So there has to be a line, but I also feel like it is entirely me and it’s the most honest representation of me. It’s funny to me because of the influx thing, it is both. I have distance from Anna B Savage, but I also am completely inextricably entwined to the music and the output and the creation and I love having a handle on all of the different things that are going on. It is both ultimately.

You made your EP by yourself and then you brought in William Doyle for your first full length album. Then you’ve worked with more people on this album. How does collaboration make you a better artist?

I love collaboration so much, and it definitely makes me a better artist. I really love people, I find them infinitely interesting. I think maybe that’s also partly why I love therapy so much, because it not only teaches me about me but it teaches me about my interactions with other people and their interactions. I had spent so long working on my own for the first EP, and then writing the first album before I got into the studio with William Doyle. As I had written that album, I also then started making a film with my ex-boyfriend and our old best friend from school. So suddenly I was in the studio with Will and then I was working on this film with Jem [Talbot] and I was just like, is this what it can be like? You’re allowed to do this, this is fun, this is fucking fun. I’m not in a weird bedroom with all the curtains closed trying to pull this song out of my brain. There’s such a beautiful dynamic where you can balance each other out. If someone’s having a little bit of a wobbly day, the other person can sweeten them up and vice versa. It’s a real exercise in trust and it’s a real exercise in communication. Those are things that I find really hard and really interesting and really fun to challenge myself with.

You played saxophone and clarinet on this record, and you hadn’t picked them up in over a decade and I wonder if it’s tied in with going to therapy and hashing out your past and figuring out your journey. Do you think it’s helpful to journey back to certain past selves, especially when you were creative, and rediscover them?

There’s an element of sweeping up everything, being like, ‘Oh, you’re invited too. I’d almost forgotten about you, of course you can come as well.’ I hadn’t really thought about the saxophone or the clarinet in probably well over a decade. Then, I don’t know why I said it, but when me and Mike [Lindsay] were first talking about the album I told him I could play the clarinet and the saxophone and when I brought them in, I wondered what the hell I was doing. I feel like I quit them for a reason because they didn’t feel like me. So, it felt very gracious to let them back in because I think I was too mean to them before. Now I love the clarinet so much, and I think it’s one of the most beautiful instruments and it breaks my heart and it makes my heart sore at the same time. It’s evolution, isn’t it? Something that at one point I was like, “No, I’m never going to play that. I’m totally done with it,” and then realizing that actually there is real beauty in it and there’s space for it in what I’m doing. I also like a little bit of a challenge and I hadn’t necessarily thought that I was challenging myself as much as I was on this album. It feels like the whole exercise was putting my trust in this album. I trust that I’ll be able to play the clarinet. I trust that if I do the morning pages and arrive at the studio that it will just happen. I wonder if that was a lot to do with therapy as well––maybe I can just do it and see what happens.

You played the wrong chord on your song “Orange” but you kept it anyway. How has your relationship with mistakes developed over the years?

It’s been a journey. One of the reasons that it took me so long to put anything out is because it feels like a totally shameful thing to make any mistakes whatsoever. I wonder if that’s maybe because I feel like as the daughter of two professional musicians I should know all my musical theory, be able to do every scale on the planet without even thinking about it. I never was good at theory, and I failed my grade five and it was a fucking nightmare. My God, those exams were so painful. The quantitative thing: having a grade put on your one hour that you spent with this person. As a child I was so sensitive; that was not a way to get me to get good at stuff, where you get penalized for mistakes. I think that got so drummed into me and it’s really only in the last few years where I’ve realized that I’m allowed to be wrong. It’s not the most shameful thing in the entire world. You just have to lean into it. When I wrote my first album, I would only write it when there was no one else in the house, and the idea of someone hearing me flub even as I was writing, if I played the wrong chord or would sing a note that didn’t fit in that progression, it was physically painful. I think letting my producer Mike [Lindsay] in for In|FLUX at the earlier point when I was constantly making mistakes, felt really empowering. The mistake on “Orange” is perfect, it makes the song for me. I’m very happy that it’s now there as an example of mistakes being good.

What do you think is the best thing you’ve learned since 2015?

It’s all kind of mixed in, isn’t it? I think there’s two things. The first is, in order to have the work done you have to actually do the work. As annoying as that is. I feel like in 2015 I was reading all the books on how to do it and constantly searching for that magic piece of the puzzle that would suddenly mean that 25 songs fell out of my brain onto a CD or whatever; it doesn’t happen. You have to keep showing up and it’s really annoying, I wish that wasn’t the way. So just showing up all the time and being fucking gentle with myself. Speaking gently to myself, allowing myself to make mistakes. I think there’s such power in gentleness, and there’s such power in being sensitive and being vulnerable. I only saw it as a real crack in me before, and now I’d like to give her a little hug. It’s a really important part of me. I cry three times a day. The more I do it in front of my therapist, my therapist is like, “So you’re feeling something?” Yes, I’m feeling something, thank you very much. Whereas before, I didn’t know.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Sammy Maine.

Climate news can be disheartening. But as an older climate scientist, I am neither discouraged nor disengaged. Instead, I feel more determined than ever to support younger generations ready to face our climate challenge head-on, and promote steps to reduce carbon dioxide in earth's atmosphere to limit rising temperatures.

As a professor of chemistry for twenty-six years, I centered my professional life on calculations and experiments. Then in the late 1980s I launched an "encore career" in climate science for diplomacy, including as lead author on five reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

It's fair to say that I am deeply versed in the science of climate change and its technological solutions. But not until I walked the Massachusetts woods a few years ago with forest expert Bob Leverett did I truly grasp the major role that forests could play in moving the world beyond net-zero carbon emissions and putting brakes on global warming.

At a state forest less than an hour from my western Massachusetts home, Bob led me through woods he knows well to a grove of towering white pines, seventy-six trees that got their start around the time of the Civil War.

Nearly my age, Bob is a retired engineer, big-tree expert, and co-founder of the Native Tree Society. He and his colleagues have developed state-of-the-art methods to measure tree volume, and calculate the weight of trees from their density. Since wood is half carbon by weight, he and I have determined precisely how much carbon mature trees contain between ground and crown.

Bob pointed to a tree he called "Pine 58," and we craned our necks. "This tree has grown 21 feet taller in the thirty years I have been measuring it," he told me. "At 176 feet and still growing, it is the tallest accurately measured tree in New England."

Taller than a 15-story building, Pine 58 has captured nearly 20 tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and stored six tons of elemental carbon in the wood of its trunk, branches, and roots. Additional soil carbon has accumulated as fallen trees, branches, and needles decompose and networks of carbon rich fungi connect tree roots throughout the soil. From root tips to pine cones, this tree is a carbon champion.

Unlike the two of us standing in its shadow, Pine 58 is barely middle-aged. Barring storms or saws, this pine has at least another century of life ahead of it. Such trees should not be rare in our forests, but they are. Nearly 96 percent of all American forests are younger than Pine 58, even though most tree species can live for two hundred years or much longer. And throughout their lifespans, trees accumulate carbon.

"Many people think trees stop growing productively long before they do," Bob tells me. "Pressure to log them for profit and misinterpretation of data on how trees actually grow perpetuate a myth of early senescence."

It can take more than 30 younger trees half the height of Pine 58 to store as much carbon as one mature tree like Pine 58. Protecting mature trees so they can keep growing (instead of cutting them down)—a management practice I call "proforestation"—can deliver three to ten times the carbon storage benefit of planting new trees during this critical century. In 2022, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, "protection of existing natural forest ecosystems is the highest priority for reducing (carbon) emissions …" citing our proforestation paper.

Large older trees maintain their carbon storage advantage over small younger trees as they age. The total amount of carbon captured and stored above ground by forests is greater in older stands, and the amount of carbon accumulated continues to increase well beyond 150 years.

Trees can no longer accumulate carbon when they are cut down. Even though lumber contains carbon, less than half the wood in a harvested tree ever becomes a board. The rest winds up, sooner or later, as released carbon dioxide.

Planting trees is an excellent thing to do, but from a carbon point of view, saplings will always lag the amount of carbon being kept out of the atmosphere by existing trees that are allowed to keep growing. Wouldn't it be wonderful to live among trees fulfilling their potential to accumulate carbon at high rates for centuries?

In Seattle last April, President Biden directed federal agencies to safeguard mature and older forests on public lands. Just one month before that report is due, agencies are announcing major harvests including in older forests. A few months following the President's directive, the US Department of Agriculture launched its "Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities" program, including incentives to log on private forestlands.

"Climate-smart commodities?" I am not convinced. By contrast, Washington State's Department of Natural Resources is on track to designate 10,000 acres of timberland as "carbon reserves," older forests protected from logging. Creating carbon and biodiversity reserves, spared from the saw, is central to proforestation management.

Here's how you can help: Let local leaders know that you recognize the climate importance of larger trees. Protect trees on your local landscape.

Both in our eighties, Bob and I are healthy and expect to live past 2030, the year by which humanity must slash carbon emissions by half to have a shot at "net zero carbon" by mid-century and a tolerable limit on global temperatures. That's the point at which carbon removed by nature equals carbon emissions.

Then, to avoid irreversibly severe floods, droughts, heatwaves, and wildfires, humans must emit less carbon dioxide than land and sea absorb each year, until and beyond the year 2100.

The oaks and pines near his Walden Pond cabin inspired Henry David Thoreau to write that "a man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone." Pine 58, left alone on a hillside for 160 years and counting, continues to add steadily to the six tons of carbon already stored in its trunk, branches, and roots.

Making sure that our forests grow more trees like Pine 58 will allow natural forests to assist carbon drawdown for centuries after Bob and I—and the rest of us—are gone. Let's accept this gift that forests are offering us—that strikes me as "climate-smart."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by William Moomaw.

Featuring: Saleh Hijazi (BDS Movement) and Nadya Tannous (Palestinian Youth Movement) in conversation with Tariq Kenney-Shawa (Al Shabaka)

The post Learning & Unlearning Palestine Part 4: Allyship & the Fight for Palestinian Liberation appeared first on Al-Shabaka.

This content originally appeared on Al-Shabaka and was authored by Saleh Hijazi.

Students who come from homes conducive to learning usually do well in school. Their parents do a wonderful job in raising their children in ideal home environments, with the result that their children flourish in school. Would that there were more of these parents! There are also parents who don’t provide such homes, which often causes their children problems in school.

It is hard to teach children from homes where marital strife and impending divorce convulse their sense of themselves; where children are physically or emotionally abused; where little parental concern is shown about them either at home or at school; where children aren’t taught the difference between right and wrong, or the importance of old-fashioned values like responsibility, self-discipline, and a solid work ethic, or kindness, respect for others, compassion, and politeness.

It is hard to teach children from dysfunctional homes and emotional wastelands; where parents endlessly preach to their children, instead of being role-models after whom children want to pattern their lives; where parents are too busy to do what parents always did in the past like being parents, who explained the world to their children, answered their questions, talked them through the problems of life, taught them wisdom about how to grow up, showed sympathy with their defeats and sorrows, and interest in their successes and dreams, and were always there to love and protect them.

It is hard to teach a fatherless or a motherless child who feels cheated by a parent’s absence or loss; a lonely child who feels uprooted by a parent’s frequent job relocations and no longer bothers to make friends at school; a child shattered by a parent’s drinking or drug problem; a spoiled child bribed by parental guilt-offerings for time and affection rarely bestowed; a defeated child who knows only rejection and has nothing to live for; a frustrated child who can never measure up to a parent’s expectations; an angry child who lashes out to prove he exists and will make the world pay for his pain.

It is hard to teach children of helicopter, snowplow, and bulldozer parents who infantilize them by making it impossible for them to grow up, to become their own persons, and to live their own lives; parents who instill in their children a gargantuan sense of entitlement; parents who refuse to set limits on their children’s behavior, wanting to be their friends instead of their parents; parents in denial about their children’s behavior, eternally making excuses for them, enabling them to become more uncontrollable year after year, and thereby disabling them later to be mature human beings.

It is hard to teach children from homes where the life of the mind is disdained or neglected; where there are no books; where parents don’t read, don’t read to their children, or encourage them to read on their own; where a child’s curiosity is never piqued by a parent’s questions, or by parents discussing ideas within their child’s hearing to suggest a larger world outside the home.

These are but a few of the home lives of children, some of whom have been so deeply scarred that they may never be reached. These home situations weigh heavily on teachers when these children arrive at school already maladjusted, troubled, or broken. Teachers never give up on them, however, so that they can experience some human contact, understanding, and comfort.

There are so many lost children in our schools today that one wonders whether they are the canaries in the mine shaft of American culture, signaling that there is something terribly wrong in our country.

Many of the problems that afflict inner-city children — living in decaying neighborhoods, surrounded by gang wars, homicide, drugs, alcoholism, unemployment, hunger, sickness, lack of health care, poverty, despair and hopelessness — affect many children at all levels of society no matter where they may live, or how affluent they are for broken children come from all kinds of homes, rich or poor.

How can one realistically expect these children to be motivated to learn amidst such conditions? These students are defeated even before setting foot in the school.

They come to school hungry, malnourished, disturbed, and, in some cases, so traumatized that massive interventions are needed but can’t be provided since school nurses, psychologists, and social workers have been let go because of budget cuts and funding diverted to charters.

Teachers have neither the time nor expertise to deal with these problems because they must teach overcrowded classes. The result is that many schools have become warehouses for children whom America has written off as expendable.

Education “reformers” claim that there are no such things as “bad home situations,” or that, if there are, they are only “excuses” for children’s not learning. If you want the response to such claims, simply ask any school nurse, psychologist, or social worker, if you can find one, about what many children endure in their homes and its effect on them in the classroom.

And yet teachers are held accountable for the academic progress of these blighted young lives too distracted to learn or who have simply shut down.

Children need a sense of security, a comfort zone, and parental love to understand why learning even matters in life or why even being alive matters. Children are not inert objects, but fragile creatures in need of gentle rain, sunshine, and a nurturing home.

They need to be accepted by their parents for who they are, not for who their parents want them to be; made to feel valued and special to believe they are special, little of which occurs in these homes.

Yet somehow schools are simply expected to deal with these children who are sick-at-heart with undiagnosed problems and emotional issues. Teachers try to get through to each of these children because they are often a child’s only hope.

Given the plight of these children today, teachers are understandably more concerned about them as broken human beings than as students. Teachers don’t teach subjects. They teach children, many of whom are profoundly damaged, and therein lies the challenge of teaching today.

Anyone can master a body of knowledge, but imparting this knowledge in ways that enable children to grow and to see the world differently; that inspire them to re-imagine who they are and what they still may become; that show them how to transform learning to discover their dreams and to realize them — this is the lifeblood of teaching.

However, teaching today is dealing with the collateral damage of young lives adrift and bringing them back from the edge. Teaching today is working in field hospitals among wounded children in desperate need of professional and clinical care which schools and teachers cannot provide.

Teaching is about taking these children from wherever one finds them, moving them forward, and, hopefully, returning them whole to themselves. Teaching is about listening, mentoring, and, perhaps, even healing. How does one even begin to teach children from homes that are themselves the source of their problem

However, there is still something else that is having a corrosive effect on the American classroom. More parents than one would care to imagine have simply abandoned their responsibility for raising their children and expect the school to raise them, instead.

When their children do wrong, these parents invent any excuse for blaming the school for their own dereliction of duty. In the past, one could assume that the children who came to school had been properly raised, but this is today no longer the case.

These parents simply desert their children lest raising them interferes with their careers or “lifestyles,” or they give in to their children rather than being their parents, which requires time and hard work. The result is that too many schools have been turned into emergency wards that struggle to instill basic standards of civilized conduct which should already have been taught in the home.

Schools cannot take the place of the home, nor can teachers assume the role of parents. If parents do their job so that teachers can teach rather than being surrogate parents, children are the winners, and the school can proceed with its mission of teaching the young.

There are parents who do an excellent job in raising their children and creating homes that are conducive to learning. There are also parents who show little interest in their children or their academic progress.

It is vital that these parents play an active role in their children’s education by working closely with the school. Teachers cannot educate children alone, but rely on parents to support the school’s efforts. Children should sense continuity between the home and the school, not contradiction.

Parental expectations are a force of nature, and their children will take school seriously if their parents do and follow up closely on their children’s progress.

Everything in this world is attitude. If parents encourage their children to do their best, their children will rarely disappoint them. The climate of learning in which children thrive should pervade the home even before children enter the school. Learning never takes root unless the soil has been prepared in the home.

In fact, everything about becoming a human being begins in the home. It is society’s great civilizer, the molder and shaper of children’s hearts and minds, their characters and values, their behaviors and attitudes, their views of themselves and the world.

Raising a child during their magical years is an awesome responsibility, for parents are fashioning their child’s very soul. A child is something sacred, someone to be approached with great reverence. Being a parent is an act of faith, hope, and love that will shape a child forever and it all begins on the holy ground of the home. You may have heard that old saying that God couldn’t be everywhere, so he created mothers!

While nurturing the body, parents ought never lose sight of their child’s soul, mind, spirit, and emotional life, and devise all manner of experiences that would stimulate their child’s innate curiosity and playfulness, imagination and creativity, mental development and the love of learning. Teach your child to look at everything in different ways, sympathizing with all points of view, seeing things through the eyes of others, even of animals.

Expose your child to Beauty in all its manifestations by walking in nature, listening to all kinds of music, and looking at all kinds of art. Have your child look for truth and values in stories, all kinds of stories — fairy tales, folktales, and the wisdom in the fables of Aesop.

But, above all, allow your child to soar into unexplored realms of inspiration and wonder, and do everything in your power to keep these twin-companions alive, for they are your child’s only true teachers.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Frank Breslin.

Featuring Inès Abdel Razek (PIPD) and Dr. Yara Hawari (Al Shabaka) in conversation with Dr. Maha Nassar (U. of Arizona).

The post Learning & Unlearning Palestine Pt 3: Normalizing and Peacemaking as Discourses of Violence appeared first on Al-Shabaka.

This content originally appeared on Al-Shabaka and was authored by Ines Abdel Razek.

In Samira’s Dream, we follow Samira over a period of seven years as she grows and develops without losing sight of her objectives. The length of time taken to make this documentary reminded me of the fictional film Boyhood which is made and takes place over a period of 12 years, an accomplishment whereby “we watch the actors getting older for real, which gives their characters a sense of authenticity.”

The same can be said for Samira’s Dream as we see the difficulties and real problems she faces over the years, where even being filmed exerted so much pressure at one point that she asks for it to be stopped. She was never sure that she could overcome all the problems she encountered along the way, and the sometimes tense atmosphere during the filming added to the authenticity. As the film’s director Nino Tropiano noted: “Werner Herzog said that filmmaking is not about aesthetics, it is about athletics. In other words, you have to work hard.”

