Corn Killz: on intergenerational queer feminist collaboration
October 28, 2025
Over the weekend, I participated in a workshop on Dyke Camp at Lesbian Lives led by my collaborator Bea Hurd. A small but activated gathering of intergenerational feminist rockstars discussed the lesbian gaze, the dyke erotic, and how all this changes depending on your age, and the times, in an openhearted and intense conversation built through her PowerPoint.
We also read aloud from our recently completed zine, Queer Feminist Media Praxis: Queering of the Corn, showed excerpts from two versions of our gothic horror feature in progress, Queering of the Corn, and wrote our desires on ears of corn for a ritual that didn’t happen cuz we ran out of time, too busy doing the actually hard work of intergenerational lesbian/queer conversation.
We have been working on this raggedy, evolving, collaborative, truly inter-generational project (still in process!) with Z Behl since living together for a month in 2021 in a ramshackle house called Victoria during lockdown in Nebraska at Art Farm.
I inhabited, with a small and changing group of queer feminist “art farmers,” an impermanent, ramshackle house in Nebraska called Victoria over one intense and also gutted month in 2021. I used this strange stay to return—first in my mind, next on my studio’s walls, and then in this and other writing and media—to other generative homes and roads: the liminal and powerful sites that can invoke transformation. I never supposed that these imaginative visits, or my embodied one in Nebraska, were a healing or even escape from COVID, even as the virus set me into flight, illness, anxiety, isolation, and then, late in my stay at Art Farm, queer feminist community and media praxis. Learning from disability justice, a lifetime in AIDS activism, and my own enduring of long COVID helped me shy from particular words or their projects: healing, escape. I stayed with the IS: a living and reckoning with; a making art in a place and time.
4 pages from the zine
Those opening words, and many more about my time at Art Farm and how we decided to shoot a feature film on a janky VHS camcorder and lively iPhone, now live in a beautiful and zany zine, designed by my collaborators B and Z, written by me. You can order a beautiful all-color version of the zine by messaging one of us, or you can enjoy a flipbook here. B’s amazing, original, very dyke camp movie, Corn Killz is here. Z’s will come, and then we will certainly do more!
While I was at Art Farm I wrote a lot about my Queer Feminist Media Praxis while alone in my studio. These were ideas borne from decades of collaboration; and then collaboration became fleshy, and lived (and this still continues, as the project can’t seem to end). The doing of it is harder than the writing about it, but also more exciting and gratifying, uncertain and magic (although I don’t believe in that or God, as I testify in the work).
It has been gratifying, as we continue to work together, to see how the tenets of my QFMP are put into play as this loose but surprisingly generative connection fades, solidifies, generates, and wobbles. I wrote these words at Art Farm, I am pleased to see them resonate in the work I share here, and that which will certainly still come.
My queerness is a process and related methods to think and act past intertwined binaries. It is an amplification or extension of my feminism—a technology. It helps disrupt and refashion the world and how we live in it. Learning from and with others, I strive to make a world structured by other systems. My feminist queer methods are grounded in process and based in:
▪ collaboration
▪ power-sharing
▪ being situated in a place and a community
▪ naming our shared and responsive ethics
▪ being aware of power in all circumstances
▪ celebrating and learning from difference
▪ seeking safety or harm reduction
▪ making use of hierarchies as needed
▪ flattening expertise as needed
▪ affording dignity, agency, and creativity to all
▪ self-reflexivity and transparency
HOLDING PATTERNS: distributing archival activation in LA & NY
September 26, 2025
In 2024-2025, I completed, and then enjoyed a grassroots DIY release of a feature experimental video, Please Hold. The video premiered at the Parkside Lounge (a critical location in its mise-en-scene and NYC queer nightlife more generally, more pix here) at a raucous and yet focused night of memory, witness, and community around the documentary’s core commitments: AIDS, the Lower East Side and NYC streets, queer life and love, technologies of memory.
It went on to show online and in person to the communities from whence it hailed: at the Wexner Center for the Arts (where it was edited), inside of academic conferences and classrooms, for queer and experimental media lovers invested in the past and present of AIDS and the forms that might hold some of this. Many participants gave me something in return—writing, testimony, audio recordings, questions—thereby distributing voice and responsibility amongst the audience to be embedded as context for the documentary’s online home.
