These aren’t just two women talking about the world’s problems, but share real stories that braid the political with the human centric approach to liberation. A revolutionary collaboration about the world we're living in now, between two of our most important contemporary thinkers, writers and activists. Across the pandemic-imposed distance, Leanne and Robyn begin a new iteration of the practices they’ve enacted in their labors and loves for years—this origin rises in letters, in which they take account of (and consequently bear the physical, emotional, and intellectual burdens of that accounting) the intimate and public violences committed by our governments upon our peoples, lands, waters and non-human relatives. In these letters, Leanne and Robyn constellate our brightest wounds and scars, but refuse to waste their energies of love and imagination on fixing or salvaging the Nation/State. Instead, they reorganize the trajectories and shapes of those constellations—retelling stories again and anew, of who we have been and might yet be again. ”

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson: For me, I think it's the most important part, because I think we can use that critique to inform what we do. Right now, I'm in the territory of Yellowknife and with a group of 16 Indigenous women living on the land. In a sense, it's a little microcosm and a way of coming together on the land to create a different world. Maynard’s first letter was written a few months before the pandemic’s onset, and Simpson’s last reply came shortly after the 2020 U.S. election. Both are lyrical, compelling writers, and their early letters are infused with the energy that defined the early months of COVID-19. “People are revolting for wildly imaginative things: for worlds radically transformed, for the end of policing, the end of prisons, the end of ICE and the CBSA, of militarism and colonialism,” wrote Maynard in May 2020. Reading that line now is almost painful; by November 2020, Simpson wrote, “We aren’t banging pots and pans every afternoon in support of health care workers. No one is baking sourdough.” If you find yourself, in 2022, crushed by exhaustion and despair, you might ask yourself: is there any hope left to truly change things? This book must be read for its future vocabularies, its political intimacies, its careful assemblage of the materials of our activisms, and its generous and fulsome thinking.” Award winning author, poet, musican, educationalist and activist Leanne Betasamosake Simpson Link opens in a new window has been described as 'one of the most compelling indigenous voices of her generation'. Her work breaks open the intersections between politics, story and song—bringing audiences into a rich and layered world of sound, light, and sovereign creativity. Get Rehearsals for Livingfrom Haymarket: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1880-rehearsals-for-livingThe epistolary form allows a vulnerability and closeness that wouldn’t have been possible in any other genre. The book, however, still manages to be immensely scholarly, journalistic, historical and theoretical all at once. Both writers use the intimacy of their domestic lives to reflect on the larger political and social phenomena around them. Rehearsals for Living by Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. Published by Knopf Canada.

And to me, that also just means, "What kind of actions do we need to take every single day?" So if every day I wake up and rehearse the kind of person I want to be, this is who I become. So in the everyday acts and work toward freedom, we are building more liberatory worlds all the time — and that's something that I think we are really focusing on. In the everyday acts and work toward freedom, we are building more liberatory worlds all the time. - Robyn Maynard In Rehearsals For Living, Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson showed me how to find reassurance in world-changing. They showed me how world-changing is happening all around us, all the time. It's an incredible book, probably the best I've read all year, and I'd recommend anyone interested reads it. (I'll lend you my copy if that's what it takes.) Abolition was at the core of this book. No more policing, prisons, capitalism, land abuse and title. A return of land and a return of community. No more individual gain at the core of interaction. Gift economies and reciprocity. Homelessness and sharing not hoarding. Limiting use and honouring all parts of this world beyond the human. No more change from within. Abolish it and start anew. Listen to the folks who have been resisting and rehearsing other ways of living in perpetuity.

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This story first appeared in Broadview’ s October/November 2022 issue with the title “Remaking the world.” In our group work and play, we practice living in the here and now. The work evolves out of the work that we do together, we co create from the efforts of the group participants. Rehearsals for Living explores our dynamic relationship conundrums in engaging and revealing ways, helping us to release patterns of behavior that are no longer working for us. We practice new ways of responding. We learn to become fluid, connective, and responsive to ourselves, the people in our lives, and society. .

In your letters, you both declare yourselves as nerds and Star Trek fans. And this is a serious question: What does Star Trek bring to your thinking in your practices? Ruth Wilson Gilmore is Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences and Director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics at CUNY Graduate Center. A co-founder of California Prison Moratorium Project and Critical Resistance, she is author of the prize-winning book Golden Gulag: Prison, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. Gilmore is the recipient of the Cultural Freedom Prize from the Lannan Foundation. Liane, you say the absence of hope is a beautiful catalyst — and you reference Mariame Kaba's idea of hope as a discipline or a practice. Can you talk about hope as a practice? As an invocation for collective resistance, the book succeeds, but it’s also powerful when the authors share the small details of their lives – Simpson’s meditative nighttime runs with her daughter, Maynard effortfully tolerating the spider on her stairs – that ground their ethics in the reality of daily living. At times, their dialogue wades so deeply into critical theory that the epistolary structure is obscured. But when Maynard writes, “I miss you, Leanne,” in the midst of one didactic letter, it is a heart-rending jolt of intimacy. left to right: Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (Credit: Nadya Kwandibens) and Robyn Maynard (Credit: Stacy Lee Photography)Robyn Maynard: This is a dangerous question to ask me! [laughs] You have no idea how much Star Trek content didn't make it into the book based on the amount that I actually talk and think about Star Trek in my everyday life. For me, in the Star Trek world, The Next Generation universe is this world free from want — this world in which the divisions of race and gender are now seen as foolish; in which capitalism and the senseless destruction of the planet is seen as foolish; that people have what they need. They don't have a cash economy. It's not based on extreme wealth and poverty. Mariann earned a Bachelor’s in Fine Arts and a Teaching Certification in 1972 from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She earned a Master’s Degree in Fine Arts in Painting and Drawing from York University in Ontario, Canada in 1976. She taught Art and Humanities part-time at Whatcom Community College, 1982-1985. She practiced as a Certified Acupressure Practitioner, a form of mind body work incorporating Chinese Five Element Theory and emotional health from 1985-2000, during this time she held a Washington State Massage License.