How to Build Relationships, Hook Up & Raise Hell Together: Conversation w/ DEAN SPADE - Highlights

How to Build Relationships, Hook Up & Raise Hell Together: Conversation w/ DEAN SPADE - Highlights

/

Conversation with DEAN SPADE about How to Build Relationships, Hook Up, and Raise Hell Together

This book has a lot of the wisdom of things that feminists and queers have learned in the community about sexuality, but the book is really for anybody who is political, even those just starting out and beginning to realize that there is something wrong with the systems they live under. I want to be in movements. Our movements are made of relationships. So, if you're just getting into our movements, or if you've been here for years and have been watching the ways we hurt each other and fall apart relationally, this book is about identifying these common patterns.

LOVE in a F*cked-Up World: DEAN SPADE on How to Build Relationships, Hook Up & Raise Hell Together

LOVE in a F*cked-Up World: DEAN SPADE on How to Build Relationships, Hook Up & Raise Hell Together

/

This book has a lot of the wisdom of things that feminists and queers have learned in the community about sexuality, but the book is really for anybody who is political, even those just starting out and beginning to realize that there is something wrong with the systems they live under. I want to be in movements. Our movements are made of relationships. So, if you're just getting into our movements, or if you've been here for years and have been watching the ways we hurt each other and fall apart relationally, this book is about identifying these common patterns.

How Can Music Heal Trauma & Foster Identity? - Highlights - MATTIA MAURÉE

How Can Music Heal Trauma & Foster Identity? - Highlights - MATTIA MAURÉE

/

Interdisciplinary Composer ·  AuDHD Coach
Host of the AuDHD Flourishing Podcast

So for me, just removing a lot of the shame and then a lot of the energy that I was wasting trying to fit myself into a neurotypical process or framework or way of thinking or being. So, you know, some people call that unmasking, just kind of removing. I was wasting a lot of energy, basically trying to be someone else and function in a different way. And then just beating myself up internally for not being able to do that. And throughout my healing journey, as I really realized, Oh, that's actually what's happening. Like there's not actually anything wrong with me being able to...That's why it's called Love Your Brain. It's not just, you know, tolerate your brain. Or, fine, you can work with this brain that you have. It's like, no, I genuinely love the weird experiences that my brain can give me and the incredibly rich, deep experience I have of the world. Like I experience nature so deeply and so intensely. I have really strong connections with animals. I have really great intuition, which I think is just from picking up all this sensory data and putting it together. All these experiences that I get to have, but I don't get to have those experiences if I'm just trying to make myself be something else, which I think is most people who are late diagnosed, I feel like that's their experience. It's just like I've been trying to be someone else for so long. It's exhausting. And then you don't have the energy then to be creative, the carving out the time, making the time to actually create.

Exploring the Sensory World of Autism, ADHD & Non-Binary Artists with MATTIA MAURÉE

Exploring the Sensory World of Autism, ADHD & Non-Binary Artists with MATTIA MAURÉE

/

Interdisciplinary Composer ·  AuDHD Coach
Host of the AuDHD Flourishing Podcast

So for me, just removing a lot of the shame and then a lot of the energy that I was wasting trying to fit myself into a neurotypical process or framework or way of thinking or being. So, you know, some people call that unmasking, just kind of removing. I was wasting a lot of energy, basically trying to be someone else and function in a different way. And then just beating myself up internally for not being able to do that. And throughout my healing journey, as I really realized, Oh, that's actually what's happening. Like there's not actually anything wrong with me being able to...That's why it's called Love Your Brain. It's not just, you know, tolerate your brain. Or, fine, you can work with this brain that you have. It's like, no, I genuinely love the weird experiences that my brain can give me and the incredibly rich, deep experience I have of the world. Like I experience nature so deeply and so intensely. I have really strong connections with animals. I have really great intuition, which I think is just from picking up all this sensory data and putting it together. All these experiences that I get to have, but I don't get to have those experiences if I'm just trying to make myself be something else, which I think is most people who are late diagnosed, I feel like that's their experience. It's just like I've been trying to be someone else for so long. It's exhausting. And then you don't have the energy then to be creative, the carving out the time, making the time to actually create.