Importantly, its busy and deeply engaged life included film festivals of no variety. It wasn’t and isn’t film festival fare. Instead it sits on a website, available for free, replete with its own ever-growing history of use, many others’ thoughts about watching it, and my suggestions for ways for audiences to help distribute, watch, or engage within their own communities (even a “community” of one).
After much soul searching and community conversation about what film festivals are today, what they have been and could be (questions quite live in this diverse community), I committed to experimenting with different routes to distribution. Like many others who make activist media, my “impact campaign” would be unlike those invented as required prose for grant applications and funders. Rather, without funding or festivals charting my course, I would seek connections to those impacted by HIV/AIDS and those committed to experimental/radical forms, people with whom I’m already immersed in community, conversation, and care.
What if I blew the documentary out into the very communities that are and have already been invested in its themes and practices and in which it invests (the teachers, students, archivists, librarians, activists, artists, and nonprofits that have put much of what they have into improving the daily lives of people impacted by HIV/AIDS and remembering others who did so before us)? What if I took up the responsibility of the hard work of distribution—sharing and listening—given my qualifications as one already within known worlds (that is, settings in which I am already a stakeholder, in which I have a share, an interest).
What if we had words, and their linked practices, for the production of meaning and feeling, by way of encounters with technologies and media and each other—words for the work of distribution—that didn’t come from or for capital? Of course, many of the great traditions of activist media—from Vertov’s agit-train to the Third Cinema to early feminist film—have known that radical distribution is at the core of work bent on communal transformation. And many film festivals have radical roots grown from such traditions. So, the question seems less about what film festivals can and can’t do, and what else is possible outside their gates. If a film falls outside a festival, will anybody see it?
Many of these questions had come to me by way of the amazing Mimesis Documentary Festival where the documentary and I had enjoyed a presence—in 2024 and in my hometown—on their invitation … albeit by showing my video as an installation: HOLDING PATTERNS.
Building from this invitation, and materializing a community-based distribution practice made in collaboration with invested others, the installation is now further developed. From October-December, 2025, it will be simultaneously living in and supported by two of the very queer archives/libraries—ONE Archives at USC and the Pat Parker/Vito Russo Library at the Center—that hold their own gifts, research, and memories of queers affected by HIV/AIDS and related health troubles. Envisioning this, organizing it, supporting its materialization as a place to go, research, remember, and hold, has demanded distribution efforts by workers (often volunteers) who are well outside of film scenes while deeply inside of others (queer non-profits, schools, bars, neighborhoods).
Because the video is now also an installation, this labor is less about distribution than emplacement or perhaps co-emergence. My materials sit alongside holdings that were already there. My materials, and the research and commitments that fueled them, help identify other archival subjects and patterns of holding that always need our attention and care. My memory practices align with those of others, like curators and programmers, Alexis Johnson and Quetzal Arevalo, at ONE Archives, and Library Steering Committee members Mev Luna and Liza Minno at the Pat Parker/Vito Russo Library at the Center in NY, and its archivist, Lou McCarthy.
HOLDING PATTERNS takes an artwork that held Jim and Juanita in the linear and two-dimensional form of a documentary and disperses these people, and their conversations with me about AIDS and related concerns, as material into a room where others join us. It renders research as embodied and material and communal. Immersing a visitor into a space of study that holds VHS and digital video, web links, paper, and fabric, it asks visitors to consider the specific and interlocking patterns of the many media we use to hold onto people and their memories, actions, and desires. In so doing, more people can help carry their weight and beauty for which I am responsible. Also available for focused study are my 2024 Zoom conversations with four contemporary AIDS workers—Jih-Fei Cheng, Marty Fink, Pato Hebert, Ted Kerr. Their wisdom creates other frameworks to hold and honor my ghosts and those who are beloved to others.
Just so, in LA, HOLDING PATTERNS also invites people I met through their archival holdings—Mina Kay Meyer, Yolanda Retter (who I already knew!), and Kenneth Wiederhold (who has hold in his name)— into the room. I came to know them during one focused, a little feverish, and especially desirous day of research in September 2025 at the ONE Archives. Hello! Welcome back. At the Archives where some of their things were already held, we reintroduce these Los Angeles queers—delightful, powerful, regular humans who organized, partied, got married, had sex, fought for queer and health care rights, died of various illnesses, and so much more—to their local community, inviting more deserved connection and care. Our engagement with some of their things demonstrates how research and sharing can lead to a kind of distribution that is saturated with the depth of a life lived and connections made.
