You are here and so is my book.
SUMMARY
I write summaries for people who have to carefully marshal their effort or attention.
- My book is out; set up a reading! Do your own counseling booth! Leave me a review?
- Some events that are coming up, mainly in New England right now
- If you get the book and use it, I would like you to tell me (and each other) how!
Lessons From the Climate Anxiety Counseling Booth is fully out today. You can buy it, or ask a library near you to buy it. Both, even!
Let me know if you want me to come read with you or near you, or if you want a hand adapting the book’s exercise for purposes of your own.
If you’re interested in setting up your own version of a Climate Anxiety Counseling booth, as some others have done, I’m going to put a how-to on my website soon, and I can also help you plan your version.
If you like it or find it useful, will you review it on Goodreads and/or Amazon so that other people can know what it’s good for? (You don’t have to buy it from Amazon, but I know people do look there to see whether they should buy something.)
Some upcoming events:
4/14, 5:30pm, at Riffraff (60 Valley St, Suite 107A, Providence, RI). Scroll down for the listing. I’ll be in conversation with Monica Huertas of the People’s Port Authority.
4/16, 7pm, at Broadside Books (247 Main St, Northampton, MA), I’ll read from the book and we can do a couple of the exercises together if you’re willing.
4/23, 4:30pm, at the Lincoln Field building (180 Thayer Street, room 120, Providence, RI): Macarena Gomez-Barris of Brown, Lotus Rodriguez of Movement Education Outdoors, and Jesus Hernandez of the Providence Racial and Environmental Justice Committee will talk with each other and me about land, grief, haunting, and healing.
THERE WILL BE MORE EVENTS SOON—again, let me know if you’ve got an idea for one!
How I’m feeling about it:
Good? Weird?
In my note at the end about how the book came together, I include something that Blia Moua, a farmer in Providence, said when we were looking over the chapter where he appears: that as I share this book with others, I will learn more about what else is needed and what I can offer to others, and improve upon what’s in the book itself. That is my intention, and I hope you will help me by telling me:
What felt or sounded right, or worked well
What didn’t work the way that I said it would, or that you hoped it would
How you changed what’s in it to be useful to you
What you wish it held
Different ways you talked about it or did things from it with different people
I actually think it would be funny to do this on the Goodreads page, so that people can see how each other are using the book instead of it all getting filtered through me. But do as you will!
Lessons From the Climate Anxiety Counseling Booth is a book about how: it’s right there in the subtitle, How to Live With Care and Purpose in an Endangered World. I want to know how you are using it, what you’re bringing to it beyond what I put there, what you’re making with it that’s true to where you are and who you’re with and who you are among them. Things I couldn’t imagine without you. Things you couldn’t imagine without each other.
QUESTION:
What do you hope this book will address, offer or raise?
PRACTICE:
Write, type or record your answer to that question. Put it in a place where you will see it regularly—tape it up?—or do something that will bring it to your attention each day. Notice your reactions when you visit it on purpose or stumble upon it by accident. Do this for about a week, and at the end of the week, tell someone you know what you want to have offered to you: what insight, what provocation, what direction. You could also tell me: write to me at schapira.kate@gmail.com.
SHORT READING: Guerin Asante, “in the shadow of bodies crossing each other’s transits (two eclipses)”
LONG READING: Well...
I wrote a book, LESSONS FROM THE CLIMATE ANXIETY COUNSELING BOOTH: HOW TO LIVE WITH CARE AND PURPOSE IN AN ENDANGERED WORLD (Hachette Go, 2024). This newsletter holds the ways that what's in it has branched out: new reflections, events and workshops, unresolved questions, further reading, ways to connect and act. I'm glad to be here on earth with you.