Highlights - Fury Young - BL Shirelle - Co-Executive Directors of DJC Records

Highlights - Fury Young - BL Shirelle - Co-Executive Directors of DJC Records

/

Co-Executive Directors of DJC Records

I took this class on genocide that had a huge impact on me, and it also coincided, just the timing, with the Occupy Wall Street movement. So then two years later in 2013, I was reading The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander, and the book is about how mass incarceration is like a modern-day racial caste system. And I just got the idea to do an album, because I was listening to a lot of concept albums like Pink Floyd, The Wall. And it started from there, just a little seed and a spark of just this idea for this one album. And then over time, it just evolved into an EP, and then a record label and a nonprofit. –Fury Young

I think in the end, what our mission is, is to dismantle stereotypes around race and prison. But maybe from listening to that album, and you see this guy, he applied for your job, and he has a drug charge or something. Maybe you're not looking at it so crazy anymore. It's like, know what? I'll give him an interview. I'll see. And that interview may change, you know, your life and that person's life. So that's like the ideal scenario. – B.L. Shirelle

Fury Young - BL Shirelle - Co-Executive Directors of DJC Records

Fury Young - BL Shirelle - Co-Executive Directors of DJC Records

/

Co-Executive Directors of DJC Records

I took this class on genocide that had a huge impact on me, and it also coincided, just the timing, with the Occupy Wall Street movement. So then two years later in 2013, I was reading The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander, and the book is about how mass incarceration is like a modern-day racial caste system. And I just got the idea to do an album, because I was listening to a lot of concept albums like Pink Floyd, The Wall. And it started from there, just a little seed and a spark of just this idea for this one album. And then over time, it just evolved into an EP, and then a record label and a nonprofit. –Fury Young

I think in the end, what our mission is, is to dismantle stereotypes around race and prison. But maybe from listening to that album, and you see this guy, he applied for your job, and he has a drug charge or something. Maybe you're not looking at it so crazy anymore. It's like, know what? I'll give him an interview. I'll see. And that interview may change, you know, your life and that person's life. So that's like the ideal scenario. – BL Shirelle

Highlights - Sonnet L’Abbé - Poet, Songwriter, Editor of “Best Canadian Poetry in English”

Highlights - Sonnet L’Abbé - Poet, Songwriter, Editor of “Best Canadian Poetry in English”

/

Award-winning Poet · Songwriter · Author of Sonnet’s Shakespeare
Editor of Best Canadian Poetry in English

Sonnet’s Shakespeare itself came out of thinking about the form of erasure, what working in that form could do and mean… And I was looking at critical writing about it, and I couldn't find anything that talked about the role of the poet who is doing that as censorial or as somehow violencing the original text. I was thinking about my resonance with the word erasure and thinking about censoring and deleting what somebody else has already said resonates with me as an analogy for being black, being mixed race, being racialized, and non-European in spaces that are predominantly Anglo-Canadian. One tries very hard. At least I did as a child, as a teenager, to just try to fit in and make my visible difference as minimal, as invisible as possible. So it's a way of thinking about erasing the self. And so I took that theme and thought, How do I show through a poetic erasure this dynamic of self-erasure and feeling erased?

Sonnet L’Abbé - Award-winning Poet, Songwriter, Author of “Sonnet’s Shakespeare”

Sonnet L’Abbé - Award-winning Poet, Songwriter, Author of “Sonnet’s Shakespeare”

/

Award-winning Poet · Songwriter · Author of Sonnet’s Shakespeare
Editor of Best Canadian Poetry in English

Sonnet’s Shakespeare itself came out of thinking about the form of erasure, what working in that form could do and mean… And I was looking at critical writing about it, and I couldn't find anything that talked about the role of the poet who is doing that as censorial or as somehow violencing the original text. I was thinking about my resonance with the word erasure and thinking about censoring and deleting what somebody else has already said resonates with me as an analogy for being black, being mixed race, being racialized, and non-European in spaces that are predominantly Anglo-Canadian. One tries very hard. At least I did as a child, as a teenager, to just try to fit in and make my visible difference as minimal, as invisible as possible. So it's a way of thinking about erasing the self. And so I took that theme and thought, How do I show through a poetic erasure this dynamic of self-erasure and feeling erased?

