How rad to be side by side with @margaretkilljoy for this early May Day celebration—at least in spirit via our books, both published by the equally rad Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness collective!

And while our anarchist holiday thankfully doesn’t revolve around shopping, anarchist books have a long, storied history in educating, agitating, and being the inspiration for all sorts of good troublemaking. They also make for good bedtime reading given that they’re filled with the stuff of sweet dreams. Plus in this case, you can get both our new books through May 7, so you can focus fully and freely on May 1.

That said, I hope you do decide to snag copies of my “Try Anarchism for Life: The Beauty of Our Circle” and Margaret’s “Escape from Incel Island.” I also hope that my book encourages you to remember some of the many beautiful reasons we’re in the streets, forests, cities, and elsewhere, not merely fighting for a better world, but already living as if it were here.

May Day and books—and who we are and what we put into this world—are crucial carriers of the flames of liberation and freedom, especially in a time that feels and is so antithetical to all we strive for and try hard to prefigure. We need our blessed flames more than ever as the gloom and doom of fascism descends.

So write, read, and rebel, knowing that words can shape and transform lives, that words can be our weapon and collective defense, that words can keep us going and lend comfort and joy to each other. Words can sabotage the current social order by sharing stories of what’s possible instead.

Plus both our books, in this specific instance, are fun to read.

To order, see www.tangledwilderness.org

Use the promo code: MAYDAY.

#TryAnarchismForLife
#BeautyOfOurCircle
#ReadWriteRebel
#AlwaysCarryABook
#AnarchistsCareAboutBooks
#HappyMayDay

(photo features the covers of the two books—Margaret’s with a drawing of swords and palm trees sticking out of an island, and mine sporting a big, bright pink circle A with a simple floral pattern in it surrounded by a spring-green background)

Mini review of my latest book, #TryAnarchismForLife, published by the amazing Strangers In A Tangled Wilderness collective, with springlike-joyful cover by @eff_charm and life-giving circle A by Landon Sheely.

Grateful to @AntifascistMoon for posting their thoughts, in three tweets, about my 26 tightly crafted prose pieces revolving around some of the many beautiful dimensions of anarchism, all paired with a gorgeous circle A dreamed up and drawn by 26 different anarchist artists.

As they write:

“I couldn’t have higher praise for Try Anarchism for Life by @cindymilstein — absolutely incredible, beautifully written prose about the beauty found in a boundless, liberated, free existence for all!

“Ecotones of Possibility [one of the pieces] honestly made me cry — the beauty in [Milstein’s] descriptions of liminal space-times and the joy expressed in the anarchist grabbing their friend by the hand to come see those places found the perfect heartstring to pluck.

“The entire book made me realize I was an anarchist before I ever even properly understood what anarchism was. Thank you for sharing this view with the world!”

As always, this book is a labor of love for me. Any proceeds go to support the rad work of @tangled_wilderness to put out all sorts of other anarchic media from books to games to zines to podcasts.

http://www.tangledwilderness.org

#BeautyOfOurCircle
#TryAnarchismForLove
#EverydayAnarchism

(photos: book seen in the wild at Insoumise, a longtime anarchist bookstore in Tio’tia:ke/Montreal; 3-part mini review posted on Twitter, 3/20/23)

Truth be told, it’s been hard to get out of bed this winter. More pointedly, it feels hard to find reasons to get out of bed.

Some call that depression, set in motion by trauma and grief. And no doubt there’s much truth in that. Yet I call it trying to live with “the gap between ‘what is’ and ‘what could be’”—a gap that these pandemic years has pried so far apart, it’s now (in winter three) nearly unbridgeable. And without a bridge, any sense of being able to wander forward toward horizons of possibilities gets blocked.

Hence the limited reasons to peek out from under the comforter and see promise in a new day.

That gap, mind you, is always there. And I know that we anarchist types, no matter how beat down we feel, continually have to build our own bridges—again and again. But we can’t do it alone, nor without bridging the generations so that we can come at the project of constructing a new world from multidirectional vantage points of brilliance and inspiration.

So I’m super grateful to @marixfort and her 7- and 10-year-olds for supplying me with some much-needed scaffolding right now.

Marixfort read my new book “Try Anarchism for Life” (@tangledwild) to these two kids, who both loved it, and had lots of questions and comments. Last week, out of the blue, the youngest said, “You know what, mamá, I will raise my kids to be anarchists. Thank you for reading us that book.” Then the two children dreamed up and drew the bridge-building “blueprints” (pictured here), and asked their mamá to share them with me, and their mamá said I could share them with you.

The beauty of anarchism is that even if you (or me) can’t see across the rumble at times, but can only see the ruins, there are always other anarchistic spirits who will hold up a cobbled-together lantern to aid you in noticing (again) the flowers and rainbows in the misty distance, and thus help you go the extra mile. Or in my case, get out of bed.

#BeautyOfOurCircle
#EverydayAnarchism
#AWorldInWhichManyWorldsFit

(photo of #TryAnarchismForLife by @blkstarseed, featuring cover design by @eff_charm with circle art by @landonsheely)