Sunday afternoon newsletter
Conversations, #8
Hi friends and strangers,
Here's one of the final installments of my Conversations Series. Thanks for reading these. I'm starting a new thing here soon. Keep an eye out. Meantime I hope you enjoy this talk with author and friend Kevin Tucker.
About this series: The Conversations Series is what it sounds like—transcribed conversations with people I like. Not interviews. Not journalism. Just a nice, in-depth talk about whatever's going on in our lives. Usually about our work. (But it’s definitely not limited to that.) These come out Sunday afternoons because Sunday feels like a good time to read a long talk between two friends.
Other things-
-The hardcover edition of my book Float Me Away, Floodwaters is out now. Get one here.
-Lots of new merch here. Mostly shirts.
-I'm doing two book readings in Kansas City, MO and Lawrence, Kansas on Wednesday, April 2nd. One in the morning, one at night. You should come on out if you want. Details here.
-The 6th printing of my book After Tonight, Everything Will Be Different and the 15th printing of The DIY Guide to Fighting the Big Sad are back from the printer. Get them here.
-June book tour dates coming soon...
-My writers record label has released some new stuff. Very proud to have put out the new Jessie Lynn McMains poetry EP. The label has been very lefty-political lately. Make sure to check out the Danielle Freiman tape and after america by Mischa Pearlman as well.
-Have I recommended this Rios de la Luz book to you? Available at Bread & Roses Press.
-Erik Tinsley wrote up some interview questions and so far my label's website has published answers from Zenaida Smith, Rin Hart, and Lora Mathis. More to come. Read those here.
That's it. Read the thing.
-AG
CONVERSATIONS, #8, KEVIN TUCKER + ADAM GNADE
Kevin Tucker writes about the world-destroying impact of civilization—and writes about it well. I consider Kevin a good friend, an excellent writer, and an important voice for these hard times we’re in. If what you read here resonates with you (I hope it will), check out Kevin’s Black and Green Press and get a book or two at Bread & Roses Press.
AG: Hey Kevin. Where are you and what are you up to at the moment?
KT: Always good to hear from you, Adam. The complexities of life have me pretty nailed down outside of Lancaster, PA right now. Occupied Susquehannock and Lenne Lenape lands.
At the moment, I’m working entirely too much and dealing with a mix of fallout from total personal heartbreak and struggle with the disgust and wretched despair of the world at large. Parenting through it all, navigating that even in the collapse of civilization, I still have to pay for rent and bills.
But I think I’m on the better side of it to be writing again. I’m at work on a couple books at the moment.
AG: That's a lot all at once which seems like the current theme of human existence—a lot all at once. I'm sorry you're getting hit by all that. How do things feel in Lancaster post-election? Here in Kansas it's like nothing has changed—except among my close friends who are of course suffering under the weight of it all.
KT: I appreciate that. It’s honestly a bit hard for me to speak for the general take in Lancaster. I’m at work so much and I’m back of house in a restaurant. So we’re all very immersed in our own world, and have nothing to do even with the customers. The crew is really good though, a few anarchists and even more who are certainly sympathetic. We’re in an industry that leans towards outcasts, so the view is generally dismal, which is to say it’s more accepting of reality. And there’s no question, the reality is bleak. It was bleak without the election, that’s for sure, but certainly is bleaker with it. There are some Guatemalans who I work closely with. They’ve expressed more concern about the increasing racism that they’re seeing. That’s a brutal reality, and I’m not the only one to make it clear that we have their backs. But still, it’s not just bleak, there is sincere danger here. At the same time, this town, in general, is so goddamn liberal. The county is most definitely not. We have a ton of Amish, who are certainly extremely conservative, but there is a massive Christian nationalist undercurrent too. It’s not good. And the liberals are definitely not going to be the ones to really confront that. Instead, it’s got an air of what I call freshman level politicking. You see liberals who are more the type to hold it against Palestinians and their supporters that Harris lost. Vile, really. Nothing goes deep enough. And the more you look at it, the worse it gets. I’ve seen a rash of trans-kids committing suicide. The democratic mayoral candidate lost their trans-kid to an overdose, which is horrible. But he used that as a talking point in his campaign: my kid wanted this! His kid was an anarchist! They hated him and his politics. So it’s not just naïveté, it’s insidious. But every part of this society perpetuates it.
