One of the projects that has been slowly unfolding over a series of years has reached an important milestone! We have completed the zine documenting our work together, and it’s ready to share. You can access the 52 page pdf in my proton drive here. (The switch over to proton drive is new, so if you have trouble accessing it, just send me a message at tiffany at groundfireccw dot ca.)
This project was a collective effort between me, my colleague and friend Frankie Hanman-Siegersma, and a group of community members who came together to collectively respond to the grief of a parent whose trans child had died. All of the photos in the zine were taken by people who participated in the project.
This project has taken three years to get to this point, and it’s not quite done yet. Frankie and I are working on a paper for practitioners, but that won’t be finished for a while yet. And the relationships that have grown in this work will hopefully persist for many years.
The zine is meant to document what we did together in a way that might invite other people to also undertake a collective response to grief.
It has been such a significant project – a collective response to grief, responding to a parent whose beloved trans child died by suicide.
Every time I worked on the zine, I ended up in tears. There is so much love represented in these pages, and such a commitment to showing up for community and for each other.
Everyone who was part of this project was willing to say yes to this… I know that’s obvious – of course the people in the project said yes to being in the project – but it really matters.
It matters that even though everyone involved was going through their own stuff, they said yes.
It matters that the parent said yes to sharing their story.
It matters that we all, every single person in this project, made a choice to be involved. And I hope that now that we are able to share about this work, other people will read about what we did together and will find ways to say yes to responding collectively to pain and grief and loss.
What we did in this project is only one possible way to co-create a collective response, and we outlined the steps that we took in a way that, hopefully, will invite readers (community members or practitioners) to find their own specific ways to co-create a response.
Here are the steps that we took:
This project represents a huge investment of time and energy and care.
I have no idea how many hours have gone into it, but it’s a lot. And it has absolutely been worth it.
If you find the idea interesting and there is a collective response that you’d like to organize but you’re feeling a bit daunted by the idea, let me know. I would be really happy to chat with you about how to go about it.
“There are two groups of stick figures, one on each side of the image, with three figures in each. Between the groups are 6 little zines. Text reads: We are not alone. We can imagine our way through this. Together. Zine library project.”
This post is an invitation to join a new project!
This will be a longer-term project, which I’m imagining will grow over the next year or longer, and community members are welcome to join for any part of the project (without an expectation of committing to all the parts).
I’m hoping to create a series of zines, each focused on a different metaphor or idea for getting through hard times.
The first conversation in this project will be a project launch conversation, where we’ll talk about what kinds of metaphors are sustaining us (we’ll make a list, which will become the first very small zine, and we can then use that list as inspiration for some of the zines!).
I think launching a project can be kind of nice, and a way to connect with other interested folks in a low intensity way. We can talk about what sorts of things people might want to contribute and how they might want to be involved, and I think having a whole conversation about what metaphors we’re leaning on might be really heartening right now, even if we don’t dive deeply into any of those metaphors specifically in this conversation.
The project launch will be March 18 5:30-7 pm mountain time / March 19 10-11:30 am Adelaide. If you’re interested in joining, let me know (email is easiest – tiffany @ groundfireccw.ca) and I will send you the zoom registration link. (I have had problems recently with bots registering for some of my community conversations, so since this is a public post, I’m not putting the link in here directly.)
Registration is free, though donations are gratefully accepted throughout the project to support the labour in making it all happen. (These will be processed through Groundfire.)
If you would like to share this invitation with friends and community members, we welcome any and all who might be wanting a space to be not-alone in 🙂
Some of the zines will have an open invitation to contribute (so community members can email a contribution in), many will have a co-writing session scheduled for folks who want to body-double while writing or making art, and some will be created by a smaller group of folks together without an open invite. If you have an idea for a metaphor you’d like to see become a zine for community, let me know!
One zine will be about mushrooms and the metaphors they offer for resistance. I’m co-creating this with a friend, Heather, and we’re going to host a zoom co-work session for folks to come and write or draw and chat about mushroom metaphors, and then we’ll put the zine together. That one is open to anyone to contribute to. The co-writing/art/companionship session will be April 1, 5:30-7 pm mountain time / April 2 10-11:30 am Adelaide. Let me know if you would like the registration link for this, too!
Another one is metaphors of spoon gardening/cultivating/hatching. Credit goes to Danielle for this idea, and they are happy to have it go out into community to become a zine. Christine Miserandino’s spoon theory has been so important in disability spaces, but/and it might feel joyful and possibility-making to stretch that metaphor and reflect on ways that we collectively share spoons, ways that we care for our own and each other’s spoons, ways that we adapt our lives to create contexts of spoonery, etc. – basically, disabled trans wisdom for living a spoonie life not entirely circumscribed by discourses of scarcity. This will also be open to anyone to contribute, and there is no zoom scheduled yet, but I’m thinking maybe in late April.
Another metaphor will be flotation devices, and what keeps us afloat. This will be with a small group, and I’m not sure yet if there will be an open invitation, or if this will be something we create and then offer to community from our small group.
Another metaphor will be about safety nets, and how we weave them together, and none of us can be the whole net.
