Volume 3, No. 31: Activist Lineages + Chocolate Olive Oil Raspberry Cake

Greetings, book and treat people! I’m back in Western Mass after a month of beautiful ocean and family time. I’m very happy to be home with my books and plants. But the most exciting thing to come home to is THE NEW LIBRARY!

I live in a tiny town (population 700) and while there is a one-room library that is open a few hours each week, the library I use regularly is in Greenfield, the nearest sizable town. The old library was small and dark. It was not a nice place to spend time in, and it was certainly not resourced enough to serve the town’s population. The new library has been under construction for the past few years. It’s right next door to the old library. I’ve watched it come into existence while picking up and dropping off books. Now it’s open, and it’s everything.

It’s big and airy and full of places to sit and work. There’s a balcony and a garden! There’s a huge children’s room, a teen room, a makerspace, reservable study rooms, and laptops to check out. There’s a circulating zine collection (which will soon include a few issues of the First Root Farm CSA News Zine)! It’s everything I dreamed of and more. I’m currently sitting at one of the many tables, under one of the big windows that looks out onto center of town. I will be working here all the time. I’ve only just begun to process what an incredible gift this is, how much it’s going to change the shape of my days. It’s going to provide so many things for so many people. I am definitely not done shouting about it.

Onward to books! I’ve been thinking a lot recently—for years, really—about activism and what it means to be an activist and whether it’s even a useful concept. Sometimes I think it creates unnecessary divides between what we do every day and events like protests and marches. Sometimes I think those divides make it harder to actually engage in activist work—which can happen in your house, your town’s library, your workplace, on the internet. It can happen anywhere there are people.

Only one of these books is about the kind of activism that word so often conjures up. It’s an incredible memoir. It’s also just one avenue. I’ve paired it with books that address activism and movement work less obviously because I’m interested in how they intersect. I’m interested in engaging with every kind of activist lineage. I’m curious about what I can learn from the diverse and sometimes contradictory histories (and presents) of people remaking the world—in ways big and small.

The Books

Being Heumann by Judith Heumann (Memoir, 2020)

I only knew a little bit about Judy Heumann before diving into this memoir, mainly that she was a leader in the Section 504 sit-in, which was pivotal in the eventual creation of the Americans with Disabilities Act. She goes into a lot of detail about the sit-in, and it’s truly incredible to read such a thorough account of a remarkable moment in disability history.

But she begins with her childhood in Brooklyn, recounting what her life was like before she encountered widespread, institutional ableism. She writes about playing with other kids in the neighborhood, how they all found ways to make whatever they were doing work for her and her wheelchair. This celebration of communally created access is a thread that runs through the entire book. Though much of her story is about the barriers she fought against, it’s also about the things she fought for—bodily autonomy, access to education, freedom to live independently, the right to respectful health care and personal assistance—and, maybe more importantly, why she fought. It’s a memoir about fighting for change, but it’s also about having fun.

The early chapters are often harrowing. Heumann was denied entry to school as a kid, continually told that she could not attend because she could not walk. When she was finally accepted into a school (after years of her mother fighting the system), it was to an under-resourced program for disabled kids that treated them like unteachable burdens rather than human beings. “Not only were we not required to participate in the American system of education; we were actually blocked from it and hidden away in the basement,” she writes.

After college (another struggle against seemingly-endless ablest barriers), Heumann applied for her teacher’s license and was denied, once again, on the grounds that she could not teach because she could not walk. She sued the New York City School System for discrimination, and won. The case garnered a lot of media attention, and Heumann went on to become a leader in the disability rights movement. She worked with the Centers for Independent Living, founded by Ed Roberts in Berkeley, CA, and later founded other disability rights organizations and worked for the federal government as a disability advocate.

I love the way Heumann writes about activism. She highlights the mess of it. The chapters on the Section 504 sit-in are vivid but not dramatic. She shares how hard it was to live in a government building for weeks, especially given the different access needs of everyone involved. She writes about moments of hopelessness, disagreements between leaders and participants, feeling burnt-out, angry, exhausted, and alone. She writes about the home she found in activist spaces and what she learned about solidarity and true community care during the sit-in. She’s honest and forthright about what it all took, about the mistakes that she and others made. Her story is filled with sweetness and riotous celebrations of success. It’s also filled with setbacks and failures. Her work changed the world; the world is still broken. This is so often how it goes.

This memoir taught me so much about disability history and illuminated so much about where we are now, 33 years after the signing of the ADA. Heumann’s life’s work is easily legible as activism: lawsuits, sit-ins, protests, the slow but steady shifting of public policy. These are all important tools, but they are not the only tools. One of the sweetest gifts of this memoir, for me, is that it’s also about how community-led movements can enrich and shape individual lives. Most of us are not full-time activists. Heumann shares so many lessons that are meaningful for our lives, too.

Judy Heumann died earlier this year. Her loss is such a huge blow to disability justice movements.