Highlights - Cynthia Daniels - Grammy - Emmy Award-winning Producer, Engineer, Composer

Highlights - Cynthia Daniels - Grammy - Emmy Award-winning Producer, Engineer, Composer

/

Grammy & Emmy Award-winning Producer, Engineer, Composer

We all are looking for a little magic in our lives, and I think that's what art and the creative process allow for, above all. In a world that can be either way too predictable and mundane and create tedium, the creative mind, for me, is the curious mind and the mind that's always learning and allowing yourself to make mistakes. To generate from your core, from your soul, and from your experience something new and experimental and something that is unique to yourself.

Cynthia Daniels - Grammy and Emmy Award-winning Producer, Engineer, Composer

Cynthia Daniels - Grammy and Emmy Award-winning Producer, Engineer, Composer

/

Grammy & Emmy Award-winning Producer, Engineer, Composer

We all are looking for a little magic in our lives, and I think that's what art and the creative process allow for, above all. In a world that can be either way too predictable and mundane and create tedium, the creative mind, for me, is the curious mind and the mind that's always learning and allowing yourself to make mistakes. To generate from your core, from your soul, and from your experience something new and experimental and something that is unique to yourself.

(Highlights) Mario Alberto Zambrano · Dancer, Writer, Assoc. Dir. of Dance, The Juilliard School

(Highlights) Mario Alberto Zambrano · Dancer, Writer, Assoc. Dir. of Dance, The Juilliard School

/

Dancer, Writer, Choreographer
Associate Director of Dance at The Juilliard School, NYC

In both writing a first draft and in the improvisation of a dancing body, what is so key and relevant and exposed is voice. That internal voice of the artist of what they're writing on the page or what they're writing in space. If you go to fiction workshop, you talk about plot, structure, and you talk about character development, but there are very few classes within a dance curriculum where you break down an improvisation and you talk about voice, point of view, metaphor, or musical composition within a phrase. The lifespan of a phrase. And so this realisation is helping me understand that a one minute post of improvisation or even a ten-minute span of improvisation if it’s recorded is very similar to a first draft of creative writing, where then the artist is in a position to evaluate those 10 minutes and identify what is the setting? What is the voice that has come out of my experience of writing this first draft of an improvisation? And how can I give it structure? How can I give it form?

Mario Alberto Zambrano - Dancer, Writer, Assoc. Director of Dance, The Juilliard School

Mario Alberto Zambrano - Dancer, Writer, Assoc. Director of Dance, The Juilliard School

/

Dancer, Writer, Choreographer
Associate Director of Dance at The Juilliard School, NYC

In both writing a first draft and in the improvisation of a dancing body, what is so key and relevant and exposed is voice. That internal voice of the artist of what they're writing on the page or what they're writing in space. If you go to fiction workshop, you talk about plot, structure, and you talk about character development, but there are very few classes within a dance curriculum where you break down an improvisation and you talk about voice, point of view, metaphor, or musical composition within a phrase. The lifespan of a phrase. And so this realisation is helping me understand that a one minute post of improvisation or even a ten-minute span of improvisation if it’s recorded is very similar to a first draft of creative writing, where then the artist is in a position to evaluate those 10 minutes and identify what is the setting? What is the voice that has come out of my experience of writing this first draft of an improvisation? And how can I give it structure? How can I give it form?

Highlights - Isabel Sandoval - Director of "Lingua Franca" - “Under the Banner of Heaven”

Highlights - Isabel Sandoval - Director of "Lingua Franca" - “Under the Banner of Heaven”

/

Director of Lingua Franca & Under the Banner of Heaven

Before coming on board Under the Banner of Heaven, I had very little knowledge of Mormonism, but having read the script by Academy Award-winning screenwriter Dustin Lance Black, who is also the showrunner for the show, I resonated deeply with Jeb Pyre (played by Andrew Garfield) when it comes to his growing ambivalence and his crisis of faith. And the more he learned about the gruesome, grisly history of the founding Mormonism, and also about the case that he was investigating, the more disillusioned and disenchanted he was becoming. And that resonated with me because I was raised Catholic in the Philippines, but as I grew older, actually went to Catholic schools and universities from kindergarten until college, and then the more I learned about the history of the Catholic Church and the atrocities and the injustices that it has committed, especially in the name of colonialist and imperialist pursuits in the Middle ages, the more I questioned its control over me and my life.

