This post is long, rambling and potentially triggering for survivors of sexual violence.

I want to write an uplifting, inspiring post about how amazing the AMC was this year. But that’s not the post I need to write right now, or at least that post needs to be interspersed with a very different post in which I take the bloody, tangled mess that I’ve been running away from, pushing away, trying to destroy and excavate it and tell the story/change the story into a new story by telling it, a story of how one moves from powerlessness to power, isolation to connection, fear to love. Maybe this post will be inspiring after all.

At the AMC I saw many beautiful and exciting examples of how individuals and groups who have been (and are being) abused and dominated by oppressive systems are surviving and resisting, turning their pain into song, using the power of their voices to demand change and to build alternate systems and communities.

–I don’t want to write this, not really. I don’t want to stop running away, because the pain seems immense, like it could swallow me whole/it pulls on me like destiny, like gravity But I’ve already ceded so much ground to it and I need to write this.

This year has been shitty for me. It’s been punctuated/punctured by new memories of the sexual abuse my father imposed on me, the violence he inflicted on my body/mind/soul. Starting last May, and then again a month or so later, and then again in January and then again at the end of June. I don’t know how I survived my childhood/how I can survive this. I don’t know how many times my father molested me. Again and again, he found me and tore me up inside, turning my precious soul into a rag which he used to wipe up his cum. He raped me and I didn’t know how to stop it. I didn’t know how to breath. There, in that space, there is only him and me and the pain and fear and rage–rage pushed away like a balloon, distorted into the wish for death, the floating away up to the ceiling, as if I were having a near death experience or being abducted by aliens. Once, when I was a kid, I was convinced that I was going to be abducted by aliens. I didn’t want to be, but I felt like it was my destiny and I had to be there, you know? I stayed at home while my parents went to church. Who knows what they thought about this? The aliens never came. It was my father, all along.

And one of the worst things is that my father’s violence took him away from me, as a nurturing, loving presence in my life. I mean, he probably wasn’t that nurturing anyway… but sometimes he was. And now I feel this terrible hunger, this open wound that I keep trying to fill with the wrong things, with sensitive codependent straight boys who will never be my lover, who will never be my father.

This is how I talk in the traumatime, in fragments and jumping around, weaving a new path, a safe way to walk by going into the pain and coming out, reconnecting through allowing my disassociated mind to move at its own pace, through the terrible howling void, as bleak as outer space only full of monsters like some bad science fiction horror move and out into vast realms of creativity and play and humor and back into the physical world and around again.

This is what I remembered, a few weeks ago:

I was fourteen years old, I was sitting on my bed and masturbating. My dad came into the room. “Do you want to see how a real man does it?” he said. I told him I didn’t want to. He threatened to kill me. I can never be safe. He touched my penis with his hand and masturbated me. He forced me to do the same to him. I wanted to kill him/I wanted to die. I didn’t want to ever be touched again. After I ejaculated, he hit me on the face, with a calculated amount of force so that I wouldn’t bruise. My father was a master of disguise, subtle as a chameleon until he exploded into a shrapnel of obscene colors. My father stitched a mask onto my face, into my soul. That is why I couldn’t breath–that and the bodily memory of his penis stuck in me throat like a sword, like a factory wedged into a wetland, clogging the lungs of the earth with smoke. After my father hit me, when I was fourteen, he said something like, “You made me do this, you wanted this, you dirty faggot.”

