Novitas Podcast

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Exploring stories that show us how to live outside the capitalist paradigm towards collective liberation. novitas.substack.com

Episodes

  1. 04/18/2025

    Breaking Up with Car Culture

    Our culture is pretty obsessed with cars—not just as machines, but as personal necessities for getting from point A to point B. But it hasn’t always been that way. For most of history, people got around just fine by walking, biking, or using public transit. It wasn’t until the 1970s, when urban sprawl really took off, that suburbs started cutting people off from city centres and made cars feel essential. Even just a decade ago, there was barely any focus on building infrastructure for people to walk or bike to work, school, or the grocery store. The thing is, cars are a huge burden—on the planet, on our health, and on our wallets. They pollute, they’re expensive to buy, fuel, and maintain, and they take up a lot of space. So it’s not surprising that many cities are starting to rethink things, with ideas like the “15-minute city” or “complete streets” encouraging more active and public ways of getting around. Despite the whole rite-of-passage vibe around getting your license at 16, Aviva Davis decided not to. Living in Toronto, most of what she needed was within walking distance, and the subway could take her pretty much anywhere else. Not everyone gets her choice, though. She even wrote a zine called Why I Won’t Drive a Car, and I invited her to share it in the second issue of Novitas Magazine. In her piece, Aviva explores how we shifted from walkable, transit-friendly cities to a culture built around cars—and how that shift has impacted our lives in ways we don’t always notice. In this episode of the Novitas podcast—the first of season 2!—we talk about how car culture affects the environment, our mental health, and how we see the world. We also share what it’s like to intentionally live without driving and how that choice reshapes everything from daily routines to big-picture perspectives. You can support this project and podcast by becoming a paid subscriber here on Substack. * $5/month or $30/year * $4/month or $24/year * $3/month or $18/year * $2/month or $12/year If you have a person or project who you think is doing really awesome work in their community, please recommend them by emailing me at kel@novitasmag.com. Get full access to novitas at novitas.substack.com/subscribe

