Joyce Chen: We’ve structured the Artist in Residence role as one that takes our contributors’ pieces and alchemizes them into original artworks that can take the form of visual art, audio experiments, or otherwise. What were your hopes in joining the team in this capacity, and what excited you most about this process?

Sanna Wani: When I joined the team, I hoped to learn from and embody TSW’s spirit of community. I’ve so often been fascinated and inspired by the way The Seventh Wave turns certain things about writing and publishing on its head, to move really in the spirit of publishing people not pieces. I wanted to be part of that ethic, that practice. I was so excited to challenge myself to tune into this disposition. It was exciting to think of what it meant to be an artist among people, in residence, rather than an artist on my own.

Joyce: In the earlier phases of our conversations, we spoke a lot about the possibility of audio, of perhaps having you conduct brief interviews with our contributors as a way to dig into their work and their processes together. That original idea obviously morphed quite a bit to become what we’re excited to share now, which is collage and text-based cards. Could you share a bit about how that initial idea evolved and changed over time?

Sanna: I think another thing about TSW that was so exciting was the space to be curious. I had a lot of different directions I was excited to explore. I think what really ended up forming the direction was your encouragement, Joyce, to be brave. I’m not a visual artist. Audio would have been a slightly easier lateral move, because I like interviewing people and the medium of conversation. My wheelhouse and my comfort is very much with words, written or spoken and meaning. But earlier in the year I was experimenting with collage, with paint. I wanted to know what visual practices felt like. And so we tried a few different things (manual collage, digital collage) and I felt a few things fail until I found (or re-found more) concrete poetry and realized this was the avenue through which the desire for an image and my skills with language could go hand in hand to create something worthy of the contributors’ work. 

I’ve so often been fascinated and inspired by the way The Seventh Wave turns certain things about writing and publishing on its head, to move really in the spirit of publishing people not pieces. I wanted to be part of that ethic, that practice.

Joyce: As part of your process, you shared a brief survey with our contributors to get a better feel for their own interpretation of their pieces — what colors and songs they might associate with their pieces, what sorts of textures or feelings they wanted to elicit in their readers. What was your hope in sending along that survey to the contributors?

Sanna: I think in moving towards the visual, there’s a lot more to do with how one interprets a piece and understands it beyond logic. The feelings and textures of the piece really arise and are guiding the process more than any logical understanding. It was important for me to pair my own interpretations with as much knowledge as the primary interpreter’s — the writer’s — to create something in tune with itself. I don’t believe in that whole thing about every interpretation is equal, the art divorced from the artist, blah blah blah… pieces come from places. From people. Before I paint it with the pictures, smells, memories and textures of my own life, I want to understand the worlds it comes from. I want to get as close to experiencing it as the creator experienced it before I take it somewhere else.

Joyce: How does the interplay between text and image surface in your own work? Did you find yourself discovering anything new about that relationship in the process of creating these particular collages?

Sanna: I think to answer this question, it’s important for me to share that all the photographs paired with the texts here are my own. I have two film cameras, which I acquired around 2018 and which I played with for a few years. Then the dust of a new hobby settled, and I had all these photos, heartfelt photos, that I wasn’t sure what to do with. I just put them in a photo album, thinking they were a nice keepsake and maybe I could figure out some project to fit them into someday. And this was the project I was waiting for.

Like I said about the survey, each of those photos inhabited a place, a smell, a texture. It was a really wonderful, rich exercise to read each of the writer’s pieces and their answers to the survey and then kind of compare notes on my own feelings about each photo to find the perfect match. I learned how much of text is image and how much of image is encoded with text. Meaning, meaning hanging in layers behind them both. It flexed a good muscle, to sift through meaning like this and find matching threads. As a poet, especially, it felt like understanding again how poetry is not about the words but what is beyond them; not about the sunset or the sand, but the feeling behind it.

Before I paint [a piece] with the pictures, smells, memories and textures of my own life, I want to understand the worlds it comes from. I want to get as close to experiencing it as the creator experienced it before I take it somewhere else.

Joyce: What is your hope with the release of these cards out into the world; how do you see your art interacting with the contributors’ work, with readers’ experience of the pieces, with this idea of “proximities” that was at the crux of Issue 16?

Sanna: Honestly, I just hope the contributors like it! I tried my best to sink as close to their words as I could and I hope the photos resonate with their own understanding of their work. I hope it makes them feel seen. I also hope that the cards might land someday with someone who has no idea about The Seventh Wave or the contributors at all — and they are led back to the issue, and are moved in some way to connect with one of us or all of us. Or are just moved at all! I think that’s what proximities means to me, this interaction between all of us. The reader, the artist, the writer, the publisher. The tides that are tugging on all of us, that move feelings between us and allow us to experience things in a new way. Which proximities allow what? I hope these cards become like a prism through which the proximities between us become more apparent, like a forcefield brought to light or a new lens clarifying.

As a poet, especially, it felt like understanding again how poetry is not about the words but what is beyond them; not about the sunset or the sand, but the feeling behind it.

Joyce Chen: Something I’ve always been struck by with your work is the breadth and depth of each piece, how you create such a sense of intimacy with each individual “moment” within a work. You’ve mentioned before how you liken your landscape pieces to a novel or a book, with different elements slowly revealing themselves over time. How would you define a “moment” within your work, or does that measurement not feel apt for the kind of time you’re trying to capture in your pieces? 

Ellen Wiener: For decades, medieval illuminations have been among my most enduring influences — in part because of what they show us about reading and looking. In Books of Hours (which were often the only book their owners might have had access to), each single page is a world unto itself and each prompts a radical shift in perspective. Opening a book is a “yes” response to an invitation to go on a journey. Like footsteps, or beads on a necklace, the increments accrue to become a whole.

This engineering methodology is particularly true in the accordion book “Metes & Bounds,” exhibited in this issue of Proximities. I am asking observers, readers, or lookers to hold how each panel unscrolls to both tell its own story and make meaning in concert with the rest. For example, the prefacing image features a shovel and a winding path leading up a hillside. This, in itself, implies labor, digging, walking and a manipulation of the landscape. But the symbol of the shovel also introduces the work as a kind of archeological dig into the tools of navigation seen throughout the book. Observatories, lighthouses and star-gazing instruments are all historical artifacts for way-finding — yet, how many of them have we left behind as outmoded? What does that say about our own “facts” of time and space, or even how we mark the boundaries between spaces?

The title “Metes and Bounds” is itself taken from an archaic legal term used to describe property perimeters based on natural landmarks. Because the tallest tree can be felled and creek beds waver over time, the “real” of Real Estate is now measured by an imaginary net; flexible, efficient, and huge, it covers the whole of the earth’s surface and beyond. And yet we, with our real and metaphorical shovels, constantly invent new borders and boundaries. Our sense of boundaries, where and how we inhabit place, even, is inevitably filtered through the trending intellectual constructs of our lifetimes. Yet, perennially, we mistake these as being permanent truths. 

Joyce: I love what you’ve said about wanting your art to envelop a viewer “like a pit occupies an olive.” What, for you, does that immersive quality do for the viewer? For you as the artist? How does the proximity of both to the work itself impact its efficacy and effect?

Ellen: I’m not sure where that pit and olive quote comes from but I am grateful to whoever said it. What I appreciate about the metaphor is the sense of a perfect fit. You actually used the word “envelop” in your question and I am going to add an “e” to that to make another excellent pairing: a letter in its “envelope.” Envelopes, like books, writing, prayer rugs, and gardens are all vehicles that mediate between the intimate and public, the inner and outer life. 

In a similar way, I intend for the sometimes dense fleshy “surround” in my work to create a kind of visual hum of immersive detail, an embracing field that mediates connections. Here, the eye automatically seeks focus; glitches and breaks become outliers and seeds gleaned from the mesh. I try to orchestrate the elements of symbol, color, and space as plays between close and far, in and out, pits and fruit. I recognize that this sifting process takes a bit of work and maybe even some of the close attention one might more naturally bring to parsing a poem. 

You asked about time earlier. Time has been a key subject in my work: calendars and memory in particular are recurring themes for me. Books of Hours eponymously map a system based on the progress of a day. I think of how our calendars are imagined to be ideological safety nets; we drape them over time as though they might actually order some aspects of human experience (!).

But I also think about the time taken in the process of looking. The “thickness” of my work asks lookers/readers to slow down — to consider, think, shift focus, look again, shift back, and understand anew. The harvest of this time-consuming labor is that one might participate actively by manipulating the object and the order of the reveal, so that ultimately meaning is created somewhere “outside the lines” and off the page. And, ideally, the viewer is meant to be enveloped in the process.

Our sense of boundaries, where and how we inhabit place, even, is inevitably filtered through the trending intellectual constructs of our lifetimes. Yet, perennially, we mistake these as being permanent truths.

Joyce: There are such striking environmental influences in many of your works, and definitely in “Metes and Bounds” and “Neither.” How would you describe your relationship to the natural world in the context of these two pieces, and what are the qualities (sounds, textures, colors, scents) that most impacted your creation of these two books? 

Ellen: Some Books of Hours feature sections on the subject of Purgatory. Visually, as in Dante’s version, we picture this as a vertical descent. So I began examining the underground in my imagery by visiting caves, grottoes, and mines. I acquired a pick-axe. I made drawings and paintings of rocks and minerals, and then eventually also of fossils, which I came to understand as a giant notional hinge that transformed our understanding of geological time and our planet’s age.

The fossils led me to botanical illustration, a tradition committed to a strict representation — everything measured with calipers and dividers, every single seed and spine and leaf counted with utmost attention — that was new for me. It changed my drawing. And in the process, I found myself back from whence I’d just come: my detailed leaf drawings, seen close up, resembled nothing less than granite grain, shale beds, or unfolded crystalline structures; I saw that pollen mimicked sand and chlorophyll formed steppes and mesas. The biological and geological were not so distant, it seemed, but rather symbiotic neighbors. 

Through all of this, I kept sketchbooks, as I have done for half a century. But as I was drawing and re-drawing rocks and leaves with meditative precision, I began to use the images differently. I scanned sketchbook pages and collaged back and forth between paper books and digital images. I could flip things, distort them; take a pencil drawing of a seedpod and then make it an element for an entirely different sense of scale. As the drawings became plant/rock hybrids, I developed the content of the book “Neither.” In this book, geology and botany, rock formations and plant fossils, are literally pressed together, mirrored, and inverted. Tiny spores on a fern, seen through a microscope, are wedded to vast geological features. These hybrid views, all completely non-normative abstract landscapes, don’t exist in real life. The book presents a ripped re-ordering of research, personal archive, and a wonderment log.  

And so it made sense for that book to exist digitally. Unlike some of my more sculptural work, “Neither” doesn’t really physically exist. So, perhaps it is fair to say that I am a student of the natural world, but also of the accidents of our developing comprehension of evolution and what forms exist in the ecology of the imagination. 

Joyce: I’m really excited about this process that we’re undertaking with your two books and the pieces that we’re publishing within this winter edition of Issue 16: Proximities. It feels almost like a reverse ekphrastic, in that we’re taking your artwork and pairing it with the words of other writers and poets. What has been your own experience working between words and visual art? Do you find them to be complementary, parallel art forms, or something else altogether?

Ellen: Well, I am a reader and artist, inseparably. There are words throughout my work — notes, poems, letters, definitions — and there is always a relation to books. I have kept a journal since the age of 14. Books are containers; they are lenses to view the ideas that shape our identity, memory, perception, our sense of self.  “Metes & Bounds” and “Neither” are books and ask to be looked at with a bookish point of view, but other works, like “Mason & Miner,” are carved into the physical body of books; or like “Cave Diagram,” peripherally involve themselves with text added to a painting. 

Beyond my personal relationship with books and texts, I’ve benefited enormously from my relationships with poets. Sometimes these have begun with the poem, sometimes the other way around. 

When I randomly read Andrew Joron’s “Boreal,” I felt a jolt of recognition — that the world of his poem echoed the drawing I happened to be making at that very moment. He gave me permission to use his poem in an accordion book, and as I manipulated each cut-out word, recited it, noticed where it opened for breath — all this changed the color of my skies,  the length of the image, suddenly the drawing now needed to rush thickly across folds where the poem seemed to speed. It was a great lesson for me, a musical one.

With poet LB Thompson, the process has gone in both directions. LB and I met at a reading of her work in a gallery showing the first poem-accordion-book I had made, and that sort of opened the door for us to work together. I made the painting “Cabinet of Cards” as a response and as a physical site to display her work, “Poems in the Suit of Diamonds,” and together we produced a deck of cards for an exhibition that could be dealt out like a tarot spread. Later on, we created  “Between Red and Green” in the opposite way — she wrote the poem for my painting and I was let to chime in on its creation. Throughout the process, LB and I worked together in an exciting very lively “give and take” way. I would bring up a book I was reading, and she would say, “Oh, I have that,” or vice versa — so it’s been an ongoing exchange of ideas, and formed a deep tribal friendship for me.

