Hey, did anyone find an iPhone 8 with a yellow case in the park at the #MontrealAnarchistBookfair ?

Please boost :)

Cool #montrealAnarchistBookfair finds: my table neighbours have these really beautiful French editions of Cometbus 😍

Found at the #montrealAnarchistBookfair

So many ideas for various “picture-prose” pieces have been floating around in my head—and so many photos of the #ArtOfResistance have been filling up my phone. Yet there have been way too many “real life,” aka in-person, happenings to carve out the time-space to craft words for Mastodon—most of them sweet, even if overwhelming, like helping to co-organize this weekend’s huge #MontrealAnarchistBookfair.

So for now, I’m savoring the fact that social media isn’t lording over my “life” as much. Instead, I’m grateful for what has become so much more rare since pandemic times, and thus so much more precious: face-to-face human connections that also revolve around face-to-face anarchist connections, including friends old and new. And I hope to say hello to and swap stories with a whole lot more of you in person this weekend!

No doubt, this current moment will end. Such is the poignancy of all our anarchist time-spaces: we continually have to make and remake them, carrying memories and social relationships between them.

There will, alas, be a “downtime,” and my picture-prose pieces on social media will re-emerge—part of my own #ArtOfResilience to help get me through. To help me dream aloud when dreamy days feel further away, and mourn well and rebelliously too, since our grief is a carrier for what we love and fight for.

For now, here’s a tiny glimpse of a tiny sticker I saw outside a cooperative bar that lent its time-space to host a fundraiser the other night on the stolen lands of Tio’tia:ke for @stopcopcity. For it’s true: whether here in Montreal or amid @defendatlantaforest, the land already knows it is free. It just needs us humans, especially those who think they can play god with it, to let the land be free of colonialism and capitalism and so much else that separates us from ecological and egalitarian lives.

(Photo: Pink and blue sticker with the words “The land needs no ‘lords.’”)

I’m delighted to announce the dates for the next Salon du livre anarchiste de Montréal | Montreal Anarchist Bookfair, started almost 25 years ago and still going strong: May 27–28, 2023.

Its longevity speaks to many decades of often-imaginative anarchist(ic) resistance and many generations of anarchists here in Tio’tia:ke, not to mention far more continuity between people, projects, spaces, uprisings, strikes, and so on than in most North American cities. Plus the bookfair is always like an enormous anarchist family reunion, filled with all sorts of events as part of the “Month of Anarchy” here, including the Festival International de Théâtre Anarchiste de Montréal | International Anarchist Theater Festival. And Montreal in May is rebelliously romantic!

So here’s my encouragement, as a collective member who has a longtime diasporic and loving relationship with Montreal, to apply to table at this large, beautiful two-day bookfair and/or propose an event (talks, panels, debates, skill share, care or kidz zone offerings, music, art, performance…). Or *simply* plan to come to the bookfair that weekend! I don’t know about you, but after three pandemic years of too much isolation and fragmentation, the more that a whole bunch of us can gather, socialize, grieve, process, gossip, laugh, play, learn, and so much else together in joyous spaces of our own making, the better!

For tabling and event applications, see www.salonanarchiste.ca (French-language version) or www.anarchistbookfair.ca (English-language version). Deadline for applications is March 15, 2023.

You’ll find other info at our bilingual website too, including that we’re asking everyone to mask up when indoors at the bookfair—because #AllCOVIDsAreBad and #AllCaretakersAreBeautiful.

I’d also greatly appreciate it if you’d circulate these infographics, via my post or by making your own, on your Instagram, other social media, email lists, Signal chats, and other places.

Hope to see many, many, many of your faces (and masks) there!

#AlwaysCarryABook
#AutonomousCommunitiesAreBeautiful
#ReadWriteRebel
#MontrealAnarchistBookfair