Image: Women's Pavilion, Paul Klee 1921 - public domain
What follows isn’t an essay or an article, but rather a sort of hybrid of a list, a sketch, some random and erratic scribblings and notes — not very sorted. Just flowing as it flows.
I’m wanting to publish more interviews and dialogues / conversation here in The R-Word in the near future. When I’m one of the participants, which will not always be the case, I will generally do the interviews and conversations (slowly) by email. This way I don’t need to work out a means of recording audio and transcribing. And in this way we can think about what we’re saying before responding and take our sweet time. Nothing hurried… it can take days, a week, or weeks to complete an interview or conversation this way. No deadlines.
R-Word contributor Adam Wilson has agreed to do such an interview with me, with myself as the interviewer. If all goes as expected, I will probably invite Adam to engage in a conversation after the interview has been published. Conversations are different from interviews, as interviews are focused on the interviewee. And I have so many questions for Adam!
I will very gratefully and happily look at interviews and conversations as submissions to The R-Word! No need to pitch the idea with me. Just go for it, and I’ll decide if it is a good fit. But if you want reassurance, you can pitch your idea to me. Sorry, I cannot pay for contributions. Essays and articles are also welcome!
Over the months to come, I hope to take a deep dive into exploring certain topics and themes which have really grabbed my interest. And I’ll do some writing — and interviews and conversations — on these topics and themes. But I also want your submissions on these topics and themes.
So what are these topics and themes? I’d like us to dive deeper into exploring what it means to have a non-violent, non-insurrectionary eco-cultural revolution. It’s time to really dig in and dialogue with one another on this topic … and to share the results here in The R-Word, in hopes of sparking that conversation in the wider world beyond these digital pages.
… and more on topics and themes: I’d like to focus a lot on the question of what the future (largely post-carbon, very low energy) economy must look like, and how to begin to create the conditions for it as far before economic and social collapse as possible — as in right now. Anyone who has been reading my articles and essays knows I believe the near term future economy will require a rather rapid and dramatic adoption of micro-agrarian, intensely local self-provisioning of our most basic necessities, such as food and shelter. Since urban environments are so densely populated, there just isn’t enough land for such community self-provisioning, so many people will have to leave cities and relocate to rural areas. And I think this means basically adopting agrarian village modes of economy. Money will be scarce, so community-based self-provisioning makes sense to me as a means of access to livelihood. This just happens to be how people generally lived before capitalist industrial consumerism, and it will be the likely form of our future economies.
This means those without land will be needing land, and many or most of these cannot afford to purchase land within the market / real estate system. So we need to talk about how we can enact a gentle, kind, loving, non-violent revolution in land access. Let’s explore how that might work, please.
The R-Word is ready to shift from having just one editor to having multiple editors — arranged without hierarchy. If you’d like to contribute in this way just let me know — jrivermartin (at) gmail (dot) com.
If you are one of our contributors who hasn’t yet contributed an original piece (as contrasted with having your article or essay republished here), please consider contributing a previously unpublished article, essay, poem, or whatever. Photo essays would be cool, too! We may also be able to publish audio and video.
Let’s make The R-Word a fully collaborative space which belongs to all of us together! What would you like to see in these pages? Let’s do it. Let’s get creative and spark our collective imagination/s.
Meanwhile, I'm jumping into this conversation in the middle. The Anarchist and the Animist #5b: The Hope Thieves. It's very engaging!
https://peasantryschool.substack.com/p/the-anarchist-and-the-animist-5b?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2