AG: The Palestine disconnect has been such a mindfuck. It's made me feel completely derailed seeing people you'd think would see this for what it is—a genocide—calling it a "war" or "deserved" or referring to Palestinians as terrorists. Or just not caring at all. I mean it makes sense when you acknowledge how racist our country is, but it was still a surprise. I'm trying to write about it. I mean in my own way. In my books. It's all I really know how to do. What are you writing at the moment? I know Jessie said you're at work on a new book.
KT: The book that's coming down the line quickly here is What is to be Undone. The title is a play on Lenin's bullshit, but it's also basically the exact opposite.
I don't write theory. I'd say that's a rule for me, but it's a personal kind of repulsion. I despise philosophy. There's so much going on in the world at all times that there's never a need to discuss ideas abstracted from reality and then turned into rules for living. Lenin is an absolute case in point. Selling an ideology and then handing in the blueprints for its authoritarian roll out.
In a tongue-in-cheek way, I say this book is as close to writing theory as I'll ever come, but it still isn't that. I have a voice in how I write and there's a degree of breaking the fourth wall that I'm never shy of doing, but the tack here is like a bit more direct. It's almost more of my editorial voice, though I'm speaking from the place of being overly analytical about it, my voice is my voice. All the writing comes from the same place and same compulsion.
The book is, at its core, about flipping the narratives of civilization and refusing to see its histories and myths about it being in control. By writing its own history, civilization is able to make a buckshot of opportunistic brutality look like a linear story where everything was done by heroics of power enacting the inevitable. By seeing it as it actually is, all those supposed strengths belie the endless weaknesses of power.
Effectively speaking, if you're not trying to redirect the monster through its own means, you'll see that everything it upholds as strength is actually its weaknesses. How do we divest ourselves from the fate we've been sold? How do we divorce ourselves from the war machine and the world destroying realities of industrialism?
The land is a relationship, and the core of being alive is understanding our context. Not defining ourselves in some perceived absence of it. When you start to see what it means to awaken those ties to the land and all its communities, then you get a longer and deeper view of the horrors civilization has unleashed and the beauty of a world that refuses to succumb to it. I want to convey that understanding, which is hard to do. By all measures, it's like speaking a completely different language.
The point of all my work is to try and see past all of that. This book is just a little bit more direct in that regard. We don't have time left to dance around it.
AG: I'm ready for this book and I know a lot of people are as well. If someone wanted a reading list that would share shelf space with your books, or even just the new book in particular, what would that look like?
KT: Great question, and the core piece of this book is called "the Ecology of Colonialism," which is about pulling on the threads of each part of civilization until you start to see this tapestry that colonialism creates. All these points of violent collisions that dip back through the violence of all these pieces and parts. How to see the ways that they interconnect and reverberate repeatedly.
That's something I'm always wanting to show: how to tell stories that lean into the complexity of civilization's realities rather than just try to craft some simple story about it all. It's like developing pattern recognition instead of just giving little talk points. So right now there's a million directions my mind goes in, but I'll just try to trim it down to a handful.
Just over a year ago, the world lost a great warrior and I lost a true friend, the Diné writer, musician, poet, artist and so much more, Klee Benally. His book No Spiritual Surrender came out not long before his death and I cannot recommend a book more strongly. And adding to the relatively recent books, we finally got that new novel of ecological resistance from Madeline ffitch, Stay and Fight. Abbey was long overdue for retirement. Pick that one up.
Fredy Perlman's Against His-Story, Against Leviathan is probably my favorite book of all time, and I think his ability to see the complexities of civilization and to speak of it outside its own narratives is crucial. John Trudell, in any format or capacity, carried the same gift. My long time friend and regular co-conspirator John Zerzan has been indisputably pushing these questions for decades.
This current book owes a lot to two very different authors, but in monumental ways; Sven Lindqvist and Michel-Rolph Trouillot. Lindqvist's "Exterminate All the Brutes" and Terra Nullius are both just masterpiece-level demolition of civilization's reality. Trouillot's Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History is probably one of the single most profoundly engaging books I’ve dealt with on this long path. Eric Wolf’s Europe and the People Without History deserves a mention too.
Just in terms of being able to see the world in different ways, I’ve also been on a kick recently of reading and/or re-reading Kurt Vonnegut, Ursula K Le Guin, Philip K Dick, and James Baldwin.
