Reflections from the Road
Loam Co-Editor Kailea on our MUTUAL AID IS LOVE tour
Loam co-editor Kailea here, writing in from the nook of a café in Berkeley, California. The fog metaphorically and literally has lifted, and my mind feels as expansive as this clear blue and sunny day.
Our panel at the Bay Area Book Festival yesterday marked the end of our events here in the Bay Area. The last two-and-a-half weeks of launching our community textbook, Compassion In Crisis: Building Disaster-Resilient Communities, into the world has been joyful, energizing and just shy of overwhelming.
I’ve been comparing each day to the experience of wringing out a wet towel. At the end of the day, I feel we have sufficiently wrung out the day. There is not one drop of day left to experience, there is only my pillow and checking one last time to make sure I’ve set my alarm.
This week, we start driving to Southern California and even though we have been doing a fair amount of zipping around the greater Bay Area, in many ways our events in Los Angeles and San Diego mark the official start to the greater grassroots tour.
What do we mean when we say grassroots? We mean that we have not yet booked one hotel room because we are being hosted by family, friends and friends-of-friends we’ve yet to meet. We mean that the course we are charting has in large part been decided by you, our readers. Back in January, we wrote you all and asked who might like to co-host an event with us. Our curious outreach resulted in a flurry of emails, meet-ups spanning months, and a gigantic virtual puzzle as Kate and I attempted to chart a travel map across the U.S.
This lift, which has been all of our 2026 so far, has been tremendous. Most of what I do at Loam is unpaid, and all of what I do for Compassion in Crisis has been unpaid. A lot of these months, while I’ve remained clear sighted in why I’m doing this, I’ve felt a bit mentally hazy. Coordinating 20 events across 18 vastly different communities spanning the country will do that to you. But these last weeks where we’ve finally been able to see our book in stores and meet so many of you has provided me a clean slate. Our purpose has never been sharper.
Publishing is fickle. The margins are thin and getting thinner with each passing year. To say it plainly, you don’t get into writing or publishing if you are trying to make money. You do this work because you cannot help but do it. Against all better judgement, against the backdrop of late nights after your child goes to sleep, against the thrum of little voice in your head that says, “am I writing into a void?” I think us writers are more than a bit masochistic, and also there continues to be so much to harvest from the pain. All to say, there was no budget for a book tour. What our publishers could provide us with was applications to book festivals and support with reaching out to bookstores to pitch our book as part of an in-store event. How we got to said bookstore was truly up to us.
Our choice to start in the Bay was in large part due to our getting accepted to the Bay Area Book Festival and a few local bookstores saying yes to our publisher’s pitch. AND you may have noticed that a lot of our events do not take place in bookstores. From the start, Kate and I felt strongly that we wanted to create interactive and skill-based events as a way to example how you can use Compassion in Crisis as a tool to gather people. So being the scrappy, creative and highly unrealistic people that we both are (my husband loves these qualities about me, I swear) we set about enacting this vision.
This is what we mean by grassroots. The vision has never been just about selling books (but yes, please buy our book) it has been about gathering people together to learn in community. A few special mental snapshots from these weeks include a bird sit in a field together; a participant showing me his really cool and tiny radio that he’s learning how to operate; and 50 people sitting under the redwoods at dusk discussing what currency they have to offer each other besides cash. It has also looked like Kate and I moving tables, chairs and benches. Attempting to not get lost on the freeway. Trying to protect our books while walking through the rain. Realizing we suddenly need to eat while attempting to locate ourselves on a map. I anticipate many more of these small, silly, exhausting and precious moments together. The little droplets of water that we wring from each day. The turning to each other and saying, “good job” and “we did it.”
Okay I buried the lead because I had to get this all out. The lead is PLEASE help us spread the word about the our tour, and our upcoming events (see the list here).
Please sign up for them and bring a friend! All of them are FREE. We can promise engaged discussion, likely a small dose of silliness (because it’s us) and always depth (also because it’s us).
Come out and meet your neighbors and learn why Compassion in Crisis is the tool for these times.
Thank you for answering our call again and again. We remain committed because of each of you.
With care and appreciation from the road,
Kailea with Kate