Indeed, just last month, at the beginning of my one heady research day, I ran into these intrepid archivists working on their own project. Saying hi, Lynn Ballen and I quickly realized we had met, in the 1990s, via … Yolanda Retter. That’s how I knew she would be HOLDING PATTERN’s third Los Angeles subject (there were many many to choose from, each deserving of a vitrine and attendant attention).
Speaking of attention and care, a teaching and learning guide will also be available at the two sites (and online), written and produced by graduate students Chloe Buergenthal and Shwe Ye Shoon Myat. While further activating the installation space through suggested research practices—creative, embodied, intellectual, emotional—their work is an example of the cross-generational dialogue that is another heart of this, and many activist projects’ production and distribution (see above): handshakes across time and inside spaces of community.
Archival engagements—a kind of distribution as labor and love through donation, research, and reanimation—can be opportunities for patterning queer community across time and beyond death, aligning political and cultural connections from the past and into rooms where people who are alive meet.
Thus, as part of my experiments in place-based distribution, in LA, HOLDING PATTERNS invites visitors to share material traces of grief through an exercise organized by the What Would an HIV Do? collective (we will also have two workshops about political grief, the first in person at ONE Archives, the second online in November, more forthcoming). In NY, the installation centers community-made donations that hold memories of grief in light of AIDS; precious objects that will be left for other’s attention by visitors to the show.
When distribution is placed-based activation, artists can ask for more than viewing and attendees can do more that watch, creating impact outside of capital, as a giving, showing, telling, and holding.
My is a process and ness IS one of its technologies
March 11, 2025
Please enjoy this sanitized version of my yet-to-be-published manifesto, now purged of “discouraged words under Trump” (plus a few more)
My is a process and related methods.1
There are many: some personal, others specific.
My is not about anything as much as it is about everything because is my set of approaches to the world and its ideas and.
My is a set of orientations and related ideas and actions—practices—focused upon changing or celebrating material and ideological conditions.
My is not about and, or, or.
My is not about , class, , the, the environment, the internet, film, video, politics, my family, my friends, my Jewish non-Zionism, my community, or myself.
My is a set of methods to engage ethically and collectively in thinking, teaching, collaborating, and making art and ideas about the issues and material conditions that concern me and others, including all those listed above.
My is good work. It is an ethical way to live. Learning from and with others, I strive to change a world structured by arbitrary, stupid binaries that are also hierarchies that apportion rights, power, access, and ways of living unjustly.
Male/.
/White.
Rich/Poor.
North/South.
Nature/Culture.
Road/Home.
Abled/.
Sick/Well.
Theory/Practice.
Form/Content.
Home/Work.
Jewish/.
My is because stupid binaries are mutually inflecting and dense.
My is a process and related methods to think and act past intertwined binaries. It is an amplification or extension of my—a technology. It helps disrupt and refashion the world and how we live in it. Learning from and with others, I strive to make a world structured by other. My methods are grounded in process and based in:
▪ collaboration
▪ power-sharing
▪ being situated in a place and a community
▪ naming our shared and responsive ethics
▪ being aware of power in all circumstances
▪ celebrating and learning from
▪ seeking safety or harm reduction
▪ making use of hierarchies as needed
▪ flattening expertise as needed
▪ affording dignity, agency, and creativity to all
▪ self-reflexivity and transparency2
CODA
This brief and quick and easy-to-do exercise reveals as much as it obscures. Importantly, many attributes I cherish (dignity, agency, creativity, community, safety) stay present! The processes I use (teaching, art, collaboration, power-sharing, situated, self-reflexivity and transparency) are strong as steel. Righteous traditions of thought, still intact (ethics, harm reduction, stupid binaries). As importantly, words that one would imagine to be utterly verboden (non-Zionist, class), are currently left alive. This must be because the censor is looking in the wrong directions. Or lets his stupidity, or lack of information—moving as fast as he is without a proper education—allow for certain areas to stay unattended to (or perhaps attended to, but in ham-fisted ways). What seems clear to me is that without the words that have disappeared, what I believe in, have done, and will do, remains legible. I wonder how many words would have to go before I too, vanish.
- In this quick and easy exercise, I have chosen to entirely excise a word leaving no indication that it has disappeared. BAM. Certainly, another way to embark on this good American work would be to mark the gaps. ↩︎
- With some transparency: I helped the censor by preemptively striking a few terms he didn’t know enough (yet) to pay attention to in the list above:
System
Queer(ness)
Woman
Lesbian
Movement
Sexuality
Muslim
COVID
Long COVID
Long Haul
AIDS ↩︎
This is a poem and a video written by Jose G in October 2018 at a Fake News Poetry Workshop at Poets of Course.
