March 2020
Rural manifesto visioning sustainable and networked queer group living.
Scout and I wrote this piece trying to sketch the boundaries of a realistic queer commune. It was an iterative process of following and interogating desires, and from there we arrived at a kind of world building. It speaks to the quotidian, to rituals, to everything-as-skill, to communicating needs, to material necessities, to resource management, to the public/private tension, to the integration of internet networks. We wrote it as if we were really doing it, so we talk about how someone might join and how someone might have to be asked to leave. We gesture toward what a day might look like.
I learned a huge amount with this project and verbalized a lot of my sincere worldbuilding desires and intentions for the first time here. This thing changed my life trajectory, without a doubt. But, it's not even close to perfect. Since writing this, we've both left the palouse. Even before we left I think we both realized that the whole fantasy of starting a commune was just too settler-colonial. We tried addressing involvement with local indigenous groups but we didn't go far enough. We weren't critiquing our underlying assumptions about and entitlements to land nearly enough.
We also wrote this just a few weeks before COVID changed the world. We went into quarantine having talked so much about virtual networks and prepping, it was an especially weird headspace for us. It still is.
Very collaboratively written/visioned with Scout Haener for Johanna Gosse's graduate seminar on Black Mountain College.
Get in contact if you're interested in reading! Or maybe if you root around enough in this page's dirt you'll find it...