Samira’s Dream (Ndoto Ya Samira) (2022) – Trailer

This is easy to forget in an age where everyone seems to be constantly taking selfies and filming themselves doing the most insignificant things. Having a documentary made about you would be many teenagers’ greatest fantasy and desire. Yet, in societies where liberal freedoms cannot be taken for granted, and your dreams are not easily accomplished (especially for women), there is no sure ending.

Samira gets knocked down, and she gets up again, and again. She works hard, gets help wherever she can, and has the support of a husband who (although anxious about the effect her high level of education might have on their marriage) still gives her wishes his blessing.

For Tropiano this long project was not like Michelangelo’s sculpture where a start had already been made on the block of marble he fashioned into David. The film took shape very gradually, as Tropiano explains:

Here I am thinking where will I start? I called a friend of mine who had spent a few months in Zanzibar. Where is that!? A traditional Muslim society. That’s intriguing. One of her photos in particular, struck me. A group of young female students walking out of a madrassa in a very orderly manner. It was then I knew the subject matter for my film – female education. So, I needed to write down a synopsis of some sort. I imagined a young woman coming from a remote village, who dreams of moving to town to get a college education. By following her life, I would have a film.

Even when Tropiano arrived there, he still did not have a subject for his documentary. A chance meeting with a friendly group of schoolgirls led to some general interviews and his choice of Samira for “her natural charisma, open-minded attitude, and cheerful approach”. Diplomacy then ensued as he had to gain the trust of the local people, the Shia Leader of the community, and the teachers in town. Over the next 7 years, a friendship built up which allowed for a constant revisiting and filming that made for a much deeper story than a single visit would have told. By keeping a low-key profile he was able to fly below state officialdom and keep costs down. Over the years Tropiano was able to gain the confidence of the people, demonstrated by the relaxed humour and friendly disposition of the protagonists while, at the same time, capturing the natural beauty of the landscape and the colourful clothes of the people in some beautiful photography.

Nino Tropiano came to Ireland in the mid-90s where he graduated from the National Film School in Dublin with a 50-minute film entitled My Daughter Does Madonna. He went on to direct and produce Mary’s Last Show, Class Reunion and a short film called The Fall. Later his documentary Chippers (2008) was awarded Best Documentary Memorie Migranti at Gualdo Tadino in 2010.

Chippers: The story of the Italian community in Ireland

Even though fish and chips is an English fast food tradition, by a strange quirk of fate it was mainly Italians who set up the fish and chip shops all over Ireland. Tropiano delves into the history of the Italian peasant farmers who sought work abroad and ended up selling English traditional food to the Irish. Irish efforts to mimic the business soon discovered that selling fish and chips was hard work with very long and unsociable hours.

Tropiano’s ability to be a fly-on-the-wall and let ordinary people tell their own story is very evident in Chippers and this style of filmmaking pays off handsomely in Samira’s Dream. With a minimal voiceover, much of the narrative is conveyed in Samira’s own words.

His own struggles to get funding, the difficulties of getting to Zanzibar and the problems of production and editing, could have led him to give up the project altogether. He notes:

Each time I got turned down when I applied for funds, I faced an existential crisis, followed by an upsurge that fed in me the ability to see things in perspective. In hindsight, things went the way they were meant to.

However, Tropiano is also aware of Western tropes, a trap whereby authors/filmmakers/artists make themselves the centre of their own work and lose sight of their original intention: “I faced many obstacles along the way and I suspect that in the hands of other filmmakers, Samira’s story would have come second with the focus shifted towards the struggling life of a filmmaker trying to tell a story in Africa. I resisted the temptation to put myself into the film, to narrate some thrilling backstories in fear they might divert from Samira’s quest into the unedifying and morally bankrupt African tale Western audiences generally look for and festivals tend to love and give awards to.”

This predicament faced by the artist is discussed by the writer James Joyce who discusses creativity (in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) in terms of the developing maturity of the the artist:

The image, it is clear, must be set between the mind or senses of the artist himself and the mind or senses of others. If you bear this in memory you will see that art necessarily divides itself into three forms progressing from one to the next. These forms are: the lyrical form, the form wherein the artist presents his image in immediate relation to himself; the epical form, the form wherein he presents his image in mediate relation to himself and to others; the dramatic form, the form wherein he presents his image in immediate relation to others.

Tropiano moves away from making his art about himself, or about his encounters with others. He takes himself out of the equation while guiding his project in such a way that it becomes a story that the real hero, Samira, can take centre place in, all the while providing inspiration for many women who aspire to achieve similar educational goals.

It is so easy in Western society to fulfill the role of the individualist, Romantic hero telling of his adventures far away from home in distant lands. Western cinema is full of heroes and superheroes, but to create something which turns an ordinary local into an extraordinary example and symbol is a real achievement in art.

Back in Zanzibar at a music and film festival, Samira’s Dream (Ndoto Ya Samira in Swahili) was to be screened. After two hours of dancing to live music Tropiano was called to the stage to speak:

I prepared a little speech in Swahili and the crowd jeered at my blunders. Then magic happened. There were about six hundred people, and they sat, remaining glued to the screen till the end. That was my reward: I realised the film deserves to be promoted and be seen as it creates a true sense of awareness in Tanzania.

Samira’s Dream is a story that takes us through the hardships and joys of life, over a timescale that is a rare experience in cinema and which demonstrates dedication to a craft and an idea which takes time to be perfected and achieved so well.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Caoimhghin O Croidheain.

The post Learning & Unlearning Palestine Part 2: Limited Paradigms appeared first on Al-Shabaka.

This content originally appeared on Al-Shabaka and was authored by Yara Hawari.

This conversation examines the history and current reality of the erasure of the Palestinian narrative, the delegitimization of Palestinian voices in mainstream spaces, and possibilities for change. Recorded on January 30, 2022.

The post Learning and Unlearning Palestine Part 1: Who Can Speak on Palestine? appeared first on Al-Shabaka.

This content originally appeared on Al-Shabaka and was authored by Nour Joudah.

COVID-19 “brought to light”  the stressors faced by students, Nate Turcotte, an assistant professor at Florida Gulf Coast University, told the Hechinger Report. Un-grading “takes stress and anxiety away… But more importantly, it prioritizes their learning,” said Turcotte. “Instead of ‘What did I get?’ it’s ‘What did I learn?’” Evergreen State College, in Washington, has dropped letter grades and switched to written evaluations while students at Brown University were given the option to choose their preferred grading methods.

Since 2000, first-year students at MIT have participated in what one school official described as “ramp-up grading.” In their first semester, students receive a “pass” grade for each course they successfully complete; if they fail, the course is not recorded on their transcript. In the second semester, they receive a letter grade of A, B, or C—but if they receive a grade of D or F, the course is not recorded on their transcript. By year two, students receive standard letter grades in most classes. “We’re gradually getting people acclimated, and they’re calibrating themselves to what it takes to succeed with our very rigorous academics,” Ian Waitz, MIT’s vice chancellor of undergraduate and graduate education, explained.

In April 2022, EdSource reported how a number of academic departments at campuses across the  University of California system are rethinking how to assess student learning and exploring alternatives to the A-F grading system. Though EdSource noted that “officials acknowledge there’s no consensus across the system of the best approach,” figures such as Jody

Greene, Jody Greene, the associate vice provost of teaching at UC Santa Cruz, told EdSource,  “We will be better institutions for this… As painful as the last couple of years have been, we’re now having genuine conversations about how we can better serve the students.”

News about alternatives letter grades has mostly been limited to education-focused outlets, such as the Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed. In October 2022, KQED, the San Francisco NPR affiliate, republished Jon Marcus’s article for The Hechinger Report. In early 2020, during the onset of the pandemic, the Washington Post published an article on un-grading, which emphasized that “not all students are on board with ‘ungrading.’”

Sources:

Jon Marcus, “Momentum Builds for Helping Students Adapt to College by Nixing Freshman Grades,” The Hechinger Report, October 4, 2022.

Michael Burke, “Letter Grades on Way out? Why Some University of California Departments May Use Alternatives,” EdSource, April 27, 2022.

Student Researchers: Onuma Dieke, Jacob Falkenberg, Grace Farnham (University of Massachusetts Amherst)

Faculty Evaluator: Allison Butler (University of Massachusetts Amherst)

The post “Un-Grading” Seeks to Prioritize Student Learning and Mental Health appeared first on Project Censored.

This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Vins.

I learned about how important collaboration is to me in some form. I don’t like writing songs in a vacuum. I love the craft of writing songs, but I get a lot of joy from the puzzle pieces and working with another mind and making the songs come to life however the song is asking to go.

I really loved that process with [the producer] Brad Cook, and I felt I learned about what I am capable of. Everybody is capable of way more than they ever imagined when they have the proper support and love. I had this in my mind that you’re supposed to hustle and you’re supposed to strive and suffer for your art under the worst conditions, or with a lot of struggle and obstacles. But with Brad I felt very safe, supported, and loved. I learned that that gives you so much more energy. I think I really needed to learn that lesson for myself but also just for a viewpoint on humanity.

When you’re supported by your community and collaborators you can relax and the process goes better.

There’s that relaxation that’s so important and I learned a lot about this whole time period where I was making the record and during the early days of the pandemic, I was, for the first time, not running around, touring and booked.

In probably a decade of my life, it was the most still I had been and I learned a lot about what my body was actually feeling and all this tension and anxiety that I was under and it just started this road of being like, “What is this feeling and why do I feel like there’s a tiger on the other side of the door all the time?”

I think a lot of people who have experienced traumatic things, we just get used to this low grade or maybe sometimes high anxiety and tension and it’s so hard to relax and flow. This was the beginning of me experiencing even moments of that feeling and being like, “Oh my god. Is this what life could be like in my body?” That was a really important lesson. I’m so grateful.

Have you been able to maintain that state of being more with the flow or is it possible to break that pattern?

I think it definitely is. Of course, it’s very hard to be alive. We live in a very brutal society, especially for sensitive people, for people who care about the future of the planet; I don’t think it’s possible to just be zen all the time, but I do think it’s possible to break patterns. I got really nerdy about EMDR therapy or just ways to heal neuropathways that go to these immediate reactions, because of traumatic experiences you’ve had. I definitely think it’s possible to heal. You just get more tools in your tool belt and you experience something difficult and you can be like, “I know that that one feeling I had exists, at least.” It’s so hard to imagine it when you’ve never experienced it, and then once you have, you can be like, “Okay, I’m going to just try to get back there.”

In your NPR conversation with adrienne maree brown, you mentioned that it’s important to you as an artist to be honest about not having it all figured out and how important it is to face mystery. Can elaborate on what you meant by mystery and admitting that being brave does not mean that there are no tears or struggles?

I feel like every time I turn on my phone, every time I see what other artists, creatives, or celebrities or whoever, or even just your own friends are putting on the internet is just perfection and having all the answers and there’s, especially in the world of healing, so many wannabe gurus and people in politics, who say that they have all the answers.It’s so important to admit, “I don’t fucking know. I don’t know and I’m just trying to figure it out just like everybody else.” That makes people feel less alone, and I’ve had moments where I’m looking at another artist or looking at a celebrity or a spokesperson and been like, “Fuck, I can’t even do self-love right.” You know, people are just like, “You’ve just got to love yourself and think that you’re the shit” and I’m like, “Damn, I’m also failing at that?”

There’s a culture of pushing us to feel like we’re always failing. I read a Rumi poem about how failure is actually a gift from the gods, because it teaches you how to be a horse that’s ridden by the muses, and you learn to trust it: “I thought we were going that way, now we’re going to go this way.” You learn how to go on the journey with more trust.

That’s what I’m talking about with the mystery, learning how to free fall a little bit and think of these failures or these ideas of coming up short or not being perfect as gifts. When I think about being a musician right now and having an audience I don’t ever want to make somebody feel bad about where they’re at in their life or their art or their songwriting. I don’t have total control over that, but I think that’s just something I want to be intentional about.

In this world of chaos and uncertainty, what do you think is the most radical act we can do? And by radical, I mean something you mentioned like trusting in ourselves or navigating or building meaningful relationships.

I think empathy. It sounds so cliché but it’s just the most radical act that you could ever have. Not blaming someone for where they’re at at the moment. If someone is in a really hard position, take a moment to not blame.

Sometimes I struggle with being like, “I don’t want to think anyone is my enemy” but then I feel like that’s so naïve and I tousle back and forth being like, “Well, some people just fucking are my enemy.” If they spend all their time trying to cause harm and dominate, then they are.

Even then I try to have moments of empathy. Is a really useful tool in a time when we are getting so much more programmed to hate each other. I also think it’s a radical act to believe that there is a purpose for your life and what I’m struggling with now is to try to believe that. Trying to know in my gut that small moments are just as sacred and maybe small purposes, like private purposes, are just as sacred and important as big public ones, because I think as a society, we’re also really navigating this public and private. It feels like the private doesn’t exist and that isn’t as important. For example, why don’t I think that my relationship with someone in my family is just as much a part of the purpose of my life as having a band or making work that’s like celebrated or something.

Is there an idea, practice, or method that you had to let go of in order to move forward artistically?

I am trying to practice understanding what’s out of my control. Everybody is talking right now about how hard it is to tour, to be financially profitable to tour, and how it is different from what it used to be. I could think about that all night and be like, “Is this a sign that I shouldn’t be doing this anymore?” I don’t understand, because it feels like this is what I’m supposed to do with my life. I get very practical and very mythical and mystical at the same time.

I’m trying to learn what is out of my control and decipher what is and really trying to harness trust because I don’t know what else to do. And trust could be a lot of things. Sometimes it’s in a higher power, which, to me, is the spirit of my grandparents, my ancestors. It can also be trust in my community. I have spent a lot of time putting my heart and soul into a community and, originally, that’s the only reason why I wrote songs, it is because I wanted songs for my friends to have with them, as a thank-you for taking care of me. Sometimes it’s that. It’s like, okay, if the going gets tough and I really need help, financially or some other way, I’m just going to have to trust that my community will be there for me and that they won’t let me fall through the cracks.

That’s really where I’m at with trust and letting go and also understanding that this music industry is so fucked. It’s so corrupt. It’ll kill your soul if you let it. For me, I’m deciding how to be reborn. I got to a point of like I’m a fucking tough bitch and you are not going to get me down. If I survived everything I already have, then I’m going to just find a way to make art no matter what. Deciding that you’re strong has been really important for me as defining what that strength is. It’s like what we talked about with vulnerability is strength, tears are strength. There are moments where I’m just like I don’t know if anybody cares about what I make and it feels like this industry is built to exactly the opposite type of work of what I make. But deciding that no one is going to ever, ever, ever make me stop writing songs and making art is a game-changer, to acknowledge that in myself and be like if nobody got you down already then no one will.

Where were you in your life when you wrote the song “Pa’lante”? And for you, has the song evolved or changed now that the world is a different place?

That song has grown with me and it’s changed my life in a lot of ways. It took me years to write that song. I had different little pieces and, at first, I had no idea what the song was about. I was on this journey of listening to my ancestors and learning more about Puerto Rico and visiting Puerto Rico on my own and trying to understand what it meant for me to be a Puerto Rican person because I guess I didn’t know what that meant for me.

I was living in Nashville at the time, which was really hard for me, it was isolating. Hurricane Maria had happened, but I started writing it before the election. It was like Trump was starting to pop up and be everywhere and it was a joke and then suddenly it wasn’t a joke and things were just starting to feel so scary. My grandmother had passed away and suddenly I felt like, “Wow. Now I have these guardian angels” and I was in a very lonely, scary time where I just didn’t know what was next.

I also was trying to get away from a music world that became very unsustainable for me emotionally and physically. I wrote “Pa’lante” and when I recorded it, it was the biggest catharsis. When I was listening back, me and the producer Paul Butler, started crying because we were both just like, “We did it. There it is.” I kept trying to explain to him, “‘You don’t understand,’ Paul, ‘I really think the world is ready for this fucking anthem and it should come from a queer person, it should come from me, I just finally think people are fucking ready.’” He’d be like, “I don’t know if they’re ready. I don’t know what you’re talking about but, sure, we’ll do it.”

When we did it and it felt universal but also like very specific, that felt so important. I finally experienced that feeling of like, “Oh my god. There it is, a really big idea that took years to turn into this four-and-a-half-minute moment in time.” Then it gets addictive to be like, “Damn, how do I do that again with another huge topic?” It’s really grown with me, and now when I play around the world, people want to hear that song. People all over the world really relate to it. I’m like, if my grandfather if my great-grandmother could only see this moment of people really relating to the Puerto Rican struggle, to Puerto Rican liberation and seeing themselves and their people’s struggle in it, I just think they would be really so ecstatic.

What is something you wish you knew 10 years ago?

To recognize that your friends are my family. I’ve been thinking a lot about time. The new work that I’m making is a lot about memory and about my experience with time. For so long I felt like I’ve been doing time, in a way that isn’t how it works. I don’t know how else to explain it, but I always thought I could go back and do it again. I always thought, “Well, I’m going to leave home and I won’t be able to spend all this time with my aunt,” who raised me but, “I’ll be able to come back.”

I didn’t get that, no, this is a fleeting moment and, of course, I don’t regret a lot of the things I’ve done, but I do feel like I wish I understood that sacred moments with my friends, that they really are fleeting and that you really don’t get them again. That’s something that older people always try to tell you when you’re young, but when you’re young time feels so boundless and so endless. I wish I was really told these things that you’re doing for your career right now, of course, they’re important, but the real gold is these moments with your friends and your family.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Miriam Garcia.

The post Art World Life: Learning from Jerry Saltz’s Art is life appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by David Carrier.

[When] I’d just joined Pilobolus’s Dance Theater, the first dance company I joined out of college, we had a gala with the new members for the new season of the theater in Connecticut. We all know Connecticut, all these funders were there, beautiful, pristine, clean people. And this is my first time out of Camden, really. They would introduce me and be like, “This is Kingsley, our new dancer, he’s from Camden.” That’s how they would introduce me to all the funders. “He made it out. Look at that, he made it out.”

I was 22, 23. But I understood, even then, it was not that I was their pet, it was…I was an orphan. That’s what it felt like. “We helped this guy get out of Camden.” And then the people would be like, “How is Camden now? How does it feel to still live there?” And to me, I’m just like, I’m there. This is my home. It made me feel I need to always be proud of where I’m from.

A lot of your recent work–including your debut album Udo– centers on this theme of community. How do you balance the needs of your community with personal and creative needs? What have you been learning about boundaries?

The truthful answer is, I haven’t created boundaries. I love to help. Even if I grunt and moan, I like to do the most. I like to go overboard, maybe so I can complain to myself later. I love to just be a part of things. FOMO, but in a very helpful way. But a lot of my detriment comes from people believing they have access to me.

