Books Won't Save Us
Writing and Publishing When the Future is Uncertain (At Best)
I’m from a generation that considers a book to be the preservation of something of great value, for future generations to hold and treasure. It’s been a difficult paradigm shift for me to realize that I’ve fulfilled my dream of becoming a published author at a time when the creation of a book is no longer the mark of exclusivity and high quality for something worth preserving, but is more often the signal of something or someone popular at a particular, brief moment. To be clear, I’m not nostalgic for a time when authors were nearly all rich cis white men defining what European-descended folks in the “Western world” consider to be “canon.” I’m still mad that Their Eyes Were Watching God wasn’t required reading in high school. The greater accessibility of publishing is a great thing, and at the same time, the shift toward focusing on what’s “of the moment” instead of what’s worth preserving for generations to come helps co-create the sense that future generations are too precarious to consider, so all that matters is right now. The music industry has also contributed to this sense of immediacy over longevity, with the shift toward singles over albums, and to streaming at the expense of record sales. Investing in a musician or an author for a long-term career, trusting that they are talented enough to sustain quality work, isn’t a priority any more.
I don’t have social media influencer status and I’m not “popular” by anyone’s measure, so it feels like such an anomaly that I even get to be published at all in this day and age. At the same time that this feels like the luckiest chance of a lifetime to secure a long-term writing career, I’m thinking about how the life of our planet itself is being shortened every day that bombs are dropped on Gaza, contributing more to intensifying climate change than any individual or corporation ever has. With the desperate need for action to fight the current state of fascism in the United States, it’s hard not to question the value of books, or of anything that is slow, solitary, intellectual work, like reading and writing. It’s hard to even believe there is a future where books will be treasured at all.
I feel caught between wanting to fight the armchair over-intellectualizing of an urgent need for social change, and wanting to fight the anti-intellectualism that leads to an ignorance that makes people easy to manipulate. If more people had known the history and ongoing reality of Palestinians before October 7, there wouldn’t have been as much time wasted on “both sides” arguments or misplaced faith in ceasefire resolutions and UN proceedings. Knowledge is necessary but not sufficient for power. As I say in my book, “The truth alone will not set us free; we have to act on it.” But most people don’t get the knowledge that persuades them to act from books any more. The kind of information that lights a fire under someone to take action is of-the-moment and contextual; it’s breaking news, or a meme that hits just right. A publishing process that takes a year or longer means that books are often several steps behind by the time they’re released.
Strangely, though, I don’t feel that my book is outdated at all. In some ways I did write it to be “of the moment” because I was motivated by my frustration with people going “back to brunch” after the Black Lives Matter uprising of 2020. Since then, I’ve seen the largest explosion of radical activism, including unprecedented direct action, demanding a stop to the genocide of Palestinians. The world is waking up in a lot of ways, but at the same time, I can’t help but notice there’s a significant layer of people who treat social movements as trends, and the struggle for Palestine hasn’t deepened their commitment to antiracism; on the contrary, I’ve seen people behave as if they don’t have to care about anti-Blackness any more now that the focus is Palestine. There’s a general cultural habit in the U.S., supported by the music, publishing, and news industries, to view everything through the lens of “right now,” out of context with anything that’s happened before. I’ve found it striking how names and concepts that I mention in my book keep popping up in the news this year, from Julian Assange to Harvey Weinstein to the laws that placed kings above the law itself, defining what we call sovereignty. It’s really reinforced for me how the ideas and historical facts carefully selected for my book all have perpetual and recurring relevance.
78 Acts of Liberation: Tarot to Transform Our World includes many tidbits of history, of the kind that you could learn about by hopping around Wikipedia, if you knew what you were looking for. But what’s different about my book as a “sampler” of radical historical moments is that it’s placed in context with a spiritual tool, one that is both ancient and very much “of this moment,” and one that works by calling up memories and associations of our past experiences in order to tell us something about our future, making explicit the nonlinear nature of time. My book is a guide to seeing something like ACT-UP’s activism around HIV/AIDS or the Indigenous Water Protectors fighting the Dakota Access Pipeline as experiences we can return to over and over again in order to glean lessons and be guided in the here and now, just as we do with our past relationships and childhood memories whenever we read Tarot cards. It’s training in a way of thinking that is contextual and historical rather than absorbing disconnected and easily forgotten info-bytes and hot takes taken out of the context of history in the urgency of the moment.
