Transcript: adrienne maree brown on Writing Our Future /278

Ayana Young Hello, and welcome to For the Wild Podcast, I'm Ayana Young. Today I'm speaking with adrienne maree brown.

adrienne maree brown is the writer-in-residence at the Emergent Strategy Ideation Institute, and author of Grievers (the first novella in a trilogy on the Black Dawn imprint), Holding Change: The Way of Emergent Strategy Facilitation and Mediation, We Will Not Cancel Us and Other Dreams of Transformative Justice, Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds and the co-editor of Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction from Social Justice Movements and How to Get Stupid White Men Out of Office. She is the co-host of the How to Survive the End of the World, Octavia’s Parables, and Emergent Strategy podcasts. adrienne is rooted in Detroit.

Well, adrienne, thank you so much for joining us here again. For the Wild community has been so lucky to have learned from you over the years. And I'm just excited to be back here with you and connecting.

adrienne maree brown If you can imagine ourselves as a community, as opposed to a bunch of individuals trying to survive these conditions, it's like actually, we're a community trying together to survive these conditions. And even that kind of a small shift of identity can transform what's possible. So new stories lead to new actions, new possibilities.

Ayana Young adrienne maree brown is the writer-in-residence at the Emergent Strategy Ideation Institute, and author of Grievers (the first novella in a trilogy on the Black Dawn imprint), Holding Change: The Way of Emergent Strategy Facilitation and Mediation, We Will Not Cancel Us and Other Dreams of Transformative Justice, Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds and the co-editor of Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction from Social Justice Movements and How to Get Stupid White Men Out of Office. She is the co-host of the How to Survive the End of the World, Octavia’s Parables, and Emergent Strategy podcasts. adrienne is rooted in Detroit.

adrienne maree brown Thanks for having me on again.

Ayana Young I wanted to start with an introduction to a more recent project you’ve been working on: Imagine 2200: Fix’s climate-fiction contest, which recognizes stories that envision the next 180 years of equitable climate progress, imagining intersectional worlds of abundance, adaptation, reform, and hope. I’m wondering if you could give us some insight into the project and what drew you to it?

adrienne maree brown Yeah, for a long time, I've been really into the work of visionary fiction and how we write stories. Walidah Imarisha and I did Octavia’s Brood two years ago and the bent of it was how do we tell stories that sort of activate our imagination of the future in ways that feel compelling, right, like ways that are like, “Oh, I would like to go there to be a part of that.” So when I got this invitation from Grist to be one of the judges for this incredible climate fiction contest I jumped at the chance and I got to work with a lot of other people. Incredible judges Morgan Jerkins, Sheree Renée Thomas, Kiese Laymon, to sort of sit and read through really groundbreaking work. And the idea is if we can envision the world, the world ahead of us together, we can start to share from these dreams that we're having, that we might actually be able to increase our chances of living on a planet that feels viable to more and more of us.

And I really loved getting to read the stories. A ton of stories came in, I think something like 1000, 1100 people or something submitted stories. And it got narrowed down for us, we read like the top 20 stories or something. But just knowing that many people are holding pieces of the future, gave me a sense of hope and possibility.

Ayana Young That sounds like a really beautiful way to spend time is to go into other folks’ imaginations. And gosh, this is something that I've thought about so much with our past conversations, that's come up again and again in my organizing work, and just my own personal work around hope, and seeing through the overwhelm and anxiety of this time, just this idea that, and I don't want to misquote you, but this idea of the imagination battle and how we're living in other people's imaginations that we didn’t even consent to.

adrienne maree brown Yeah, that actually, that idea was to a friend of mine named Terry Marshall, who works with Intelligent Mischief, and I remember sitting in a room in Boston, they were doing a panel training there, and I remember Terry talking about this, like that we're in this imagination battle. And the idea was so clear to me, right? I was just like, “I understand exactly what you mean,” someone envisioned and imagined the world being the way it is now in a way that we can take for granted. Right? That it can just be like, “Oh, white supremacy has always been here and that's just how white people are,” you know?