In general, I am an artist largely because I’ve sought refuge from chaos in the quiet of books and ideas — I spend a lot of time in my own hermit head. But I do also recognize that I am bound by the limits of my own imagination, education, and a selfish character — I recognize the need for other voices to feed and water my tiny garden plot. So these collaborations with poets have produced a sum greater than their parts, their familiar but alien cadences revealing — and stretching — the boundaries inherent to my own native language.

Perhaps it is fair to say that I am a student of the natural world, but also of the accidents of our developing comprehension of evolution and what forms exist in the ecology of the imagination.

Joyce: I would love to hear a little more about the process of creating “Metes and Bounds,” as it is an incredibly intricate, long scroll that sutures together landscape and image and story. What was the original seed of an idea that sparked this book, and how did you sustain that energy and intention throughout the creation of the piece? Were there particular rituals you invoked in its creation, certain songs or sounds that you listened to whilst making, or specific stories or narratives you were pulling from?

Ellen: I’ve spoken about the fossils and pickaxes and calipers, above. That journey sustained me, you could say — as curiosity always does. 

I’ll add, though, that the working title for this book during most of the three years I fussed over it was “myth remembers more than science,” a quote from William Thompson’s book Imaginary Landscape. I take it to mean that all of our facts and proofs are ephemeral, fragile and mutable, while Myth (with a capital M) is rooted in emotional and biological foundations. You can know every detail about a tree species, the name of every leaf-part, but a forest at night is still very scary — getting lost and the fear of falling seem ever-true. Human nature is, after all, a part of Nature.  

Joyce: What is the role of space or spaciousness in your work? Upon first glance, it can appear as though many of your works are filled with art and gesture; but upon closer study, I notice that there is a lot of deliberate open space and breath. How does space factor into your making, and how does the proximity of space to object or landscape help to define your finished pieces?

Ellen: “Metes & Bounds,” like most horizontally oriented formats, instantly implies a trip or a ramble; whether it’s through the subtle eye-scanning of a reader or feet moving noisily through a thicket, we proceed. Walks are passages through time as well as space. There is a perpetual “next,” repeated “agos,” and plenty of goodbyes. Perhaps the less crowded parts of the text are spaces to pause and reflect, regroup and re-orient, before being plunged in again. There are a lot of literal reflections in my work — pools, mirrors, repetitions, and inversions — that often correspond with these more open spaces. 

“Neither” is different, because although it resolved itself into a book, it is not a walk. It is rooted, actually, in suspension and the vertical. I began this investigation about caves and grottos and rocks because of my curiosity about purgatory, which is an invented political space envisioned by select theologians not very long ago. But visceral power exists in notions of the liminal — some version, facet, or aspect of it plays a part in almost every culture. This can look like suspensions of gravity, the mysterious landscapes between earth and the starry dome, hell and heaven, ancestors, the living or dead, ghosts, spirit guides, the list goes on. Purgatory, apparently, is suspended somewhere on a vertical axis — it occupies a moral waiting room between “above” and “below”; so it inverts the horizontal nature of both landscape and reading. Thus the digging, which contrasts with preoccupations with the celestial (windows, telescopes, astronomy, navigation) that are so evident in some of my earlier work. Some of their signature is still present in “Neither,” but the specific images — these in-between, un-real hybrids — are suspended on their pages. They are of landscape, but they are not tethered to it. 

Joyce: You’ve spoken before about this idea of territory and place and ownership, and how it fascinates you and inspires much of your own landscape work. What are some landscapes that you have yet to explore in-depth that you’d like to evoke in future projects? These can be real or imagined, physical or metaphysical.

Ellen: I’d actually like to explore the domestic: the idea of Home, the daily, the diary, the ordinary. This may seem drab compared to monumental landscapes or far-flung pilgrimages, but I have come to see this symbol of stability as an element many of us, both newly arrived or staid in our habits, sorely need. I am conscious in this moment of what a privilege “home” is.

And I am interested in asking: What changes when you are anchored? When sameness blooms? When chaos is not a constant threat? No one is ever immune to change, disaster, revolution — but the ability to focus, to be still, to create, to sustain and comprehend long sentences, is rare in our day and it’s a skill I’d like to cultivate further. For many of us, the most incomprehensible landscapes are those of our own intimate lives. What happens when we turn the tools of looking — invented for the wild beyond — towards our recursive interior narratives? 

I am interested in asking: What changes when you are anchored? When sameness blooms? When chaos is not a constant threat?

Sarah Neilson: How did you get involved with the South Seattle Emerald, and what does the publication and your work there mean to you in the trajectory of your career?

Sharon H. Chang: I’m not sure of my origin story at the Emerald anymore, but I know that it had to do with community because I’ve been in community for a long time. I’m a longtime South End resident, was on the ground a lot participating in marches and protests or eventually photographing them, and just involved with different activities.

I published two books and I also started writing short form at the same time. I wrote for some national publications, did some journalism, some editorial, and part of that process was also writing for hyperlocal publications like the International Examiner, and eventually the South Seattle Emerald became part of that. I really dialed it back to hyperlocal writing. That’s just where my heart was. I didn’t feel like writing for national publications was necessarily as fulfilling, I really care about community work, community-based writing, community-based journalism, storytelling that’s based in lived experience and uplifting voices that we don’t hear too much. So that’s the best origin story I can give at the moment. I really want to say that it was Marcus [Harrison Green] who recruited me. I feel like most of us have that story.

Sarah: How long have you been there?

Sharon: I guess that first piece that I wrote for them was at least 2016, so five or six years, you know?

Sarah: When did you step into the managing editor role?

Sharon: Just last year, so it’s been almost exactly one full calendar year; it was September of 2020 that I stepped into this role. I was doing some freelance editing before that, and prior to that was a longtime community journalist and photojournalist with the Emerald.

Sarah: I want to ask you about your photography and your books too, but I also want to ask if there’s any short form story or journalism reporting that you are really proud of, that you really like, or that had some kind of impact you can remember, whether it’s for the Emerald or another publication?

Sharon: Oh my gosh, how do we answer questions like that? You know, you’re a writer, we write so much stuff. Some of the editorial stuff earlier on, when I was maybe a little angrier and younger and had something I needed to say about social justice, some of the stuff that went viral, which is always a mixed bag.

But that was impactful and it was important to know that as a woman of color, I could make statements about these injustices, and that if written in a way that was accessible to readers, it could be really compelling and could be read by a lot of different people. I guess to some extent, we all know that that pen can be powerful, but I think with digital technologies, things taking off that way was definitely an experience worth having. That is not my goal, but some of the editorials I wrote about racial justice, and I had some big opinions about Seattle’s pseudo-progressive Pacific Northwest liberalism, those were… I guess fun could be a word to describe it, but eye-opening experiences. Then there are things that I’ve written that are really community-driven, really about uplifting voices or issues that might not normally get tons of airplay that I’ve been really proud of. I got a couple grants to work on a women of color farming series [called Farming for Change] where I went and photographed and interviewed a ton of women of color and queer farmers of color and that was really cool. A couple of those articles went viral, but just working on a longer series like that was really great.

Sarah: I would like to hear more about the women of color and queer farming series if you want to talk about it. I also wanted to ask you about the COVID-19 Safety Not Stigma series. Could you tell us a little bit about those projects, how you conceived of them, and what impact you’ve seen them have?

Sharon: COVID-19 Safety Not Stigma was a visual portrait campaign rolled out primarily on social media, a project that I conceived of pretty early on in the pandemic when we were seeing a lot of racial bias specifically towards Asian Americans and African Americans wearing masks in public. When Americans and people who live in the US were still trying to get used to the idea of wearing masks, there was a lot of racial bias against specifically Black and Asian people for wearing masks.

So, I conceived this idea to create a portrait campaign of different community members – often a lot of them were pretty influential Asian American and African American folks – wearing masks to normalize the sight of Black and Asian people wearing masks, but also to humanize us. I definitely had friends who were dealing with racism in public, being discriminated against for wearing masks, Asian friends maybe even experiencing some threat of violence or actual violence, so it was really important to normalize and humanize us wearing these masks. There was always a portrait of the person in their mask; then I did posts that also included portraits of them with the mask off and some personalizing information, usually a quote and some information about who they were, because I think with the mask you can’t see people and you don’t really know who’s there sometimes. They all went together on social media and were published in the Emerald, also in the International Examiner.

With Farming for Change, that was started earlier, and unfortunately I didn’t finish all the things I wanted to finish because of COVID. But I had friends and I had heard of people through friends who were really getting into farming. It seemed like growing locally and growing sustainably and growing in a smaller format was a way that a lot of BIPOC folks and women of color were trying to reclaim their health, their well-being, and were resisting. Of course, feeding our bodies what we’ve grown ourselves – this is not a revolutionary idea, taking back control of our flesh and what we’re putting in our mouths. A lot of these folks were using farming in a really radical way to build community and be really innovative and creative, and I wanted to contribute to trying to help document that in our region, so I traveled around and talked to a bunch of different farmers. That was a really cool experience. I published at least three articles in the Emerald about some of those farmers.

Sarah: Have you had any feedback? What has the response been to some of your photojournalism campaigns?

Sharon: The Safety Not Stigma campaign got a really positive response. People were grateful to have some visual imagery, to have a more artistic approach to dealing with the bias. There were a lot of folks trying to address it in different ways, and I think approaching it from a creative and visual standpoint on a social media platform that could be shared widely – that was part of the concept, is I can put these photos out there and then they can be shared really widely on digital media. And if we’re trying to normalize the sight of an Asian person or Black person wearing a mask, what better way than to try to get these photos out there. I remember pretty unanimous appreciation for that campaign at the time. It’s interesting how much things have changed not necessarily for the better since then, but we’re definitely in a different place now. It was a wonderful way to capture a moment in time, even though it was a really tense time and there was so much conflict, to help remember what we’ve been through and what we continue to go through.

Sarah: Both of the books you’ve published – Raising Mixed Race and Hapa Tales – really dig into the nuance, or lack of nuance, in conversations about being mixed race. There’s a line in Hapa Tales that reads, “Being Mixed Race in a highly racialized, fissured, and fractured society is often about searching for where we belong. But belonging within division is complicated and painful…” Can you talk about that line?

Sharon: I think that’s still true. We live in a racially divided world where things are often organized by categories, by the way people look and by the way people perceive others to be based on the way they look.

When you are a person who doesn’t fit neatly into those categories or are ambiguous looking, it’s in a world that is so racially divided where there are very real consequences and impacts on people’s lives for those racial divisions. It’s complex to navigate, and I don’t want to play violin for myself, I have privileges to. Most mixed folks I meet are dealing with this to some extent. Like, how do I exist as a person across boundaries in a world that is defined by these boundaries? This is ongoing, I think. I was living abroad in Taiwan for last school year with my son because of COVID, and that was interesting. There were a lot of these similar issues that I faced there just being a person that wasn’t easily identifiable, there were a lot of questions constantly, so that remains true I guess. I like that quote. That’s a good point. I was like, “Oh, I wrote that?”

The other thing I will say is the US census is rolling out their results now from 2020 and it’s looking like the multiracial identified population has jumped enormously in the last decade. So these are questions we do need to look at. That data is complicated and needs to be disaggregated. We only just started letting people tick off multiple boxes. I think the conversation about now disaggregating that a little better is next level. It can get messy, it can get complex. The relevance of that quote still remains for me as far as the books go.

How do I exist as a person across boundaries in a world that is defined by these boundaries?

Sarah: How did you approach writing these two books, which are similar in topic but they range in terms of what they’re actually covering, and how did those writing experiences overlap or diverge from each other?

Sharon: The first one is more of an academic book. It was a research project that I started in graduate school. At the time, I just had my son and I thought as a mixed race person, and my partner’s also mixed race, that it would be really easy to raise a mixed kid. I realized pretty quickly I still didn’t have any answers.

I wasn’t sure what to say to my kid when I was looking around for kids’ books or adult books or movies or TV shows or toys that reflected our experience. I wasn’t finding much. I was like, “Oh no, I don’t know what to do. I’m going to go out into the field and interview other parents because they must know what to do.” So, I went out and started with a smaller group of interviewees. It was pretty fascinating. Wrote my graduate thesis and I thought, I have more. I think this could be a bigger project. I think this could be a book. Went out and interviewed more parents and then eventually turned that into a book that was published through Routledge. Mostly interviewed Seattle area parents of young mixed race children, asked them questions about how you’re going to raise your kids to have positive multiracial identity. At that time, I pretty much discovered most parents don’t know how to do that and don’t even know what that means quite frankly. That was 2016. Have we made more progress? I definitely see more materials, more people are writing books on these subjects; also I’m seeing more of a reflection of mixed-race children in movies, in shows, in kids’ books and all kinds of things. Definitely, the needle is shifting. I’m not sure which direction it’s going.