    26 min
  2. The Magic of Making

    12/02/2024

    The Magic of Making

    Too often, we’re told that our individual actions are too small to make a difference in the face of global challenges like climate collapse and late-stage capitalism. While there's truth to this, I believe we are still called to individual action to participate in what Joanna Macy calls “the Great Turning”—a shift toward a more just and sustainable world. At first glance, the impact of individual actions may not seem significant. One person is unlikely to stop big oil from drilling, or to enact policies like universal basic income. On a global scale, it can feel as though our efforts barely register. Yet, the importance of individual actions cannot be underestimated. After all, a waterfall begins with a single drop. Then another. And a few more. The changes we make in our own lives first shift our mindset, and as that change ripples out, it can contribute to broader cultural or societal transformation. Many people I know began questioning colonialism and capitalism because they wanted to change how they were living in the world. They asked themselves: If this isn’t working, what will? And from that question emerges the search for new, more sustainable ways of being. This episode's guest, Anna Hewitt, embarked on her own journey with a similar question: What can I do to make a difference? In our conversation, Anna shares how she became a maker—a DIYer—and how this shift has transformed her life. Making is magic! It’s grounding, connecting, and often stands in direct opposition to the forces of capitalism that prioritize efficiency and profit over people. Making invites us to slow down, connect with raw materials, and create something new, whether by shaping, growing, or baking. If you’re keen to read more, you can find Anna on Instagram at @annaghewitt and Anna also has a substack you can subscribe to below: You can support this project and podcast by becoming a paid subscriber here on Substack. * $5/month or $30/year * $4/month or $24/year * $3/month or $18/year * $2/month or $12/year If you have a person or project who you think is doing really awesome work in their community, please recommend them by emailing me at kel@novitasmag.com. TRANSCRIPT (please excuse the typos) Intro: Welcome to Novitas, a podcast that explores stories and ideas outside the capitalist paradigm. My guest today is Anna Hewitt, a writer, mother and maker who shares her thoughts and stories online about, well, living life. Anna feels a bit like a kindred spirit, another human being out there in the world, learning and sharing how best to live life in a way that has intention and meaning without contributing to systems that we know to be harmful. Anna's story that she shared in the first issue of the Novitas magazine is about the magic of making, about using creativity as a tool to connect with the world and how DIY can help us act with intention. In this episode of the podcast, we talk about how this lifestyle doesn't always make sense within the parameters of capitalism, and why making space for creative practice in the everyday can actually be an act of resistance. I hope you'll enjoy the conversation. Kel: Hello, Anna. Thank you so much for joining me today to chat about your piece in the first issue of the Novatos magazine, which is sadly sold out now. But we're prepping for number two, so I'm excited for that one. I guess we could start a little bit. Do you want to talk a little bit about your piece and what kind of inspired you to write it or contribute that topic in particular? Anna: Sure. Um, yeah, so I think the piece that I wrote is pretty representative of what I often try to put out in the world, which is the power and of just making and engaging in the world in a kind of physical way by doing things hands-on. I think I wrote about things like baking and the things I do are sort of home-based. Like I have a big garden, I preserve food, I bake, I sew. And it doesn't have to be those things but just the way that we can interact with the world through making and the way that hand making by hand and kind of slowing down to do that is a little bit a small way of disrupting the more common cycle of consumption, I guess. Kel: Right, yeah. So specifically around like creativity and like being a maker, I guess they say. How did that come to be kind of a central role in your life? Anna: I think it's been part of my life forever. I have a lot of memories of trying to build a table as a kid or like trying to make pants from patchworks. And then I got gain skills and I was able to be able to do it without as much with better results, I guess. Um, so it's just something that is part of my life. I did, um, I went to college and studied art, but then I kind of pivoted towards, I think I just really liked having creativity integrated into every day. So, and for me, like cooking dinner maybe for a lot of people does not feel creative, but I actually love that time to maybe have a