AG: What books were you reading when you first began to think of and pick apart the realities of civilization, and where were you in your life? I’m always interested in those moments when the light comes on for the first time. Most of us who write have that happen and it can be some of the most powerful and profound shit ever. I mean, it can also be embarrassing. Some of the books I read at a young age that made me want to do what I’m doing are… really embarrassing to admit. But it doesn’t take away from the power of the meeting between the reader and the book. Or the listener and the record. Watcher of the film. Or maybe it’s a person who kicks us off or an experience or a combination of constituent elements or influences.
KT: In terms of writing in general, I was a big reader from a young age. I definitely escaped in books. Vonnegut was probably the one who blew it open for me. I've been revisiting his work lately and it's a trip to see how much influence he had on me. Slaughterhouse Five is definitely the book. I held it in such a high regard that I was afraid to revisit it almost, but it's impeccable. It's still just absolutely amazing, and the best book ever written about the horrors of the civilized world.
I read it at a young enough age that the boundless realities he was capable of envisioning, becoming unstuck in time, because kind of a blueprint for me. I have Dissociative Identity Disorder, and an extremely large system. It's an extremely severe kind of trauma response, but the patterning of my system itself kind of falls back on that book too.
So the compulsion to write has been there for a long time, and I think it's always been a way for me to process questions stemming from my own experiences. It's easier to extrapolate that into the world, but it's never disconnected.
I had systemic abuse rip me apart. The framework for it was built into Zionism, so the madness stems directly from this colonial brutality. The logic of it, however, is absolutely convoluted. It takes these massive leaps in narrative, and then pushes that one step further in order to groom children into feeling an impossible debt to our elder Zionists.
We've seen this with the Catholic church, we just haven't confronted it within Judaism because Zionism is such an effective cloak and dagger. We're seeing that now just way too clearly. As a kid, the first Intifada was being met with incredible propaganda. There was this chasm between talking about fighting Nazis and then the reality of genocide against Palestinians was profound. Around the start of the first Gulf War, the cracks gave way for me. I needed to understand how much of it all was just lies and domination.
I found Emma Goldman and CRASS at the same time. Both massively profound. But it was also just the beginning.
That search to understand the root of power kept growing, and I was just building off anything I could find. Ecofeminism, Indigenous resistance movements, Black anarchists, earth and animal liberation; each piece was pulling at the fabric. It was my now long time friend John Zerzan who was the first person I encountered between the Reclaim the Streets and N30 anti-WTO protests in 1999, that really pulled all the threads together. Here was the thing, civilization itself, directly under target. I ended up reading Elements of Refusal, Future Primitive, and his edited collection, Against Civilization, in like a week. We became friends, I'd end up co-editing the second edition of Against Civilization six years later.
That first collision was in 1999. I had already been an anarchist for six years, and I was 19. The change in the world was so palpable, and that anti-globalization movement was strong as hell. The ELF had come onto the scene. I came up in the punk scene, and the anarchist world was inextricable from it. Food Not Bombs was a huge part of my life. We were protesting outside Shell stations every other weekend with Ogoni people who had barely escaped paramilitaries. I first met Klee because his punk band was on tour with other members of his family who were protesting Peabody Coal and their occupation/desecration of sacred lands.
I'm sure there are embarrassing parts to it all, but that initial spark was so intrinsic to me that by the time all of the pieces are coming together, the arrow pointing at civilization itself, I was just so entrenched already.
I started the Coalition Against Civilization in 1999. Black and Green Press started as Black and Green Network in 2000.
At that time, the global green anarchist/anti-civ milieu was just this massive thing. I could write something and within months it's translated into a handful of languages and redistributed throughout the world. My first book came out in Serbia, I think. I never actually saw it, but I just heard about it. Things moved quickly then, but we all still had these real world networks and publications to disperse new information through. It was such a different time. There really hasn't been a moment between now and then where I wished those networks were still in place.
The Green Scare was global though. And so many groups were lost to it. The repression really did cycle back and take out the means of more meaningful conversation and argument. We need those so badly now...
Back to 1999, Fredy Perlman was another huge influence. Paul Shepard as well. John Trudell, a former AIM activist, poet and musician, has books, but his spoken word just meant so much to me. That was really formative. Chellis Glendinning's My Name is Chellis, and I'm in Recovery from Western Civilization and Off the Map, both absolute powerhouse books.