This and other poems from “My Phone Lies to Me” (punctum books, 2022), will be read at a 2025 Fake News Poetry Reading celebrating truth, science, Latin/x people, and more given that this is a second 100 days of lies and fear.
March 14, 10:15 am – 12 pm EST, on ZOOM
Invite for Zoom event is here! https://www.eventbrite.com/myevent?eid=1261311138569
Science is Real
Science is challenged by religious people
they have their own ideas about science
That is not fact, it’s fiction
Science is challenged by politicians.
They deny science,
that global warming is real.
They wants to destroy the planet,
make money,
they don’t care about the future.
Science is challenged by stupid people
who think the Earth is flat.
Old science stupidity
You try to explain the fact,
they don’t want to believe it.
The proof is in the pudding
My science is challenged by people that are too stubborn to understand
I am not stupid
I am a smart person
I am not a rare unicorn
“Oh my God A Latino person who is smart!”
“Oh my God! A disabled person who is smart!”
I have a disability, I am not stupid
-José G.
More about the workshop and Poets of Course where this and other work was written.
In 2016-17, I engaged in a daily practice for the first 100 days of a presidency, blogging about fake news and matters of civic decency, and as often as not sharing the page with friends and colleagues. That became a website with 100 Hard Truths about Fake News: #100hardtruths-#fakenews.
For many years after, I ran workshops with poets around the world together thinking about those hard truths and the words of other participants: fakenews-poetry.org.
Those poems became a book, My Phone Lies to Me, published by punctum press (available to download for free).
On Friday, March 14, from 10:15 am-12 pm EST about 15-20 participants in this project (writers, poets, teachers, friends), will read poems from this collection. They may also have written new poems, to fit this 100 days and how matters of truth, the internet, and civic society have changed. They may speak about the workshop process and what can be useful or not in this time. There will be time for discussion or the reading of more poems after the one-hour reading. The reading will also be recorded as part of punctum’s Encounters at the End of the Book series.
It is good to be together with poetry at this time. There will be time for discussion or the reading of more poems after the one-hour reading.
Evite for the ZOOM.
On Suicide Notes in Place of Passports
Migrants were born from the river’s cavernous mouth
Cradled by overgrown bamboo and caña de azúcar
Ripe mango flesh dripping from our teeth
Caked in the desert’s grime
Abuelita’s palms fold in a symphony of praise
Her tongue wisps a language of smoke
Dense and oily, her words hang stagnant in the air
She keeps it tucked away in her diaphragm
Her lips imprinted with N-400 form
Naturalization isn’t possible when your body is already considered unearthly
While burning sage to keep the spirits away
Says “Hay un remedio para todo excepto la muerte”
There is a remedy for everything except death
Someone pray for the undocumented immigrants
The infants swaddled in crimson
Product of rape by border patrol
Dehydrated bodies cremated into sand dunes
Empty water jugs rolling like tumbleweeds
We hand down heartache like heirlooms
Recuerdos of suicide notes and bullet shells
For Jose de Jesus Deniz Sahagun, 31
Screams echoing off isolated cell walls
Copper teeth grinding against the ache of vacancy
We keep mistaking detention center for death sentence
He stuffed his esophagus with socks
Attempted to take his life 3 times before
A testament to the torture behind closed doors
For Joaquin Luna, 18
Who carved out his obituary in spiral notebooks
God’s greed gave him a gun
Holy bearer of bullets
Dressed in his Sunday best
He couldn’t be an architect without papers
So he sprinkled blueprints with lighter fluids
Envisioned the contrast of vermillion stains on his cream shirt
Formulated the spatial composition of the bathroom and his body
Mapped out his apology in blue blood
He shot himself a week before receiving his college acceptance letter
I can’t bear anymore eulogies
My bedtime stories are news reports
Sometimes I can’t tell real from fake
Alternative facts scream ICE raids in the wrong places
Tombstones cluttered my closet
Each inscription with the date scraped out
From when I wanted to die at 7, 10, 13, 15
Home is only 3 letters away from homily
And I will worship every god to keep this family whole
Turn our bodies into sanctuary
Welcome to this holy house
I keep waiting for a resurrection
But the dead don’t dance on the devil’s back.
