Novitas Podcast

About Novitas Podcast

Exploring stories that show us how to live outside the capitalist paradigm towards collective liberation. novitas.substack.com (https://novitas.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast)

Publisher

subsomatic

Category

society & culture · society & culture

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

6 Jul 2024

Latest episode

18 Apr 2025

Latest episodes

10 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   18 Apr 2025

   Breaking Up with Car Culture

   Our culture is pretty obsessed with cars—not just as machines, but as personal necessities for getting from point A to point B. But it hasn’t always been that way. For most of history, people got around just fine by walking, biking, or using public transit. It wasn’t until the 1970s, when urban sprawl really took off, that suburbs started cutting people off from city centres and made cars feel essential. Even just a decade ago, there was barely any focus on building infrastructure for people to walk or bike to work, school, or the grocery store. The thing is, cars are a huge burden—on the planet, on our health, and on our wallets. They pollute, they’re expensive to buy, fuel, and maintain, and they take up a lot of space. So it’s not surprising that many cities are starting to rethink things, with ideas like the “15-minute city” or “complete streets” encouraging more active and public ways of getting around. Despite the whole rite-of-passage vibe around getting your license at 16, Aviva Davis decided not to. Living in Toronto, most of what she needed was within walking distance, and the subway could take her pretty much anywhere else. Not everyone gets her choice, though. She even wrote a zine called Why I Won’t Drive a Car, and I invited her to share it in the second issue of Novitas Magazine. In her piece, Aviva explores how we shifted from walkable, transit-friendly cities to a culture built around cars—and how that shift has impacted our lives in ways we don’t always notice. In this episode of the Novitas podcast—the first of season 2!—we talk about how car culture affects the environment, our mental health, and how we see the world. We also share what it’s like to intentionally live without driving and how that choice reshapes everything from daily routines to big-picture perspectives. You can support this project and podcast by becoming a paid subscriber here on Substack. * $5/month or $30/year (https://novitas.substack.com/subscribe) * $4/month or $24/year (https://novitas.substack.com/cab5278e) * $3/month or $18/year (https://novitas.substack.com/937db3de) * $2/month or $12/year (https://novitas.substack.com/9eb7caf3) If you have a person or project who you think is doing really awesome work in their community, please recommend them by emailing me at kel@novitasmag.com (mailto:kel@novitasmag.com). Get full access to novitas at novitas.substack.com/subscribe (https://novitas.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)

2. 

   2 Dec 2024

   The Magic of Making

   Too often, we’re told that our individual actions are too small to make a difference in the face of global challenges like climate collapse and late-stage capitalism. While there's truth to this, I believe we are still called to individual action to participate in what Joanna Macy calls “the Great Turning”—a shift toward a more just and sustainable world. At first glance, the impact of individual actions may not seem significant. One person is unlikely to stop big oil from drilling, or to enact policies like universal basic income. On a global scale, it can feel as though our efforts barely register. Yet, the importance of individual actions cannot be underestimated. After all, a waterfall begins with a single drop. Then another. And a few more. The changes we make in our own lives first shift our mindset, and as that change ripples out, it can contribute to broader cultural or societal transformation. Many people I know began questioning colonialism and capitalism because they wanted to change how they were living in the world. They asked themselves: If this isn’t working, what will? And from that question emerges the search for new, more sustainable ways of being. This episode's guest, Anna Hewitt, embarked on her own journey with a similar question: What can I do to make a difference? In our conversation, Anna shares how she became a maker—a DIYer—and how this shift has transformed her life. Making is magic! It’s grounding, connecting, and often stands in direct opposition to the forces of capitalism that prioritize efficiency and profit over people. Making invites us to slow down, connect with raw materials, and create something new, whether by shaping, growing, or baking. If you’re keen to read more, you can find Anna on Instagram at @annaghewitt (https://www.instagram.com/annaghewitt/) and Anna also has a substack you can subscribe to below: You can support this project and podcast by becoming a paid subscriber here on Substack. * $5/month or $30/year (https://novitas.substack.com/subscribe) * $4/month or $24/year (https://novitas.substack.com/cab5278e) * $3/month or $18/year (https://novitas.substack.com/937db3de) * $2/month or $12/year (https://novitas.substack.com/9eb7caf3) If you have a person or project who you think is doing really awesome work in their community, please recommend them by emailing me at kel@novitasmag.com (mailto:kel@novitasmag.com). TRANSCRIPT (please excuse the typos) Intro: Welcome to Novitas, a podcast that explores stories and ideas outside the capitalist paradigm. My guest today is Anna Hewitt, a writer, mother and maker who shares her thoughts and stories online about, well, living life. Anna feels a bit like a kindred spirit, another human being out there in the world, learning and sharing how best to live life in a way that has intention and meaning without contributing to systems that we know to be harmful. Anna's story that she shared in the first issue of the Novitas magazine is about the magic of making, about using creativity as a tool to connect with the world and how DIY can help us act with intention. In this episode of the podcast, we talk about how this lifestyle doesn't always make sense within the parameters of capitalism, and why making space for creative practice in the everyday can actually be an act of resistance. I hope you'll enjoy the conversation. Kel: Hello, Anna. Thank you so much for joining me today to chat about your piece in the first issue of the Novatos magazine, which is sadly sold out now. But we're prepping for number two, so I'm excited for that one. I guess we could start a little bit. Do you want to talk a little bit about your piece and what kind of inspired you to write it or contribute that topic in particular? Anna: Sure. Um, yeah, so I think the piece that I wrote is pretty representative of what I often try to put out in the world, which is the power and of just making and engaging in the world in a kind of physical way by doing things hands-on. I think I wrote about things like baking and the things I do are sort of home-based. Like I have a big garden, I preserve food, I bake, I sew. And it doesn't have to be those things but just the way that we can interact with the world through making and the way that hand making by hand and kind of slowing down to do that is a little bit a small way of disrupting the more common cycle of consumption, I guess. Kel: Right, yeah. So specifically around like creativity and like being a maker, I guess they say. How did that come to be kind of a central role in your life? Anna: I think it's been part of my life forever. I have a lot of memories of trying to build a table as a kid or like trying to make pants from patchworks. And then I got gain skills and I was able to be able to do it without as much with better results, I guess. Um, so it's just something that is part of my life. I did, um, I went to college and studied art, but then I kind of pivoted towards, I think I just really liked having creativity integrated into every day. So, and for me, like cooking dinner maybe for a lot of people does not feel creative, but I actually love that time to maybe have a little time to myself and just prepare food. And it feels nourishing to me. I've just been lucky, I guess, to be able to incorporate a lot of making and growing things into everyday life. Kel: Yeah, that's cool. I mean, I wish I thought it's a beautiful way to think about making dinner. Sometimes I think the hardest part about adulting is the fact that you have to make dinner every night. But it is true and it's also been kind of an inspiration for me too as I've explored more about how to eat locally and source local food is that shopping for food becomes my shopping in the way that other people shop for clothes or gadgets or whatever. It becomes the way that I get to spend money in this really cool way and then, yeah, like craft something and experience and it is time for yourself kind of that you that you have to schedule for yourself. So that's a very cool way of thinking about it. What other kind of creative practice you mentioned like sewing and I know you're your homeschool parent as well. Anna: I am Yeah. Kel: Does this trickle down into your homeschool practices then as well? Anna: It does. And I just want to say it's not like I love making dinner every night like my kids make it feel very challenging to me, but when I can take the time and when I can enjoy it, I do really like it. Kel: Mindfulness practice, right? Anna: Yeah, it comes and goes, of course, and sometimes it's very difficult to even want to make dinner. But yes, I am like sporadically sew things. You know, I do love things like quilting, like hand stitching. I knit a little bit, but just even having a project to kind of the go to keep that regular making going. So, you know, working on something while my kids are doing something else, or we also do dual projects. We used to do a lot more when they were younger, and now they kind of want to do their own thing, but like right now we're making Halloween costumes together, depending on their interests, like they'll join me in making jam or baking cookies or whatever. And I know those are all really small things, but that just, to me, that really is creativity, even if it's not like, inventing something brand new or like I think just the small like things like that do matter. Kel: Yeah for sure and I think that came across in your piece as well like integrating those everyday moments and taking time to say like uh with intentionality saying this is the way that we're going to incorporate creativity into our everyday lives not see it as something separate or something that we have to schedule time for but just incorporating it into day-to-day activities. I know that a lot of people who have this kind of creative streak within them or choose to be very intentional makers struggle with the idea of making their projects into like a side hustle or You know Monetizing it. That's the word I'm looking for. Do you struggle with that as well? Anna: Um, I Think I just never succeeded in that area. Like I think if I think I have to say like, okay being home with my kids, like part of that, I'll be able to have like a creative business of some kind. So there is always that temptation. Maybe there's a balance that can be found. I don't, yeah, I think it's important to realize, especially nowadays, or side hustles are very publicized, I guess, to kind of say like not everything has to be, doesn't have to have a purpose. Like I was actually recently writing about sort of taking this further, like a lot of the creative work that I do has a purpose, like I'm making food or I don't know, making a quilt or a piece of clothing. But sometimes I think it's also great to just do something that really has no purpose, but it's creative. I'm like, you're never going to put it on your wall. You're never going to, might never even show it to anybody. It might not build your skills, but it's still, it's kind of like childlike creativity, I guess, where a lot of younger people aren't thinking I'm going to make this so I can sell it, or I'm going to make this so I can share it on Instagram or whatever. So I think there's value in that too. Kel: Yeah, and it ties into this idea of what it means to be productive. I actually, I struggle with this a lot because I do publish things online, right? And so it's hard when I'm doing a drawing or creating something. It's like, what is the intention? Can I just sit with this object that I've created and not have any kind of like future purpose for it? Can the purpose just be this object rather than am I going to sell it? Am I going to publish it online? Is it going to get lots of likes on Instagram? That kind of thing, right? Anna: Yeah. Kel: And there's a there's a piece in there for me that ties into like productivity. And I think sometimes I can only justify creative practice when it contributes to that idea of it being productive, a productive use of my time. And then of course, that gets tied into profitability as well. So I guess, a question in there is what does it mean to be productive for you? And how does that shape your like day to day creative practice as well? Anna: That's an interesting question, because I do think about this a lot, especially because I don't do any paid work at the moment. And it's not that I don't want to, but and I think that's a piece that's interesting to think about, because there's a lot of pressure to, obviously, there's financial reasons, but also just, you know, everybody else is writing and has a lot of subscribers to their substack or and there's so much that we see all the time if we're watching and maybe it's better not to but... So sometimes I think about the word fulfillment and how I think there's a lot of times in my life where I've been like, have I been productive today? But thinking more like, and it's a luxury to be able to consider whether you're fulfilled, but to think about like, is what I'm doing how I wanna spend my time. And we don't always have a choice about that, but especially if you're thinking about the small things that you can do within the time that you're spending in your day, can some of those be maybe more fulfilling? Like you're talking about the way that you shop. And that's not always an option, but it can be a nice way to think of things. Kel: Yeah, for sure. And I think there is that distinction too, right? Like, for people who have to spend their time selling their labor in order to have their basic needs met, sometimes the the priority of personal fulfillment doesn't become an option. But there is often for most of us, those moments in our days where we can sit down in front of a TV and, you know, consume media and there's nothing wrong with that. But is there a way that I can feel more fulfilled with my time and often creative practice then like kind of slides in there, right? Anna: Yes, and sometimes it's like knitting while you watch a show, you know, like that's okay too. Kel: For sure. I remember when I started doing more DIY stuff, it was like I was really interested in the zero waste movement. And I think that was a big catalyst for me. Um, because you get, you get pulled into like in your day to day life, there's a lot of like consumerism and packaging and capitalism influencing how we consume things. And I think when I was really getting into that zero waste stuff, I realized that there, I had a desire to have stuff with less packaging and get stuff from closer to its source. And so like just the idea of my life being a little bit more sustainable, I guess, and relying less on consumer goods played a huge role into why I started making stuff from scratch. Did you have a similar path through like consumerism or did you find that there was different motivations from the outset for you? Anna: Um, I think that's definitely a piece of it. I have also explored kind of lower waste and I actually have done a bunch of different projects based on like reusing and turning something into something else. And then I feel like maybe it's not, doesn't always feel creative, but it's kind of like a shift in the way that you think about maybe what you're buying or how you're buying it. Which can, if that's something that's important to you, like it can feel maybe a little bit more fulfilling to make choices that are less wasteful and that, and that does lead to some creative thinking and creative problem solving sometimes too. Kel: You talked a little bit at the beginning about how creativity and, you know, making things for yourself also, there's a, there's a piece in there about slowing down. And I guess there's something beautiful that happens when we kind of embrace DIY lifestyle around slowing down, where we can use our time to like make and create things rather than existing in this kind of transactional relationships with goods and products that we require in order to have our needs met and like baking bread instead of buying it or making room for creative practice, maybe with our kids. Obviously these aren't like efficient ways of doing things. They take time and they kind of force us to slow down. And in that way, I guess DIY culture becomes something bigger than just like crafting or up cycling. Can you talk a bit about those kinds of intentions behind your DIY practice? Anna: Yeah. I mean, I think it's a combination of a lot of things. Like it can be a choice to like, okay, I could buy this, but I want to make it myself because it feels more creative or I don't want to spend the money or let's see how it turns out. And I don't know, I think a lot of like hand stitching things is often feels to me like very meditative and a time to kind of be slower. It doesn't necessarily mean that I'm taking hours to do it or I'm doing it in absolute silence or anything like that. But it's just one particular creative process that feels relaxing and nourishing in some way to me. I also kind of feel like when I talk about it, I feel like in some ways there's this idea of slowing down with all of these things and it doesn't necessarily always feel like that in practice because you know you're timing the bread baking with this call or whatever it is. So it's like more fulfilling to be involved and I guess another piece that I talk about a lot with making things is that it's kind of like a way of connecting with the world around me. And that feels, I don't know if it's slower or what, it's different than when you go into a store, grab something, pay for it and leave. And it's even more than that. It's like, I'm planting this seed in the soil and in a way, like I'm a little tiny piece of that process. Kel: Yeah. And so there is this kind of, um, like almost alchemical process that happens when you start with ingredients or start with the, you know, scrap pieces of fabric and end up with something where you can see how it's created and you can see where it came from and you can see how all the pieces came together. And when you go to a store and buy that thing, you don't experience that at all, right? Anna: Yes. And I love being part of like this transformational process. You start with a bunch of random things that don't seem like they're going to be anything or you know they will, but you know, and then it becomes something else. And even though like you've baked hundreds of loaves of bread, like it's still kind of magical that you get to facilitate that process. Kel: Yeah, I'm still like shocked often when I take it and I'm like, it's just flour and water. It's just flour and a little bit of salt, but it tastes so good. Break: You're listening to the Novitas podcast with my guest Anna Hewitt, and we're exploring what it means to be a maker inside a system that tells us that making things we need for ourselves is often inefficient. Anna wrote a wonderful piece for the first issue of the Novitas magazine, which is now sold out, but we are just about to launch presales for the next issue. If you're interested in ordering a copy, you can find out how on our website at Novitasmag.com or over on Instagram at @NovitasMag. Now back to the conversation. Kel: Yes, I very much resonate with that kind of experience. And I also really resonate with the process, the hand stitching, because I'm currently getting prepped for a couple of pop-up markets, and I'm making these patches. And it's funny because it's this really kind of slow process. And I know I'm not going to sell the patches for very much. They're probably going to be a couple bucks. And they take me a couple of hours to make. So like an hour doesn't compute at all. Right? In there like the math of capitalism just doesn't apply anymore. But there is other ways that I am fulfilled by the act of creating this patch, right? Where it is I'm taking time for myself and slowing down and experiencing that magic of creativity. So even though it doesn't pay off in dollars, it pays off in other ways. Anna: Yeah, and I think also making something that you put out into the world, like you don't, that's not necessary, but there is that's another piece where maybe someone's buying it and you're not making as much money as would make sense for dollars per hour or whatever, but you're then putting it out to other people and that I do feel like it's meaningful to put it out there. Like I write my substack newsletter and don't really hear back from people much, but I still value being able to like reach people in a small way. Kel: For sure. And that There's a piece in there for sure about the content creation going into the void, but I'll let you keep going. Anna: Yeah. You know, it doesn't always make sense to do something that reaches other people that they that you don't get a lot back. But but sometimes I think that can be an important aspect of creativity for some of us. Kel: Yeah, it's and it's hard because those motivations come from outside our capitalist paradigm that we exist in. Right. So you and you have like it's healthy to find those motivations. It's not something where it's like I have to feel embarrassed or I have to, you know, make excuses about why this is still worth my time. Anna: Right, right. Kel: Because it is personally fulfilling. And that's, that's kind of, that's all you need. That should be all we need. How is your experience? Tell me a little bit about your substack. I mean, we can trade horror stories. Anna: No, I just, most weeks I try to write an essay and I've been doing it for about a year. And it's actually, I've learned so much as a, and I feel like I've learned more about myself as a writer and so that's been really worthwhile. And it does feel, yeah, it's an interesting thing because there's, I don't know if this is like a modern social media age thing where it kind of feels good to like broadcast something to whoever happens to see it, or if it's just we live in less integrated societies so we're not having as many opportunities to interact with people and tell them things that matter to us. I don't know. But there is something, some part of me wants to be able to put something out. Nothing else has really stuck. Kel: I can fully validate this experience. I have tried like journaling, getting a blog, and it really doesn't have the same effect. It's like, what goes out into the world, there's this kind of like, oh, it's done. Right? Anna: Yeah. Kel: Something exists in private or unpublished or just for myself, it doesn't feel this, I don't get that like, okay, it's done now. And I don't know, you're right, maybe it is just the like deep desire that we have to communicate with other people and knowing that there's people that are reading it on the other end and that are consuming it, makes it feel more complete for me, I'm not sure, but there's definitely some. Anna: Obviously, there's something about it where we all like putting our opinions or our experiences out there. And you know, I guess people like painted on caves and yeah, they didn't just draw it in dirt so it would wash away. Kel: Something more permanent out there. And I do find that like note and I'm totally going off topic here. But like, I find often when I am intentional about my social media usage, a lot of the times that I reach for my phone, I'm actually looking to connect with people. There's a genuine desire in there to be around other people to be communicative with other people to have I like more than transactional relationships with people. And I think social media does a piss poor job of filling that need. But sometimes it's all we have. Anna: Yeah. Yeah. Kel: But the cool thing about it is that we do get to connect across time and space in a way that we couldn't before. And we do get to share knowledge and information and resources and ideas in a way that we've never been able to do before. And I think there's real power there. I was talking with another friend about reclaiming social media. Again, you have to switch your motivations and your intentions because your stuff might get lost in the algorithm or it might not reach a wide audience in the way that you want it to. But reclaiming it and saying, this is my space and I'm making it for me and screw your algorithm. I don't care if you like what I'm posting or not. And then, you know the people that you do connect with, those connections feel a bit more genuine to me. I don't know. Anna: Yeah, that makes sense. Kel: What kind of stuff have you been writing about on your substack? Anna: Yeah, I kind of write about tangentially like creativity, seasonal living, some unschooling, just mostly it feels like I'm kind of writing about what's what I'm interested in and I feel like sharing and people enjoy it and that's kind of what I'm doing. Kel: Yeah, that's awesome. One of the reasons that I started posting on Instagram way, way, way back when because a good friend of mine who is also on the podcast, Helen Tremethick, told me that people need to see examples of how to live differently. And I think that is valid when we often get lost in the how many people are subscribed to my substack or how many people like my post. Just even providing a countercultural option for people, for permission to say like, it's okay to slow down. It's okay to do things in an inefficient way, because it's more fulfilling. It's okay to, you know, take a break from the rat race and maybe try something different. So I think the more people that are out there sharing the way that they're doing things in countercultural ways is really good. Anna: Yeah, I think I've been able to learn from a lot of people reading and seeing social media. And it reminds me of like, back, I don't know, 20 years ago, I still was like baking bread and making things. I was living with some other people and that, and I just remember feeling some satisfaction that like I was doing that. And then they were interested in trying some of those things. That was the old way, I guess, of spreading. Yeah. Kel: I mean, I hope we get back there at some point where I feel like maybe people are creating more in-person interaction rather than just online interaction, maybe coming out of the pandemic. Anna: Yeah, I just wanted to say like the creative stuff that I do is for me, but it matters enough to me that like I want other people to see that it's an option or that it might work for them too. Kel: Yeah, for sure. And I think one of the pieces that came out of your magazine that I really resonated with was like you don't have to be really good at something or have a product that's marketable in order to consider yourself an artist or a creative person, right? Anna: Yes, I'm actually not the best at all the things I do. I like to just, I don't like to follow patterns and I don't always follow recipes, so I do it and sometimes have to redo it. But I still, you know, and I've also been telling myself I should try a little harder to get better at it, but it's just it's something that I enjoy. And so if I do it the way that I like to do it, that's part of the process. I guess Kel: For sure. And I guess for anybody listening, this is permission for you to like do things poorly. It still counts as creativity. Anna: Yes. I think that's really important because people are like, I'm not creative or, you know, there's a lot of perfectionism that gets in people's way and it's okay to bake way too much bread and then it explodes over the pan and gets burned. But my kids still ate it. You know, you have to start somewhere and eventually, if nothing else, you become more comfortable with the process and you might still make mistakes, but it's okay because you know you can try again. Kel: Yeah. I'm also not a recipe follower and my family will attest to this. Like, my pancakes are hit and miss. Um, I am not very good at cooking. Like it's not something that comes naturally to me at all. Um, but I did find that when I started getting interested in local and sustainable food, you just kind of like have to keep going and like through the blenders and through the things that don't taste good, just practice. And as like the years go on, kind of, you find the pieces that work for you or the processes that work for you or the recipes that work for you or the patterns or whatever. And, uh, And there's a natural aptitude that just builds over time, even if you're not naturally good at something. Anna: Yeah, I think that's important because it's easy to feel like you have to be great at something that you wanna try. And you can try other things and creativity, there's some things that will feel really comfortable and some things might not. And you just kind of figure it out over time, like you said. Kel: Yeah, I really love this thread of like, does it mean that you're not productive if you're failing? And where does that message come from? And who's telling us that, you know, failing is a waste of time? Because I can tell you, my kids are like way bought into this idea that failure is bad and that it's not worth their time if they're not going to be really good at it. Anna: Yeah Kel: I love, I love, love, love ways to like break that down with them as well. But I think it is part of our cultural narrative for sure. Anna: Yeah, definitely. I mean, you don't really hear much about the mediocre bread bakers or whatever. Kel: Yeah, they don't post those on Instagram. Anna: It can be frustrating because I feel like it also takes work and energy. And sometimes that is not as abundant as we want it to be. But I do really think like we've been saying, the more you do it, the less difficult it is and then the mistakes don't matter as much. Kel: Yeah, that's true. In your article, you have a quote from Wendell Berry, who wrote, every day, do something that won't compute. Do you want to talk about the context of that quote a little bit? Anna: Yeah, I mean, he wrote a poem about it and talking about how basically, all the stuff we've been talking about, step away from what they want you to do and doing all the things that society says and saying that it won't compute to me is like, it's not gonna make you money, it's not gonna bring you fame. I feel like those are the two biggest things that society values. And so when you choose to do something creative, whether or not it's like productive that you're making something you're going to use or it has no purpose, to me that's stepping outside of that framework that feels so prevalent. Outro: Thanks for listening to this episode of the Novitas Podcast with me, Kel Smith, and my guest Anna Hewitt. If you'd like to learn more about Anna and her writing, you can visit her substack Basil and Honey at annahewitt.substack.com. That's A-N-N-A-H-E-W-I-T-T dot substack dot com. Or you can follow Anna on Instagram at @AnnaGHewitt. If you're interested in supporting this podcast, you can become a paid subscriber over at the Novatas Substack at nova and there's also sliding scale options as low as $12 per year, and I'll include some information in the show notes about how you can subscribe. This podcast is totally unfunded, so it means a lot to have your support. Thanks again for listening. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit novitas.substack.com/subscribe (https://novitas.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2)

3. 

