mixed-class anthology, call for submissions

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http://augustpoemsongforliberation.wordpress.com/invitation/mixed-class-anthology/

Mixed-Class Anthology

>>>> Call for Submissions <<<<

 

Mixed-Class:

Because Sometimes You Gotta Piece it All Together

• What if we inhabit multiple class experiences – in our families, and throughout our lives?
• How do race, disability, migration, gender, sexuality, and more mediate our mixed-classed experiences? How do we make sense of our messy, sometimes contradictory experiences of class?
• How do we inherit and navigate mixed-class ancestries, histories, and genealogies meeting in our lifetime?

Seeking more connection around being mixed-class, the two of us came together with the vision of gathering stories of people in our communities who identify and resonate with a mixed-class experience.

We know that being mixed-class can be hard to make sense of. Some of us grew up with parents and families with more than one class reality, and many of us have had shifting access to money and resources due to changing relationships (i.e. partnership, co-parenting, and divorce), inheritance, chronic illness, migration, un/employment, and other factors. Some of us grew up poor or working-class, and have had more class privilege in our adult lives; while others of us grew up middle or owning class, and have also had changing experiences of class. Amid all of this we can retain class privilege, or continue to not have it.

 

The root of this project feels deeply personal and about healing. We hope to maintain this as we invite writings and visions grounded in personal experience. Through this story-telling, we hope to broaden conversations about class as a static identity category, while honoring the very real violence of capitalism, particularly for cash poor communities in the US and around the world.

 

>> The Anthology <<

 

We hope to gather the experiences of people who resonate with being mixed-class to build community and story-tell with each other.

We welcome personal essays and reflections, critical essays, letters, conversations/interviews, poems, other genres/mixed-genres, and printable black and white 2-D images! In its initial phase, we plan to self-publish and distribute this collection zine/chapbook-style, and may pursue publishers!

We envision a collection that includes contributors who hold commitments to challenging white supremacy, settler colonialism, ableism, capitalism, heteropatriarchy and transmisogyny; and to growing our practice towards collective liberation.

 

Some places where our lives have intersected with being mixed-class include:

• Parents from different class/backgrounds and relationships with families of origin
• Living with intergenerational trauma in our families
• Inheriting and/or building mixed-class, mixed-ability, and/or multiracial family
• Cultivating cultures of abundance, interdependence, and resource sharing
• Cross-class relationships and/or organizing
• Geography, gentrification, mobility, and/or class
• Heteropatriarchy, gender, class, and our mixed-class experiences
• Wellness, dis/ability, class, and our mixed-class experiences
• Addiction and mental health
• Transnational migration, culture, and class
• Raising mixed-class children, and/or cross-class adoption/foster care
• The list goes on…!

Submit pieces to: mixed.class.anthology@gmail.com

 

>> Up to 3 single-spaced pages. Please also include a brief bio of yourself.

Contact us with any questions, comments, ideas, or if you would like to contribute a longer piece!

Deadline: July 15, 2013

 

About your co-editors:

We live in the United States, and both grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area on stolen Indigenous land. We want to acknowledge that we are part of the ongoing settlement and occupation of Indigenous nations in the places we have lived.

 

Savannah is a white, mixed-class cisgender queer/femme settler, born and raised fourth-generation on the occupied Ohlone and Miwok lands known as the Bay Area. I have a mixed, at times divergent experience of class, have class privilege, and relate to having a mixed-class background. Some of the ways this has played out in my life include being separated from my (raised-poor) working-class Mom for periods of time as a pre/teen due to a bitter, seven-year divorce from my abusive owning-class/rich Dad, and having moved over 15 times before high school graduation. I also have had some access to unearned/inherited wealth, and don’t have debt or college loans. I am committed to moving towards interdependence, resource-sharing, and community reparations (props to POOR Magazine’s poverty scholarship for this framework). I also think a lot about challenging masculinism as I practice growing strategies that center wholeness, emotional wisdom, storytelling, sensuality, and celebration as transformative tools for liberation. I envision this project as a healing tool for myself, and hope that it can be that for others as well. This fall, I’m gonna start a PhD program at UCLA where I plan to research queer settler relationships to space and place in the US.

 

Vanessa is a tender, freedom-loving heart born to Chinese-descent Mandarin-speaking immigrant parents in Berkeley, California in the early 1980s. Primarily raised by my mom here in the States, I grew up with education, class, and ability privilege in a majority white, upper middle class neighborhood. With my mom working days and nights, many of the hetero two-parent, vacationing lifestyles around us didn’t reflect our realities at home. We later moved more solidly into an immigrant middle class, and I began to build bridges towards resource organizing across class and the varied networks of support and accountability in my life and cultural work. I’ve since been on a journey befriending chronic illness; through becoming disabled, my access to money has continued to evolve in needing to access food stamps and low-income services, and invite community support to sustain my wellness, livelihood, and practice. Within these ebbs and flows, I wholeheartedly live and love from the belief that poetry is not a luxury — “For within structures defined by profit, by linear power, by institutional dehumanization, our feelings were not meant to survive” (Audre Lorde); for when we fearlessly invite the vulnerability necessary to grow loving ecologies from and with our courage hearts, we enable infinitely increased potential for transformative magic.

http://augustpoemsongforliberation.wordpress.com/invitation/mixed-class-anthology/