A revolution on a world scale will take a very long time. But it is also possible to recognize that it is already starting to happen. The easiest way to get our minds around it is to stop thinking about revolution as a thing—“the” revolution, the great cataclysmic break—and instead ask “what is revolutionary action?”
—David Graeber, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology
STORIES PUBLISHED by After The Storm—a DC-based anticapitalist magazine collective of which I’m part—explore this question posed by Graeber on two levels:
Contemporary fiction continues to be enamored with “sublime apocalypse,” to paraphrase Ajay Singh Chaudhary. He writes in “The Long Now” that “a desire for the future is often the lament of living postmodernism, capitalist realism, or just the accelerating daily exhaustion of the vast majority of people on this planet.” Imagining a post-apocalyptic future speaks not only to the difficulty of imagining alternatives to capitalism but also names our feelings of helplessness and justifies our collective inaction, our waiting and looking.
The name of our magazine, After The Storm, implies the same desperation for rupture, borne of the same exhaustion. In analyzing current discourse around climate, Chaudhary examines our society’s underlying conceptions of time. Specifically, how political time tends toward the horizon, the brighter tomorrow, the “what-if” after this great cataclysmic storm. In our practice of writing, editing, workshopping and publishing stories, we’ve experienced our own limits of conceiving change in this way. Personally, I find it challenging to practice collectivism instead of individualism, to imagine a different world without needing a reset, to balance my ego and fear when taking political action—these form my daily questions.
To move beyond this mindset is to recognize, as Chaudhary does, that “it is not about what ‘we’ can achieve tomorrow; it is a political struggle in this moment.” The fundamental transformation of the systems of today is our precondition for thinking about tomorrow. Reframed in this way, new media created in dialogue with past knowledge and present visions abound with possibilities, not only in media creation as organizing, but also and especially in media consumption that is decommodified—world-building not for traditional publishing or recognition, but for communities to negotiate in real time between imagination and action.
For myself and After The Storm, guiding such acts of imagining can be our part in linking and spreading radical cultures.
The craft of writing (or the perceived skill with elements of writing) was never meant to be neutral. Drawing from Eric Bennett’s Workshops of Empire and its descriptions of creative writing programs during the Cold War, Matthew Salesses traces the history of craft as it is taught today in America to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, led by Paul Engle. In his book Craft in the Real World, Salesses described Engle’s “investment in craft [and its expression of certain artistic and social values] as an ideological weapon against the spread of Communism.”
In a society that venerates and betrays its artists in equal measure, art is clearly never meant as neutral. “Apolitical art” is itself a political stance. Upholding an individualistic (and mythical) image of the artist is an ideology that advances cultural capital as power for particular interests. So is capitulating to the institutions that simultaneously define how art is valued while hiding the expectations that shape those values.
When After The Storm hosts writing workshops, we almost always hear doubts—if not from others, then from ourselves—about who gets to call themselves a writer. As if preemptively answering “What are your credentials?”, people warn us that they’ve never published anything. A blog or a journal becomes an almost guilty pleasure that people are ashamed to admit is “self-published,” or “not a regular enough habit,” or both.
Who gets to write stories, if not literature? Who determines what writing is important and for whom? “Reading and writing are not done in a vacuum,” Salesses continues. “If writers really believe that art is important to actual life, then the responsibilities of actual life are the responsibilities of art.”
In the fall of 2022, three of us with After The Storm co-created a six-session “curriculum” that we continue to iterate with community input. Every session included a short introduction to the topic, related writing exercises, and writing and sharing time. An understanding we shared was “craft in service of ideas.” Exercises and critique focused less on traditional skill-building and more on the values driving our ideas and writing processes. By explicitly requiring our art to be political, we sought to politicize and collectivize the act of writing itself. How might we apply lessons from solidarity organizing, from pleasure activism and from transformative justice, using different story models to imagine beyond what we thought was possible alone?