   12 Nov 2024

   Art Outside of Capitalism

   The role of art in our culture and society is a complex topic, to be sure. Likewise, the topic of personal creativity and the desire to create art is multifaceted. If I have learned anything over the recent years, the creative process and consumption of art are critical pieces to post-capitalist living, and here’s why: Art is both cathartic and exploratory. It helps us collectively process strong emotions but also acts as a conduit for cultural change. Art helps us grieve; it helps us think; it helps us understand. In other words, art is important. But when we only consider art within the cultural context of capitalism, we fall short. As an artist and writer, Blaise Moritz has spent a lot of time exploring what it means to create and consume art. Through poetry, illustration, narrative, and political comics, Blaise’s creative gifts to the world explore many of these complex topics, from consumption to culture; history to politics. In this episode of the podcast, Blaise and I talk about his history and inspirations in his own creative process alongside the community of artists in Toronto, but also his experience studying art and comparing it to the grassroots movement of DIY and zine culture. We explore what it means to make art outside of capitalism, intrinsic motivations for creativity, and how politically-driven art can be accessible across cultures and classes. You can find Blaise’s work on his website at https://blaisemoritz.com (https://blaisemoritz.com) or connect with him on Instagram at @blaisemoritz (https://www.instagram.com/blaisemoritz/). There are also a few other references from the conversation that I want to include here: * Jenny Holzer (https://projects.jennyholzer.com/) is an American neo-conceptual artist whose work is focused around the delivery of words and ideas in public spaces and includes large-scale installations, advertising billboards, projections on buildings and other structures, and illuminated electronic displays. https://projects.jennyholzer.com (https://projects.jennyholzer.com/) * CAROUSEL (http://carouselmagazine.ca/) was an exquisitely produced hybrid literary/arts magazine representing new & established creators, with a focus on positioning Canadian talent within an international context. The print edition ran from 1983-2003 and then as an online magazine until 2023. http://carouselmagazine.ca (http://carouselmagazine.ca/) * Bar Delicious (https://conundrumpress.com/product/bar-delicious/) is a book by Blaise Moritz published by Conundrum Press in 2023. You can purchase a copy at https://conundrumpress.com/product/bar-delicious (https://conundrumpress.com/product/bar-delicious/) * Ray Walker (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Walker_(artist)) (1945–1984) was an English artist, considered among the most prominent of a movement of political and community orientated artists who created murals in London during the 1970s and 1980s. You can support this project and podcast by becoming a paid subscriber here on Substack. * $5/month or $30/year (https://novitas.substack.com/subscribe) * $4/month or $24/year (https://novitas.substack.com/cab5278e) * $3/month or $18/year (https://novitas.substack.com/937db3de) * $2/month or $12/year (https://novitas.substack.com/9eb7caf3) If you have a person or project who you think is doing really awesome work in their community, please recommend them by emailing me at kel@novitasmag.com (mailto:kel@novitasmag.com). TRANSCRIPT (please excuse the typos) Intro: Welcome to Novitas , a podcast exploring stories of post-capitalism and what it means to live towards a collective liberation. The stories shared here covered topics like culture, politics, education, parenting, but also especially art. My guest today is an artist and writer living in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, named Blaise Moritz. Blaise has published numerous works through independent publishing studios, but also self-published much of his own work. Blaise in my mind is first and foremost a poet, a zinester, and an artist, whose expansive work touches on topics of history, culture, capitalism, and more. Blaise is also, however, a connector, a community connector, and a connector of thought, bringing together both people and ideas, exploring culturally significant experiences of ideas and art to create thought-provoking pieces to share with the world. In this episode, Blaise and I talk about his experience and inspiration, his motivation and process. I hope you'll enjoy this conversation and find your own artistic inspiration while you listen. Kel: Well, I guess I should first say, Blaise, thank you so much for joining me and taking time to have this conversation. I wanted to start off by asking you when you started creating art and kind of how did your style develop over time? Were there experiences or influences that shaped your perspective or how you wanted to make art? Blaise: Yeah, Kel, sure. Great question. Yeah, lovely to be here. I really enjoyed being part of the first issue of Novitas. You know, I think probably, I would think there would be a lot of people who maybe would relate to the idea that I go all the way back to before I can remember, like when I think about, you know, making art. So I think about enjoying doing that as a child, as that being an activity that I enjoyed, an activity that, you know, I felt encouraged in, an activity that I felt was like an interesting, you know, way of relating to all sorts of other things. Like when I look back, I can feel like, well, if somebody was going to encourage you to know about say another culture or another person, one of the things that they did was show you some of their art or encourage you to draw, copy some of the pictures or something like that. So I think that, so I always go back to that. And I think about like just enjoying copying pictures out of books on Greek mythology that I had. I always go back to that. Like I can remember that, you know, it was always interesting to me when I was, since I've been a very schooled person in my life, it was always interesting to me to meet people who had, who associated art making with school, right? Like I actually went to, you know, studied art as an undergraduate student in college and ended a year of graduate school and to meet people for whom art was something that they had sort of... it was one of the various things that institutions had presented to them as things that they might do and that they just sort of liked it a little bit better or thought it would be, you know, somewhat more tolerable to be a art professor or something than an economics professor or something else. Like, you know, I always found that sort of fascinating, kind of bewildering. As I grew up, I mean, I was very interested in comic books because I think for me, you know, when I encountered comic books, I think that I encountered them as an extension of how I liked to read. So I'm a, I love to read, but I was not a... I didn't take very immediately or very naturally to reading books without pictures. I don't know if it was just the comfort or the love of, you know, reading books that had pictures as a child. But, so I don't know that comic books appealed to me because I particularly liked the stories, you know, really when I look back at them and stuff, I sort of think like, you know, I never particularly fantasized about those kinds of situations or things like that. Kel: So it wasn't a super hero thing... Blaise: Yeah, no, I just kind of felt like, well, you know, there's only so many Dr. Seuss books and there's only, you know, and it was, I think, doing the grocery shopping when I found comic books. And I think, yeah, it was like, wow, look, there's stuff to read with pictures in it and it's colorful. And so I think I've always... and I also think the idea that it was accessible, you know, if I was paid, you know, 10 cents to do my grocery run, then, you know, after a couple of days, you could, like I think at the time of comic book cost, like 35 cents or something. And it was sort of fascinating to think about. And I think I go back there because I think that's still sort of a touchstone for me to think about, like capitalism doesn't necessarily get to own all economic activity or the idea of a market or the idea of production or exchange. Like these things exist in humanity and exist in history, like outside of the dimension of capitalism. And I think so, so to me, art is kind of associated a little bit with things like love of reading, love of pictures and feeling like, um, that those things could be accessible, could be shareable and stuff. And, uh, so I think that was a very definitive thing for me. I think, um, for me, it goes all, you know, that connection to it being sort of like a primal thing, you know, a thing that's part of who you are is like very important to me. Kel: Yeah, for sure. That's really cool. And I, you touched on a lot of really cool things in there and I'm going to circle back to some of them. Blaise: Yeah, sure. Kel: I love the idea of comic books being outside of the system of capitalism. And I mean, there's, there's the collectors and there's the, the, I guess, the industry that has turned it very much into a marketable product. But I'm kind of the same way where I grew up during the hayday of Archie comics. Blaise: Sure. Kel: And so that was, you went to the grocery store and there was, you would get the latest Archie comic and I think it was a couple bucks and it was like a hundred pages worth of comics. And that was totally accessible for a young person that had a little bit of pocket change. Right? And I think that's also why I'm very much drawn towards zine culture because it really exists outside of that idea of, can I do this to make money? Right? Blaise: Sure. Kel: One of the reasons that I really fell in love with your comics and your, I guess, style of art, because it seems to tackle kind of these complex topics or maybe ask complex questions through really simple statements. And the pieces that you submitted for the Novitas issue, I think really reflect this as well. Can you remind me what they're called? Blaise: Oh, sure. I refer to them as Zero Songs. Kel: Zero songs, that's it. I think there's something really cool about the combination of the abstract nature of the illustration that couples with this like abstraction of complex topics into really simple statements. And was that intentional? And where did you get that kind of inspiration as well, if so? Blaise: Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I mean, definitely intentional. And thank you for picking up on that. I mean, I think it comes from a couple of things. An artist who had a very big influence on me was Jenny Holzer, you know, the American artist who's probably best known for her long-running body of work, which are usually titled truisms. Barbara Krueger also, who did some similar kinds of work, but Jenny Holter is known for these sort of short aphorisms, you know, abuse of power comes as no surprise, and she would have all different ways of deploying them. You know, I was in New York City not too long ago, and I always think when I walk through Times Square that like I saw Times Square before it really got renovated and there was a block of, I guess what had formerly been like X-rated movie theaters and they were derelict, but they had, Jenny Holzer had done an installation where her truisms were on the marquees or she sometimes prints them out on like a cash register receipts at the gift shop if there's a gallery or museum that's having a show of hers or something. So I think I was always fascinated by these kind of aphorisms and I think I often noticed them in other authors. Kafka and Beckett were authors that I liked in high school and sometimes they have these short expressions or very sparse expressions. In recent years though, I was really impressed by, I guess, two specific things. One was a wonderful Canadian artist named Marc Laliberté, who's long been associated with Carousel Magazine, which bills itself as "hybrid literature for mutant readers". Marc had a long running feature called the Four Panel Project, in which he encouraged people to experiment with a four panel cartoon strip as a sort of poetic form or poetic cartoon form. So that was definitely a big influence on me, seeing the different things that people have done with that. And then also, I think I was really struck by another wonderful Canadian artist, the long-running cartoonist Seth. You know, I was very struck by him in a talk once, you know, sort of musing about, you know, I wonder if, you know, I think I see comics more as like poetry with the the breaks between panels, the breaks between pages, like line breaks. I thought this was a very insightful comment and one that was resonant for me. But as somebody who was interested in outsider or oppositional kinds of art and was interested in different ways of working with language and was very interested in poetry, I sort of found myself thinking, that's inspirational. I wonder what kind of poetic language would really be appropriate to that. But I feel like a lot of cartooning that gets, you know, sort of accepted, like, I enjoy it very much, like, you know, it's sort of, it's kind of comfortable a little bit. So I found myself thinking about people who wrote, like, you know, like, about Jenny Holzer, people who are, like, outside of, like, literature. It's this very sparse, stripped down poetry. And so to me, there was something about that that felt appropriate to the idea of, like - Okay, well, if a comic strip could be like a poem or could have a poetic dimension, it felt like something was something about that very stripped down kind of language. I think I was very interested also in the way that a panel could isolate, I mean, kind of like you see in a poem, like that a panel could isolate a word so that even a single word or a couple of words could have a resonance to them, which could be all their own, even if they also made sense in the whole sequence, they could sort of suggest something by themselves too. So, you know... Kel: The way you use that single word sometimes in the juxtaposition of the art sometimes has an impact all of its own, even outside the context of the larger strip. That's really cool. I love hearing all of those different influences because they come from very different places, but I can feel them all in your art, which is really awesome. Do you want to talk a little bit about Bar Delicious and how that project came to be? Blaise: Yeah, so Bar Delicious is a sequence of about 40 panels. And it's, like we were talking about, they function independently. They almost look like art deco or between World War I and World War II illustrations or prints. And Bar Delicious started as a poem. And it started as a poem about consumption and about. like I think one of the things that I like most in you know poetry is the idea that expression can be liberated or sort of oppositional is... if its process of becoming what it is are not like two separate things like I feel like it's very mechanical or sort of quasi industrial to sort of like come up with an idea and then kind of manufacture it right? Like oh I know what my novel's about so I just have to crank out the however many hundred pages of storytelling or something. Kel: Very institutional. Blaise: And so I think that one of the things I think about that, because I think Bar Delicious is, I hope participates in what I'd like to think of as the best of a discursive, meditative poem where it allows the thinking to unspool and stuff. So it starts out basically about like, you know, Here I am eating a candy bar. And it's just sort of like, you know, tries to like evolve from there and think about like, you know, the processes that come together in that moment. And I think things that are we're, I think very, should be very conscious of today, which I think many of us are, which I, you know, I appreciate in your, you know, activities that you do, I see like, you know, thinking about like, what are the natures of our desires? Like, how are those constructed or, you know, how can we see the differences between ones that are constructed or put upon us and what might be more healthy or natural and, you know, what does complicity mean? Like what does it mean to participate in the things which are kind of around you? So I think was kind of interested in this notion of sort of redeeming or recontextualizing some of those kinds of techniques to tell this story, which was ultimately about kind of being willing to sink into one's own doubts and even at some point one's own frustrations or outrages with sort of being, you know... A candy bar sweet and all, but it's kind of also emblematic of this landscape you're kind of, I don't know, I don't know if you're ever really trapped in a landscape, I mean, but you're kind of, you're enmeshed in it, right? If you find yourself there. Like one of my favorite lines, you know, in that book, I always think like, you know, there's one panel that says like, "but did I desire this bar delicious, this candy bar, or did I go out into the city prepared to eat whatever I might find?" Kel: I really... that's really cool. I really love the juxtaposition of the artwork as being this kind of futuristic advertisement, but also posing the questions at the same time. Am I okay with being advertised too? So when did you publish Bar Delicious? I think it had just came out before we met. Blaise: Yeah. It was, I guess the, that was published in a book by a really wonderful press from out east in Nova Scotia called Conundrum Press, which is building up to its 25th anniversary with a series of pocket books. And so it's a very nice little format and they're supposed to be sort of self-contained, relatively short graphic narratives. And so yeah, so that came out in October of 2023. So it was actually just about a year ago that that book came out and I had, I think, originally made that stuff in late 2020, early 2021. So, yeah. Kel: Cool. We've touched a little bit about this idea of comics and zines and your artwork in particular being made from a place where you want to be accessible. Maybe not as like accessible to other people, but making sure that that's part of kind of the art that you're making rather than institutional art or art because it's a career field or things like that. And I know from personal experience that people don't generally make zines and comics because they're lucrative. And I know that it can be really hard to find the motivation to continue one's art practice in a capitalist system when you're not making tons of money. I think this is something that a lot of different artists deal with. Where do you find that inspiration to create when it's not financially motivated? Blaise: I think there'd probably be two answers. I mean, one a little bit would be, you know, from my family experience. I mean, I think both of my parents are people who would probably think of themselves of having escaped their families and of having to try to like, so I think I grew up around people who were trying to find different ways of how what they thought they wanted to do could fit in the world. And so I think I grew up with some sense of that and one of the things I think that sometimes has been very rewarding to me, I just not exactly an answer of like how I keep going but maybe it's kind of an inspiration. Like sometimes I've kind of felt like, like I've known plenty of people through jobs or through school who have sort of looked at me and said, well like I wish I still drew or maybe I'll maybe I'll try making a zine or like you know that's great that you still do that. And it's also been very rewarding and motivating to kind of be there in a world where people are, you know, like if you weren't there, they might not have a connection to that or they might not have something because I was always very struck by that thing. I think it's a Camus thing that like where he said like, you know, freedom is that like very small movement by which a being doesn't completely render back its conditioning. Like sometimes it's a very small thing, right? Like, so sometimes, you know, maybe it's a motivation to like, maybe you can be that small thing for somebody else, right? Or that thing that just makes them wonder, like why are you doing that? Why do you spend so much of your time, you know, on that? But, you know, I also think about like that Jackson Pollock thing of like, I paint because it's the best way I've found of like living with myself and like, it's the moment of being, a moment of doing that counts. Like, I don't know, somewhere along the way I think I found myself really thinking hard that it was kind of a mistake for people, it was very human and very natural, but kind of a mistake to say that what you want to do and how you survive are the same thing. I think that if you think you're creative, if you think you like to write or draw or sing or dance, somehow conflating those two things and say, aha, this terrible society and its institutions dangles this weird, you know, thing in front of me of like, maybe I could be Taylor Swift. I don't know. Kel: I was talking about this in my last podcast with Helen talking about like, you can make your money doing this thing over here and you can create your joy over here and that's okay. And I think that's this really beautiful idea that like by doing this and putting ourselves out into the world and not doing it for money sometimes gives other people permission to say I can also do that thing that I used to really enjoy doing and I stopped doing because it wasn't profitable. Blaise: Yeah. I think- Also, I think when you think about solidarity with other people, I think it's great and all and I'm a firm believer in the idea that everybody can be an artist or everybody can be expressive or anybody... At the same time, I feel like I don't see that as because that's a better use of your time than growing a vegetable or repairing a wall that needs to be repaired. So to some extent, I think if you expect solidarity with people, you kind of have to be in solidarity with them about everything, not just like, hey, let's all escape into a world where we make zines all the time. Break: You're listening to Novitas, and today my guest is Blaise Moritz, a friend and artist who draws, writes and publishes many of his own zines and books from his home in Toronto. As we mentioned, Blaise contributed some of his art to the first edition of the Novitas magazine, which was released in the summer of 2024. The next edition of the magazine is now underway and will be released this winter, so stay tuned for more details on the website at novitasmag.com or on Instagram at @novitasmag. Now back to the conversation. Blaise: But when somebody says like, I'm not sure I want to do this thing, like we're, you know, it's not being valued because like you can't make any money in it. It's like, well, there's like a knot to untie there, right? There's like, you know, you sort of like, you want validation from the very system that has basically shown you time and time again, it's, it's not gonna... what's the expression? you know, work is not going to love you back. Yeah. Capitalism is not going to love you back. Yeah. You know, like, so. Kel: Yeah. And you touched a little bit on this and I want to dive a little bit deeper. I'm always super excited to go to Toronto for zine events and comic events because there's a really beautiful community there. Do you want to talk a little bit about that kind of zine community or scene in Toronto and how has your work been, I guess, received in that community and how do you feel like encouraged? Blaise: Yeah, I think it's a really wonderful community. I mean, I think it's been... I'll talk to Toronto but I'll just give a quick nod to like, you know, I mean, I know sometimes people are down on the internet and down on the algorithms and things like that. I mean, sometimes I think it's all about when you make a mural on a wall, why does that wall exist? Chances are that that wall exists for kind of, potentially questionable purposes. So sometimes I think like, well, using Instagram well is kind of like, making really beautiful graffiti on a wall that like you can get away with making graffiti on or something. Right? It's not like... Kel: Who cares about that, let's just use it the way that we want to use it right? I'm here for it. Blaise: I often think to myself you know like I mentioned earlier like oh I did go to like school for art right and uh one of the things which was very fascinating in that context was the whole you know institution of the critique and and it was like um and it was endlessly angst ridden, like people were like afraid of critiques or, you know, always talking about how to make critiques positive or... I think there can be value in some of that, but it all just seemed like a lot of wasted energy. And one of the, you know, I really found in the zine community was sort of like, not that people, you know, couldn't have opinions or couldn't be like some things more than others, but there's just seemed to be, for me, a much more like top of mind focus on appreciation. First of all, that we were going to appreciate that people put themselves out there, that they spent some of their solitude, like a very precious thing, or some of their community, if they did it collaboratively. But they made something that could be outside of themselves, and they put it out there to be shared. And it just felt like, to me, again, like I had gone to school in art. When I first moved to Toronto, I was active sort of mostly in the poetry community, and sort of like the you know, like small press but mainstream, like publishing poems and literary journals associated with universities. And you know, I published a couple of books of poems with good presses and those were good experiences. But I just, you know, for at least for me, I felt there was still a little bit too much of like playing at like some kind of weird, like why are we acting like we're in this institution? Like we have this freedom to be whatever we want to be. And we're still talking about who's got book deals with you know, these presses and it's, you know. Kel: And what's worthwhile to be published, right? Blaise: Yeah, and it's just sort of, so it just seemed very odd to me. And, you know, in the zine community, I just felt like there was so much more emphasis on appreciation. And I think also the liberation of editorial control, I think is pretty important, right? Like, I think, you know, there's nothing wrong with the concept of the editor necessarily, but I think to have that be something where, you know, I mean, just the way in other other zones of life where we think about like, how can you organize with like, you don't have to have a boss to be organized, or, you know, you don't necessarily have to have a hierarchy to get things done. I feel in the zine culture, like, editing is not somehow like above other functions from other functions and stuff, you know... Kel: I totally agree. I love that. And I it's like, one of the things that I absolutely love about zines. And again, in the community, this is so encouraged. It's like, just do it, just publish it, make your zine. You can do it on a single sheet of paper. And if it never sells, that's fine. It's your act of creative expression. And you put it out there, and if people wanna receive it, that's great. And because it's so low budget and there's not so much overhead to it, it's just like continual creation without that like restraint, without the critique, without the you know, need to validate whether it's worthwhile or not. It's really just about like putting it out there into the world. And I know that there's a lot of, well, the ones that I've seen, at least in, in Toronto and Hamilton and other places where there's events where people can go and like make a zine and there's very little limitations around it. It doesn't matter what you make it about. It's just, you know, come and experience what this is like and then put it out into the world and see if you enjoy it. Blaise: Yeah, absolutely. And to see such a wonderful mixing, like I remember it was wonderful when we first met at Canzine, because the things that you made covered such a wild and wonderful range of topics. To think about all the different things you were sharing, whether it was like the unschooling things or other just sort of things you had learned or were interested in, or some of your own drawings or things. I think to feel that freedom, like obviously I'm interested in comics or graphic literature in particular, but you know the first zines I ever knew were political zines primarily, anarchist zines, and so I think one of the things that can be really wonderful is to see where those boundaries also are broken down and stuff, and I think I like nothing better than to see like, you know, that it combines like some activism with some art or comics and stuff. And so I think the ability for those two things to come together is very powerful. Kel: For sure. Do you have any new projects planned? Blaise: Sure. Yeah, you know, I mean, maybe that's one of the motivations too. I kind of feel like there's always new things and stuff. So I set myself a schedule. So I do make a zine every month, recently I've been on a kind of production schedule. I just finished a story, which is actually a story about somebody working in sort of a commercial enterprise and trying to subvert it and stuff. But I think that when I think of the head to projects that I wanna work on, like Bar Delicious is part of a set of, you know, stories that take our traditional senses and then also ESP as sort of entry points into thinking about how we relate to the world. So I have two more, I think probably the next thing I'm gonna work on is two more stories about that. You know, I was very happy after Bar Delicious, I sort of worked on a project that I had wanted to work on for a long time about trying to really, to some extent, not exactly cure myself of comics, but I'm always fascinated by this idea of like, do you liberate yourself from stuff? So I did this big project about, one of the most famous American comic book artists, Jack Kirby, and sort of refashioning a lot of essays he wrote towards the end of his life when he was kind of bitter about, you know, his fortunes and trying to insist that he had all these big ideas he wanted to talk about. And so sort of taking those as a launching point. I sort of mentioned that because I think the thing I would like to do most next is I've had this long-term, and might be most interesting to Novitas listeners or readers, is like... I got a chance to go to England when I was kind of small because my mom did went there to do some research. And I remember this arc in my life of getting to go to England. And like, I became very fascinated with London and stuff and read a lot about it. And gradually it became a real focal point of my interest in urban renewal, because one of the big urban renewal projects was of East London. And then of the fascination of like East London, of working class London, and of it as a crucible of so many themes that have played out in Western narratives of post-colonialism, capitalism, and anti-capitalism. So I found myself going back there, specifically to the East, and discovered this muralist, this person Ray Walker, who was active in the late 70s and early 80s, and did a number of large-scale political murals, some of which still exist. There's a project in my mind which is about the history of my relationship to London and to this artist and to work sort of more, you know, potentially more directly on some of these kinds of labor themes, political themes, because, you know, my own family is from a sort of steel country in Northeastern Ohio. I think one of the things that's been fascinating to me in my life, which I think is always fascinating for people who are, I think, interested in our collective future is like, from one point of view, that struggle was kind of lost. Like, whole industries, whole communities were kind of destroyed. And like when we, this maybe connects, we can bring it full circle... When you think back to the 35 cent comic books in the spinner rack, and you think about like the glossy comic books of today, which are hard to afford and which really just exists to promote the next Marvel comic movie, it's sort of like that thing of like the capitalists sort of like taking their ball and going home, when it doesn't suit them anymore and totally disregarding the idea that human communities have a tendency to humanize and potentially make wonderful... almost anything. You look around the world, you look throughout history, and it's kind of magical, right? How many unlikely environments, how many challenges people have taken and made into amazing communities with amazing systems and ways of living with the earth and ways of creating things. To me, I felt very sad for the idea that like, you know, that these people in England, kind of like the people of my parents' communities, like... They needed for industry to figure out a way to be human and non-destructive or something. They didn't need it to just get moved somewhere else and become a problem out of sight or something. And so, to me, so I don't know. There's a project in there somewhere. Kel: There's a project. That's cool. I like, again, I love hearing about all your different angles of inspiration because you can see them coming together into something really tangible. So I'm excited for that, whatever it may be, whichever direction it may go. But I think, yeah, the idea of accessible art mixed with political messaging is really a cool, and doing it outside of the capitalist motivation to make money is this truly liberatory practice where we are now spreading accessible messaging to more people out there in the world. So that sounds exciting, whichever direction it may take. Okay, last question. Do you have any words of encouragement or inspiration for new or emerging artists who are interested in creating art in a world that often diminishes the artist experience as impractical or not worthwhile? Blaise: Yeah, for sure. So you asked earlier about like the sort of economy of language in some of those cartoons or comics like the Zero Songs that are in the Novitas magazine. Another touch point was some people who tried to strip language down to its essentials to try to make sure that language could communicate. And so they came up with things, these are philosophers of the early 20th centure and they came up with things like "blue here now" to be very specific. Like this was something very tangible. It's very beautiful. It's a sort of poetic thing. Well, and you were asking about the zine community and he asked about Bar Delicious. So in the last TCAF last year, I got the chance to be on a panel and it was led by somebody I knew through the zine community here, a wonderful artist named Lina Wu. And it had two other people who had books in that conundrum series of chapbooks. And we talked about, you know, our roots in zine culture. One of them was an artist from Vancouver, who was just sort of a legend in making mini comics, named Colin Upton. So there was lots of nice questions and conversation. And, you know, when I was saying earlier, like sometimes we find our ideas in conversation, I think that one of the most important things that occurred to me to say to the people at that moment was, "I'm here now". I'm not hoping to be someplace else. This is not a stepping stone or anything. I want to be in this conversation right here, right now. We're doing it. We're having a wonderful interaction. We're living a wonderful life. We're talking about art. And so I think one of the big lies of our culture, the dominant culture that we live in, is that it sort of says it's very realistic and very practical somehow, and yet, it's completely abstract. You know, it's always about something else. It's always about, you know, it's not really about, like, being in the moment of who you are and how you relate to the Earth or to other people. And so, I would just encourage people to say, like, well, you know, just make it because in that moment when you're making it, like, you are authentically yourself, and you are, to some extent, there's a lot of different traditions or things you get situated in, but if you want to know what you could do to cure the earth, cure yourself, obviously there's lots of direct action, lots of different things you can do, but don't doubt that that moment of indulging your solitude and your individuality and expressing that self, that is a place where good things come from. The things that we don't like in the world, I don't believe they come from that moment. So I think if you let yourself dwell in that space and if you say your creativity is like a moment of dwelling in that space, I think you're contributing to the good. Kel: That's beautiful, Blaise. Thank you so much. What a heck of an outro there. I think that's like good life lesson for anyone regardless of whether they're making art or not to be able to treat each moment as an end in itself and not a means to a further end, right? Outro: Thanks for listening to our conversation on the Novitas Podcast. My name is Kel Smith and I really enjoy chatting with Blaise Moritz, an artist and writer from Toronto, Ontario. You can find more about Blaise on his website blaisemoritz.com, that's blaisemoritz.com or on his Instagram account at @blaisemoritz, where you can see so much of his art online. As mentioned, Blaise published a pocketbook with Conundrum Press called Bar Delicious, and I'll include a link to where you can purchase a copy of that book in the show notes. If you're interested in supporting this podcast, you can become a paid subscriber on the Substack account over at novitas.substack.com where you'll find other podcast episodes alongside additional writing and thoughts around what it might mean to live outside a capitalist system. You can also follow along on our Instagram account @novitasmag. Thanks for listening. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit novitas.substack.com/subscribe (https://novitas.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2)

4. 