-Arlene Campa
A response to #100hardtruths-#fakenews #20: “Stress Related to Immigration Status is One Result.”
See its Video-Poem (#17) created at a second workshop with Get Lit here: https://partnerandpartners.gitlab.io/alex-juhasz/media/new.html. This poem was written by Arlene Campa in March 2018 at a workshop at Get Lit, an LA group for youth poetry.
Online Premier “Please Hold,” featuring writers from “AIDS and the Distribution of Crises”
February 13, 2025
Please join editors and writers from the collection, AIDS and the Distribution of Crises (Duke 2020), as we screen together and then discuss my new experimental documentary, Please Hold (70 mins, 2025).
The event will be a Zoom webinar, Saturday March 8, 3-5 pm EST. Sign up is here.
The event will feature conversation among these amazing AIDS workers, all writers for the anthology. My co-editors, Dr. Jih Fei Cheng and Dr. Nishant Shahani, and HIV/AIDS scholars, organizers, and artists with associated interests in Long COVID, disability justice, queer and trans media and history, documentary, and more: Cecilia Aldarondo, Pablo Alvarez, Pato Hebert, Cait McKinney, Quito Ziegler.
If you can’t make this screening and conversation, or the in person premier at the Parkside Lounge on the Lower East Side on March 2, not to worry!
Please Hold is available on the official project website at no cost, reflecting my commitment to accessibility and collective engagement. You are encouraged to watch the video with others by organizing screenings and other gatherings that can honor the legacy of those lost to AIDS and other illnesses, as well as those living with them. Aligned with the project’s ethos, audience members are invited to contribute reflections, images, and other responses after their screening to an online collection.
Like much else in my practice, this is a DIY video, and DIY release, organized around conversation, community, and interaction. Here’s more info about Context, Suggested Viewing Conditions, and Discussion. And here’s where you order the video for free.
March premiers of “Please Hold,” my experimental AIDS video
February 12, 2025
I am so pleased to announce the premiere of my latest experimental documentary, Please Hold (70 mins, 2025), my first personal video in nearly fifteen years: online and in person. Edited by Matthew Hittle and Paul Hill, this intimate and evocative work will debut at the iconic Parkside Lounge in New York’s Lower East Side on March 2, 2025, at 5 PM (tickets here). As part of a dynamic, multisensory, community-based experience, before the screening (3–5 PM) attendees are invited to bring and share personal objects that hold memories of HIV/AIDS, the Lower East Side, or the Parkside Lounge. Co-sponsored by the MIX NYC Queer Experimental Film Festival and Visual AIDS, the event, emceed by “High-Profile NYC Drag Queen!” Linda Simpson, will conclude with a live performance by CHRISTEENE, whose music is featured in the video. It will be a memorable mix of joy, community, and remembrance, as is the video itself.
At its core, Please Hold explores the intersections of activism, memory, and media through a profoundly personal yet communal lens. Drawing from decades of DIY activist video, two deeply intimate death-bed/legacy recordings, and conversations with living AIDS workers, the documentary creates a layered meditation on the ways we hold — and shed — loss, memory, and collaborators, interrogating the questions:
How do neighborhoods, sweaters and scarves, videotapes and queer bars hold ghosts?
How do we let them go?
Shot on a mix of consumer-grade recording devices — iPhone, Zoom, VHS camcorder, and Super-8 film — the documentary is an homage to grassroots AIDS mediamaking, across decades, and its ability to capture intimate, honest communication about hope and loss. It is anchored by legacy videos, shot on their request, of two of my closest collaborators and friends: James Robert Lamb (1963-1993), taped in 1992, and Juanita Mohammed Szczepanski (1957-2022), shot in 2022. Their voices are joined by contemporary “AIDS workers” Jih-Fei Cheng, Marty Fink, Pato Hebert, and Ted Kerr, culminating in a poignant sequence filmed at the Parkside Lounge, a site layered with queer history and ghosts, memories, and present day stories of AIDS.
Following the in-person premiere, I will host a global online screening and conversation with writers for my co-edited collection AIDS and the Distribution of Crises, including the book’s co-editors, Jih-Fei Cheng, and Nishant Shahani, documentary filmmaker Cecilia Aldarondo, AIDS scholar Pablo Alvarez, artist and Long COVID organizer, Pato Hebert, queer media scholar Cait McKinney, and artist Quito Ziegler on March 8, at 3–5PM ET (tickets here). In addition, on March 22, Please Hold will close the Picture Lock film series at the Wexner Center for the Arts, where I edited the documentary in residence at their storied Film/Video Studio.