Isabel Sandoval - Director of “Lingua Franca” - “Under the Banner of Heaven”

Isabel Sandoval - Director of “Lingua Franca” - “Under the Banner of Heaven”

/

Director of Lingua Franca & Under the Banner of Heaven

Before coming on board Under the Banner of Heaven, I had very little knowledge of Mormonism, but having read the script by Academy Award-winning screenwriter Dustin Lance Black, who is also the showrunner for the show, I resonated deeply with Jeb Pyre (played by Andrew Garfield) when it comes to his growing ambivalence and his crisis of faith. And the more he learned about the gruesome, grisly history of the founding Mormonism, and also about the case that he was investigating, the more disillusioned and disenchanted he was becoming. And that resonated with me because I was raised Catholic in the Philippines, but as I grew older, actually went to Catholic schools and universities from kindergarten until college, and then the more I learned about the history of the Catholic Church and the atrocities and the injustices that it has committed, especially in the name of colonialist and imperialist pursuits in the Middle ages, the more I questioned its control over me and my life.

(Highlights) Tey Meadow · Author of “Trans Kids: Being Gendered in the Twenty-First Century"

(Highlights) Tey Meadow · Author of “Trans Kids: Being Gendered in the Twenty-First Century"

/

Author of Trans Kids: Being Gendered in the Twenty-First Century
Assistant Professor of Sociology, Columbia University
Co-editor of Other Please Specify: Queer Methods in Sociology

So while there is no kind of one size fits all story, there are plenty of times when...kind of like clusters of activity. And some kids don't come out as trans. They come out as wanting to begin a process of exploration around gender, wanting to sort of bend things a little bit or begin to present themselves in slightly different ways without a concrete cross-identification.

Tey Meadow · Author of “Trans Kids: Being Gendered in the Twenty-First Century"

Tey Meadow · Author of “Trans Kids: Being Gendered in the Twenty-First Century"

/

Author of Trans Kids: Being Gendered in the Twenty-First Century
Assistant Professor of Sociology, Columbia University
Co-editor of Other Please Specify: Queer Methods in Sociology

So while there is no kind of one size fits all story, there are plenty of times when...kind of like clusters of activity. And some kids don't come out as trans. They come out as wanting to begin a process of exploration around gender, wanting to sort of bend things a little bit or begin to present themselves in slightly different ways without a concrete cross-identification.

(Highlights) Courtney Peppernell · YA Writer & Poet · Author of “Pillow Thoughts”

(Highlights) Courtney Peppernell · YA Writer & Poet · Author of “Pillow Thoughts”

/

YA Writer & Poet
Author of Pillow Thoughts & I Hope You Stay

I really hope that kindness is preserved. I really think manners and being polite can go a long way. People are in such a rush these days. Everybody wants to acquire so much, and they forget to just be thankful for the little things in life. To slow down, how you move through the world and how selfless you are, holding open a door for someone, or just telling someone to have a good day. Those are all things that can have a lasting effect on another person and make them want to be better as well.

Courtney Peppernell · YA Writer & Poet · Author of “Pillow Thoughts”

Courtney Peppernell · YA Writer & Poet · Author of “Pillow Thoughts”

/

YA Writer & Poet
Author of Pillow Thoughts & I Hope You Stay

I really hope that kindness is preserved. I really think manners and being polite can go a long way. People are in such a rush these days. Everybody wants to acquire so much, and they forget to just be thankful for the little things in life. To slow down, how you move through the world and how selfless you are, holding open a door for someone, or just telling someone to have a good day. Those are all things that can have a lasting effect on another person and make them want to be better as well.

(Highlights) TREVA B. LINDSEY
TREVA B. LINDSEY