Feelers out for a Livable Future

Back in December, I wrote about how little I had read that seriously imagined a livable future:

I am very excited to say, I have some updates on that front. First of all, I started reading a book called Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune 2052-2072. It is a collection of imagined interviews with people living in a cooperative, slightly futuristic post-capitalist New York City. So far, it’s slightly dry, like the genre it is enacting, but I’m excited to see what it holds. Because it’s written like an oral history, rather than like a story that is unfolding, it’s really tricking my brain into feeling like the future it describes will happen. Plane travel will end in the 2040’s! The U.S. will implode, like all nation states! We’ll all be eating in communal neighborhood canteens and saying things like “fec and spittle”!

I’m interested in to see the rest of their version of the future, and I’m also interested in how powerful the act of writing this future feels as I read it. How I can feel it working in my imagination. As adrienne maree brown writes in Pleasure Activism, “the realm of the imagination is also where culture begins — we imagine things that in turn shape our real life desires and practices. Where did capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy come from? Some imagining of scarcity and power that isn’t true.” brown, who is talking about fantasy and desire when she writes this, goes on to nudge us to be conscious about where we spend our imaginations, what we create with them. And I think, turning the lens back to the future, that yes we can get off on stories of dystopia. Yes we can spiral on visions of fascist bleakness. But we’d be better off pitching our imaginations towards where we really want to go. Not delusionally or ignorantly, but intentionally, and with great delight. So I look forward to finishing this book, and thinking about where my imagination overlaps and diverges.

Second, last week I was in LA for the AWP writing conference. LA is a city I’d never visited on my own terms, and never as an adult, and this time I saw very little of it except the hotel/convention/wasteland district, which is never the best representation of the city. But I did see some things: palm trees in front of building-sized video ads next to half-finished-but-not-under-construction high rises with graffiti on every level and a taco truck below. Sidewalks full of small dogs and large dog poop. Bougainvilleas and bright blooming trees. A stumbling man with vomit in his beard. Robot food delivery carts weaving around people sleeping on sidewalks. Empty panopticon cars driving themselves like restless hunters through crosswalks as proportionally wide as the wide, wide roads. Motorcycle gangs and moped gangs and gangs of cop cars, all loud. A tiki bar speakeasy. The decayed decadence of last century’s glory. A farmer at a street market who told me about having so many kumquats he juices them. Piles of local avocados. A hand drawn sign of a chiseled man advertising “Brotox.” (This was not a joke.) A cat on a leash, yowling. Boxes in secular hallways where people could write other people blessings.The smell of piss on the streets. Sunshine.

I read my fiction in a white-molded room full of windows and light. I heard some of my favorite poets read. I met a lot of cabbies. I listened with my eyes closed while J. told me his deep thoughts about my novel and his childhood at 1:30 in the morning. I mused on contemporary art at The Broad, over and over seeing it as a critique of everything that still needs critique today. I ate tacos at a poetry reading and crunched loud chips between poems. I wandered the book fair in a fluorescent daze and the grocery store in a midnight one. My dear friends and their dear friends swirled together in sterile hotel bars and beautiful ones and we were our own aliveness.

It’s hard to sum up AWP. It can be so many things. But one of the things, and the reason I’m talking about it at all, is that it is a place I stumble into conversations that change how I think. Like how this time I found myself having coffee with a group of writers who are working collaboratively to write things set in a near future they’ve imagined based on climate predictions, with some fantastical elements as well. They were from Haiti, Puerto Rico/New Jersey, New Orleans, and Nigeria/Connecticut, and they spoke about decolonizing the imagination, of writing a livable future, and of the pleasures of seeing characters they made up appear — and deepen — in other people’s stories. They were lit up and open to possibility, and so kind and inclusive: of me, of the man sitting alone at the next table.

I told them I write a lot about utopian experiments, and the man from Puerto Rico/New Jersey, said (and I paraphrase), “So often, someone’s utopia depends on someone else’s dystopia. It’s a utopia for billionaires right now.”

I’ve been turning this thought like a pebble in my mind. And I’m also surging with excitement that this group of people are writing and imagining, and I hope I someday get to read what they write.

Walking to the hotel bar, full of poetry and tacos, C. and I stopped to talk to a delivery robot. It did not reply.