In October, when stopping over for a couple days in so-called lovely Asheville on a Rebellious Mourning: The Collective Work of Grief (AK Press) book tour, I got to savor many a good, in-depth conversation, whether hanging out in the fabulous space of Firestorm Books & Coffee (I’m a sustainer; you should be too!), walking around a graffiti-turned-arts district (#GentrificationKills), or nestled in the cozy studio of The Final Straw Radio. You can hear one of those conversations here, thanks to the marvelous dialogic interviewing skills of Bursts with The Final Straw Radio — or rather, a lengthy chat on themes ranging from grief, care, and play, to intimacy, bravery, and prefiguration, and much more.
It truly takes two (or more) people, face-to-face, to dig into enjoyable and open discussions, so I can’t thank Bursts enough for spending so much quality time with me talking, and then so many hours of editing and curating to get it to somehow fit well in two one-hour segments, hopefully for your listening enjoyment. Check out the many amazing segments on The Final Straw, too, and while you’re at it, consider sending a bit of mutualistic financial aid to this “weekly anarchist show”!
Part I is called “Grief, Care, Anarchy, and Vision.” You can listen to it here: https://thefinalstrawradio.noblogs.org/post/2018/12/16/cindymilsteinpt1/
To accompany this first segment, Bursts wrote:
“Cindy Milstein is an anarchist, activist [I’d say ‘organizer’], and author who was a touring few months back with Rebellious Mourning: The Collective Work of Grief, published last year by AK Press. The book is compilation of essays by various authors about loss in its myriad forms experienced under cis-hetero-patriarchy, in a capitalist settler colonialism, anti-Black and otherwise racist, able-ist society. After Cindy came to speak at Firestorm Books in October 2018, we sat down for a LONG chat. In this FIRST hour, Cindy shares thoughts on the following topics and more: a prior book they put together, Taking Sides (AK Press, 2015); the process of making Rebellious Mourning and creating ‘brave spaces’ for engaging with hard topics; prefiguration during the anarchist summer camp they help organize called the ‘Institute for Advanced Troublemaking’; and multigenerational care and care-taking in anarchist communities.“
Part II is titled “Rojava, Autonomy, Religion, Anarchism, and Care.” You can find it here: https://thefinalstrawradio.noblogs.org/post/2018/12/16/cindy-milstein-pt2-rojava-autonomy-religion-anarchism-and-care/
As Bursts describes it,
“Cindy mentions a documentary about the co-president with Abdullah Öcalan of the PKK who was assassinated in 2013 in Paris. The film was called SARA – My Whole Life Was A Struggle and can be watched on youtube in full with English subtitles. The film covers the life and struggles of Sakine Cansiz who, alongside Fidan Doğan and Leyla Şöylemez were taken by an assassins bullets while struggling for Kurdish autonomy.
“Cindy also refer to other interviews they’ve given on podcasts. Two of the more recent ones that happened before ours with Cindy were from The Solecast and This Is Hell.”
#MakeMediaMakeTrouble #WeMustCareForEachOther #TryAnarchismForLife #TryAnarchismAsLife