Please Hold will be available on the official project website at no cost, reflecting my commitment to accessibility and collective engagement. Viewers are encouraged to watch the video with others by organizing screenings and other gatherings that can honor the legacy of those lost to AIDS and other illnesses, as well as those living with them. Aligned with the project’s ethos, audience members are invited to contribute reflections, images, and other responses after their screening to an online collection and to consider donating to support Holding Patterns, a community-based installation of the project that debuted at the Mimesis Documentary Festival in Boulder, Colorado, in August 2024.
Showcasing paper transcripts of interviews, AIDS books, and queer magazines, death-bed/legacy videos, online archives, photos, and the four complete hour-long Zoom interviews with “AIDS workers” that were used in making the documentary, Holding Patterns interrogates the ways we learn, mourn, and remember differently across mediums and archives. By juxtaposing analog and digital technologies — from VHS tapes to Zoom grids, sweaters to porn magazines — Holding Patterns navigates the flattening and deepening of attention, connection, and care in the wake of technological shifts. The installation is designed to be responsive to community-based placement in spaces imbued with memory and activism: such as queer bars, libraries, archives, bookstores, or feminist and trans community centers. New iterations are planned for The Center’s Pat Parker/Vito Russo Center Library in New York City in Spring/Summer and the ONE Archives at the USC Libraries in Los Angeles in the Fall.
More information about Please Hold, including archival materials, interviews, and details on organizing your own screening or installation can be found on www.pleaseholdvideo.com.
Tickets for the in-person premier at the Parkside Lounge on March 2, 2025, at 5 PM are available HERE.
For the online premier on March 8, at 3–5PM ET, registrations can be made HERE.
Any questions? Please reach out. I am eager to share the video and/or installation to those ready to hold its and my commitments to interaction, communal engagement, and careful attention to loss, love, memory, and community.
Poetry from reflection and compassion for the loss
January 22, 2025
On the night of the inauguration, I was lucky enough to watch an online reading of powerful poems (1 of 2) from Winter in American (Again: Poets Respond to the 2024 Election while letting little else fill my screens, as had been my commitment.
I was reminded of the warmth and magnetism of communities of the sane, the ethical, the artists. Thank you book editors and participating poets for inviting me in.
Then, only then, did I also remember my similar effort. I can’t tell if my 2022 book of poems by workshop participants (not the astounding writers you’ll see above, but poets nevertheless) is tragic, useful, or both. In any case, it’s free, like so many inspirational resources from the amazing punctum books.
The lengthy process that ultimately coalesced as this book about breaking through media manipulation began over the previous first 100 days of the very same president, when fake news felt catastrophic. Now conjoined with environmental and genocidal cataclysms as well as his return, technology’s and his lies are known knowns. I offer this now because perhaps poetry can reveal a few more real people’s truths, just as I experienced watching readings from Winter in America (Again.
“This book of poems about fake news written by diverse project participants is foremost an invitation and invocation for readers to participate, with others, in an experiment in knowing and working differently with the internet: Fake News Poetry Workshops. Between 2018 and 2020, Alexandra Juhasz directed more than twenty of these workshops around the world, and these are ongoing beyond the confines of this book. Each differs in form and structure, but participants are always asked to attend to research, their own knowledge about the internet and social media, and what they can learn from their workshop and previous ones.
My Phone Lies to Me shares the poems created in the workshops. As moving, eloquent, and useful as they may be — and you are invited to indulge in and learn from them — enjoying and learning from the poems is only a small part of this book’s project. Four short essays (two by Juhasz, with a foreword and afterword by critical internet scholars Tara McPherson and Margaret Rhee, respectively) introduce and situate the project’s processes of radical digital media. You can learn what Fake News Poetry Workshops make, do, and believe in, as well as how to collaborate with others to create your own.
Fake News Poetry Workshops are one way to counter dominant and dominating internet modes and values, to fight the corrupt ways of being and knowing that use digital media to create, fuel, and weaponize fake news. The project verifies good news in the face of fake news: that we can gather together in our many local places and use analog structures (about digital things and ways) to generate, hold, and share “art answers to phony questions.”
we’ll just keep doing those things in our families of choice
January 18, 2025
Alex: I am recording. It’s so kind of you to join me for the last conversation for my personal blogging practice that will end when the new president arrives. I chose you very specifically to end this process because of the intimate nature of the collaboration that we’re going to discuss. Sometime after the president takes office, you’re going to have a baby and I am going to come and live with you for three months! The two of us, and others, are going to be in community and collaboration during the first few months of the life of a child that you are having on your own.