It’s a relief to write this, or perhaps I’m just disassociated. One of the most difficult things for me to deal with is my murderous rage at my father. I don’t just want to kill him–I want to rape him, to do the very same things he did to me, and then snap his bones, his neck, in two with my hands. I know that this is a completely understandable reaction, this desire for vengeance. But it’s terrifying to admit that part of me wants to rape anyone, even my father. Especially because I know this very desire for vengeance, displaced from the abuser onto weaker, safer targets, is part of what leads to sexual violence. Like many survivors, I feel, deep down in the guts of my slow-changing emotional body, that one can either be an abuser or a victim. I decided, long ago, that I would rather die than become an abuser like my father, and so I turned that terrible rage towards myself and it became a host of gremlins hacking away at the architecture of my interior, sabotaging my life in so many ways. In a way, in my suicidal ideation, I play both roles–I am inflicting violence upon myself, at least emotionally. Really, who doesn’t inflict some violence upon themselves in this country? But I know there is another path, a way apart from the path of the abuser or the path of the disempowered, never-going-to-heal victim. I no longer live in my father’s house. For me, that path involves telling my story, especially the scariest parts of it, the oh-my-god no one will love me if I say this parts of it. In telling this story, I am feeling my way in the darkness along this path, this third way, and moving back towards life, back towards hope, back towards the warmth and cacophony of human crowds. I am the phoenix and I am coming back to life.

Much love!

More about the AMC soon

Sometimes I speak with the voice of a part of me that I’ll refer to as the translator. This usually happens when the more emotional, spontaneous parts of me are dealing with too much raw pain to speak directly. The translator is trained but still stands close enough to the wild to hear it, to listen to the torn-up children and broken wolves, the bloodthirsty demons and howling ruined bodies and obsessive hermits, the bleeting wounds and ferocious enraged monsters within me. The translator surveys the ruined landscape, the rivers of blood and pus, the poisoned rain, the torture chamber beneath the quiet suburban house and the monstrous bloated woundworlds that belch up from it, bursting through the bubble of denial. The translator surveys and he analyzes and summarizes, distancing himself from himself necessarily, in order to still breath and speak and move, albeit in limited, constrained ways. The translator knows how to communicate the howls and cries and terrible anger and pain in ways that are socially appropriate, in ways that others have at least a chance of understanding.

This is what the translator says:

In January, I remembered that my father raped me when I was fifteen. I’ve been struggling a lot since then. I’ve been feeling an intense amount of self-blame and self-hatred. Self-blame is a common defensive mechanism for survivors. It’s been worse this time, because… well, lots of times when I tell friends that I feel like it was my fault, they’ll say, “There was nothing you could have done. You were only a child.” But is a fifteen year old a child? It seems like fifteen is in that liminal space between childhood and adulthood, when boys are becoming men and are expected to begin defending themselves. I know this is toxic patriarchal bullshit but I feel, deep down, like I failed to protect myself, like I failed to be a man. I feel ruined and broken and alone.

As bad as that is, blaming myself is a defense mechanism because it protects me from even worse terror–if there was nothing I could have done, then there’s nothing I could do now, if someone assaulted me again. Of course, this is an existential reality; in this world, there’s no guarantee of safety or security for anyone. But most people deal with that through some form of denial, some form of pretending that they are in fact safe. To preserve that protective bubble, I have to believe that I could have stopped it but failed.

I feel like I shouldn’t talk about this but there’s no way to tell the story of my life right now without talking about it: I’ve been thinking about suicide a lot. Part of this is an extension of that self-blame–I feel like I deserve to die for failing to stop the rape. But it’s also a kind of denial. There’s this quote I read for the first time in high school, from George Sand–”We cannot tear out a single page of our life, but we can throw the whole book in the fire.” I don’t know how to accept that this terrible thing happened, that I’m so deeply wounded, and there’s a deep, powerful part of me that feels like I have to do anything to stop it from happening. Of course, I can’t change the past, but that part of me wants to erase the past by “throwing the whole book into the fire”. It feels like it’s more important to erase the trauma than it is to be alive. Allowing the trauma to be real, to be something that happened to me, feels like dying itself, or something worse than dying.

Of course, this is very much about control. I hate hate hate that I’m not in control of so much. I feel like the basic situation of my life is not one that I consented to. I’m extremely angry at the world and at everyone in it for failing to stop the rape from occurring. So that’s part of it too–suicide as a way of saying, “Fuck you, I’m leaving.” But I also feel like it’s the only way I can retain control, the only way I can say, no, this is not okay. This can’t happen.