I don’t think there’s any book that will save the world, no matter how talented or truthful or popular or inspiring the author may be. I keep thinking about times in my life when I’ve looked to books to save me, and they could not. When I’ve been desperate for a savior, I’ve tried self-help books, astrology books, books on spirituality and radical politics, and even skills-based books, thinking that if I understood technology or finance or politics better, then I would be able to change my life. The problem wasn’t that I couldn’t find the right book, because when I think about it, there have been books that saved my life when I least expected it and when I wasn’t looking for them to do that. I learned boundaries that helped me to safely get away from someone set on hurting me by reading about protection magic in witchcraft, for example. My problem was with having a savior mentality, thinking a book could help me fix myself or something else once and for all, and then everything would automatically fall into place. The books that did save me, indirectly over time, were books that helped me know myself better, helped me understand my lifelong depression as a social issue instead of a personal flaw, helped me connect the dots between things that seemed unrelated, or helped me see other ways of living and being that I never could have understood on my own without knowing someone else’s experience, whether it was a fictional character or a real person.
The books that save lives are ones that open up a new world beyond a person’s limited, familiar reality. So, of course I question the value of publishing my own book. There is no possible way that my book can save my life, directly or indirectly, because it’s comprised of my own experiences and what I already know. That leaves me with the uncomfortable feeling that my book may do nothing for me, but could possibly be life-changing or even lifesaving to someone else. It’s a lesson I thought I learned from COVID, back when the CDC told the truth about how masking only protects others from you, but doesn’t protect you from others. Being the only masked person in a room of unmasked people where even one of them has COVID means you may get COVID (with all of its long-term consequences) even though you are doing the right thing and wearing protection (and that exact thing has happened to me). There is something so poignant about only being able to protect others from yourself, and not being able to protect yourself from others. It means we have to share responsibility for protecting each other, or we’ll all suffer.
There’s a part of me that resists so strongly the idea that I’m obligated to share my writing because of the difference it might make to someone else – it feels too self-important, too egotistical to place that much importance on my own work. But whether it’s wearing a mask or saying something that someone else needs to hear, it’s not about my individual worth or being a savior, because no single mask-wearer or protester or writer can save anybody; it’s only when we all do it together that we stand a chance.
I don’t place too much importance on my book because I wrote it – but I do think it’s important that radical voices are out there, that trans stories are heard. And I know that publishers are always going to pay attention to their bottom line, and go with what sells. I don’t want to see a future where books by Leftists and transgender people aren’t widely available because fascists are in power and everyone is just trying to survive by selling whatever makes them enough money to live. I feel in this moment how important it is to reward a publisher for taking a chance on a radical, trans person who doesn’t have a huge social media following. It’s about the cultural context we create together, not any particular individuals’ career. I don’t feel I could ever be someone who hypes myself up as someone you HAVE to know and support just because I’m awesome, but when I depersonalize it and consider the time we’re living in and how the dominos are falling, I see how urgent it is to support writers like me, and I have to include myself in that call for support.
The best way you can support me, and any authors you see who are in danger of having their voices silenced by the far rightward slide of people in power, is to pre-order our books.
The reason that pre-orders are so important is because early interest in the book determines whether the distributor will decide to put it in bookstores at all, whether it will get reviewed, and how online bookstore algorithms behave to make it visible. The way the publishing world works, the release date (for me, August 20) is really too late; the biggest way you can help is by securing as many pre-orders as possible by ordering and encouraging others to do the same. A single direct recommendation to someone who actually pre-orders is probably more valuable than a passive social media share, although ideally you might do both. All pre-orders are counted up and included in the first week of sales numbers once it's released, so that's the biggest number of sales there is likely to be for one week, and if it's lower than expected there isn't really a way to recover from that. The big New York Times bestsellers often get there because rich people organize bulk buys during the pre-order period, and obviously I can't do anything like that (nor would I want to), and I don't expect to have THAT level of visibility or success, but even if I can just meet the relatively moderate pre-order goal that the publisher has for my book, that would give me the best possibility of getting another book deal, and continuing to put my words out there where the people who need to hear them can find them.
It's a delicate balance, not to over-intellectualize our circumstances or escape into literature while still valuing books, writing and stories that are part of creating the cultural context for political realities, and political possibilities. We’re in this together, doing the best that we can, and any way that you can support what I’m doing is support that I am forever grateful for. Thank you.
You can pre-order 78 Acts of Liberation: Tarot to Transform Our World anywhere that you like to buy books: bookshop.org, amazon, Barnes & Noble, Target, your local shop, anywhere. If you have pre-ordered it, please feel free to forward this email to anyone you think might want to support me, too.