If I can be stern about the thing I love, which is art, and really lock myself away, I can do that with people I love. I can be stern and lock myself away from them and say, “I need this time for myself.” But I have not. And that’s the truth, I have not been doing that.

I’ve learned that I have to set boundaries because I want to stop complaining. I want to fill my time with other things. With prayers, maybe. I want to fill them with chants. Stuff that’ll motivate me.

How do you know when it’s worth it to sacrifice your peace or time or energy?

It’s hard for me to think about that, to be honest. My last name, Ibeneche, means, “my brother’s keeper.” It is an obligation. It’s like it’s in the contract, you have to. I can’t think about [was it worth it]. If I think about that, I would never help. The American side of me is like, “No, I don’t feel you’re doing for me what I am doing for you, so I’m not going to do this.” And that’s real truth. And it’s not to hurt anybody, but it’s just sometimes, I don’t see it back. And it hurts.

But the African side of me says, “This is grace.” This is what it is to lay grace. You learn that lesson. You have to bow down constantly through the day, and to protect and help your family. And sometimes your King is not good to you, but it’s all right. You bow anyway, and hopefully it gets better. Tough.

Also the American side really doesn’t even exist. I am a Nigerian in America. That’s what I feel and that’s what I am, so I’m happy to help my brothers. We’re poets and so we have to talk heavy. But I’m always happy to help them.

Your debut album is named after your father’s village in Nigeria. He passed during the finishing stages of the project. What was it like for you to put out Udo, with his death still being so recent?

I have different realities with the album. One, it’s a manuscript for whoever’s trying to be free. There’s another reality where I feel like I’m my father, writing in his village. I picture him in Udo writing these songs and building these worlds. He’s writing these songs, and I am him. In another more literal world, it’s a bunch of love songs, songs about breaking free.

I guess it’s hard for me to think about his passing. I’m really good at running away from the subject. I like ambiguity. So that’s how I would speak on his death too. Sometimes I know enough details for me to know. And I don’t dig deep in my mind to think about it, it’s something I have to obviously dig through on my own time. But I don’t even want [the album] to be a tribute. It’s just, “Dang, look. I’m your son, be proud. Be proud of something I created.” Very simply. There’s no poetry for that. I want him to be proud.

How do you get creative about grieving?

I got to keep going. That’s how I grieve. Keep creating, keep making things I don’t even think about. I don’t even know what grief is. I don’t know how to formulate it in my body yet. I feel I need somebody to teach me, almost. I feel stuck. It’s a space I don’t really expound on, in my heart and in my body.

When you set out to write something or to make a piece, what is your process?

I need some type of sound wave. The feeling is in the beat, and that’s the truth. I’ve always needed to write to something, or to be writing while making sound, or to be dancing while there’s sound playing, or while I’m making sound I need to dance and maybe shout or create a groove. I guess it starts from feeling. It does start from feeling. It starts from feeling. Keep it at that.

How do you determine if something you’ve made is good?

I know it’s good when I can confidently show it to someone, or when I impress myself. I’m a hard critic, and I don’t lie. I try to live my life unbiased as possible. With myself, I’m like, “This sucks.” I wouldn’t talk to anybody else like that. “This is trash. Try again.”

I love basketball, I compare a lot of things to basketball in my life. When you play basketball, you know when you’re good. You can be good in many ways. Rebounding, shooting, passing, creating a play, defense. You lean on that, and you’re good. I live my life like that, too. I know when I’m not having a good game, or I’m not having a good writing session. I know I need to break or to find a different way. All that pours into knowing, after I create the piece, or while I’m creating it. I can just tell, “you’re trying too hard.” I know it’s good when it happens naturally. When I know for a fact, this is going to hit other people.

Being Nigerian and a dancer you practice an art that’s deeply rooted in your lineage. How do you balance reverence for tradition and being an individual in a different time and place, putting your unique touch on things?

It is deeply rooted in me. That’s a lesson we learned as kids: Honor who came before you, honor who is here, and honor who will come after you. I think my dad is the best dancer I’ve ever seen. Maybe not the best, but the most creative. And I’ve seen a lot of dancers. I always admired that about him, how he had traditional movement but then put his own twist on it. That balance has always been an intention for me.

Even when I didn’t know I wanted to be a dancer, I always felt I stood out because I was able to connect from a root, where others couldn’t. I think it’s important for me to hold onto that, because that information is sacred. To be able to filter that information and transform it into something is sacred. Not everybody can do that.

You are a performance and a recording artist, which require different skills. Is there a difference in how you approach them?

Everybody I know knows I’m in love with performing. That’s what I want to do. Hands down, I know that’s my strong suit. I’m really, really good at it. I always say I’m a man of the people. I really am. I know what will make people smile. I’ve always been like that, even as a kid. As a writer, I also know. I care so much about people. I’m thinking, “What will make them smile? What will make them feel safe? What will make them feel seen or heard?”

While I’m dancing, I don’t care. I really don’t. The pure performer Kingsley is like, “I don’t care about y’all, this is for me right now.” That’s the difference for me, [when I’m performing] I try to let go. That is my goal. To let go so much that I can do whatever I want. I don’t care. And I want to lean into that more. I really do.

What is your philosophy when you’re learning something new?

I only learn things enough to enjoy myself. I never take on the burden of… “I am going to be the greatest at this.” Being a dancer, it’s “you need to be the greatest at this thing.” And so that does build a lot of insecurity because you aren’t. You never can be. It’s literally, highly impossible.

When I go into things now, I don’t have an expectation to be the greatest. I have an expectation to really enjoy myself. I want to flourish in my own light, and not in anybody else’s light. If I were to tell somebody about learning something new, I would tell them to look like a fool.

When I first started dancing, I did this competition, the NAACP Axio Competition. I didn’t win, but I was killing it. This guy, Obediah Wright, who is a prolific choreographer and dancer, was one of the judges, and he saw me and he’s like, “I want you to train with me in New York at my theater.” And I’m like, “Yo, this is crazy.” I’ve never, I didn’t even…

So I go there. I’m spending three days. He wants me to learn a piece, it’s a five to six minute piece. So he’s just teaching me the movement and the sequences, talking me through them. He’s… “All right, you’re going to do a double turn into an arabesque, you’re going to do a pas de chat,” and I don’t have… I’m a good faker. What he’d seen on stage was me just expressing myself, but this guy has technique. I was so exhausted from trying, and so nervous I didn’t remember one move. I would learn eight counts and I would forget because I was so scared.

He got frustrated, and he’s like, “Oh man.” The days pass, it’s [the third day] now and I’m in rehearsal. And he looked at me and had a smile on his face and was like, “You don’t give up. Anybody else would just call for a bus home. You don’t know one step. You’ve been here eight hours, I know your feet hurt.” And I’m just like, “My feet are not going to stop me from this opportunity. I get to learn something new. I’m here.”

That’s the story I would tell someone. You really gotta see your joy in the thing you want to learn. Really. Even if you are embarrassed. I’m telling you, I was sweating. It was three days of dancing. But then he told me, “You’re a soloist.”

Does doing something that you love for money change things for you?

Definitely. My insecurities grow every day. When I first started doing it, it was pure joy. It was like, “I’m good at something, finally.” I was always aware that other people did not know what they were good at and so I was very grateful. But then you get older and you realize it’s not enough to just enjoy this thing. Now you have to make money off of the thing you’ve studied and spent $80,000 on in college. You have to make money now. How are you going to do that? And that builds a lot of insecurity and questioning yourself.

I don’t like to say that I’m the best at what I do, but I’m so aware of what I can do. I know I could establish myself and make money off of the things I love, but I don’t know if I would love them anymore. That’s what’s changed for me, is thinking of ways to make money instead of thinking of ways to heal myself through expression. It’s tough. But I know there is a balance.

Photo by Wren Rene

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Jessica Dore.

What I’ve been finding out about images that I capture and images that are pre-existing from photo albums and shot in film cameras is that they have a different quality to them. Just seeing the way that a person outside myself composes a moment that they value, or feel to be honorable to capture or to canonize like that—I’m trying to understand what was actually occurring during that time period, especially because they’re from my past and some of them were from before I was even alive. It’s interesting to see what kind of environments these subjects, my family, lived within, and seeing how they made a living through minimal amounts of resources or money. It’s interesting to see how they create domestic settings and love and tenderness in these spaces that I might not ever fully have access to. I do have my memories with these individuals and it’s nice to project myself into past time periods and be reflective, not only just about the moment but what that person’s psyche was. I’m always questioning what was going on with these family relationships and how they were being mended and how they were being created. I really love photographs that I didn’t take, that have some history to them. I think about this, too, “Is it selfish of me to focus so much on my own family history and my lineage?,” and it’s like, “No,” because there’s so many gaps and there’s so many pieces that will never be answered. I only have so much time in this life to excavate as much information as I can. As family members are passing away around me, so much of that [information] is getting lost in people that I never met. I would like to at least archive something, or keep something in this world to pass along so that there’s not more gaps created.

Case, 2020. Embroidery floss, thread, found tree bark, acrylic ink, chalk pastel, rebar wire. 35 x 23.5 x 1.5 inches

The archiving information and mending relationships elements you mentioned feel related to the nature of embroidering on cloth, preserving and repairing what is.

I think even the stitch line, that individual mark-making—I could relate it to painting but it’s something different where you’re actually building out these individualized marks. It could be really fragmented or you could have loose areas with it and I think you could put more of a meaning behind how the tension works between these marks I carry through. The stitching, too—it’s just such a slow pace. It slows me down.

How do you approach something you don’t know how to do?

Oh, my goodness, it’s such a challenge. Even now, when I am embroidering and things are really large scaled—that was a shift for me, because I like to work really intimately. I like to have things that are portable and I can carry and pull out in the car or on a train ride. I started to enlarge the scale of my work when I was applying to grad school. [It was a challenge] figuring out how to create flesh and line directionality and instill the truth to this textile representation of these subjects that are figurative. It was really difficult for me to find ways to shift that stitch in that material but still hold true to this painting quality, and have these techniques of painting still in them

I do a lot of tests. I have a lot of failed experiments, I have money that I put into things that don’t necessarily become anything, things I destroy by accident. I will create an image that I’m not happy with or create an object that I’m not happy with and out of destroying it and then rearranging it, I’m able to make something that I am satisfied with, more so than the original product. I think that’s how I approach things that are challenging, just being able to detach from them. I have to detach from them to be able to even be innovative in any way—not that I’m trying to be the originator of anything, it’s just when you get to that point where something is challenging, how do you ever get over that obstacle? You have to be willing to take a risk. I destroy and then I reconfigure a lot of things. I try not to be wasteful with things that I have messed up or think that I’ve created an error in. I try to find a way to recycle it back into something else, like a project at a later time that I think it would fit better in, because there’s a reason why it wasn’t working with whatever original idea I had. It’s not totally wasteful, especially if I’ve been trying to build things that are more structural, not just making pictorial work. I’m trying to actually build themes and settings that [the pictorial works] live within by using parts from demolished homes. That has been extremely difficult because at a certain point you do need an engineer or an architect to be able to make those things safe.

I’m noticing that I’m having to bring other voices in who are experienced, where it’s not just me being isolated in the studio by myself anymore. It’s like you have to get to a point where you are able to ask for help from other people who have knowledge. I find it’s hard for me to ask people for help sometimes because I always think people will have their own thing going on, but people enjoy offering their assistance in things that they are good at. It’s nice to have them challenge themselves or explore. I needed to build a room in my studio because I was using plaster when I was at Yale. I would carve into the plaster so there would be a lot of particles in the air just all the time and they never settled, really. When they would settle, they would settle on everything. There would just be plaster everywhere. I was like, “I need to contain this plaster in a space where it can just live in this one space.” Me and my friend José Chavez built this room in my studio over the summer and he ended up using that project for his application to grad school because he wanted to study environmental architecture. I had no idea he was going to take that opportunity and apply it to something that will propel him forward in his career.

Lacerated Faith, 2020. Black Pigment, paint, chalk pastels, bible books. 9 x 12 x 17 inches.

Do you ever feel stuck, and what do you do to move through it?

I do feel stuck, especially when I’m reaching the end of a body of work. Sometimes my natural default is to re-incorporate hand embroidery as much as I can. I got to a point where I was like, “You know what? No. There are so many different ways to approach art.” If I want to make a video and I have this idea that just will not function in this medium then I have to change it. Again, I have to ask for help, or I’ll ask what software people are using. Along with just trying to read things that I enjoy and listen to interviews and Art21’s, I use search engines. Google is a super resource. Sometimes it’s just a word that I’m thinking about that I don’t necessarily have an idea of what it may look like. I will just literally Google it and see what kind of images come up that I’m inspired by. That’s really helpful, because, what does a subconscious look like? What would come up if you Googled that? What have other people thought or pondered on? That’s me getting help again. I use as much assistance as I can.

I was watching this H.R. Giger documentary—the guy that created the drawings for the Alien sagas—it was just on his process as an artist and developing that creature. He just fused all of these different aesthetics from all of these things that he thought were interesting and he enjoyed. The documentary was like, “He didn’t just steal from anybody, he stole from everybody.” I thought that was so transparent. It’s like, yeah, we look at each other. I look at what others are doing and I’m inspired by those things and then I’m able to generate my own interpretations of these things through inspiration of other people and other materials they might be using. So, I don’t see it as stealing. I just see that as “it’s all related” and that’s just how we relate and that’s how we understand the world around us, through each other. You create your identity through others. Even when you try not to, that’s how you are as soon as you’re born.

Precarity of A Person, 2020. Fabric, chalk pastel, embroidery floss and thread. 28 1/2 x 17 inches.

What’s your relationship to play?

I have to really make moments of play. I have to just let things happen that are humorous in my work because I’m too hard on myself. I know this. My work focuses on the past and other people’s psychological conditions and I’m trying to take them really seriously, so I’m trying to see the humanness in them all the time and sometimes it’s hard for me to find moments of laughter or joy in some of these family members’ stories because they have a lot of melancholy in them. It’s like I want to respect that and take them seriously but also represent them in this way that honors them. When I’m talking about sexuality and gender and racial oppression and those things, they’re really hard to sit with and they do take a toll on me after a while, so I have to do other things. I have to play my drum because it’s my only escape. I have to do something with my body that’s other than just being in the studio because I take that very seriously.

I was having an interview where somebody asked me what I was reading, and it’s only been within the past year that I’ve ever explored fiction. We started talking about how even through reading we find that there has to be this certain level of rigor, right? It can’t just be imaginative and fun or not real. That’s not fair. Our minds are so expansive, why is it that I only have to indulge in something that’s factual? Or [thinking about] when the two worlds collide—imagination comes from realism to a certain degree. It takes the two opposing things for that to even happen. I really consumed a lot of Octavia Butler this year. I’m bringing that up because I am just so fascinated by the way that she could build worlds and people and I’m just like, “She’s crafting a language and I could create a visual from those ideas.” I can see them. It makes them exist in a world. So, that’s been fun. I’ve never been a big reader and I would always be hard on myself about that, but it was because [I was reading] things that I wasn’t enjoying.

Do you keep a set schedule in your studio?

I’m really bad at setting a schedule because I like to work throughout the entire day. I don’t really have a set schedule but I do go in there every day and I am in there for a good 12 hours a day. Usually I’m there till around 1:00 or 2:00 AM, sometimes 3:00, and I start pretty late in the day, sometimes around 12:00 PM. Some days I wake up and I start, and some days I’m so frozen or intimidated to do the next thing that I’m in there not doing anything for two to three hours. I didn’t intend to do that, it’s just when it comes to destroying something or detaching from something, sometimes it takes me a while to even get into that motion. If something isn’t working, I know that’s the next step and it’s like, “Man. I already know what I got to do to this thing.” I don’t really like the nine-to-five type of stuff. I don’t want it to mimic a job. I feel like I’m looking for something, I can’t just relay that to a schedule like a nine-to-five.

Iron Father, 2020. Tree Bark, embroidery floss, fabric, window blinds, chalk pastel, rebar wire. 23 x 21 x 3 inches.

You taught art in Chicago Public Schools for a few years. What would you offer to younger artists or your younger self?

I would say know that there’s a career in art and that you can be an artist. You may not be successful for years, decades, but if you can make time to do it at any degree—try to just keep a practice going. I would definitely explain to them that you don’t have to be this A+ student—not that you shouldn’t challenge yourself or you shouldn’t have achievements or expectations or aspirations, but you can also be really good at what you are good at. See, that’s another thing. Sometimes people don’t know what they’re good at. Once you find something that just really comes naturally to you, really try to explore that. Whether it’s guiding people, whether it’s life-coaching, fitness. Things that come effortlessly to you, you should really hone in on and see what possibilities you can make from that. What I would tell a young person is, “Everybody’s good at something. Something. There’s something you’re good at. Try to really investigate it.”

What have you learned through making your work?

My work has taught me so much. It’s a long list. It taught me how to be open-minded, it taught me how to be expressive. It taught me how to speak up for myself and how to be compassionate and empathetic towards other people, because you have to spend time with people’s stories. Maybe that’s because these are the people that are close to me, I don’t know, but it also makes me look at the world differently because I have to look up things. What was I looking up? The psychology of splitting and having to code-switch, double consciousness, and different roles individuals have expectations to play. Gender roles. It has taught me a lot about colonialism. I probably would have fallen into these subjects later in life. I don’t want to say I don’t come from a family of readers, but because I was so deeply involved in having a studio practice and wanting to be educated, I continued to go to school and be around other people from different [backgrounds]. It was so diverse, and I was learning about their experiences and cultures along with knowledge that they had. It broadened my world so much and so rapidly that I wish I could have had some of those things earlier on in my life, and been able to share some of those things with my family, to really get an understanding of why the world is the way that it is. [It has taught me] to slow down, just observe. Just really observe. I don’t know, I feel like a totally different person.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Annie Bielski.

The post Learning From Gorbachev’s Failures appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by John Feffer.

Four and a half million people.

That’s how many Chinese people would have died from Covid-19 had its government taken the same approach to the pandemic that the United States has taken, and gotten the same results.

Instead, China has had 15,000 deaths from Covid—most of these from an outbreak in the spring of 2022 in Hong Kong, which has its own healthcare system.

Meanwhile, the United States has lost more than a million people to Covid since the pandemic began. Deaths currently continue at the rate of about 450 a day, which would add up to roughly 160,000 a year if present trends continue.

The New York Times (9/7/22) continues to present the Chinese government’s saving millions of lives as an unmitigated disaster.

Clearly China and the United States have very different systems, and what works in one place would not necessarily work in the other. But given the remarkable success that China has had in protecting its population from a deadly and pernicious virus, surely US-based journalists are examining what lessons China has to teach us?

No, not if you work for the New York Times. There you’ll be writing yet another in a series of articles about how China has had the enormous misfortune of avoiding mass death.