   21 Oct 2024

   Natural Learning and Nature Connection

   When I started writing this blog years ago, I wrote a lot about the education system. As an unschooling parent of two boys who don’t fit well in a classroom space, I have had to do a lot of learning about what it means to learn. Some part of this journey have been very hard, but some has been really easy. For me, forest school just makes sense. We all agree that kids thrive when they spend time outside in nature, and I firmly believe in mentorship as an alternative to formal teaching. Outdoor education has been proven time and again to help physical and mental health, social skills, cognitive development, environmental awareness, and even academic improvement. I really do believe that every kid could benefit from a day spent in the woods with peers. In this episode of the podcast, I get to chat with my good friend Kim Simpson from the Free Spirit Forest and Nature School (https://fsforestschool.com/) based on southern Georgian Bay in Ontario, Canada. Kim and her partner Matt have been trailblazers for the forest school movement, having started their programming way back in 2016, when forest schools were just finding their footing. In our chat, Kim and I share our experiences witnessing natural and place based learning outside of the classroom, where there is space made for exploration, inquisitiveness, collaboration, and a focus on encouraging kids to show up as their true selves. You can support this project and podcast by becoming a paid subscriber here on Substack. * $5/month or $30/year (https://novitas.substack.com/subscribe) * $4/month or $24/year (https://novitas.substack.com/cab5278e) * $3/month or $18/year (https://novitas.substack.com/937db3de) * $2/month or $12/year (https://novitas.substack.com/9eb7caf3) If you have a person or project who you think is doing really awesome work in their community, please recommend them by emailing me at kel@novitasmag.com (mailto:kel@novitasmag.com). TRANSCRIPT (excuse the typos) Intro: Welcome to Novitas, a podcast exploring stories about how we might live outside of the capitalist paradigm into a future that focuses on collective liberation. My name is Kel Smith. My guest today is Kim Simpson. Kim and her partner Matt are the collective force behind Free Spirit Forest and Nature School, an outdoor education program for kids and adults along southern Georgian Bay in Ontario, Canada. Free Spirit is a school with no classroom, a one day a week program where kids can skip out on the modern education system and get connected to nature. Full disclosure, my kids have been long time forest school participants and I am a huge advocate for this style of mentorship and natural education. I will also disclose that Kim and Matt are two of my favorite people on this planet. I was so excited to connect with them and for my youngest son to participate in the weekly programming at Free Spirit. In a time where we see anxiety and depression in young people at an all-time high, spending time outside with peers is a simple solution that benefits everyone. Free Spirit's mentorship model empowers kids to actively shape their day, collaborate with one another in community, and connect to the natural world around them. It allows them to slow down, witness the world in a safe and caring environment, and it really allows them to show up as their true selves. I have witnessed firsthand with both of my children how transformative these experiences can really be, and when I think about the kind of education and learning that I'm excited about in a post-capitalist society, the values and practices of outdoor education, like at Free Spirit, are exactly what we need for our children. Kim and I share a beautiful conversation about Free Spirit Forest and Nature School, how it came to be, how it has changed and grown over the years, and why it is sure to continue for many years to come. Kel: Hello Kim, thank you so much for being here and taking the time to chat today. Um, I was wondering if we could start off, uh, if you could tell me a little bit about how you first got interested in outdoor education. Kim: Yeah. So I think like being outside and connecting to nature, it was just something that I was always interested in. Um, so like my, my childhood, I feel like that that's like where I can pinpoint my love for being outside. And then I was the kind of kid that like really loves school. So I just, wanted to do school forever. So they kind of just like married in a really great way. Sorry, when I went on my first like canoe trip as a guide, I thought, wow, like you can get paid to do it. Kel: Yeah. Kim: Yeah. Blew my mind. And so I was able to like slowly understand that the jobs that we know don't have to like they they've evolved, I guess, and they can kind of be anything. My my very first guided trip, I think was maybe one of the most profound moments for me, paddling in Algonquin, like in the starry night where the stars are reflected in the water. Like I could still, I can feel that in my bones, you know? I'm still gushing over it. Kel: That's really cool. I didn't know you were a canoe trip guide. I was also a canoe trip guide. And I don't think we've ever talked about that before. Kim: No, I think there's a lot of overlap. Kel: And so when did you, when did, I mean, the article in Novitas goes pretty in depth as to how you got started with free spirit outdoor school. Do you want to talk a little bit about that now? Kim: Yeah, sure. So Matt and I met in 2012, and I think around like 2016 was like our very first winter. And it was sort of newish to the area. We had other jobs that worked over the weekend, so our weekdays were free. And this idea of forest schools was just kind of trickling into our area. We were sort of approached because we were both teachers and outdoor educators to sort of start a pilot program, I guess. And then we started with just a handful of children on like the snowiest day. Some of the children in that program have like, you know, they're whatever the math is, like teenagers now, right? And they can remember their first day at firest school. Kel: I feel like starting in the winter must've been very bold. Kim: Yeah, yeah. It was like, are we doing this? Kel: Right. And for context, for people who don't know, Kim is located just, the first one was in Collingwood, is that right? Which is like top 10 snowiest places in Canada because of the juxtaposition of where it's located off of Georgian Bay and in proximity to Lake Huron as well. It's just a lot of snow, so starting something like that in the winter. But Collingwood also has a big ski hill and it's kind of a destination area, so it's kind of an outdoor destination I guess. And it's nice that you kind of got head hunted that there other people that understood the value of what you were trying to do. And you were, you must have been one of the first forest schools, at least in Ontario. Kim: Yeah, yeah we were. We um, which was kind of daunting, like jumping through the hoops of ministry guidelines and building rapport with with the schools nearby. Once we were able to do it, it wasn't, it wasn't as intimidating as we thought. And then we were able to help other folks, because there are a lot of forest schools now, which is a really beautiful thing, and more outdoor schools. And so we've been able to help folks who are just starting out on their journey and figure out how to navigate all the red tapes and stuff. Yeah for sure all the requirements. Kel: Yeah yeah. So I will call him up after but Roland was very excited that I was chatting with you this morning and I was trying to come up with my questions this morning while I was drinking coffee with him and I asked Ro who is eight now what is the difference between for a school and normal school and for reference my eight-year-old has never been to modern like in the modern education system so he doesn't actually know. His answers like I said what do you learn at Forest School and his answers were you learn about nature, you learn how to be respectful, you learn how to be kind to your friends and you learn how to make a fire. I thought those were very good answers and he was like yeah that's pretty much it. Kim: I'm crying. That guy nailed it. Kel: I mean obviously I am a proponent of nature connection and I am not necessarily a proponent of the modern education system and I think being kind of an anti-capitalist person I can recognize in the modern education system that they are teaching the tools required in order for our young people to become productive members of a capitalist society and I think one of the reasons that I really love outdoor education in particular is because it doesn't do that it is actually quite the opposite in a way that is almost visceral. Like I think outdoor education and nature connection gives kids a fundamentally different tool set to enter into the world. Do you want to talk a little bit about that and what kind of focus that you've had at Free Spirit as to what kind of tools you're interested in providing kids as they you know graduate or head out into the world? Kim: That's a really great question. I think like what's beautiful about outdoor schools, it's just like being able to hold space in like a really, a really meaningful way for children. And we're outside. So there's like, there's just so much room, I think I could go on forever, to like work through things. Whether that's like between an adult mentor and a child or within like a child and child relationship. So they're like, they're strengthening so many tools in their toolbox, like the social emotional pieces, the physical literacy, like all of that stuff, that's just so important in becoming like a healthy kiddo. Yeah, and so we do a lot of like community building stuff and we focus a lot on emotional intelligence. We are like, there's resilience where we're like working hard to build fires and we're learning those like outdoor skills and bushcraft skills. We take time to do like creative arts and and it could be like your your classic like pen, paper, journaling, reflection, watercolors or maybe you're using charcoal and and like making your own pencil like it's can be really really creative. The nature connection piece just it looks so different for everybody and and that's such a profound, impactful thing for everybody, but especially for kids. Just thinking about our future of our community and thinking about children having this really profound nature connection just gives me so much hope for later. There's play. There's so much play and a huge focus on gratitude and reflection. And so I think Roland was right when he said, we learned how to practice being kind to our friends and respectful and like that's a huge I guess pillar right? Respect and connection for for your friends, for nature, for yourself like it's I don't know. Kel: Yeah and and I think it goes beyond what you can teach in a curriculum right? You can't... I know... I'm sure a lot of teachers, especially in the modern education system, will say yes there's a big focus on being respectful but I don't think there's necessarily room within that system because you say like as you say like you have time you're not adhering to a schedule so if there is conflict you can literally stop everything else and take the time to resolve that conflict whereas often when there's bells ringing or kids running around or other things there's not really the space to have that kind of reflection and moderating experience like where everybody can really feel heard and have their needs met and all that kind of stuff so I think that's obviously different ways that different forest schools will approach their day. But one of the things that I really love about that free spirit and also the Guelph outdoor school where my kids are going now is that there is no schedule. I mean there's a loose schedule, there's a very loose schedule. We have to make sure that the kids are eating and that's it. But I think the most beautiful thing reading kind of what you guys have done during the day or talking with your or Matt at the end of the day, like we set out to do this thing and then the kids got totally distracted with this other thing and so that's what we spent our day doing. And having um I guess that's a good thing to talk about is the the self-direction that comes with kids having the responsibility of making choices for themselves but then also doing that in a larger group so that it's not 100% autonomy. They have to decide how they're going to do things together and how their day is going to play out and if there's conflict, how they're going to resolve that. That's a really beautiful experience that again I don't think you quite have in the modern education system because of the way that it's structured. Kim: Yeah, yeah. I think you're right like when we're when we're not bound to a curriculum there's just there's just so much opportunity. I really can't imagine being in a classroom personally like the the load that they're carrying is it's it's wild right and and so yeah for me and like coming into it with a plan and like, okay, maybe this is how the day will unfold, but probably not. And then to see that, like, that, um, it just says, you've said like the children come with their own inspiration of the day. They're usually thinking about forest school beyond the day of forest school. And they'll come like, Hey, remember last week, we were looking at salamanders while I found a guidebook and, you know, all of the stories, um, like help sort of pave the way of the day. And just as you said about like, I think collaborating is a huge piece of forest school. And that's like removing any kind of authoritarian, you know, piece of it all. So the children are really valued as like, as members of our community, and they have such a role and have this like agency and autonomy that they and they get to exercise those muscles and they're working with their peers to sort of forge the day, I guess. And it's really beautiful. And then when they are engaged in that way, and they're really passionate about it, like there's such a buy-in. And we know when there's a buy-in, like that's when the learning happens. Yeah. When they're able to, I guess, plan the day or like pivot and we can follow their lead and we can be the co-conspirers and really like just play with them. It's really great. Which is really cool. Kel: I remember when I started unschooling, one of the things that, I think was recommended to me is like count the number of times you have to say no in a day. Kim: Yeah. Kel: And I think when you create that kind of environment where the kids do have agency you're limiting the amount of nos. You're limiting the amount of times that you say sorry we can't do that. And like yes we can do that and let's get excited about it which is really cool. Kim: It's exhausting to say no. It's so much easier to say yes. Or like how? What does that look like if we want to go up over the hill. Like how, it just makes so much sense, right? Like children, if we're thinking about children and we're thinking about like, you know, all of our, not that I have expectations, but when I think about the future of our community and future of our space we're living in, and we hope that like the young kids that we're mentoring now are like actively involved and engaged in that community. Like they need to practice how to hear other people, how to respect other people, how to just sort of work through conflict or like get excited about other things people are interested in and kind of big each other up I guess. Yeah for sure. Yeah and just to witness that is really amazing. Kel: Yes that leads really nicely into the next thing I was thinking about is what becomes your role then as a mentor or a facilitator or a teacher or whatever word you feel drawn to in helping the kids in that kind of environment kind of way. Kim: Yeah, so I think like the biggest sort of unlearning that I had to do was like was learning how to step out of the way truthfully and how to like really trust the process. I think that was maybe the my biggest aha moment coming from the background that I had was like really trusting the kids in the process, sort of knowing the right moment to step in. And you can kind of, that's like leaning into your intuition. That's sort of just like reading the temperature of what's going on. And I think sort of the more experience you have doing that, the sort of the quicker you know, like when, when to sort of pause or when to like go in with a new prompt or a different idea or, you know, kind of guide it because there's lots of like, like finessing that happens and like gentle mentoring or guiding along the way. And I think it's just something that evolves over experience, really. Kel: Do you find it's different depending on the kids? I feel like that's a loaded question. Obviously it's different depending on the kids. But what kind of variables, I guess, play into that with different groups? Kim: Oh, so many variables, right? Like the dynamic between the children, the age of the children, even the weather, right? If it's maybe like a trickier weather day. Sometimes morale is not as high. I think that's an adult concept that like, well anyway, it's a... Kel: Yeah, no, it's feel free to tangent. Like that's a really cool idea that like adults on rainy days don't want to go play outside but kids are totally fine with it. Kim: It's amazing, right? And like I think maybe the adult burden of like, okay, well now I've got to do laundry and your boots are wet for tomorrow. Like we just go so far downstream and children are just so present, right? And sometimes there's consequences for that. Like they just need to be in that puddle right? And it's 9 a.m. so they're like okay well... but usually parents are really great at having extras so it's okay for them to explore that and then then they're wet and then we'll change up from there but yeah definitely I would say all of the variables between maybe children know each other outside of school and and their their dynamics are different when they're in programming or what's kind of beautiful about forest school is that a lot of students come from you know... some are homeschooled or unschooled, some are in sort of modern education programs, so they don't necessarily know each other. So it's like this blank slate when they do show up and arrive, which is really cool. They don't have like, you know, maybe the labels that they might have or they're the class clown or whatever expectation that they are sort of known for and they get to just be who they are and they can show up in a pretty cool way. Kel: That's awesome. Break: You're listening to Novitas and my guest today is Kim Simpson. Kim contributed an amazing article talking about her experience mentoring kids at Free Spirit Forest and Nature School, an outdoor education program that takes kids out of the classroom and flips learning on its head. The articles from the first issue will soon be released online for paid subscribers on the Novitas Substack. You can subscribe at novitas.substack.com. There's a sliding scale option available which I'll include in the show notes. Now back to the conversation. Kel: And I wonder sometimes when you remove the restrictions, can I say restrictions? Is that a fair word of a classroom environment? A lot of the kids who would typically be seen as bad behavior or disruptive, those labels just kind of melt away as well. Kim: Yeah, like a tendency to thrive in our program for sure, because there's so much movement, you know? You're feeling like a little squirrely, and you wanna pull, like take the wagon, pull the gear, this is great, like there are less limitations for sure. Yeah. And if they need to go for a walk or like take a break, like often actually people, some students will say like, I'm feeling a little overwhelmed or overstimulated, like imagine saying that as a child, can I go to my sit spot, right? Like amazing, yes. Kel: Yeah, to have the agency to do that is beautiful. Can you talk a little bit about sit spots and what they are? Because I think they're, I mean, are a common trend. Kim: So it's kind of funny because I was feeling a little bit nervous about meeting this morning, full confession. So I was like, OK, I found myself pacing or trying to do, trying to make coffee, not sure, writing down ideas. Anyway, and I thought, you know what? I need to quiet my mind. I need to go outside, just be in my body. And so I have a little sit spot near my house that's in our backyard. I visit as often as I can and and not enough. Like the more that I go the more I almost need to go. Okay, so a sit spot is like a quiet spot in nature where you just you spend time. I'd say it's like a pretty pivotal piece in nature connection. It could be like somewhere near your house. For some folks it could be by the window, you know. Just sort of a spot that that you can kind of just arrive and usually like you're just like observing things that are around you and noticing some of the things that might be changing, heightening your awareness of kind of what's going on around you. Whether it's the color of the leaves or like the grass was really wet this morning. Yeah. And it's something that we practice at school. Even like our four year olds will, will like have a good time doing a sit spot. And sometimes they like sneaky sit spots and they don't, they don't know that they're sitting and quieting their mind. And then another times it's like intentional piece that we try to like foster. Kel: Cool. I only know of sit spots through secondhand information that I am told about. How do the kids kind of respond to it? Kim: Yeah, now like they love it. Older kids especially like genuinely genuinely love it. They sometimes will go with a journal and a prompt, sometimes they'll come back and say like that wasn't long enough, you know, and that's... for an eight-year-old to say, I could actually use a little more time at my sit spot. Our older ones really like going to the same spot because they have this relationship that they're building with the spot that they've chosen. I don't want to say it's ownership but it's a relationship so they start to take care of it. They start to notice the animals that are nearby or how it takes about 10 minutes for things to sort of settle back in before the birds start coming back, like, I saw this in my sit spot or I heard this in my sit spot. Kel: That's very cool. So some of the other things that you guys do during the day, um, do you want to talk a little bit? Maybe this is a proud mama moment, but Ro was leading his balloon breaths in the morning for a long time. Kim: Yes! It was amazing. I can't remember how he stepped into that role, but um, just for folks listening, Ro... What a pleasure to be around him all day. He is really, really amazing. You're blushing. Kel: I am. Kim: If anyone's wondering, Kel's blushing. Just what a special kid. I miss him a lot. We would have like 15 children. And here he is at the beginning of the day, leading everyone in our circle before we did our song, just to get everybody sort of on the same page and grounded. Everyone comes with different starts to their day, different mornings. So we would always like reach, reach up high, breathe in really big and deep, and then like exhale in a really funny like way. And he would lead this and we would start with our hands on the ground touching the earth and we would end touching the earth. And it was just like, and we would do that a couple of times and he would be facilitating this. And then we would dive into like a big loud, you know, morning song that got us all pumped up for our hike out. Yeah. And there's just like little casual ways that we can, you know, pop in some like, that's something that like my child will do when she's feeling overwhelmed. So I'll have to take some balloon breaths and I'm like yes that's so great. Like just like a little tool that we have in our back pocket that we might not really know that we need until we need it. Yeah. Kel: I also as far as events that are part of your daily practice when you're outside with the kids, sometimes I would come to pick up Ro and go for a little walk because the space where obviously the foreschool is is beautiful. Sometimes I would hear these kids being very loud close to the end of the day and I always meant to ask you what that was about. Like riding on a roller coaster kind of loud. Kim: I know it. I know the loudness. They love it. At the end of the day. So song is just woven throughout our day. And so there's one song. Can I do a shout out to my pal Pete Moss? He has a song called... Is it called the Finch song? I actually don't even know the name. But it was like our closing song. So we would all sing the song as loud as we can. And the very last word, it says like shout out loud and everybody screams, potato chip. And that's just what, and they would hold it. So it would be like, I mean, you could hear it at the water and we were up in the forest. And they would sing it as loud as you can until someone, you know, made the motions of like, okay. Kel: And what a beautiful thing to be in a space with your peers and your friends having fun and be that loud. Kim: Yeah and that was all like they wanted to do it you know. Well, which is great. Kel: But like I appreciate your mentorship model so strongly Kim because you make space for the kids to be as loud as they possibly can or to move as fast as they possibly can or do all of those big things that so often in our world or held in or restricted saying no you can't do that this isn't the space for that but then there ends up being no space for that right and so I really love that that for school is a place where all of those things can come out and I don't was that intentional was that kind of like when you were thinking about the space you wanted to create was that part of that vision? Kim: No I truthfully everything is blown any part of my vision ever like um it's evolved in such a beautiful way that can only exist this way because of the children in our program for sure. Not every group ends the day that way, right? There's kids who need to be loud, like are loud when they need to be loud, and it works, yeah. But going into it, I mean the idea of like holding space for people to be themselves, I guess that was the goal and is the goal, but it's definitely looked a lot different than I anticipated. You should have seen us in the early days. I was like, it was funny. Kids would go home with the water cycle and a Ziploc bag. So it's evolved instead of really valuing the process and fully believing in the process. And before I think we were trying to make it a little bit more product oriented to be like, see your child learned, look at the water cycle. And now they maybe know the water cycle because of and like just how they're playing or like what's going on with their day and Yeah, like why their shoes are wet in the morning. So it's definitely it has shifted a lot. Kel: That proof of learning is a funny one for sure and I understand it and like there's nothing wrong with giving your kids the printed water cycle sheet like that's really but when we... I think there's a really beautiful thing that happens within the framework of education - I'm using scare quotes education - that natural learning really works like it really works in a way that will blow your mind when you come to trust it where like my kids are coming home from forest school and telling me about all this cool stuff that they've learned and there's no proof of that like there's no... it wasn't taught it wasn't part of the curriculum that morning it wasn't anything that anything that any teacher has set out to teach my kids, but they've learned it. Like, Roland has learned to read. He's eight, like maybe that's on the bell curve, it might be a little bit later than some kids if he was in the modern education system learning to read every day, but he's never been taught to read. And I remember when I started unschooling, it was helpful because my oldest one had already learned to read. He was in Montessori and he learned to read around the same age, maybe a year younger. But he was practicing reading every single day. And I was like, genuinely, can kids learn to read without that kind of environment where they're being taught it every day? And some kids can, and some kids can't. I'm not going to speak across the board. But when it happened, it was kind of like, oh my god, it does work. They do learn. They can experience things. And I think as a parent, I'm sure you can relate to this. We always worry that maybe we're f*****g up our kids, right? There's always this worry that... I believe in the system and I trust it, but if it doesn't work, I'm not the one that's going to suffer from it. So it's always very affirming and very rewarding when you witness, I'm feeling teary eyed saying this, when you witness that natural learning that happens. I feel like in some ways the Forest School model has kind of taken that totally like much more palitable for people to say this is an educational model where you send your kid for the day and there's structure to it but it still allows that natural learning to evolve. Does that does that resonate? Kim: Like is that again like maybe not the intention of setting out to saying we're gonna do a nature immersion program but to have that happen have you witnessed that as well? Yeah like Roland is probably interested in reading right now because well because there's things that that are interesting to him right and and so when there when there's buy-in like there are like leaps and bounds and their growth right so when children are fascinated by like the bugs and critters and the crawlers and all that stuff, they're turning to guidebooks and they're looking up and they're looking at the picture and maybe the name and looking at the habitat. Maybe it's also an opportunity to talk about our mentors. The quote is, nature-connected kids need nature-connected adults. When you have a mentor team that's passionate about nature and being connected and moving in an unhurried way and in a good way and just in relation and a collaborative approach, like it just like screams good things, I guess. So the mentoring and the modeling that happens is also really inspiring. When we bring things that we're really passionate about into the program, it's just so contagious. Just like when someone, like a child brings something that they're passionate about, like it ripples through the whole community. And it's really, really amazing to see and to support. And like it brings a bunch of like, beauty to the day really. Kel: I read a stat or I read a stat the other day and it's totally unsourced so I might be wrong but it was something like the human brain learns something when you're learning things through repetition on average it takes about a hundred times before that neural link forms or the synapse or whatever in your brain except if you're learning through play in which case it's only 20 repetitions. Kim: Oh wow. Kel: Yeah and again totally unsourced might be totally wrong but I think that speaks to the type of thing that we're talking about here. Kim: Yeah. Well, it's like, it's like meaning making in your learning, right? Like it, of course it sticks in a deeper way, right? Kel: Yeah. When it's contextual, for sure. If we were going to expand, I mean, culturally, a cultural we, if we were going to expand on the model that's kind of been developed around outdoor education and the forest school system, where can you see it going? I, I asked this specifically, like, I think about my teen who is really lucky to still have a forest school program available to him here, but I know a lot of teens don't. And I think about adults who are, it's hard to make time to do things like nature connection as adults. Is there, is there room for nature connection for the rest of us? Kim: Like hard yes, right? And, and it doesn't have to look like through programming, I guess, either. And it's obviously easier for a teen to show up to a program but just to speak to adults like even just like five minutes a day in your yard or your garden. I think that that's a start, right? Kel: Can you talk a little bit about the adult workshops that you guys are running and how they've been received? Kim: Sure. Yeah, they're really great. So we kind of just like keep our ear out and hear like maybe what the community is missing or wanting. And so lately, a lot of like wild edible stuff in the fall. We have like an upcoming mushroom workshop. Usually in the spring, we'll do like a wild edible walk. We have a really cool plant dying workshop I'm like especially excited for using like natural, yeah, natural material. So we basically are supporting folks in and around our community to come in and just share their expertise and their skills. Yeah. So, and for me, like, I think that's a highlight sitting around the fire with a bunch of adults. It's just a different, it's a cup filling experience. Conversation's really great and usually you end with a neat project too, which is fun. And you can see like the hours of work you put into the spoon or whatever your project was. And then we take that into our world. So then I find myself like wanting to tinker a little bit more or like looking at plants in a different way. Yeah. Kel: Yeah, definitely. That's been my experience for, because I think sometimes as an adult, it can be kind of daunting because you don't really know where to start right? So my experience with like I really wanted to learn more about wild edibles and herbs and things like that and like you can look online and there's lots of information but there's really nothing that can replace having like a teacher or mentor who has this knowledge that can share it and I find that experience that the experience of taking those workshops to be really really instrumental in something that I'm now passionate about. Kim: So usually it's like in a space that you know, too, right? Where reading it online is one thing, but like, if you know, on the trail on the left, there's false Solomon's seal, you know, like things like that. We're like, I don't know. I think in context and that connection to place, it's just like hammer is home. And you can't, you can't taste something online either. Not that I suggest tasting all of the, you know, disclaimer. Kel: If there is kind of one thing that you've learned from your experience working with kids and, you know, diving into this world of nature connection and natural education, what do you think it would be? Kim: I think it's trusting the process, like, like, fully and really trusting the kids. Like, I think the value of holding space for people to show up as they are and with the things that they're interested in and like just trusting the landscape, that it'll provide. I guess the ultimate thing is trust. At the end of the day, it's not about a product or an outcome, it's really about the quality time spent together in nature and the connection to self and to others and yeah, to nature. Outro: Thanks for listening to the Novitas Podcast with my guest Kim Simpson from Free Spirit Forest and Nature School. You can learn more about Free Spirit on their website at www.fsforestschool.com. My name is Kel Smith, and if you're feeling moved, you can support this podcast by becoming a paid subscriber at the Substack at Novitas.substack.com. There's also a sliding scale subscription option in the show notes below. Thanks for listening. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit novitas.substack.com/subscribe (https://novitas.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2)

5. 

