Help Me Build This House

This month you’ll notice a few changes to my blog and newsletter. Throughout my sixteen years in business, I’ve largely kept politics separate. I have never explicitly named Presidential candidates in my blog, newsletters, or public-facing messaging, nor have I asked others to join me in standing up for the rights of artists and cultural organizations when they come under attack.

That is no longer going to be the case.

What’s not changing: This will always be a place you can receive useful, brief writing-life support. You will always find resources pertinent to your lives as creatives. And you’ll continue to receive little updates about my family, writing, and teaching.

Now, you’re also going to see calls to action, opportunities for crowd-sourcing, and hopefully a few celebration spotlights featuring efforts put forth by others who are also taking a stand to protect our rights against authoritarian rule.

There is so much at risk for so many communities right now. But this is America. We have a history of resistance and risk-taking, and our most successful movements have always been multivoiced. When I ask for your support through donations or your readership or your click-throughs, I am not asking you to simply be a consumer or a follower. I’m asking you to hold my hand. Everyday people are in need of creative homes and, together, we can build those homes and inhabit them with the most uplifting, forward-thinking art imaginable. Like a hammer, money is simply a tool. Please click here to help me build this house.

My first Call to Action: Activist Vu Le has been tracking HR 9495, which passed in the House and goes to the Senate very soon. As Le summarizes, this is “a bill that would allow the Trump administration to declare any nonprofit it doesn’t like a ‘terrorist-supporting organization’ and remove its tax status, without any due process. It gets even scarier with the possibility of the Trump administration then seizing the assets of those organizations.” In other words, if a nonprofit organizes protests, makes financial moves, or takes any other actions that don’t align with the incoming administration’s agenda, with a few swift moves, that organization could be silenced and financially depleted. That includes WRITEABILTY, but one must also wonder: What if the Sierra Club protests drilling for oil in contested spaces? What if Americans United doubles down on their lawsuits defending the separation of church and state? Will these nonprofits be divested of their funds, to say nothing of the cultural, personal, and physical assets they protect? Please take action today. This article offers five things you can do. Click here to help!

Thank you, as always, for reading and caring. As my newsletter and blog starts to shift in the New Year, I hope you’ll comment below and let me know what resonates with you (do you like calls to action?) or what you’d like to see more of. Meantime, a very loving and warm Solstice and New Year to you, as we head into these final days of darkness.

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