In session one, we began by exploring pleasure and joy in world-building. adrienne maree brown writes in Pleasure Activism, “Pleasure activists believe that by tapping into the potential goodness in each of us we can generate justice and liberation, growing a healing abundance where we have been socialized to believe only scarcity exists.” We responded by asking ourselves, what about writing brings us joy? How might it be an act of pleasure activism? What does pleasure mean to us, and how might pleasure exist in our world at the infinitesimal, everyday and grand scales?
In session two, we centered on busting the lone-hero narrative, inspired by oral tradition and lineages. Salesses quotes Thomas King’s The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative: “To tell a story is always to retell it, and that no story has behind it an individual.” He also quotes Audre Lorde: “There are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt, of examining what our ideas really mean.” And Gish Jen, who analogizes memoir as a Chinese teapot, “prized for how many teas have already been made in it.” When we are open to different models of story design beyond the hero’s journey, how might we write about the “we” instead of the “I”?
In session three, we sought to examine and reimagine the language that is familiar to us. Scratching the surface of language as a system of communicating, we touched on a brief history of constructed language and its use in fiction, as well as the ways in which the lack of exact equivalency between languages (note: not a lack in language proficiency) might change an author’s voice. Which words are familiar to us, what do they mean, and what are their histories? Can we imagine alternative histories and definitions for them? In doing so, how might this change our relationship with those words?
In session four, we practiced writing in sensory detail as a way to materialize our world-building. Our most technique-heavy session, we chose prompts that would ground our stories and settings in what we wanted to see, hear, taste, smell, and touch. Where world-building can often begin and get stuck in abstraction, this offers an alternative way to imagine an experience of the worlds we're building.
In session five, we discussed interpersonal relationships and where interpersonal power overlaps with political power. In The Interpersonal is Political: Lessons from Indigenous Solidarity Organizing, Annelies Cooper writes about a seemingly insignificant moment of frustration when purchasing a pickaxe that revealed larger control over the finances in their delegation of union activists to support indigenous land defenders. “All material resources for our delegation were in settler control. I came to realize how insufficient and uncomfortable this structure was and began to think about transformative relationships in solidarity work. The moment exemplified how systemic power imbalances across settler-Indigenous difference can be mirrored back to us through our relationships.” What relationships are we writing about, and how might they reflect systemic power imbalances? Through changing these relationships, can we change reality?
In session six, our final one, we pondered the role of conflict in revolutionary action. As a starting point, we drew from Prentis Hemphill’s words: “What if we could see ourselves less as innocent, but as harmed and harming, more or less honest, more or less able to be conscious when triggered, more or less manipulative, more or less willing to take responsibility for our own change, more or less caught in patterns. Would we be better able to create and respect boundaries between each other?” What about conflict invites transformation? Where might this be valuable in our storytelling?
Haymarket’s panel discussion “Art in the After-Culture: Capitalist Crisis & Cultural Strategy” identified, among other things, a tension between politicizing art and repackaging political movements into the cultural space. While we want to be mindful that we aren’t mythologizing ourselves as Artists with Solutions or framing art as consequential only when there’s a direct outcome, we do see ourselves as people using and practicing artistic modes of being to transform ourselves and our communities. This is fundamental to any discussions about solutions and might move us away from considering capitalism as a problematic system that merely needs to be fixed.
During an author discussion held in partnership with Bol Coop at Creative Grounds in the summer of 2023, a theme emerged among most of us—writers and readers—who felt the tension between writing and acting. As much as we value storytelling, in the face of mounting political struggle, how much is it worth? If imagining is only the first step, what more radical action should we be taking?
As After The Storm continues to facilitate spaces for anticapitalist writing, we view our words as a tool we can use to move beyond the stories we tell, into ideas and action. It is political education that reminds us of our agency by challenging our sense of responsibility. It is collective reimagination that defies conventional notions of authorship, and it is narrative work that we, as a community, value in ideology because it informs, and is informed by, our action.
Join me and others in collaboration through After The Storm—we want you to shape our “curriculum” and workshops, participate as readers and political activists and be in dialogue with writers, readers and organizers. Email afterthestormmag@gmail.com to reach us or amandaliawhs@gmail.com to reach me.