I put Susan Griffin's Woman and Nature really high on that list too. It's such a powerful book, but the way her writing moves between essay, poetry, and prose gave me that feeling that I'd gotten from reading Vonnegut. That, wait, you can do it like this? feeling emerges. It's liberating really, but it's a really clear influence on my writing. You can usually look at a page and see my writing style. That's no accident. I heard once that the average reader takes away about 5-15% of a book, tops. So who do I look to? Those books that seemed to embrace that and have the author say, I'm going to guide the reader towards the takeaway I want to impart, but I'm going to anchor as many of these points as possible.
The compulsion is to write. The need is to be heard. It's not really a one foot in front of the other process, if you want your reader to really engage the content. I've read a lot of powerful voices, and I like to pay it forward in all regards. The list of foundational books could go on forever.
AG: Where do you write? What is your workspace like?
KT: I'm a creature of habit. I've got a desk that is some degree of organized chaos. Right now it's probably got 100-150 books piled on it, but, again, in a way that makes some sense to my brain for what I'm writing.
I write non-fiction, but the more narrative non-fiction elements I can incorporate, the better. So I do everything I can to facilitate that. I'm an extensive note taker. And I'll try to do the vast majority of the research and nail down the avenues of attack ahead of time. That looks like all these pages of references arranged in a rough order, so that when I'm in writing mode, it's pretty much all there. Then there's going to be a handful of pages with writing flow charts and notes around too. I take writing very seriously and I'm writing about pretty horrible things, so I don't want to be cheap in the way I present that. It's a craft, so the cleaner it may look in the end, the better the job you've done of front loading the chaos so that the reader isn't trudging through it. No one wants to read that.
The piece I'm working on right now for What is to be Undone is one of these things that I consider writing history sideways. Cull is like that, Gospel of Empire, the book I've been working on for a decade now is like that, some of the stuff in my book, Gathered Remains, namely the titular essay, are too. But it's trying to show the circular nature of the world via a format that's best suited to adherence to linear time. I think it can be really effective, but it's pretty goddamn messy in the making.
Hence the number of books I have on my desk, and the pile of them stacked open. Organized chaos.
AG: Was good talking to you, Kevin. Maybe we end with this: What are five things every adult should do right now to resist civilization?
KT: There's a genuine question about how direct I can legally be about this, so I don't know, read between the lines. Dream bigger.
1. Be honest with each other.
Not with bosses, not with cops, but real people. We can't afford bullshit and small talk anymore. If someone asks how you're doing, tell them how you're actually doing. Maybe it'll be an annoyance, but maybe it'll be the conversation that needs having.
2. Learn to listen to the Earth.
Pay attention to bird language. Look for signs of animal uses. Feel the spirit of the land. Feel it mourning and learn what it's in mourning about. See the beauty in life, and feel the rage that lies in the chasm between what could be and what is. Let that love and rage engulf you.
3. Be honest with yourself.
That can mean asking yourself all the hard questions you would anyone else. It's okay to be wrong, just as long as you adjust accordingly. But a big question to ask yourself has to do with the way that civilization has removed community and built up the individual. Are you struggling because there's something wrong with you, or because the state of the world, the conditions of life in this agony, and the expectations of a life dictated by economists and machines is absolutely beyond the realm of human expectations? You can't walk yourself out of this problem alone, and if you're waiting for your life to be more "together" so you can make changes, then you're probably not being honest enough about what's really holding you back. Allow yourself to feel your feelings.
4. Practice mutual aid and be prepared for the bottom to drop out.
In this world, that can mean many, many things. From the realities of deportations, detentions, or rapid shifts in both the political, social or ecological climate. We're at the end of Empire. There is no part of our life that is going to be separate from that. But knowing what is coming or what may be already underway, does not protect you from the realities of it. These are hard times. Being honest is being brave, think about it that way. Hubris is for civilization and its logical conclusions. No one is going to save us, but us.
5. Stand your ground.
This all gets by because there are a hundred things a day that we see and say nothing about. Don't regret not injecting yourself into a volatile situation. Don't regret seeing someone in misery and not reaching out. A hard conversation is always better than a harder reality. There will increasingly be moments when the line is drawn and the need to cross it will become clearer. For any of us, the breaking point will come at different places and at different times. But the mechanisms of civilization are everywhere. Confrontations don't always mean staring down the barrel of a gun; the face and fist of State violence is fed by a long stream of supply and energy, all filled with their own vulnerabilities.
Thanks, Adam, for the chat and for all your books!
Read previous installments of the Conversations Series