The second book that I wrote a couple years later, Hapa Tales, is more personal narrative. There’s still a lot of research because I love research. I’m a very research-driven writer, maybe that’s the journalist part of me, but there’s more of my story in it. In that book I wanted to unpack the way that I’ve been racialized my whole life which is usually by being told I’m Hawaiian, which I’m not. I’ve never lived there and I’m not from there. But it seemed like there was something that needed to be explored in that constant racialization. It was a tricky book to write because I’m not Hawaiian and yet I’m assigned Hawaiian identity all the time. So I had to be really thoughtful about approaching that subject in a way that still centered Native Hawaiian voices and Indigenous voices. I think the other reason I wanted to do that book in that way was because some of the feedback I got from the first book was that academic writing can sometimes feel really dense. Some folks found it was hard to get through all the theory. It’s a critical race theory book, right? I wanted to write something that was more pocket size and more like a page turner and more about storytelling. I also self-published it because I wanted to see what it was like to work outside of the really traditional mainstream publishing and that was a cool experience. Those are how those two books came to be.

Sarah: Has your relationship with those books changed over time since you’ve published them?

Sharon: I think most writers, artists, anybody feels that way about stuff they make at a certain stage of life, like, “I don’t know if I can look at that anymore.” But I’m grateful I wrote them. I haven’t dove back into either of them deeply yet.

With the first one, I was a young first-time mother and particularly concerned with early identity development for my child because I’m formerly an early educator and I really believed then, and still do, that pouring a really strong foundation in those first critical learning years is key to developing all kinds of positive identity later in life. Now my son just started sixth grade, and identity is a whole different ballgame for a middle schooler. It’s fun and interesting and fascinating to reflect on how us doing that work early on, and him doing that work on his own now, manifests as a tween. I wouldn’t have been able to see how that would play out when I was younger. It’s really cool. I’m here to vouch for the value of doing that, my son can talk about himself and his identity and things in a way I certainly never could at his age.

Hapa Tales is interesting. I’m still fairly close to that book and trying to navigate a bunch of stuff and unpack a lot of stuff. That’s an ongoing story; it was almost like I was stepping closer to Taiwan. I spent the last year abroad in Taiwan with my son, doing a lot more identity exploration, and realized I learned a lot about Taiwan from writing about Hawaii because the analysis we use for understanding race and colonialism in the “mainland” doesn’t really work for island nations and communities and cultures. What I learned from Indigenous Hawaiians and Native Hawaiians about how to think about island communities and island nations that have been taken over by successive colonizers really helped me start to understand the history of my family in Taiwan, and that is ongoing. I don’t know if this is confirmed, but I think there are very strong theories now connecting Native Hawaiians to Taiwan. Interestingly, it is thought that Indigenous folks from Taiwan were maybe the first ones who made their way to Hawaii. That felt even more intense when I learned that.

I learned a lot about Taiwan from writing about Hawaii because the analysis we use for understanding race and colonialism in the “mainland” doesn’t really work for island nations and communities and cultures.

Sarah: I read on your website that you’re working on a memoir about that.

Sharon: I hope. I started a few times. It’s a little tricky to figure out how to write about that, but that is my pie in the sky dream.

Sarah: Related to that, do you want to say anything about the Taiwanese Daughter video project and what it’s been like to learn more about your family and your family’s history in Taiwan, and Taiwan’s transition to democracy? You just voted in your first Taiwan presidential election, right?

Sharon: Last January before COVID got really bad, I had this very strong instinct that I wanted to go vote in Taiwan’s presidential election. I’m a dual citizen so I can do that. I’ve never voted in Taiwan before. We have the same presidential election cycle in the US as Taiwan, but they vote in January where we vote in November here in the US.

My dad grew up during what’s called the White Terror Báisè Kǒngbù in Taiwan, which is the second longest martial law period in world history and pretty much his entire young life was earmarked by this martial law period. He was never allowed to vote for president under martial law and tons of Taiwanese people died for that right. So, it was really important to him and my elders to always vote in the election when they could, and I realized that I was probably taking that for granted. I was like, Okay, I need to go do this at least once. I need to show some respect and also appreciate, like we do in the US, appreciate this right for which so many people fought and died. And also, the incumbent was running again, who’s a woman, Tsai Ing-wen, and well, I haven’t gotten the chance to vote for a woman here, but I voted for her there and then got to see her win, which I haven’t gotten to see yet in my lifetime in US so that was really important.

I only went for like 10 days, but I got it in my head that I was going to go video and film as many of my elders as I could about our family and our history. My dad was amazing, he was my ambassador, because most people in Taiwan are multilingual so there were a lot of languages that I couldn’t speak. Some of these interviews were in English, some were in Mandarin, some were in Taiwanese, some had a little Japanese sprinkled in there. I have all that footage. I was able to put together one video so far. But I hope to put together a lot more about that really unique time in history, that transition period when Taiwan went from being a country who had been ruled by successive colonizers for many, many, many years to transitioning suddenly to a democracy which is still pretty new. That’s what I collected in January and then the world fell apart so I’m still playing catch up.

Sarah: What draws you to the type of storytelling you do in journalism, writing, photography, and documentation generally? What’s your storytelling origin story?

Sharon: Maybe it’s a little cliché, maybe a lot of folks of color would say something like this, but I really do think it just comes from growing up and never seeing stories that felt like they reflected my experience, or never getting to interact with stories that I felt like I could relate to… just looking around and feeling like there was so much missing, number one. Number two, knowing personally and also seeing around me that a lot of people’s voices weren’t getting heard. It’s not only my story that needs to be told. There are ways we can help lift up other people’s stories.

For example, like my father, who is an immigrant: folks who are maybe not going to be that comfortable writing their story in English. There is a way that someone else just needs to step in to support that person. There are times where it is really inappropriate to be talking for somebody else or telling somebody else’s story, and there are also times where it needs to take a village to tell that story. Some of it they’re going to tell on their own in their own way, and some of it maybe needs to be amplified by others in respectful, authentic ways. Also, being a multicultural mixed race, maybe even transnational person, seeing that there’s such a lack of nuance in the way we talk about things in this country and really wanting to complicate that more, ask some tough questions, maybe even some controversial or upsetting questions.

There are times where it is really inappropriate to be talking for somebody else or telling somebody else’s story, and there are also times where it needs to take a village to tell that story.

Sarah: Lastly, the theme of this issue of TSW is Economies of Harm. As an editorial team we’ve been talking about this theme as an exploration of capitalism’s expectations of time and the matrix of values we hold both as individuals and societies. From an outside perspective, it seems like so much of your work is about dismantling capitalist, imperialist harm and building and nurturing more humane values systems, but I’m curious about your thoughts on this. What does the phrase “Economies of Harm” bring up for you, what does it make you think of? How would you characterize your work within that framework?

Sharon: I definitely saw the word “economy” and thought of capitalism. I could not get away from that. I kept thinking about imperialist capitalism. It’s not only about money, but the ways that dictate so many values about, as you say, the ways we use our time, the ways we’re expected to produce certain things in certain ways, and how that is often harmful for those of us who this system is not designed to serve. Because our oppression serves people who have the power.

My work is a lot about storytelling – telling my own stories, trying to support and uplift the stories of others, usually as the stories that we’re not hearing. It’s about rewriting narratives, counter-narrating, and undoing a lot of those expectations. A lot of the stories I like to tell and that I’m trying to support and uplift are about resilience and reclaiming a voice, identity, life, well-being, all the things that our current social structures really take away from us. I’m thinking as we’re talking about burnout culture and overworking ourselves. Earlier in my career, I always got asked to do things for free. Just learning to say no to that and learning to value my work and stand tall and proud and say, I have a strong voice. I have experience. I have skills. Look at all this. Look at this body of work that I just did out of love, a lot of times. Undoing personal harm and systems of harm. I think storytelling is really powerful for that. I can’t even take any credit. I’ve heard women of color say that over and over. Once we can start changing those narratives and altering the story we tell about society and ourselves, then we start shifting the way we think about interacting with each other and the ways that we care about each other.

Once we can start changing those narratives and altering the story we tell about society and ourselves, then we start shifting the way we think about interacting with each other and the ways that we care about each other.

Mary Pan: Early in Heart Radical you share that no one in your family wanted you to go to China. What was it like to have a deep desire to understand this part of you and your heritage but also be discouraged to do so by your family members?

Anne Liu Kellor: I understood on some level that my family’s response at the time was coming from fear—from not wanting their twenty-one-year-old daughter to go somewhere far away by herself.

As a mother now, I can better understand that fear. But back then, it just felt like another way in which my parents were firmly planted in advocating for so-called safe and practical paths. They wanted me to go to college and get a good job. For me to want to be a writer and travel in Asia instead—that felt risky to them. But I was used to them discouraging risk. Perhaps I hoped that on another unspoken level, they also admired the decision. Both of my parents have always shouldered a lot of responsibility in their families—but they also were the first to travel far from home. So after they got used to the idea that I was going to do what I wanted, maybe I sensed they were proud of that independent, brave part of me; maybe it reminded them of parts of themselves or other paths they might have taken. I do feel that as children, we live out a part of our parents’ unlived paths.

I do feel that as children, we live out a part of our parents’ unlived paths.

Mary: Speaking of influence across generations, how do you think intergenerational trauma impacts both what we feel drawn to as well as what we might avoid in our lives?

Anne: I’m so thankful that many of us are leaning into this question these days. Trauma can impact us—and our descendants through many generations—in different ways. Either we run from past trauma, don’t want to look at it or can’t—because our bodies are protecting us from the pain, or we become aware of it and move towards it—remembering, questioning, and paying attention to how it shows up in our bodies.

I would not say that I’ve experienced much direct trauma, so it used to puzzle me why I felt so much sorrow. But, through writing this book and digging into my Chinese heritage, I’ve come to see how my mother and her mother and many generations on that side have experienced trauma—being refugees and growing up amidst war. Whether that has been passed down to me through my DNA or simply in the way that I was raised, nature versus nurture, isn’t that important for me to distinguish. What is important is simply acknowledging that I have inherited legacies from my ancestors, and perhaps because I feel more of the residual impact versus the blunt force, I am more capable of turning towards it, and being both direct and gentle with my questions and treatment of it.

Mary: You note how your second trip to Tibet felt different than the first and opt to omit your involvement in Free Tibet activism from a fellow traveler you met, Zhang Jie. Why did you withhold your views on China and Tibet from those you met in China?

Anne: Learning about modern China and Tibet’s history was my earliest introduction to cultural genocide, famine, torture, and the great suffering that humans can inflict on one another. However, when I was drawn into Tibetan rights activism in my early twenties, it was easy for many to frame the conflict as good vs. evil—evil Communist army against pure, spiritual Tibetans—and thus to speak of “the Chinese” with a negative connotation.

I was never satisfied with this narrative, and nor did it align with what I was learning about non-duality from Buddhism and the Dalai Lama. I was, of course, deeply moved by the Tibetan people’s plight, but I could not separate that from the suffering that Chinese people had been through as well, especially during the Cultural Revolution. And when you drill even deeper into the nature of karma and suffering, you can see of course how even the perpetrators, even the murderers and torturers, are suffering and deserving of compassion—how everything is a part of a chain of cause and effect, no one is just born “evil,” we all learn our behaviors from our ancestors and those around us. But I was not able back then to express these kinds of ideas very well, especially in Chinese. So instead I just avoided having conversations about politics and spirituality—which ironically was what I wanted to be talking about the most.

Mary: This gets to the fact that in Heart Radical you note many of the challenges to existing between and within two different cultures. What are the benefits of belonging to two different cultures?

Anne: I think if you are able to do the work of interrogating your many layers of experiences, feelings, and identities, you can emerge into a place where you understand what it means to embody “both/and” as opposed to “either/or.” For many of us, our embodied experience of how we are seen in the world, or how we experience it, rejects binaries and embraces an innate sense of complexity. This can be interpreted as a burden, especially when we are younger and pressured to fit into narrow boxes or social groups. But ultimately, I now see my mixed heritage as both a responsibility and a gift. I understand how my Asian and white American lineage can both embody the oppressed and the oppressor—it’s not abstract exercise for me to think in this way. It’s my blood line, it’s my inherited privilege, blind spots, and habits. It’s a gift to be able to feel like you have an in-road into being heard or seen as “one of us” by more people, at the same time that it can feel like you are hiding something, like you are afraid that you will be exposed as a fraud. So I feel compelled to look at this directly, to digest it, and attempt to make meaning of it through which I can connect with others who might share similar experiences.

If you are able to do the work of interrogating your many layers of experiences, feelings, and identities, you can emerge into a place where you understand what it means to embody “both/and” as opposed to “either/or.”

Mary: Yes, this kind of intentional reflection is so important. I do want to ask about your experience of being perceived in a certain way. You note the scrutiny received just walking down the street in some of the places you lived in your early twenties. What did being a societal minority, a kind of novelty, during that time teach you about others’ experience?

Anne: It taught me what it felt like to be othered, to continually guess how people see you, how you may be judged. And as such, it gives me a more universal awareness of what it feels like for anyone who feels singled out for looking or acting differently, or even feeling differently inside. Understanding this on a visceral level versus an intellectual level makes my commitment to others more personal. For example, Black Americans. I would never overtly compare my experience of being othered or scrutinized to theirs. And yet, when I was in China, the intensity of people’s gaze and mistrust of me made me more aware of this dynamic—let’s call it the Chinese gaze I experienced there, versus the white gaze. Nevertheless, while living as an American with Western features and light skin in China, while I may have been resented at times, I also was often envied or admired. So it’s not an equal comparison. Just a continual widening of empathy and awareness that I took with me back to the States where I would go on to interrogate how my racial identity operates on this side of the world, which is very different than in China.

