10/21/20

Two weeks until the election! So many folks have been writing letters, postcards, and texts. So many have been making phone calls! It is heartening. Keep on going!

And a note about our daily dose feminist climate writers event tonight!

This was the ad for tonight’s event!

The Daily Dose: Feminist Voices for The Green New Deal
Join us LIVE tonight at our LitQuake panel, 7 pm Pacific Time:
https://litquake2020festival.sched.com/event/dlRL/the-daily-dose-feminist-writers-respond-to-the-climate-emergency

      We just finished our panel, “The Daily Dose: Feminist Voices for The Green New Deal” at the wonderful annual Litquake. Aya de Leon, a spoken word artist and a fiction writer, helped curate this year’s Litquake. She also helped organize this panel. We had five of us: Aya de Leon, Elizabeth Stark, myself (Vijaya Nagarajan), Mary DeMockes, and Susan DeFreitas. It will be available soon streaming. We will post it as soon as we get the link.

       First, it was so inspiring to be together, even through the digital veil of zoom. I felt each of the panel member’s innate generosity of spirit and their density of commitment, each one coming in with unique gifts, capabilities and desires. We all realized how much we missed seeing everyone, and without the pandemic, we would have much more likely continued our monthly meetings in person.

     We began with the story of how the daily dose began for each one of us! Aya spoke about her writing a post in a women writers on-line board––– about wanting to connect with climate writers. Elizabeth had responded, and this part of the story I had not even known or remembered. This was the part of the story that I heard for the first time today! I was the third person to be brought in. Each of us told the founding of this blog from our own point of view. A good friend once said, we all remember history the moment we enter it and do not often know what happened prior to our arrival. That is what I felt like. That I heard the founding of our blog in a different way.
     It was Aya, at our second or third monthly meeting, who had suggested doing a blog, because of her experience with the Debutante Ball. Elizabeth quickly catalyzed creating the on-line structure for it with Angie Powers, her wife and partner. I initially had said no, I had too much on my plate and there was no way I could commit to writing a piece once a month. I was a very slow writer and I had never done this kind of explicit political/environmental writing with a quick turnaround. I just did not think I could do it. I had done scholarly writing that was more literary but not many writerly pieces.
       But I got so excited seeing how they were talking about it. This would be a concrete way to put in energy towards what all of us desired, which was to bring the Green New Deal more into the explicit and implicit center of our political conversation and to support all the young people who had started The Sunrise Movement, a very important intervention.  I am so happy I chose to join in. What an adventure it has been this past year! We have committed to each other to continue until the election day, two weeks away; then we will regroup and see what makes sense.
      So many beautiful ideas swirled around this evening. We each spoke both on our own stories joining the Daily Dose and about our own writing. We read from our poetry and essays.
     Aya spoke about her wanting to seize the means of literary production, of being tired of begging to get our climate pieces published. I loved hearing that again, reminding me of why and how we are doing this.
       Elizabeth read from a piece she had written for a blog post on Book Writing World about the low point in a story and how there is a comparable low point in our own lived story. Here is the link to that piece: https://mailchi.mp/515a795d2e0c/84orv5jrn3-3556146?e=6e07375bd6. She ends with “Feel familiar? If we are some kind of collective protagonist, surely this is our all is lost moment, our dark night of the soul, the moment when everything is stripped from us except the chance to get it right.” I loved that, the hopefulness of realizing we are still in the middle of our collective world-wide story. We don’t know how this all ends. We all still have power to write/enact a different ending. I loved that. 
     Susan, a poet, a fiction writer, and book editor, read three of her poems, talking about the power of storytelling. A part of the reason we are in the mess we are in right now is the stories that have been told to us in the past are those that we are living out now. So we actually need fresh stories desperately right now, to change the outcome of the future. I loved that. 
     Mary shared a mini-talk on the comparable natures of the problems of Coronavirus and the Climate. I loved being able to see more clearly how these two momentous challenges have so much in common and the idea of this is a practice for how to solve the climate problem brought me so much hope. 
        I spoke about the commons and climate and read a piece I had written about filling up water for our seven daily buckets fifty years ago when I was a nine year old child growing up in India.
          Each one of us also talked about the idea of hope, each of us in our own way.
         I loved hearing each one of us––feminist climate writers––think out loud and read. A real diversity of voices! Fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and much more!
A joy!