little time to myself and just prepare food. And it feels nourishing to me. I've just been lucky, I guess, to be able to incorporate a lot of making and growing things into everyday life. Kel: Yeah, that's cool. I mean, I wish I thought it's a beautiful way to think about making dinner. Sometimes I think the hardest part about adulting is the fact that you have to make dinner every night. But it is true and it's also been kind of an inspiration for me too as I've explored more about how to eat locally and source local food is that shopping for food becomes my shopping in the way that other people shop for clothes or gadgets or whatever. It becomes the way that I get to spend money in this really cool way and then, yeah, like craft something and experience and it is time for yourself kind of that you that you have to schedule for yourself. So that's a very cool way of thinking about it. What other kind of creative practice you mentioned like sewing and I know you're your homeschool parent as well. Anna: I am Yeah. Kel: Does this trickle down into your homeschool practices then as well? Anna: It does. And I just want to say it's not like I love making dinner every night like my kids make it feel very challenging to me, but when I can take the time and when I can enjoy it, I do really like it. Kel: Mindfulness practice, right? Anna: Yeah, it comes and goes, of course, and sometimes it's very difficult to even want to make dinner. But yes, I am like sporadically sew things. You know, I do love things like quilting, like hand stitching. I knit a little bit, but just even having a project to kind of the go to keep that regular making going. So, you know, working on something while my kids are doing something else, or we also do dual projects. We used to do a lot more when they were younger, and now they kind of want to do their own thing, but like right now we're making Halloween costumes together, depending on their interests, like they'll join me in making jam or baking cookies or whatever. And I know those are all really small things, but that just, to me, that really is creativity, even if it's not like, inventing something brand new or like I think just the small like things like that do matter. Kel: Yeah for sure and I think that came across in your piece as well like integrating those everyday moments and taking time to say like uh with intentionality saying this is the way that we're going to incorporate creativity into our everyday lives not see it as something separate or something that we have to schedule time for but just incorporating it into day-to-day activities. I know that a lot of people who have this kind of creative streak within them or choose to be very intentional makers struggle with the idea of making their projects into like a side hustle or You know Monetizing it. That's the word I'm looking for. Do you struggle with that as well? Anna: Um, I Think I just never succeeded in that area. Like I think if I think I have to say like, okay being home with my kids, like part of that, I'll be able to have like a creative business of some kind. So there is always that temptation. Maybe there's a balance that can be found. I don't, yeah, I think it's important to realize, especially nowadays, or side hustles are very publicized, I guess, to kind of say like not everything has to be, doesn't have to have a purpose. Like I was actually recently writing about sort of taking this further, like a lot of the creative work that I do has a purpose, like I'm making food or I don't know, making a quilt or a piece of clothing. But sometimes I think it's also great to just do something that really has no purpose, but it's creative. I'm like, you're never going to put it on your wall. You're never going to, might never even show it to anybody. It might not build your skills, but it's still, it's kind of like childlike creativity, I guess, where a lot of younger people aren't thinking I'm going to make this so I can sell it, or I'm going to make this so I can share it on Instagram or whatever. So I think there's value in that too. Kel: Yeah, and it ties into this idea of what it means to be productive. I actually, I struggle with this a lot because I do publish things online, right? And so it's hard when I'm doing a drawing or creating something. It's like, what is the intention? Can I just sit with this object that I've created and not have any kind of like future purpose for it? Can the purpose just be this object rather than am I going to sell it? Am I going to publish it online? Is it going to get lots of likes on Instagram? That kind of thing, right? Anna: Yeah. Kel: And there's a there's a piece in there for me that ties into like productivity. And I think sometimes I can only justify creative practice when it contributes to that idea of it being productive, a productive use of my time. And then of course, that gets tied into profitability as well. So I guess, a question in there is what does it mean to be productive for you? An