   30 Sept 2024

   Anti-capitalist Existence in a Capitalist System

   What does it mean to thrive as someone who is opposed to capitalism but still has to exist in a capitalist system? This question is one that my friend and colleague, Helen Tremethick, has spent a lot of time thinking about. Helen is a business coach, writer, and entrepreneur who GETS IT. Most of her clients share the same story: they don’t want to play the game, they don’t want to take other people's money, and they don’t know how to help their business grow without compromising their personal beliefs. Helen’s insight and both/and approach help provide guidance to those struggling to understand how best to tackle these questions. Her wisdom shines through in this podcast episode as I ask her about all my personal questions, offering forgiveness and challenging me to push through instead of going around, and sharing her experience navigating late-stage capitalism as an entrepreneur and small business owner. You can find out more about Helen on her website at https://helentremethick.com (https://helentremethick.com). You can support this project and podcast by becoming a paid subscriber here on Substack. If you have a person or project who you think is doing really awesome work in their community, please recommend them by emailing me at kel@novitasmag.com (mailto:kel@novitasmag.com). TRANSCRIPT (excuse the typos) Intro: Welcome to Novitas, a podcast that explores stories about how we might live outside the capitalist paradigm towards collective liberation. My name is Kel Smith and I'm so excited to share today's conversation with Helen Tremethick. Helen and I first met over a decade ago in a garden volunteering together to build a new community space to grow food. It didn't take much time to recognize Helen as a friend and co-conspirator, an ally in navigating the challenges and celebrating the joys. Helen is an anti-capitalist business coach, a profession that may seem at odds, but with more of us critically questioning what it means to be alive during late-stage capitalism, Helen's wisdom has become so critical. Helen sees the world in a real way, in the rich multiplicity of lived experience mixed with the honest challenges many of us face. Not only as entrepreneurs, but as human beings. Helen's work asks the ever important question, what does it mean to exist inside the capitalist system while also working to dismantle it? In this episode, we explore what it means to be anti-capitalist, how we find joy while living in struggle, how we use our labor to have our needs met, and how we balance those needs with the work of building something better. I hope you enjoy the conversation. Kel: Hello Helen, I'm really excited because we are in the same space together recording this podcast. The stars have aligned and we are able to be in the same room having a conversation, which is awesome. Helen: I know for the first time in like six, seven years. Kel: It's been a while. If you didn't catch it, Helen contributed a really beautiful piece to the first issue of the Novitas magazine talking about what it means to be an anti-capitalist business owner or entrepreneur, I guess is a better word. Helen: Yeah. Kel: Yeah. Do you want to talk a little bit about what that means? Helen: Sure. So where to start? The other day in my membership community, we were talking about being anti-capitalist versus being capitalism critical. And I think that's a really good place to start because I think more and more of us are becoming capitalism critical, not necessarily anti-capitalist per se. There's a lot of connotation that goes along with that term that I think mainstream folks are uncomfortable with. And I'm not. I love being anti-capitalist. I love being capitalism critical. But having that kind of accessible language I think is really really important. So essentially as an anti-capitalist entrepreneur I approach my business with the desire to help people over profit more money. I try to make very conscious decisions about my pricing and the accessibility of my pricing, knowing that I still live in this system, I still need to be making a certain amount of money in order to be compensated both for my work as well as pay for my rent, pay for my food, etc. So what I like us to think about as entrepreneurs is where can I make more intentional decisions that do not put profit, money profit specifically over the other reasons why I got involved in this work. Kel: Right. Yeah. I... sorry. I did tree planting when I was in my early twenties and when people sign up to go tree planting, I think a lot of they time they think of the trees and being in nature and being in the woods, but like little do they know that tree planting is like grueling work. And if you're not in it for the money, you're probably gonna go home in the first two weeks. Helen: Absolutely. It's grueling work. Kel: Yeah. Helen: And it's monocropping one species in your pockets, well they're not pockets, but they're, you know... Kel: Your planter bags. Yeah, that's like just a really good example that has never come to me before until you said that that's, that's the profit over the people. Helen: There's a profit over the people. It's the profit over the ecology of it. And I do really want to disclaim that we still live in this system. So we still need to exchange money in order to survive. And so when I talk to my clients or when I talk to my audience, I tend to talk about the fact that we still need to make money. We still need to be in the system and we still need to consider money as a neutral tool of exchange. We can make good decisions with money and we can make bad decisions with money. There are numerous examples of people in the world who are making bad decisions with money. And so those of us who have anti-capitalist tendencies also tend to have money stories where we don't want to earn a lot of money because the examples of what we've seen are so bad of, you know, what people are doing with those giant amounts of money. Notwithstanding the fact that we will never make that kind of money, but we still need it. So if we can consider it as a neutral tool then we can start thinking about it in terms of what amount of this neutral tool do I need to exchange in order to feel fully compensated and feel like it's accessible for people as well. So I'm still helping people. Kel: Yeah. And that's a tough one because I find the benchmark that people are going to use for like how much money do I need is am I having my needs met? And that is a largely arbitrary term. Having my needs met is going to be different than you getting your needs met and the amount of money that's required to meet those needs is inherently different as well. So it's like this slippery sliding scale of how much money is, am I justified in charging or taking from other people, right? Helen: Yeah. Well, there's a really good point. It's like are you taking from other people or are you exchanging at a rate that feels fair for both of you and you're right that is completely arbitrary. What your needs are will depend on where you live. If you're living in a city, it's going to be more expensive than if you're living rural. You're gonna have to factor in the size of your place, the size of your family. Also, what you consider your needs. Do you consider the newest smartphone your needs? Because you need to have the fastest technology. There are a lot of people out there who would say yes. So where do we draw that line and say this is what enough is. I'd like to consider that a lot of times, when we say okay, I'm gonna price my services, this is what enough is, we also don't factor in future care because that feels selfish or greedy or what have you, Kel: Hoarding... Helen: Or hoarding. But this is also important. What my needs are aren't just so that I can get to the end of the day. And I talk a lot about how sustainability and sustainability as a whole is b******t. The idea is b******t because it considers only what we need to sustain ourselves. But when we start thinking about this in terms of thrivelihood, what do we need in order to thrive? Then we can start making decisions that aren't just money-based, but are also time-based, that are also connection-based. So when we're thinking about profit, we're taking the idea of making enough money, yes, but also making sure that we have enough time to spend with our families, making sure that we have well-being, and making sure that our future selves cared for and there are ways to do that that are not hoarding, that are not selfish, that are not greedy, that are not all of these things that we connect our money stories to and they are and always will be subjective but that there is the work, that there is where we need to do the work for ourselves, where it is not a formula that you can... I could never say this is how much you need to make this to happen, therefore this is what you need to do. That's not the work at all. The work is more introspective. How much time do I need to spend with my family in order to feel like that is enough? Kel: Yeah, for sure. I think it's interesting when you factor in those other pieces as well to say like, in the work that I'm doing, how are my needs getting met, not just financially, but in community connection and in all these other different ways as well, that makes the formula even more complicated, right? Helen: It does. Kel: I know I talk a lot about doing volunteer work and the type of rewards that you get from volunteer work is very different than the type of rewards that you get from paid work. Helen: Yeah. Kel: So how do those things then play in together as well? Helen: Yeah. And the vast answer for a lot of people, well therefore I need to sell my services for a higher amount and the trouble is is that it's not that easy. Chances are if you're listening to this podcast and you are an entrepreneur you probably do need to raise your rates and and there is also an element there of, you know, what the market can withstand what people are able to afford and of course I would rather spend as much time with my family as I possibly can and there needs to be there needs to be an ebb and flow. There needs to be some flexibility. So it's not just about raising our rates more. Although it probably that's probably a bit Kel: ...that is probably a piece of it... Helen: But it is that we need to consider all of the factors in our personal ecosystem, work being one of them, that includes compensation, but also what else is in our ecosystem, and that will be wholly individual. So for you, there's volunteer work in there, as well as paid work. And there's also parenting and being part of the family, and that is going to be a factor in your ecosystem as well. There's going to be growing food and making decisions outside of the status quo society. So when we start plotting out your ecosystem, then we can start looking at, okay, what makes most sense for you in terms of your capacity. So your financial capacity, your time capacity, your well-being capacity and so on. Kel: Right, right. You talked a little bit at the beginning about the difference between anti-capitalism and capitalism criticism, is that what you said? Helen: Yeah, critical. Kel: Critical capitalism. I guess for those people, who are listening and are interested in doing more of this work, what is the difference or what is the boundary between those two things? Because I think it's really clear that we are seeing a cultural shift towards being more critical of capitalism, like becoming mainstream in the status quo kind of thing. But there is also people really interested in doing this work of how do I remove capitalism from being such a huge influence in my life. Helen: Yeah. Kel: And like, what is, what is the, the jumping off point there? Helen: That's a great question. What is the jumping off point there? I think there are those of us who enter into this sort of thought process as realizing where we're realized that the system isn't really working to benefit us as individuals. And that's where we start what I would say becoming capitalism critical. Then we start learning terms like anti-capitalism. We start learning terms like wage theft. And we start criticizing the amount of money that the top earners in the world are making and seeing how that is directly affecting those in society. If there's a jumping off point between that and anti-capitalism, I would say that that's in the action. Kel: Right. Helen: That's in the active space of going from, hang on, maybe there is another option or other options, or maybe there are different decisions that I could make to be more intentional. And then the action of it saying, no, I do not want to participate in this particular way and I see the option and I'm going to take it. That is where we become more anti-capitalist. I think that anti-capitalism is a verb. Kel: Right, right. So it's in the action itself. And I don't want to be exclusive and say because you work in nine to five and you're making money for a fat cat somewhere that you're not anti capitalist. Helen: No! Kel: I don't think that's the work. Helen: That is not it. We cannot get we cannot get further as communities by shaming each other for our current situations. All we can do gosh, so much of this work is internal and individual. It is not pointing fingers at people who are also trying to make the decisions that they can for their family. There are a lot of people out there that are working two, three jobs just to make ends meet. I'm not going to tell them to quit one of them because their boss is stealing their wages or because capitalism is awful and will not ever because we can only do what we can. And until those options are available, we're going to keep doing only what's available. The things that we have to. Kel: Yeah. I wrote in a recent blog post that capitalism harms us all. And I really think it does, like from the top down, because the people who are even doing the hoarding are still suffering under the same system internally, right? How well connected can you be to the land and space and people when you're partaking in this system, which you're told is how you succeed in life, right? So it's definitely not just, the suffering doesn't just happen on the bottom, it happens on the top too and I think the more that we can identify the harms of capitalism as systemic and not necessarily attached to specific individuals who make it worse. Helen: Yeah. Kel: I think that the change needs to come from that space, right? Helen: I wholly agree. And the way... some of the things that you talk about a lot is how community will be the way that we move away from this system. Kel: I hope so. Helen: I hope so too. And community is very hard to create as adults when we are stuck in nine-to-fives or in the ways that we make our money in order to get our needs met and so on. Community is very, very difficult. And even more so because we live in a really divisive society right now, which benefits the system, it benefits the structure. If we're in-fighting about this versus that, then we are going to be less of a tight-knit community and therefore more hyper individualistic and therefore the system gets more ingrained. So saying like making community, that's the solution. It is one of the solutions, but it's not easy. None of this is easy. If it were, then we'd be shining examples of how easy it was and you could do it too for only six payments of whatever, right? But it's not that, because it's so individual, because it's so personal and because the current wants to push us downstream. Kel: Yeah, for sure. So I moved back to Guelph, back to the city from the country and I was looking for community to tap into and one of the things that I have found and I don't know if this is universal, probably not, the city where I live is a pretty special place, but there's all of these little pop-up markets. I don't know if you've experienced this, but I came back and it was like during the summer and there was this swell of local makers coming together and doing these little pop-up markets, which is really cool except now there's this super saturation of them and for the most part, not including the farmers market, I would say but for the most part people are selling handmade clothes, jewelry, trinkets... I sell rugs and zines. These are not things that people need to buy and before we were talking on the podcast we were talking a little bit about how as a business that sells a non-essential items, sometimes it can be very hard to want to market yourself. So there's this strange juxtaposition where we're like, yes, let's relocalize our economies, but the things that are being offered in those spaces aren't necessarily the things that people need. Helen: Yeah. Kel: And as an entrepreneur or a business owner, I am now struggling kind of with the idea of like, is the thing that I am selling worth selling? Is there value in me in participating in these spaces? Am I justified - that may be a strong word - in asking people to spend their dollars on a non-essential item to support my entrepreneurial idea or my small business? Helen: Yeah. Oh. So the question that you're asking is a really common one, especially for those of us who take the time and look around and say see what's happening, seeing what's happening with the market, seeing what's happening with people in general. I think we are currently in a place where people don't have as much disposable income as they used to and that means that they're not paying for things that are, like, quote-unquote, unnecessary. That includes stuff like therapy, that is necessary, but it includes stuff like self-development, it includes stuff like hobbies, it includes art. And this is such a shame that these are the things that drop by the wayside when those are the exact things that build us up and make us healing and whole humans. So the question you ask is really common. Should I even be selling this? You know, it's not something that people need. And the only thing that I can say as somebody who, you know, facilitates ideas and questions in other entrepreneurs is the world needs you, the world needs your gifts, and we can't make up what other people's money stories are. We can't spend our time inside other people's wallets guessing at what's there. We can show up, do our best, try and have fun, and there will be people who will say, actually, you need a new rug. Like I actually do, because my dog chewed up the last one and this is exactly what I need right now. Or I have a little bit of disposable income and I really, really, really want to support zine makers. And so there are those people still. The other thing, I love to think about, and as I know you do, and it's not talked about a lot, is the gift economy where we take money out of it altogether. Most of the time, sometimes money is involved because again, it's a neutral tool for exchange. And you know, it doesn't work for entrepreneur necessarily because I tend to think about the way that we make our livelihood and currently our livelihood involves being compensated with that neutral tool of money. And there are these options as well. And when those options are in play, we can then decide intentionally whether this is a decision we want to make in that direction or not. And that way we support each other more. Kel: Like, as far as like whether I need to make money in order to pay my bills or whether I can offer this as a gift, like in that kind of economic model. Helen: Yeah, or exchange something else with it. So whether you can accept something as a gift, that is a big one. The big one is really hard to accept the gift, especially when we've attached value to it in our head and that value seems high. It's very difficult to receive and it's less difficult to give. But these are ways that we then sort of build up that community in kind of a subversive way that is outside of making money. Again, not withstanding that we still need to make money to survive. You did touch on something that I think is important to note about there are all of these pop-up markets happening and that that is becoming quite saturated and I feel the desire to mention that it is so fun, there is just so much dopamine in starting a thing. And sometimes, we don't need to start a thing. Sometimes we need to find the things that are happening and then join them because there are other people who have started it and they need more hands. Kel: I've been thinking a lot about that since moving back and leaving the volunteer opportunities that I was working at when I was more rural and coming in and being like, where do I wanna spend my time and energy? And the default is always I want to start this new cool thing. Helen: Yeah. Kel: Not because I want to have ownership of it or because I want it to be mine, but because I love planning s**t, like it's really exciting for me. Helen: Yeah. Kel: But I did my research and talked to a number of different community members who are doing work in the same kind of space that I'd like to be doing and they were like, oh do you know this person? They could really use some help. Or have you heard of this farm? They could use some volunteers for sure. Or there's this program happening that is very well aligned. Maybe you should check that out. And it was like, this is a little bit of come down. I mean like, okay, my gifts aren't needed here. But also like having worked in spaces that are volunteer run, you always need more hands. Always, always, always. And joining those communities and seeing the cool work that's happening is definitely the same kind of dopamine hit as starting your own thing. And sometimes like in an even more rewarding way. Helen: Absolutely, it can be. If we can put the ego piece aside, right? Because it's not that your gifts are not needed. Your gifts are needed. And sometimes starting a new thing isn't the best decision for the whole of the community. Sometimes, sometimes it is, sometimes it is. Break: You're listening to the Novitas podcast with me, Kel Smith. And my guest today is Helen Tremethick, a business strategist for established yet weary entrepreneurs tired of compromising their ideals and vision to play the game of capitalism. Helen's insight helps folks like me that struggle with existing insight while also trying to tear it down. Helen wrote an amazing piece for the first issue of the Novitas magazine, which is sadly sold out, but you can follow on the socials and on the Novitas website to stay tuned as the next issue is coming together. You can find Novitas on Instagram at @NovitasMag and online at www.Novitasmag.com. Now back to the conversation. Kel: So we're talking about the difference between capitalist, criticism, say it properly for me again. Helen: Capitalism critical. Kel: Yeah, capitalism critical, I was saying it the other way around. And then people wanting to do the work to move to anti-capitalist. I feel like sometimes a lot of people fall into this habit of like, okay, I need to work for myself. I don't wanna work for other people. And then, or even people saying, I think the work that I wanna be doing isn't producing widgets anymore. I really wanna make art, which is awesome. Like that's great, that's needed. It's a form of self-expression that I think everybody needs to, you know, but then we get to a point where every, like there is a super saturation of people making art. And I think I feel this a lot social media culture as well. We have a lot of people saying the same thing in different ways and the message gets saturated and I just I feel like maybe we've reached this point of like independent creation outside of the capitalist paradigm but there's all these people doing the same thing and for me personally it makes me want to pull back a lot. Like, a lot a lot like on the bad days like why am I even doing this there's so many other people doing this work in this space. I am just contributing to the noise, I'm contributing to the clutter, what I really need to do is pull back and just maybe just listen more instead of speaking so much. Helen: Right. Kel: I don't know if that plays into it at all. Helen: I want to offer this. And this is so very not business coachy. It is not a thing that people are supposed to say as business coaches. They're not supposed to say, maybe you make your money elsewhere. And maybe you make your joy separately from your money. Because the whole idea of being an entrepreneur has been really tied into do what you love, do what you love for a living. But here's where I'm getting stuck, especially recently. I think that this idea of the entrepreneurial landscape, the freelancing landscape of doing what you love for your living is actually just another perpetuation of living the American dream. It is just another perpetuation of capitalism as a whole. You as an individual, you can make your money, live your life, do this one thing and have it all. And all you gotta do is sell it more. All you gotta do is sell it more. All you gotta do is show up, say the right thing and then people will come and I don't know that that's true and I got I gotta say I've been doing this work in one iteration or another for 13 years and this one idea has thrown me for a bit of a loop because now I want to say what if what if we make our money because we need it in the ways that we can make our money and not put so much pressure around what that money means or where it comes from or how it's made and we find our joy where we find our joy. In microjoys at work, in macrojoys in you know that beauty of creation. And when they overlap, to notice and be super grateful, but not to consider it a failure if they don't overlap. What if we can pull ourselves away from this idea of the way I make my money must be the way that I fulfill myself. Kel: As a rule of anti-capitalist behavior, right? Like, in order to be anti-capitalist, you have to do it this way. Helen: Right? Kel: Yeah. That's very insightful, thank you Helen. I'm just asking all of the questions that I'm struggling with. Helen: Well I love that we're talking about it because these are questions that I struggle with as well. I recently got a part-time job, like a J-O-B, where I have a supervisor who has a supervisor who also has a supervisor. I am not a union employee, but it behaves a lot like one because there are union employees in the county. I'm a county employee. I love it. I love it. And in order to get this job, I had to make a resume. I had to submit the resume online. And to go through the interview process... Kel: ...which all probably felt kind of icky. Helen: Oh my gosh, I had to prepare for the interview. Why am I a good person for this position? What experience have I had that would add to the culture of the space? It did feel icky. It felt like, it felt like kind of a failure. It felt like taking a step backward because I was supposed to have made it. I was supposed to have not needed the part-time job and there are other factors that this part-time job fills for me, namely my need for community, which has been entirely online for 13 years and I have felt a real lack of physical provides that and that's a beautiful thing and in all honesty it also provides a regular amount of money in my bank account that I don't have to worry about and I don't have to market for and I don't have to produce content for that I then have to edit that content and then write something that's so piffy and witty that people are like, oh, I want to buy her services right now. I don't have to do that. I just show up. Kel: And it also facilitates your ability to continue doing this other work that you love doing. Helen: Exactly, exactly. And how beautiful is it that I can then go and get some money elsewhere so that I can continue doing the thing that I love. Kel: Even if it doesn't make as much as I need if it's not fulfilling your needs, like in all the ways that we talked about. Yeah, I think that's really beautiful. And I love the permission to be able to do that. And also, hopefully for folks being able to find work that they do find meaningful. Helen: Yeah. Kel: And it's funny because a lot of typical questions that gets asked in like anarchism 101 groups is, who's gonna pick up the garbage and who's gonna do all the jobs that nobody else wants to do. But in reality, like when you find a job you love... It's... you love it for many different reasons. And sometimes it's picking up garbage, right? So hopefully for people who are on the fence about that kind of stuff and listening to this, that the permission to go and find something that you find meaningful for paid labour does not mean that you're a capitalist. Helen: It doesn't. Kel: You know, pig or anything like that. It just means that you're surviving in a system just like everybody else. Helen: Absolutely. Kel: Hopefully, while also building the new structures that allow us to operate outside that system in the future. Helen: Yeah, where it provides you options to make more intentional decisions. And I would also like to offer, we've been talking a lot about chores in our household because I live with a pre-teen, and we talk about how they say, oh I don't like doing that, and I found myself saying the other day, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter whether you like it or whether you don't like it. It is a thing that needs to get done. And when we wrap it all up in, well, I like it, well, I don't like it, it puts a whole lot of pressure on the task to serve you in a particular way. And sometimes the kitty letters just needs scooping and it doesn't have to be enjoyable or not enjoyable and we don't have to be like compensated in ways that we're like, oh, that was worthy and I feel worthy. Sometimes you pick up the garbage because you want to live in a clean house and that's it. Sometimes you just scoop the litter boxes because they were gross. Kel: Yeah. In some ways the chore conversation is such a big one for me ebecause I think a lot about contributing to the collective as well. So just because you don't find a task individually rewarding, can you get some gratification knowing that you are contributing to a whole where you are helping meet the needs of other people as well. Right? So yeah that's a big one that comes up a lot in our unschooling world because there is these different branches of unschooling and some of them tend to be hyper individualistic where I say to my child, no you don't have to do anything you don't like. And that's not serving them I think, and it's definitely not serving me. Helen: Yeah. Kel: Because then I'm picking up everything and then I get strained on, right? So this idea of unschooling as a community activity where we're all taking care of each other. So if I say, can you come do this thing with me? And I know you're not necessarily going to like it, but it's really helpful for me. And then like, here's the prime example: Yesterday I got home after a very long day of being out and I had to do grocery shopping and we're trying this thing to do grocery shopping by bicycle, which is great except someone stole my bike trailer. Oh no. Yeah, which is unfortunate. I hope they needed it more than I did. So I have a basket. Helen: That's very generous of you by the way. Kel: There was some choice words when it happened, but I have a basket on the back of my bike and I have a basket on the front of my bike and I can put two on my handlebars so I'm pretty sad but if we need more groceries as we did yesterday sometimes I need my teenage son to come with me so that he can carry some stuff as well and he doesn't want to do this at all right this is not his idea of a fun Friday activity biking down to the grocery store when we could be going in the van, right? Really we could but he didn't complain at all yesterday about it I just asked him and he said yes and I asked my younger son if he wanted to come and he said no and there was no argument he just came. And it was really beautiful and I hope maybe deep inside like a representation of like him providing assistance to me in a way that I needed so that all of the family could have groceries Helen: Yeah, and seeing value in that work not for what it serves how it serves individually, but how it serves as you say like the community collective in this case your family and that is a really beautiful way of thinking about, you know, these tasks. Well, who's going to pick up the garbage? Well, it, it doesn't necessarily have to be your top skill. So when we're talking about business. I don't want to forget that we're also talking about life. We're talking about life. Don't want to forget that we're also talking about business. We're essentially talking about how does my ecosystem work in a way that is most favorable? And this is where the permaculture piece comes in, where these are all of the pieces of my ecosystem. How do I get the most yields while meeting the needs of all of these pieces? And that is a very, very personal solution. And very disappointingly, it is not a fixed solution either. It is fluid and flexible, just like every ecosystem. So what we want to do instead is learn how to resource ourselves so that we're caring for our nervous system, so that we can make better decisions for, and not just reactive decisions. So we care for our nervous systems, and then we consider the whole, and then we make our decisions intentionally. And when we're doing that, then all of a sudden, money doesn't play into it as much. It doesn't have as much weight and that is so anti-capitalist. It's not that it doesn't have weight. Of course it has weight. We live in this system. But we can pull out and see what else there is available. Kel: Even just to acknowledge that there are all these other pieces to it, which I think for the most part, when you're stuck in that nine to five grind that is leaving you unfulfilled and unsatisfied in all the other ways. You don't even notice that those pieces are there or required or missing or attainable, you know, absolutely. They don't even come into play. Helen: Until somebody says, Hey, actually, do you want to do community food prep on Sundays because the food thing is driving me bonkers and I'm eating crap all week. And then all of a sudden you've created a little community of people who are prepping food together and then you're eating better throughout the week and then you have this connection piece even though you're in the nine to five there's still there's still ways that you can serve the other pieces in that ecosystem so the nine to five becomes just a thing Kel: And to tie it back right in here the activities that maybe are not our favorite activities become more enjoyable and more fulfilling right because we're doing them in a different way. Helen: Exactly. So there are ways, not around, but through those pieces in us that are stuck or hesitant or resentful about. Because one of the things that comes with being an anti-capitalist more often than not is resentment about the fact that we live in a capitalist society where like I hate it here and I want to just opt out altogether. Kel: This is not how I want to live my life! Helen: Right and the only way out is to pay your way out. The only way out is to make so much money that you can now afford to opt out and most of us, slash all of us, aren't going to get there in that way. So how do we game it so that we're going through these pieces that we usually resent, but are being rewarded in other ways? Kel: Yeah. We've been chatting for a while, kind of non-stop. Is there anything else that you want to talk about, Helen? Helen: Oh, so off the top, I want to say sometimes the decisions that we make are not the ones that have the latest footprint. They're not the ones that are necessarily the most anti-capitalist or divest from the system. Sometimes they're just the ones that make it easier today. And sometimes that has to be okay. And sometimes, sometimes it won't be. Sometimes it'll be like, actually, I'm gonna work a bit harder and I'm gonna make a better decision here. But gosh, we can't do this work from a place of guilt. And we can't do this work from a place of judgment. We need to come back to our self-compassion. We need to come back to caring for our nervous system. And if we're gonna be making our money from a nine to five, then that's just, that's okay. It doesn't mean that you failed. If you're gonna go and get a job on the side so that you can continue to do the work, that's okay, you haven't failed. It's not a step back. It is actually a step forward in a clear decision and an intentional decision that makes your ecosystem work better. Outro: Thanks for listening to this episode of Novitas with Helen Tremethick, a holistic business coach that helps entrepreneurs navigate the business world in late-stage capitalism. If you'd like to learn more about Helen, you can visit her website at www.helentremethick.com. That's www.helentremethick.com. I hope you've enjoyed this conversation as much as I did. If you'd like to support the podcast, you can become a paid subscriber on the Substack at Novitas.substack.com. Thanks for listening. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit novitas.substack.com/subscribe (https://novitas.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2)

6. 