And it's like, actually no. Someone constructed that. Someone looked at the world and the way resources move through the world and thought it would be really strategic if we declared white people as some kind of superior species: we will be able to take in and move, and trade, and do everything just for ourselves, you know? So I'm like, for a lot of us, especially those of us who are not white, we look at that and it's like, how? In what realm, in what world is there a superiority here? There's not, it's imagined. And if that can be imagined anything can be imagined. Right? And so then we start to say, well, what would it look like to actually imagine a world that meets the needs of its people, and a world in which people don't have to be born into a certain race or class background in order to have access to health care, or to have access to a healthy environment, in order to have access to education and all those basic human needs.

So much of the science-fictional behavior that Walida and I have always kind of pushed people towards it's not about being the most bombastic, you know? We're talking about basic human needs here and what would it look like to get to a place where that felt like the primary focal point and the primary reason for the decisions that we've made as a collective species.

Ayana Young Yeah, this thread is so fascinating to me because I've been doing a lot of organizing work in southeast Alaska. One particular mine for the last nine months - well, it's a series of mines, but it's one corporation - and they are planning on drilling a mile-long tunnel into a glacier. And just like, well, okay, we're talking about strange, dystopian sci-fi imagination: this is that. How can some folks think that drilling into a glacier in climate chaos is possible but those of us who are struggling to even imagine that a community garden is possible? And just to see the discrepancy in that, that those who think they're in power, and who are controlling a lot of the reigns of how the resources are extracted from this earth, can have these wild imaginations to do just things that seem completely impossible yet somehow they get the investors to back them and their imaginations can be manifested. So I guess I just want to hear you speak to those of us who are in our communities and are feeling maybe a little downtrodden, that the things that we want to imagine like you're saying, health care, and food, and safety, that those things sometimes can feel unreachable?

adrienne maree brown Yeah, I think this has been a really tender time. I know that it has felt that way for me, wanting the species to be so much more self-aware and self-reflective, and to have a sense of like, “Oh, we're the stewards, we're responsible for some of what's happening on this planet? And how do we be responsible in a good way?” How do we take that responsibility in a way so future generations can look back and say “wow, y'all really turned something around here.”

I think that part of the tenderness of this time is recognizing that a lot of the people who can make decisions about the direction that things are going in are not driven by the same values and not driven by the same beliefs, right? And maybe even not driven by the same sense of urgency. When I hear someone's going to drill, I'm like, we're past that point; we're past being able to act as if we don't understand the impact of such drilling. We're in a new phase of our planetary self-awareness. And when will our decisions start to reflect that? I'm hungry for that moment when our decisions start to really reflect that we understand we have an impact on this planet.

I've been listening to this book, A Brief History of Earth, I don't know if you've heard of it, (I go through my little audiobook phases), part of it is like, “how do we make people understand just how magnificent and unique and special and spectacular our planet is.” And some of us are really on that vibe. It’s just like, maybe if you understood just how miraculous and unique it is that would make people feel more hopeful. But it doesn't. And so for me, I know that the thing that happens when I realize that as I feel this overwhelming despair, and I've been sitting with that despair more often recently. I'm just like, “Okay, what is this despair here to teach me? How can I lean into this feeling?”

And what I realize is that when I'm feeling that despair, that hopelessness, in some ways, I'm really feeling the most connected feeling I can have on the planet right now. Right? But it's like, I'm not just feeling selfish like “I just want to live for as long as I can.” There's a real interconnected energy that I feel flowing through me that's like, “I can feel myself connected to the generations to come. And I can feel their disappointment, and I can feel their innovations.” And that gives me a sense of peace, a sense of hopefulness, that we're not the first people to try to turn this thing around, we will be the last to try to turn this thing around. There's not a quick solution, actually. There are many, many solutions and many, many experiments.

And, as a US citizen, the way that things are playing out here is not the only way the species are figuring out answering these questions. So all of that gives me some hope. And then there's a book that came out this year from Dean Spade called Mutual Aid, and the way that even during this immense, overwhelming crisis, much of which feels spurred on by our inability to make decisions with a collective orientation, even during this time there have been people learning to practice mutual aid, and that maybe more than any other thing gives me a lot of hope. That it's like, okay, people could be spending their time on a lot of different things and the thing that a good number of people are actually putting their energy into is, “how do I think collectively? How do I give from what I have? How do I be in a relationship with other people that's not rooted in scarcity?”