    29 min

  3. 11/12/2024

    Art Outside of Capitalism

    The role of art in our culture and society is a complex topic, to be sure. Likewise, the topic of personal creativity and the desire to create art is multifaceted. If I have learned anything over the recent years, the creative process and consumption of art are critical pieces to post-capitalist living, and here’s why: Art is both cathartic and exploratory. It helps us collectively process strong emotions but also acts as a conduit for cultural change. Art helps us grieve; it helps us think; it helps us understand. In other words, art is important. But when we only consider art within the cultural context of capitalism, we fall short. As an artist and writer, Blaise Moritz has spent a lot of time exploring what it means to create and consume art. Through poetry, illustration, narrative, and political comics, Blaise’s creative gifts to the world explore many of these complex topics, from consumption to culture; history to politics. In this episode of the podcast, Blaise and I talk about his history and inspirations in his own creative process alongside the community of artists in Toronto, but also his experience studying art and comparing it to the grassroots movement of DIY and zine culture. We explore what it means to make art outside of capitalism, intrinsic motivations for creativity, and how politically-driven art can be accessible across cultures and classes. You can find Blaise’s work on his website at https://blaisemoritz.com or connect with him on Instagram at @blaisemoritz. There are also a few other references from the conversation that I want to include here: * Jenny Holzer is an American neo-conceptual artist whose work is focused around the delivery of words and ideas in public spaces and includes large-scale installations, advertising billboards, projections on buildings and other structures, and illuminated electronic displays. https://projects.jennyholzer.com * CAROUSEL was an exquisitely produced hybrid literary/arts magazine representing new & established creators, with a focus on positioning Canadian talent within an international context. The print edition ran from 1983-2003 and then as an online magazine until 2023. http://carouselmagazine.ca * Bar Delicious is a book by Blaise Moritz published by Conundrum Press in 2023. You can purchase a copy at https://conundrumpress.com/product/bar-delicious * Ray Walker (1945–1984) was an English artist, considered among the most prominent of a movement of political and community orientated artists who created murals in London during the 1970s and 1980s. You can support this project and podcast by becoming a paid subscriber here on Substack. * $5/month or $30/year * $4/month or $24/year * $3/month or $18/year * $2/month or $12/year If you have a person or project who you think is doing really awesome work in their community, please recommend them by emailing me at kel@novitasmag.com. TRANSCRIPT (please excuse the typos) Intro: Welcome to Novitas , a podcast exploring stories of post-capitalism and what it means to live towards a collective liberation. The stories shared here covered topics like culture, politics, education, parenting, but also especially art. My guest today is an artist and writer living in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, named Blaise Moritz. Blaise has published numerous works through independent publishing studios, but also self-published much of his own work. Blaise in my mind is first and foremost a poet, a zinester, and an artist, whose expansive work touches on topics of history, culture, capitalism, and more. Blaise is also, however, a connector, a community connector, and a connector of thought, bringing together both people and ideas, exploring culturally significant experiences of ideas and art to create thought-provoking pieces to share with the world. In this episode, Blaise and I talk about his experience and inspiration, his motivation and process. I hope you'll enjoy this conversation and find your own artistic inspiration while you listen. Kel: Well, I guess I should first say, Blaise, thank you so much for joining me and taking time to have this conversation. I wanted to start off by asking you when you started creating art and kind of how did your style develop over time? Were there experiences or influences that shaped your perspective or how you wanted to make art? Blaise: Yeah, Kel, sure. Great question. Yeah, lovely to be here. I really enjoyed being part of the first issue of Novitas. You know, I think probably, I would think there would be a lot of people who maybe would relate to the idea that I go all the way back to before I can remember, like when I think about, you know, making art. So I think about enjoying doing that as a child, as that being an activity that I enjoyed, an activity that, you know, I felt encouraged in, an activity that I felt was like an interesting, you know, way of relating to all sorts of other things. Like when I look back, I