Falling Back in Love with Being Human by Kai Cheng Thom (Nonfiction/Poetry, 2023)

I love everything Kai Cheng Thom has written, and her newest book is no exception. It’s a collection of letters—they’re really prose poems—that are full of hope and longing, anger and forgiveness, exhaustion, all the messy intricacies of healing. She writes to trans women, to friends she’s lost, to her younger selves, to JK Rowling, to tricks and ex-lovers and old crushes, to Jesus. Some of the letters are addressed to specific people. More often, they’re addressed to groups of people: “the ones who hurt me”, “the confabulists”, “the exiled”, “the sidekicks”. There are prompts scattered between the letters, little invitations to the reader to slow down and reflect. Things like: “Learn some facts about one animal that inspires you. Spend a few minutes pretending to be that animal.” And: “Decide what’s more important to you: safety or freedom. Discuss with a friend.”

In addition to being a writer, artist, and activist, Thom is a community healer. This book feels like an offering of community healing. In the introduction, Thom writes about how lost and alone she felt in the early days of the pandemic:

I wrote as though poetry and prayer might mean the same thing, as if words might reconnect me with what I once considered my unshakable relationship with the human divine. I wrote to summon the language that might help me fall back in love with being human. I wrote my way through the question: What happens when we imagine loving the people—and the parts of ourselves—that we do not believe are worthy of love?

The way she tangles with this question is gentle, warm, and full of openings. Writing down the question, writing through it, feels like an act of transformation, and so this book feels alive. “This book is my act of prayer in a collapsing world,” Thom writes. She wants you to come in and sit down and stay a while. It’s a book that feels like it wants to hold its readers. I felt held, reading it, and not in a trite or rote way, but in the way I feel when I’m in the ocean: held within a place that expects and honors complexity, held in every mood. So much of what Thom says in these letters is about how hard it is to be alive, how much it hurts, how easy it is to harm and be harmed. When she writes forgiveness, when she writes spells of healing, when she opens wounds with her words—she doesn’t ignore any of the hurt and the hard, or wish it away. She invites it in. In her letter to JK Rowling, she says: “a monster is a part of ourselves that we don’t want to find in the mirror. a part of ourselves we try to cut out and split off and put inside other people so that they can carry it for us: our fear. our shame.”

Thom writes as the monster and to the monster. Each letter is a little prayer, a bit of sustenance, a reminder that we are all in process, that living is world-building, that vengeance is mixed up with tenderness. We do not owe each other victory or certainty. Maybe all we owe each other is each other.

dear monster, it’s time to choose your new shape. dear fearsome freak, dear sacred homo, dear magic maker and lawbreaker, what will you choose? to return to the village or dwell in the woods? there is no safety in the circle of village fires, but i can promise you no safety here either, in the shadows of the trees.

In one of my favorite letters, Thom writes to herself from the future (“to me, from a revolutionary trans femme of color living in the distant future”). This one hit me right in the heart. We are not on a linear journey to liberation. Time does not equate progress. We are just on a journey. We are just living in time.

i want you to know that we didn’t win, not exactly, but we took the stories you and your brethren left behind and wove them into a new way of being. we never stopped hurting, but we learned how to heal. we never stopped harming one another, but we learned how to grow through our wounding in honesty and forgiveness.

This is a book to read in an afternoon and then return to when you need it—when you need to be held, when you need a mirror or a portal, when you need a push or a rest. I didn’t love every letter equally, but I cherish the offering.

Your Driver is Waiting by Pirya Gunns (Fiction, 2023)

I loved this smart, funny, sad novel. It gets so many things just right. Damani is a queer Tamil rideshare driver. Her beloved father has just died and the grief is fresh. She’s taking care of her mother, who’s struggling in the wake of her husband’s death. The rideshare company she works for is exploitative and predatory. She wants stability, love, fun, freedom. She works and works. Then she falls for a terrible white woman, Jolene, and things get messy and then bad.

This isn’t a novel about activism, except that it is a novel about activism. It’s about precarity and grief, about survival choices, about the illusion of comfort, the dream of comfort, how easy it is to pretend all the warming signs away, because you’re so tired and so burnt out and so sick of it all. It’s about the violence of white women, which takes the form sometimes of tears and pleas, and sometimes of fetishization and fragility and fear that costs lives. It’s about the ways that communities use violence to fight back, and the cost, about what’s worth it and what isn’t. And it’s about friendship and food and dancing in the face of loss.

I’ve read a lot of reviews that mention the slow start, and I understand where they’re coming from. The first part of the novel is an aimless meander. Damani goes about her life. There are a lot of everyday, unremarkable moments. I loved just getting to be with Damani in her life. Gunns writes a world that is beautifully textured and full of details that hurt and sting. The slow, ordinary beginning of the book makes the last third even more impactful. The action picks up in a big way after Damani meets Jolene, and the ending is explosive. It’s high drama that doesn’t feel dramatic at all because it’s so realistic.