Mary: Did your relationship with Yizhong give you insight into your parents’ possible experience as a mixed-race couple?

Anne: It’s kind of amazing to me that I’ve never directly considered this question. But of course there are parallels, right? As a foreigner, alone in China, I was both incredibly independent as I forged a life for myself and incredibly dependent on others for help, especially my boyfriend at the time, Yizhong. I can see how my mom when she came to the States for grad school was operating in a similar space. The difference was that while we both might have been perceived by others as foreign, I was simultaneously experiencing a kind of homecoming through speaking Chinese. But I’m sure people stared at my mom and dad in Wisconsin, as they stared at us. And I’m sure that my mom and I both experienced culture shock on a similar level. Also, a lot more hinged on her success in America—future opportunities for her family, who all followed in her footsteps and came to the U.S. Whereas for me, traveling was more of an adventure. My family wasn’t dependent on me. I hoped to stay in China and create a home for myself in some way, but I always knew it was my choice to stay or leave.

A sense of belonging doesn’t have to be so binary or tribal—you can never find one group that shares all of your traits, customs, or beliefs, but rather you can form allegiances and connection across many groups and intersecting layers of identity.

Mary: Whether in Germany, Hong Kong, Chengdu or Seattle, your self-perception is shaped by your environment. How does being mixed-race allow for such shapeshifting? Is this a benefit of being mixed-race or do you think it creates a challenge to finding a true home?

Anne: Again, the answer is paradoxical and nonbinary. This awareness of how others perceive or misperceive you is one of the universal experiences that mixed-race folks have. It then leads to continual choices around what you choose to divulge in any given situation—which in turn can often feel like code switching or shapeshifting or like coming in and out of hiding. Living with such a consciousness can create a lot of stress, and it can also lead towards a greater understanding and acceptance of how you are made up of many influences and layers. While you may never achieve an easy sense of belonging within one ethnic or racial group, you can learn to find belonging across many identities. A sense of belonging doesn’t have to be so binary or tribal—you can never find one group that shares all of your traits, customs, or beliefs, but rather you can form allegiances and connection across many groups and intersecting layers of identity.

Mary: That’s so powerful, this idea of finding belonging across many identities. How does being mixed-race and your experience of living in China in your twenties impact your values of success and worth? Has your experience during the pandemic enhanced or altered those values?

Anne: As a child of a Chinese mother, I’ve received many of the same messages that children of immigrants receive—work hard, get a good paying job, value wealth and security for your family over creative or spiritual pursuits. I think this is one reason why I felt at first like my journey to China had to be tied to achieving something tangible—if not becoming fluent in Chinese, then gaining some insight into my life’s work. After I returned to the States and gradually lost my hard-won ties to China and speaking Chinese regularly, it did feel in a way like I’d failed. I wasn’t going to become some China expert or translator. Instead, I just kept coming back to my writing. And while finally publishing Heart Radical after working on it for so long does make me feel more “successful and worthy,” what has felt the most redemptive of all is being able to teach writing and foster community. My students and my writing community have been essential to me not feeling like all of my writing-work is selfish or ego-driven. To hear your story in someone else’s story, to foster more empathy and love towards humanity, to feel less alone—there’s little that feels more important than this, especially right now, during the pandemic and during a time of such division.

To hear your story in someone else’s story, to foster more empathy and love towards humanity, to feel less alone—there’s little that feels more important than this, especially right now, during the pandemic and during a time of such division.

Mary: During your travels and time living outside of the States, did you encounter communities of communal belonging, of taking care of others above ourselves? How might we learn from those communities?

Anne: I can’t say that I ever fully entered a community while in China, but I did experience so many instances of people extending kindness towards me. Strangers taking me into their homes for a meal, or literally offering me their shoulder to lean and sleep on during a long bus ride. An old Tibetan beggar man once invited me into his shack to drink a cup of tea. A wealthy Tibetan family invited me in for a day of feasting and watching a Sylvester Stallone movie on their TV. It didn’t matter how rich or poor they were—people in China, and especially in Tibet, welcomed me into their homes in a way that is hard to imagine happening in the U.S. These kinds of experiences made me ask: how can I give back with my life? How can I make use of all of this wealth and privilege I’ve been born into? Most of the time, I do still focus on taking care of myself before others—it’s wired into me in a big way. But at least I am aware of this impulse now, and continually interrogating it. Asking myself: when does it make me more secure to live like this, or when does it harm me—when does it make me more fearful and closed off, and as such less fully alive?

I find value in exposing. Anything I keep hidden is usually linked to fear or shame. That doesn’t mean that everything is ready to come out or needs to come out in a public way—sometimes we simply need to expose things to ourselves.

Mary: There are themes of exposure, of being hidden in Heart Radical. How did your experiences show you the value of being exposed? Of keeping things hidden?

Anne: The more I write and publish, the more I find value in exposing. Anything I keep hidden is usually linked to fear or shame. That doesn’t mean that everything is ready to come out or needs to come out in a public way—sometimes we simply need to expose things to ourselves. But for writers and artists, we often live so much of our lives in our heads and creations, that to finally share our work brings a cycle of discovery to full fruition. But we have to be ready and choose it for ourselves. I stayed hidden for a long, long time. Being quiet and watchful was safe for me. I developed an inner trust in my voice and who I was, a core that can’t easily be shaken. For me, I needed a long gestation period.

Mary: What has it meant to you to teach classes to help others explore their own multiracial identity?

Anne: It has meant so much to me to connect with other mixed-race people and writers, when for most of my life, I never had any community around this part of my identity. It has validated for me how universal some aspects of our experiences are, and how different it can be depending on what we look like, what mix we are, what generation we are from, or where we live. It has strengthened my trust in my voice and vulnerability when it comes to writing around race, my trust that there are a lot of us out there who are hungry to hear more voices speaking to the multiracial experience. And that in sharing our stories, we can contribute to the incredibly urgent conversations our world is having around binaries, around racism, colorism, anti-Blackness, privilege, and responsibility. Mixed-race people are not a monolith, nor are we especially enlightened in our views. But most of us do carry a lot of inherited silence and pain—the tensions of racial dynamics embodied in our very being. And as such, we carry a lot of potential for transcendence, for the rupturing old silences, and for healing.

In sharing our stories, we can contribute to the incredibly urgent conversations our world is having around binaries, around racism, colorism, anti-Blackness, privilege, and responsibility.

Joyce Chen: The sex positive community has always smacked of a certain bold-faced honesty and authenticity that is often missing in almost every other community besides maybe recreational drug users. So let’s start with a fun question: what’s your favorite thing about sex?

Carlton Perry: I think sex positivity is about a lot more than just sex. It’s about a lot more than just two people or multiple people fucking. It’s a state of mind. It’s a state of body positivity. It’s a state of how you and your body and your mind react to the world and society around you. Sex is great. Sex is awesome. Not having sex is also great and awesome. The unique thing about sex positivity is that it holds space for all of that. All the way across the spectrum. From if you’re consensually and happily a slut all the way to if you are ACE (asexual). There’s a lot under that sex positivity umbrella.

The unique thing about sex positivity is that it holds space for all of that. —Carlton

Dr. Kit Stubbs: Absolutely. Sex is all about connection and connecting with a partner in a physical way. I have physical disabilities; I’m disabled by chronic illness and generalized anxiety disorder. I’m very open about that, and so for me, while sex has been at times tricky to navigate, it’s also felt like a liberating force in my life. So that’s the thing I’m really grateful for. Connection, liberation, so many things.

Joyce: And those two things are very much related.

Carlton: I think sex positivity expands your definition of sex, so sex can be very much what people need it to be at a given time. If penetrative sex doesn’t necessarily work for you, then phone sex is a thing. Connecting over technology, using technology. Kink, BDSM, touch. There are so many different ways to have a sexual, connective experience or a sexually intimate experience, or just sex for fun that expands the definition of what we think of as “just having sex.” It deals with the mind, it deals with the spirit, and it deals with the body. It deals with a lot of different things, so just as we said about sex positivity, it can include not having sex or it can include having sex. It also broadens our definition of what we think about sexuality and pleasure and health and all of these other things.

Joyce: I’m curious to know more in terms of your own awareness of sex positivity and being introduced to that as a concept. Did that happen earlier on in life or later on in life? 

Dr. Kit: I don’t think I came across the words “sex positivity” until 10 or 12 years ago. I grew up in a very conservative, religious family — I’m from Missouri originally — my family is Missouri Synod Lutheran. They’re not the most conservative Lutherans, but they’re, like, the next most conservative Lutherans. So I had abstinence-only education through the church, not really so much through my school, and I was not excited about that. When I became less religious later on in high school, I was a teenager, and I decided, okay, I’m going to get on birth control, I’m gonna go to college, I’ll find someone I trust, and I’m going to have sex. And that’s pretty much what I did. And it was great. I still had a pretty narrow conception of sex at that time, and I mostly thought of sex positivity as, “Hey, everyone should get an education.” Everyone should have access to birth control and the health care that they need. It wasn’t until later when I started making sex toys and started talking to other people and getting introduced to the sex positive community that I started to learn and appreciate how broad it really is.

Carlton: I am actually still a practicing Catholic. I grew up as a Catholic and all of my schooling up until the bachelor level was in Catholic institutions. But I had an amazing family and I had an amazing mother who told me to think for myself. To explore things. To discover things. And as long as I wasn’t hurting anybody — my mother always preached consent to me — she wanted me to be my own authentic self.

I started off as the typical kinky person who looked at comic books and movies and saw bondage and said, “I like that, but I don’t exactly know why.” Then life happened. I went through a period of my life where I was actually a caregiver for my grandmother, who had dementia. I cared for her until her passing, and that was a 10-year period out of my life. That took me to a little later in my life. I always had an interest in kink, so I started to revisit it after my grandmother passed. That’s when I realized, wow, there’s actually a community. And you can take classes and there’s actually people who do this stuff. And that helped me embark upon my journey and get to where I am now.

Joyce: Were there any misconceptions that you had about sex positivity that, as you learned more, you course corrected? Or, is there anything out there right now that is a misperception about sex positivity that you feel like people should know more about?

Carlton: I think people tend to grow up with misperceptions. People either think, I’m attractive or I’m not attractive. People tend to think I’m good at sex or I’m not good at sex. Or, I’m good in relationships or I’m not good in relationships.

When you become more exposed and you start thinking more about what sex positivity can offer you, you find out a lot of things are skill-based. That’s why most of us have sucky experiences the first time we have sex: because we don’t know what the hell we’re doing. The cool thing about becoming sex positive is we learn that we can develop skills. I can become better at sex. I can self-pleasure myself. Masturbation is also its own thing, so you find all of these different things and all of these different tools to help yourself. And not only physically, but you also find these tools to help yourself emotionally.

When you get into the sex positive community, you start to learn about negotiating. You learn about informed consent. And it’s like, oh wow. I can actually ask for what I need? I can actually see that my needs are being met? I can show concern for my partner’s needs? It’s like, wow, there are so many modes of relationships! I’d almost compare it to going to a small little hardware store and there’s only a few things that you can buy to work on a project. But then somebody says, “Why don’t you check out Home Depot or Lowe’s?” and you walk into this big box store and there’s all this stuff and you realize, Oh, I can order stuff too? And now you can put all these things together. You went from not being able to put together a tool shed to being able to build an entire building. And that’s what sex positivity is: it gives you all of these tools to live your best life. To fully come into yourself and come into your own.

When you get into the sex positive community, you start to learn about negotiating. You learn about informed consent. —Carlton

Dr. Kit: Growing up, I read a lot of the books of R-rated movies. My parents would not let me see the R-rated movie, but I could check out anything I wanted from the library and nobody would care. I did as much reading as I possibly could to make up for my actual experience, and one of the things I started to run into in college and even later was kink and heavy sensation play.

People are flogging each other, they are whipping each other. They are saying, “I want to be bit,” and for me, that just did not make sense. That is not an experience that I generally have. I have enough pain in my life that for me, more pain is not a useful experience. But then at one point, a partner and I were having a make-out session and they begged me to bite them, and I was like, “Okay, this is what you want?” And then watching and hearing and feeling their response, I realized, Oh, they’re actually enjoying this. Ohh. This is not a thing that I would like to receive, but clearly, I’m hearing them, I’m seeing them, and they’re telling me that they want this kind of pain, and so for me, that was really eye-opening.

People are just wired differently in all kinds of ways. The more I learned about humans, the more I learned that humans sure do a lot of things. And I think coming to sex positivity and realizing that nope, we’re not going to shame that and nope, we’re not going to judge people — but having that personal moment of going yup, people are really into things that I’m really not into, and that’s okay. We can work with that, we can negotiate that. And for me, that was a really big moment.

Joyce: You both mentioned that consent and negotiation are important and foundational to sex positivity. Has sex positivity changed the way that either of you have treated others?