can feel like, well, if somebody was going to encourage you to know about say another culture or another person, one of the things that they did was show you some of their art or encourage you to draw, copy some of the pictures or something like that. So I think that, so I always go back to that. And I think about like just enjoying copying pictures out of books on Greek mythology that I had. I always go back to that. Like I can remember that, you know, it was always interesting to me when I was, since I've been a very schooled person in my life, it was always interesting to me to meet people who had, who associated art making with school, right? Like I actually went to, you know, studied art as an undergraduate student in college and ended a year of graduate school and to meet people for whom art was something that they had sort of... it was one of the various things that institutions had presented to them as things that they might do and that they just sort of liked it a little bit better or thought it would be, you know, somewhat more tolerable to be a art professor or something than an economics professor or something else. Like, you know, I always found that sort of fascinating, kind of bewildering. As I grew up, I mean, I was very interested in comic books because I think for me, you know, when I encountered comic books, I think that I encountered them as an extension of how I liked to read. So I'm a, I love to read, but I was not a... I didn't take very immediately or very naturally to reading books without pictures. I don't know if it was just the comfort or the love of, you know, reading books that had pictures as a child. But, so I don't know that comic books appealed to me because I particularly liked the stories, you know, really when I look back at them and stuff, I sort of think like, you know, I never particularly fantasized about those kinds of situations or things like that. Kel: So it wasn't a super hero thing... Blaise: Yeah, no, I just kind of felt like, well, you know, there's only so many Dr. Seuss books and there's only, you know, and it was, I think, doing the grocery shopping when I found comic books. And I think, yeah, it was like, wow, look, there's stuff to read with pictures in it and it's colorful. And so I think I've always... and I also think the idea that it was accessible, you know, if I was paid, you know, 10 cents to do my grocery run, then, you know, after a couple of days, you could, like I think at the time of comic book cost, like 35 cents or something. And it was sort of fascinating to think about. And I think I go back there because I think that's still sort of a touchstone for me to think about, like capitalism doesn't necessarily get to own all economic activity or the idea of a market or the idea of production or exchange. Like these things exist in humanity and exist in history, like outside of the dimension of capitalism. And I think so, so to me, art is kind of associated a little bit with things like love of reading, love of pictures and feeling like, um, that those things could be accessible, could be shareable and stuff. And, uh, so I think that was a very definitive thing for me. I think, um, for me, it goes all, you know, that connection to it being sort of like a primal thing, you know, a thing that's part of who you are is like very important to me. Kel: Yeah, for sure. That's really cool. And I, you touched on a lot of really cool things in there and I'm going to circle back to some of them. Blaise: Yeah, sure. Kel: I love the idea of comic books being outside of the system of capitalism. And I mean, there's, there's the collectors and there's the, the, I guess, the industry that has turned it very much into a marketable product. But I'm kind of the same way where I grew up during the hayday of Archie comics. Blaise: Sure. Kel: And so that was, you went to the grocery store and there was, you would get the latest Archie comic and I think it was a couple bucks and it was like a hundred pages worth of comics. And that was totally accessible for a young person that had a little bit of pocket change. Right? And I think that's also why I'm very much drawn towards zine culture because it really exists outside of that idea of, can I do this to make money? Right? Blaise: Sure. Kel: One of the reasons that I really fell in love with your comics and your, I guess, style of art, because it seems to tackle kind of these complex topics or maybe ask complex questions through really simple statements. And the pieces that you submitted for the Novitas issue, I think really reflect this as well. Can you remind me what they're called? Blaise: Oh, sure. I refer to them as Zero Songs. Kel: Zero songs, that's it. I think there's something really cool about the combination of the abstract nature of the illustration that couples with this like abstraction of complex topics into really simple statements. And was that intentional? And where did you get that kind of inspiration as well, if so? Blaise: Yeah, for