I know it might be scary to read all of this. The fact that I’m writing it actually probably means you should worry less because writing of this kind is inevitably a way of letting go, of allowing all of this tangled mess to change through exposure to light and air, a new story to begin to take shape in the clearing.

Okay, back to what I was saying. Part of me feels like I haven’t consented to this and so my ongoing existence itself is something unconsensual, a strange metaphysical form of rape. This is probably related to the way that unresolved trauma doesn’t sit contained within the typical narrative order of past, present and future; my daily life feels like rape because I’m re-experiencing the emotions of the earlier, repressed past, the day to day life in that house where my father raped me, where he held a knife to my throat and forced me to moan in pretend pleasure as he fucked me. Typing that is like dropping a block of cement into my stomach, acid splashing all over, I don’t know how to breath I don’t know how to breath I don’t know how to breath but I am still breathing and I hate that in and out like the ticking of some interminable, soulless, unstoppable clock, a juggernaut, a machine, my flesh is a machine my body is outside of me and I will not let you put me back together.

Well, that last little bit wasn’t the translator speaking, obviously, but there was still some translation, as in any writing or speaking. See how I disassociate by using postmodern literary theory? I don’t know the ending to this story yet. But I hope that reconstructing the fragments and speaking from this place of deep pain, even in a translated way, will help someone else understand their own story, their own pain, and find the courage to speak, in whatever voice they need.

I don’t want to be here again, staring into the gullet of familial history, waiting for another monstrous memory to emerge like vomit, hissing and acid, burning my skin, the skin of the world, away.

I don’t want to be here again, in that terrible closed off place where my father rapes me again and again.

I don’t want to be here again, this place of not-wanting, this place of refusal, this place where I split from myself and live in the gaps and cut-off corners, my body like a colonized land split into pieces, artificially divided zones mapped out by my father-rapist, my conqueror, in collaboration with the treacherous parts of me. But maybe that’s not right. In at least two ways. Whose responsibility is my pain, now? My disconnection, now? And as much as the divisions hurt and cost me, they were (and sometimes are) necessary for my survival. They could be barricades built by the resistance. The first duty of a revolutionary is to survive. Yes, and the second duty of a revolutionary is to remember, to reconnect that which has been severed. But survival must come first. And so the revolution-within-me may now be tearing down the barricades they once built in self-defense. But, Goddess, I wish it did not hurt so much.

I’ve fallen silent recently, mostly because a lot was stirred up by the workshop. Today I’ve been reading a lot of things that have been really inspiring–it’s so amazing to me how much the written word can do, how it can tear us and the world apart and then put us back together again. I want to share what I’ve read with you:

First, Hope in Common by David Graeber (which really needs to be read in full):

Consider here the term “communism.” Rarely has a term come to be so utterly reviled. The standard line, which we accept more or less unthinkingly, is that communism means state control of the economy, and this is an impossible utopian dream because history has shown it simply “doesn’t work.” Capitalism, however unpleasant, is thus the only remaining option. But in fact communism really just means any situation where people act according to the principle of “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs”—which is the way pretty much everyone always act if they are working together to get something done. If two people are fixing a pipe and one says “hand me the wrench,” the other doesn’t say, “and what do I get for it?”(That is, if they actually want it to be fixed.) This is true even if they happen to be employed by Bechtel or Citigroup. They apply principles of communism because it’s the only thing that really works. This is also the reason whole cities or countries revert to some form of rough-and-ready communism in the wake of natural disasters, or economic collapse (one might say, in those circumstances, markets and hierarchical chains of command are luxuries they can’t afford.) …It’s only when work becomes standardized and boring—as on production lines—that it becomes possible to impose more authoritarian, even fascistic forms of communism. But the fact is that even private companies are, internally, organized communistically.

