Rehearsals for Living (Abolitionist Papers Book 3)

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left to right: Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (Credit: Nadya Kwandibens) and Robyn Maynard (Credit: Stacy Lee Photography) When I read Emergent Strategy earlier this year, I remember sitting with the wisdom of Octavia Butler referenced by Adrienne Marie Brown throughout. I remember repeating to myself: "Everything you touch, you change. Everything you change changes you. The only everlasting truth is change. God is change." And although I knew that envisioning change was essential to radical abolitionist work, it was hard to find comfort in change as a constant. It might be the Virgo (or mental illness) in me, but I didn't really know how to find peace in continuous world-changing, world-ending, and world beginnings. Register through Eventbrite to receive a link to the video conference on the day of the event. This event will also be recorded and live captioning will be provided.*** In your letters, you both declare yourselves as nerds and Star Trek fans. And this is a serious question: What does Star Trek bring to your thinking in your practices?

Please join us for the Lansdowne Lecture with Rehearsals for Livingauthors Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. Maynard’s first letter was written a few months before the pandemic’s onset, and Simpson’s last reply came shortly after the 2020 U.S. election. Both are lyrical, compelling writers, and their early letters are infused with the energy that defined the early months of COVID-19. “People are revolting for wildly imaginative things: for worlds radically transformed, for the end of policing, the end of prisons, the end of ICE and the CBSA, of militarism and colonialism,” wrote Maynard in May 2020. Reading that line now is almost painful; by November 2020, Simpson wrote, “We aren’t banging pots and pans every afternoon in support of health care workers. No one is baking sourdough.” If you find yourself, in 2022, crushed by exhaustion and despair, you might ask yourself: is there any hope left to truly change things? Simpson similarly details how, in her Nishnaabeg culture, there is a deep reverence for water as life-giving — leaving the reader to imagine a world where water is respected more and First Nations communities in Canada, as well as poor communities in the Global South, don’t have to fight for safe drinking sources. It’s the first book i’ve ever read with a dialogue between two authors, written in the form of a letter. Not only does it feel like i’m learning something new from the two as they dissect very real racial, spiritual and ecological plights, but I get to learn more about their friendship and the lives/communities they’ve worked hard to uplift.

also, audiobook-wise, there's power in hearing the voices of these phenomenal activists read aloud their own writing, but because there are constraints (as opposed to them giving a speech at an event) that audiobook narrators know how to navigate, it really made me appreciate how much of a difference one's skill in their profession can provide. Robyn Maynard: The title has so many different meanings. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, who wrote the foreword for our book, describes abolition as "life in rehearsal." And that's really a way of thinking about the kind of world that we want to live in — about the kind of world that freedom could mean.

A revolutionary collaboration about the world we’re living in now, between two of our most important contemporary thinkers, writers and activists. Our team is working hard to bring you more independent, award-winning journalism. But Broadview is a nonprofit and these are tough times for magazines. Please consider supporting our work. There are a number of ways to do so:

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This book must be read for its future vocabularies, its political intimacies, its careful assemblage of the materials of our activisms, and its generous and fulsome thinking.”

Get Rehearsals for Livingfrom Haymarket: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1880-rehearsals-for-living Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson authors of Rehearsals for Living in conversation with Suzanne Morrissette and Alia Fortune Weston I've read a lot of books about activist issues. I think they're important, and teach me to question myself and our collective culture, and fight for change. These books are not easy, fun, or enjoyable to read. They're hard. Really hard. They present uncomfortable truths, force you to challenge ingrained assumptions, and present you with startling stories and statistics. This book falls in that category.

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The beautifully named Rehearsals for Living is a gift conjured by a pair of brilliant scholars during the dark days and months of the pandemic, lit by a powerful resistance movement, fueled and rendered magical by a profound and challenging dialogue that offers ways to collectively think and be and act in a chaotic world.” Across the pandemic-imposed distance, Leanne and Robyn begin a new iteration of the practices they’ve enacted in their labors and loves for years—this origin rises in letters, in which they take account of (and consequently bear the physical, emotional, and intellectual burdens of that accounting) the intimate and public violences committed by our governments upon our peoples, lands, waters and non-human relatives. In these letters, Leanne and Robyn constellate our brightest wounds and scars, but refuse to waste their energies of love and imagination on fixing or salvaging the Nation/State. Instead, they reorganize the trajectories and shapes of those constellations—retelling stories again and anew, of who we have been and might yet be again. ” Well, Leanne is somebody who I had already had a deep respect for as an intellectual, and somebody who was becoming a friend. I really needed to reach out in the sense of what it means to be coming up against so many crises, to somebody who was very much a part of freedom-making traditions and comes from a history of work and thought in Indigenous radicalism. My only wish was that they spoke more about practical ways to tear down capitalism and these structures. A lot of talk about how bad certain people, groups and structures are but not how to create real change. Advocating and taking naps is not enough. Real change happens within our political and legal systems. Having conversations is the first step, advocating is the second - but real change occurs in the third.

The exchange grew into their new book Rehearsals for Living — an urgent demand for a different way forward that offers new insights into where we go from here. Award winning author, poet, musican, educationalist and activist Leanne Betasamosake Simpson Link opens in a new window has been described as 'one of the most compelling indigenous voices of her generation'. Her work breaks open the intersections between politics, story and song—bringing audiences into a rich and layered world of sound, light, and sovereign creativity. Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson embody and express how practice makes different. This necessary book is a model—through the shared process of two brilliant thinkers it gifts us clarity to see rehearsals otherwise and elsewhere.” As a musician, rehearsal is what you spend most of your time in. You spend most of your time engaged in that repetition, in that space — a kind of safe space, because there isn't an audience and it isn't a performance. I like this idea of coming together and trying to make or build something with a group of people in real time, and then practicing it as a way of generating the knowledge that we all need to be engaged in these little making practices. As Ruth Wilson Gilmore says, "Practice makes different," which I really like a lot. The pace is slow, and I had to take out the book from the library twice to make it through the whole thing. It's a bit like reading a calculus text book. Not enjoyable, lots of struggles, important lessons, you want to put it down but then you'll fail the class.Betasamosake Simpson and Maynard spoke to Shelagh Rogers about the conversations that led to Rehearsals for Living. Rehearsals for Living is a finalist for the 2022 Governor General's Literary Award for nonfiction. The winner will be announced on Nov. 16, 2022. Leanne Betasamosake Simpson is a renowned Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar, writer and artist, who has been widely recognized as one of the most compelling Indigenous voices of her generation. Leanne is the author of seven books, including her 2021 novel Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies, which was named a best book of the year by the Globe and Mail, and was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award for fiction. I enjoyed both listening and reading this one. While listening, though I often stopped the audible to write my writing ideas - the writings of both Robin and Leanne are so beautiful that they inspired waves of ideas.