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Since my last email where I talked about being soft evicted, picking up work at the mall for the holidays, moving in temporarily with one of my best friends, and battling with IngramSpark so my book could come out, and getting but possibly not being able to use a DC Arts and Humanities Grant…
I’ve felt nothing but love.
Love from people, especially my Carolinans in and out of the states, and the Baltimorean’s who have been here to receive me.
But, now that I’ve released this boulder of a secret I’ve been holding onto for months, I woke up early on Saturday morning, as I tend to do when I can feel the corporate, neoliberal, capitalist world slow down by a hair, with a word to share.
I remembered that get so much strength from writing these public newsletters to the world. I got caught up in them always making money, but honestly, there’s a greater currency that these emails pay me in.
I think about how we pull from James Baldwin, Octavia Butler, Audre Lorde, Nikki Giovanni, Ursula K. Le Guin, and so many other authors and musicians and other artists who have gone on to the ancestor portal, but their words are just as loud, clear, and powerful, if not more so.
I want to make sure my words have that power too across generations, especially as I turn 40 in 14 days.
Plus, I adore that some of you are reading them in real time, with time to shift solutions.
Please do continue to pitch a few bucks over to me each month to help me pay my hosting costs and supplement what I don’t make at Lush. And I will be adding more sustainablily produced products at the KristPattern store, namely the It’s Time To Defy Gentrification collection!
And of course this power in my words and graphic and textile designing is how I decided to create The Defying Gentrification Playbook.
Even if it ends up on the banned bookshelf at a less rigid local library or my Lush store, someone will pick it up at just the right time.
It’s also why I am working on a paperback version that will be easy to share, purchase and donate. That version will also be updated with my thoughts on surviving soft eviction and extreme income loss, and how we can be more humane around this, especially as more college educated, middle class people, fall under similar oppressions, along with dealing with new grief and disability from COVID.
But if you order the hardcover version, and leave a review of it on your favorite review platform, you’ll still see how much people power is involved in defying gentrification right now, in this calendar year!
You will want to make the manifesto of “I can have faith, I can engage in cultivation and creativity and self-care, but I need community care, access, infrastructure, and convenience to defy gentrification” yours, especially if you’re a Black woman or gender expansive person, in the African diaspora.
I’m still honoring the paperback price for a signed hardcover on my site, but if you’re reading this version of this newsletter post, I’ve already sent out my first order f or signed copies. You should get them in the next two to four weeks, pending no other shipping delays.
And Bookshop is running its own sale and so are a lot of your favorite local bookshops throughout the holiday season. Even the big dogs can order my book by ISBN, so if you want to prove a point that a gentrification book can be sold by gentrifiers, have at it.
Finally, in a world where we think the solution to urbanist problems and affordability is to negate non-means tested vouchers and subsidies and demand more proof before we help people, unless they are developers and start-up bros, we need to get back to basics of helping people living in tents or barely making childcare, student loan and mortgage payments, by sharing our gifts and abundance.
And you can join me in celebrating the book launch on December 14 at Red Emma’s in Baltimore from 11-1 pm! We’ll be in the Free School space so drop by and say hello! You can order the book there and participate in the first of many workshops that will help you put the methods in the book into action.
Next time, I’ll be back to have another conversation about why I’ve chosen textile art as my primary tool besides writing to promote defying and destroying gentrification, and reflect on what working in the mall on Black Friday has taught me.
Until next time,
Kristen
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