Rehearsals for Living (Abolitionist Papers Book 3)

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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. 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.” 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. Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson authors of Rehearsals for Living in conversation with Suzanne Morrissette and Alia Fortune Weston A revolutionary collaboration about the world we're living in now, between two of our most important contemporary thinkers, writers and activists.

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. 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. 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.Robyn Maynard: This is a dangerous question to ask me! [laughs] You have no idea how much Star Trek content didn't make it into the book based on the amount that I actually talk and think about Star Trek in my everyday life. For me, in the Star Trek world, The Next Generation universe is this world free from want — this world in which the divisions of race and gender are now seen as foolish; in which capitalism and the senseless destruction of the planet is seen as foolish; that people have what they need. They don't have a cash economy. It's not based on extreme wealth and poverty. Betasamosake Simpson is a Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar, activist, musician, artist, author and member of Alderville First Nation. Her work often centres on the experiences of Indigenous Canadians. Her books include Islands of Decolonial Love, This Accident of Being Lost, As We Have Always Doneand Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies. Why Robyn Maynard & Leanne Betasamosake Simpson wrote Rehearsals for Living

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson: For me, I think it's the most important part, because I think we can use that critique to inform what we do. Right now, I'm in the territory of Yellowknife and with a group of 16 Indigenous women living on the land. In a sense, it's a little microcosm and a way of coming together on the land to create a different world. 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?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? Ruth Wilson Gilmore is Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences and Director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics at CUNY Graduate Center. A co-founder of California Prison Moratorium Project and Critical Resistance, she is author of the prize-winning book Golden Gulag: Prison, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. Gilmore is the recipient of the Cultural Freedom Prize from the Lannan Foundation.

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. ” In Rehearsals For Living, Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson showed me how to find reassurance in world-changing. They showed me how world-changing is happening all around us, all the time. It's an incredible book, probably the best I've read all year, and I'd recommend anyone interested reads it. (I'll lend you my copy if that's what it takes.) As an invocation for collective resistance, the book succeeds, but it’s also powerful when the authors share the small details of their lives – Simpson’s meditative nighttime runs with her daughter, Maynard effortfully tolerating the spider on her stairs – that ground their ethics in the reality of daily living. At times, their dialogue wades so deeply into critical theory that the epistolary structure is obscured. But when Maynard writes, “I miss you, Leanne,” in the midst of one didactic letter, it is a heart-rending jolt of intimacy. The epistolary form allows a vulnerability and closeness that wouldn’t have been possible in any other genre. The book, however, still manages to be immensely scholarly, journalistic, historical and theoretical all at once. Both writers use the intimacy of their domestic lives to reflect on the larger political and social phenomena around them. Rehearsals for Living by Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. Published by Knopf Canada. What a pleasure and honor it is to read two such probing and principled minds in conversation and collaboration. Maynard and Simpson dare to confront the most wrenching challenges of our omnicidal times, while finding joy and love along the way. A beacon of a book."

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Working for two decades as an independent scholar using Nishnaabeg intellectual practices, Leanne has lectured and taught extensively at universities across Canada and the United States and has over twenty years experience with Indigenous land based education. She holds a PhD from the University of Manitoba and is member of Alderville First Nation. And to me, that also just means, "What kind of actions do we need to take every single day?" So if every day I wake up and rehearse the kind of person I want to be, this is who I become. So in the everyday acts and work toward freedom, we are building more liberatory worlds all the time — and that's something that I think we are really focusing on. In the everyday acts and work toward freedom, we are building more liberatory worlds all the time. - Robyn Maynard A revolutionary collaboration about the world we’re living in now, between two of our most important contemporary thinkers, writers and activists. 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. These aren’t just two women talking about the world’s problems, but share real stories that braid the political with the human centric approach to liberation.