“China’s ‘Zero Covid’ Bind: No Easy Way Out Despite the Cost,” is the headline of the latest iteration (9/7/22), written by Vivian Wang. The article begins:

Tens of millions of Chinese confined at home, schools closed, businesses in limbo and whole cities at a standstill. Once again, China is locking down enormous parts of society, trying to completely eradicate Covid in a campaign that grows more anomalous by the day as the rest of the world learns to live with the coronavirus.

But even as the costs of China’s zero-Covid strategy are mounting, Beijing faces a stark reality: It has backed itself into a corner. Three years of its uncompromising, heavy-handed approach of imposing lockdowns, quarantines and mass testing to isolate infections have left it little room, at least in the short term, to change course.

The New York Times maintains it’s the country with the orange line, not the dark blue one, that has the Covid policy problem.

Nowhere in the article is any comparison of the respective death toll in China and the US. Or any hint that life expectancy in the US has now dropped below that of China—76.1 vs. 77.1 years, respectively (Quartz, 9/1/22)—an acknowledgment that would render ridiculous the Times‘ assertions that that China’s “government has pushed propaganda depicting the virus as having devastated Western countries,” and that President Xi Jinping “has prioritized nationalism over the guidance of scientists.”

But it’s not just the Covid death toll that the Times has to hide in order to make its anti-China spin remotely credible. Much of the piece deals with the hardship supposedly caused by the zero-Covid policy: “The social and economic cost will continue to increase,” insists one of the article’s relatively few sources, the Council on Foreign Relations’ Yanzhong Huang (author of the New York Times op-ed “Has China Done Too Well Against Covid-19?”—12/29/20—which argued that “China’s comparative success now risks hurting the country”).

Wang sure does make the economic situation in China sound grim:

Many Chinese have found ways to cope, even if reluctantly: putting in longer hours to scrape up more money, cutting back on spending. Complaints about a shortage of medical care or food often emerge, but some residents say they support the overarching goal….

Youth unemployment is soaring, small businesses are collapsing and overseas companies are shifting their supply chains elsewhere. A sustained slowdown would undermine the promise of economic growth, long the central pillar of the party’s legitimacy.

But what is the actual cost of China’s Covid success? In 2020, the first year of the pandemic, China’s GDP grew by 2.2%, while the US’s shrank by 3.4%. In 2021, the US economy bounced back, with 5.7% growth—but not as much as China, which grew 8.1%. Projections are for the US to grow by 1.3% in 2022, while China is expected (by Goldman Sachs) to grow 3.0%.

When you add it up, China is expected to be 13.8% richer at the beginning of 2023 than it was when the pandemic began—whereas the US will be just 3.4% better off. So which country’s belts need tightening as a result of its Covid strategy?

The New York Times (9/7/22) reported that China “suffered from low vaccination rates”—but a glance at the Times‘ own vaccination tracker shows that China in fact has one of the highest vaccination rates in the world.

The Times similarly had to suppress any comparative numbers to make it seem like China’s vaccination strategy was particularly dangerous:

Buoyed by its early success at containment, the party was slow at first to encourage vaccination, leaving many older Chinese vulnerable….

While other countries prioritized vaccinating the elderly, China made older residents among the last to be eligible, citing concerns about side effects. And it never introduced vaccine passes, perhaps sensitive to public skepticism of its own vaccines.

In late July, about 67% of people aged 60 and above had received a third shot, compared to 72% of the entire population. Medical experts have warned that an uncontrolled outbreak could lead to high numbers of deaths among the elderly, as occurred during a wave this spring in Hong Kong, which also suffered from low vaccination rates.

Go to a helpful page of the New York Times website called “Tracking Coronavirus Vaccinations Around the World,” however, and you’ll find that China isn’t “suffer[ing] from low vaccination rates”; it actually has one of the highest rates of Covid vaccination in the world, with 93% receiving at least one dose and 91% “fully vaccinated.”  The latter number compares with 86% in Australia and South Korea, 84% in Canada, 81% in Japan and Brazil, 79% in France, 76% in Britain and Germany—and 67% in the US.

That last number, in China, is treated by the Times as a dangerously low percentage of the elderly to have received booster shots—but in the US, only 41% of those aged 65–74 have received booster shots, along with 42% of those 75 and over—and just 26% from 50–64. Isn’t the US booster rate much more ominous?

Well, yes—and that’s part of the reason that tens of thousands of elderly people will die this year as part of the US’s effort to “learn…to live with the coronavirus.”

ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com (Twitter: @NYTimes). Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your communication in the comments thread.

The post NYT Scolds China for Not ‘Learning to Live’—or Die—With Covid appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Jim Naureckas.

Despite the extremely disheartening developments across the spectrum of worldly life, despair and defeat are—while understandable—not inevitable. That is the good news. We are never obliged to surrender the best of our humanity, even as things around us devolve. But in order to find our footing, it is important to begin by seeing the current reality without fear or illusion. We can be fairly certain that the tipping points have now tipped, that we are in for an epic unraveling. The planet is on fire and under water, plagues are on the loose, croplands are becoming barren, rivers going dry. Further, the shreds of sane governance that might have kept us afloat a little longer are going down in flames. The omnicidal fascists, waiting impatiently in the wings for their moment on center stage, are almost certain to speed us ever more swiftly toward the end of life as we have known it.

In everyone's personal life—and now in the life of the Earth—there comes a point when a convergence of natural forces relays the message that we are no longer the master of our physical fate.

Personally, I believe in miracles because I have seen a couple in my day. I never rule them out entirely, and my fingers are crossed that we will get lucky. However, only a fool would count on divine intervention. Particularly after we repeatedly and decisively failed to heed all the wisdom so generously handed to us, such that we might save ourselves. It is a good time, then, to start learning how to die. Maybe you won't need to leave life—as an individual—right now, maybe you can find a way to secure the futures of your loved ones, your kids and grandkids.  But we all live together on a dying planet and we are assuredly going to witness continued decline and demise on many fronts.

If we tell ourselves the truth, we know that things will never 'get back to normal.' That vain hope—often built on dreams of technological solutions to climate collapse, or a political messiah emerging from nowhere to make us all sane again—may be comforting.  I would never suggest that we turn away from the things that help us get through the day. God knows, it is getting harder and harder to do, and we need all the tools we can gather. But I also believe that this is a moment—looking death in the eye as it barrels toward us—when courage and a commitment to digging deep, whatever that means to each of us, is paramount.

Thirty-five years ago, a beloved and too-young friend succumbed to an especially aggressive cancer after what was often referred to as a 'long and valiant fight.' He and his doctors left virtually no allopathic stone unturned, and I spent many months—on and off –by his side at Massachusetts General Hospital, supporting him as he prepared for or recovered from one well-intended but barbarous intervention after another. 

In the end, the cancer took him. 

He maintained an absolute allegiance throughout to the notion that he would survive. With an impressive store of personal will, a hefty amount of denial, and best standard of care, he kept the fire lit under that belief up until about 20 hours before he passed. I think he must have felt that any admission of mortality would have given the errant cells an opening. 

The afternoon before his death, he looked at me through a heavy morphine-and-brain lesion-induced fog. He looked at me, as if struggling to understand something as baffling as the world we all look out upon today, and said with horror and disbelief, "I'm going to die?"  Within hours, he was unconscious and soon after that, he left his body. 

This is an ancient episode in my story. I recount it because I feel a resonance with our current and multivalent predicament, and because it points toward an opportunity that I—and we—miss at a cost. Brad clung to his life, as full of pain and fear as it was. He wanted to go on, he wanted to find the workarounds that would make up for all he had lost. There were many things he longed to accomplish and experience. He was not prepared to die. He was not willing to die.

This is the case for most of us. We want more, and we have purpose—work to do, change to make, books to read and write, music to play, love to love, kids to raise, mountains to climb and seas to sail. We are not, most of us, ready to lie down and concede defeat. But in everyone's personal life—and now in the life of the Earth—there comes a point when a convergence of natural forces relays the message that we are no longer the master of our physical fate.

Which is inherently terrifying. So we rely on a variety of strategies to navigate the journey toward possible personal and global extinction. Some cling to hope like an overturned life raft on the open ocean. Others fight like hell for the just world they want to live in. And a lot of us, like my friend Brad, default to thoughts, often relatively unconscious, of 'getting back to normal,' and so put one foot in front of the other, moving inexorably toward the abyss, blindfolded and yet distracted by visions of happier times. The truth is that most of us have no idea what to do, and are simply trying to keep the flood of rising panic from drowning us altogether.

Hope and anger can be cathartic, galvanizing. They make us feel like agents in this time of decline, when it is apparent that our season of dominion is at an end. If we survey the situation with clear eyes, openings to accomplish anything substantive are few. Electric vehicle?  Sure. Eat local?  Why not?  Recycle? Nice try, but…no, not really. Get out on the streets? Yes! But does anyone in power care? And that newly passed and much heralded climate bill? Sadly, likely too little too late. Of course, these are all good things, but a reality check will reveal how hollow they are—if our goal is to turn this ship around. Still, it is natural to reach for anything that conveys a little agency, that allows us to take part. Who wants to feel like an odd bit of flotsam or jetsam at the mercy of forces completely beyond our control? Who wants to sit by and watch helplessly as the whole world goes to hell in a handbasket? Anger and hope are strategies a lot of us reach for.

It may be hard to swallow, but the position of minds far better than mine (Scranton, Hedges, Chomsky to name just a few) is that we have likely crossed several thresholds. We are now primarily in the realm of palliative measures. I continue to bow—with profound respect—to the activists who are using their lives, possibly their last breaths, to defend pieces of this beautiful planet and the various worthy species (including our own), to soften suffering, or to call for justice, but I no longer hold out hope for any sweeping worldly victories. And with that recognition, I find myself asking: What is my role? How can I do this well? How do I find meaningful direction in the midst of this often frightening process of dissolution?

I am not alone in asking these questions, I know. 

We humans are very good at building and expanding. We, at least in the Western-devoured, capitalism-dominated world—which now includes most of us—adore bigger and better. Therein lies our accustomed meaning. We love the 'miracle' of birth, we rejoice in creation. We are drawn toward becoming larger, extending our reach. This seems to apply, even when our creations are works that engender equality or beauty or understanding. Becoming smaller and less influential, losing and dying, declining and letting go—these are not things we tend to aspire to, or even try very hard to understand.

And that presents a real problem. Here we are, living in the very heart of a trajectory that conflicts in a fundamental way with our culturally inculcated values, with the prevailing principle and ethos of our time and place—capitalism. Many have warned that unrestrained growth is incompatible with enduring life on this planet, but we failed to take this to heart. We did not upend the giant, globe-strangling machine that spews toxins and death, for profit, soon enough.

Now, we are immersed up to our necks in the fall, while we have learned to worship only the ascent. Most of us know absolutely nothing about how to become weak or to die with dignity or grace or…gratitude and joy.  We've probably never seen it done well, and we have so very few role models. In fact, we often put those who know something about loss—our elders and homeless, for instance—out of sight, ashamed either by their frailty and bad fortune, or by our own lack of compassion for them. 

Growing old and moving toward death is a developmental phase we have not devoted much energy or attention to in Western culture. We tend to look upon it as nothing more than an end to all that was worthwhile in our prime.  And so it is with the decline and death of a civilization, and potentially all life on this planet. I want to know: is it possible to find beauty and value in this decline?  Is there any kind of personal expansion that can occur while the structures that have upheld us crumble?  Are there boons we can discern, even as the gifts of youth and endless growth are stripped away, as the ease of life lessens?  What gold can we unearth in this era of loss?

We know that dead trees in the forest nourish the miraculous mycelium, but we have yet to celebrate the slow death of a tree from drought or pests or fire damage or old age. Many people I know swear they are unafraid of being dead; it is just getting there that worries them!  Is it possible to attune ourselves to nature, whose rhythms are impeccable, such that we reject no part of our journey?

Brad was a bright young man, and yet he couldn't look at or live what so undeniably was happening to him. He held on and fought that 'valiant fight,' until he lost it. Because he was so determined to have a post-cancer future, he never seized the moments he actually had.  He did not pursue the conversations I know he wanted to have. He postponed his dream of touring France and dining at La Pyramide in favor of paying off his student loans. He put all his eggs in the basket of a healthy life, after 'things got back to normal.'  He was an avid autodidact, yet he turned away from the one window he had to learn how to die. Death came while his attention was riveted by the possibility of survival, and it took him. 

As I ponder how to live purposefully on a planet that is currently passing through the portal –environmentally, politically, economically—I find myself thinking of another good friend whose death I attended many years after Brad's.  I met Yun Sooo when she was 83 and dying from metastatic melanoma. The scope of her vibrant physical life, which could easily fill a thousand pages, had narrowed considerably, but her mind was at its peak and her spirit in its glory.  She confided in me soon after we met that she had just embarked upon the most thrilling adventure of her lifetime.  She said, 'To be able to observe and to participate in the process of dying with full consciousness outshines any explorations I have ever undertaken. I watch with anticipation and excitement to see how this unfolds, how I respond, who I really am as I lose control of my life."  Yun Sooo had a long run, unlike Brad, as well as the benefit of wisdom accrued over the decades. Her approach to dying—courage, curiosity, a willingness to be present to whatever life brought on the road to death—was a revelation.

She inspires me, as does Brad. I don't want to miss this incredible moment in time and in my life, simply because it frightens me.  Do you ever wonder how it is that you ended up here at this very instant, when things are exploding, imploding, rotting on every front?  Could it be a privilege to be alive and awake in 2022, to be a witness, and a participant, almost inevitably impacted by fire and flood and fascism?  Is there an inherent challenge here that—if taken up—could lead you to a vaster and more magnificent expression of your own life?  Perhaps this feels counterintuitive?  Paradoxical?  Likely so.  But it might be worth considering.

I know that I need to learn how to die, both as an individual human being, and as part of this grand experiment, which appears to be wrapping up. I need to show up for this chapter, just as I did for the years of creating, and nurturing those creations. It has been my good fortune to know a few people who accompany the dying, through their work with hospice. I look to them for guidance as I continue to try to make sense of this increasingly terminal world, to help answer my queries about how to live meaningfully. Their courage, willingness to sit with the entire gamut of emotion without pushing anything away, acceptance of decline and loss as natural parts of life, honesty tempered with compassion, intentional offering of an open heart—these help me to shape my understanding of how to be a good human—both to myself and others—in these upcoming minutes, days, years….  

Of course there is grief—and anger—when we contemplate the loss, the suffering.  And it all must be honored.  But if these are allowed to overtake us, if despair and hopelessness are left to eclipse all else, then we may miss our opportunity to prise from this process all that It has to offer, to transcend our egos' addiction to survival at all cost, to become who we always believed we could be, to live as if each breath and each thought and each word matters.  We may miss the only chance we have to learn to die well.

It is unlikely we will change outcomes on the planet by living and loving as if we were almost out of time, but surely we can change ourselves. And those we touch. We can choose to have the conversations that we fear, but deeply want to have. We can give away what we don't need today instead of saving it for some imaginary future. We can stop to appreciate the weeds that grow up through the cracks in the sidewalk, thank the birds that somehow continue to nest and breed, send love to the insects who soldier on to our great benefit. We can pause to honor the fish and the polar bears and the people who perish. We can look for ways to twine the grief and pain with gratitude—that we are alive and able to feel so deeply. Even when it hurts, even when we know that all we love will not last. Time may not be long for many of us, so perhaps, dive into that gratitude? For that which has been easy and good and beautiful, and for that which asks us to become so much more than we ever imagined was possible. 

We have a huge privilege. However, the window to embrace it is not wide. There are many whose lives have been or will soon be consumed by desperate pursuit of survival. If yours is still mostly in your hands, then please, don't waste this narrow and spectacular opportunity. Even as you attend to the mundane, using whatever tools you need to stay afloat, go ahead and learn how to die. Start by taking the radical step of showing up, heart open to all that is, even and especially when so much is dying around you. Resist the instinct to flee, fight or freeze. This is not about surviving, it is about living. While the world we have known dies. 

And then explore what this segment of the journey can mean and hold for you. Look at what you are able to receive from this dying planet, and what gifts you have to share with it. Don't be afraid. There is literally nothing to lose, other than the opportunity to be present. If you want company on the road, it is out there; some of us will make our way alone. No one knows the 'right way' or holds the patent on how to navigate something this big and uncharted, no one can tell you how to live while we die. We are all finding our way, alone and together, in this unprecedented collective project. But please, don't miss out. It could be that this is the most brilliant and meaningful time of your life. As my friend Yun Sooo affirmed: this is the time to find out who you really are. 

Remember: no matter how dire things become, no one can force us to surrender our right to love—nature, one another, ourselves—and to be loved.  These will always be ours to choose.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Elizabeth West.

The post Learning How to Die: Finding Meaning in the Midst of Collapse appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Elizabeth West.

I guess as a reporter, you always go in with an expectation of what the story is going to be and main themes that you want to hit, and a successful reporting project probably involves having all of those expectations be really mutated, and different surprising themes emerging from the interviews, or having interviews where the person really challenges what you were thinking about the subject. The most exciting reporting is when there’s twists and turns.

I feel I learned a lot when I was writing this book, especially about some of the topics that I had already reported on. When I was at The Verge or at The Atlantic, there were things in fandom and specifically in One Direction fandom that I thought I already really understood, and then I learned so much more about them when I was really digging through the deep dark pits of Tumblr.

How do you start a project?

I have a problem with my day job where when I’m nervous about a story because it seems really substantial, I do true high school nerd behavior. I really regress, and I’m like, “I need to read 15 books about this before I end up writing the first thing.” Sometimes I really shoot myself in the foot with that because then I just end up on weird tangents and falling into research rabbit holes that are not fruitful.

But in the case of this book, before I wrote the proposal I read basically everything I could find and realistically read about fan studies going back to the ’80s and tried to understand the history of academic research because it felt like it would be a useful foundation to have. I also wanted to make sure I wasn’t going to swoop in and be like, “I came up with this amazing revelation,” only to learn somebody had said the same thing in 1994. I did a lot of that.

Then for the internet side of things, I just spent however long it took to try to remember what my Tumblr password was when I was 19, and then went back into that account and poked around to see which pages were still up or what links I could find that I would be able to reconstitute through the Wayback Machine, which is by the way, just the most important website ever created.

I guess I have a hard time outlining. I do a ton of research, and I have a very hard time stopping. That sounds like I’m doing a humble brag, but I’m actually not. I really procrastinate starting the work of outlining or of thinking through the writing process by just being like, “Well, I’ll just read one more thing or I’ll just find a few more memes before I get started,” so I definitely pushed it off for a long time and was just continuing to, I don’t know, waste an entire day reading Pew Research surveys about cell phone use or whatever.

There was a lot in your book about the Beatles fandom. Is that when fan research began?