Dr. Kit: I will say that I was not explicitly taught about consent growing up, and the only sex talk I got with my parents was heading off to a boyfriend’s house in high school and my parents saying, “Be good.” That was all I got. Not super useful. So for me, getting a little older and getting involved in the sex positive community, I’ve learned that it’s okay to ask for what I want. It’s okay to have boundaries. It’s okay to say touch me here, don’t touch me there. Today, this is okay but tomorrow, this might not be okay. This idea that it’s okay to be excited and to talk to your partner about what you each want and what you each don’t want is really empowering. I hope it is for a lot of people. Like, yeah, we get to have things we want. We get to talk about that with people. We get to find where we match. We get to articulate those boundaries. I feel that sex positivity has a lot to offer people because unfortunately, we don’t have enough parents emphasizing consent with young people. At least around the communities where I grew up.

I’ve learned that it’s okay to ask for what I want. It’s okay to have boundaries. It’s okay to say touch me here, don’t touch me there. Today, this is okay but tomorrow, this might not be okay. —Dr. Kit

Carlton: What was a blessing for me was that I was raised mostly by women. Being raised by primarily my mother, aunts, and my grandmother, I fortunately avoided a lot of toxic masculinity. By no means have I been perfect, but I didn’t grow up in a culture where when you’re in your teens, you’re expected to go out and sow your oats. That’s what makes you a “man.” That’s what makes you an adult. So I avoided a lot of things.

I can remember being in high school—I went to a Catholic high school)—and we took sex ed. A teacher asked me the question, What do you do when you’re going on a date? How do you approach it? I start off on this long monologue about how you’re supposed to talk to this person and ask about their feelings and when I got finished, there were a bunch of guys who were laughing at me. And one of the guys said, “From hearing you say that, I can tell that you’ve never been on a date.” And I remember that and at the time it bothered me a little bit, but I’m so grateful for the education that my mother gave me and the things that she exposed me to, because having that mentality then allows me to do what I do now.

I’ve had the opportunity and the blessing of having a little more fun than I probably would’ve had in high school, doing things that some of those folks only get to see on TV. The blessing of being raised mostly by women has been big, because having that knowledge taught me not only how to treat people, but how to take care of myself too.

Joyce: I’m curious how rebellion plays into sex positivity — or does it?

Carlton: I think when you say to someone that something is “rebellious,” it also gives you the connotation that it’s wrong or that it’s subversive in some way. I think part of what we try to do with The Effing Foundation is we try to reduce sexual shame and sexual stigma, so we can have open, healthy conversations around sex and sexuality and things like gender and all these other things. There is no shame. What being sex positive does, is it teaches you that you don’t have to be embarrassed of who you are or what you want. Or fundamental things that are integral to your being.

Dr. Kit: When I was a teenager seeking information about sex or trying to figure out how to masturbate, that felt super rebellious because that wasn’t information I was getting anywhere else. If anything, it was super negative information. Unfortunately, we still live in a very sex negative culture. Sex is this thing that we obsess over and yet, we cannot talk honestly about. At the Foundation, we normalize conversations about sex, we’re reducing shame around sex and sexuality, and so we are pushing back against longstanding Puritan narratives about who people are and what they should do. Does it feel rebellious? Well, there are not yet long lines of funders lining up to hand us money. We are out here on the fringes of the bigger nonprofit community. There are some other organizations, but I don’t know that anyone else focuses on sex positivity and art education like we do.

Unfortunately, we still live in a very sex negative culture. Sex is this thing that we obsess over and yet, we cannot talk honestly about. —Dr. Kit

Joyce: In terms of both your experiences within different institutions — academia or otherwise — I’m curious about whether sex positivity was or wasn’t welcome there, and, was that at all an impetus to starting The Effing Foundation? 

Dr. Kit: For me, I started getting involved in the sex positive community through the maker movement.

There is a maker space that started in Somerville that was called Artists in Asylum. And I started going there and taking classes because most of my background in work had been either software or my undergrad was in computer science and my grad work was in human robotic sciences. I’m very interested in anthropology, and I think that people are more important than tech, but I come from a very academic or even software space. Not so much things you can touch.

Going to those maker spaces, I met people who were artisans and crafters, hobbyists and folks who are making things. it took a few years volunteering there to figure out what I wanted to make. And I realized what I wanted to make was sex toys, so I took a casting class from my friend and I said, “Okay, I’m signing up — you understand that I want to leave your class with the maximum number of fuckable objects?” And my friend said, “Okay.” First project, everyone makes a candle, Kit makes a butt plug. Final project, people have various sculptures, and I have a copy of my favorite dildo. I started making toys and I started meeting more people and there was some contention, but folks were generally supportive. I kind of started from there — giving talks and meeting people — and finding folks in the sex positive community who were like, “This is amazing! We need more of this.”

It turns out, if you want to change the world, one of the things that is necessary but not sufficient is money. So it became: can I take money from my friends in tech and give it to artists and educators who are doing this kind of sex positive work? This is where the foundation came from.

Carlton: I’m currently working on a degree in project management, but my bachelor’s degree was actually a degree in political science from Loyola University here in Baltimore. As I said, it’s a Catholic institution and a lot of my teachers were Jesuits. And for all of the many problems that priests have, Jesuits are typically excellent teachers. A lot of what I focused on was political philosophy, so it was a lot of Socratic thought, a lot of Montesquieu, Descartes, and what it did was it trained me to think.

I’ve always been the sort of person who asks a lot of questions, and my education kind of formalized that. As I embarked on becoming more sex positive in my life, I had this idea of “I’m not sure about this, but let me find out. Let me be creative in some way.” When I got involved in the BDSM community, it was cool because it’s something to learn. Kinky folks love to go to classes. And they love to read books. They love to do all of these things. It’s not necessarily — like you said at the beginning of this interview — about just sex. If you’re preparing for a kink scene or you’re going and learning about it, the sex part of it is awesome, but it’s also about how suspension works. Or let me find out about the kinesiology of how I can go for longer. I’m teaching a wax play class tonight. So it’s like, let me figure out the physics that go into the heat of pouring wax on somebody. It’s all of these things that you get to geek out on, that you get to think about. Basically, it’s like a really cool science project.

Sarah Neilson: I read that A Natural History of Transition was originally going to be a work of nonfiction. What about fiction felt more right for this project for you?

Callum Angus: It was more that nonfiction just felt like the wrong direction to tackle some of these themes that I’m interested in. Originally, I was thinking about writing essays that were about instances of transition: plants and animals changing, that kind of thing. But I started and stopped that a couple times and then decided eventually that wasn’t the direction I was interested in going with this, because it already presupposed a divide between humans and nature.

It’s like saying, “Being trans isn’t unnatural. It actually happens in nature all the time,” which wasn’t something that I was really interested in doing. I think there are ways to write about that, but for me personally it wasn’t feeling like the right choice. Around the same time, I had been shopping around a novel about two trans men and about borders and their relationship. That wasn’t really going anywhere. I was getting frustrated with the fact that the stories I wanted to tell, and the way I wanted to write them, were about trans people, but they were also about something else in nature and tying those two things together. People didn’t really understand how to read that or, if they were an editor or an agent, how to sell that. So I kind of knew I was going to have to create an audience for this work. I was writing and pitching more about it and started this journal, smoke + mold, and eventually looked back and was like, “Oh, I’ve been writing these stories all the while in the background. Maybe they can come together into a more kind of cohesive collection that might be able to say something about these topics.”

I was getting frustrated with the fact that the stories I wanted to tell, and the way I wanted to write them, were about trans people, but they were also about something else in nature and tying those two things together.

Sarah: I wanted to ask you about language, because beyond the genres of fiction and nonfiction, the stories here could be called “magical realism” or “horror,” but those words feel flattening to me. Which is a problem with words in general, especially labels. Even the words “natural” and “unnatural,” like you said, create a troubling binary. What are your thoughts on the use of labels for genre, identity, etc., and more generally, what are your thoughts on the limitations and the possibilities of language? As a writer, where does it feel constraining and where does it allow for a kind of freedom?

Callum: For me, the first thing that comes to mind where language feels expansive is in the choice in what we get to call ourselves. I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently, like if I still identify in the same way as a trans man as I did before I started writing and before I started doing all of this, and I don’t really know that I do anymore.

A long time ago, I was sort of like, “Oh, this is easy. I’m transitioning, moving from female to male.” And those labels were very clear and straightforward and something that I felt like I fit. And now that I’m about nine years into my own transition, I’ve found that there are some of those words that either don’t fit as well anymore or maybe they don’t feel as necessary. Or maybe it’s even that I feel like I’m putting into action some of these things in my own work much more than I ever have been able to before. And because of that, some of these labels or titles don’t matter as much to my idea of myself. For a long time, before I had done a lot of work on this or put a lot of work out into the world, I was always identifying myself in bios as like, “Cal Angus is a trans and queer writer,” or something like that. But these days it feels so redundant to put that in there. And now sometimes I will take it out and just say, “is the author of this and this, this and that.” But sometimes that also feels like a covering up or something. So I’ve been thinking about language in those terms a lot recently. It can be constraining in some sense with having to juggle that.

But when I’m writing fiction and essays, language is important to me. Even though I do care on a craft level how my sentences come about, and that’s really how a lot of my own writing moves forward, like constantly polishing the sentences, I wouldn’t say that my central project is really focused on language in that way. Although in the past it has been, when I’m thinking about scientific names and how that slots certain organisms into particular categories and also ties them to the people who named them. I was just reading the other day, there’s a group called Birdability. They want to make bird names more descriptive so that it’s more accessible. At the same time it removes names of birds named after 19th century naturalists who often also played a large role in Indigenous genocide and things like that. That is an interesting realm to me too, where language plays a large role in our relationship to the world around us. And maybe that’s where I’m most interested in, less on the page and what my language is doing on the page, and more in how it maps out our relationships to the physical and material world.

Maybe that’s where I’m most interested in: less on the page and what my language is doing on the page, and more in how it maps out our relationships to the physical and material world.

Sarah: One of my favorite stories in the book is Rock Jenny, which was first published in The Seventh Wave. It’s actually really poetic: geology has this vast vocabulary and this material of rock that I think many people think of as sort of dead or immovable is actually so nuanced and alive. Could you talk about that story and how it came about, and what you think about rock?

Callum: Totally. I’m fascinated by it. I do take a lot of inspiration from scientific language. In college, I was a geography major. Not geology but close kin to that in many ways. Since then I have turned away from the scientist path, but I sometimes feel like the ways in which I try to tell stories is like a different kind of close looking and experimentation in certain ways. Like trying to kind of do my own science both without the very rigid categories and hierarchies that sometimes come with a lot of Western science and at the same time trying to turn that around and look at the history of colonialism in Western science as well. Rock is kind of the first thing that comes to mind when I think of something that is non-human but that still has such a presence about it. Humans build stone monuments, and they are some of the earliest evidence of human creation and that sort of thing. So, I think there is a real presence about rock in that way.

This is just kind of a side note, but I’ve often thought I really want to write an essay about fictional geology, like different representations of it. And not necessarily from books — I’m more interested in film and theater, like when you watch the old Star Trek and you look at the renderings of like paper mache Martian landscapes, that kind of thing. I’m really interested in those sorts of displays of geology. But I think when I’m writing a story like Rock Jenny and thinking about geologists — her mother is a geologist in that piece. So there’s that relationship, too, with how Jenny ends up becoming a rock for a certain period of time and is briefly legible to her mother, but then becomes the Moon and her mother’s kind of trying to sift through the air and still capture any kind of particles of her daughter that might be accessible to her. I think when I’m writing stories like that, I try to take all the science and sources of inspiration and almost hold them back a little bit. They kind of build the dam, and it’s all trying to speak through these characters. But I don’t want the weight of it and the language of it to overwhelm the poetry of the sentences, because that’s very easy for me to do.

I think when I’m writing stories like that, I try to take all the science and sources of inspiration and almost hold them back a little bit. They kind of build the dam, and it’s all trying to speak through these characters.

Sarah: I’m interested in the exploration of time in these stories. Like geological time, transness is ancient, and although these stories are contemporary, they really hold that idea of ancient knowledge in them. There’s also this interesting and sometimes playful thing about museums, and even the title of the book sounds like a guidebook; both museums and guidebooks have to do with time and cataloguing histories, but sometimes that cataloguing erases the present life of those histories too. Can you talk about your use of time in the book, how you conceive of time and how you approach it?

Callum: That’s an exciting question to me. Long before I started writing any of these stories, when I was in grad school, I was thinking a lot about, what does a trans short story look like? Does it follow the same kind of narrative rules that were taught about short fiction in MFA programs, like rising action and climaxes and complications, etc? I don’t want to make any broad sweeping generalizations; I sort of think of it as a thought experiment just to see what other templates are out there for telling these stories, and how they move through time. I do think there is something different, at least to how more realist stories are told about trans life. There’s different ways in which trans people move through time too, I think. People will talk about second puberties and returning to that sort of rush of youth that you maybe didn’t get as the gender you sort of felt more aligned with growing up. Even that is changing now though. So much of this is changing these days, with how we see young people thinking about gender, which is very exciting to me because I think it again changes the sort of stories that we allow ourselves to tell about us.