Next, The Love of My Life by Cheryl Strayed. One of the most difficult things about dealing with my father’s abuse has been the terrible loss–I can’t be close to him and, really, I never could. Strayed’s essay about her overwhelming grief after the death of her mother struck a deep chord in me, and made me cry. A lot. Here’s the opening:

THE FIRST TIME I cheated on my husband, my mother had been dead for exactly one week. I was in a cafe in Minneapolis watching a man. He watched me back. He was slightly pudgy, with jet-black hair and skin so white it looked as if he’d powdered it. He stood and walked to my table and sat down without asking. He wanted to know if I had a cat. I folded my hands on the table, steadying myself; I was shaking, nervous at what I would do. I was raw, fragile, vicious with grief. I would do anything.

After reading this, I spent more time browsing through The Sun’s archives and came across this interview with Andrew Harvey, a gay man who’s been writing about spiritual and religious traditions for decades and now feels called to engage in sacred activism:

Harvey: …Sacred activism is the fusion of the mystic’s passion for God with the activist’s passion for justice, creating a third fire, which is the burning sacred heart that longs to help, preserve, and nurture every living thing.

Lawler: So mysticism alone is not enough? It must merge with activism?

Harvey: All mystical systems are addicted to transcending this reality. This addiction is part of the reason why the world is being destroyed. The monotheistic religions honor an off-planet God and would sacrifice this world and its attachments to the adoration of that God. But the God I met was both immanent and transcendent. This world is not an illusion, and the philosophies that say it is are half-baked half-truths. In an authentic mystical experience, the world does disappear and reveal itself as the dance of the divine consciousness. But then it reappears, and you see that everything you are looking at is God, and everything you’re touching is God. This vision completely shatters you.

We are so addicted, either to materialism or to transcending material reality, that we don’t see God right in front of us, in the beggar, the starving child, the brokenhearted woman; in our friend; in the cat; in the flea. We miss it, and in missing it, we allow the world to be destroyed.

I’ve been reading and really enjoying Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction. Here’s an interesting quote from it:

A political activist can take her answers from the current ideology of her movement, but an artist has got to dig those answers out of herself, and keep on digging until she knows she has got as close as she can possibly get to the truth.

What do you think?

I’ve been reading about trauma, in preparation for this workshop and, unsurprisingly, it’s been bringing up a lot of feelings and sensations. One of the worst is the feeling of tightness in my face, behind my eyes and in my sinuses, like there’s something clogged or clenched that won’t go away. This separation from myself. A lot of times I respond to my pain as if it were an enemy, and I close myself off in order to “save” myself from the pain, or at least to be free from experiencing it. But when I do that, the pain doesn’t really stop, it’s like trapped in the space created by closing part of me off and it rattles around and ends up rotting and spreading and the rest of me stagnates.

Some of what I was reading were the quotes on Planting Seeds, which are amazing and wise and full of insight and compassion. And I tried to respond to myself in that way, using the techniques for internal change and spiritual growth I’ve learned through Reclaiming and many other places. And two nights ago I did return, re-connect, go deeper than the pain to that place where I am always strong and whole and Divine. I’m learning that it’s time to let go of the pain and cycles and addictions and illusions. In a way, I hold onto the pain, to the wounds, because they’re familiar, because they’ve been around so long they’ve become part of my identity. But the pain, in a really deep sense, isn’t mine. It isn’t healthy for me to keep it, and it isn’t a burden I need to carry alone. The birds, the wind, the water running through my veins and out of me as urine, the earth that holds me up, the ancestors that watch and love me–all of these will help me to transform. To transform, I need to allow myself to manifest my strength in the world. It is time to do so.

At a class I recently attended, one of my Reclaiming friends spoke about her experiences witnessing people die in hospices (she’s given me permission to write about what she said). She said that the hospice workers told them not to ask questions of those who were actively dying, because it distracted them–dying was something that people had to work to do. She said it was like “unbirthing”, in the way that babies have to work to be born, to come through that difficult, squeezing squeezing squeezing channel into the world. She said it’s the same way when you’re unbirthing parts of yourself or patterns that no longer serve–you can’t just say, okay, I’m done with that, it’s a struggle, it’s a process.