I am imagining a slowly growing library of zines with different metaphors that might resonate at different times and in different ways for folks, with a range of content (hopefully including some art and maybe even some micro-fiction alongside non-fiction writing, and with narrative invitations for readers to reflect on).
I think it will be a nice project to engage with over the next while, a way to be connected and to share our ideas for getting through these hard times. Maybe I’ll see you there!
Last week’s video included a review of Rebekah Weatherspoon’s cowboy romance, A Thorn in the Saddle, and a discussion of why I think reading romance novels (or other media that helps us imagine beyond the stories that are most often presented to us) is important. A Thorn in the Saddle is the third book in the Cowboys of California series, and it’s a lot of fun, and I think it’s doing something really interesting when it comes to how communities and families can respond to inappropriate behaviour in loving and restorative ways. It’s really good! In adrienne maree brown’s essay on love as political resistance, in her book Pleasure Activism, she writes about how we need to learn how to love, and how this is something we learn in relationship. I think romance novels are one place where we can learn better ways to love, and where we can learn to imagine love outside of dominant discourses. Any community that you most often see represented as struggling, suffering, excluded, traumatized… if you can’t remember the last time you saw a story about someone from that community thriving, loving, and being loved, I think it’s worth seeking out romance novels by and about them. I think now, even more than before, we need to be able to witness and imagine trans joy, immigrant joy, Black joy, Indigenous joy, queer joy. Things are really hard, and going to get harder, and I’m not at all suggesting that we pretend this isn’t the case or that we turn away from the material effects of hardship and injustice. I just think that it can be sustaining and generative to also seek out the stories that help us remember that another world is also possible, and that people are never just the hardest moments in their lives.
I’ve started a weekly(ish) book review vlog! I record the videos and then Joe edits them. I’m pretty excited about this project. When I took the train to visit my sister and Elliot last year, I kept a little vlog, and I did the same when I went to Australia for the first time.
Joe gifted me a vlogging camera for my birthday this year, and set up a PeerTube instance for me, but I didn’t manage to keep going with the vlogging. But now we have a plan! And it’s a team effort, so hopefully that will help me keep up with it. The first two videos are up. In episode 1, I reviewed Cat Sebastian’s queer historical romance, You Should Be So Lucky.
And in episode 2, I reviewed Ally Carter’s The Most Wonderful Crime of the Year, and gave a tour of the Lego Botanical Gardens set, which I built with Joe while listening to the book.
We’re hoping to release episodes every Wednesday. I’ll post them here and on my Patreon. (The Patreon also gets monthly updates! And supports my unpaid community work, such as the disability peer group, and the trans and non-binary narrative practitioner peer groups, which I continue to run every month. Maybe you want to join?)
This document is, at its heart, about caring for trans community. This care might take the form of quiet friendship, vocal advocacy, public support or private support. It might be as simple as using someone’s pronouns or as involved as advocating for policy change. These actions of care might be understood as solidarity (though you’ll find some reflection on the limits of this framing in this document). These actions of care might be understood as compassion, companionship, connection, as movements towards justice and liberation, as love. They might be personal and private or very public.
This document is about actions of care, whatever they are, however you understand them, towards and with and within trans community, by which we mean, the vast expanse of gender expression and identity that is not cisgender (cisgender is when the sex you were assigned at birth aligns with the gender you know yourself to be).
We are sending this document out into a world that is increasingly hostile to trans community, especially to trans youth, trans women, racialized trans people, and disabled trans people.
This hostility is not new, and no injustice exists in isolation. Hostility towards trans community has always impacted different groups in different ways at different times, and always intersects with other systems of power and control.
Legal protections only go as far as other hostilities allow.
We hope that one action of care that extends from this document and these conversations is an interest in and invitation towards connecting with trans communities across difference, finding each other and caring together.
There are so many communities, including trans people who are racialized, who live in rural contexts, who are incarcerated, street involved, or otherwise disconnected from structural supports and “legitimate” trans identities and experiences. These are communities that governments fail to serve, and that have been left or pushed out of queer spaces.
In times like these, I think we can lose connection with the reality that trans folks and our allies have been supporting each other’s mutual existence forever. And maybe it’s hope-building to know that communities that have had less structural access have developed a richness of resources and conversations, skills and knowledges, networks of mutual aid and care to support one another in getting our needs met. There’s possibility in connecting to and working to strengthen these mutual aid systems because maybe this loosens our attachment to institutions and strengthens our connections to each other.
I hope that disconnected communities will be motivated to repair or build connections, and allow us to orient ourselves towards the movement, honouring the work, knowledges, and lineages in these communities. I hope we can remember that our liberations are collectively bound, and that this isn’t the start of something new but it is an opportunity for connection.
– Aakhil, contributor
Trans community includes people from every community. Every community includes trans people.
This document is a collective action of care extended from everyone involved in this project to every trans person who may come across this document, and we hope that it invites you, beloved reader, whoever you are, to join us in caring and in being moved to action by that care.
“Bearing witness to how many people want to do right and want to make active change and be supportive, it does inspire hope.”
– A contributor, about reading this document. We hope you feel the same.
This document has been shared in the International Journal of Narrative Therapy and Community Work. You can also hear an audio practice note about its creation and our hopes for the project here.