   11 Sept 2024

   Beyond the Garden: Permaculture as a Way of Life

   Like many people, I learned about permaculture as an approach to help me understand how to grow food in a more sustainable way. But Liz’s approach goes way beyond the garden. Liz Postlethwaite (https://lizpostlethwaite.co.uk/) is a community artist and permaculture designer who has blended her love of both to create a unique course teaching permaculture principles to artists and creatives. As Liz explains, permaculture is all about creating regenerative systems, and the tools and framework provided by permaculture are applicable to different areas of modern life. Join me for a wonderful conversation with Liz learning about permaculture, it’s provocation and principles, and why this might be the perfect moment for permaculture to be more widely used as a tool for regeneration at a time when we desperately need positive action and change. Liz mentions a few other permaculture designers that I wanted to link here as well: Tyson Yunkaporta (https://experts.deakin.edu.au/45373-tyson-yunkaporta) is an indigenous skolar (Apalech clan (Wik) Lostmob Nungar) working with Indigenous Systems Knowledge and collective Indigenous inquiry methods inflected with complexity science to resolve global existential threats and issues in regenerative design responses to crises. Looby Macnamara (https://loobymacnamara.com/home/) is a permaculture teacher, designer and writer who lives in Herefordshire with her partner and two daughters. Together they host Applewood Permaculture Centre, an education and demonstration centre. Dan Palmer hosted a permaculture podcast called Making Permaculture Stronger (https://makingpermaculturestronger.net/) about regenerating permaculture design process together. The podcast saught to uncover core ideas about what permaculture design process is and bring them into open with a spirit of collaborative inquiry to reveal and walk down deeper and more powerful pathways toward life. You can support this project and podcast by becoming a paid subscriber here on Substack. If you have a person or project who you think is doing really awesome work in their community, please recommend them by emailing me at kel@novitasmag.com (mailto:kel@novitasmag.com). TRANSCRIPT (please excuse the typos) Intro: Welcome to Novitas, a podcast exploring stories about living outside the capitalist paradigm towards collective liberation. My name is Kel Smith and my guest today is Liz Postlethwaite, an artist and permaculture designer living in the UK. While most people associate permaculture as a land-based practice, Liz has a unique approach of teaching her love of permaculture design through a course designed specifically for artists and arts organizations. She talks about the provocation of permaculture design, using systems thinking, taking inspiration from the natural world, and of course the permaculture ethics. I love this application of the permaculture principles outside of agriculture, and Liz's deep knowledge around the topics of sustainability, resilience, extraction, and regeneration come through in this wonderful conversation. I hope you'll enjoy. Kel: Hi Liz, do you want to take a minute and introduce yourself and maybe talk a little bit about how you came to permaculture practice? Liz: Well I always find it hard to introduce myself because I'm not quite sure what I do really but my name's Liz Postlethwaite and I'm based in Manchester, just north of Manchester which is in the north of England, in the United Kingdom. And I came to permaculture design, think about four years ago. I did a PDC about 12 years ago, a permaculture design course. I came to it on my gardening perspective. And as we'll probably talk about today, my practice as a permaculture designer is really around art and creativity. I'm an artist by trade, I'm a performance maker, a theatre maker. So it's been about bringing together permaculture design, which is originally a land-based design practice and a participatory art practice and trying to let them understand what those two things look like when they come together. Kel: Right, so I know permaculture as a practice can be a bit confusing for people because as you say, it starts very much as a land-based practice or gardening or growing food, kind of focused around that for most people, but then also covers a lot of different topics in areas. Can you give a brief primer on what permaculture is for you? Liz: Yeah, I mean, I think it's interesting because a lot of people do come to permaculture design thinking it's like just a land-based practice. And actually, historically, it was never intended just to be a land-based practice. And that's how permaculture design started to emerge. But actually, when Bill Mollison was exploring the ideas around permaculture design, he was acutely aware of the fact that he, in an industrialized culture that he was part of, had become disconnected from a connected way of being with the land. So actually what he was really interested in was, how can we live... Hhe used the word sustainably, but I know sustainable is a bit of a funny word now... How can we live our lives with the least impact on the planet and in a way that's connected to the planet? So I think that thing of people seeing permaculture design as a land-based practice, it is, but that's just one tiny part of what it is. It was always envisaged or envisioned as a way of designing all interactions that humans have. But I think what's interesting is for a lot of people, they come to it from food growing, because as soon as you start to grow a little bit of food, you realize that everything's interconnected. Kel: It's so true. Liz: So for a lot of people, like for me, food is, trying to grow food or growing food is a gateway to understanding the interconnectedness of things. Kel: Right. Liz: Yeah, does that answer your question? Kel: Yeah, for sure. So we know that permaculture is definitely more about growing food. Do you want to talk about some of the other parts that permaculture contains or touches? Liz: Yeah, so I think it's quite interesting. So I think one thing that's quite interesting to define is that people talk about like permaculture, like permaculture is this fixed thing that's set in stone and I find it a bit weird when people talk about permaculture as a noun. Because to me, permaculture is a verb, permaculture is something that you do, and it's a set of tools that help you make regenerative things. So in that sense, the provocation of permaculture design is about making regenerative things. And if we take regenerative to mean things that are connected or reconnected with the living systems and the kind of pulse of life that exists on this planet. If we're thinking about regenerative in the sense of practices that reconnect us with those life-giving processes, then that's the provocation. And I think it's really important to frame as well that it's only our industrial cultures that have lost connection to those life-giving processes. For millennia, that's how humans have lived on the planet and there's still many cultures and cultural practices that have got continuous tradition and continuous practice of being connected to living cycles on the planet. And I think it's interesting because then people often say well permaculture design is about appropriating kind of cultural traditions or knowledge that doesn't, that isn't ours to appropriate and to me if permaculture design is doing that then that's not permaculture design because that's not an embodiment of the permaculture ethics. To me, work share, Earthcare, People Care, Fair Share, to me permaculture design is about me from an industrialised culture recreating ways of being that are connected in a way that isn't about appropriating or taking other people's practices or other people's stories or things that aren't mine to take. Kel: Right, I think it's so important to be able to identify what is, you know, traditional ecological knowledge, what is appropriation, and then what is also like us learning how to live in a way that is more harmonious with the earth and that doesn't have to be appropriation, right? Liz: It's quite interesting, I mean I find it quite, I'm not really in a position to talk about this because of kind of my background, you know, it's not my knowledge or my place necessarily to talk about ownership of indigenous wisdom or different cultural practices but I think there's got to be a place... I really like hearing Tyson Yunkaporta talk about it and Tyson Yunkaporta is a permaculture practitioner and is really interested and really kind of deeply knowledgeable from a personal perspective and a personal heritage of the interaction between permaculture practices and traditional ecological knowledge and where those two things meet and where those two things potentially clash with each other. But we've got to find a way and we've got to find a way to be together and we've got to find a way to respectfully nod to other people's knowledge in a way or ask or have conversations with people. And I suppose that's about community-ship and about relationships and kind of how we share knowledge but don't own knowledge. Kel: Right, yeah. Liz: And I think there's sometimes this tendency that of like wanting to own certain knowledge without honoring the cultural practices that historically run alongside that knowledge. And that's really, really challenging. Yeah, it's just so complicated and a lot of the times like when you work, a lot of the creative people, because a lot of my work now is I've developed a permaculture design course for artists and creatives and for a lot of people when they start on that journey the question is, becomes a kind of design process of what does it mean wherever you are as an individual to be indigenous again, to be indigenous to place and I'm like a British person living in the north of England with Irish heritage. So how can I even start to think about what that might mean? Kel: Right, for sure. Liz: You know, so it's really, really complicated. Kel: Yeah. Can I ask a little bit about the course that you've developed? Liz: Yeah, sure. Kel: That's really interesting. So we talked a little bit about the fact that like permaculture is more than just food and more than just growing food and even more than one's connection to the land because it's also about connection to people and space and heritage and ancestry and living life in a more regenerative way. How does that work for artists? Do you focus on the food side of things? Because I know most PDCs are very specific around food, right? So how does that play out? Liz: I find it really interesting because when a garden is regenerative, we know what it looks like. It's kind of easy to know what it feels like because it's thriving in a certain way. I always use the example of woodlands. If you go into a woodland or a forest, a natural woodland or forest that's thriving, you just can feel what the regenerative process feels like in that place and it's hard to put a finger on what it means but if you go to a garden that kind of got those processes in place but we know that it's not just our gardens that need to be regenerative. Our hospitals need to be regenerative, our schools, our transport systems, our absolutely everything and that's like more complicated. It's easy to say what a regenerative garden looks like or easier but what does a regenerative school look like? What does a regenerative cultural and arts practice look like? And I'm not a farmer. I grow food. I've always grown food most of my adult life. But for me, after I did my permaculture design course, what I became really passionate and interested about was how can I take this learning to have most impact within my niche? Kel: Yeah. Liz: And my niche is like the arts and the cultural sector, so what might that mean? And what I was really interested as well is that my arts practice has always been like a participatory arts practice, working with people, working with communities. And a big part of permaculture design is about kind of embracing the abundance of edges, like we know in ecosystems that often the most abundant and the most dynamic ecological relationships happen at the edges of ecosystems or where one ecosystem meets another. And a lot of participatory arts practice is operating in the same spaces socially. So for me, there was like a natural crossover between the permaculture design practice and participatory arts practice. And then I was really interested that I felt that the tools of permaculture design can bring a lot to arts practice, but I also permaculture design is a process of imaginative observation. So I think there was this really good crossover. So then I got really interested in, well, if there was a permaculture design course for artists to help us design arts practice or arts organisations, what would that look like? Because I'm often really aware that artists making work or arts organisations make work about the climate or about the environment in ways which is damaging to the environment. So they make a show about the climate and everyone's come there on a plane and they bank with a bank that's invested in oil and they use plastic and so I'm interested in like that contradiction as well that actually it's really important to say those things and have those conversations, but like actually what's important as well is the structures that support those conversations. So the Permaculture Design course that I run, there is a curriculum for the Permaculture Design course, there's certain things that you have to cover, but all of those things are then about reflecting back about that deep knowledge of the natural systems that you get from a permaculture design course and thinking about how that might inform your arts practice or the organisation that you're creating or the way that you're working or the stories that you're telling and what like what would generative practices mean because I always find it really interesting. We were talking about forest gardens and I always find it really weird when people say, oh a forest garden is a permaculture garden. Well it might be but it might not be because if everybody is exploited to make the garden, well there's no people care there. And if the materials are kind of extracted from all over the world, there's no earth care. If the garden is not accessible, there's no fair share. So it's kind of like a big part of permaculture design course is about learning ways to enact the permaculture ethics. And in that sense, what I think is really interesting about the permaculture ethics is they're really closely aligned to the kind of ethical or cultural ideas that sit at the heart of most indigenous cultures. And that's partly to do with the research and the way that Bill Mollison himself acknowledged how deeply indebted he was to those cultural classes and cultural knowledge, but there's something in those ethics which is about the essence of humanness in the context of a living culture. Kel: Right. That's really cool. I'm interested in this idea of taking the permaculture design principles and then applying them to different sectors beyond agriculture and growing food because it really does balance this idea of, you know, theory and praxis where sometimes I know a lot of people that come to permaculture design are looking specifically for like how do I grow better food or how do I do whatever I'm doing in a better way and that's very, you know, tangible. And then there's also a lot of discussion around the theory behind how do we live in better harmony with the planet and with each other and all that kind of stuff. So it's this cool kind of balance where you can take these ideas and then find practical ways to implement them based on whatever you're working on, wherever you are, whoever you're working with. So that's really cool. Have you heard of anybody else taking that idea of taking these principles and applying them to different sectors or different areas? Liz: Yeah obviously there's kind of really established permaculture practitioners like Luby McNamara who are looking at like people in permaculture and she was like one of the pioneers of kind of taking permaculture tools and looking at them within kind of social contexts. And I think there's kind of a growing interest in actually there's more possibility to this and we might originally envisage there to be. Break: You're listening to Novitas, a podcast that explores stories and systems about living outside of capitalism. I'm speaking with Liz Postlethwaite, a permaculture teacher and designer, about exploring the foundations of the permaculture system and how it can be applied to how we design and live our lives. Liz was a contributor to the first issue of the Novitas magazine, which is now currently sold out. However, the next issue is in the planning stages so keep your eyes open for more news on that issue coming soon. You can follow along on our website at www.novitasmag.com. Now back to the conversation with Liz. Liz: I think it's quite interesting though, because when you're thinking about permaculture design, you're thinking about systems, ecosystems, and you're thinking about wholes. And I think before I did permaculture design, my life was like, it was like compartmentalized. Kel: Yeah. Liz: It was like, this is where I'm an artist, and this is where I'm this, and this is where I'm that. But the more that you understand about the living world, the more that you understand that wholes are messy and entangled, complicated and intertwined. So to me, I couldn't have a permaculture garden if I wasn't trying for all other parts of my life. And of course, if we are working in organizations where everyone's burnt out and no one's paid properly and like we're extracting creativity and ideas from people, then they're extractive practices. And so I think the challenge of the regenerative for us in the positions of great privilege that we live in, a privilege which is supported by other people's suffering, it provokes us to ask really challenging questions and show up to answer them honestly and in ways that are not defensive. Kel: Right. That's an easy one to fall back on. It actually flows really nicely into the next question I have listed here. You talk in the magazine specifically about permaculture ethics. And for me, that aligns really well with this idea of post-capitalism. Because I think, as you mentioned, the ways that capitalism extracts in every sector is very much in opposition to what permaculture ethics might look like? Liz: This is not, this is my opinion. To me, permaculture design is anti-capitalist. You know, they're opposites of each other. And so that's why I find it really curious when people say, oh, you know, I've set up a, I've moved from Manchester to Costa Rica and I've set up a permaculture farm and and what the process is are all in contradiction to the permaculture ethics. Kel: Right. Liz: So I think that's why to me the ethics are really a really kind of powerful grounding compass as to... I don't want to say if something's really permaculture or not permaculture. Kel: Right, but maybe the varying degrees of which we might consider it a permaculture practice. Liz: Maybe it's better to say whether something is regenerative or not. Like there's loads of... I don't know if it's the same in Canada, but there's loads of ads on the TV now in the UK for like, there's a company that makes oven chips in the UK, right? Kel: Okay. Liz: The oven chips come in a plastic bag and they're in the freezer at the supermarket. And, but the advert is "we use regenerative agriculture". Now they might be using regenerative agriculture, but it's not a regenerative whole. So I think that the permaculture ethics almost invite us to look at the whole and to understand the whole and to try and understand balance. And if you look at the permaculture ethics, to me, the massive problem trouble that we are in is an absence of those ethics. Kel: Right. Do you want to talk a little bit about what those ethics are? That's the people care, earth care and fair share, right? Liz: Yeah. Kel: So what do those mean? Liz: So just to go back to very quickly, so permaculture design, the provocation at the heart of permaculture design is to create regenerative things using three different elements. The first element is to take inspiration from the natural world. And by association, that also means take inspiration from traditional ecological knowledge. The second provocation, the second part within it is about systems thinking and thinking of systems design and thinking from the perspective of the whole. And the third part is about having an ethical basis. And the permaculture ethics are central to the permaculture design process. And so and what's quite interesting about that is that it's easy to take inspiration from nature. Or to try to. It's easy to try to live ethically, it's easy to try to do systems thinking and systems design, but it's hard to do all of those three things together. And there's no other there's nothing else that makes that suggestion that maybe we need to do those three things together. So the ethics are really central and the ethics is this idea of Earthcare, people care and fair share, which is the third ethic or future care is often used for that third ethic as well. So it's how those ethics are kind of centered within the design process, I suppose, and how they ground things. And a really good example that I often use is the difference between biomimicry and permaculture design. And people say, well, what's the difference between biomimicry and permaculture design? Because biomimicry is often systems thinking and biomimicry is taking inspiration from nature. But if you're using biomimicry, they presumably often that shoe is still made in an exploitive working condition probably by children and it's made out of unsustainable materials whereas the aspiration would be that the permaculture ethical basis would prevent that from happening. Kel: We've talked a little bit, I don't know, would you consider permaculture design part of an environmental movement or does it kind of transcend beyond that? Liz: I don't know, I mean I suppose what I like about permaculture design is that it's a really broad range of people using it. I would say that my permaculture design practice has been closely aligned to environmental activism but I don't think that's true of everybody who is using permaculture design necessarily. So I think that's quite a personal thing probably in terms of how people are using those tools. I would say it is an environmental practice. Kel: Fair. You mentioned a little bit earlier about using the word sustainable. And I think in environmental movements and permaculture as well, there's kind of this flurry of words that people use like sustainable or regenerative or resilience. And what do you think about the difference between those words and how when you're using permaculture design to look at different systems, where does it move from sustainable to regenerative? Liz: So I think what's really interesting about sustainability is that sustainability is interrelational, all right? So the way I like to see it, if you had a line, extractive is a line going down because you're always taking things and so the resources that are available just dwindle and become less and less and less and less. And that's what's happening or has happened with our extractive practices on this planet. To me, sustainable is kind of a flat line. So sustainable is about the continuation of something. So there's two different challenges with that. Number one is that if the planet is already really extracted, what are we sustaining? And the other problem is that if you're talking from like ecosystems perspective or ecological perspective, and nothing is consistent, there's always shocks within a system. So if you've got a sustainable system that's flat and then it suffers a shock, it drops down a bit and then it drops down a bit next time. So it's the regenerative processes in nature that allow a sustainable system to be resilient because the life-giving processes mean that the system can recover from shock. And that's like, I find it really weird about the way we use the word resilience because we say, oh... because resilience is about interconnectedness and it's about being in relation with things. And we say, oh, kids need to be resilient. They need to be able to recover from shocks. They need to be able to deal with bullying because they won't be resilient otherwise. But when you look at resilience in terms of true ecological systems and ecological processes, things are only able to be resilient because of relationships with other things. Kel: Because they're supported. Liz: Yeah, but within capitalism, resilience is a personal responsibility. And it's something that we say that people should be able to do on their own. So to me, that's the big difference. And actually, the reason that sustainable is a challenging word for me is what we need to be thinking about is about regeneration, but also kind of restorative processes and healing processes and not just restore healing processes for natural world but by association for ourselves as part of that kind of complex living planet. So to me when people embark upon like a permaculture design, the permaculture design course, that little thing that we've just been talking about, about these like graphs of like down, that's extractive, this is sustainable, this is regenerative, this is what resilience means, that is like such a light bulb moment for so many people because it makes people go, oh my God, like so much of what I've been aspiring for or what I've been doing is just so far away from where I want to be or where I need to be. A really good way of describing it is a way that my friend or colleague is a regenerative farmer in North Wales. And he often says, think about a person and think about a person who you really value their relationships that might be partner or your child or a friend and just think about like how you feel about that relationship and how important that is to you. And then think about how would you feel if they describe that relationship as sustainable, right? And how would you feel if they described it as regenerative? And there's something about that. The proposition is very different and there's something dynamic and beyond our control about the regenerative. And I think what's really interesting as well is that you can't make regenerative. You can only hope to create the context in which it can make itself, because there are infinite things in the incredible wild world that are far beyond our understanding or our control. I think part of this, these little steps that permaculture design has helped me make or helped me take, and I hope it helps other people take as well, is about, um, how we create structures for ourselves that allow us to embrace the wildness of the world. And by association, the unexpectedness of regenerative processes and that's really hard when the capitalist culture wants us to believe and modernism wants us to believe that the world is a fixed point and that progress only happens in one direction. Kel: And that we could control it. Liz: And that we could control anything! I suppose for me one of the things about permaculture design as well... so I did my PDC and then I did a diploma in permaculture design and I just feel like if now is not permaculture's time, when is it gonna be? Do you know what I'm like? And I think what's really powerful about permaculture design is you don't have to go to like, obviously I teach permaculture courses, so this feels like a little bit of a, but I've got like a book on my desk here, like right next to me about permaculture design. You can read that book and you're a permaculture designer. Permaculture belongs to, it doesn't belong to anybody, it's a community of practice. In that sense, it belongs to everybody and it's something that we can all contribute to and participate in and it's not perfect and some of the hierarchies that exist and in the, I was going to say the real world, the rest of the world are being replicated in permaculture design and we have to keep calling those things out and keep challenging those things out. And some of the kind of cults of exceptionalism and personality are being repeated. And again, like we have to keep calling them out. But the reason I continue with it is because I haven't found anything better. Kel: Right. Well, and I think, again, it's not the fault of permaculture or the design process or any of the ethics or the provocation. It's more about the implementation. Right. So ensuring that if you're interested in learning more, find good resources and make sure that those resources are people who are embodying those those ethics as well. Liz: Yeah. And also about aside from all those critiques, which are really important and I'm like more happy than anybody to jump into those conversations and like amazing people like Dan Palmer. Dan Palmer did so much through his Making Permaculture Stronger podcast, having these conversations about criticism and kind of opening that conversation. But equally, regardless of the imperfections, I would rather see a hundred people using permaculture imperfectly and a hundred people doing nothing because they're worried about it not being perfect. Outro: Thanks for listening to the Novitas podcast. I'm Kel Smith, and I want to thank my guest today, Liz Postlethwaite, for sharing her deep knowledge and passion for permaculture and exploring the possibilities of what we might accomplish extending permaculture principles into a post-capitalist society. If you'd like to learn more about Liz, you can visit her website at lizpostlethwaite.co.uk. That's L-I-Z P-O-S-T-L-E t h w a i t e dot co dot uk. If you're feeling moved to support this podcast, you can become a paid subscriber on the substack at novitas dot substack dot com. You can also check out our website at novitasmag dot com or follow on instagram at novitasmag. Thanks again for listening. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit novitas.substack.com/subscribe (https://novitas.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2)

7. 

