Dear friends, family, fellow travelers,
It's been eighteen weeks since Governor Baker here in Massachusetts declared a state of emergency due to covid-19 and the Massachusetts Historical Society sent us all home to work remotely for the better part of four months. Last week, we had our first week of limited staff access to the building. Here in Boston, covid-19 cases are holding steady as of this writing, and mask-wearing, social distancing, and safer-at-home practices still seem to be fairly high relative to what I am hearing about other parts of the country (and even other places in Massachusetts. However, we're all nervous about what happens in September if the colleges and universities decide to bring students physically back to campus in any capacity -- many traveling from and through places where the virus is spreading rapidly.
The pandemic is far, far from over.
Image: Reflection of myself, wearing a cloth mask, in the glass of a doorway at work bearing a "Staff Only" sign. I took this as I locked up the building on the final day (7/10) of our first week of limited access to the building since March 11th, 2020.
The #Auction4AWEfund was a great deal of fun -- and a fundraising success! All but seven of the sixty-two items on the auction block sold and when the final donation was made the total raised for the Archival Workers Emergency Fund was $2,135.50. A number of people have expressed the hope that we will hold a second such event in the future, and while we will likely wait until after the AWE Fund pilot period (through December 31st) is over and we know what the future of the fund will look like, we on the AWE Fund Organizing Committee -- as well as the Persistent Stitches coordinator (a.k.a. me) -- hope to make it an annual event. In the meantime, of course, the AWE Fund is always accepting donations and we are gearing up for a new grassroots micro-donations campaign to be launched in August called "Coffee for Colleagues (Tea on Me)!" ... stay tuned for details.
Image: An illustration showing two hands framing the words take care/care take. Used in the promotional materials for the "Community at Work" panel. Art credit: "Take Care / Care Take." Art by Peter Railand, sourced from Justseeds.
This past Tuesday (7/14) the AWE Fund Organizing Committee also held our first of a planned series of online conversations about issues in the LAM ("libraries, archives, and museums") sector: "Community at Work: LAM Mutual Aid and Solidarity." The conversation was about organizing for mutual aid and solidarity in the time of covid-19 and I was honored represent the AWE Fund as a panelist alongside Callan Bignoli of #librev(olution) and #ProtectLibraryWorkers, John Chrastka of EveryLibrary, and Paula Santos of Museum Workers Speak. You can watch the hour-long discussion on YouTube!
Image: A teapot modeling a teapot cosy knit from grey yarn with splashes of rainbow color. Yarn is one of the "colorburst" series from Frabjous Fibers & Wonderland Yarns.
I've been knitting teapot sweaters! I made a number of scarves for the AWE Fund auction and wanted to switch gears so decided to make tea cosies (using this free pattern) for a few friends in need of cheering up. While I still love doing Persistent Stitches work, it's also been good to craft some things that aren't for fundraising but just for fun and friendship.
Image: A skein from Fully Spun ready to be balled for another friendship cosy.
My twin reading/writing goals for July, on the scholarly front, are to catch up on a number of book review assignments that are unconscionably late to my editors and to continue pushing forward with the rough rough (so, so rough) draft of the Ida B. Wells biography due at the end of August. And because self- and community care is important, queer romance novels are always on the agenda. In early July, I had the pleasure of attending E.E. Ottoman's talk on worldbuilding for trans and queer historical romance hosted (virtually) by The History Project, which you should definitely check out if you have an interest in LGBTQ+ history and stories. A few of the books I've been reading lately include:
It's been eighteen weeks since Governor Baker here in Massachusetts declared a state of emergency due to covid-19 and the Massachusetts Historical Society sent us all home to work remotely for the better part of four months. Last week, we had our first week of limited staff access to the building. Here in Boston, covid-19 cases are holding steady as of this writing, and mask-wearing, social distancing, and safer-at-home practices still seem to be fairly high relative to what I am hearing about other parts of the country (and even other places in Massachusetts. However, we're all nervous about what happens in September if the colleges and universities decide to bring students physically back to campus in any capacity -- many traveling from and through places where the virus is spreading rapidly.
The pandemic is far, far from over.
Image: Reflection of myself, wearing a cloth mask, in the glass of a doorway at work bearing a "Staff Only" sign. I took this as I locked up the building on the final day (7/10) of our first week of limited access to the building since March 11th, 2020.
The #Auction4AWEfund was a great deal of fun -- and a fundraising success! All but seven of the sixty-two items on the auction block sold and when the final donation was made the total raised for the Archival Workers Emergency Fund was $2,135.50. A number of people have expressed the hope that we will hold a second such event in the future, and while we will likely wait until after the AWE Fund pilot period (through December 31st) is over and we know what the future of the fund will look like, we on the AWE Fund Organizing Committee -- as well as the Persistent Stitches coordinator (a.k.a. me) -- hope to make it an annual event. In the meantime, of course, the AWE Fund is always accepting donations and we are gearing up for a new grassroots micro-donations campaign to be launched in August called "Coffee for Colleagues (Tea on Me)!" ... stay tuned for details.