    39 min

  4. 10/21/2024

    Natural Learning and Nature Connection

    When I started writing this blog years ago, I wrote a lot about the education system. As an unschooling parent of two boys who don’t fit well in a classroom space, I have had to do a lot of learning about what it means to learn. Some part of this journey have been very hard, but some has been really easy. For me, forest school just makes sense. We all agree that kids thrive when they spend time outside in nature, and I firmly believe in mentorship as an alternative to formal teaching. Outdoor education has been proven time and again to help physical and mental health, social skills, cognitive development, environmental awareness, and even academic improvement. I really do believe that every kid could benefit from a day spent in the woods with peers. In this episode of the podcast, I get to chat with my good friend Kim Simpson from the Free Spirit Forest and Nature School based on southern Georgian Bay in Ontario, Canada. Kim and her partner Matt have been trailblazers for the forest school movement, having started their programming way back in 2016, when forest schools were just finding their footing. In our chat, Kim and I share our experiences witnessing natural and place based learning outside of the classroom, where there is space made for exploration, inquisitiveness, collaboration, and a focus on encouraging kids to show up as their true selves. You can support this project and podcast by becoming a paid subscriber here on Substack. * $5/month or $30/year * $4/month or $24/year * $3/month or $18/year * $2/month or $12/year If you have a person or project who you think is doing really awesome work in their community, please recommend them by emailing me at kel@novitasmag.com. TRANSCRIPT (excuse the typos) Intro: Welcome to Novitas, a podcast exploring stories about how we might live outside of the capitalist paradigm into a future that focuses on collective liberation. My name is Kel Smith. My guest today is Kim Simpson. Kim and her partner Matt are the collective force behind Free Spirit Forest and Nature School, an outdoor education program for kids and adults along southern Georgian Bay in Ontario, Canada. Free Spirit is a school with no classroom, a one day a week program where kids can skip out on the modern education system and get connected to nature. Full disclosure, my kids have been long time forest school participants and I am a huge advocate for this style of mentorship and natural education. I will also disclose that Kim and Matt are two of my favorite people on this planet. I was so excited to connect with them and for my youngest son to participate in the weekly programming at Free Spirit. In a time where we see anxiety and depression in young people at an all-time high, spending time outside with peers is a simple solution that benefits everyone. Free Spirit's mentorship model empowers kids to actively shape their day, collaborate with one another in community, and connect to the natural world around them. It allows them to slow down, witness the world in a safe and caring environment, and it really allows them to show up as their true selves. I have witnessed firsthand with both of my children how transformative these experiences can really be, and when I think about the kind of education and learning that I'm excited about in a post-capitalist society, the values and practices of outdoor education, like at Free Spirit, are exactly what we need for our children. Kim and I share a beautiful conversation about Free Spirit Forest and Nature School, how it came to be, how it has changed and grown over the years, and why it is sure to continue for many years to come. Kel: Hello Kim, thank you so much for being here and taking the time to chat today. Um, I was wondering if we could start off, uh, if you could tell me a little bit about how you first got interested in outdoor education. Kim: Yeah. So I think like being outside and connecting to nature, it was just something that I was always interested in. Um, so like my, my childhood, I feel like that that's like where I can pinpoint my love for being outside. And then I was the kind of kid that like really loves school. So I just, wanted to do school forever. So they kind of just like married in a really great way. Sorry, when I went on my first like canoe trip as a guide, I thought, wow, like you can get paid to do it. Kel: Yeah. Kim: Yeah. Blew my mind. And so I was able to like slowly understand that the jobs that we know don't have to like they they've evolved, I guess, and they can kind of be anything. My my very first guided trip, I think was maybe one of the most profound moments for me, paddling in Algonquin, like in the starry night where the stars are reflected in the water. Like I could still, I can feel that in my bones, you know? I'm still gushing over it. Kel: That's really cool. I didn't know you were a canoe trip guide. I was also a canoe trip guide. And I don't think we've