I'm practicing this very personally right now: how in my community, how do my partner and I, my siblings and I, my family and I, my friends and I, how do we think of our resources collectively? How do we make sure that everyone has enough time, money, childcare, healthcare? How do we make sure we have everything we need, and being in that activity brings my attention to the realm at which I can touch and feel the people I'm caring for. And I find that to be really helpful. When I get overwhelmed with despair, it's usually because I have my attention on everything in the entire world. And I can't take action on every single thing in the entire world. In fact, I can get very inactive, I can get very overwhelmed, and then nothing happens. So I've been in a practice of like, all this is true. We are in a climate catastrophe. All of this is unfolding. But there's also a lot of good unfolding, and what can I bring my attention to? What can I grow with my attention? And what can I grow with my practice? So that's, that's kind of the vibe I'm in right now.

Ayana Young Oh, that was medicinal to hear. So many pieces of that, the mutual aid, but also just this, when you're speaking to, you know, we're not the first we're not the last, and people all over the world are working through it. And we have so little knowledge of the what is it almost 7 or 8 billion, I forgot, 7 billion people. And I think that there's a lot of release in that, that I'm hearing at least for myself because it's like letting go of the pressure of trying to figure it all out because we can't. And I do think that when we get too big, and in that anxiety to fix or save the world, we actually can't really focus on what we have real possibility with, which is those around us those we are connected to and maybe that's even part of the design of this time of the sinister ones just trying to jumble us a bit so that we feel too overwhelmed. Like I think about that even with the media news, it’s just too much.

adrienne maree brown I think about this all the time. I think about this all the time. I'm frequently getting off of social media, taking breaks from it, dosing myself with that addictive substance, and recognizing my attention is really the most valuable thing that I have that I can offer to the world and capitalism really benefits from our distraction. All the forces that keep us kind of asleep and consuming really benefit from us staying asleep. But there's always something happening. There are always people trying, there's always people envisioning the world anew.

This is part of why the fiction contest for me was really interesting. Because the stories are not just like, “and then everything was great,” you know? People are really being very rational even in their imagination, right? It's like, okay, what are the basic needs that we need to attend to, how do we be visionary about that? And if we can already imagine what it would look like in the best-case scenario, how do we bring that into our daily lives now? What does that look like? And I think that sometimes it can be really scary for people to shift from panic to practice, right? I've just like, “Oh, my God, it's a total crisis, and there's nothing to be done.” And it's like, well, what are you practicing? If you practice every day, panicking, and surrendering your power to the 24-hour news cycle, then yeah, it's not going to feel like a very hopeful time. You know, you're not generating a field of possibility, that's for sure. Right?

But for me, I find that I'm like, okay, when I feel that despair and that overwhelm, who can I turn to? Who can really help me hear a different possibility, even in this moment? Who am I giving my attention to? I asked this question to myself all the time, like, an annoying amount. I'm just like, who's getting this attention? And do they deserve this attention from me? Am I actually entertained? And I actually intrigued? Do I feel like my humanity is witnessed? You know, who I want to give my attention to? And it's changed a lot, I spend very little time reading the news, I spend a ton of time reading visionary fiction, I spent a ton of time thinking through. Once I read something from Octavia I'm like, “Well, what would it take to practice this? How do we create spaces where people could practice this?” And sometimes the practice is just reading together: reading and being like, “Well, what do we think of that?”

You know, I often will tell people like we're in this age of abolition, and trying to figure out what justice looks like. And like, read Woman on the Edge of Time. It's really, really helpful to read it and think about what kind of punishment are we currently engaging in and how would we break into a different relationship with each other that wasn't punitive? I'm just like, there's fiction, people have written about all these things and by asking the question, like, “could you live in this world? How about this one over here? What if it was like this?” You know, asking ourselves allows us to start to get in the practice of creating worlds that we could actually live in and feel justice. And that's to me what we're supposed to be doing? Or we're constantly supposed to be experimenting with, “Well, if this isn't working, what could work? Could that work?” You know, there's got to be a way.