   30 Aug 2024

   Grassroots Community Support During the Current Housing Crisis

   In this episode of the podcast, I chat with Meghan Sheffield, a friend and co-conspirator living in Cobourg, Ontario. For the first issue of the Novitas magazine (https://www.novitasmag.com), Meghan shared an intimate and beautiful article about her experience working with her community to support a growing unhoused population in her hometown. Meghan and I talk about a lot in this episode: grassroots versus agency support, de-stigmatizing what it means to be unsheltered, unpacking her experience providing on-the-group support, the impact of the rising costs of living on the current homelessness crisis, and more. We mentioned a few different organizations in Cobourg and Guelph that I wanted to link: Green Wood Coalition uses a community model of caring to walk alongside people living with poverty, mental and physical illness, drug dependency and disability. You can find out more about them on their website at https://www.greenwoodcoalition.com (https://www.greenwoodcoalition.com/). Hope House Guelph increases the well-being of vulnerable adults, youth and children through the provision of immediate relief and ongoing support. They operate and advocate on the belief that poverty, food insecurity, inequality, health and community are all interconnected. You can learn more about Hope House on their website at https://www.hopehouseguelph.ca (https://www.hopehouseguelph.ca/). You can support this project and podcast by becoming a paid subscriber here on Substack. If you have a person or project who you think is doing really awesome work in their community, please recommend them by emailing me at kel@novitasmag.com (mailto:kel@novitasmag.com). TRANSCRIPT (please excuse the typos) Intro: Welcome to Novitas, a podcast exploring stories that show us how to live outside the capitalist paradigm towards collective liberation. Sometimes when I talk about these stories, I like to think of them as potential solutions to the problems of capitalism. But other times, certain stories don't feel like solutions at all. In the case of the homelessness crisis we are currently facing in late-stage capitalism, it's hard to imagine what a solution might even look like. Homelessness is a complex and multifaceted problem that is tied intimately with mental health, financial inequality, class struggle, and more. My guest today is Meghan Sheffield, a friend and co-conspirator living in Coburg, Ontario. In the recent issue of the Novitas Magazine, Meghan shared a beautiful and contemplative piece about her experiences supporting unhoused members of her community. Her piece honestly shifted my perspective. And I was so excited to speak with her about her story directly. We shared a wonderful conversation together, but only later did I realize that the audio didn't record very clearly. So I ask your forgiveness, dear listener, but I couldn't bear to re-record. And I think when you listen to our conversation, you'll understand why. Kel: So, Meghan, thank you so much for being here and taking the time to chat today. Did you want to start off by giving a brief introduction of who you are and a little bit about your piece in the magazine? Meghan: Yeah, sure. Yeah, thanks for having me. My name is Meghan Sheffield and I am a mother of three and also like a lifelong writer and that has been the bulk of my like fairly freelance heavy career has been in writing and I started off in newspaper journalism like right at kind of a moment when I was like oh wait newspapers are really dying and since then have yeah had the opportunity in so many different ways to explore, research and talk with so many interesting people in a variety of mediums. And yeah, I live in Coburg, Ontario, just right on the north shore of Lake Ontario. And it's a small town. It's about 20,000 people. It is also the county seat. It's the biggest town in our region. I would also just sort of situate the place where I live because it's so relevant to my piece in the magazine. Yeah, because of so many of those factors, the housing crisis has hit really hard here as in so many other places. And I think that here where I live, it has been a real... It has signaled major changes in the community, even because this isn't, you know, visible poverty, people visibly living unsheltered is not something that was common before just a few years ago. Kel: Yeah, for sure. It's really interesting. I think so we just relocated back from Owens Sound down to Guelph. And when we talked to a lot of people about, you know, what what's going on with the city, how things changed and everybody, everybody mentioned homelessness as a critical thing that has changed within the last kind of five years of us being gone. And I think you're right, because it is visible in a way that it wasn't before. Like you knew there were homeless encampments around, but they weren't front and center. You knew there were people that were unhoused but you didn't interact with them on a daily basis. So it was largely an invisible problem and now has become a visible problem. And it's interesting because coming from Owen Sound, there's also a homelessness problem there. And so I think it's just kind of showed me that it really exists everywhere. I think reading your piece in the magazine really opened my eyes to the fact that this is everywhere and it's happening in a lot of our towns and cities. These days, it's much more of our friends and our neighbors and people in our community that aren't able to afford housing anymore. Meghan: Yeah, that's right. Yeah, it really is. It's people who are from here and people who I went to high school with and my, you know, my neighbors who used to live on the same block and now don't have housing. Like it's it's really, it's close to home. And I think there is this mythology that people are coming from elsewhere and that often comes up like if there's like discussion of increasing resources or increasing services, people will say no, no, it will attract people. And it's like - We don't need to worry about attracting! There's plenty of people with needs right here. Kel: Yeah, for sure. Meghan: And actually, it's important, I think, to dispel that myth by reminding ourselves and each other about the connections that people have in the place where they live. For sure. I do, and just as you do, people do not move forward because there's a promise of, you know, a new shelter opening up elsewhere. They overwhelmingly, human beings, want to be with the people whom they know and they trust and they have that network of relationships with. And that is overwhelmingly the case, regardless of your housing status, I think. Kel: Yes, for sure. How did you first get involved with supporting unhoused folks in your community? Meghan: Yeah, well, I should say that the support that I do or participate in is is totally like non-professional. It's totally on it on a neighbor-to-neighbor basis. Kel: That's the best kind in my opinion. Meghan: Yeah and I'm just like happy with that like this is just not um, it's not my industry and it's you know and I understand that there are yeah there are people for whom this is both their paid work and unpaid work and you know there's just like a whole... you know, it's just really important that there be structures and safety nets that are well funded. And I'm not necessarily part of that. You know, and so I would say, like within my family, I have family members who do work in kind of like community building and you know across class and community outreach, street level outreach and harm reduction right in my family and so you know it's not stretch for me to connect with some of the same folks but a couple of years ago there was a sort of like a political campaign within the municipality to - it was called Shelter in Peace - to ask the municipality to have a moratorium on enforcing bylaws against camping in light of the fact that there weren't enough shelter beds. And so that and that actually, just to back it up a little bit more, that stemmed originally from a roundtable meeting, a community-wide conversation, kind of like a listening circle where each person in the room got to speak on the topic, I think it was on the topic of homelessness. And folks who were unhoused came, and folks who were housed, you know, there was like town councillors and Green Party members, and I don't know, it was just like a pretty wide cross-section of the community who turned up together to talk about this and talk about, some people had ideas, some people had experiences, some people had fears and campaign to advocate for Sheltering in Peace came from that community conversation. And during that meeting, I was sitting there and, you know, listening and it was actually at that meeting one of the people who was currently unhoused sharing his experience. I realized we went to high school together and he's sitting beside a town councillor who we both went to high school with. Kel: Right. Meghan: And there was something like there was something just like really, yeah, it hit me, of the things that we discussed. And yeah, the connection, the real human connection, the way like, oh, we all started at the same place, same high school. And yeah, it was so hopeful to all be in the room together and ideating that way. And also they came in a personal level. So that was a real gap, a gap in my experience of just like being in solidarity, you know, standing at a podium at the town council meeting, you know, next to someone who was like sharing her experience of being unhoused and yeah that was, I would say that that was like a pretty like critical turn of events. Kel: Do you remember who organized that meeting? Was it municipality or someone just interested in like, was it an organization that started the meeting? Meghan: Yeah, it was definitely not the municipality. Kel: Right. Meghan: It was an organization called Greenwood Coalition. My dad is actually the executive director so that same way it allowed listening and each person to have a chance to speak. Kel: I think even having everybody in the same room is such a rare experience, so that we can remove this kind of othering that happens. You mentioned having gone to high school with, you know, these were people, these were your peers. And when we think about people that are unhoused in our communities, we often do this kind of big "othering" where they're not us, they're not my friends, they're not my people, they're not my community, they're other people, right? So bringing it back where everyone can be in the same space and listen to each other means that we're breaking down those barriers of like this is a problem that I'm far removed from to like this is a problem that's happening in my community to people, to members of my community, right? Meghan: Yeah, that's so right and yeah in that timeline like between that to the very different spirit of a municipal council meeting - in between that, it was like a week or 10 days, a young man in the community who was unhoused died of a drug poisoning in a bank vestibule. And he was also someone I had gone to public school with. And there was a kind of like community organized grassroots memorial event held for him outside that bank with candles lit and so many people donated flowers from their yard to just decorate that space for him and it was a real... people speak about that loss and that memorial to this day. And so then, you know, that was again another galvanizing thing. It's like this is just so urgent, the need to address what's happening in our community and how it's like really affecting people's lives. And yeah, so that also, you know, the community kind of carried that into the council meetings from there. Despite all of this like real need, real emotion, real connection on the community level, the municipal response unfortunately was just not interested in trying to come up with real solutions. Kel: That's really unfortunate because you feel like when you get the community momentum at the bottom that the municipality kind of has a duty to respond to that, but far too often I find that they don't. Meghan: Yeah, it was hard and like, yeah, actually, and there was all of a sudden, again, like... Cobourg, Ontario is a very small place and in the weekend leading up to the municipal council meeting, there was all of a sudden like a fully funded Ontario Proud, which is like a far right movement, an Ontario Proud video campaign about "Cobourg wants to legalize homeless encampments". Kel: Right. Meghan: Then like, I don't think that was like representing a local movement of far right Ontario proud members. I think that was, yeah, that was being funded from outside the community. Kel: Which is really unfortunate because they were obviously trying to set a precedent that like the the municipality can't possibly let this pass because then it will snowball into... Meghan: Absolutely yeah and just like really stigmatizing videos that were used and like money, real money. And so as a result, walking into that council meeting, I've never before since seen such a presence of police. It felt like it was armed. There was police on the landings of the staircases leading up to the council chambers. I've never seen anything like that before since, like I say. Like it was so, which really sets the tone of what's, you know, the stakes of this conversation, like dangerous, rather than coming from a place of care or the human experience that is, you know, it is real and happening. Kel: Yeah, and what a divergence from the previous meeting that where everybody had a chance to share and listen and be part of the conversation to one, whereas heavily policed. Meghan: Yeah, literally. Yeah. Kel: So since that meeting, obviously the municipal level government, are they doing sweeps? Is there homeless campments allowed? Is it just largely untalked about? I mean that's what it feels like in Guelph, where people talk about it and complain about the homeless people and the municipality kind of tries to provide like, certain options for people where they're, I think I saw last year where they like would tack a sign up to the tent and say, we're gonna remove your tent tomorrow. You need to, you can go to this place to get support or this place to get to support, which is may actually be what they need or maybe not what they need. Meghan: Yeah, so that summer in 2022, that is exactly what the municipality started to do was, yeah, they like sort of upgraded their notice to vacate signage that they would tape onto tents and to include like phone numbers of resources. Kel: Right. Meghan: So, and at that time, the like survival camping that was only, you know, like just like a tent or two scattered here and there rather than, um, like a true, like kind of encampment with many tents. And in about a year ago, in August 2023, there was a pretty large scale closure of a boarding house that made a number, a larger number of people, you know, suddenly unhoused or unsheltered because, you know, some people who didn't necessarily pay rent there often, you know, would use the shower there or that kind of thing. So all at once a bunch of people were unhoused simultaneously because of a closure that was like a partnership with the Health Unit and the Cobourg Police, just basically they closed and boarded up this home, which is still sitting empty a year later. And at that time, Cobourg experienced its first larger scale encampment. And in the time since then, that encampment has moved to the former, it's like the grounds of a former youth detention center. And so it's provincial land that continues to be Cobourg's largest encampment and seems to be like, you know, not clear like who's responsible, who can do what, you know, what can be done about this because the town of Coburg, you know, parks bylaws, for example, don't apply on that land. Kel: Right, because it's provincially owned. Meghan: Yeah, that's right. And yeah, there's discussion whether the Waterloo ruling, which is like an Ontario-based charter case in like Waterloo closer to your area where it was decided that like because the land where folks were camping was the property of the same level of government responsible for providing adequate shelter which they weren't doing that the people were entitled to camp there. Kel: Right. Meghan: So yeah I would say like there actually is there's a lot of discussion about this. You were saying Guelph is not too much discussion. Kel: Right that's really not fair. I think there is probably is a lot of discussion and there's a lot of things happening and I do know that there's some amazing different agencies that are providing support for people so I don't want it to seem as though nothing is happening. I'm just not very tapped into it and I find colloquially when we're talking in our communities often there's very hush-hush conversation and not like solutions focused conversation. Meghan: Yeah I mean I feel like in Coburg at just about every level of, you know, community conversation, whether it's like the media, whether it's in politics, whether it's like the briefings from the police chief and the police services board, it is a constant topic of conversation. Oh, and among like the vigilantes, like there's been a real like citizen vigilante. Kel: Like we're gonna end the homeless population by kicking people out kind of vigilante? Meghan: Yeah, like Facebook groups in which people are monitoring the behavior of people who are unhoused or like, it's hard to just like, feel sometimes like a faith in humanity and a faith in the ability of communities to respond because you see that like some people are literally building community and finding friendships and finding purpose in like, hate. Kel: Yeah, and it feels like when it's not hate against this group of people, it turns into hate against this group of people or this group of people or this group of people. And it's just kind of never ending. And I am feeling disheartened hearing this, mostly because I would like to think that our communities are shifting into a space of more caring instead of more hatred, but I don't know if that's true. Meghan: That's a tough one. It has become... I know what you mean. It feels like both are happening. And, you know, I turn to Joanna Macy's Active Hope a lot and you know she describes her vision for like the Great Turning like yeah it's gonna be like there's gonna be painful resistance and there's gonna be like building of you know new capacities for life. Dealing with these challenges for sure. Yeah and so both yeah it is both. Break: You're listening to the Novitas podcast, and today's guest is Meghan Sheffield. We're exploring her experience providing support for unhoused folks in her community in Coburg, Ontario. As Meghan has mentioned, Coburg has been hit hard in recent years, as so many other towns and cities have, with rising housing costs, little support, and growing stigma against the homelessness crisis. Meghan shared her story in the first issue of the Novitas magazine which is now sadly sold out. Stay tuned for the second issue coming out later this year. You can get updates through the sub stack at Novitas.substack.com or on Instagram at @NovitasMag. And now back to the conversation. Kel: So, as far as your involvement has been, and I think it's just kind of been like on the ground providing support where it makes sense to, what kind of strategies have you seen succeed and what strategies have you found are not so helpful? Because we have talked a little bit about the municipal level and some of the agencies that try to provide support for people who are experiencing homelessness, but maybe missing the mark. Do you know what I mean? Meghan: Yeah, I think like the best strategies are like are the closest to the ground. And absolutely there's a role and an important one for agencies that are, you know, receiving good funding from government sources. And I think that even those agencies benefit from relationships with community members. And particularly people with lived experience, you can help them to help those agencies to offer what is really needed and what will really help them to meet their own goals as an agency. And you know, ideally improve the daily lives of the folks who are most in need. So, and obviously that's, that's going to change based on your place and based on the situation that people are in and whatnot. Kel: So I recognize that it's unfair of me to say what solutions are working because it's going to be different for different people, right? Meghan: Yeah, I feel like the things that, the things that work best are the things that care for all of the humans involved. Because even, you know, even like community groups are, like, when you're working together with other people, challenges arise and people go through things. And I think, like, I think what doesn't work on any level is for people to put their own needs and humanity to the side. I think the stuff that works best is the most sustainable and that means it is the actions and organizations where you can say, yes, take a break. You totally deserve to care for yourself. And we've got this and that's okay too because we got it you know we got it all. Kel: Right, because if it's not sustainable then it's not going to work. Meghan: Yeah, that's right. Yeah. And at the same time, like, I think to have seen the stage, like encouragement about how much bolder could we be. And sometimes I think what that looks like is, is being like, can I really find my like Friday night social joy in this harm reduction outreach? Like, yeah, that can that be where I like, hang with some pals and get that like good positive input rather than going, you know, I'm way too tired. It's Friday night. I don't want it. Kel: You know, I'm going to binge on Netflix instead. Meghan: Yeah. And so yeah, like finding, yeah, like what is, what is that like overlap of like self-care and community care and also caring like, I think part of that conversation that sometimes gets dropped like as parents, for example, is like where my self-care, my community care, I also have this middle part where I'm caring for a bunch of other people. Kel: Right. Meghan: And you know, and that's the case for like almost everyone, right? Where we have family members in need and elderly parents or whatever the case might be. So holding faith for that in the framework of finding like sustainable ways to like connect and move forward and not burnout. I think like avoiding burnout at this point, you know, a few years in for me and much longer for many of the people that I'm connected with. Like it's a long, it's like, I think that a couple years ago I was like, if, if the municipality will do this, you know, like I think I, at some level was like... Kel: We can fix it. Meghan: Yeah. And I think that we're on a really long journey. Like the housing crisis, as we were it's so widespread, the financialization, like the ways that people have to profit is a real deterrent to solving the needs people have. And so, yeah, and I just want to say the other piece that like I think gets forgotten sometimes in this conversation is like there's the financialization, you know, and then there's also the people who are like have been working basically like paid off a mortgage and now because of like the total shortfall of overall care in our society, they're now relying on their actual home to to retire and be able to like basically have care in their elder years. So now you're like an ordinary residential home is worth $800,000 or a million dollars, the stakes in talking about, you know, community solutions have totally changed for very, very ordinary middle and working class folks. And so it makes that it's just like another element. Kel: For sure. It changes the dynamic totally because the idea of affordable housing, like the idea of it is so unattainable at this point because of what's happened to the housing market. And for me who I feel really fortunate to pay a mortgage instead of paying rent, someday this house will be how I retire or how I support my kids or you know, all of those things. So you're right, we still need to, I need to make sure that my house maintains its value otherwise I'm out of luck like everybody else, right? Meghan: Right, because elder care is also financial. Kel: Yeah, for sure. Meghan: Yeah. I actually read a story about a local habitat for humanity project here that was a new build, and it has a really cool solar, like, it's a real sustainable build. And they were seeking families for this to move in. Residents for this for this project and the income level was like in the realm of $100,000 and a lot of folks were really mad they were like hey like how can Habitat for Humanity do this? and it's like and also that that project is making homeownership possible because there are people making that income that can't afford that homeowner Kel: Yeah for sure Meghan: So if the goal is for Habitat for Humanity to make home ownership affordable and accessible, the baseline has shifted so much. But like, yeah, it's not because Habitat is suddenly serving fat cats. It's like the whole landscape has shifted. Kel: And the price of building and yeah, and the mortgage interest rates and everything just shifts up. And it's funny because I, this conversation is a conversation I have frequently with people. But I hadn't made the mental link about how the, I mean, yes, it affects homelessness because we have more people experiencing homelessness with the rising house costs. But... Mghan: when there was like a shift all of a sudden to like rentals being then sold to us all to into home ownership because of the increase. Kel: Yeah, for sure. So there's quite a few different layers of the ways that it all interacts with each other. And you know, we talk about fixing the problem. And I think we'll probably see the problem get worse before it gets better if we see housing prices remain where they are, let alone get higher, which is also a possibility. And so as it goes with complex problems, there's not always simple solutions, right? Meghan: Yeah. And like as folks have been unhoused, you know, in the basically, in the immediate aftermath of the pandemic. Now, some of those folks, they're going on, you know one year, two years, three years, four years that they've been outside. And it just, you know, that just like increases the need for support and the type of transition they need into housing. And so like, it's not, yeah, even the solutions need to be like really long-term because what we're doing right now, like what we're accepting on a societal level about, yeah, just like more and more people are being moved outside into survival camping are into daily trauma, you know, just like in a survival state day after day after day. Now that's, you know, compounding like, yeah, it's got to be like an all hands on deck response to that degree of need and I think that a lot of the response that we see is like, "Oh no, the business owners are concerned about what's happening downtown". And it's like, what's happening downtown is people are in active trauma. And, we just like, we just need better tools. Kel: Yeah. And I hope, I mean, so I guess we can talk a little bit about some of the solutions so we end up on a positive note because it's been, it's a hard conversation to have for sure. And I know that there is... there are people out there doing really good work. The Greenwood Coalition, like you mentioned, is something that's local in Cobourg, and we've got Hope House in Guelph and other institutions that are helping provide support for people experiencing homelessness and then other institutions that are trying to rehouse folks as well. I know that we've got some like affordable housing builds that are happening, so repurposing old buildings and turning them into small units that are more accessible for people to at least make that transition from being, as you say, in a trauma response survival camping into something that's more stable. Do you have approaches that are taking place in Cobourg around that as well? Meghan: Yeah, I have seen here, as elsewhere, an increasing interest in like creative housing alternatives. So, you know, sleeping cabins is one that has been tried like at municipal levels in Waterloo and in Peterborough. And that, you know, there is this organization locally here that is continuing to try to put together the pieces, bring it before the municipality, you know, look at zoning possibilities. And there's also like a tiny house organization that would be looking at home ownership but on a very small scale. And so I think stuff like that, like keeping that, like just that conversation ongoing with municipalities and with like the, especially like at the staff level to like keep, just like keep putting forth ideas. And I will say like, I think that levels of government, like they would prefer, not not individual, but the bureaucratic system would prefer that nobody challenged the boxes. It's simpler. It's simpler to just be like, these are the options that we have available. And to just like keep bringing forward new ideas, different ways of looking at what housing can be and like, you know, housing that can be safe. That's obviously like a shared goal of everyone, but maybe can be more creatively made so that it meets the needs of folks at various points on the housing spectrum. I think like the other thing that comes to mind is like the power of group chats. Kel: Right. Meghan: I mentioned that like just really quickly in the article. But it's like I and I will say in my article, I feel like I use the word "I" a lot. And I was like, I've been like, ug, that's just like too much because, you know, I do not do very much as an "I", but I can only write as an "I". Kel: Yeah, for sure. Meghan: And so and I think that like there is power in the network of being able to connect and so I am part of a Facebook group, a WhatsApp group, and then also like various iterations of that among formal organized more organization-y work and then also just like a few people to say... What was a call I got this week? Someone said "hey do you know if you're if you're taking someone up to get their belongings from the jail do you need to like call ahead and make an appointment?" or "can you just like drop in there and right pick up two people from the food bank i'm dropping them off but i can't stay right stay drive them home", you know it's like something as small as that... I don't know, I don't think that that's like a capital S solution but it's a type of example that I think, I don't know... I feel like we're still in the middle of the story, but I feel like it's gonna... that type of like close contact with each other, with my neighbors, with folks who are unhouse and folks who are housed. You know, that interweaving is the way that we can at least have like maybe better eyes to see capital S solutions with. Kel: Right. It's foundational. That's the human connection part of it, being human centric in our solutions. So, okay, I got one last question. How do you feel that doing this work or being involved in this community has changed your perspective or your life? Meghan: Oh, I feel like a little bit verklempt. It is... What I feel, and I think that this article I wrote in the magazine was a really beautiful outlet for expressing this, is I feel myself to be so much more interwoven with the place that I live. And it feels like almost like on an interspecies level, because it's like, what we share, my neighbors, housed and unhoused, like is this environment. And, you know, one of the things I talked about was that there's like a cooler at the edge of the sidewalk, at the edge of my lawn. And that place is also a Monarch Way station. So it's a place that, you know, we have milkweed growing and wildflowers that are pollinator friendly, and we like signed an agreement that we wouldn't use pesticides. And then there's this little sign that comes from Kansas that says this is a monarch way station. And then this is like, you know, a box that holds a cooler, and in the cooler is like water and or Gatorade and granola bars. And sometimes in the winter there's like hand warmers and, you know, it's like this resource station is happening in the same real estate. And that is like, I also want to add the cooler is kind of a mutual aid project. It's not something that I'm just like individually funding, but it is because it's like on our front lawn, it is like, I'm the one, I'm the tender of that. There's this real interweaving that I find hard to put into words, but feels like really deeply experiential. And I hope that that is what readers will take away from the article. Like that is what I really needed to excavate for my own self. And I was so grateful. You know, like, I wrote it in a time of really present, active grief, and to be able to like... and they didn't have capacity to write anything but that and this was what I really really needed so yeah. I'm so grateful for that opportunity. Kel: Well I thank you very much Meghan like it was really beautiful um I think it was a really beautiful pertinent way for us to explore some of the really challenging issues around homelessness but also within the context of capitalism and individualism and like how we all personally hold this grief of the challenges that we're currently facing. So... Meghan: that's so well said. And like, I think that there's like a lot of there's a lot of beauty. You know, there's a lot of beauty in this world and to be found in relationships with others and that's also part of why I invited the text in the magazine that came from my friend Jess, writing about her experience being unsheltered and the connections that she made with the more than human world through those experiences. And yeah, that the way that we all can interweave with each other is like, it's still there. It's still present, like despite like so many walls that were sort of... that we're all... well you know the stigma is so real the fear-mongering danger of people who use drugs the danger of people who are homeless and and yet... Kel: They are people. Meghan: Yeah! Actually, I just have friends. Yeah I just feel like so grateful to you for like holding that space. Kel: It's my pleasure and I think um yeah the magazine is definitely richer for it so thank you very much for your contribution. Outro: Thanks for listening to this episode of the Novitas Podcast with Meghan Sheffield and me, Kel Smith. I hope you've enjoyed this exploration into Meghan's experience supporting folks in her community experiencing homelessness. I want to thank Meghan for bringing her story to both the podcast and the magazine in a time where we really need to have more conversations to destigmatize and support folks who are unhoused during this crisis. If you're feeling moved to support this podcast, you can become a paid subscriber on the substack at novitas.substack.com. You can also check out the website at novitasmag.com or follow on Instagram at novitasmag. Thanks again for listening. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit novitas.substack.com/subscribe (https://novitas.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2)

8. 

   8 Aug 2024

   Disability Justice and Art in a Post Capitalist World

   Maria Epp is an artist, a mother, and an advocate for those struggling with disability, both visible and invisible. Maria shares her art and writing online, also lending her energy to her local community in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Her journey has been one that many white settlers can relate to on Turtle Island: uncovering the legacy of genocide and oppression, understanding what it means to practice active anti-racism, and using this knowledge to reconnect to community in a time of hyper individualism that doesn’t always make space for disabled folks. Maria’s art in not only a tool for connection and storytelling, but for processing grief and exploring personal ancestry as well. You can find Maria's work and writing on Instagram at @MariaEppArt (https://www.instagram.com/mariaeppart) and on her Substack thehungryhouse.substack.com (http://thehungryhouse.substack.com) Maria’s art and writing is also featured in the first issue of Novitas Magazine and you can read her piece, along with others, in that first issue available at https://www.novitasmag.com (https://www.novitasmag.com). There are a few copies still available if you’d like to order one. You can support this project and podcast by becoming a paid subscriber here on Substack. If you have a person or project who you think is doing really awesome work in their community, please recommend them by emailing me at kel@novitasmag.com (mailto:kel@novitasmag.com). Thanks for listening! Notes: Maria’s mentioned Artbeat Studio and their residency program. You can find more info about Artbeat at https://artbeatstudio.ca (https://artbeatstudio.ca) TRANSCRIPT (please excuse the typos) Intro: Welcome to Novitas, a podcast that explores stories about living outside the capitalist paradigm towards collective liberation. Each podcast episode features a contributor from the print magazine, which you can find online at www.novitasmag.com. Today's guest is Maria Epp, an artist, a writer, a mother and parent living in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Maria lives with hidden disabilities and mental health challenges. Her art and writing are a part of her journey to unpack the history of ableism she has experienced within the context of colonialism, white supremacy, and capitalism. I feel honored to have been on part of this journey with Maria since 2020 when we met online as part of a unschooling community. Maria's work speaks to me on many levels, as a parent, as a white settler living in so-called Canada, but also as someone who is working to undo the narrative of colonial culture on a deeply personal level, exploring history and ancestry, and finding the pieces of our own lineage, the ones that have caused harm, but also the ones that can help us reconnect. Maria and I shared this conversation asynchronously, a different approach to dialogue that I really enjoyed. It allowed me time and space to consider her responses when thinking about the next question I wanted to ask. In a conversation centered around disability justice, it felt very liberating to adjust the interview format to meet our different needs. I hope you'll enjoy the conversation. Kel: So if you could start by sharing a bit about yourself, anything that feels specifically relevant in relation to your piece in the magazine. Maria: Thanks for having me on your podcast and for inviting me to join this incredible collection. I am really inspired by you. Yeah, my name is Maria Epp and I am a white woman from Manitoba, Canada. I have two young people, 14 and 16, and I'm married to Nathan. We've been on a self-directed learning journey for sort of like almost as long as we've had kids. And we've also been on a journey of detaching from or facing ableism and disability since before I got married actually. It's basically always been a part of our family life. I guess I wanted to talk about this topic of disability as it pertains to the future because I just need to see myself and others with more visible our humanities are all welcome and celebrated and you know it's not like an exclusive club that gets to quote survive. So that's kind of where I wanted to come from and I wanted to give a bit of background on how hard it was to be a mom with young kids and to you know struggle in building resources and community and some of the struggles that a lot of moms that I talk with struggle with and just envisioning. I mean, I don't come up with that many answers as it comes as it pertains to parenting, but I do start to build. It's just a very, very small taste of what it might look like to not be rushing off to a office job or some location far away from where all your people are. Kel: Yeah, for sure. Thank you. I think one of the reasons that I really love doing the magazine as an editor was that I was introduced to a whole bunch of amazing topics that I think about or on my periphery but don't always come to the forefront of my life because it's not something I deal with directly. So disability justice definitely falls into that category because I'm an able-bodied person. But I’m also like really aware and think it's really crucial. And we've talked about this before, that when we consider disability justice, specifically about like imagining in the future, there's this cool thing that happens where when we center people with disabilities and design systems and communities around those needs, we end up being super inclusive for even people who don't have disabilities and just creating like kind of better systems that meet the needs of more people. I wonder if it has to do because there's so many invisible ways that people are dealing with either mental or physical disability that we don't address. So when we build systems for our future that are more inclusive, we end up including more people than we maybe even originally intended to. Maria: Totally, Kel. This has really radically changed the way I see the world, the way that I walk through the world, move through the world. And so much so, like, every time I embrace and accept, radically accept myself more, the more I expect the world to also embrace and focus and center on not only my needs, but the needs of all sorts of disabilities. So we went to like a museum this summer and all I could look at was how is this space accessible? How is it accessible to children? How is it accessible for people with high sensitivities, people with mobility aids? Like I was just analyzing criticizing, critiquing, I guess, every aspect of the space. And I was overstimulated. So I was looking for places for escape and noticed that they did have a little quiet room where you could put a headphone on and block out the noise and stuff. Because even though it was a low lighting kind of environment, the noise level was pretty high because there was a lot of children. The disability justice movement like within disability spaces is a multifacetedness to it. And so if I have fibromyalgia and you are autistic and deaf, like you're going to have very different needs than I am going to have. And so there's no monolith of like, this is what disability means, you know? But I think in general, yeah, like when we're centering the needs of more bodies, more people have access to spaces, which means more, there's a richer way for us to all experience the world. Another example that like I don't really talk about in the paper, but I've run a community newsletter in Winnipeg here and we are like in a very low income neighborhood. And there's a high percentage of elderly who are often, they're kind of housebound and lacking like available like technology. So they are somewhat, one of the populations that this newspaper focuses on because we want to give them access to goings on, you know, like current events, community, you know, resources, phone numbers, ways to get their needs met. And so we do a printed version of the newsletter and it's the only one in the city and it's free. And so we basically say it's a low barrier access to community news. And I've never really seen it as part of disability justice except now I do because it is so like countercultural because a lot of the world moves to this digital online space, assuming we all have access to that and have money and have, you know, the technology brain that can like access the right pages and stuff. So there's a lot of assumptions there, which isn't always the case for all of us, right? I guess this is where intersectionality comes in because as a white body person, I go into spaces and see the missing, you know, how are my needs not getting met? And then I feel emboldened to often speak up or, you know, speak up on behalf of my children and like feel a lot of privilege to have my voice heard. Not realizing that the things that I'm speaking up for might not be what is needed in my community. So to be very cognizant of the needs of all people, like of all races. I guess that's what I'm learning from the books and the authors that I'm reading, who are primarily black and brown. And they're talking about how the disability rights movement centered white disabled people and the disability justice movement is about centering black and brown BIPOC. Where are their rights and their bodies not allowed to go? Where are their voices not allowed to be heard? And centering that as the most important voice to lift up. So yes, my needs matter. And I'm able to focus on them because often in an able-bodied, ableist world, sanest world, everyone who has any kind of visible or invisible special need is discredited and, you know, ignored. But even within those spaces, it's really crucial to uplift and center the needs of BIPOC. Kel: I love that it always comes back to this intersectional lens, even when, you know, we start from different angles that we always seem to come back to the same perspective that we can't just look at these different issues in silos, and we really, really need to explore them all together. So thanks for bringing that back as well. I wonder if you could talk a bit about how the role of art and writing has played into your journey as you've kind of gone through the process of uncovering all of these different issues and how, I guess that art has helped you process your own understandings, own grief, own place in all of it, I guess, and then how writing ties in as well. Maria: Thanks for this question, Kel. I love that I'm able to reflect on this a little bit before answering and go down memory lane because it revealed to me like 25 years of, I mean my whole life, but 25 years as an adult where art and music and writing and creative expression have tethered me, kept me grounded, helped me process incredible grief, incredible depression and anxiety and all those really intense emotions while it continues, right? Like the art and the processing, it doesn't make it go away. It gives a portal to place it, to let it live in its darkness, in its sometimes desperation. There it is, like you can see it, you can feel it, and it can live somewhere outside of the tangled mess inside of our hearts. Like this sensitive part of our souls that needs someone to hold us, that needs words, that needs like imagery to express what words can't express. And I think, I mean, there's a lot within abstract art that can do that because you can see mixtures of colors and shapes that represent so much more than a word could represent. And I think that's one of the gifts of art and writing and music is that you can speak your truth, you can find your truth within your creation, and not have to answer to anyone. You know, there's some freedom there. Break: You are listening to the Novitas podcast and this episode is with Maria Epp, who is a contributor to the print magazine. The first issue was released in June 2024 and has contributions from different people all over the world sharing about what a post capitalist society might look like. You can find more information about the magazine on our website at www.novitasmag.com. Now back to the conversation. Maria: I have seen art as a laboratory tool from an early age. Children have a gift of accessing their intuition without a lot of barriers in front. And art can do that, like for adults too, if we give ourselves the time and the, like if we remove our critical glasses that we have been trained into. One of the ways that I was able to start pursuing art as a career was a residency for six months here in the city that was called Artbeat. And it is focused on giving adults who are struggling with mental health a place to create. So they were given a small studio, they were given this group of friends that they would meet with every week and ask each other how there was just an incredible camaraderie there. And through that experience, which my husband pushed me to go to, I could even like reckon with my own ableism and start to just start to see how my life with depression specifically was not going anywhere and was something that I'm gonna have to navigate. And here was this incredible tool that I was drawn to that I could access community with. I could access healing and truth telling. Like I could access affirmation from the larger community. All of these things were incredibly life giving. And I don't think, I mean, we can access these things through like lots of mediums. But this kind of like self-expression is unique. I would say it's very quite unique in its intimacy level, right? And I'm just so, so grateful for that experience and the way that it's formed my heart and my beliefs and given me a vision for how we can be together as humans that we don't need to erase parts of ourselves to contribute, to be helpful. Yeah, it was transformational really. And that is still going on that program. If you ever wanna look it up, it's called Artbeat. Kel: Thanks, Maria. That program sounds really cool. And maybe I will go and add some links in the podcast notes for people who might be interested in more information. I wrestle with the role of art in our culture and and weird part of me wants to like to credit art as useful or think about it as not as useful as like more direct tools of action and I waffle with this regularly and I'm really not sure why. Because when we talk about art as a tool for processing grief or, you know, education, there's so much that art can bring out when sometimes words don't suffice, right? And I think art is such a cool tool for being able to connect to each other and to ourselves in ways that other mediums or other tools just don't allow for. And I really hope that as we move into like a post-capitalist society, art has more of a central role. Um, because when we move kind of the financial barriers of what it means to create art and, you know, having it tied to a monetary value, I'm hoping that we can kind of all see ourselves as artists and I guess just use art as a way to process our own grief or our own challenges as we transition into a post-capitalist society. And so I wonder kind of what role do you think art might play in that, in a world without capitalism and how does art help us move beyond our current state of capitalism? Maria: Whoa, that's a really huge question. Also exciting question and terrifying question because it's asking where do we as humans exist in this transformation? Because I don't see art and creativity as separate from being human because to be a human is to manifest, is to create symbols, create language, create a story really around what we are going through. Story is culture. And so then, yeah, you can look back throughout history and see kind of how story was used for harm, for good, and, you know, manipulated through powerful dictatorship, you know, because we create out of our emotions. And when that resonates with other people and connected and bonded and resolute to pursue whatever it is we're pursuing. And that could be a certain type of supremacy, or it could be a bonding around being oppressed and being the survivors. And how do we generate a feeling of wholeness and okayness within ourselves while under some kind of oppressor? I think I struggle with the idea that we are fighting for a future. I don't know why I struggle with that word because I feel like it's antithetical to what it means to be a human, which is to thrive and to be filled with wonder and joy and thankfulness for, you know the abundance that is around us. And so out of that kind of wellspring arrives like our desire to make more beauty and to give thanks for that beauty. Like there's a lot of generativeness to creation, obviously. It's the opposite of destruction. So I guess that's where I find it hard when we say like fighting for something new, which is actually a generative action. I guess I hear the word fight and I think violence, I think, you know, pushing back resistance. But it's a forward motion, right? Like you said, like it's a forward motion. We're pushing towards a future without these hierarchies, without these oppressive tools that are putting people in cages, putting ourselves in cages. And so that's incredibly positive, but also a part of human nature is to get comfortable and to get like accustomed to our cages and to the things that we're used to because we're very habitual and to think outside of the four walls that we've been trained in takes a lot of courage, takes a lot of risk taking and a sense of safety almost. Well, not safety as in like, I feel safe enough to risk losing all of this, but safe within ourselves, like I am worth and we are worth enough. We feel that worth is strong within us to fight and push against these encroaching walls, like encroaching on our life force. So I think as a creative myself, like who works in that field on a daily practice, I struggle immensely with maintaining a sense of self-worth against the tide that is coming against me, you know, thwarting that and like pressuring me into smallness, into quietness, giving up, depression, all of those things. And maybe the arts, and like I don't have answers, but maybe the arts are a way for us to link arms and to say we're not alone, we have each other and we are going to sing the songs together. We're going to dance the dances together. We're going to scribble on the walls. We're gonna like graffiti the walls together. We're like, we are gonna use our tools of creativity for resistance because we have so much love for each other. I posted recently, I said, are we at that tipping point yet? And I think we're all wondering and waiting and wishing for it. Like, when are enough people going to get fed up with business as usual, with the status quo, with pursuing the bigger dollars, the grind? Like, when are we going to be tired of it all, right, and see through it all? Oh, that is the ultimate question. And I do love listening to other, like, thoughtful questioners who are interrogating these systems and are like watching what's happening, like watching the resistance take place, the mobs, the protests, the graffiti, like the destruction on public property, the theft, like there is this outrage that is growing. And with the outrage comes: This is protest art, right? Like, this is, we're getting the message out. We're doing a rally cry and that's where we're going to unite. And then there's, there's when you move past that and you say you get to the other side where you have just met, like everything has fallen apart. It's dismantled. Then you start to rebuild. And what does rebuilding mean? Where does our culture making take place? And again, it comes back to story. What are our stories to tell? What are we trying to communicate to each other? Because art is just another communication tool. Like it's another extension of our language. You have seen a lot of my art that circles around kind of animist, indigenous, European thoughts and how did we live pre-Christian, pre-colonization. I mean, there was always oppression of some kind, but it was much more tribal. And we were once connected with the land and with the animals and with the spirits, especially seasonal spirits. And I really am fascinated by, like not just through a colonizer lens, like, oh, let's go back and take from our past ancestors. But I see that mystery and that intelligence with like the connection with the land as integral to our sustaining life force. And I have in the past tried to create art that reflects on that to hearken us back to that time, I guess. But I have to be careful because I don't want to realize a sort of white supremacy where it's like European romanticism, right? Like where it's like, oh, we all need to be witches and create ceremonies like we used to and bring back the old goddesses and gods. Some people are really excited about that. I don't feel as much inclination towards that. I definitely feel more inclination towards being on the land and the place that I currently am and letting the land teach me from where, not just me, but teach all of us. So I feel like we do need a rebirth. I guess I'm kind of against world travel. That is quite controversial, I'm sure. Yeah, I just really see the importance of like being rooted and grounded and not being hyper mobile and building your culture around the seasons, the foods, the animals, the life ways that are right here and letting your language come from that, letting your expression your creative expressions come from that. So that's how I envision the future. And that's probably why in my piece I wrote about the nettles because they do grow here, actually in my garden right now and I need to harvest them. And I guess that's where this countercultural revolution could be birthed from is not only just resistance, but of placemaking with the people that we are in proximity to who may not look like us, may not have the same ancestry as us. But it's like we get the opportunity to learn together almost from scratch. And just the last piece: I spend a lot of my time online and a lot of my art practice is dispersed through that medium. But as I think about the internet and the world of information, I do feel like it's very human-centric and it is not giving us access to learning from other species and I guess other languages. Like we spend so much of our time learning from other humans, you know? And it's not giving us a full picture of what it means to live on this earth. So maybe that's where you're feeling the pull away from creating more artwork and stuff. And you're saying, can we just stop? And can we watch and learn from the plants and the insects and the birds and the animals and let the creation that's already existing give all the knowledge and truth that we need and let's just rest in that. Outro: Thanks for listening to this episode of Novitas with Maria Epp. You can find Maria's work and writing on Instagram at @MariaEppArt and on her substack, thehungryhouse.substack.com (https://thehungryhouse.substack.com). If you'd like to read Maria's contribution to the magazine, there are still a few copies of the first issue left online at www.novitasmag.com (http://www.novitasmag.com). If you'd like to support this podcast, please consider becoming a paid subscriber on the substack at novitas.substack.com where I also publish additional essays exploring what it means to be alive in late-stage capitalism. My name is Kel Smith and it's been such a pleasure to share this conversation with you. If you're interested in contributing to a future issue of the magazine, feel free to reach out at kel@novitasmag.com. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit novitas.substack.com/subscribe (https://novitas.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2)