ever talked about that before. Kim: No, I think there's a lot of overlap. Kel: And so when did you, when did, I mean, the article in Novitas goes pretty in depth as to how you got started with free spirit outdoor school. Do you want to talk a little bit about that now? Kim: Yeah, sure. So Matt and I met in 2012, and I think around like 2016 was like our very first winter. And it was sort of newish to the area. We had other jobs that worked over the weekend, so our weekdays were free. And this idea of forest schools was just kind of trickling into our area. We were sort of approached because we were both teachers and outdoor educators to sort of start a pilot program, I guess. And then we started with just a handful of children on like the snowiest day. Some of the children in that program have like, you know, they're whatever the math is, like teenagers now, right? And they can remember their first day at firest school. Kel: I feel like starting in the winter must've been very bold. Kim: Yeah, yeah. It was like, are we doing this? Kel: Right. And for context, for people who don't know, Kim is located just, the first one was in Collingwood, is that right? Which is like top 10 snowiest places in Canada because of the juxtaposition of where it's located off of Georgian Bay and in proximity to Lake Huron as well. It's just a lot of snow, so starting something like that in the winter. But Collingwood also has a big ski hill and it's kind of a destination area, so it's kind of an outdoor destination I guess. And it's nice that you kind of got head hunted that there other people that understood the value of what you were trying to do. And you were, you must have been one of the first forest schools, at least in Ontario. Kim: Yeah, yeah we were. We um, which was kind of daunting, like jumping through the hoops of ministry guidelines and building rapport with with the schools nearby. Once we were able to do it, it wasn't, it wasn't as intimidating as we thought. And then we were able to help other folks, because there are a lot of forest schools now, which is a really beautiful thing, and more outdoor schools. And so we've been able to help folks who are just starting out on their journey and figure out how to navigate all the red tapes and stuff. Yeah for sure all the requirements. Kel: Yeah yeah. So I will call him up after but Roland was very excited that I was chatting with you this morning and I was trying to come up with my questions this morning while I was drinking coffee with him and I asked Ro who is eight now what is the difference between for a school and normal school and for reference my eight-year-old has never been to modern like in the modern education system so he doesn't actually know. His answers like I said what do you learn at Forest School and his answers were you learn about nature, you learn how to be respectful, you learn how to be kind to your friends and you learn how to make a fire. I thought those were very good answers and he was like yeah that's pretty much it. Kim: I'm crying. That guy nailed it. Kel: I mean obviously I am a proponent of nature connection and I am not necessarily a proponent of the modern education system and I think being kind of an anti-capitalist person I can recognize in the modern education system that they are teaching the tools required in order for our young people to become productive members of a capitalist society and I think one of the reasons that I really love outdoor education in particular is because it doesn't do that it is actually quite the opposite in a way that is almost visceral. Like I think outdoor education and nature connection gives kids a fundamentally different tool set to enter into the world. Do you want to talk a little bit about that and what kind of focus that you've had at Free Spirit as to what kind of tools you're interested in providing kids as they you know graduate or head out into the world? Kim: That's a really great question. I think like what's beautiful about outdoor schools, it's just like being able to hold space in like a really, a really meaningful way for children. And we're outside. So there's like, there's just so much room, I think I could go on forever, to like work through things. Whether that's like between an adult mentor and a child or within like a child and child relationship. So they're like, they're strengthening so many tools in their toolbox, like the social emotional pieces, the physical literacy, like all of that stuff, that's just so important in becoming like a healthy kiddo. Yeah, and so we do a lot of like community building stuff and we focus a lot on emotional intelligence. We are like, there's resilience where we're like working hard to build fires and we're learning those like outdoor skills and bushcraft skills. We take time to do like creative arts and and it could be like your your classic like pen, paper, journaling, reflection, watercolors or maybe you're using charcoal and and like making your own pencil like it's ca

