The Myth of 'Away'
An Offering on Disposability Culture
PHOTO BY JESS DRAWHORN
Tomorrow is the last day to order your copy of How Do We Come Together In A Changing World? Curated in collaboration with our beloved friends at Center for Humans & Nature, this essay collection is an invitation to consider how we handle each other in the face of compounding crises.
For more on this anthology, check out this conversation between Loam Co-Editors Kailea Loften and Kate Weiner and Center for Humans & Nature Managing Editor Katherine Kassouf Cummings on building courage and relational editing. And if you haven’t yet read the essay by Dr. Kyle Mays on kinship as solidarity from our series, you can do so here!
As we close out pre-orders, Loam Co-Editor Kate shares a short reflection on this offering, below. We’re so grateful for your sustaining support, and hope this project can serve!
One of the central tensions of print publishing is that whatever you produce is time-stamped. In part, this is what I love about print: it’s specific to the moment. And, it also means that you run the risk of irrelevancy.1
The questions at the heart of “How Do We Come Together in a Changing World?” are questions that Kailea and I have been holding for years. It wasn’t until our Editorial Fellowship with the Center for Humans & Nature (CHN) that we were able to really take the time to materialize our vision for a compendium of essays that spoke to the spiritual and somatic impacts of disposability culture. CHN’s generosity gave us the space to reflect on “conflict, kinship, and compromise [...] in this era of narcissism” (Kailea). In conversation with our incredible contributors tayla shanaye, Serena Bian, Dr. Kyle T. Mays, Lucía Oliva Hennelly, Jeanine Canty, and Lauren Hage and Sam Edmondson of Weaving Earth, we curated an anthology that reckoned with how we handle each other.
We worked on this series through the summer of 2023. In the many months since then, we have witnessed the escalation of U.S.-funded genocide in Palestine. War in Sudan. Wildfire in Lahaina. Grouping these atrocities together—when every one is an incalculable and unredeemable loss—is its own kind of suffering. And, we are interconnected. Our struggles, our liberation. The fight for a Free Palestine is a climate issue, is a feminist issue, is a land back issue. The brutal loss of life in Sudan is a threat to life everywhere. Wildfires (and their toll) are as much a consequence of a changing climate as they are supremacist government policies.
Our responsibilities in this moment are particular to our positionality and place. But every one of us is responsible: and this means that as culture workers, we need to continually reflect on what we are offering, and why.
In total transparency, I had some initial hesitation about sharing this book right now. I worried that the title in particular felt tone deaf in our current cultural climate. Like so many, I’m sensitive to the ways that the language of “coming together” has been weaponized to collapse differences and elide disparities. If a call for collaboration isn’t rooted in respect (as in accountability, as in reciprocity) “coming together” can feel not just anodyne but violent.
But this book isn’t really about “coming together.” Or, not in so simplistic a sense. This book is more of an inquiry—emergent, and evolving—into how we might build lasting solidarity. Our “we” is not universal (we are not asking you to build bridges between someone who doesn’t respect your humanity)2 but it is bigger than us. Integrity matters. Unwavering conviction is critical. So too, is the fluidity, the humility, to recognize every one of us is growing. We have to learn how to hold space for growth, how to create space for growth, without trashing each other for every slight or slippage.3
In the face of staggering atrocity, freedom from carceral dynamics is a practice.4
As Kailea shared in a recent post on this publication:
“What we are really trying to do here is practice de-centering our own comfort as editors as part of modeling de-centering the comfort of ‘you’, the reader. We did not water down or try to make nice. The world feels too urgent for that. We ask, ‘how do we hold space for discernment and generative conflict?’ and ‘what does it take to stay in our bodies when we don’t agree?’
As with so much of our work, it’s an experiment in leaning in with our readers, towards the horizon of a new day. After all, liberation beckons and it will require that we know how to talk to each other.”5
In sharing this, I am reminded of something tayla shanaye wrote on social media when we were in the last push of publishing “Nourishing the Nervous System.”
“Post like these are awkward for me.
Like—the world is on fire and while we’re living in this dystopian hellscape, buy my book!
Even if it’s a conjuring for justice.
Even if it’s a practice space for freedom.
Even if it’s an opportunity to reset so we can stay with the trouble.
Even if it’s an offering toward transformation…
I for one am with the hard fact that it won’t change the world. It won’t stop genocide. Climate collapse. Extinction. The weaponization of existence.
Nope. It’s just a book. But in your hands it might offer you a moment. A breath. A second. It might remind you of yourself. It might bring you back from the edge. It might help you get bigger. It might…help.”6
Marketing most anything in a moment like this feels unimportant. This book is not a salve, or cure-all. It’s not critical, or enough. Nothing, on its own, is.
And, also, I believe this offering, however small, is strategic.
Disposability culture has conditioned us to throw so much away without thinking. But there is actually no ‘away.’ Our waste doesn’t dissolve into the ether once it’s out of our line of sight; people don’t disappear when we’re ‘done’ with them. This willingness to trash each other shrinks our world and saps our movements of their strength.
So it’s our prayer at Loam that you can find something in these pages that might help you stay solid7 and in relationship. Because if we want another world—one more just, liberated, loving, than this—we need to learn how to cultivate the relational skills to navigate rupture and repair, better distinguish between discomfort and danger, challenge groupthink, and cultivate a sustaining sense of solidarity.
This is the beauty of zines—you can create (and share!) stories pretty quickly! But more often than not, a bound book with multiple contributors just takes longer to publish.
Mia Birdsong beautifully articulates this distinction in How We Show Up: Reclaiming Family, Friendship, and Community.
We Will Not Cancel Us by adrienne maree brown is an incredible inquiry into what it will take to compost disposability culture.
Listen to Mariame Kaba and Prentis Hemphill explore harm, punishment, and abolition in this powerful podcast.
Read the entire post @kailealoften
Follow @taylashanaye for more
Earlier this year, I shared an excerpt by Elaine Castillo on solidarity in my essay on allying our art with action. Her articulation of what it means to be solid—for and with each other—is immensely powerful. If you haven’t yet read the passage, you can scroll to the bottom of the essay to do so. Better yet, buy How To Read Now. It’s one of the most beautiful books I’ve encountered on cultivating our critical thinking skills as readers, culture workers, and co-creators.