9. 

   18 Jul 2024

   Project Knotwork: Merging community and education through project based self-directed learning

   Lane Clark is an unschooling parent living in Marquette, Michigan where she and two friends started a very cool micro school called Project Knotwork. In this episode of the podcast, Lane shares her experience building out a community space that was designed specifically for self-directed project-based learning but in a unique way brings together community members, the arts, education, and a hardcore DIY attitude. You can find out more about Project Knotwork at https://www.knotworkstudio.com (https://www.knotworkstudio.com) or on Instagram @projectknotwork (https://www.instagram.com/projectknotwork/). Lane also shared her experience in the first issue of Novitas Magazine and you can read her piece, along with others, in that first issue available at https://www.novitasmag.com (https://www.novitasmag.com). There are a dozen or so copies still available if you’d like to order one. You can support this project and podcast by becoming a paid subscriber here on Substack. If you have a person or project who you think is doing really awesome work in their community, please recommend them by emailing me at kel@novitasmag.com (mailto:kel@novitasmag.com). Thanks for listening! TRANSCRIPT (please excuse the typos) Intro: Welcome to Novitas, a podcast exploring stories that show us how to live outside the capitalist paradigm towards collective liberation. My name is Kel Smith and I'm excited to be joined by Lane Clark to talk about Project Knotwork, a self-directed project-based learning space and artist collective in Michigan. Project Knotwork is an amazing example of folks coming together to build intergenerational community from the ground up. I hope you enjoy the conversation. Kel: Do you want to jump in and start off by doing just a basic introduction? Lane: Okay, so I am Lane Clark. I live in northern Michigan up on Lake Superior, and I am a parent to two unschooled children who are ages 13 and 10, and they have never attended school other than nursery school when we lived abroad. And we have been navigating creating community in unschooling since we returned back to the US six years ago. And one of the projects we landed on in the last year and a half is a self-directed project-based learning group called Project Knotwork, which is learners from ages 10 to 15, 16, gathering together in a shared space in an adult-facilitated but led by them session-based group learning. So they have a theme and they choose where the theme will go and what will happen next, and myself and two other adults facilitating and support them in that, as well as a group of adults that share that studio, that are adult creatives who come and give them support and workshops and tools, literally sometimes physical tools that we don't have, and also teach them skills that us as the primary three facilitators don't have. So that's my focus. right now with their self-directed learning, but of course every day is an adventure and we are figuring it out as we go. Kel: Awesome. Is it a full-time program or is it like a certain number of days a week? Lane: No, it's not a full-time program. It's one day a week. It's on Thursdays. We are very lucky to have a pretty robust, one, a very large homeschooling community in general where we are and a pretty robust self-directed community. wide range of meaning. Part of the reason it's only one day is because myself and other many other adults have been creating community in other ways for them throughout the years. So I was part of creating well a co-op of self-directed learners that does meet two days a week one time fully outdoor in the woods and one time indoor in a kind of space that's rotating and in borrows basements of churches and things like that. and spend time in community with a much larger group of people. There's, you know, anywhere from 30 to 50 people, you know, at our gatherings on that day week. Our library provides programming for our kids on Wednesdays where there are book clubs that are facilitated there. And then on Thursdays we're at Project Network. So they have a kind of, in my opinion, full schedule, obviously. Not full by school standards, but... But pretty robust. Kel: Very full by my family standards. Lane: By my personal standards, full too, yeah, for sure. Kel: That's cool. So why do you think that there is this community that's kind of come together where you live? It's Marquette, right? Lane: Yes, yeah, we're in Marquette. That's a really good question. And my friends and peer adults here, and I have discussed that over the years. I think there's a couple of reasons. Where we live is physically very remote. We don't have any city nearby. There's no suburban kind of access to a lot of resources that might be available in urban or suburban areas. So when people move here, or stay here, either move here or don't leave, it's a choice. It's like a very intentional choice. You can't kind of access things accidentally. So a lot of the way people live is very intentional, whether that be their schooling choices, whether that be them being. somewhat off the grid, whether that be them being very like, there's a lot of people very outdoor sport focused here. And that's what drew them here. So I think living intentionally is a common thread of people I'm in community with in general, even outside of unschooling. And the piece about unschooling, I think one, I guess, very practically in Michigan, there are very few regulations around homeschooling. So just to put it plainly, there's no testing. You don't have to register with your school district. There's nothing like that. So there is more freedom to do things in a self-directed way than there might be in other places In addition to that, there's a very Midwestern kind of like live and let-liveness happening here There are more pointed school at home homeschooling communities here There are more specifically religious homeschooling communities here for sure. But outside of that, there's a very eclectic group of kind of Everyone has maybe different motivations, whether that be that it began with, you know, kind of anti-establishment kind of libertarian thinking, whether that be more, I wanted a more natural rhythm to our day. And those people kind of come together and overlap in the ways that we share value, which is in children having autonomy over their time and over their interests. Kel: That's really beautiful. Lane: Yeah, that manifests differently for all these families. And honestly, in Knotwork, we're navigating that a little in terms of finding that my children specifically, who are part of the program, are very used to controlling their own time and having autonomy over it. We've also invited children that we don't know as well and have a more school at home experience, and they are very disoriented by that freedom at first. And so that's been a beautiful challenge for me as an adult to recognize like, Yes, we can form all sorts of loose and close bonds in community, but until we're in direct relationship with kids and learners, we don't really understand the impact of what they're experiencing at home and how we can learn from that and also how they can learn from us. So that's been a challenge, but also really fun. Kel: Right, yeah. And I think a lot of spaces that I've at least make or break a space. So that's cool that you've identified it and are dealing with it rather than trying to avoid it, which I think sometimes happens. Lane: Yeah, one of my co-facilitators, her name is Amber, she's an artist, she brings a really, and she's a former educator, and she brings a really cool, intentional, philosophical point of view to things that sometimes my overachiever doer brain doesn't pause on, and I appreciate that. We've had some interesting conversations recently as we've introduced new learners to our group who we weren't in community with previously. And they're all great and we've been enjoying it, but there is conflict is obviously a really wide ranging word. It's not actual conflict in terms of anything unsafe, but it's new tension. And we've been talking about like the way that having conflict can be a form of intimacy if you're comfortable with conflict. It can be a way to... really learn more about people because especially kids, when they're feeling some stress, that can come out as behaviors that in typical society, we want to stop or control instead of ask questions about. But when we do ask questions about it instead, you do see like a guard come down. It's obviously not exclusive to kids, but I think in the way we treat adult to child hierarchy in our culture, we don't tend to get curious, we get controlling. And that's been a really nice reminder to me of the way that conflict can actually bring connection everywhere in my life, not just- Kel: That's what I was going to say. It feels like a beautiful representation of a lot of the challenges that us adults are dealing with, definitely post pandemic. As we're all coming, we're trying to come together from different lived experiences and different backgrounds. So I think that's beautiful that you guys are exploring that with the kids, but also hopefully they can take that experience towards- the rest of their lives as well. Lane: Yeah, hopefully we all can. Kel: So you've got other like the is it a co-op? So you've got the co-op. What inspired you to start Project Notwork above and beyond what you already had going on? Lane: Yeah, I know. Sometimes I ask myself these questions. You know, so as my kids have gotten older, they've been able to be more specific about. what is and isn't working in our flow and in our daily life. And it's been less about, when they're younger, you're kind of intuitively trying to follow their cues. But now they have lots of language. And my kids, as we came out of the more acute phases of the pandemic, were asking for some more structure in terms of not like evaluation of learning, but just like progression. So initially this began as a very kitchen table project where they were gathering with the families of the two other facilitators one day a week, a specific day we were rotating houses and they were planning projects and completing them together. You know, Amber's children and my children built a board game that took them a couple of months. They did some building of marble runs. They did, you know, a few things like that took them longer, took them a little more planning but they really enjoyed. And then I just happened to be visiting a friend in San Francisco whose kids do attend school, but attend a project-based learning school. And as the universe does, you know, put weird things in our path that happened to be that in her education experience, my co-facilitator Amber was in relationship with the principal of that school. And we ended up in these conversations. And I started literally impulsive in the middle of the night when I don't sleep text to... Amber and Jamie, our other facilitator, who are just parents that have similar-aged kids as mine, are similar in philosophy, but also have way different skill sets than I do. And I just was like, here's the school I visited. Here's what they're up to. My kids are kind of wanting a little more anchor in some of their life. Is this something you think we could make? And they both just responded that night like, yeah, let's do it. And we started some asynchronous conversations over Google Documents. And then we ended up going to just, we took ourselves on a little trip. sleepover in the woods with our kids. And we got out a notebook, I mean, a literal pen and paper, and wrote our kind of our philosophy. We thought about who might be up for the invitation in terms of people in our community, thought about pricing, which I know that the capitalism conversation is part of what you're trying to get to, but how to make it accessible, but also affordable to. the space that we wanted as a dedicated space. That's one thing different from our co-op. We wanted a space that the kids could actually feel ownership over, because I think that's something that they miss from a school experience. One positive of school is just kind of this, like, this is our building feeling. And we also wanted to be able to have at least the goal of compensating ourselves for the labor of supporting our kids, but also other kids. Kel: Yeah. Do you mind if I ask, what was the, you've talked about it a little bit, but like, it sounds like there was already something going on. with you and these families, and then it took this jump into being something more structured and organized. And what was the motivation to get it from casual hangouts to something like here's our space, here's our community, here's our tuition prices, etc. Lane: My motivation personally was my kids to start with in terms of them wanting that. And while I in our family at least, the philosophy is just sort of it's year to year, kid to kid in terms of like whether we would investigate them trying school or not. I want to, I'm not anti-school in a dogmatic way. Like I understand why it exists. I understand why we need it still, even though we don't like how it's formatted. And I understand why there might be reasons some of my, you know, that either one of my kids, one in particular might be curious about it. And secretly, I want to make every opportunity for them to not feel that's where they need to explore their needs, if possible. And I won't stop them if that's what happens. So like, but what can I do? On the other hand, like to zoom out from my own micro, you know, situation, I wanted to test what it means to be physically together in a way that is less chaotic than our co-op. I'm not using the word chaotic negatively there. I actually think that it is like, you would probably love it and some kids hate it, but one of my kids in particular really thrives there. It is, we are outside. Everything is made into a sphere. There is a lot of shouting. There is world building. There is team making. There is, you know, I think it's really great for my kids. I think it's really amazing that, you know, that our co-op has kids up through 18 who are still doing wild play and I love that and both of my kids in their own ways despite their very different personalities. We're really craving some like start to finish completion and like understanding process and feeling a little bit accomplished in the way that I don't want them to be attached to school like a sticker chart, but I do think like as a business owner and as a person in the world like, skills I want to give them are not memorizing dates, but I do want them to understand how a project works and what goes into completing something. And building an accountability is different than building in like punitive structures around arbitrary curriculum. And they were definitely craving that without those words. Even just like legitimately asking, can we have like a workbook? And I was thinking, nobody really workbook. What is it that you want? What do they want? So the reason to take it out of our kitchens and bring it to something else was because I do feel that like anti-excellence is something I've like made up and I joke about a lot, but I'm also very serious about which is like doing things that are important to us, doing them to the best of our ability, but also doing them in front of other people when they're not fully done and they're not perfect. I wanted to invite other families that were in community with to do that. we have a lot of relationship here that has given Amber, Jamie and I trust from other adults with their children and I don't take that lightly. And I thought that my kids could benefit from that community and other kids could benefit from it and I've learned so much from it. So I guess the second answer besides my kids is just like having a more concrete exhibition of what unschooling is in our physical community for other people to see. and for other kids to enjoy. I think the space being physical was important. I also think, you know, part of our model that we borrowed from this school that I visited in San Francisco is that at the end of every session, we have a public day. Kel: Yeah. Lane: Parents can come, but we also invite the community. The building that we, the warehouse that we're housed in is kind of a commercial space for artists and creative people. many of them come and support our kids. People from the community have started to come. And that's another piece. Like sometimes when I think what can I do to bring the parts of school my kids might be missing into their life, it's, you know, you get these concerts or you get these science fairs or you get, and I don't again want that for arbitrary reasons, but it feels good to share something you've made. Kel: Yeah, for sure. I was going to ask you because it does look like you guys have a connection with the, excuse me, with a larger community. not just them coming to your space, but you also going out into the world and out into community to participate in different spaces as well. Lane: Yeah, you know, I have, Amber, Jamie and I have spent a lot of time learning about how to invite people to interact with us through this process. And we have like basically a standard operating procedure or like a set message to give to adults who want to come connect with our kids. That being said, we did make it an intentional part of that, that woods retreat we took ourselves on that we wanted to not be the only adults that our kids were connecting with. I think, again, when I'm thinking about what can I bring from school to real life that my kids might appreciate, I'm sure you feel that I may, well, maybe you don't, but I have like teachers that are very dear to me in my memory of like being someone that encouraged me or understood me in a way my parents didn't. I think when we're talking about capitalism or systems at... dismantling in a positive way this isolation of a nuclear family is really important. And that's one thing that school can in a way provide, which is like adults that kids trust that see them differently than their parents. I don't see my kids in every single way, and that's not my job. But I have to trust that there are other adults who can see them differently and who can bring other riches to their lives. So we live in a really, really cool community. There's a lot of people doing really awesome stuff. And I... was really glad that Jamie and Amber were on board to create a space and a group that would invite them in and that they would invite us to their spaces. So that was an intentional decision. And we've been blown away by the reaction of adults who interact with our kids. Even though I've been doing this for 13 years, even though I have a certain amount of confidence in my kids in general and in what we're doing as an experiment, You do get a little self-conscious sometimes being like, here's 15 weirdos. Come talk to them. Weirdos in the best way. But like, sure. It's like the homeschool stigma. Yeah, it is. Because they are absolutely not socially isolated. They are not, you know. kept from information. They're not like, there's many stereotypes. They do not fit. However, the weirdo. Like they're dressed like a Wes Anderson movie on drugs. Break: You're listening to the Novatos podcast. And today we're listening to Lane Clark talk about Project Notwork, a community-minded space for young people and creatives to come together and learn from each other. Project Notwork is about building community and experiencing alternative education outside the modern schooling system. It is designed to honor the needs of young people, breaking down barriers around adult-child hierarchies and dismantling the silos of education, life experience, and mentorship, creating a space built on respect. You can read more about Project Knotwork in the latest issue of the Novitas Magazine, a collaborative project exploring stories about how we might live in a post-capitalist society. You can find more about the magazine at www.novitasmag.com And now back to the conversation with Lane. Lane: You know, one thing I'll say that I notice very differently than some school kids I interact with is just like, they do not see adults as authority figures. They see them as peers and they're very comfortable asking questions and they're here. Kel: That's what I always say, like, whole school kids know how to talk to grownups. And I'm not sure if it's just because they don't have that, the relationships that are built up in a school environment, or if it's because they are weirdos, like that just. You know, I don't have those kinds of inhibitions, but it's really cool to walk into a space and have other adults recognize that the kids are comfortable talking to them and being a little bit taken off guard by it, right? Lane: Yeah, and it's great because one of the things that I learned, you know, I sort of mentioned that we made sort of a standard operating procedure of how to invite people to connect with us is I genuinely say in our internet when we email people and say, like, here's what we're doing. Here's how you could support us and support these kids in learning. I say, These children do not need a worksheet. They are not looking to be talked down to. They are asking. Kel: Not taught, right? Lane: They're not. They're not looking to be taught. They're asking for you to share something you love, and then they might have questions. And they're in. they're in community with adults who welcome their questions. And so they assume that of the people who join our space. And we've just had a really great string of people being able to introduce. It's like, I'm actually introducing some of these adults to being their own self-led learners and saying, like, Here's what I really love. I'm really into mushrooms. I really love theater. And then the kids cling onto that. Because one... Because as we know, when you see someone sharing something they genuinely are interested in, it's interesting. Kel: Yeah, for sure. Especially for our kids who may not know anything about that. Like this is their first introduction to it. So seeing them see adults be passionate about stuff encourages them to be passionate about it as well. Lane: Exactly. Kel: I was going to come back. There was one thing I was thinking about when you were talking about the relationship between kids and adults in this space and taking it, the intention of taking it out of your kitchens and into a more formalized space where the kids... as adults we are very close to our children but we also know that the kids often will come out of their shells in different ways when they're with different adults right and so that's another thing that I really admire about what you've done with project not work is create that kind of environment where it's not always the same parents and so that and find their space in different ways or find their groove kind of, their flow, whatever, in different ways with different adults based on interests and stuff like that. Lane: Yeah, I think that's been for me an important part as a parent. Even though I'm there every third week, I think it's really nice to experience my kids through another adult. One thing we do is take a video of them at the end of every session. We ask, What did you do today? They pretend to be annoyed, but I think they like it. And one of the reasons that I find it so interesting is who they're answering to. It changes how they answer. If Amber's asking, if Jamie's asking them, if we're asking them the same question, but it changes how they answer. And that's just been a fun little archive of their process, but also the kind of proof of like relationship dynamics being so... different and that being really important to like development of community and of connection. Kel: For sure. I wanted to also cycle back. You talked a little bit at the beginning about some of the challenges around. having different people with different homeschool experience or maybe do you have any kids that are coming one day a week like from the school system or is it all homeschoolers? Lane: No, so everybody at this point is a homeschooler. We have had, it's funny you bring this up, I had an inquiry from someone last week who has a childhood be like in the end of elementary here which is fifth grade asking like could they come if they got you know them out one day a week. I for me it's an absolute I've not been in the school system in the US, so I don't know how flexible that would be realistically. In my mind, it's completely reasonable, but of course I don't really know. There are kids, a couple of kids, we have 15 kids right now, who are very much a school at home family. They're on the curriculum. They're really great kids, and they've actually pushed us a lot to think about how we... Assume things first of all, which you know isn't usually that helpful as it turns out. And then how have we, in our own way, created this bubble for our kids, who are really self-directed learners all the time and are used to that? And then bringing in kids who learn differently even though they still don't go to school has challenged our kids to find new ways to interact with peers. I'm really grateful for that experience. And the other thing that we started doing was in service, so when the public school here is on a, you know, teacher development day or whatever, it might be hosting play days in our space. Of course, that's more kids in the space getting to enjoy it. It's a warehouse so they can be, of course, that we have standards of keeping it together so everyone can respect materials. But it's a messy space. We don't have to be precious about it. And I really appreciate that. But also because we. The three of us genuinely do not believe that self-directed learning is something for homeschoolers only to explore. We also don't believe it's only for children to explore. And it's been a mix of, we filled our play days every time and my kids will help facilitate. And it's been a really interesting experience for them, but also for me to think about wider ways to talk about what we're talking about that don't immediately have people turn off their brains because they don't homeschool. Homeschooling is almost beside the point of what I think you and I are talking about. It's some way to access what we're talking about, but it's not the way. And little things, like when we hosted the play day, that I didn't anticipate, which I should have. I know plenty of kids who go to school. And I went to school the whole time, and I liked it, or whatever I thought I did. They didn't understand what I meant when I said, This is the table where we eat. We're going to eat here. So for safety, we have allergy concerns and whatever. But whenever you're hungry, you know. Just go eat. And like many kids, including one who is genuinely my nephew, came up to me and were like, I'm hungry now. And I was like, no, no. And I, that's, and so now you can go eat, you know? And they were just like, right now? And I was like, really? Whenever you need to, yeah. Kel: That's funny. Lane: Or a child who we had on one of our play days, some sewing materials. And they were like, I don't want to do the other things. I just want to do this. I said, That's great. And she said, kind of like, Well, what if I just want to do this today? And I said, That's fine. And she said, What if I want to do it all day? I was like, yeah. That's okay. And you and her sister—she was just kind of like, What time does this end? You know? And I was like, Oh, I just kind of forgot that even on their days off. when you're used to a schedule, when you're used to things having an end time, when you're not actually used to being able to access flow state, which kids are actually so good at getting into. Um, you can't; you don't have that muscle built up. There's places. I'm happy to be in a place where they could try to build that up. Kel: Yeah, and I think even in our self-directed worlds as well, I think sometimes we forget that our kids are different in that respect, which some of them really love having that kind of structure of, okay, now we're going to do this, and now we're going to do this, and now we're going to do this. I have one kid in particular who, if I give him open-ended options, kind of freezes because it's too much for him. Lane: Right. Kel: And some people forget. I know a lot about the forest school where my kids go; they kind of have to remind them to eat throughout the day because they get so enraptured. Lane: And especially if you get enough kids with things like ADHD or something else, you know, they will absolutely cruise through eating for sure. Yeah. Kel: But yeah, it's funny, my youngest. Every time he goes to school, I'm pretty sure every day he gets there, and the first thing he eats is his chocolate granola bar before he does anything else. And I love that there are spaces that allow him to do that and are comfortable with him during that. Maybe someday he'll grow out of it. Maybe not. That's okay, too. Lane: Maybe not. Kel: One question I wanted to ask you is: How do you feel like the project has changed from those initial days of sitting down at kitchen tables and imagining what it might be like? become? Lane: Yeah, I mean, it's changed in a few ways. I think, you know, we just had dinner a couple weeks ago to celebrate our first year, and we're reflecting on that a little and planning for the fall. And I think it's changed in... a couple ways that are the most important. I mean, one thing I don't think we've had time to talk about yet is that there was a little pushback from some of our own community about what we're doing, not because they don't want us to do what we're doing, but because, for the reasons of the literal physical constraints of the space as well as our comfort level, we've decided on a numbered cap for our comfort level because we're facilitating alone each time and it can't include everyone. has been hard. I understand that from their point of view, but I also feel that it's been hard for them to be generous in understanding what we're doing as a test of trying something and that we are also just people with capacity limits. Kel: The feeling is that it's become exclusive? Lane: Yes. Yeah. You know, the other feeling being like that is, from our side of it, how do we continue to evolve? in a way that centres the children, centres their interests and their desires, but also as we want to make it more sustainable for us as facilitators who also are, all three of us work, all three of us parent, all three of us partner, all three of us whatever, that we have to plan ahead. And that doesn't always allow for real-time pivoting on kids' preferences. All of us have ideas all the time, and we're the people who actually brought this idea to fruition and are doing it. And it is our responsibility to try to understand how that might be received in our community. And I think maybe we didn't predict that well. And it's a reminder that in this world of having to create communities where it's not naturally encouraged and facilitated, we also have to respect our own capacity and limits and be okay with people feeling that way. And that's been. That's been. an important part of this conversation because while it hasn't, I don't think, overall harmed our community, it has just reminded us all that there are all these ways, even in this beautiful community we've built here, that because of capitalism and because of hyper individuality, we're pushed onto these islands and forced to make different choices, and that's been a little hard. And then the other, you know, piece about the pivoting is just that I'm not a purist in anything that's against my nature, and I just kind of try to put me in a box and I'll rip the box apart. But I think it's just an interesting exploration for us of how to encourage kids to be self-led even when they don't get to choose everything about an experience. And to me, that's really hard for some people who are in our physical community here, but also in the online community of unschooling, who are a little more dogmatic about autonomy. But it's also me trying to bridge the gap in the real world, where we're all looking for more autonomy all the time. and we live in systems and situations where we can't control every variable. Kel: So the balance between autonomy and living in community with other people—that's a lot of variables. Lane: Living in community with other people and living in systems we might not agree with but that we can't exit. Kel: Right. Lane: So that's been a little place for us to give ourselves grace. You know, we're planning ahead for the fall and the winter, and the kids give us input, but they can't control every aspect because, one, some of them may not continue, and two, you know, their interests change so much because they... are in a more fluid part of their lives. Whereas we're like, we have to also pay this rent; we have to also get people to agree to support us, and they have schedules. And then within that being, like, okay, this isn't exactly what you wanted; what can we make it into from here? Kel: Right. And that piece at the beginning that you were talking about as far as your kids having that desire to have that kind of continuous flow of a project that starts and finishes. And that can be challenging sometimes because you get halfway through the project and then you're like, I'm not digging this. I want to go in a different direction. But there are real values to seeing it through to the end. So again, the balance of autonomy and personal choice with the commitment to complete a project. Lane: And again, we do have some membership agreements that we send to the parents when they're looking into it and making a choice, which is about, like, we do expect engagement. We do expect participation. So if this is something your kid may not want to do, please don't send them up against their will. Because that is now, are there going to be days where a kid doesn't feel like doing something? Yeah, of course they're a person. But in general, we want it to be like a choice they made because those are the parameters of that session that we decided. Kel: Yeah. Lane: And within that, they could choose any topic they wanted. There was no limit. So that's where we're looking at the self-directedness meeting the project parameters. We did a session in the winter that was for 10 weeks, and half of it was making zines, and half of it was making a podcast episode. And the goal of that, obviously, was the project completion piece and also some skill building around those. There were some very specific technical skills there that they were working on. And when I tell you that we were down to the wire, on our expo day, where we were inviting the public, we had kids finishing their podcast recording. I'm uploading it to Spotify as people are going to get in the door. I'm printing out QR codes. We laughed about it later, a few days later, because we were just all sweating. That is actually how a lot of projects end. Kel: I was going to say that sounds pretty accurate in the real world. I feel like all your way through university, it's like, I have six weeks to write this essay, and the night before is when you're finishing it. So that sounds pretty accurate. Lane: Yes. And I think we were balancing. We had a conversation about it as adults later, where we were like, What's real? What's procrastination? And what's the process? Some of their procrastination was because they were genuinely not ready. And they needed to get to this point. And then they needed this time of pressure. And not trying to shame them for not being ready, but also trying to help them get a more real sense of time, which you don't have as a child, which is great in terms of building in plans for things going wrong, not affecting everything to be smooth. So we laughed about it because, on one hand, we were like, OK, how do we make our next arc not end like this? And there's some level to which it's always going to end like this. Kel: Yeah, for sure. And because you are creating an environment that mirrors the real world, And when the kids have that kind of control and decision-making power over the process, I guess the good kind of chaos is there, and the bad kind of chaos is there as well. Lane: They're there together, for sure. Kel: Yeah. Do you want to share one or two big highlights? Lane: You know, I think for us, the highlights have been, you know, some of the more, you know, maybe camera-worthy moments. We have all agreed that the kids and the adults like the feeling when you finally get to the expo day, where we get to invite people into our space physically and see what they made. Even when we're, you know, just talking about the chaos that leads up to it, when it hits three o'clock, which is the time we always start the expo and the doors open, there is kind of this just like joy and excitement of kind of like bringing someone into your clubhouse or getting to show, you know, getting to show like your project off. You really can't beat it, and I will just say that Amber and I have both reflected that our co-facilitator Jamie is like an expert at bringing us into that feeling after we might have just had a really chaotic couple of hours preparing for it. Jamie is just this like a living bubble, and she is just really happy and full of sunshine when you need it, and she just gives this really welcoming feeling and brings the kids into that. You know, that joy of hosting when you want to host—that feels really good. So those are just highlights for me of, like, you know, after our first arc, like having people in our space for the first time, after our solstice arc, where we did a very intentional, like community invitation where people really joined us, we had community come and bring musicians and do, you know, we did this really cool solstice spiral and just feeling really the kind of magic that can come from inviting people into a space, but not expecting anything perfect to happen to our most recent one where the kids created, wrote, created, and produced a play themselves, which was in a truly three-week period, which meant three meetings only, was so fun because their feeling of accomplishment was like coming out of them. Those are, you know, kind of scrapbook moments of accomplishment. But I think some of the other ones are just, honestly, for me. It's been really exciting to see my kids see me make a project and witness the work that goes into it. My paid work, which, you know, pays for our groceries, is sort of invisible to them. They kind of know what I'm up to, but they're like, She's over there on her computer. So having them be part of seeing Jamie and Amber helps me build something physical and also invisible in the community. One of my daughters makes the reels. They've helped me write the emails, you know, just kind of seeing what goes into again that real-life thing of starting a project and completing it and all the invisible work that goes into that, and then to connect to that is that it's given me a new type of relationship with Jamie and Amber. You know, I've known them both for a decade, but you get to really see the way their parenting that I always experienced kind of alongside them can support my children and our community as a whole. I actually just got goosebumps. It just makes me really proud of them. And also just reminds me, you know, when we were starting the studio, one of our themes was that we can mine our own community for gold. We don't need outside experts and, you know, fancy tools to make our own community better. We... We have been able to, you know, mind ourselves in that way and provide that support to our kids, but also, you know, all these other people from, you know, local farms, like, you know, local startups. We have had someone come and support them to make podcasts; someone taught them how to do hand lettering for zines. We've been able to just show our kids who's in community with them when we're out on the street, and they have all these ways to recognize other adults that have supported them. It just... I'm really proud of us for that, honestly. I'm from the Midwest, so it's hard to say that, but I am proud of us. Kel: That's awesome. If other people read your article or listen to this podcast and are inspired and interested in starting something similar, would you have any words of encouragement or, like, a laundry list of what kind to get started? Lane: Yeah. You know, I think I would say. At least from my point of view, where I am a non-shy introvert, which is how I would describe it, it's okay to start small. The year we spent doing this between our kitchen tables was not time wasted. It gave us a lot of direction, data, and confidence, and it gave our kids a really cool energy and starting point. So I think sometimes it's hard. You know, because even me, like, we have this project going and we feel really proud of it, but I look at people that can do it every day of the week and people that can serve 30 kids instead of 15. And you know, there's always a way to think I could do this bigger, I could do this better. But I think, you know, even when I was writing the piece for you, like literally these tables that we took sometimes off the side of the road are a metaphor for how simple it can be, and that the simplicity does not necessarily... correlate with the impact. I would also just say from a very practical level that, and the piece we learned a little bit from having to navigate within our larger community is that it's okay not to be able to make something that works for everyone. I do want to have a bigger impact on our community, and I do want to be part of a conversation in our culture about self-directedness because I think it has a lot to do with ways we're going to disentangle ourselves from systems that are harmful. However, I... I also know that right now, in this season of my life, my kids are my main focus, and that might not always serve the largest number of people or have the biggest impact on the community. And as people who want to be part of change, I think that can feel stressful sometimes. Like, am I doing enough for everyone? No, probably not. Kel: You never really can, right? But, right. And so, like that small number of people can sometimes be more meaningful. Lane: Yes, and like the learning I'm doing in this smaller way, I think it will be a way that I can support more people when my kids are more independent and maybe don't live with me or maybe don't need me in the facilitation of their day-to-day lives in the same way they do now. But I also want to not underestimate as cliche as this. Isn't it pains me to even say that we teach our kids that things can be different than we did? It is a butterfly effect of some kind. We do not know what kind. And we don't really know how big, and it's kind of irrelevant, and it's again about the anti-excellence of not needing perfection; I don't need my kids to have a perfect childhood. I don't need them to have, to love everything about not going to school. I don't need them to ever, to not ever go to school. For this to have been a worthwhile way to spend our time together, I do need them to understand how much I trust them to make choices for themselves. And... from that maybe affect other people that they want to affect and connect with. So being generous with yourself about your capacity when you're raising children is important. And there's a reason why we get to a point of being elders in community and we have more time for supporting people. But we're just like not there yet and that's okay. Kel: I feel that very much. Thinking about all the ways that I wanna get out into the city and I wanna be a part of things. also remembering that I have this very specific role that I need to fulfill for the next, you know, five to 10 years kind of thing. Maybe not that long, but for the time being, kind of holding my horses and remembering. Kel: Yeah, and it's funny because it's very much like, you know, I don't know about you, but in my experience, like a lot of the parents and families I've connected to through self-directed learning are absolutely former top students who... were very burnt out on their own life experience and don't want their children to have to experience that. And when we then start to unconsciously impose that perfectionism on the way we're doing this. Kel: Right, on self-directed education. Lane: Policy-making perfect life, that's a really tricky moment you find yourself in. So just giving people permission to do what they can with what they have and not feel inadequate about it in any way they need to. But I also would... The last thing, I guess, if it was a laundry list is just to not feel you have to do it all. Asking for help and telling the community whatever that means, that means that 50 people around you means that's a thousand people or whatever, what you're doing. I think I've been surprised at people's enthusiasm for it and what time and resources they're willing to give even if it's like they think it's nothing, oh, it's just an hour. That's huge to these kids and to me. So Sharing what you're doing and accepting help or accepting expertise is really important. It's part of this piece of getting away from the silos that hyper individualism and capitalism put us into. Outro: Thanks for listening to Lane Clark on the Novitas podcast, talking about Project Knotwork, a self-directed project-based learning space in Marquette, Michigan. Lane is one of three founders and facilitators at Project Knotwork. You can find out more about the space on their website at knotworkstudio.com or on Instagram @projectknotwork. This is the first podcast episode in a series that interviews the contributors to the first issue of the Novitas Magazine. You can read Lane's story along with others in the magazine, available from the website NovitasMag.com. Stay tuned for more episodes coming soon by subscribing to the Substack at novitas.substack.com. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider becoming a paid subscriber on the Substack. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit novitas.substack.com/subscribe (https://novitas.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2)