There was definitely writing about fandoms that are older than the Beatles fandom. In the book, I also talked to Allison McCracken who wrote about maybe the earliest pop music fandom that resembles what we think of as pop music fandom now, which was Rudy Vallee and Bing Crosby.

There’s also been a lot of discussion within the field of fandom about how at first, because most of the people who went into that branch of academia were also fans themselves, there was a little too much focus on redeeming fandom or showing fandom in a positive light, so it’s gone through these existential crises of recalibrating like, “We need to be more critical” or, “Okay, now we’re being too critical.” I emailed some of the authors, and they were so helpful. One of the embarrassing perks of being a journalist is that someone else spends their whole career focusing on one topic, and then you can get curious about it for two days, and call them, and be like, “Can you explain this to me?” Everyone was very generous.

I feel like that really benefits someone like you who writes about technology and social media, because those people are still alive, versus if you were writing articles about some really antiquated shit, and you couldn’t contact anyone because they’ve died or retired.

I’m going to say something tacky. I feel like sometimes as a reporter you’ll look someone up, and they’ll have just died two years before and it’s like, “Man, that really stings more than if they were long dead. I wish I’d had this idea sooner.”

That makes sense. [laughs] You mentioned the Wayback Machine. Do you have any other online tools or tips for sourcing good material?

The other thing that ended up being really valuable for me was just connecting with people who had been in the fandom for a really long time and either remembered things or were publicly maintaining a little bit of an amateur archive. I think that’s probably something that exists in a lot of fandoms or in a lot of internet subcultures in general. These experts emerge who you can go to and say, “Do you remember this zany meme from however long ago?” And they will be able to find it or, if they can’t, they’ll at least affirm your memory to you.

It seems like people were super willing to talk. Despite having never listened to One Direction, I became very invested in the gossip, the lore. Especially the Larries [fans who believe in the conspiracy theory that Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson are secretly in love] and Babygate [the conspiracy theory that Louis Tomlinson’s and Briana Jungwirth’s child is not his or, more radically, that the baby isn’t even real]. Your interviews with these fans were so fascinating.

Well, people definitely weren’t as excited to talk about those topics. The Larry community on Tumblr has become pretty isolated and skittish. I had written about Babygate a couple of times before, so there was definitely a pretty strong reaction from most of them of, “You’re a grifter and a scam artist, and you were just here to profit off of telling everybody that we’re freaks or something,” which was not my intention, but I can see why they felt that. I mean, some people who were Larries did eventually agree to talk to me, which I really appreciated, and I hope that they think my portrayal is at least fair. I wasn’t interested in holding up this weird story and being like, “Can you believe these women? They believe they spent all this time talking about this thing that’s obviously not true. It’s so wild,” but about how these theories affected relationships within the fandom, as well as certain factions of the fandom’s willingness to completely reject reality and create their own information environment in a way that I think is similar to other little pockets on the internet.

I think it was definitely hard to balance because people who really hated the Larries and thought of them as a malignant force within the fandom were much more willing to talk about Babygate than Larries themselves, so it was like, “I want to make sure I’m not getting too carried away listening to the people who really despise Larries just because they’re the ones who are willing to be open with me. How do I give a fair shake to this other group that’s not willing to talk?” Those chapters took a really long time.

Fans seem like they can be scary. They wield a lot of online power. Do you have any fears about the potential reception of your book now that it’s out in the world?

I don’t know. The book was announced almost three years ago, so there were fans who reacted in a hostile way from day one. I wasn’t surprised by that even at the time, because I know as a fan myself I’m pretty defensive while reading anything about fandom, especially if it’s not by somebody whose writing I already know or whose perspective I’m already familiar with. It’s just been written about in such an obnoxious and patronizing way for such a long time. It makes sense for people to be a little defensive.

Fandom is such a broad category and such a broad prompt, and there’s so many different lived experiences within it that there’s no way at all for me to possibly cover every perspective. I wouldn’t have been able to say anything in the book if I hadn’t over generalized a bit. It would’ve been totally abstract, or I would’ve just been rattling off all the different versions of each thing, and that’s boring to read. I’m sure there’s places where I make a statement in the book that doesn’t seem true to somebody’s experience as a fan, where they’re like, “I don’t know where she’s getting this. This isn’t what it is for me.” I think I just had to accept that and try my best not to fill the book up with caveats that are like, “I know this might not be true for everyone, blah, blah, blah.” I think that is a scourge in modern writing, especially on the internet. It’s just boring.

It’s too careful and pandering.

There were several moments of crisis where I was worried that I might be saying what I personally think a little bit too forcefully and laying out what I think is good, and bad, and right, and wrong, and maybe moralizing. I didn’t want to do that, but also I had to pick a perspective. I couldn’t just be mealy mouthed.

When you took that trip to LA and set out to find Harry Styles’ vomit, it reminded me of method acting. Do you generally submerge yourself into the world of your subjects?

I mean, I think I always want an excuse to travel for stories. When you’re a child dreaming of being a journalist, you don’t really think about just sitting at a computer all day long and calling people on your iPhone. You think about it as being something you do out in the world. I was like, “This book is getting away from me in the sense that it’s just too much in my head. It’s just too much looking at a computer in my apartment. I feel really frustrated by the things I’m not able to find online, and I think it would feel good to try to do something really fan-ish and weird.”

It was a really fun trip. I only did things that Harry Styles had done, so I went from the airport straight to Randy’s Donuts, because Harry styles has a Randy’s Donuts sweatshirt that he jogs in sometimes, and I got donuts. Then, I drove to Malibu and hung out around this restaurant that Cindy Crawford invested in, that Harry Styles has been seen at. It was a ridiculous day, but it was also so fun. Then I looked for the vomit shrine. I obviously couldn’t really find it because it was just a nondescript patch of highway. I just drove up and down the 101 a couple of times and was like, “Okay, well I’ve covered it. I’ve covered the territory.”

You for sure saw it. You just didn’t know you were seeing it.

Yeah, exactly. Actually, that was the first time I’d ever really explored Los Angeles. It felt very dreamy to have the exhilarating freedom of being an adult with some amount of discretionary income where I could go do something really ridiculous, without being so grown up that I would pause over doing something totally pointless.

Some of my favorite moments in the book were the stories from your own life or your own experiences with fandom. How do you balance personal anecdotes with reporting in general?

I’ve scaled back a little bit on personal disclosure in my work at The Atlantic. It was something that I did a lot when I first started in journalism because I was blogging, and that was what I was reading. I liked reading stuff where people would put funny little personal stories into everything they wrote. Also, I found myself wildly entertaining, so I wanted to talk about my life all the time. It was an exciting time of life too, when you’re in your early twenties. Things are happening to you all the time that feel really interesting, worth sharing. Then when I started writing the book, I wanted to include some personal stuff because the subject felt so personal to me, but I also felt that some of the points I wanted to make would be a little bit abstract for the reader if I didn’t ground them in a specific personal experience.

At the beginning of the book, when I’m talking about how I became a fan of One Direction, at first, I was just like, “Oh well, I saw that documentary with my sisters, and I just thought they were very charming, and then I was a fan.” Then I was reading it back after the first draft of the book, and I was like, “This doesn’t feel very useful or honest to me. I need to be a little bit more frank about what was going on,” which was that I was extremely lonely and feeling like a real freak being at college and not really having any friends. I had zero romantic experience to speak of, and I was having these weird fears about whether I would ever be part of a community or a circle again that felt good, comfortable, and safe the way that my high school experience did.

I’m used to writing about myself a lot, but in a way that’s very funny, flippant, and not necessarily totally honest, at least not in a way that’s embarrassing or difficult. I had to put in the more vulnerable stuff later, but I felt like it was necessary to illustrate how people often find fandom during challenging times in their life.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Shy Watson.

I guess as a reporter, you always go in with an expectation of what the story is going to be and main themes that you want to hit, and a successful reporting project probably involves having all of those expectations be really mutated, and different surprising themes emerging from the interviews, or having interviews where the person really challenges what you were thinking about the subject. The most exciting reporting is when there’s twists and turns.

I feel I learned a lot when I was writing this book, especially about some of the topics that I had already reported on. When I was at The Verge or at The Atlantic, there were things in fandom and specifically in One Direction fandom that I thought I already really understood, and then I learned so much more about them when I was really digging through the deep dark pits of Tumblr.

How do you start a project?

I have a problem with my day job where when I’m nervous about a story because it seems really substantial, I do true high school nerd behavior. I really regress, and I’m like, “I need to read 15 books about this before I end up writing the first thing.” Sometimes I really shoot myself in the foot with that because then I just end up on weird tangents and falling into research rabbit holes that are not fruitful.

But in the case of this book, before I wrote the proposal I read basically everything I could find and realistically read about fan studies going back to the ’80s and tried to understand the history of academic research because it felt like it would be a useful foundation to have. I also wanted to make sure I wasn’t going to swoop in and be like, “I came up with this amazing revelation,” only to learn somebody had said the same thing in 1994. I did a lot of that.

Then for the internet side of things, I just spent however long it took to try to remember what my Tumblr password was when I was 19, and then went back into that account and poked around to see which pages were still up or what links I could find that I would be able to reconstitute through the Wayback Machine, which is by the way, just the most important website ever created.

I guess I have a hard time outlining. I do a ton of research, and I have a very hard time stopping. That sounds like I’m doing a humble brag, but I’m actually not. I really procrastinate starting the work of outlining or of thinking through the writing process by just being like, “Well, I’ll just read one more thing or I’ll just find a few more memes before I get started,” so I definitely pushed it off for a long time and was just continuing to, I don’t know, waste an entire day reading Pew Research surveys about cell phone use or whatever.

There was a lot in your book about the Beatles fandom. Is that when fan research began?

There was definitely writing about fandoms that are older than the Beatles fandom. In the book, I also talked to Allison McCracken who wrote about maybe the earliest pop music fandom that resembles what we think of as pop music fandom now, which was Rudy Vallee and Bing Crosby.

There’s also been a lot of discussion within the field of fandom about how at first, because most of the people who went into that branch of academia were also fans themselves, there was a little too much focus on redeeming fandom or showing fandom in a positive light, so it’s gone through these existential crises of recalibrating like, “We need to be more critical” or, “Okay, now we’re being too critical.” I emailed some of the authors, and they were so helpful. One of the embarrassing perks of being a journalist is that someone else spends their whole career focusing on one topic, and then you can get curious about it for two days, and call them, and be like, “Can you explain this to me?” Everyone was very generous.

I feel like that really benefits someone like you who writes about technology and social media, because those people are still alive, versus if you were writing articles about some really antiquated shit, and you couldn’t contact anyone because they’ve died or retired.

I’m going to say something tacky. I feel like sometimes as a reporter you’ll look someone up, and they’ll have just died two years before and it’s like, “Man, that really stings more than if they were long dead. I wish I’d had this idea sooner.”

That makes sense. [laughs] You mentioned the Wayback Machine. Do you have any other online tools or tips for sourcing good material?

The other thing that ended up being really valuable for me was just connecting with people who had been in the fandom for a really long time and either remembered things or were publicly maintaining a little bit of an amateur archive. I think that’s probably something that exists in a lot of fandoms or in a lot of internet subcultures in general. These experts emerge who you can go to and say, “Do you remember this zany meme from however long ago?” And they will be able to find it or, if they can’t, they’ll at least affirm your memory to you.

It seems like people were super willing to talk. Despite having never listened to One Direction, I became very invested in the gossip, the lore. Especially the Larries [fans who believe in the conspiracy theory that Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson are secretly in love] and Babygate [the conspiracy theory that Louis Tomlinson’s and Briana Jungwirth’s child is not his or, more radically, that the baby isn’t even real]. Your interviews with these fans were so fascinating.

Well, people definitely weren’t as excited to talk about those topics. The Larry community on Tumblr has become pretty isolated and skittish. I had written about Babygate a couple of times before, so there was definitely a pretty strong reaction from most of them of, “You’re a grifter and a scam artist, and you were just here to profit off of telling everybody that we’re freaks or something,” which was not my intention, but I can see why they felt that. I mean, some people who were Larries did eventually agree to talk to me, which I really appreciated, and I hope that they think my portrayal is at least fair. I wasn’t interested in holding up this weird story and being like, “Can you believe these women? They believe they spent all this time talking about this thing that’s obviously not true. It’s so wild,” but about how these theories affected relationships within the fandom, as well as certain factions of the fandom’s willingness to completely reject reality and create their own information environment in a way that I think is similar to other little pockets on the internet.

I think it was definitely hard to balance because people who really hated the Larries and thought of them as a malignant force within the fandom were much more willing to talk about Babygate than Larries themselves, so it was like, “I want to make sure I’m not getting too carried away listening to the people who really despise Larries just because they’re the ones who are willing to be open with me. How do I give a fair shake to this other group that’s not willing to talk?” Those chapters took a really long time.

Fans seem like they can be scary. They wield a lot of online power. Do you have any fears about the potential reception of your book now that it’s out in the world?

I don’t know. The book was announced almost three years ago, so there were fans who reacted in a hostile way from day one. I wasn’t surprised by that even at the time, because I know as a fan myself I’m pretty defensive while reading anything about fandom, especially if it’s not by somebody whose writing I already know or whose perspective I’m already familiar with. It’s just been written about in such an obnoxious and patronizing way for such a long time. It makes sense for people to be a little defensive.

Fandom is such a broad category and such a broad prompt, and there’s so many different lived experiences within it that there’s no way at all for me to possibly cover every perspective. I wouldn’t have been able to say anything in the book if I hadn’t over generalized a bit. It would’ve been totally abstract, or I would’ve just been rattling off all the different versions of each thing, and that’s boring to read. I’m sure there’s places where I make a statement in the book that doesn’t seem true to somebody’s experience as a fan, where they’re like, “I don’t know where she’s getting this. This isn’t what it is for me.” I think I just had to accept that and try my best not to fill the book up with caveats that are like, “I know this might not be true for everyone, blah, blah, blah.” I think that is a scourge in modern writing, especially on the internet. It’s just boring.

It’s too careful and pandering.

There were several moments of crisis where I was worried that I might be saying what I personally think a little bit too forcefully and laying out what I think is good, and bad, and right, and wrong, and maybe moralizing. I didn’t want to do that, but also I had to pick a perspective. I couldn’t just be mealy mouthed.

When you took that trip to LA and set out to find Harry Styles’ vomit, it reminded me of method acting. Do you generally submerge yourself into the world of your subjects?

I mean, I think I always want an excuse to travel for stories. When you’re a child dreaming of being a journalist, you don’t really think about just sitting at a computer all day long and calling people on your iPhone. You think about it as being something you do out in the world. I was like, “This book is getting away from me in the sense that it’s just too much in my head. It’s just too much looking at a computer in my apartment. I feel really frustrated by the things I’m not able to find online, and I think it would feel good to try to do something really fan-ish and weird.”

It was a really fun trip. I only did things that Harry Styles had done, so I went from the airport straight to Randy’s Donuts, because Harry styles has a Randy’s Donuts sweatshirt that he jogs in sometimes, and I got donuts. Then, I drove to Malibu and hung out around this restaurant that Cindy Crawford invested in, that Harry Styles has been seen at. It was a ridiculous day, but it was also so fun. Then I looked for the vomit shrine. I obviously couldn’t really find it because it was just a nondescript patch of highway. I just drove up and down the 101 a couple of times and was like, “Okay, well I’ve covered it. I’ve covered the territory.”

You for sure saw it. You just didn’t know you were seeing it.

Yeah, exactly. Actually, that was the first time I’d ever really explored Los Angeles. It felt very dreamy to have the exhilarating freedom of being an adult with some amount of discretionary income where I could go do something really ridiculous, without being so grown up that I would pause over doing something totally pointless.

Some of my favorite moments in the book were the stories from your own life or your own experiences with fandom. How do you balance personal anecdotes with reporting in general?

I’ve scaled back a little bit on personal disclosure in my work at The Atlantic. It was something that I did a lot when I first started in journalism because I was blogging, and that was what I was reading. I liked reading stuff where people would put funny little personal stories into everything they wrote. Also, I found myself wildly entertaining, so I wanted to talk about my life all the time. It was an exciting time of life too, when you’re in your early twenties. Things are happening to you all the time that feel really interesting, worth sharing. Then when I started writing the book, I wanted to include some personal stuff because the subject felt so personal to me, but I also felt that some of the points I wanted to make would be a little bit abstract for the reader if I didn’t ground them in a specific personal experience.

At the beginning of the book, when I’m talking about how I became a fan of One Direction, at first, I was just like, “Oh well, I saw that documentary with my sisters, and I just thought they were very charming, and then I was a fan.” Then I was reading it back after the first draft of the book, and I was like, “This doesn’t feel very useful or honest to me. I need to be a little bit more frank about what was going on,” which was that I was extremely lonely and feeling like a real freak being at college and not really having any friends. I had zero romantic experience to speak of, and I was having these weird fears about whether I would ever be part of a community or a circle again that felt good, comfortable, and safe the way that my high school experience did.

I’m used to writing about myself a lot, but in a way that’s very funny, flippant, and not necessarily totally honest, at least not in a way that’s embarrassing or difficult. I had to put in the more vulnerable stuff later, but I felt like it was necessary to illustrate how people often find fandom during challenging times in their life.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Shy Watson.

I’m a Martinican (French Caribbean) writer, podcaster, and independent researcher. My work focuses on the colonial and postcolonial history of the Caribbean, through the lens of gender, queerness, and resistance. My reflection is rooted in a diasporic, transatlantic framework, which means that it radiates towards Europe, West/Central Africa, South-Asia.

Both in my podcast and my upcoming historical novel, I strive to articulate historical and sociological reflections in a way that is digestible by/targeted at my communities of belonging—Caribbean people, French POC, Afro and POC women and queer. Popularization of academic work should not come at the expense of quality: to me, it does not mean “lowering” the rigor of my work, but rather being very intentional about making what I do accessible to people outside the little bubble of academia. There’s a lot to say about the hegemony of Western academic institutions and the gate-keeping they perpetuate.

In my work, this effort of subversion manifests both in the topics I write about (history that is relevant to nowadays’ struggles for emancipation and decolonization) and the formats that I choose. It demands to rethink what we deem “legitimate” sources of knowledge and supports for its dissemination. Especially as a Black woman thinker, writing from a postcolonial society, I believe it is inherently political to challenge the dichotomy between objectivity and subjectivity. Writing about academic subjects, while allowing space for radical creativity, imagination, poetic sensibility and subjective perspectives.

What was your path and your background to getting to where you are now?

It’s funny, because ever since I was a kid, I knew I wanted to be a writer. I was also so drawn to research. Of course, I didn’t have a word for it at the time, but I was obsessed with collecting stories from the past and connecting them to the present. I would spend long afternoons at my grandmother’s house, harassing her with questions about her youth, her family history, and life in colonial Martinique during the 1930’s. I would take thorough notes, and even recorded her with my dad’s old camera. I think I was made aware very early of the incredible value of “little people”’s stories within the “great,” official History—what the adult Isis would nowadays refer to as the “history from below” of subaltern people. But although it was an early calling, it has been such a long road for me to reach a point where I can live it fully.

