Get Rehearsals for Livingfrom Haymarket: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1880-rehearsals-for-living Mariann earned a Bachelor’s in Fine Arts and a Teaching Certification in 1972 from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She earned a Master’s Degree in Fine Arts in Painting and Drawing from York University in Ontario, Canada in 1976. She taught Art and Humanities part-time at Whatcom Community College, 1982-1985. She practiced as a Certified Acupressure Practitioner, a form of mind body work incorporating Chinese Five Element Theory and emotional health from 1985-2000, during this time she held a Washington State Massage License. I enjoyed both listening and reading this one. While listening, though I often stopped the audible to write my writing ideas - the writings of both Robin and Leanne are so beautiful that they inspired waves of ideas. Betasamosake Simpson is a Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar, activist, musician, artist, author and member of Alderville First Nation. Her work often centres on the experiences of Indigenous Canadians. Her books include Islands of Decolonial Love, This Accident of Being Lost, As We Have Always Doneand Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies. Why Robyn Maynard & Leanne Betasamosake Simpson wrote Rehearsals for Living

In Rehearsals For Living, Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson showed me how to find reassurance in world-changing. They showed me how world-changing is happening all around us, all the time. It's an incredible book, probably the best I've read all year, and I'd recommend anyone interested reads it. (I'll lend you my copy if that's what it takes.) The exchange grew into their new book Rehearsals for Living — an urgent demand for a different way forward that offers new insights into where we go from here. Robyn Maynard: The title has so many different meanings. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, who wrote the foreword for our book, describes abolition as "life in rehearsal." And that's really a way of thinking about the kind of world that we want to live in — about the kind of world that freedom could mean.

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Rehearsals for Living is a finalist for the 2022 Governor General's Literary Award for nonfiction. The winner will be announced on Nov. 16, 2022. Ruth Wilson Gilmore is Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences and Director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics at CUNY Graduate Center. A co-founder of California Prison Moratorium Project and Critical Resistance, she is author of the prize-winning book Golden Gulag: Prison, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. Gilmore is the recipient of the Cultural Freedom Prize from the Lannan Foundation. As a musician, rehearsal is what you spend most of your time in. You spend most of your time engaged in that repetition, in that space — a kind of safe space, because there isn't an audience and it isn't a performance. I like this idea of coming together and trying to make or build something with a group of people in real time, and then practicing it as a way of generating the knowledge that we all need to be engaged in these little making practices. As Ruth Wilson Gilmore says, "Practice makes different," which I really like a lot.

As an invocation for collective resistance, the book succeeds, but it’s also powerful when the authors share the small details of their lives – Simpson’s meditative nighttime runs with her daughter, Maynard effortfully tolerating the spider on her stairs – that ground their ethics in the reality of daily living. At times, their dialogue wades so deeply into critical theory that the epistolary structure is obscured. But when Maynard writes, “I miss you, Leanne,” in the midst of one didactic letter, it is a heart-rending jolt of intimacy. Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and Robyn Maynard envision a future shaped by freedom in Rehearsals for Living Maynard and Simpson would probably say this is the wrong question. Simpson writes, “Our movements and mobilizations do not have the privilege of resting upon a fleeting emotion. The absence of hope is a beautiful catalyst.” Elsewhere, Maynard notes, “Even though I will dip my toes into cynicism now and again, I won’t let myself reside there.” They keep writing to one another, but also working: protesting, advocating, teaching, gardening. Maynard and Simpson, both mothers, ground their efforts in the very urgent need to create a survivable future for their children and communities.Leanne, you write to Robyn that it's never enough to just critique the system, a name or oppression. We have to create the alternative on the ground in real time. How important is this building of the alternative?

In your letters, you both declare yourselves as nerds and Star Trek fans. And this is a serious question: What does Star Trek bring to your thinking in your practices? Betasamosake Simpson and Maynard spoke to Shelagh Rogers about the conversations that led to Rehearsals for Living.The epistolary form allows a vulnerability and closeness that wouldn’t have been possible in any other genre. The book, however, still manages to be immensely scholarly, journalistic, historical and theoretical all at once. Both writers use the intimacy of their domestic lives to reflect on the larger political and social phenomena around them. Rehearsals for Living by Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. Published by Knopf Canada. Leanne Betasamosake Simpson is a renowned Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar, writer and artist, who has been widely recognized as one of the most compelling Indigenous voices of her generation. Leanne is the author of seven books, including her 2021 novel Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies, which was named a best book of the year by the Globe and Mail, and was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award for fiction. A revolutionary collaboration about the world we're living in now, between two of our most important contemporary thinkers, writers and activists. In our group work and play, we practice living in the here and now. The work evolves out of the work that we do together, we co create from the efforts of the group participants. Rehearsals for Living explores our dynamic relationship conundrums in engaging and revealing ways, helping us to release patterns of behavior that are no longer working for us. We practice new ways of responding. We learn to become fluid, connective, and responsive to ourselves, the people in our lives, and society. . Although the book is a blueprint for change, it also questions the value of hope. Simpson forces us to re-imagine the idea, writing that her Nishnaabeg ancestors have never needed hope to survive. Instead, “the absence of hope can be a beautiful catalyst.” Tenacity, anger and despair, as well as love, respect and joy, can all be motivators. Colonialism is a world-ending event, destroying cultures, languages and ways of being, but her forebears struggled against it, continuing to “world-build anyway.” This is a useful prescription for all of us as we attempt to move toward a world that is freer, and safer, for everyone.