Speaker 2: Thank you for having me as the last person that you’re talking to as part of this project. And I think as someone who also works in academia, there can sometimes be the cerebral or academic ways of thinking about collaboration. That’s such a big part of both pedagogy and the kind of things that I think about and teach about. But there’s something that’s just so personal and so intimate, having a child. This is helping me to think through how to bring intentionality into that, and how to communicate what I’m hoping that’ll look like to those who will help. I think it’s important for a baby and a child to have a larger network of people in their life with different experiences and backgrounds and ages and jobs and so on. That works against seeing parenthood as primarily about the hetero-nuclear family, and just two people, and all the pressure and expectation that comes along with that. So, the more the merrier, the more people I can get and the more help I can have around me and the baby, the better.
Alex: One of the amazing models that queer families of choice put out for everybody is all the intention that drives the construction of our families—from procreation to parenting to community—in a way that heteronormative monogamy can more easily leave things unthunk or stuck. And again, nothing against lots of wonderful straight people who’ve done all kinds of imaginative things, but we have to do every step as a choice.
And then, there’s a bond between mother and child that is very intense, formative, beautiful, important. And there are other bonds that form community through a child and with a child. I couldn’t name a larger privilege than to be able to be in on the early stages of that grouping with you. What are some of the things that you want to happen in your household in the first year of your child’s life, your dream of that given that we can’t control much of anything and now the world outside looks to be scary, confusing, new, damaging, cruel?
Speaker 2: Well, to be perfectly honest, for the very beginning, I’m just wanting to survive as a solo parent and be intact with my sleep and my mental health and really leaning on people for help, where I can ask in different ways that I haven’t been able to in my life. I have neighbors who I’ve gotten to know really well, and I ask them if they can lift things for me, or move things, or shovel my walk, which are things that are hard for me to ask for, but you just have to when you are pregnant and by yourself. I’m just going to have to ask people for help.
If I were to dream about or have a sort of ideal, what would the first year look like? it would be having and building community that can help to make a young life thrive in community, in a world that people are trying to make healthier and better, not just for this one life but more broadly. I hope I can make as many connections as possible because I fear it can be a very isolating process and one that can, for a lot of parents, become so focused and so myopic.
It’s such a hard process to become a parent for some people, including myself, so you really see how little our society, our government, supports pregnant people. Even me, as someone with so much privilege, and so much help, and so much support, including from you and from so many other people, encounters how hard it is to be a parent. And so hopefully I can continue to foster patterns of mutual aid so as to be in relationships with other people who struggle around all of these things: childcare, healthcare, education, every part of the process. It’s very challenging, but obviously very exciting.
Alex: One of the marvelous things about working on this blog has been that I have these one-on-one conversations which are quite delightful. And then I’m talking to people in my life about them because they’re very present to me. I was talking with Cathy yesterday about the fires—she has been featured on the blog, too—about how so many of us are thinking that whatever work we do to resist, whatever work we do to organize politically, there’s another thing that’s about to happen in and about the domestic, writ large. The ways in which we already produce beautiful and vibrant community: in our families and friendships, with our children and parents, with our students, in our activist circles, in our social worlds, we’ll just keep doing those things. They’re not going anywhere, but they are going to feel more important. And maybe they always were that important, but we lost sight of that: our art, our friends, our conversations, our families of choice. Each one is a model that we can delight in about how to be right in the world. And that’s what I heard you say about making a family as a single queer mother in the new world order. Just the simplest model of how to have right intention in our country at this time.
Speaker 2: It’s a really scary time. How to balance out, how to foster something new, like a life in this space of so much looming cloud. That’s going to be a real challenge, to be completely honest. It’s not going to be easy. And at the same time, I am in this moment where I’m feeling so much excitement and so much joy and so much actual sense of opening around the things that I want to happen in my life, even daily life, that I haven’t necessarily felt for a long time. And so I am really excited about what my life can look like with other people with me and with a child and in response to what’s happy. That’s a thing that I’m experiencing at this moment that is also very hard; just, excitement.
MEDIA PRAXIS 