I find the discourse around sapphic books like this so odd. It seems like people want sapphic relationships that characters experience as romance to be healthy. I don’t get it. This is not a romance. It’s about desire and lust and everything that can drive someone into a relationship they know will hurt them. I also don’t understand the people who put this in the “unhinged woman/bad decision” genre. I understood every decision Damani made.

Is she the most self-aware, the most thoughtful, the most restrained? Of course she’s fucking not. She’s trying to survive. She’s taking care of her family. She’s grieving personal loss, dealing with everyday racism, stuck in a hellish political reality. She’s had it up to here. She wants something for herself. She wants to rest. Gunns asks so many interesting, complicated questions about what activism is and who gets to do it, about who gets recognized for doing it and who doesn’t, about all the ways that people fight to stay alive—and thrive—that go unnoticed.

I don’t know why this is being called a social satire, though. Nothing about it feels satirical. This is the world we live in.

The Bake

I still don’t know what I want to do with this section of the newsletter going forward. My newest idea is to check out cookbooks from the library, try one or two recipes from each, and write mini reviews. Maybe I’d focus on a different cookbook each month. This might bring me a lot of joy, or it might be too much. I’ve also been thinking about baking as a metaphor for transformation and growth, and using this section to expand on the themes of the newsletter—sharing reviews, interviews, and other media. This might bring me a lot of joy, or it might be too much. In the meantime, I baked another cake from Snacking Cakes, and it’s delicious.

Chocolate Olive Oil Raspberry Cake

This is a moist and fudgy chocolate cake made with cocoa powder. It’s delicious but not too sweet. The almond flour in the batter gives it a lovely, crumbly texture. I sprinkled chopped chocolate on the top along with the raspberries, which I highly recommend. Like many of the cakes in Snacking Cakes, it took me maybe 12 minutes to mix up. Low effort, high reward. No notes.

The Bowl & The Beat

The Bowl: My Favorite Summer Salad

I think I must have shared this recipe once already, because I love it and make it constantly, but who cares. I made it again last week and it’s perfect. Here’s your reminder to make it, too. It’s a celebration of everything I love about summer produce.

Cut some little potatoes in half or quarters. Fingerlings are nice. Spread them on a baking tray with olive oil and salt and pepper. Roast at 450 for 20 minutes or so, until they’re golden around the edges. Meanwhile, trim some green beans (or yellow or purple beans) and cut them in half. Give them the same olive oil treatment and roast for 10-12 minutes (or longer if you like them softer). Slice a pint of cherry tomatoes in half. Cut half a block or so of fresh mozzarella cheese into chunks. If you have some fresh basil or dill or mint or literally any other herb you love, chop it up. Mix everything together in a big bowl. To make a dressing: press a garlic clove into a jar. Add a few teaspoons of mustard, a tablespoon of red wine vinegar, a few tablespoons of olive oil, and some salt. Shake to emulsify. Taste and adjust seasonings. Toss with the veggies and mix well. Yum.

The Beat: Glassworks by Olivia Wolfgang-Smith, read by Katherine Littrell

I am so into this book. It’s very sad but very good. It follows four generations of one family from 1910 through 2015. Each section focuses on a different character. It’s extremely queer. I especially love the way Wolfgang-Smith writes about queer families and queer lineage: silence and inheritance and what gets passed down and what doesn’t. I will probably write more about it at some point.

The Bookshelf

Around the Internet

On Book Riot, I wrote about why comics are the ultimate reading slump-buster. I made a list of some award-winning “literary” fiction you might not have heard of. For Audiofile, I wrote about some recent audiobooks all about transformation. My review of Bellies by Nicola Dinan is up on BookPage. Spoiler: I adored it! In fact, I loved it so much that I’m giving away two copies on Instagram, because I want you to read it, too! You can enter the giveaway here.

Queer Your Year

News & Announcements

Thanks to everyone who participated in the July raffle, and congrats to Amanda, who won! This month’s prize is for everyone who already has enough books: an infinity scrarf and collection of cloth wipes and rounds from Mama Hen. Mama Hen is a queer-owned clothing business in Maine run by a friend of mine. She’s great, and her products are durable, fun, and beautiful. Check out all the details here!

As always, don’t forget about the super fun prize packs! Everyone who submits a game card gets one, and they ship internationally. And please come join the Queer Your Year discord if you haven’t already! If you’re stuck on a prompt (or just want to chat about queer books), it’s the place to be.

The Boost

I don’t have any new links for you today, just some extra beauty—though many of the farms and relief funds I mentioned two weeks ago, after the flooding in Western Mass and VT, are still accepting donations.

The extra beauty: Sometimes I remember that music exists! Last week a bookish internet friend recommended this album to me and I have been listening to it nonstop.

As always, a little bit of beauty to send you on your way: My fist morning home, I walked up to the top of the hill to watch the cloudy sunrise. I love the ocean the most, but I am so happy to be back among the hills and fields.

Catch you next week, bookish friends! Next week’s essay will most likely be about queer representation, inspired by We See Each Other by Tre’vell Anderson. If you want to read it, you can subscribe here.