Ayana Young Yeah, I think speaking of the value of attention and presence, I've noticed that so strongly, especially since COVID started, how valuable and precious presence to me, and how much I want to give my presence to those around me, my loved ones, and how much I want to receive that. And then I think with the attention, there was an interview I did a few years ago and I think one of the quotes from the mycologist, Schwarz, he said something like, “attention is the most valuable currency in the universe.” And yeah, I really sat with that and was like, “wow, we've really been duped.” That other things are more valuable than that, that other things are more valuable than spooning, or looking into each other's eyes, or sharing a meal. Like, what are we trying? Where else are we trying to go? What else is better than that?

And so yeah, I really appreciate that reminder to come back to source in that way. Because that's like another form of that distraction that I think you're speaking to. Just to jump back to practicing imagination, and practicing this type of visionary fiction, maybe you could, I don’t know, you started to… but share with folks how they might begin to practice this in their own lives, whether that's just by themselves or within their community of maybe other folks who want to feel that type of support, but I think that could be helpful to hear.

adrienne maree brown Well, one thing that we did, Walida Imarisha and I, when we were touring Octavia’s Brood, was we would do these collective science fiction writing workshops, where we would get people together in community and we would ask them: where in your community, what wound in your community, what pattern in your community could use some visionary attention, right. And, you know, it changed from place to place. But in most places there was some element of “our education system could really use some medicine, it could really use some vision. Our healthcare system could really use this, our housing system could really use this,” like, both quickly came up with things that were like this area of our collective lives could really use a different kind of attention, a healing attention.

So we would start there and we were always blown away by how quickly people would move into, the “Okay, so build a world,” you know? Build a world and what are all the needs, what are the needs that are being met? What is the conflict inside of that world because so much of the conflict we experience now comes from people not having their needs met and trying to find ways to meet those needs when the state and the system actually don't provide in the way that they need to. So then we're like, okay, well, what would it look like if all those needs were provided for? How would we provide all those deeds?

One of my pet peeves is, you know, having critiques but not having any idea of what an alternate solution could even look like. And it's one of the main reasons I love visionary fiction in general. But get people together, what is the medicine you need? And have people be in a real conversation about that: here's what we need, here's how it could look to practice it and once people start having those conversations with each other, a lot will unfold or unveil from that place. Sometimes we'll go so far as to explicitly say, “okay, so if we're trying to end up there, where do we need to start? What was the first step that we might take locally in order to move in that direction? And every single thing, all the decisions that we live inside of every day when we start to track them and pay attention to them, almost all of us can easily see differences, changes; like “oh, here's one thing we could do that would yield different results.”

And that's the sweet spot to me, that's where you want to be, what are the things that we can imagine that actually have a tangible, different outcome? And then, how do we become the people who are willing to be in that practice? So I've done this with folks like in New Orleans, where some of the work of visioning survival together actually was able to help in terms of how survival happened during the next hurricane. You know, it's like if you can imagine ourselves as a community as opposed to a bunch of individuals trying to survive these conditions, like, actually, we're a community trying together to survive these conditions. And even that kind of a small shift of identity can transform what's possible. So new stories lead to new actions, new possibilities.

Ayana Young Well, adrienne, thank you so much for sharing some time with us today and awakening these rumblings in us. And just as we close, I want to bring back up Imagine 2200 and just see if there's anything else you want to touch on before we say goodbye? Or how people can learn more about this contest and where they can potentially read any of these works?

adrienne maree brown Yeah, I can send you the link to drop in the show notes of all the stuff that is published already. We're actually going to be publishing a book of the winning stories. The winning stories in the finalists are going to be published, and they just opened. So there's actually a submission portal, we're doing another year of the contest. So this year's judges are Sheree Renée Thomas, Arkady Martine, and Grace Dillon. And I think the deadline for that is May 5, 2022. So people should write their stories and get those into us so that they can read more. And you know that we can find out more about the clues that people have in their imaginations for what this next 180 years of survival looks like.

Ayana Young Awesome. Thanks so much. We'll definitely share it and yeah, I hope you have a beautiful rest of the day. Really lovely to connect.

adrienne maree brown You too, sweetie. Talk to you soon.

Ayana Young Okay, bye for now.

Emily Guerra Thank you for listening to this episode of For the Wild podcast. The music you heard today is by Nia Simone. And The Mysterious They. For the Wild is created by Ayana Young, Allie Constantine, Erica Ekrem, Emily Guerra, Julia Jackson, and Melanie Younger.

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