But in terms of the collection itself, I’m glad you picked up on the museum thread there, too. I’m really fascinated by tearing apart the concept of the museum. Typically, you think about a natural history museum, and you think, “This is where I go to learn about nature and about natural processes.” And yet when you go to a museum like that and you’re surrounded by all these different exhibits, you’re kind of in this place where there is the least of that [nature]. Because everything has been flattened by the way it’s all catalogued right next to each other. You’re not out in the environment, you’re in this institution that has kind of ironically posited itself as the antithesis of everything that it intends to display. In that kind of array, that setting of a museum like that, time gets totally flat. It just becomes tiny little notations on a label card. That’s so boring to me.

There’s the one story in the collection that goes back to the moment of contact between European colonists and the indigenous peoples of North America. There’s also the story that’s more or less from the point of view of Gertrude Stein [called Moon Snail]. I think most of the other stories are contemporary, but I try kind of hard not to place them too squarely in a certain time. There’s been a lot of “internet novels” that have come out recently or people writing about that, and that’s not really something that I try to put in my work, in part because I don’t believe it’s going to last that long. I don’t think it’s going to become this great interesting cultural moment that we think it is. I think it’s going to do something much different. I know it’s kind of a strange claim to make. But I really do think that as we think more about ourselves and how we’re situated in time, and especially in a time of climate crisis and increasing fascism and far-right movements all across the globe, I think we’re quickly approaching a moment of people becoming very discontented with the models of online connectivity and large corporations controlling a lot of the journalism and conversation that’s happening around this. I think you’re already seeing it with some Gen Zers not being on Twitter and not wanting to participate in those networks in the same way that a lot of us millennial creatives or writers have really embraced, because it was new and it was writing based in connectivity. I think we’re going to change our minds about that in a big way. That’s my current theory anyway.

It’s been great in a lot of ways; I’ve met a lot of people and in some ways [under Covid it feels] necessary to stay sane and happy. But I do think that being online so much has done something to our idea of history and how we engage with history, too. Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of wonderful historians on Twitter and all over the place doing incredible work. But I think on a broader level. I think about myself and how I learn about and think about and read about history now. I find that I just haven’t been reaching outside of myself as much as I feel like I used to.

Sarah: You brought up the Moon Snail story, and I wanted to ask about that, because in that story in particular it seemed to me that the prose itself mirrored the spirally Snail shell pattern. Can you talk about the different ways you approach the mechanics of prose writing in different contexts, or to mirror different paradigms or scientific or earthly frameworks? Is that something you do deliberately?

Callum: In a general sense, I tried to make every story I write feel very different on the level of language. Which is kind of contrasting what I said earlier about like, “I don’t pay that much attention to language.” But it is important to me, especially in a collection. Those are the collections I get the most excited about, when each story feels so new and different.

I can’t necessarily say that I’ve achieved it here or not, but with Moon Snail in particular that was a very conscious choice of wanting the language to feel different. I wanted my punctuation and syntax to be working differently here. in part because it’s about Stein and her origins as a marine biologist before she came into poetry. That is all true. She spent a year at Woods Hole Oceanographic marine institute in like 1893 or something. History happened, and she moved to France. But I don’t feel like her way of looking at the world changed that much. I sense the real scientist’s attention to detail and relationships and interaction with a lot of her poetry. I’m not an expert on Stein, but I have always been intrigued by the way that her poems and work sound so different from so much else that I’ve read and encountered.

I see a lot of even the molecular biologist’s attention to detail. She was studying embryos, developmental biology. She was studying fish embryos there, which is still something that’s used today to study developmental biology. That’s because as embryos, often we start with a very similar body pattern no matter the animal. It’s the changes that happen from there that sort of split us off into different directions. So it’s fascinating to me that that’s where she started her kind of intellectual investigations in life, looking so closely at these tiny little things that go on to change in such drastic ways. Then she ends up turning to poetry, but I don’t think that means that she left that all behind.

In that story, because of Stein, I really wanted to walk that knife’s edge of, “Okay, I don’t want to be trying to imitate her because I’ll never be her, and that’s impossible.” But I did want to preserve some of that oddness of the language, the sense of combining unexpecting things together to create a rhythm and a syntax that feels outside of certain bounds of scientific inquiry. I think probably she was feeling somewhat frustrated with the kinds of categorization and modes of thinking that she was asked to stay within those bounds of in that program. Maybe that’s a bit of a projection. But that’s kind of what that story is about. It’s projecting what that journey could potentially be for someone who was so inclined to think about these questions of language and description and development, and then ultimately decided they had to go and pursue that somewhere else. Not to claim a similar lineage, but that’s a very similar pattern to how I feel I have proceeded for a long time. I was a science major in college. I thought that’s what I wanted to be. One of my summer jobs in college was as a naturalist in a natural history museum. And then I realized that I wasn’t able to study the things that I wanted to study in the way I wanted to do it. I was sort of wishing, can’t a poet go to grad school for science and just absorb all of this material but then put out in whatever form they want, not academic papers or laboratory experiments? I feel like that would be great. That’s what’s missing. So, in a sense, that’s kind of how I work and accumulate material and sort of put it through my mind and then kind of see what comes out in that way. It is kind of an experiment as well, that kind of way of looking.

In a general sense, I tried to make every story I write feel very different on the level of language. Those are the collections I get the most excited about, when each story feels so new and different.

Sarah: Smoke and Mold just released issues 4.1 and 4.2. How is it going with that project?

Callum: I’m really, really excited about what’s happening. We just brought on three new assistant editors. I started the journal on my own, just wanting to do what I could with the resources that I had available to me at the time. I was sort of tired of waiting around for stuff to happen. So I just started it with the plan that I would always bring on more people. And finally, we’ve been able to. I’m especially excited about that. I’m excited about how all the new people and the new voices that we will publish will change the journal a lot, I hope, over the next 10 or 11 years until it stops. That’s the goal, is that it eventually will end. I’m excited by how much we can do in this period of time, and how much energy that ending date will give us. I’m excited for the ways that especially a lot of writers of color and editors of color will change the journal. We’re trying to bring on more Black, Indigenous, and People of Color right now as editors. Nature writing has for a long time been defined by white men, and I am a white man also. I’m a trans man, but I’m also a white man. So, I’m very cognizant of the limitations that a journal started by a white trans man faces. I can’t possibly even conceive of all the different ways that the journal could change and grow over the years. And I’m excited that we often will publish a lot of writers’ first publications. So I’m just thrilled and privileged to be able to get to be a part of this thing.

Sarah: What was the most joyful part of writing these stories or putting together and publishing this collection, and/or where are you gathering joy from right now?

Callum: Writing these stories over the last three or four years, to keep me going, I would tell myself, Okay, me sitting at my desk writing this story right now about people turning it into rocks or whatever might not be the most important contribution to the larger conversations happening in this country or this world right now. But at some point they’re going to become important, and it will have been important that someone was thinking about this stuff.

I think that goes for everybody, for anyone that has a particular thread that they’re chasing with their writing or theme or idea that’s very important to them. It’s important that we follow that kind of inspiration and the thing that makes us feel the most excited in our writing, because it will be important that someone has been doing that work all along. So I think for me, thinking about joy, it’s exciting and joyful to be at that moment now when I’ve done all that work, and now this collection is coming out and people are reading it. And especially at a time when trans identity is again back in the spotlight, not for great reasons, but it’s there. So I’m kind of feeling that joy of like, “Oh, this is the time.” It’s very exciting and joyful to finally be read in that way. But also writing; when I sometimes get a little overwhelmed by online life and social media, I’ve been finding a lot of joy in going back to the work.

I’m working on a collection of essays right now, and it’s just so much fun and joyful to do that.

Ella Shapiro: The first stand-up of yours I saw was about HIV and being HIV-positive. I’m curious about how you feel about touching on things that are so publicly stigmatized. How do you talk about those things?

James Tison: Honestly, I was really inspired by Hannah Gadsby and Nannette. By the time that I talked about HIV in my stand-up, I had had it for about two or three years, and had gone through this peak of having been steeped in stigma when I first got it.

The first thing my mom said to me when I came out to her was, “Don’t ever get sick.” I knew nothing of undetectable, so when I tested positive I was coming at HIV from such an ignorant place. It took me two years to clear out that stigma within myself. So, when I say I was inspired by Hannah Gadsby — if you’re familiar with her special Nanette — it’s her talking about trauma. I wanted to bring a level of vulnerability to stand-up and my work, but it was also the “comedian trickster” in me, knowing just how fucking nervous it makes audiences and people in general. If you just blurt it out, it sort of discombobulates people. Gadsby talks so much about making audiences nervous and making them tense, and you kind of play with that. I genuinely empathize with audiences’ ignorance around it because I was so ignorant about it. I had come from so much stigma and had worked through it. It was funny for me to then play with it. So, it wasn’t as noble as like, “I want to destigmatize,” because I had to do so much destigmatizing within myself.

It wasn’t as noble as, “I want to destigmatize,” because I had to do so much destigmatizing within myself.

Ella: Do you have to deal with that in other things you talk about in your stand-up, or is that more exclusive to HIV?

James: Depends on the audience. It depends on what’s trending on Twitter. I also have some material about being nonbinary and being part of the trans community. Two years ago, that wasn’t such a tense issue. I don’t think the rage around trans issues — the bile that people have around it — was quite as palpable as it was in the past year. I’ve noticed that when talking about trans issues, you can feel an audience start to get nervous, or excited, or whatever it is. That to me is a version of stigma, whereas when I talk about my nieces and how annoying they are, that’s not so stigma-related. Although, there should be more stigma around having kids, in my opinion.

I’ve noticed that when talking about trans issues, you can feel an audience start to get nervous, or excited, or whatever it is. That to me is a version of stigma.

Ella: A lot of what you’re talking about is your relationship with an audience, and right now, with the pandemic, we’re not having those in-person relationships with people. Have you been able to mimic that online, or found any ways of interacting with people in this new digital landscape?

James: Yes and no. I mean, you’re talking to me because of TikTok. This conversation that we’re having is an absolute “yes.” I have more fully embraced that side of things, meaning social media, digital content, and especially TikTok. I feel like I got lucky in the timing of when I joined TikTok in March/April 2020, when we were all truly trapped and didn’t know when we were getting out. I was doing some Zoom shows as well for the first six months of the pandemic. The Zoom shows are frankly terrible. They’re such a poor substitute, but especially in those first three months, you could genuinely feel how hungry audiences were for just anything.

There was, I think, an element of “Okay, there is some connection happening here.” Then, I was sitting on all of these stand-up clips that I hadn’t shown, which is when I started sharing them on TikTok. That’s where I say I feel like I got lucky. I had this little trove of maybe 10 minutes total of jokes that I had happened to film or had gone well right at a time where everyone was like “Please, give me something!” So, “yes” is the answer overall, but “no” in the sense that it’s not the same thing. When it comes to stand-up, there’s just no real replacement. I’m fully-vaccinated and clubs in New York have opened up a little. Just last night, there was a COVID-safe mic that opened up, and it’s a gay mic, and I haven’t been in nine months. I was like “Oh shit! It’s time!” Even for a mic where there were 15 or 20 people and we’re all spread out and we’re all very nervous about COVID, that was so much more connected than anything that social media of the past 14 months has brought.

Ella: It’s so interesting to think about how these things will feel as we kind of reintegrate into society. How was it doing that for the first time in so long?

James: Really good. First of all, the New York comedy scene feels like it’s chilled out. It feels like the peaks and valleys of people, the “anti-PC” versus the woke, versus I don’t know, we’ve all lost a lot. There are still assholes, I’m sure, but it feels like everyone’s grateful to be here and taking it less for granted. It felt nice to connect. I think I knew 20% of the people there, so there was a whole new batch of people that had started doing comedy in the past year. It was great.

Ella: I’d love for you to tell me a little more about is the Snowflake Mic. To my understanding, you’ve been a creator and/or host of that.

James: That mic was born out of a couple experiences that I had when I first started wearing women’s clothing and going to mics. It happened several times where I was visibly trans and where I’d walk into a room and in 30 seconds, someone is saying some shit to me about how I’m dressed, sometimes with a fucking microphone in their hand. It’s just a level of, frankly, bullying that is not the same thing as what you do actually have to experience as a comic, which is bombing and having everyone in the audience hate you because your material is bad. It was a level of aggression, and transphobia, and biphobia, and homophobia, and all the things, that was totally separate from the “I’m here to enrich myself as a professional and a creative you can all go fuck yourself.” So there’s a bunch of mics in New York that, for all those reasons, either have rules where they’ll say “Don’t bring your hate speech onstage. Don’t attack people. Establish a code of manners.”

And then there’s queer, femme mics. Riffing on that element, I had an in at Club Cumming in the East Village, which historically is a very gay neighborhood. It’s where Rent is set. But the Village, for the comedy scene, has some of the most bullying environments. None of those queer mics had really set up shop in that neighborhood, so that was kind of the impetus for it. Dylan Adler and Gus Constantellis, who are fellow queer comics in the scene, helped me produce it. We actively tried to prioritize signups for BIPOC, trans, and LGBT individuals. I feel like I’ve gotten some criticism from some of the “anti-PC,” Trump-loving comedians. Those types of mics get criticism from those types of people as being anti-free speech, that they’re not real comedy, and that part of doing comedy is that you have to get bullied, which I don’t really agree with. The whole point of that mic was that free speech is just a complete two-way street. You’re actually welcome to come to that mic. If you want to tell your hate-speech joke, I dare you. The audience also has free speech and it’s a very honest room. It’s a very supportive room and it’s a very loving room, but they don’t want that bullshit. They’re not interested.

