Organizing: Nolose, Bike Ride, Voices from Inside

[susanstinson]

There's a particular thing that I love, really love, like a book that gets inside me and keeps hissing and spinning and singing and touching off memories and waking up various senses and capacities. Some people do organizing like that, they are artful and brave and persistent, and when they make mistakes, they move through them, not without pain, or anything, of course not, but in ways that make difficult worlds shift and crack open in strange, gorgeous unexpected ways. They're thoughtful. They're pragmatic, yet want so much, impossible things, sometimes, that, oddly enough, sometimes actually happen. A lot of times they talk with each other. Sometimes there are beautiful, deep rooted relationships involved that extend over decades and can be drawn on to help get the work done, or well-established habits of generousity, or sometimes everything's new, but some people take chances and rent a room, or whatever, put up some flyers, I love this, what people make happen, especially when messiness is known to be part of it, when people try not to fake stuff and try to be kind. For me, it makes all this deeper and more likely if art is welcome, art is part of it. And pleasure. And love.

Three examples of what look to me to be that kind of organizing, some by people I know, some by people I don't, that I wanted to post about:

• The NOLOSE conference in September is open for registration, and I hear that slots are going very fast. This is a gathering packed with full on beauty and courage and very original thinkers and movers who are doing radical work around queerness and fatness.
  
  Bonus feat of astonishing organizing: One of the things that makes NOLOSE possible is the always overwhelmingly abundant Fat Girl Flea Market, which is coming up in NYC in July.



• A new fat bike gang in San Francisco is having a bike ride this Sunday. They're taking a leisurely ride in Golden Gate Park, ending with a picnic in a rose garden, and everyone is welcome. Plus, the announcement includes a link to an article with tips for riding a bike in a skirt and heels.



• Here in New England, in Amherst, next Tuesday at 7, at that very fine collective bookstore, Food For Thought Books, there will be a reading from Voices from the Inside: Women Writing From Prison. My friend Erika is one of the organizers of this, and she says that it's going to be great.