Newsletter #2: I know and that’s plenty
The One Paragraph Introduction
Thank you this week for all the texts and check-ins. The displays of solidarity help me to hold on. Who holds power over you often dictates the energy you need for day-to-day survival. This is a personal email to a colleague this week.
The honest truth is that the question (of how I'm doing) you've asked can only be answered over a warm beverage with spaces for silence. The "shock and awe" of people with power and a license to harm me was more effective than I care to admit.
If you'll indulge my sentimentality, in the spirit of the writing of opportunity of the American tradition of letter writing, I'll wax poetic to best honor your ask for a check-in through prose as an aspiring fantasy/sci-fi story teller that is fluent in bad prose. I'm simultaneously "doing" by moving forward in my personal and professional life while giving myself time to feel. The professional updates I'll save for future correspondences as that seems to be what a professional administrator would do. The best way to describe my "doing" today needs to rely on great art. I haven't quite come up with the appropriate language to make sense of everything right now. In these moments I tend to turn to better writers to help me make sense of the world. Science fiction authors like Ursula Le Guin made their life's work to imagine the future of living.
There is a local author that lives on Peak's Island, Catherynne Valente, that is nationally renowned in science fiction writing. She published a short novella called The Past is Red in 2021. The text was nominated for a Hugo Award. The novella follows a child that was born on a giant ball of garbage, similar to the Pacific Garbage Patch, that acts as land for some of the last human survivors of rising sea levels.
Kids, as always, don't much care for the adults they live with as they continue to be obsessed with going back to the way things were. The adults hold animosity towards the generation of "Garbage Towners" that have only known their trash community as they are able to experience and be grateful for their floating ball of garbage in a way the adults tied to the old world cannot.There are two quotes that float to the top of my mind from the book that I'm feeling, framing, and informing my actions of my personal identity through this as mantra:
“They don’t know I’m beloved. But I know and that’s plenty.”
“Everyone says they only hate me because I annihilated hope and butchered our future, but I know better, and anyway, it's a lie.
I'm adjusting and wrestling internally with the ideas of beloved community, living with dignity, and a realistic appraisal of what humanity is by working through my resonance with this quote:
I think kings happen because some people have an empty place inside them that wants to be full and it will do anything to feel full and the first thing that makes it feel the opposite of empty it will chase forever and ever. And the weirdest thing about this place is that obeying fills it up, but making someone else obey makes it slosh up and splash all over the floor.”
I would regret not sharing this final quote that brought me some joy this morning. This quote from the book gives a very distinct "Maine in January" mood:
“Mornings are not for company. They are for feeling cross and checking crab cages.”
Warmly,
SJR
The 3 Bulleted Personal Highlights
1: I applied and was accepted into the 2025 cohort of the Natural Helpers program through the Portland, Maine Economic Opportunities Office.
- I'm joining the University faculty writing accountability group. It is a kindness they would open this space to me as a staff member. I'm devoting the time to two separate projects.
- Write out evergreen pieces about community organizing experiences and strategy that I'm fortunate to have co-constructed with comrades from all over the country.
- Develop writings on exercise to imagine what a better world would look like through science fiction and fantasy stories.
- I hired in and will be supervising undergraduate students again for the first time in five years.
The 5 Bulleted Recommendations
- A Brutal Beginning: Orienting Ourselves Amid the Shock and Awe
- "We must be prepared to live and act defiantly, deriving no legitimacy from the illegitimate brutes who would govern us."
- The Trans Literature Preservation Project: A Practical Guide to Resisting Censorship
- Anyone can pick two and take action today.
- Your School Burned Down In The LA Fires. What Happens Now?
- Slay the Spire. Someone please intervene in my life and save me from my addition.
- Balatro. I mean it. I need an intervention. My sleep schedule has been wrecked.