I don’t think all mics should be run like my mic. I think the terrible rooms are great. They actually made me a better comic along the way. The thing that I love about Snowflake Mic is that the audience is very reflective of a growing type of stand-up audience. When I think of the ’90s, honestly even the 2010s, stand-up audiences, especially in New York, you had to be tending more libertarian or looking for the bullies. There’s a newer type of audience the past 10–15 years that have no interest in that type of comedy that is rooted in bullying. I love that room for that.

There’s a newer type of audience the past 10–15 years that have no interest in that type of comedy that is rooted in bullying. I love that room for that.

Ella: I love thinking about comedy as a two-way street, as a dialogue, because I think it’s not usually presented that way. 

James: I just think that there’s space for everybody. There’s actually a lot of roast comics that I love. It’s not like I’m like, “Don’t tell jokes that insult each other.” I love roasting each other, but it’s the bullying. It’s the professional bullying out of the art form. There are so many people that say, “Oh, I don’t really like standup,” which makes no sense to me. That, to me, is the disconnect. That’s like saying you don’t like music. I think what you don’t like is bullying.

The Snowflake Mic to me kind of feels like church. It’s like what I wanted church to be when I was growing up. It’s just very celebratory. It’s very positive. A lot of audiences and a lot of people get into standup comedy because they want to punch on the little guy and that’s fine. I think there are actually funny ways to do that, but by and large lately it’s just fucking vicious. We see the real-life consequences after the Trump administration of the statistics of trans suicide rates and hate crimes. To say that there’s no connection is sort of ignorant.

Ella: If we’ve learned anything from the past four years, it’s that rhetoric leads to action. 

James: I very much agree with that. I’m 34, and I was in high school in Texas during the George W. Bush years. I was very face-to-face with conservative viewpoints. Then, I went to NYU during the Obama years. I think it’s like what you’re saying, where a lot of people told a lot of jokes they would not tell today. I think the difference is when the person who has the biggest microphone in the world is like Trump, and is using that microphone to say the most vile, vicious stuff. It’s like, oh wait, that affects how I think about what I say into my microphone as a person who says things into a microphone for a living. It’s not rocket science. That’s what actually pisses me off, too. It’s after the four years of Trump to still dig your heels in and say there is no connection between me making fun of every Japanese person in the room and every trans person in the room and the violence that then happens to those people on the street. I could scream about that for hours.

Ella: I think a lot of what you’re doing ― taking up comedy spaces to talk about all of these things like being sober, HIV-positive, nonbinary, and talking about health care ― is in many ways, an act of rebellious joy, which is the theme for our current issue at the magazine. I’m curious about what you think of that concept and if you can relate to it at all.

James: In so many ways, rebellion is such a personal thing. I’m in trauma therapy right now. In fact, the past four months, I have not really been performing at all. While we were all still trapped inside, I decided, “Okay, there’s no hustle around, just deal with your bullshit.” So I started going to trauma therapy. I come from a family that’s very, very insistent that you leave that shit in the past and that to deal with it now is just, well, bringing up the past. The connection for me between basically telling these secrets onstage — things that in my own family I’m not really supposed to bring up — is the very thing that they all need, which is to deal with their own bullshit. That is kind of an act of rebellion. That is bringing me so much joy. I think my version of Rebellious Joy this year is dealing with my own shit and not working my bullshit out on other people and finding the joy in that. I spent so much time working my bullshit out on other people with such diminishing returns. It brought nobody any joy.

The connection for me between basically telling these secrets onstage — things that in my own family I’m not really supposed to bring up — is the very thing that they all need, which is to deal with their own bullshit. That is kind of an act of rebellion.

Sarah Neilson: What drew you to modeling? Can you talk a little about what alternative modeling is, and the kind of brands you work with?

Yasmin Benoit: Alternative modelling is a genre of modelling centered on alternative fashion and subcultures — gothic subculture or punk subculture, for example. I’ve always been drawn to those styles, so that was the part of the industry I was most interested in. I became intrigued by modelling in general because I’d exhausted every other hobby, and I felt like there was a void in representation for black women who looked like me. Some alternative brands I’ve modelled for are Killstar, Punk Rave, Ada Zanditon Couture, Gothic Lamb, Necessary Evil Clothing, but my work has expanded further than alternative brands now since I also shoot for more commercial ones and lingerie brands.

Sarah: In your videos on your YouTube channel, you describe yourself as creative, and you are a photographer as well. What are some of your creative outlets, and what fuels your creativity?

Yasmin: I have a very overactive imagination so that’s what fuels most of my creativity. I’ve always been interested in creative writing as an outlet — not the kind that I want published or the kind I share with other people. I’m also quite addicted to The Sims 4 which lets me play out all kinds of stories and get creative with their entire world. Most of my photography in lockdown has been getting the hang of photo editing and self-portraits since I haven’t been that motivated to leave the house, given how cold it is at the moment. Prior to that, I had a thing for photographing natural and urban landscapes and then putting a darker twist on it.

Sarah: In what ways does modeling feel like creative work for you, and in what ways does it not?

Yasmin: It feels creative in the sense that I often get control over what I’m doing. I can discuss with the photographer what vibe we’re going for, get designers involved that I think fit the vibe, choose interesting locations. When I get to work like that, it’s very creative and collaborative. But if it’s the kind of job where I’m just the mannequin then it doesn’t feel very creative. However, it’s still fun to see what other people’s ideas are and contribute to their vision.

Sarah: In what ways is modeling, and the visibility inherent in it, part of your activism work? In what ways is it not?

Yasmin: Modeling is how I got a platform in the first place and it’s a job I continue to do while being an activist, so you can’t really separate the two. I can use it to dispel misconceptions about asexuality and also bring asexuality into different spaces within the media, increasing our representation. But at the same time, sometimes a job is just a job and it isn’t a social commentary.

Sarah: You have two science degrees, a BSc in Sociology and a MSc in Crime Science. Can you tell me about your interest in these sciences? It seems like you’re really interested in people and their psychology.

Yasmin: Yeah, I’ve always been interested in analyzing everything, whether it be interpersonally or socio-politically. I like spotting social patterns and structures. I was the kid who asked a lot of questions and either annoyed my teachers, or won them over by being engaged in the lessons. While everyone else in my school was reading Twilight, I was reading books on school shootings, 9/11, and church burnings in Norway. I found that sociology, in particular, put words to concepts I had already thought of. Crime Science was a natural progression, partially because the university I wanted to attend (UCL) didn’t have MSc Sociology as an option.

Sarah: This year will mark the first International Asexual Awareness Day on April 6, which you founded. Can you tell me about the process of founding this day? What was involved, and what are you excited about for the first one?

Yasmin: It was quite a long process. There were a lot of cooks in the kitchen, which is essential when you’re trying to create something that serves everyone and represents everyone equally. That also meant that it was quite a long process with loads of discussion, especially when it came to picking a date that didn’t clash with anything and establishing the purpose. But now we have something that everyone has gotten behind and there’s been a lot of positive feedback. The first one is going to be important for building momentum and putting International Asexuality Day on the map, so we need to make as much noise as possible. I’m excited to see what aces across the world come up with!

Sarah: How do your gender identity intersect with your aspec identity, and/or how does it not?

Yasmin: I’m one of those people who doesn’t really think about gender in terms of self-analysis. That’s probably the only thing I don’t analyse when it comes to myself. I’m just a woman who is asexual. I’m not any less of a woman because I’m asexual. I’m a woman because that’s how it worked out. All of these intersections influence my experiences but my aspec identity doesn’t necessarily influence my gender identity.

Sarah: You’ve said that your ace identity is queer. There is an ongoing and honestly kind of boring debate about whether ace folks are queer, which is irrelevant because only people who say they are queer are queer so some ace people are and some aren’t. But I’m wondering for you specifically, what draws you to the queer label or queer ethos? What does queer mean to you? How does it (or doesn’t it) intersect with your ace identity?

Yasmin: I find queer to be an appropriate umbrella term for non-heteronormative identities that have experienced literal or symbolic annihilation in our society. Asexuality falls under that, which is why I use the term in the same way that I use the term LGBTQ+ to describe a group of people with a shared experience. Not all queer experiences are the same but it’s still the consequence of the same kinds of stigma that we should all come together to combat.

Not all queer experiences are the same but it’s still the consequence of the same kinds of stigma that we should all come together to combat.

Sarah: In an essay for Glamour published this month, you write, “Women like me will continue to be dismissed as unlovable, ugly, frigid and boring. This is especially true for Black women, who are so hypersexualised, that to be a Black asexual woman seems entirely contradictory to people.” How do you care for yourself when encountering the intersections of aphobia, sexism, and anti-Black racism?

Yasmin: I find it quite cathartic to make an example of it. It’s a way to vent without actually having to get into a negative conversation with a troll. Otherwise, I just try and focus on other things that I enjoy — get lost in a book or a video game or in my other projects. No matter what aphobia or sexism or racism I experience, I don’t let it stop me from thriving — keeping booked and busy makes it easier to drown it out.

Sarah: What feels joyful to you about ace/aro/aspec identity? How do you cultivate aspec community in your own life? What is your favorite thing about being aspec and knowing other aspec people?

Yasmin: It’s just one of the many elements of my personality that I work with, and embracing it has allowed me to have a lot of very cool experiences and connect to a lot of people. That’s the most joyful part. I spend a large amount of my time working for the community so it’s a part of my daily life whether I’m actually talking to people in it or not. I’d say that my favourite part is feeling like I’m part of a community in a sense, one that values all of the work I’m doing.

Sarah: In my experience, most people under the ace umbrella reject the myth that sex and romance are a necessary and universal marker of both maturity and love. Do you agree with this? How do you reject these myths both inwardly and outwardly?

Yasmin: Of course, I definitely agree. I just live my life according to what I believe and I think it’d be healthier for everyone — asexual, aromantic or not — to place less emphasis on the importance of sex and romance.

Sarah: How do you think we as aspec folks, and as a society in general, can dismantle relationship hierarchies that tell us romantic partners are the ultimate relationship achievement?

Yasmin: I think we are getting to a stage where people in wider society are starting to question the nuclear, heteronormative, amatonormative expectations more. But we’re a long way off yet and that’s not a change that aspec people could bring about single handedly, considering that most people don’t pay attention to us anyway. I think it might change, but I question whether it’ll necessarily be replaced by a more constructive alternative.

Sarah: Lastly, the theme of our current issue is Rebellious Joy. Where do you find and create rebellious joy in your life and work, whatever that phrase means to you?

Yasmin: I think my entire vibe is Rebellious Joy, to be honest! To me, that means marching to the beat of your own drum, not conforming, being yourself, being unapologetic and shaking things up — whether it’s in my personal life, or through my modelling or through my activism. That’s what I’ve always aimed to do and that was always who I was.

Avi-Yona Israel: I will just start by saying on behalf of The Seventh Wave that we’re super excited to have you in our issue about rebellious joy, because I can’t think of anything more rebellious than being a non-theist in America. Are you currently in the States?

Anya Overmann: I’m currently in Baja California in western Mexico. I’m actually down here with my partner looking for a boat so that we can live abroad and travel in a different way.

Avi Yona: You’re my hero. I’m going to get my husband to move into a tiny house with me. Anyway, on the subject at hand, I didn’t think that there could be anyone better to ask about rebellious joy than the President of Young Humanists International. Do you feel like a rebel?

Anya: It’s kind of funny because when I was a kid, I was really into the idea of being the first female president of the United States. And as I aged, I was like, that is not my path at all. I cannot think of anything I’d want to do less. But there was still some element of leadership, especially female leadership and trying to incorporate my values into a large scale leadership role, that really appealed to me. Finding myself here has been really fulfilling and it’s a completely different way to pursue what I’ve dreamt of being since I was a child. So yeah, I guess I do feel kind of rebellious in that sense, just because not a lot of people know what “humanism” is. But when they learn what it is, they’re like, OK, that makes a lot of sense. While people might not identify as humanists themselves, they can certainly align themselves with several of the life stances and principles that humanists stand for.

Avi Yona: Can you describe humanism for us, in your own words?

Anya: I grew up in Ethical Culture, which is a sect of humanism. At this point, it’s pretty much exclusively in the United States, but it originated in Europe and it came from a Jewish guy that wasn’t really pleased with Judaism but loved certain elements of organized religion that were centered around community and life milestones: baby naming, weddings, memorial services. Both of my parents grew up Catholic and decided before I was even born that that was not their thing. They decided not to be religious.