“Unbirthing” is a concept that really resonates with me. And I think it has implications far beyond the personal. As a society, we need to do the work of unbirthing racism. We need to unbirth our denials and compliances, our addiction to control, our (self)-destructive assaults on the living web of the Earth. There is so much we need to unbirth, and we need to do it together, with the deepest and kindest parts of ourselves, parts of each other, parts of the world.

2 pm, Sunday, Nov. 23
Kalamazoo Peace Center
2101 Wilbur St
Kalamazoo, MI

First presented at the 2007 Allied Media Conference, this workshop will offer a supportive, confidential space in which participants can reflect on their own experiences of trauma and oppression and on the power of narratives in creating change. The workshop will have several different stages. First, the presenter will use a collage of quotes and excerpts from stories to simultaneously provide a framework of understanding and to illustrate the community of survivors, thinkers and storytellers who stand behind us and with us in this work. Trauma will be approached as a disruption of the narrative flow from past to present to future. From there, the role of discovering / creating / reconstructing narrative in healing and creating change will be explored. The connections between individual experiences of trauma and broader social forces/systemic structures will be emphasized.

Next, participants will have the opportunity to discuss their own experiences and perspectives. This conversation will be grounded in the perspective that, “This is your story and only you can tell it. No one else can tell you how you should tell it.” While this will be an open, free-ranging discussion, potential topics include difficulties in confronting trauma through creative writing, strategies for sharing and publicizing our works, the social changes needed to prevent further traumatic violence from happening, and the potential for organizing groups of survivors creating art and change together.

Finally, a writing exercise will give participants the chance to reflect on their own traumatic experiences, how these are connected to broader social forces, the changes they want to see, and how they might craft and share their own narratives for change. Time allowing, a discussion of this exercise will follow.

Participants will leave this workshop with a handout which includes a list of resources about trauma, recovery, and writing.

Image modified from one by Bruno Veloso

If the first duty of a revolutionary is to survive, the second may be to remember. To maintain awareness, to stay connected to vision–both vision of how dysfunctional the system is, how much unnecessary suffering and injustice the wheels cause in their daily grinding and vision of the amazing, everpresent potential for relationships based on consent and compassion, for wild and free blossomings of community and care.

Despite the insistent individualism of the dominant culture (within the United States) each of these–survival, remembrance and connection–requires support, requires interdependence. Requires radical community. If you’re currently active in radical community and movements you may not be aware of the need for these things, as they are so foundational. Able-bodied runners probably don’t often think about how their running is contigent on so many bodily factors, so much continuing to go right within their muscles and nerves and bones. I tend to think though that it’s sometimes hard for anyone to remember, to stay connected–the realities are so overwhelming sometimes, so painful and there is so much pressure from mainstream culture to deny, to pretend as if the system were sane and fair and not an out-of-control engine grinding up lives deemed as worthless because of the color of their skin or the people they love, grinding up lives on the way to bulldozing the planet. Yes, this is hard to remember (although for some the knowledge is inscribed on their bodies and their hearts and thus forgetting is in some sense impossible, but I’d say that denial is a strategy available to everyone–although sometimes it might mean shutting your eyes, sitting down and waiting to die). As Mike Ferner says in his great article It’s Our Turn Now: Resistance As If It Really Mattered:

It is not pleasant to conclude that, contrary to what you’ve learned all your life, the place you call home has become just another empire intent on enforcing its will on humanity. Our discomfort is trivial compared to the suffering of those living where our missiles land, but still there are days when the latest news from the colonies leaves you screaming with anguish and rage against the terror rained upon the innocent without end.