I left Martinique at 18 to pursue my undergraduate studies at Sciences Po Paris, a French university for political and social sciences. I also studied sociology of race and gender for a year at Columbia University in New York when I was 20. It was the most intellectually stimulating, freeing, and empowering time of my life, as well as a strong confirmation that, “Yes. That’s what I’m meant to do.”

However, when I went back to Paris and it was time to enroll in a PhD program, I backtracked. I was riddled by fear. The gloomy situation of French research, the economic precarity of doctoral students; the terrible lack of representation of POC women in French academia, as well as the general hostility of French universities towards discussions about race and gender (this was in 2011)… Plus a heavy dose of impostor syndrome.

I ended up going to Law school instead, and then worked for almost three years in a law firm that specialized in workplace anti-discrimination cases. As a young Black Caribbean woman granted with the privilege of elite higher education, I felt overwhelmed by the mountain of systemic injustices I had “the duty” to fight. I wanted to have “real” impact” and was crushed by the belief that “writing is not enough.” I thought it would be a waste of all the opportunities in front of me, which very few people who looked like me had access to. So for me, my late twenties have been a journey of learning that it’s not because I “can” that I “have to.” It’s been about deconstructing my notion of what “impact” can look like, and convincing myself of the radical potential of my purpose: the radical potential of ideas and stories.

I also had to come to terms with the fact that I don’t need to be a superhero. That’s actually an ego thing. But the truth is: I don’t “have” to do anything. I just have to be myself. Not save the world, but save myself. And that’s already an enormous challenge! And that’s the magic of it, truly: only by being the most radical version of myself, can I actually offer my best contribution to the collective.

But I always say: “the simplest things in life are often the least easy.” I think being yourself is much more about birthing yourself. For me, it has been such a long, sometimes painful process. At 30 years old, I am finally seeing my first book getting published, even though this has been my ultimate life goal ever since I was 8. Sometimes, I think: “Oh, how much time I lost!” If it hadn’t been for all those doubts and “deviations,” maybe I would have written my first book 10 years ago. But deep down, I know this is bullshit. Thoreau said: “How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.” And it’s true: all the experiences I went through during my twenties shaped the person, and the writer, I am today. The doubts, the pain, the joys, the growth, the deviations: I am so proud of it all. I have a deep faith in the timing of my life.

How did you reconnect to your purpose?

By resting. And above all, by failing. Failure—my ultimate fear for so long, the very thing I had spent my youth avoiding at all costs—ended up being the biggest blessing in my life. And it came through the form of severe burnout at age 27. Until then, I worked long, excruciating hours in this Parisian anti-discrimination law firm, and I was utterly miserable. My boss at the time would constantly compliment me on how good a writer I was, on how knowledgeable and eloquent I was about history, race, gender, philosophy (which we liked to talk about during work breaks). When I confided in her that I wanted to take a sabbatical at some point to dedicate myself to writing, she replied: “Oh, you will have plenty of time to do that when you retire.” This felt like a knife straight to my heart.

A few weeks after that, my brain and my body shut down. I quit and spent an entire year of doing nothing. The guilt and shame were crushing. For a year, I read books for pleasure, I cooked, I went on strolls, I walked barefoot in the grass, I did moon rituals and got into astrology. I treated my body like a soft, precious thing.

A year later, a big transformation had happened: I had decided not to go back to law. In 2019, I signed up for a Ph.D. program in colonial history in Paris, thinking I was finally ready to achieve my life-long dream. But it was too early. It was still the overachiever in command, the “straight-A student” who was terrified of “failing at life” if she continued to rest…Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, the timing and the conditions were not right. A few months into the program, COVID struck, and I found myself locked down for two months in my tiny Parisian studio, with no sunlight, the majority of my classes cancelled, heavily depressed, in an existential crisis, and with so much free time to contemplate what a disillusion my “dream” had turned out to be. Today, I know that this is what happens when my mind and my fears try to “force” things to happen, instead of surrendering to the organic, aligned timing of my life.

During lockdown, something incredible happened: instead of working on my dissertation, I found myself giving birth to a history podcast idea I had had for a long time. It’s called La Griotte Vagabonde (“The Wandering Griot”), and it explores African and Caribbean history “from below,” while also telling tales of my own creation, reconstituting historical scenes with sound effects, and showcasing musical folklore and literature. The union of academic knowledge and artistic creativity that I had found so lacking in academia.

I was 28 years old then, and this was the very first time in my life that I birthed something that felt so soulful and authentic to who I am. The process was so playful and full of joy. To my shock, the podcast quickly grew its audience: thousands of listeners subscribed in the first few months, and I received hundreds of comment praising the originality and rigorous quality of my work, how pedagogical it was, how entertaining and poetic. That’s when it all clicked for me. Maybe I didn’t need yet another stamp of external validation, in the form of an academic title. Maybe I was ready just the way I was.

So shortly after that, in disbelief of what a crazy move I was about to do, I quit my program and left France—where I had lived for almost a decade—to go back to Martinique. It was a critical time of healing and gestation for me: I needed to be home. There, for the very first time in my life, I made the oath that I would take my identity as a writer seriously.

Less than a year later, I was approached by a well-established Parisian publisher who was in love with my podcast. They were looking for “fresh,” strong emerging voices in French literature, and wanted to know if I had works of historical fiction I wanted to submit. I didn’t yet, but they gave me a book deal for me to write it.

So, everything connected.

Exactly, and that’s why it’s so fundamental, during the dry spells, to sustain your faith in your purpose. To cling as strongly as possible to the conviction that the universe will eventually reward your courage and authenticity, even if everything feels so uncertain and risky at the moment.

One thing that I find beautiful—a feeling of things coming full circle—is that my first published book will be a work of fiction. Not a social or political theory essay, as I had thought in my early twenties. But a Young Adult novel. Something so unapologetically creative and artistic. However, it’s a historical novel: a story that actually illustrates political concepts—decolonization, history of resistance in the Caribbean, ecofeminism, indigenous wisdoms, gender and queer history all woven into an Afrofuturistic tale with a plot of time travel and a magical storyline of sorority between four young witches.

I actually think it is in itself a revolutionary act to make Martinican Black and indigenous people the protagonists of fantastical fiction, especially in the French literary world that has still such a long way to go in terms of diversifying imagination. When I was a teenager devouring fantastic novels, I never would have dared to dream that one day, there would be epic stories like this, whose heroines would look like me and come from where I come from. I think stories are healing, and my work is oriented towards that: collective healing. So, it really feels like everything is finally connecting.

I’m finally at peace with the fact that I can’t be confined to a single box. I can’t be confined to being an academic historian. I’m also a novelist, I’m also a poet, I’m also an activist, I’m also a radical dreamer…I’m all those things, and they are all necessary threads in the complex tapestry that is my singular voice. I’m ultimately someone who build bridges, someone who connects dots. I think you should not feel defective for not being able to confine yourself to an unidimensional path: I actually think this makes you an avant-gardiste, because this deconstruction of categories and dichotomies is precisely what our future will increasingly look like.

Could you elaborate more on how you purposely integrate subjectivity into your work?

I think this divide between objectivity and subjectivity is deeply rooted into a colonial and patriarchal cosmo-vision. So-called “objectivity” is actually a political weapon, and is used to discard the perspectives and ways of knowing of those who are not white, straight, cis-men. Objectivity is actually a myth. We are all subjective beings. The closest one can come to objectivity, is actually to confront very frankly one’s subjectivity. The paradox is: the more you try to deny and repress your subjectivity, the less objective you end up being. So, to me, real objectivity is found in the thorough process of asking yourself: From where do I speak? What is the specific shape of my own subjectivity, and how does that inform my perspective?

Currently I’m reading an essay called “Braiding Sweetgrass” by Native-American biologist Robin Wall Kimmerer. She talks about her ambiguous position as an Indigenous woman in academia, and how her career has been devoted to reconciling Western science with the Indigenous ways of knowing. In the same regard, what I find fascinating is how knowledge and imagination, intellect and intuition—concepts deemed mutually exclusive in the Western paradigm—have always been intertwined in non-Western epistemological traditions. A good example of that is the West-African ancestral tradition of Griots – those are oral historians who keep records of a lineage through storytelling, singing and music. I also think of the archetype of the Hindu goddess Saraswati. I have a picture of her just on my wall here. She’s the patroness of both artistic pursuits and scholarly knowledge. And I think that’s very telling, because in the Indian way of seeing the world, there is no contradiction between being a thinker and an artist, on the contrary. Right brain, left brain. We’re made of both.

To me, embracing subjectivity as a thinker is also an effort of rehabilitating those whose voice has been consistently silenced throughout history. So yeah, I think that’s an epistemological question that is central to any de-colonial work. It’s not only about what types of subjects you tackle in your research, but also about the manner in which you proceed with that research. I’m so inspired by Gayatri Spivak’s 1985 essay, “Can the Subaltern speak?” Really, how, as a writer and an historian, can I revive the experiences and perspectives of those who were reduced to the condition of otherized object in someone else’s story?

I think using our imagination and own sensitivities is a powerful tool to fill the gaps of the colonial archive. I really like this quote by E.L. Doctorow: “The historian will tell you what happened and the novelist will tell you what it felt like.” I would add: the novelist will tell you what the historian could never know. I love working at the intersection of these two crafts.

I was wondering if you ever felt nervous about filling in the gaps? Thinking you might get it wrong? Or end up not being sensitive enough?

Of course, in the process of writing my historical novel, extensive research came first. And it’s on that solid foundation that I was able let my imagination fill the remaining gaps. But as writers, and also as historians, I think our entire craft is guided by the paradoxical idea that human experience is both contingent and cyclic. It’s a never-ending, repetitive story of power, oppression, accumulation, but also of resistance, creativity, transgression and unexpected solidarity. Maybe human history is not that different from folklore tales, after all: the same patterns, archetypes and themes, unfolding in different settings with different characters.

But to me, that’s what’s so beautiful about it: in a way, through your own hardships, dreams, joys and fears, you can connect to someone who lived hundreds of years before you.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Grashina Gabelmann.

No. No, in no way, but the book that I was referring to in that conversation with Kate was the idea that I had of the book that I would write about Massachusetts. I think at the time of that conversation, I was still conceiving of the book as a work of nonfiction, sociological, researched, serious…A real non-fiction book, not just another book about me. I thought of it as a sort of capstone. I was drawn to the idea of it being my book, because I’ve been trying to write it for 20 odd years and the material was ancient. It was the place where I was born and raised, and the particularities of that place, Massachusetts were just increasingly interesting to me as I lived in other places. My adult experience really threw my childhood into relief.

Then, I wrote a book about Massachusetts [Very Cold People (Hogarth, 2022)]. It was not non-fiction. It was not researched. It was not particularly long, but it still served to do what a book needs to do, which is to empty myself of the material. It really feels like an almost surgical or almost a religious experience in eliminating all of this so-called raw material for my working memory, and so it did that. Then, as soon as I finished writing Very Cold People, I had idea for another book about Massachusetts and I’m not working on it right now. I’m working on three other books, but what I learned from writing Very Cold People is that…What I learned is something that I already knew and have relearned over and over, but somehow need to keep relearning, and it is that you can keep writing about the same thing forever.

The example I always use is William Maxwell, a novelist that…I don’t have anything in common with him cosmetically or stylistically, but one of the things about his work that I continue to learn from is the fact that his mother died when he was four of the so-called Spanish flu. In every one of his major works, there’s a missing mother, dead, gone or there’s some sort of person in a care position with respect to the narrator or some other major characters who’s gone. He teaches us that you can just keep writing that same trauma over and over and over and over again.

One of the things is you feel like you were emptied of the subject matter in terms of Very Cold People?

Yeah. It’s the same every time. It feels like an exorcism almost. Another example that might be helpful is that the fact that after I wrote my first autobiographical book, which came out in 2008, it’s called The Two Kinds of Decay and it’s about a neurological autoimmune disease that I had in my 20s. I wrote that book from memory and I wrote it at some distance. It was seven years after, I think the last moment in the book that I write about that I began the book. I wrote it from memory. It was very easy to remember everything. Then, within a year or two of publishing the book, I realized I didn’t remember what was in it anymore. At the time, it felt like such a novelty that I no longer sort of holding onto that, which I had written about.

But then with every other book that I wrote after that, the very same thing happened. Whatever material, whether autobiographical or in the case of Very Cold People, having to do with fictional characters that I had invented, what I had been thinking and thinking and thinking about constantly for a period of years, it took multiple years to write each of my books, was gone. It was gone. A book is an amazing magically functioning instrument for emptying myself of what I no longer need, what I no longer want to think about.

Does the desire to write the big book remain?

No. I think Very Cold People is finally the book that cured me of that idea. I do certainly think there are writers who have one or two major works. I am not the person who decides what my major works are, but there are other writers who just keep putting out small to medium size books or books of similar length, depth, breadths, style at more or less regular points along the timeline. I think I had a romantic attachment to the idea of an author who had put out one book every 15 years. Every time a new book came out, it was just this sensational culture wide celebration. I’m just not that writer. There’s a writer named James Richardson who wrote an amazing book of aphoristic tiny essays called Vectors in 2001, which is a huge influence on me even now. But one of Jim’s vectors as he calls them, goes like this, “If you’re a Larkin or Bishop, one book a decade is enough. If you aren’t, it’s more than enough.”

We can go back to Maxwell – So Long, See You Tomorrow is a short book.

It’s true. Yeah. It’s his major work, isn’t it?

Maybe you’d say, “Well, there’s a centerpiece around which the rest of [Maxwell’s] work ‘gathers’”?

No, I completely agree. Yeah. Again, that’s such a great lesson that apparently, to some degree, still need to relearn, but yes, that’s a major work. It’s widely read. It’s taught. It’s studied by other writers and artists. It’s been in print probably longer, or I don’t know what the print status is of his early novels, but they’re longer, but I think that’s a shortest book and you’re right. It’s his major work. Yeah. Certainly, we’re talking about something other than length, but at least in the beginning of my so-called career as a prose writer, I had a bit of an inferiority complex about page count. I really admired people who could publish an 800-page novel every 10 to 15 years. It seemed like a moral excuse for not having a full-time job with benefits and a pension and all the other things that we forgo in order to be artists in this country.

Maybe I’ll put it in my own words: part of writing this book has expelled the source material; part has expelled the desire for the big book, because part of it is understanding what kind of writer you are. Is that right?

That is so beautifully succinct. Yes and yes, both of those statements are right. Yeah. That second thing, just accepting that I am what I am. It reminds me of something I saw on Twitter, from Mat Johnson. There’s a tweet that he wrote many years ago that stayed with me. The sentiment of it is you may as well stop trying to emulate any one of the writers or artists that you admire because the whole project is just accepting that you are the writer who you are. It sounds like such a kindergarten lesson, and yet here we are. There are plenty of mid-career writers and artists who still have the vestiges of these old ambitions to become something that is not what they are inherently.

I want to push a little bit on the idea that the big book was an idea for emulation rather than as an organizing principle for your own work.

Yeah. I wasn’t trying to emulate anybody in particular, but it was more that I had this abstract idea of what a mid-career author should have produced, or it was an idea of the kind of book that I thought would pay appropriate deference to the material, which was vast. I wanted to write about an entire culture. I wanted to write about an entire place and I wanted the place to feel real and the characters to feel real. I couldn’t conceive of doing that in a work of autobiography. As the alternative to writing the kind of book that I had written up to that point, I hit upon this idea of this vast sociological researched non-fiction tome.

I hadn’t even considered writing a novel. I just thought of myself as somebody who would never write a novel, and this is something I’ve talked about in several interviews for Very Cold People. In these conversations, I think I kind of excavated my personal history as an artist and realized that the original source of this belief that I wasn’t a novel writer was graduate school because I went to a program in which you could be a fiction writer or a poet. There was no such thing as non-fiction and whatever you chose, fiction or poetry, you were staunchly on the other side of the fence from the other… We had softball teams. The poets played the fiction writers. It was very adversarial, and the poets had their bar, fiction writers had their bar.

There’s like a little bit of dating in between, but my partner was a poet and that was appropriate. Yeah. All of the really conventional lessons that we were given, either through osmosis or through actual instruction about the division of the genres was it was really formative for me. It’s taken me decades to unlearn and relearn. Even now, I think I’m still figuring it out. Soon after I finished writing Very Cold People, I thought of it as an aberration like, “Okay. This is my Massachusetts book. I had to do a novel. I’m sure I won’t do that again.” But within weeks of turning it in, I immediately started writing another novel. Something has happened. I think it’s a good thing. It feels like an opening up of the freedoms of possibility that I think I had artificially set for myself.

I have in front of me, this is: “How To Have A Career: Advice To Young Writers,” by Sarah Manguso.

Oh, not that piece…

You had a very strong negative reaction just now. “Not that piece,” you just said?

It’s okay. I have feelings about it. We all have feelings about earlier work. No, I’m interested in how you’re going to frame this.

The framing is, “That was right. That was wrong. Here’s what I’d say instead,” etc. Okay? I’ll give you a few hits here. If it’s not fun, then we don’t have to do it.

No. I actually know what I’m going to say. Should we do it in points? You know what? Let’s do it the way you planned.

Okay. How about this one? This is an easy one. “Buy books used, perform periodic calls and resell them.” True?

I still do that. Yeah, I do buy more books new. Yeah. I do buy more books new than I did at that time, because I am able to, materially.

All right. Number two: “Avoid all messy and needy people, including family. They threaten your work.”

Absolutely, yes.

“Enemies: know who they are and monitor them.”

Well, okay. I wrote this when I was in a more vulnerable place and the culture was also different. I think it was less democratic. I wrote this before Twitter, I believe. When I started submitting work in the mid to late ’90s, you did it on paper in an envelope with a self-addressed stamped envelope inside wrapped around the manuscript. People could get up to no good. You heard stories about people shredding things and throwing them out and lying. I think people didn’t have to be as accountable as they do now with all of the things the internet has done, good and bad. There is, I have to believe a democratizing effect that it’s had on especially marginalized people who would not otherwise have been able to become writers in the commercial universe that’s always been open to some people, but not everybody.

The thing about this piece and the reason that I immediately responded negatively, and I should have known this, had I been more online savvy at the time that I gave it to my publisher’s blog. It was for the FSG blog for the launch of one of my books with them. I failed to predict that people would choose one or a few of these so-called… What is it called—advice? Rules? I think advice. People would just take one piece of the advice and repeat it or reprint it. Then, say like, “This is bad,” because I think by itself, each one of those is bad except for the fucking last one, which nobody ever talks about, and which basically throws over everything previous and says, “Forget this. This is the only real advice.” If you would, could you read that last piece of advice?