Image: An illustration showing two hands framing the words take care/care take. Used in the promotional materials for the "Community at Work" panel. Art credit: "Take Care / Care Take." Art by Peter Railand, sourced from Justseeds.
This past Tuesday (7/14) the AWE Fund Organizing Committee also held our first of a planned series of online conversations about issues in the LAM ("libraries, archives, and museums") sector: "Community at Work: LAM Mutual Aid and Solidarity." The conversation was about organizing for mutual aid and solidarity in the time of covid-19 and I was honored represent the AWE Fund as a panelist alongside Callan Bignoli of #librev(olution) and #ProtectLibraryWorkers, John Chrastka of EveryLibrary, and Paula Santos of Museum Workers Speak. You can watch the hour-long discussion on YouTube!
Image: A teapot modeling a teapot cosy knit from grey yarn with splashes of rainbow color. Yarn is one of the "colorburst" series from Frabjous Fibers & Wonderland Yarns.
I've been knitting teapot sweaters! I made a number of scarves for the AWE Fund auction and wanted to switch gears so decided to make tea cosies (using this free pattern) for a few friends in need of cheering up. While I still love doing Persistent Stitches work, it's also been good to craft some things that aren't for fundraising but just for fun and friendship.
Image: A skein from Fully Spun ready to be balled for another friendship cosy.
My twin reading/writing goals for July, on the scholarly front, are to catch up on a number of book review assignments that are unconscionably late to my editors and to continue pushing forward with the rough rough (so, so rough) draft of the Ida B. Wells biography due at the end of August. And because self- and community care is important, queer romance novels are always on the agenda. In early July, I had the pleasure of attending E.E. Ottoman's talk on worldbuilding for trans and queer historical romance hosted (virtually) by The History Project, which you should definitely check out if you have an interest in LGBTQ+ history and stories. A few of the books I've been reading lately include:
- After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging by Willie James Jennings. On divinity school education specifically, but with applicability to Western higher education more broadly, this is a searing indictment of the white supremacist patriarchal project of our model for institutional schooling and what it means to be learned. There's this feeling you get, when you read something that you know in your bones to be true, where it feels like you can suddenly breathe again after choking? That's how reading this book felt.
- The Tales of Two Seers by R. Cooper. I keep wanting to describe this book as "what if your favorite author wrote AU fanfic for their own stories??" except that I'm not sure anyone but R. Cooper could pull this off as brilliantly as she did and saying that aloud feels like jinxing it (so here I am typing that instead of saying it). It's an entire volume of short stories set in a fairytale register featuring couples from the Being(s) in Love series.
- Glitter Up the Dark: How Pop Music Broke the Binary by Sasha Geffen. A fascinating study of pop music culture across the last seventy-five years that considers how pop music makes space for artists to explore and inhabit gendered spaces and identities that aren't strictly either/or. I am also sitting with some of Geffen's thoughts on the way queer desire invites people to identify with, perhaps desire to be like their beloved rather than construct desire as something that requires distance and otherness (oppositeness).
- The Care and Keeping of Waspish Widows by Olivia Waite. Widowed Agatha Griffin has her hands full running her printing business, training her apprentice Eliza, and worrying that her son Sydney's radical politics will get him arrested -- or worse. She doesn't have time to cope with the honey bees that have made themselves at home in her warehouse. Luckily, Mrs. Penelope Flood, local apiarist is happy to lend a practiced hand. I loved everything about these two from their epistolary friendship to their so-much-more-than-handholding to their navigation of Penelope's unorthodox marriage. Go forth and enjoy this pastoral loveliness.
- A City Divided: Race, Fear, and the Law in Police Confrontations by David Harris. This is a painstakingly detailed analysis of a (thankfully nonfatal) case of police brutality in which three white plainclothes officers in Pittsburgh beat and arrested a Black teenager whom they imagined was carrying a gun (no gun was ever produced). While Harris stops short of recommending abolition, I think he does a good job of demonstrating how the militarization of police departments, and systemic racism in America, have worked together to create a situation where white officers will literally see guns where no guns physically exist. And how dangerous people who see phantom weapons are when allowed to roam our streets with the license to use force of their own.
- Waiting for the Flood by Alexis Hall. I read this novella last night and it was such a lovely, meditative story about new beginnings -- plus the point-of-view main character is a paper conservator at the Bodlein! Edwin (the paper conservator) is living quietly in a neighborhood in Oxford that's under a flood warning during a spell of heavy rains, having not managed to shift himself out from under the shadow of a long-term relationship that ended two years previous. Adam is a civil engineer who shows up to help the residents shore up their homes in preparation for the rising waters and before Edwin quite knows what he's doing he's invited Adam 'round for tea ...
Image: Christopher peering out of a paper bag.
Image: Teazle on the bed with a yellow ribbon.
Stay safe, stay furious, be kind.
Ever onward,
Anna