For me, I need community to remember and even to see the totality of these realities. I need support to deal with the intense emotions that arise when I confront these truths. For a while now, I have been denying these truths, closing my eyes, running away, waiting to die. I’ve been overwhelmed by dealing with the personal trauma of childhood sexual abuse, I’ve been coping by disconnecting, pushing the world away, inhibiting a smaller and smaller space where I could pretend that my father had never violated my body/where I could get as close as possible to the illusory comfort of living in a place where no one could touch me, a place without connection, without risk/where I could express my anger by withdrawing, by refusing to participate in a world where such things happen. A lot of things have been going on at the same time, shifts and transformations and it’s all rather complex. But going to the NASCO Institute helped me open my eyes widely again, helped me reconnect and remember.

I need to hear stories of people aware of the monstrous scale of injustice. I need to speak my own stories, my own truths, my own brokenhearted cries for justice. I need to hear stories of people actively doing what they can to resist all forms of domination, including capitalism. I need to live my own stories of resistance, to live the revolution. In many, many ways my life right now is not what I want. Transforming it is ultimately not only an individual project but a matter of collective liberation.

I’m writing this in something of a frenzy, so it might not be structured the best. But I think watching films and reading articles (like Mike Ferner’s) and poems and novels about resistance is one way of remembering. But I also need face-to-face conversations. At NASCO, I spoke with a friend who I haven’t talked to very many times, who’s been active in the movement against expanding I-69 across the country, to make it easier to exploit the workers and land of Mexico and further corporatist domination. I talked to him about some of this, how I was realizing again how crazy and fucked up the system is and he listened and we shared stories and I talked about being really active in the anti-war movement and then feeling so burnt out and discouraged when the war actually started and he told me that he realized how much he needed radical and progressive community, how that was one of the things that made him the happiest. He told me, towards the end of your conversation, “There’s lot of people who see what you see. You’re not alone.” At the root of it, that’s what we need to remember, to remain aware of: I am not alone. You are not alone. No is alone, ever. As we are interconnected, the chains and wounds inflicted by the system hurt all of us, and we can only truly dismantle them together. Not alone. Together.

This past weekend, I attended the NASCO (North American Students of Co-operation) Institute. It was a very inspiring experience–seeing old friends, gathering with lots of people sharing the ideals of social justice, participatory democracy and co-operative living. While there’s a wide range of political perspectives within the membership of NASCO, there was definitely space for radical and amazing ideas there. I feel inspired to do a lot more projects and writing, so expect to see a lot more blog posts (some related to NASCO, some not).

One of the workshops I went to was on Urban Permaculture, and the presenters spoke a lot about a really cool permaculture garden they had nurtured at a co-op I used to live in, Bower House in East Lansing. I’m really drawn to the philosophy of permaculture. But I tend to be inclined towards focusing on group dynamics and communication rather than on food production (if you’re familiar with the language of astrology, let me say that I have plenty planets in air in my chart but only one in earth). And I’m really excited about the possibility of transferring permacultural approaches to social dynamics.

Let me explain a little bit about what I mean. One of the principles of permaculture is that in any system, it’s best for each piece of that system to fill multiple roles. So, you might plant a fruit tree which attracts pollinators and also gives you and your housemates yummy, healthy food and also is a companion plant which has a synergistic, mutually beneficial relationship with other nearby plants. Another principle is that you want each need to be met by multiple pieces of your system. You don’t want to only rely on one food source, because if you’re only growing wheat (and only one variety of wheat) and some voracious pest that targets that wheat comes along, you might end up starving.