Absolutely. “Onward. Once you’ve truly begun, slow down. The difference between publishing two good books and 40 mediocre books is terribly large. Don’t expend energy in writing and publishing that would be better used in your family or community. Come tempered by life. Make compromises for love, provide a service to the world. These experiences form the adult mind. Without them, both you and your work remain juvenile.”

That’s the advice. Everything before it is… It’s almost like each one before that is preceded by, “You may think dot, dot, dot. You may think dot, dot, dot,” but really that’s the advice. Now, you know the source of my complex feelings about how this has been…This piece had a life far beyond what I had expected and it doesn’t come up as often now, but it certainly had a really long tail and I don’t think it was good for me to be associated with it.

“Onward” continues to be the good advice. “Once you truly begun, slow down.” How do you slow down now versus how you slowed down before?

Oh, the slowing down? Once you’ve truly begun, slow down. I think what I was trying to articulate for myself in writing that one was a reminder that the important work isn’t the typing. It’s the thinking obviously, but if the thinking you do best is done through writing, through arguing with one self on the page, determining what one truly believes while making that determination within language, then there’s no reason to artificially stop oneself from writing or even from typing.

I think what I was reacting against in my own work was a kind of desperation to keep going after the first book. I saw something on Twitter today about somebody was asking about what the hell do you do after your first book that you’ve been working on all of your life, essentially? You’ve been thinking about this all your life, and then it’s out of you. How do you write the next one?

The second book just feels much more different from the first book than any other book will feel from the second book. I think that’s just a fact and although I don’t remember exactly what I was thinking when I wrote that sentence, but I think it was added to the piece in order to just provide myself some kind of comfort about the wasteland, in which one finds oneself after the first book.

But that’s not that part of onward that I think is really the best advice. I think the best advice is don’t waste energy trying to write something in particular or write in general that you could better expand in your family or your community.

It’s this idea, and I don’t think this idea is as strong in the cultural imagination as it was in the ’90s when I started out, but there was this idea of the always male writer who would go and just wrestle with his typewriter while all around him, a wife, a secretary, an assistant, an army of women would just take care of everything else in his life. I wrote all of that advice before I really knew I was a woman. As a young person, I did not have any responsibilities beyond myself. I wasn’t part of a family. I wasn’t a mother. I didn’t even have a cat. It was very easy for me to identify with this kind of masculine ideal of the writer only ever writing. Then, of course, time passed and I made culturally inflected decisions that worked against myself as a writer. I married a man. I’ve since divorced that man. I had a child. I still have the child.

I understand better what I was just beginning to articulate in “Onward” back when I wrote it, which is that I had a sense that it wasn’t good to just be a writer because it just becomes this masturbatory and ultimately boring—boring to others, boring to oneself—practice that doesn’t really belong anywhere. It’s not for an audience. It’s not to anybody. I will say of everything in that little piece, each of its little articles, the one that most closely represents the way I feel about writing now is that last one, and I knew it would. I knew it would.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Colin Everest.

I definitely don’t travel well, so the past year has been about trying to figure out that exact thing. I’m in therapy; I’ve been in therapy for almost exactly a year now. That has been the big thing for me: having a weekly therapy session. It has been so helpful because, with the exception of the past couple of weeks that I’ve been in Iran, whenever I travel, I still do therapy—I just do it remotely.

Also, manufacturing a routine has been helpful. I joined a nice gym, and the gym is located in New York and LA, so I make sure I go regularly in both cities. Also, once I realized that I was going to be going back and forth constantly, I invested in nice luggage. I needed to think of easy clothes that I like, and textures that I like, and scents that I like, and things that I can take with me that I will look forward to interacting with because there’s no actual physical space that really feels like mine right now. I have an apartment in New York, but I have been there so rarely this past year that it is pretty much just an expensive storage unit.

What is your day job right now? What are you working on?

When I get back from Iran, I’ll be working on Three Busy Debras. We did a pilot for Adult Swim, and now we’re writing three more scripts—then from there, they’re going to decide if we go to series. And then, I’m just doing a bunch of other small stuff, like acting in short films on the weekends and doing live shows in the evenings, things like that.

How do you balance all of these work projects and make time for real life too?

These days, I’m lucky that I will only do stuff that seems really cool to me. This has only just become the case in the past few months. I feel like I’m still fighting the urge to not say yes to everything immediately because I’m just so excited to have been thought of.

Now it’s like, okay… I have a family that I want to talk to; I have friends or the person I am dating that I want to hang out with. So, when I say yes to something, that project needs to feel as fulfilling, or almost as fulfilling, as spending time with my people or just laying down. And, I try to make sure that I do stuff everyday that isn’t work-related, so that I’m not a maniac. I love work, and I want to be working all the time. So, I have to make myself do the other stuff that also feels good.

Why do you want to work all of the time? Where does that come from?

Well, I really genuinely love all the stuff that I’m doing now. And, I don’t have a lot of other skills. Almost all of my friends are in the same field, so everything is so interwoven. But also, I am just a grade-grubby child of an immigrant who needs to thrive in the field of my choice or else I feel very aimless. When I don’t have a job or something that I feel like I need to work on, I feel really lost, which hopefully is something I’ll figure out in therapy. I’ve been spending a lot of time with my therapist talking about when I do have time off, just not knowing what to do with myself. I don’t know exactly where that lost feeling comes from.

How did you break into the entertainment business?

The short answer is that as soon as I realized I wanted to do comedy, all of my energy went towards doing that or doing day jobs that would make it easier to do comedy. I was really aggressive.

I did a college improv festival, and at the same time, I really wanted to go to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. One of the performers at my college festival mentioned that his group went to Edinburgh, so I asked for his producer’s email and offered to intern.

Then, The Daily Show came to my college campus. They had a Q&A session after their show, and I asked how to get an internship. I knew I wanted that internship more than anything in the entire world, so I worked a bunch of extra jobs so I could fly to New York for my interview. And, I ended up getting the internship. All of that led to another internship at Late Night, where I was doing transcribing and a bunch of production work while also doing side jobs like writing for Reductress and selling mattresses so I could afford improv classes, and also doing ten shows a week, and then finally hosting a show. It was just, like, a million things. I think when one thing finally hit, it was because of all the other things adding up, too.

I knew that I didn’t have any connections outside of Ohio, so my only opportunity to go to New York was by doing something embarrassing, like asking for an internship in front of a room full of hundreds of people at The Daily Show performance at my college. I’m not necessarily saying that’s the best path, but identifying opportunities, and—even if opportunities are rare—then quickly acting on them and then doing a million hours of grunt work, maybe that’s how you’ll get the job.

Your work environment changes from the stand-up stage, to writer’s rooms, to film and TV sets. Do you feel like you have to switch into different versions of yourself to adapt?

I feel pretty consistent. If I’m in a work environment that I don’t like, my demeanor will change, and I’ll be more guarded. I don’t feel like there’s a big change with me across mediums mainly because now I mostly do stuff that I like with people who I like, so they know me and what to expect when they hire me. If I feel like I’m not myself, it’s just that I don’t like where I am or what I’m doing, and hopefully it’s either a short job or I’m in a position to change how I feel.

Where and when do you feel the most creative?

I usually feel the most creative in group settings and in writer’s rooms. When you’re in a good writer’s room and you’re vibing with the group, it’s so exciting to feel the ideas bouncing around, and to really listen to other people and connect with them. The first few weeks of a writer’s room on a narrative show are so exciting because you’re building the arc of a season, and it’s cool to see where that goes.

Alone, if I am in a good groove, I will sit in this one coffee shop that I love in Greenpoint, and I will listen to the same song over and over and over again for, like, six hours. It’s so gross. The songs are never beautiful. When I imagine someone listening to music while they write, it’s always French music or something. But for me, it’s like Charli XCX’s “I Got It” for six hours straight. It’s psycho.

What is your relationship to your devices?

I think it’s getting better. When I feel like I don’t have an idea, it’s really easy for me to get sucked into looking at a screen. I could always tell that it was a source of negative emotion, but now I’ve accepted it, and I’m actually trying to do something about it. Before I would just look at other people’s lives and careers and bodies and kind of obsess, so it’s nice to not do that as much. I sadly don’t think it was any grand epiphany that led to me deciding to cool it with the social media obsession—it was just having less free time, and eventually realizing that I was a lot happier when I stopped using my limited space in the day to stare at people I barely knew and feel bad about myself.

Do you ever feel the need to completely disconnect?

Well, I’m currently in Iran visiting family, and it’s been pretty nice to have limited access for the past two weeks. So, it takes going across the world… But, yeah, in general, I love Airplane mode. My phone is broken, and the battery dies almost instantly. I just haven’t replaced it because it’s a forced lack of access throughout the day, which is great because I can’t really be as productive if I am near it.

You’ve said that you don’t want your comedy or internet presence to revolve around identity. How do you feel about existing online as an up-and-coming public person?

I like for there to be some distance online, and I don’t want to be someone who is tell-all (at least right now). I like to keep certain things and certain people at arm’s length. I like for people to feel like they know me, and I want to have a clear voice and a clear aesthetic, but I also want it to all be controlled.

I want to really maintain a chokehold on how I talk about my ethnicity and identity in my art. Sometimes, I get pressured in meetings to talk about ethnicity because it’s hot to be brown right now, so that comes up. But, that’s not really my comedy. My ethnic identity and my background does play into everything that I make because it’s who I am. It’s all inextricably tied together and interwoven. I want to talk about it in a way that feels responsible and true. It’s so important to me, and I need to treat it with care. I am wary of people who I can tell will not. I really like to control what parts of my life I talk about.

How do you find a balance between what to share or not share online? Is your Instagram you, or is it a persona?

It feels like some version of me. If I feel hot, then I’ll post a hot picture. If I feel goofy, then I’ll post a goofy picture. But, it’s the same with all of the art that I make—it’s all at arm’s length. I’m not going to grant people access to certain intimate parts of my emotional or private life. But, I don’t mind being honest about how I feel about stuff. I just want to protect the parts of my life that are precious to me and only share what I feel comfortable sharing.

Do you feel that you are vulnerable online?

I try to be. I am vulnerable on my own terms. When it comes to political stuff, which I’m very passionate about—especially with things like the Muslim Ban, which personally affects me and my family—I try to be honest about how it affects us because I think that is the only way to get people to engage or understand.

How does anxiety play a part in your life?

I’m a really neurotic person, but writing really makes me feel like I’m in control. Spending a good chunk of the day writing helps me. I didn’t finish college, but I had a great professor who got me into the habit of just writing nonsense for 30 minutes every day. That habit has stuck.

I am always anxious that I’m not doing enough, or that I’m not working hard enough, or that I’m just not producing things that are of the quality that I would like them to be, or that I’m not challenging myself in the right way or reading enough or watching enough or whatever. But the writing helps!

When self-doubt strikes, how do you work through it and move past it?

When I am writing for a live performance, I am always convinced that I will bomb. Before every show, I spend the whole day in a blackout state freaking out and writing. I don’t like to do the same stuff more than once, so I tend to write something new each time, which definitely creates an environment that is totally anxiety-ridden every single time I do a show. It’s insane, but it is really fun to go try something new and see what works. It’s like making bets on what will be funny and what will work every single time. But as a result, I’m just so freaked out the whole day beforehand.

The most anxiety I have is when I’m writing for myself or when I am writing something completely by myself because I’m so used to working in groups. Especially when it’s me performing the material. I just worry so much. I trust other people’s abilities a lot more than mine for the most part.

The way I get through it is to just push through and control what I can about the situation. I know I can’t control my nerves. They’re going to happen. But, I can control my environment—for me, I need to be alone at least for a little while before a show in a place that both physically and mentally allows me to clear my head. I need to turn off my phone and listen to music. And, I need to have all my papers around me. It feels really small when I describe it, but it makes a huge difference.

What’s the biggest creative failure you’ve experienced?

I don’t know. I feel like I take every failure so hard. I’m so wounded by any and every failure that I’m not even really sure what the biggest one is. Every time I do a show, and I don’t feel like I’ve crushed it, I’m decimated for days.

Failure is a huge part of the creative process. How do you recover and help failure fuel your next endeavor?

Yeah. I’m so frequently unhappy with my own output and what I make of that failure is a really crucial part of my creative process. Everyone who has that crippling sense of dissatisfaction at all times knows that it is so, so powerful. My big failures allow for me to look at and fine tune my process. One time, I didn’t book a show that I had a really good shot at making, and I really wanted to get that job. I thought, “Why didn’t I get that job? Oh, because I’m not that great at acting on camera.” So, I started taking on-camera acting classes, and I felt a lot better. I got better, and I did start booking more. Yeah, so, failures can allow us to diagnose whatever our problems may be.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Kailee McGee.

New research shows the pandemic has hit Pacific students harder than others, but many schools are successfully addressing the problem, an educational leader says.

The Education Review Office (ERO) said two thirds live in Auckland, where schools have been closed more than three times longer than the rest of the country.

Pacific students have also faced greater barriers to learning because they are less likely to have access to the internet or a computer at home.

• LISTEN TO RNZ MORNING REPORT: ‘Some of these kids coming back to school are really concerned that they are so far behind’ – ERO chief executive Nicholas Pole

ERO chief executive Nicholas Pole said there was a risk that covid-19 will have long-term effects on their education.

“Through this study we’ve seen academic achievement for Pacific learners go backwards overall,” he told RNZ Morning Report.

“We are seeing lower levels of attendance back at school, so Pacific learners have been slower to return, and both Pacific learners and their teachers are reporting that they are concerned about their progress and their achievement in school.”

He said there was already evidence they were dropping out of school at a greater rate than other groups. At the end of November attendance was only 47 percent and achievement also fell over the year.

Pacific students love learning
But the ERO study also found Pacific students loved learning and teachers had been doing an excellent job but through a tough covid-19 period.

Many schools were seeing innovative approaches to compensate for this being successful.

Pole’s organisation was keeping a close eye on what was working.

Getting the basics right was an essential starting point.

“Our first message is, so that you’re maximising the time on learning and the time at school, first and foremost there’s got to be a real push on getting attendance and engagement back in learning up,” he said.

“Schools need to understand where their learners are at and where they’re behind and tailor their programmes to that to address the gaps in that learning. We’ve seen some schools absolutely go to strength to strength and achieve rates at the end of last year in NCEA [National Certificate of Educational Attainment] were above those of the previous two years.

“We’re looking at what those schools have been doing. They’re tailoring their programmes around the needs of their kids, including flexible timetables.

After-school tuition boosting outcomes
“They’re providing after-school tuition at the weekends and really doing everything they can to boost outcomes.”

Pole said students also felt covid-19 had made them anxious and it had been overwhelming moving in and out of lockdowns.

“Some of these kids coming back to school are really concerned that they are so far behind and schools have got to acknowledge that,” he said.

Some schools had made a point of allowing students to ease into their day, allowing space to reflect and take in their situation.

He said making schools interesting places to be and making it fun and allowing kids to experience a sense of achievement helped bring academic engagement.

Families needed to do their bit too, which had been the case during lockdown, he added.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Since I was a little kid, my first love was music. My parents were music fans. My mom always had music in the background and my dad is a crazy record collector. My undergrad was in architecture and then I did my Masters in textile design. In design school, I learned how to establish a creative process. When I actually started to think that I could make music on my own, I approached it from a design standpoint. They’re not that disconnected; you’re dealing with something physical and you’re dealing with aesthetics. Sound has texture and there’re so many physical qualities to sound. So, in a way, I never felt that they were different.

Your band Buscabulla has a strong stage presence. How do you prepare yourself before performing?

I go through phases. When I was in New York I was just very inspired by a Nuyorican sort of obsession with the Puerto Rican flag, and how they always had to wear it. I wanted to re-appropriate it in my own weird way. I don’t know if you want to call it deconstructing or a more postmodern or more minimal take, but I always wanted to take something—I didn’t want it to seem like I was literally dressing as a Nuyorican would do on the street. I wanted to take elements of it and then make something new.

Now that we moved to Puerto Rico, it’s a different kind of sensibility. Lately I’ve been obsessed with the local carnivals and the traditional dresses. I like to take cultural elements, and what people wear normally, and then I extrapolate it and make it my own and integrate it as a sort of hold to the culture.

You and your partner decided to move to Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria hit the Island and you recorded your first album, Regresa, there. How did you decide to move to a place where uncertainty was constant?

My partner Luis and I got to the point where New York had run its toll. And even though New York is a wonderful city, probably really great for creatives because there are so many creative people and you have so much access to performances and artistic venues and stuff like that, it really stopped having its magic for us. The call to come back home was just so much greater. And New York is going through this phase where things are so expensive, and the human, simpler qualities, or the communities, have been displaced by big corporate interests and the city is becoming this weird unlivable place.

Coming home felt like it was the place where we needed to be, or where we could find our most authentic selves. Even though it came with a lot of uncertainty, and it’s an island that has been in an economic crisis for more than a decade, and it had just been struck by a hurricane, we really didn’t care. We felt that this is where we needed to be because it was home and it was a place where we needed to make a record.

How was the process of readapting to life in Puerto Rico? You were away for 10 years and people change, communities readapt, and people and life move forward. I’m sure that you changed as well.

It wasn’t easy at all. New York keeps you so busy that you can’t really stop to think about who you are and what you do. And as soon as I got here I was confronted with like, “What are you about now? Now that this whole context of the city has been taken away who are you?” It was really hard and really beautiful.

Do you think you found some answers to what you mentioned about who you are?

Yeah and the interesting thing is that the record literally maps out that process. It goes from that first initial energy of going through the process of that weirdness of adjusting to a new place and just feeling anxiety and observing everything that was going on around me and the country. There is a song called “Nydia” where I have this cathartic moment where I’m in pain and feeling weird in my own skin. So much is about accepting that things are never going to be perfect or great and the same as with Puerto Rico. It’s both a recognition that this place has its flaws, and I also had deep flaws. And it wasn’t until I was able to really look at them in the eye that I was able to just be like, “I’m cool with this. I’m okay with things not being perfect. I can still thrive even when things aren’t perfect.”

After Hurricane Maria, you co-created the Puerto Rico Independent Musicians and Artists (PRIMA) Fund. This happened in an environment of emergency because artists needed support and assistance. There wasn’t a lot of time to think about details and processes because assistance was needed immediately. That resonates with what is happening now. How was the process of creating this initiative under a state of urgency?

I think everybody just felt so helpless. I remember telling Luis, “Is there really anything that we could do? I really don’t know if we could, do you think this is possible?” I got together with Annie Cordero, who is also a Puerto Rican musician but born and raised in the States, and we just got together and we found a fiscal sponsor quickly and immediately—like within maybe like a month or two of the hurricane hitting—we just started collecting money.