10. 

    6 Jul 2024

    Introducing Novitas

    Welcome to the first episode of Novitas Podcast! My partner Shay and I dive in talking about our journey over the last few years exploring systems of oppression, capitalism, and share the story the led to the beginning of this project. You can find out more about the magazine at https://www.novitasmag.com (https://www.novitasmag.com). There are a dozen or so copies still available if you’d like to order one. You can support the project and podcast by becoming a paid subscriber here on Substack. If you have a person or project who you think is doing really awesome work in their community, please recommend them by emailing me at kel@novitasmag.com (mailto:kel@novitasmag.com). Thanks for listening! TRANSCRIPT Introduction: Welcome to Novitas, a podcast that explores stories about living outside the capitalist paradigm towards collective liberation. These stories are about building systems and structures outside the status quo at the ground level. The changemakers featured here are not famous or rich. They don't work for Fortune 500 or large-scale NGOs. They are everyday people who are interested in making a difference in the lives of the people around them. Their stories are stories of inspiration for those of us who feel stuck in a system where we have no power or control. Some stories are small. Others are bigger, but each features the success and challenges of trying to make change at the local level in real, tangible and pragmatic ways. Kel: Welcome to the very first episode of the Novitas Podcast. I am really excited to start this journey. The first issue of the magazine was released this month, last month, I guess now. And the idea is to have the podcast each episode will give us the opportunity to kind of dive in deeper with each of the contributors to the magazine. But before I started talking to contributors, I wanted to give a little bit of introduction and some backstory to this project and myself. My name is Kel Smith. Over the last five years, I've kind of been on a journey to learn more systems of oppression, and how they operate, how they came to be, and what is my place in those systems. I've been writing a lot about this journey and sharing my thoughts through social media on Instagram and Substack, and I've been really fortunate to have the opportunity to learn from some amazing people on the internet, folks that I've connected with through those platforms. I am also a creative person and a community connector. So last year I had this idea to bring a lot of these people together from all over the internet to co-create a print publication and that's kind of how Novitas was born. But really that's just kind of scratching the surface of the story. Those five years have been an intense exploration and I wanted to share this introduction episode with someone who has been there through the whole process. My partner, Shay. Hi. Shay: Hi. Kel: Shay and I have been married for just under a decade. Um, actually I guess it's going to be 10 years this year. Um, we are very close. We run a home business together. We homeschool our kids together, and we spend most of our waking life together. One of the pieces of our relationship that I really love is that we spend a lot of time talking together. So while I've been sharing this journey about understanding systems of oppression online, I've also been talking about them pretty much every day in person with Shay. Shay: Which is why I don't read much of your blogs. Kel: That's okay, because he knows what's in them already, because he's the first person that I talk to. When I have an idea that hasn't solidified in my brain yet, I kind of bring it to Shay. So we've very much been on this journey together and I don't know if we can necessarily start from the beginning because... Shay: No, no, we don't have that much time. Kel: And I think if you went back to the very beginning, we could kind of pick apart pieces of our childhood and upbringing that have brought us to where we are now. But when I talk about the beginning, I often refer to unschooling kind of as the beginnings of my understandings of systems of oppression. So we started unschooling the kids six years ago, six and a half, and unschooling, I think, was a bit of a hard sell for me at the beginning because I was still very much kind of indoctrinated into the belief that kids need to learn through curriculum, through forced education. But you kind of were okay with it right from the outset. Shay: It was an easy sell for me because the system for me didn't do a whole lot and I feel like I learned very little in school. And I did most of my learning when I was outside of school and most of my learning when I graduated high school. There was one thing that always stuck with me and it was one time you said that the one thing about unschooling or de-schooling is that you need to learn to trust your children and that they'll turn out to be normal and hit their milestones at certain points and all that stuff. But the one thing that you taught me was that you have to learn to trust your children. I have always remembered that, days of frustration and stuff like that. Kel: During the disagreements. Shay: During the disagreements. I've always just come back to trying to worry about the kids but just let them be themselves. Because I see where we are now, six years into it, seven years into it, and I see progress and I'm happy with the people that the kids are becoming and all that stuff. Kel: That's it. One of the pieces that came out of unschooling for me that I really didn't expect but like it was never a focus when I started unschooling but it quickly became a focus when I started to understand unschooling and the implications of it is the ideas around adultism or childism and using age as a system of oppression. And not just, I guess, the difference between adults and children, but especially in modern education system, how kids are treated as lesser than compared to teachers, staff, whatever. And I think that was a big part of it for me when my mom says, so when are they going back to school? I can't actually imagine at this point in my life or their lives asking them to go back into that type of environment after they've experienced what it's like to live in non-oppressive relationships with adults. Shay: Yeah. I think they're smart enough that they could understand that they're not lesser than if they did choose to go back to the school system. But I know that it's not going to happen anytime soon. Kel: So one of the things that our unschooling journey taught me though out of that is that there are these kind of systems of oppression. And I often refer to unschooling as kind of the gateway for me unpacking a lot of that. There was a whole bunch of stuff that happened at the same time. There was the pandemic hit, we moved out to the country, the murder of George Floyd and the beginning of the Black Lives Matter movement. And then just my, I feel like my life for a period of time there became a whole, like just about educating myself. I think the anti-racism movement was a big piece of it for me because I didn't realize how many racist views I held. That I wouldn't have considered myself a racist person, but when I started to educate myself through like social media platforms during that period of time, I was like, oh s**t, I really am quite a racist person. I hold these views and I never intended to uphold these systems of oppression. And I think I wouldn't have been able to recognize that if I also hadn't been doing the work through unschooling to try and treat my kids with more respect and remove a lot of that kind of power over dynamic. There was a lot of unpacking. Shay: Yeah, there was. Kel: An immense amount of unpacking. Shay: Yeah, and I... I didn't consciously recognize that I was part of the systems of oppression. It was just like, how do we move forward? And I guess the thing that we have experience is with the children and the school system. Kel: Well, it's something that we have direct control over, right? Shay: Yeah. Kel: It's something that we can take control of in our lives, in our kids' lives. In a lot of cases, the systems that we're dealing with don't feel like systems that we do have control over because they're so big and they affects so many people. So when we talk about improving the lives of people of color or improving the lives of you know people of low income or that are experiencing homelessness, we don't feel like we have a lot of control over that. But we do have control over certain aspects of it and the obvious one is with our kids. But also I would say I don't know if it was in tandem but it feels like around the same time there seemed to be a very... maybe even a little before... there was a really obvious decision that we made as partners in life to try and not work for other people. Not work for... we could see like we talked almost ad nauseam about making money for other people and being treated like s**t at our jobs and not being valued as people and like Shay: job jumping... Kel: A lot of job jumping and trying to find a good place where like We just wanted to be respected as individuals and people and not have to suck up to people and not have to play that game. So I think that was even prior to the whole unschooling thing, but it seemed really clear that we were trying to opt out of that system as well. Shay: I think unknowingly, just trying to find the better way and then deciding. I think the homeschool and the self-employment thing was all in the same calendar year. Kel: And I don't think I would have considered myself anti-capitalist at that period of time, but I think there was during that whole shift, there was also like the whole shift with the unschooling and anti-racism. There was also a shift that I think we were both making towards undoing the cultural narrative around capitalism. Shay: I think we had like a massive shift. It may not have been the same calendar year, but I feel like it was within 12 months where we made these conscious decisions. We went through a very large transition period there, but again, I don't think we would've identified ourselves as anything other than just doing what we wanted to do. Kel: Yeah, independent, self-sufficient kind of thing. And when we moved up north, that was very much on the forefront of my mind is like self-sufficiency. Shay: Yeah. Kel: And it aligns with whole business and whatnot. Shay: Unfortunately, it's individualist and self-preservation mentality and all that s**t. Kel: And I think being up there, we realized that, right? Shay: Well, and that was a total separate mindset that we had where I think you wrote a blog post about it was like it was you know we're alone we have we have each other we have we need but you're not... We're not helping to work towards collective liberation. We're not working towards ending systems of oppression. We just... Kel: We're just opting out. Shay: We just removed ourselves from those problems and... Kel: That's it. But they're still there. And affecting everybody else. Shay: And there was that one quote that you said was, not everybody wants to... fix the problems, they just want to have enough money to make sure the problems don't apply to them. That's another one that stuck with me as well over the years. Kel: When do you think that shift happened for you to deprioritize entrepreneurialism or money in general? Shay: It was like a three year transition for me. I was bred to make money. Like for an individual or a boss or somebody. Kel: I think we all are. Shay: It was instilled for me at a very young age to work really hard and put in the hours and your job sucks but that's just the way it is because you got to earn a living and we've been really really fortunate like and I do not like... I do... I don't know how to say this, I do not not recognize how fortunate we are you've run this style of business that we run currently and have it work yeah for the most part Kel: for the most part Shay: most months Kel: yeah I was gonna say I think it's important to recognize that like we're not pulling in money hand over fist but we pay our bills and we're making a baseline income and the desire to grow the business beyond what it is right now has kind of left. Shay: Yeah, I'm quite satisfied with how much money I make and I'm quite satisfied with how we're raising our kids and I want more but... Kel: not at the expense of our own well-being. Shay: Not at the expense of, and I've been there, I've been, but again, I recognize the massive privilege that I have, that we have being able to do what we do. Kel: Yeah, I think there is, and we touched on this a little bit before, talking about moving up north and like moving away from the city with the desire to be self-sufficient, but also with the desire to like opt out of these systems that we could recognize that were harmful and trying to find better ways, and I think that's what I did for a long time, fueled by Instagram I guess. But this thing where it's like, we can build something better, we can do it differently, we can do it differently with our kids, we can do it differently with our business, we don't have to opt in to nine to five culture or like boss babe daily grind. I mean, everybody's gotta take their own path and I think I'm at a spot now where I can recognize that there are many different paths. But I think the spot that I get tripped up on is often people will justify putting their kids in school or you know trying to make as much money as possible and that those justifications just kind of continue to uphold the systems that oppress others. Shay: Yeah and it's unfortunate. There are people who have no choice but to rely on public education because they have to go to work, because they have to pay their bills, let alone if you live in the US and you have medical expenses or you have to pay for your car. People get stuck in these situations and it's... Kel: And you do what you can. Shay: And unfortunately that's where you've like literally every conversation ends blaming capitalism. Kel: But it's true. Shay: But it's true. Kel: I've read a fair bit in the last, even in the last month, with all of the f*****g s**t that's going on in the US with the elections and with the Supreme Court decisions that are coming out in the last few weeks. And of course, with the genocide that's happening in Gaza, that we're shifting from this stage of like late stage capitalism to end stage capitalism because so many people are falling at the bottom. They've just criminalized homelessness where an entry level home costs a million dollars. Like piggybacking on the notion that we are now entering this very, fractured end stage of capitalist culture and economy, everybody says it's time to hunker down and start building community. I'm really excited to be back in the city and trying to tap into the networks and systems that already exist here. Not just like opting out for us as individuals, but really building up those networks and new systems for community, for multiple people, of their income so that they don't have to pay to be part of it and all that good stuff. I will say that I think one of the things that's really beautiful about running our own business that's meeting kind of our baseline needs is that it opens up the opportunity to try other projects and do other things. I don't think I would have started writing the way that I've been writing for the last few years if I had to work a job. I don't think I would have had the capacity or the space to be able to think about the things that I've been thinking about, for us to be able to talk about the things, because when you're inside of the system... Shay: you don't have any time to think about it. Kel: You don't. There's no spoons. There's no energy. You're just really trying to get by. So having that baseline met means that I could go volunteer with Eat Local Grey Bruce and doing different publications and so I'm really excited that we've landed at Novitas and I hope for you dear listener that this story kind of helps frame how I landed here to do this magazine based on the experience of having gone through this huge kind of tumultuous period of questioning the systems and finding answers out there on the internet and meeting all these other people that are also doing this work at the same time. And I guess the other piece that's part of the magazine that is really important to me that I want to highlight is that I think that the solutions to this end stage capitalism, this community building, have to come from the ground up. And in most instances, the coolest s**t that I've seen out there is individuals taking initiative to start something cool. Or even just like go out into their community and do something. It's not NGOs. It's not charities, it's not, you know, Fortune 500, there's no techno solutions being thrown out there. It's really the... Shay: It's in the community, like it's in your neighborhood. Kel: Yeah. Shay: Essentially. Kel: So those are the stories that I wanted to highlight and to feature, not just so that like you could tap into them yourself, but so that you can find inspiration about what is working in other spaces. It's not always cookie cutter like here's the ten steps that you can do to build community in your neighborhood. But a lot of the topics cover things like economics, like parenting, like education, homelessness, how do we exist inside a capitalist economy while also trying to divest from it. And I think one of the cool things is that there is no one way. There is a million ways. And I think the success of building local community is gonna come often from the unique circumstances that exist in that community, right? And problems are only going to be solved when they're designed for the unique situation and people that are existing as part of that problem. But I think the universal, you know, framework that you can apply to doing this type of work is to use the tenants of collective liberation. You know, when we're building new systems, we're not just building it so that my life can be easier. You have to unpack and really distill what the problems are so that you can solve them in a way that is not imposing oppression or domination over another subset of people. Because that's really been our approach, and I say our as like Western culture for the last 300 years, minimum, is when we're trying to solve problems for one subset of people, we often don't think about the implications for another set of people or on the environment or... or or or, right? So I've been reading a lot of Murray Bookchin lately, and he talks a lot about this, specifically from the environmental and ecological movements but when we're... looking at hierarchical systems we need to explore them not just in mans need to dominate nature or control nature. Bookchin will tell you that that's a reflection of man's need to dominate woman or man needs to dominate other man or man needs to dominate child and so that when we build out environmental solutions to things like climate collapse we also need to unpack our hierarchical structures within our families and within our communities. So dismantling all of that, so when we're building new solutions, keeping that in mind is really important, or else we're just creating more problems for a different subset of people. Shay: More people fall out. Kel: Right. So I'm really excited to explore these ideas and these topics with different folks that have contributed to the magazine. And the first issue of the magazine had 10 different contributors, and each of them have agreed to come on the podcast and talk a little bit about their article or their essay or their contribution in more depth with me. So stay tuned for those episodes coming up in the future. And thanks so much for listening to Shay and I chat here about the backstory of Novitas magazine. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit novitas.substack.com/subscribe (https://novitas.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2)

Podcast Authority Score: 26 / 100

A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.

Quality

53

Social presence

0

YouTube

0

Engagement

0

Contact Novitas Podcast

Guest appearances

Books guests

Based on episode analysis; this does not confirm that the show is currently accepting guests.