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What I Did On My East Coast Work-cation

Posted on October 17th, 2009 in About AK, AK Allies

First, a disclaimer: I meant to write up a post about my recent trip out east as soon as I got back, but I got swept up in the hustle and bustle of fall events and catalog production and all such distracting things as soon as I set foot back in the warehouse. So I’m just now getting around to writing about things that happened a couple weeks ago—and it’s 3:00am and I’m writing this while contemplating passing out on AK’s old, dirty couch (but really…who knows where that thing’s been?). So this is all just by way of saying, please forgive me if I’m accidentally leaving anything out!

Now then. One great thing about working at AK Press (among many great things, of course) is that we give ourselves pretty generous vacation allowances. But the flip side is that we’re so into our work that it’s kind of hard to take a straight-up vacation. Whenever I’m in another place, I always find myself wanting to check out the local anarchist haunts, squeeze in a store visit, or meet up with an author. Hence the “work-cation.” It’s the perfect solution!

This time, I got to check out the Baltimore Book Festival, which I’ve been hearing about for years. It’s a huge, outdoor public book festival that’s held every year; for the past couple of years our comrades at Red Emma’s have organized a Radical Bookfair Pavilion to house like-minded projects within the Festival. So we got to table right between the Red Emma’s folks (who had some killer vegan baked goods) and our comrades from the Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative (Erik Ruin, co-editor of Realizing the Impossible, was staffing the table with his awesome new Liberation Banner on display). Also close by were our friends from Microcosm, Teaching for Change, PM Press, Wooden Shoe Books, and a few more of the usual (but welcome) suspects. The Radical Bookfair Pavilion even had its own speakers’ tent, which I was mostly too busy behind the table to step into. But I did get to check out an entertaining spiel on anarchist fiction writers by Margaret Killjoy, the author of the brand-new AK book Mythmakers & Lawbreakers.

What an excellent bookfair, and don’t even get me started about all the other great work anarchists and other radical types are doing in Baltimore these days. I was so impressed with the energy and commitment there—pulling off at least a big chunk of a huge public bookfair all while running a bookstore/café, an event space, and now a free school! Definitely check out these places next time you are out east.

After a little sleep and a little catch-up work from AK Baltimore, it was time to be on my way. I stopped through Pittsburgh, where I found not only my adorable nephew and some delicious vegan pizza and wings (in that order), but also the new anarchist t-shirt and art shop, Rebellious Nature. They had some great designs for sale and even had a few AK books and catalogs on their shelf. That always makes me happy.

Then on to Philadelphia for the “Moving Forward” event at Wooden Shoe. They’re in the process of moving their whole store, so for the event they had both their old and new spaces open and were simultaneously running panels and workshops in both spaces. I saw a talk in the new space by some folks from the Coalition to Save the Libraries, who had recently had some success in mobilizing communities to fight library branch closures, and then headed over to the old space just a few blocks away to hear from some members of the Defenestrator newspaper collective. And then, after a really strong cup of coffee, I went back to the new space to speak on a panel about “Sustaining Radical Spaces In the Capitalist Crisis” along with folks from the Wooden Shoe, Red Emma’s, the A-Space, and the hopefully-soon-to-exist DC Space. It’s always encouraging to see old projects thriving and new ones springing up even in difficult times. On the panel we tried to get at the importance of building strong relationships between similar projects, whether it be learning from each other’s organizational models and sharing whatever resources we have, or the more concrete stuff like AK helping to get new spaces off the ground and stocked with books. However it happens, these connections between projects are what will hopefully get us all through the worst of times. Which I guess is, in a nutshell, why I spent my vacation this way!

Once the Wooden Shoe had moved sufficiently forward, it was almost time to head back to the bay—but not before checking out a show by the talented Joshua Marcus. Does it seem like I’m dropping a lot of names here? Like I’ve run out of things to say and I’m now just looking for excuses to link to things on our website? Well, maybe it’s true, but only because we’ve got so much great stuff!

It’s obviously time to pass out on the dirty couch. Next stop: Seattle!