It wasn’t just me and Annie, we were reaching out to a community. Bands from California, Chicago, and Texas, and bands that were either Puerto Rican or that had Puerto Rican members, started doing benefit shows. So this really interesting network was created to support musicians. That’s beautiful. And sometimes you don’t have to do that much. You set up a system and then you use your relationships to get the message out. We already had our band platform and our social media, but we also had PR people and then it just became bigger and bigger. In the first year, we were able to give like around 40 or 50, $500 micro-grants to people. We knew people that didn’t even have money to eat. It was really bad. And musicians don’t have a safety net.

Is the fund still active?

Yeah, when we have emergencies we activate emergency events or alliances. After the earthquake, we sent out this relief application, and we reach out to alliances and we worked with the Jazz Foundation to provide grants for jazz musicians. When we don’t have emergencies, what we’ve been doing is supporting artists on another level. We were doing this showcase in New York where every summer we would bring two or three bands and we would give them exposure, get them into a press room to promote their new material.

We’ve done events here in Puerto Rico to do fundraising as well. We’re trying to be this organization that supports musicians when things are good and when things are bad; we’re trying to become this active thing and it can be smaller and it could be big depending on where Annie and I are at because it’s totally grassroots. Annie and I don’t make any money off of it. It’s complex, but I think that’s just the world we live in now and these types of things are necessary.

After your experience with PRIMA and working with your network and friends, what do you think artists can do to support themselves and other artists?

We’re in the independent music industry, we don’t have big labels or big live events, or big machinery behind us. That machinery can achieve a lot of things. But in independent music, you only have your music community. it’s just a really different world we live in and making music is just not what it used to be.

I think the only way to make it stronger, is through your community and your social networks. You put your record out, your friends put it out, you make concerts together, and then people identify you as a group of artists. That’s something really beautiful about New York. I felt like I connected with a lot of artists there that were making music in Spanish or that maybe had Latino parents and that had a sensibility. I like to identify myself as part of that community. I feel the stronger we are, the better.

You have a strong network of musician friends and collaborators. How do other collaborators figure in your work? What’s the most helpful thing about working with others?

First of all, Luis and I work together all the time. We’re not the kind of musicians that are constantly working with producers and songwriters. We make all our songs, we self-produce. There is something dangerous about that, too, because it’s almost like when you’re with your own thoughts and then you can start telling yourself things that might not be productive at all. And, it’s not until you sit down with a person and you tell them what you’ve had in your mind through the week, that you’re externalizing what you feel. You put it into the air and then you’re sharing it with another person who’s going to see your situation from a completely different point of view.

So collaboration helps you to see things from another eye, and you learn to look at your work from another perspective. So for example, when we were working on the record with Nick Hakim, he just came and we hung out and it was just amazing because it was another person understanding your music from a different point of view. By the time he came, I was really insecure about my songs and not feeling sure and then you could see how he would react and he would say “This is amazing” or “This one’s not so great”. As soon as somebody says, “I love this,” you kind of start believing it. You believe in your work again. It’s not that I’m easily swayed by other people’s opinions, but I’m definitely swayed by an opinion of a person that I admire and that I really think is talented and does their work well.

What is something you wish somebody told you before you began to make music?

I wish people would have told me me that it’s not so precious. You realize it’s only through making work that what you do is revealed to you. You realize that you have to develop patience, that every day you do work and if it’s not great or if it’s not really where it has to be, that you don’t have to feel anxious or second guess yourself. The more that I do this, and the older that I get, the more patience I’ve developed. I realized you just have to keep going.

One day you realize that you have this whole body of work, that it’s cohesive and makes sense. It reveals what you’ve been thinking. I remember I took a thesis class and one of the exercises was to just write a bunch of words. Then, when you read all the words, you’re like, “Damn, this is where my mind is at.” It’s not revealed any other way than through the work.

My approach to making music is super instinctual, so there was a lot of second-guessing, and it’s only through making the work that it’s revealed to you. I wish that maybe I was a little bit more prepared for that because I felt like I suffered in the beginning and things took more time, or I second-guessed a lot of it and it took away the fun from the work. Now I feel like I can have more fun because I know what’s on the end and I know that it takes time to get to the place where you want to be.

What do you think helped you to overcome those obstacles?

Probably through suffering. It makes you grow. All those years of struggling in New York, and going to work and coming back home and working on music after putting my daughter to bed and countless hours of rehearsal…You realize that you have it, but you only really discover it through putting yourself through it. There’s no other way to know. It’s that struggle and pain. It’s a cliché, but it’s true. Experience makes you more knowledgeable. I realized that the best way to learn is through your own process.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Miriam Garcia.

The post Learning the Wrong Lessons from Ukraine appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by David Swanson.

Reenactors under the direction of performance artist Dread Scott retrace the route of one of the largest slave rebellions in U.S. history on November 09, 2019 in New Orleans, Louisiana. The 1811 uprising of slaves, mostly armed with hand tools, began in southeastern Louisiana, ultimately growing in size to roughly 200 to 500 slaves from sugar plantations in the area. (Photo: Marianna Massey/Getty Images)

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Ursula Wolfe-Rocca.

Following recent Chinese government directives, the China-based language learning app Talkmate and video streaming service Bilibili have now removed the Tibetan and Uyghur languages from their sites, sources say.

And under a government order announced on Dec. 20, foreign organizations and individuals beginning March 1 may no longer spread “religious content” online in China or Tibet, with religious groups inside China told they must obtain a special license to do so.

The regulation, “Measures on the Administration of Internet Religious Information Service,” was issued jointly by the State Bureau of Religious Affairs, the State Internet Information Office, the Ministry of Industry and Information, the Ministry of Public Security, and the Ministry of State Security and went into effect March 1.

Restrictions are now also in place on a wide range of social media platforms in Tibetan areas, a source inside Tibet told RFA this week.

“Specifically, those platforms where users go live to perform and communicate with their audiences have seen more restrictions put in place,” RFA’s source said, speaking on condition of anonymity for security reasons.

“Tibetans are forbidden to speak in Tibetan while communicating, and if any Tibetan artist tries to represent Tibetan culture and tradition on their social media platform, their accounts are disconnected,” the source said.

“And if such performances go live, they are immediately interrupted by the government,” he added.

Authorities in northwest China’s Qinghai province have already banned Tibetan social media groups tied to religion, warning group members they will be investigated and jailed if they continue to use them, sources told RFA in earlier reports.

Requirements for proficiency in Mandarin Chinese in testing and consideration for employment have meanwhile disadvantaged Tibetan students, as China seeks to promote the dominance of Chinese culture and language in Tibetan areas, sources say.

Formerly an independent nation, Tibet was invaded and incorporated into China by force 70 years ago.

Language rights have become a particular focus for Tibetan efforts to assert national identity in recent years, with informally organized language courses in the monasteries and towns deemed “illegal associations” and teachers subject to detention and arrest.

Translated by Tenzin Dickyi for RFA’s Tibetan Service. Written in English by Richard Finney.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Sangyal Kunchok.

I think that candles seem so obvious to me looking back and the clues that led me to that path seem really obvious now, but it wasn’t in the moment. I was working at this natural skin care company and I was surrounded by candles every day. I was talking about them, I was holding them, interacting with them.

Can you say what the company is?

Oh yeah, their name is Red Flower and they have the most beautiful scented candles. They’re very ceremonial. They have dried flowers on top that you remove and you put in the bath. And I think that my work also has a ceremonial aspect to it but I don’t think it’s a direct pathway that led me from there to here.

How long ago did you start making candles?

I have to look at my Instagram to see my first candle post, but I think almost four years ago.

How did you get started? Did you have a wax mentor or a YouTube video you could pull up?

I didn’t really have any resources. I was doing clay sculpture, that was the last medium that I was using, and felt just like there was no response from people. I felt really stagnant. So I was either going to do candles, something that you could destroy through burning, or sculptural candy with marzipan. And I ended up eating all of my candy materials, so I went into wax. It was just a lot of trial and error because with what I’m doing it’s really hard to find a peer. It’s hard to get more educational resources because I don’t think there are a lot of people who are using [wax] in the same way.

So your life would look really different today if you didn’t have a sweet tooth?

Yeah.

Do you remember the first candle you made?

The first candles I made were made to be manifestation candles, so without any religion involved, more creating a very personal ceremony. I would think of what I wanted, which at that time was probably related to abundance or financial security, because I wasn’t having a lot of success with my previous art practice, and I would rub glitter on these candles that I made or put gold leaf on them. If it was for money, I would put dollar signs. That was the original intention. It was just a very personal ceremony between me and my hopes. I sort of outgrew that, but I feel like some of that still lives in the candles, which is that lighting them produces a ceremony and you can put whatever meaning you want into that.

Were you thinking about them as art pieces then or were they purely functional?

I was thinking of them as an interactive experience at the beginning— wishing on this thing and then I’m going to destroy it. And then it just grew from there.

How did that evolve into the wax sculptures you’re known for today?

[Laughs] I didn’t want to promise people magic candles. I mean, for me they’re magic, but I can’t promise that to anybody else. I think by giving somebody a candle of this weird thing that I come up with, or a portrait that they think is special, I’m leaving it open for them to create their own interaction.

Did you have a relationship with candles as ceremonial objects growing up?

In different degrees. Now I look back and I see that I did, but when I started making candles it didn’t occur to me. We would practice shabbat in our household. So holding the candle sticks and blessing them is a whole ceremonial practice we would have every weekend. And while it celebrates life, it’s also what we use to memorialize people, so there’s a yahrzeit candle. Looking back, our household always had candles and I guess they left more of an impact than I thought.

Also, in synagogue, they have these walls of names to commemorate the anniversaries, the yahrzeit of everybody. I was obsessed with this wall of lights. They were electrical lights that looked like candles and I would leave synagogue and just sit in the hallway and play with the lights, which one should not do. I was too young. I didn’t know better. It would be somebody’s anniversary of their death and I’d turn it off.

How old were you?

I mean, I probably learned better to stop doing that around nine, but in my infancy until then.

What’s the learning curve like for working with wax? Was it harder or easier than you expected?

It’s very different from what I expected. There’s a speed that you have to work with that’s different from using watercolors or oil paint. You have to be really fast and intentional because it will start to solidify on the paint brush. But I really think that with any skill it’s just about putting in the effort to learn the nature of the paint. You learn the times. I don’t use thermometers. At this point I just know how it feels in my hand. I’ll touch it and know there are 30 more seconds before it’s going to go rock hard on me.

How much time do you have before the wax solidifies?

It depends on what I’m doing. If I’m building it with my hands, I probably have like a minute of building time. And then when I get to the point where I’m painting the color, because I paint with wax, I probably have 10 seconds to apply that paint or the wax to the candle before it’s too hard to move.

It sounds like a lot of the thinking and creative decision making has to be done before you start.

Yeah, you need to know what you’re going to do. But I also think the art takes place in the accident, when it runs a little bit or if it blends. There are all these different tricks to it.

Like what?

If you want to turn it into this beautiful watercolor sort of translucent thing you do less pigment, more wax. You don’t press so hard on your paintbrush. It’s all stuff that I’ve learned through accidents. So even though I want to be super precise and planned out with what I’m doing, I try not to be too rigid about it because I learn every time. I mean I still learn because I’m still making mistakes.

Is the material pretty forgiving when it comes to mistakes?

To some degree, because that’s sort of my process of working. I’m constantly building and then I carve everything down. Then I’ll paint it. Then I’ll carve it down again. It’s not that easy to fix something, but you can go over it and you can chop it off.

Do your candles bear any resemblance to the sculptures that you were making previously with clay?

I think what I maintained from the sculptures is this sense of humor that I think is the throughline with most of my work. That was also in the animation I was doing. It’s filled with references to books and movies and whatever, but it’s with a side dish of sarcasm or it’s accompanied by a little bit of humor.

In looking through your work, many of the objects or people you choose to personify through wax exist in a very specific pocket of the cultural imagination. I’m thinking about the dancing baby from Ally Mcbeal or Clippy from Office Assistant or the vibrating bed from The Sims. How do you know when something qualifies as Janie Korn candle material?

I know it’s a Janie Korn candle if it’s something that is slightly grotesque, slightly funny, definitely nostalgic. And I’m not making it to mock whatever that object is or whoever that person is.

Irony feels beside the point?

I mean there’s humor, but I don’t want it to ever be ill intentioned. I think when you have this bit of nostalgia that’s isolated and considered an art object then we’re allowing ourselves to elevate it and really consider what that thing is or who that person is. I’m trying to think of an example…

Like the bowls of cigarettes at Mary-Kate Olsen’s wedding?

Yes. [laughs] Like those bowls of cigarettes, or like hentai Mrs. Potts. It’s something that could be a silly frivolous thing but by turning it into a candle that you could light—it could be on the Shabbat table or elevated into a ceremony— we’re re-contextualizing it. So it is this frivolous thing, but maybe it’s more culturally significant than we’re classifying it to ourselves.

I’m glad you brought up the humor in your work, which translates to not only the objects you choose to depict but how you depict them, in these uncanny waxy forms. To what extent do you think about your work in relation to caricature, if at all?

That’s something that I think about a lot. I’m working on this bigger project right now that’s wonderful and kept me really busy but I think in the next couple months, when I get a break from it, something really important to me is considering how to grow and not making the body of work feel like it’s getting into the genre of caricature. I also do a lot of commission work, that’s the main source of my income, so I really would like to take a break somehow or find time to give my work more of an art treatment for myself.

Your work has been exhibited in a number of different art fairs and galleries. How do you think about that part of your practice in relation to all the commissions you do?

Whenever I’m feeling creatively blocked, which I think I’m sort of experiencing right now, I like to plan a show—the last one me and a perfumer put on together— or I will start to explore other mediums. So right now I’m taking a ceramics class. But I mean, I don’t know how one does it. I never want to turn down [commissions]. I’m a very “yes to everything” person.

Does that come from that feeling of “how long is this going to last?”

“How long is this going to last?” And also if this is supporting me, which is great, and I’m still doing what I love to do—at the end of the day, I’m making art, but it’s not my concept—how do I say no to that and sort of trust that more money will come when I do follow my creative instincts?

Do you think of yourself as a brand?

I think I probably started to think of myself as a brand two years ago, when things started picking up for me. And because I’m not doing as many commissions as I’m working on this big project I’ve only recently started to reconsider what that means. Of course I want to grow my business, but I don’t know if looking at myself like a brand is healthy for my identity.

Is it that there’s something at odds with that brand identity and the identity that you have as an artist?

Yeah. I think where I exist in the art world is like this weird limbo of art-object. It’s hard to grow creatively when you’re a brand.

How much does Instagram play into that? I’m thinking specifically about how it can function as both a self-imprisoning mechanism creatively but also, I’m assuming, how most people discover your work.

Instagram plays into it a lot. I think it’s a really big trap for me. Like only making work that performs well or also just feeling the sense of urgency to make anything, to perform for this audience that you feel like you have to keep constantly entertained and they have to like what you’re doing and when things don’t perform well, it’s not good for me. Right now I’m not really creating anything new and it breeds this sense of competition with other people, with your peers, and I hate that. I like to support the people I love and it’s just a nasty ecosystem because I find myself being so critical of myself and then so envious of other forms of success. But it’s also great that you meet people and whatever.

If someone at a party asks you what you do, what do you tell them?

Oh, it depends on who I am around. I say “visual artist” around some people and I’ll say “candle maker” around some people. I try to target it to who will make me feel less uncomfortable or who would understand it better.

So for moms is it “candle maker” and “visual artist” to other artists?

I think around fine artists, like a blue chip artist, I’m going to say “candle maker.” And then around my mom’s friends I’m going to say “visual artist.”

What does working from home look like for you?

My living room is converted into the studio, so I have two big bookshelves. I have my workbook. I have my boxes. I have a very big living room. It fits everything, thank god.

Do you boil wax in the living room too, or in the kitchen?

In the living room, on my desk. I have my double boiler and my pot and my melting station. So everything happens in the living room.

Wow.

It’s not a living room anymore. It’s a studio. I have had studios offsite before and I really like having my studio in my home because I can work at all hours. The only thing is the wax gets everywhere. So I have two sets of headphones. I’m talking to you on my business headphones, not my personal headphones. It gets everywhere. I sweep the floors probably three times a day. Eventually I’m going to go back to getting a regular studio, but it is nice to have everything at hand.

Is wax hard to clean?

I deep clean everything, but I try to keep it isolated to the living room. I sweep multiple times a day. I have laundry that I get laundered separately. It’s messy.

Does separating work from life ever feel like a struggle? Or does work feel like a natural extension of your life at this point?

Yeah, I work every single weekend. I work every day, but I don’t think that I even mind because of the pandemic. It’s like, what else am I going to do? So I like having it at hand. I just work all the time. Not in a bad way. I break it up by taking three walks a day and then when I’m not walking, I’m working. It sounds depressing. [laughs]

Are all your walks on the same route?

Yeah, I’ll pretty much only stay in the West Village and I won’t cross certain streets. I won’t cross busy intersections. So I’ll circle and circle until I’ve gotten my energy out. I feel like I treat myself like a dog. I get my morning walk, my afternoon walk, my evening walk. It works [laughs]. I haven’t gone fully unhinged yet. It keeps me scheduled. It’s my routine.

Physically, is there a limit to how much your body can work with a material like wax?

No, it’s more mental than physical, and that’s when I stop working each day, when I just can’t continue. I also start late sometimes, so if I’m reading in the morning maybe I’ll take a later walk and I’ll eat lunch and then start work at like noon and then I’ll work until 7:30 or 8:00 or 8:30 [at night].

Do you have any concerns about burn out?

Oh no yeah, I have burned out. I’m burnt out actually. [laughs] I’m existing. Yeah, I’m trying to break it up a little bit more. That’s why I signed up for a ceramics class.

In thinking back to the ceremonial aspects of candles, how do you feel about people actually lighting your work?

I have changed my stance on it. I put so much time and love into the candle, and to me it is an art object, but when it leaves my house now I think it’s sort of badass for somebody to burn that, to destroy my work, to respectfully demolish it. I think that that’s sort of neat because they also know what went into it and they also know how much they paid for it. They know it’s something of value. I would hope that bearing all that in mind it’s a meaningful experience for them. So if they’re doing it with intention, I find it very thrilling. I would love, and this is just a matter of time and money, but I would love to set up a huge space and have a burn. I think that would be really cool.

What would that space look like?

Oh god, I guess it would have to be equipped with smoke detectors [laughs]. I just envision an intimate room filled with candles and I don’t know thematically what they would look like or if they were more abstract, but just filled with my work and then just burn it. Maybe somebody’s singing, I don’t know. I’d have to work with the symbolism or the meaning behind it. I mean, there’s something cool about burning all this time that you’ve spent building.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Mitchell Kuga.