When they had children, they sort of realized, Oh, crap, we can’t just allow them to move through the world with no religious education, because then they don’t know anything at all and have no point of reference for anything. So, we ended up going to the Ethical Society of St. Louis. We started when I was in kindergarten, learning about morality and ethical principles, just how to be a good human, how to use those teachings to be decent. It is more inclusive and accepting of other religious viewpoints — the motto is “deed before creed” — and the whole idea is that it doesn’t matter how you justify doing good; the point is just to do good. This is the only life that we have that we can point to with certainty. And with that being true, we have to to live in a way that upholds human life with dignity and respect. We value science, reason, and the rights of other human beings, and we do everything we can to uplift those, be it through politics or social means. It’s not a religion, it’s a life stance about valuing humanity at the end of the day.

It’s not a religion, it’s a life stance about valuing humanity at the end of the day.

Avi Yona: That was an incredible explanation. Now, is atheism different from humanism? And isn’t there an internal conflict in being religious and being a Humanist?

Anya: Those are two really good questions. The main difference between atheism and humanism, the way that I see it, is that atheism is an identifier of what you are not. You are not a theist. That’s great. That just means that you don’t believe in higher powers; it’s different than believing that humanity has inherent worth. That must be upheld, and it’s different than believing that science should be valued over religious belief.

In my experience, a lot of people that break from a religious background swing into atheism really hard because it’s this pendulum effect, right? And they end up being really resentful of religion, and rightfully so. I mean, it can hurt people, so it’s a really understandable resentment. When people swing out of it, they swing out hard. When they become atheists, they mean it. To me, that’s just a swing in the other direction, not a settling point. It’s a stepping stone for moving to a different set of values. And instead of identifying as something that you aren’t, you’re moving into a new set of values, identifying as something that you are. I think a lot of atheists who struggle to move forward are really caught up in identifying as what they’re not and being angry. And that’s a really tough place to form your identity.

I think that’s why a lot of religious people criticize atheists as being really angry: because they are angry, and they have a right to be. But to hopefully move forward and envision a better world, we do need something else to push us forward.

[Religion] can hurt people, so it’s a really understandable resentment. When people swing out of it, they swing out hard. When they become atheists, they mean it.

Avi Yona: Nihilism is a bit easier to come by when you’re hurt or threatened in some way. Like after a breakup, people always say, “I’m never going to date another person again!” instead of “I’m going to choose a better person next time.”

Anya: I was just having this conversation yesterday with my partner about comparing atheism to nihilism. There’s a lot of similarities there. It’s just an absolute, and by identifying as something that you’re not, there’s no way to unbox yourself. But with humanism, you are able to break free of that and be like, OK, there’s no god. Now what? There’s a clear path forward from not believing. And that’s the main difference that I see with humanism: it’s finally the settling point with the pendulum. In another metaphor, atheism is a stepping stone. You’re angry for a while, and then you’re like, OK, now I need to do something with that nonbelief rather than just sit here and stew in it. Humanism is healthier than just sitting there and stewing and being angry at religious people all the time.

By identifying as something that you’re not, there’s no way to unbox yourself.

Avi Yona: As you’re talking, I’m just thinking to myself, this doesn’t feel like an explanation of a value system, because there’s so little yelling. It’s hard to find value system creation with a functional purpose, it’s just a lot of bravado and threats. I would think step one in invoking more humanistic principles in the world would be like talking to people like you want them to be emotionally intact when you leave them, right?

Anya: You’re spot on. To answer the other question that you had about the ethical culture being inclusive of people with theistic beliefs: yes, there’s a lot of in-fighting. There’s this effort to be more interfaith and bridge the divide between religious people and non-religious people, but a lot of people that ended up there were raised religious and angry that they were so hurt by religion. It really requires a lot of forgiveness, and I guess, a lot of foresight to be able to say: yes, religion has been awful to human beings, but how can we work with people that are still religious to be able to to move forward with our shared values? Because we do have shared values. It’s just that we don’t execute them in the same way.

I go back and forth on whether that’s the best use of our time. We have these really important social justice issues that, if we did work with religious people, we might have a better shot at moving forward with. In St. Louis in particular, that has really been highlighted since Ferguson. The way that the Ethical Society got involved was we realized, hey, there are a lot of religious organizations in town that really want to advocate for Black Lives Matter, and we want to get involved. It’s an overly white organization, and that’s one of the criticisms against humanism in general: it’s very white, it’s very male, it’s very Western. And those are things that I, recently becoming president of Young Humanists International, continue to bring up. I feel obligated to say we have a really long way to go, and we are really comparable to a lot of organizations that we detest because we don’t address these issues enough. It’s just a continued point of contention, especially between the older generations that have been doing this for a long time and the young people that are now coming in thinking, why have you been doing it like this this whole time? You could be doing this better!

Avi Yona: There’s definitely a different burden going through the glass ceiling for women and people of color in the last couple of years because it really is no longer acceptable to ascend and not take anyone with you or look after your community in some sort of way. And so I do think that when we inherit the CEO positions and things like that, it always seems like we’re trying to change too much. But it’s just like, no, no one else changed anything, so now I have to change everything.

Anya: Right, exactly. A lot of people take that as an attack, even within humanism.

Avi Yona: It may not have been as diverse as it should have been, but did you actually enjoy going to the services or meetings? I don’t know what the appropriate term is.

Anya: Oh yeah! We call them platforms. It’s so community oriented and it really does take the pieces of religion that work best and bring people together. It just works so much better when it’s not built around shame and guilt, and the pillars of religion that keep people coming back. I really did enjoy that. And I have lifelong connections from attending those. As a kid, I wondered, why do I have to do this? I’m glad that my parents made me do it because there were benefits that I didn’t see as a kid. And being able to have that community that I can fall back on and rely on for support is just invaluable.

Avi Yona: I think, unfortunately, the power of the human social mechanism gets conflated all the time with the worth of the actual services. The idea that any of the benefits of church or a church-based community could be realized without its humanist properties, it’s ridiculous. It’s sort of like, you can have society without church, but you can’t have church without society, right? So humanism has got to be the foundation. And then if you want to throw anything else on top, it has to fit within those humanist constraints. But a lot of people have turned the idea of a god into a financial boon of some sort, whether it’s ancient royalty saying that the meek shall inherit the earth or something more modern, like a megachurch leader saying that a god wants me to have a Ferrari. Do you think that there is a fundamental relationship between capitalism and Americans being able to build any value system at all?

Anya: One hundred percent. You really can’t look at religion in the United States without also looking at money and the way that capitalism has played a role, especially because they have to prey on vulnerable people to sustain the capitalist system, and to sustain it as a physical, tangible place with salaries and people that work there.

Religious organizations are supposed to be nonprofits. They’re supposed to be tax exempt, but they have to make money somehow to sustain themselves. If they didn’t have money, they’d suffocate. It intertwines with preying on people’s shame and guilt, and I don’t think you can pull those apart. That’s part of the reason why so many humanists are so timid around the idea of promoting humanism, because we’re so sensitive to proselytization and we just don’t want it to come across that way. We want people to come to humanism of their own volition, to conclude on their own, instead of more damnation. And it’s unfortunate because I’m a marketer and the marketer in me says, well, we have to put the ideas out there. How are people going to find out about humanism unless we promote it?

Still, allowing people to use their own critical thinking skills to come to their own conclusions, that’s humanism. We wouldn’t use any methods that weren’t humanist to attract people to humanism. So it’s a touchy thing and it’s understandable. I mean, we do want to be really careful about framing new ideas to people, especially when you’re trying to prove that these new ideas are not going to manipulate you.

You really can’t look at religion in the United States without also looking at money and the way that capitalism has played a role.

Avi Yona: I think it’s also a little bit of a different struggle because you’re doing all of this with adults who already have the sort of formative idea of how the world works, whereas at least in America, Christianity gets at people before they can talk: the imagery, social scaffolding, the holidays at school. It’s much, much more of a pervasive context. And it may not have always seemed that way. At some point, I’m assuming most non-native Americans were Christians, in which case it wasn’t oppressive to anyone they cared about. Whereas now, I think that it can much more easily be argued that it is forced upon people. Should humanists be trying to get in at that same level, preschool, kindergarten? Is there ever going to be a chance to bring massive amounts of people into the fold if you all don’t get there first?

Anya: That’s why there’s a huge effort, particularly in Europe and in the UK, to push for humanism in schools, at the elementary school level, all the way up to secondary education. There absolutely needs to be a humanist presence, especially when religion already has presence there. And that’s not even really legal in a country that claims it stands for democracy and separating church from state. We follow a calendar that is Christian for the most part, and I don’t celebrate any of those holidays, but those holidays dictate a lot of what I do. As someone that was raised non-religious, I frequently wonder, is it really so hard to envision a world where we don’t force any religion on anybody for any reason? I think it is really hard for people to envision that, but for me, it’s really not that hard. Learning ethics and philosophy at a younger age is super beneficial in that there’s way less of a need for people to fall into religion. And humanism doesn’t have to be compared to religion in that way. Humanism is just democracy, logic, and science. It’s more normal than people make it out to be.

As someone that was raised non-religious, I frequently wonder, is it really so hard to envision a world where we don’t force any religion on anybody for any reason?

Avi Yona: I think that it’s pretty obvious that some conflict between religion and humanism has affected everyone’s life, whether it’s terrorism, charities, colonialism, abortion. How has religion in the world around you affected you personally?

Anya: My atomic family is non-religious and all identify as humanist, but my extended family is still really, really Catholic. And I struggle to maintain relationships with those family members, not just because they are so religious, but because their religion is tied up in their political and world view, more so now than ever. I have hard boundaries and I struggle to justify maintaining those connections when their values are coming through in such an extreme and unforgivable way. I can’t justify that. That’s probably the strongest effect that religion has had on me personally. The whole argument that you have to stay connected to your family, I can make my own family through human connection. Why would I justify keeping toxic people around when I have the option of removing that, and maybe reconnecting with them later? Or not. You can actually choose your own family, if yours sucks.

Why would I justify keeping toxic people around when I have the option of removing that, and maybe reconnecting with them later? Or not. You can actually choose your own family, if yours sucks.

Avi Yona: I recently had to go through the process of exorcising a toxic family member. And honestly, the most powerful listicle-style tip that I came across was: if you’re going to do it, don’t beat yourself up about it afterwards. The whole reason you’re doing it is because this energy eats at you all the time, right? So then don’t let it. And it’s like any addictive or abusive behavior. Your mind clicks in and out of this coping mechanism that you’ve developed time after time, but it’s not a correctly contextualized part of your reality. And that makes me think of the fact that you hear people say, well, it’s not all Christians or it’s not all rich people or it’s not all men, it’s not all cops, but I think that’s where humanism is really missing. There’s this individualism, the idea that you can be a proud part of a group, reap benefits, but then take no responsibility with regard to the actions of that group as a whole. Is there a place in the American religious landscape for humanism to be injected, or is it fundamentally at odds, do you think? 

Anya: If you identify as a part of a group, you do own some of that group identity, and that means having to field criticism: you have to take the bad with the good. And that’s what I think people struggle with, especially in the US. It’s the No True Scotsman fallacy, and you can do that forever. There’s no limit. But then you’re not truly a part of a group anymore. You’re just your own person. And so why not identify that way? As humanists, we can be more inclusive and more diverse with intentionality, and uplift people in a way that we haven’t done before. And we can take this criticism and not be defensive about it, take it in stride in a way that no other organization is doing. Literally right now, in the impeachment hearing, Jamie Raskin, who identifies as humanist, has been one of the leads in saying we have no choice — we have to hold these people accountable. I think that’s huge for young humanists in particular, because we’ve seen through religion, through politics, through social circles, people just not being held accountable time after time. I’m really excited to see a Humanist advocate for accountability on the grand American historical stage.

Avi Yona: As the political landscape is shifting and we’re moving into 2021, how are humanist principles informing your path forward?

Anya: I think that as we’re sort of witnessing this massive shift in our political landscape in the US, people are starting to wonder, how the hell are we going to move forward from this? It’s hard to envision what’s to come. It is undeniable that the US, as a single speck on a political spectrum, is extremely right-wing by any global political standard. A lot of people in the US struggle with that concept because they just don’t know what they don’t know. As a Humanist, and being a bit more global than the average American, it’s really not hard for me to look at what we have and say that it’s utterly right-wing. Even our left-wing party is right-wing. I think the way forward is more left-leaning. And again, that feels like an attack for a lot of people because of this rugged individualism. But seeing it that way is just so limiting.

Humans are so much more successful, in every respect, when working together and and agreeing to support one another, so I don’t think there’s any better way forward than supporting people. And in practice, that looks like universal health care, a way higher minimum wage than fifteen dollars. We could have been making incremental changes over time and it wouldn’t feel so extreme, but now that we’ve been blocked from doing that for this long, we have to make these radical sweeping changes. And it feels really difficult. Regardless of what side of the spectrum you’re on, it feels really, really hard. But we don’t really have a choice. We’re either going to fail or we’re going to move forward. Given the American nature, we will probably push forward and make this happen. But it’s going to be a really steep uphill climb.

We could have been making incremental changes over time and it wouldn’t feel so extreme, but now that we’ve been blocked from doing that for this long, we have to make these radical sweeping changes. And it feels really difficult.