The thing that I think is fascinating is how well you can translate this to other non-food-production aspects of people’s lifestyles. So, the social pressure and expectation that adults should get their emotional and sexual and household-making needs met by only one person, a monogamous romantic partner, is very similar to monoculture in farming! Whether or not polyamory works for you, I think it’s important for people to get their emotional needs met by more than one person, to be part of networks of community and caring rather than an isolated, co-dependent pair. Many people also relate to their finances in a monocultural way–they only have one source of income (which is often in a hierarchical setting) so they’re dependent on that, and are less able to challenge or resist their bosses because of this. (Of course, many of those people have their options limited by economic inequality and capitalist structures–access to health care being made contigent on employment is a huge problem.) A more permacultural approach would be to cultivate multiple streams of income (and also to find alternative methods for meeting your needs–growing your own food rather than buying grown food, or dumpster-diving)–but of course privilege and access are huge, huge issues here! People with race and class privilege, as well as the closely related category of people with cultural capital and education, have a much easier path towards doing the kind of entrepreneurial and freelance work that allows for multiple income streams.

One of the most exciting things is the way this can become synergistic. So, if you’re working a home-based job, you can spend downtime taking care of your garden or making your own food. If you need less money and can work less, you have more time to do more projects and connect with your neighbors and friends and help them do similar things. And this can happen on many scales. A co-operative house can be like that fruit tree in the permacultural garden, fulfilling multiple needs at once–giving its residents a place to stay, giving the local community space for meetings and consciousness raising groups and skill shares, even providing a space for a permacultural garden in the backyard! And that co-op house can be part of a network of houses and friends and community centers, sharing resources and time and love and knowledge, building the revolution moment by moment, conversation by conversation, meal by meal.

This post is only intended to be a brief sketch of some of these ideas (an opening), and a call to like-minded people to share their ideas and resources they know about, books or articles or podcasts which I (and other interested people reading this!) can use to learn more. So, please, tell me what you think, what you know, what dreams light your heart on fire!

Check these out:

1. enTRANS’d

Submissions wanted for enTRANS’d, a new zine focused on transsexual issues with a feminist angle. Articles, critiques, reviews and short writings (short stories, personal anecdotes and poetry all accepted). International perspectives and experiences are not just wanted, but needed, so don’t hesitate to submit, no matter where you are.

enTRANS’d is a proposal for an anthology zine on trans writing with a feminist bent. The aim is simple: to add to the increasing visibility of transsexuality in the feminist and queer communities, feminist and queer activism, and the world at large. It is my belief, as a trans person and intersectional anarchafeminist, that it is in our best interests to make our voices heard directly.

Read the rest here.

2. Pink and Black Attack

Pink and Black Attack, a new queer anarchist zine, is looking for submissions! The project is based out of Olympia, WA and the first issued is planned to come out by January. This is a zine dedicated to anti-capitalist, anti-state, anti-assimilationist queer news, theory, and action. We’re looking for essays, news, reportbacks, poetry, comics…be creative! We’d like to have submissions in by December 15th. Earlier is always better, though. E-mail submissions to pinkandblackattack@riseup.net!

No link ’cause that’s the full text and it’s been posted on various websites.

3. Stop the Silence: Talk Around the Clock Marathon

Stop the Silence: Stop Child Sexual Abuse, Inc. (Stop the Silence, www.stopcsa.org), in collaboration with Art for Humanity (South Africa) and The Global Lesson Foundation (Canada) and other collaborating organizations (Survivors Healing Center, Spiritual Alliance to Stop Intimate Violence) request your input for the first annual “Stop the Silence: Talk Around the Clock” marathon to stop the silence about child sexual abuse (CSA). On November 19, 2008 we will start talking and presenting art and information through the Web from people around the world who want to add their work and thoughts to this movement, and we will not stop for twenty-four hours. We can present your work (e.g., we can air a clip of your poetry) or you can present it live through a special Web program that will allow others throughout the world to see and/or hear you.

We need your voice, art, and information.

* We need your voice if you are a survivor, a bystander, and/or a supporter of the prevention of child sexual abuse.
* We need your voice to help celebrate the courageous efforts of past victims, survivors and those who have supported them.
* We need your voice if you are an individual, organization or celebrity who believes that no child, regardless of geography, culture or heritage or economic status, should have to endure any form of sexual abuse.

For more info, go here.