    37 min
  5. Anti-capitalist Existence in a Capitalist System

    09/30/2024

    Anti-capitalist Existence in a Capitalist System

    What does it mean to thrive as someone who is opposed to capitalism but still has to exist in a capitalist system? This question is one that my friend and colleague, Helen Tremethick, has spent a lot of time thinking about. Helen is a business coach, writer, and entrepreneur who GETS IT. Most of her clients share the same story: they don’t want to play the game, they don’t want to take other people's money, and they don’t know how to help their business grow without compromising their personal beliefs. Helen’s insight and both/and approach help provide guidance to those struggling to understand how best to tackle these questions. Her wisdom shines through in this podcast episode as I ask her about all my personal questions, offering forgiveness and challenging me to push through instead of going around, and sharing her experience navigating late-stage capitalism as an entrepreneur and small business owner. You can find out more about Helen on her website at https://helentremethick.com. You can support this project and podcast by becoming a paid subscriber here on Substack. If you have a person or project who you think is doing really awesome work in their community, please recommend them by emailing me at kel@novitasmag.com. TRANSCRIPT (excuse the typos) Intro: Welcome to Novitas, a podcast that explores stories about how we might live outside the capitalist paradigm towards collective liberation. My name is Kel Smith and I'm so excited to share today's conversation with Helen Tremethick. Helen and I first met over a decade ago in a garden volunteering together to build a new community space to grow food. It didn't take much time to recognize Helen as a friend and co-conspirator, an ally in navigating the challenges and celebrating the joys. Helen is an anti-capitalist business coach, a profession that may seem at odds, but with more of us critically questioning what it means to be alive during late-stage capitalism, Helen's wisdom has become so critical. Helen sees the world in a real way, in the rich multiplicity of lived experience mixed with the honest challenges many of us face. Not only as entrepreneurs, but as human beings. Helen's work asks the ever important question, what does it mean to exist inside the capitalist system while also working to dismantle it? In this episode, we explore what it means to be anti-capitalist, how we find joy while living in struggle, how we use our labor to have our needs met, and how we balance those needs with the work of building something better. I hope you enjoy the conversation. Kel: Hello Helen, I'm really excited because we are in the same space together recording this podcast. The stars have aligned and we are able to be in the same room having a conversation, which is awesome. Helen: I know for the first time in like six, seven years. Kel: It's been a while. If you didn't catch it, Helen contributed a really beautiful piece to the first issue of the Novitas magazine talking about what it means to be an anti-capitalist business owner or entrepreneur, I guess is a better word. Helen: Yeah. Kel: Yeah. Do you want to talk a little bit about what that means? Helen: Sure. So where to start? The other day in my membership community, we were talking about being anti-capitalist versus being capitalism critical. And I think that's a really good place to start because I think more and more of us are becoming capitalism critical, not necessarily anti-capitalist per se. There's a lot of connotation that goes along with that term that I think mainstream folks are uncomfortable with. And I'm not. I love being anti-capitalist. I love being capitalism critical. But having that kind of accessible language I think is really really important. So essentially as an anti-capitalist entrepreneur I approach my business with the desire to help people over profit more money. I try to make very conscious decisions about my pricing and the accessibility of my pricing, knowing that I still live in this system, I still need to be making a certain amount of money in order to be compensated both for my work as well as pay for my rent, pay for my food, etc. So what I like us to think about as entrepreneurs is where can I make more intentional decisions that do not put profit, money profit specifically over the other reasons why I got involved in this work. Kel: Right. Yeah. I... sorry. I did tree planting when I was in my early twenties and when people sign up to go tree planting, I think a lot of they time they think of the trees and being in nature and being in the woods, but like little do they know that tree planting is like grueling work. And if you're not in it for the money, you're probably gonna go home in the first two weeks. Helen: Absolutely. It's grueling work. Kel: Yeah. Helen: And it's monocropping one species in your pockets, well they're not pockets, but they're, you know... Kel: Your planter bags. Yeah, that's like just a really good example that has never come to me before until you said that that's, that's the profit over the people. Helen: There's a profit over the people. It's the profit over the ecology of it. And I do really want to disclaim that we still live in this system. So we still need to exchange money in order to survive. And so when I talk to my clients or when I talk to my audience, I tend to talk about the fact that we still need to make money. We still need to be in the system and we still need to consider money as a neutral tool of exchange. We can make good decisions with money and we can make bad decisions with money. There are numerous examples of people in the world who are making bad decisions with money. And so those of us who have anti-capitalist tendencies also tend to have money stories where we don't want to earn a lot of money because the examples of what we've seen are so bad of, you know, what people are doing with those giant amounts of money. Notwithstanding the fact that we will never make that kind of money, but we still need it. So if we can consider it as a neutral tool then we can start thinking about it in terms of what amount of this neutral tool do I need to exchange in order to feel fully compensated and feel like it's accessible for people as well. So I'm still helping people. Kel: Yeah. And that's a tough one because I find the benchmark that people are going to use for like how much money do I need is am I having my needs met? And that is a largely arbitrary term. Having my needs met is going to be different than you getting your needs met and the amount of money that's required to meet those needs is inherently different as well. So it's like this slippery sliding scale of how much money is, am I justified in charging or taking from other people, right? Helen: Yeah. Well, there's a really good point. It's like are you taking from other people or are you exchanging at a rate that feels fair for both of you and you're right that is completely arbitrary. What your needs are will depend on where you live. If you're living in a city, it's going to be more expensive than if you're living rural. You're gonna have to factor in the size of your place, the size of your family. Also, what you consider your needs. Do you consider the newest smartphone your needs? Because you need to have the fastest technology. There are a lot of people out there who would say yes. So where do we draw that line and say this is what enough is. I'd like to consider that a lot of times, when we say okay, I'm gonna price my services, this is what enough is, we also don't factor in future care because that feels selfish or greedy or what have you, Kel: Hoarding... Helen: Or hoarding. But this is also important. What my needs are aren't just so that I can get to the end of the day. And I talk a lot about how sustainability and sustainability as a whole is b******t. The idea is b******t because it considers only what we need to sustain ourselves. But when we start thinking about this in terms of thrivelihood, what do we need in order to thrive? Then we can start making decisions that aren't just money-based, but are also time-based, that are also connection-based. So when we're thinking about profit, we're taking the idea of making enough money, yes, but also making sure that we have enough time to spend with our families, making sure that we have well-being, and making sure that our future selves cared for and there are ways to do that that are not hoarding, that are not selfish, that are not greedy, that are not all of these things that we connect our money stories to and they are and always will be subjective but that there is the work, that there is where we need to do the work for ourselves, where it is not a formula that you can... I could never say this is how much you need to make this to happen, therefore this is what you need to do. That's not the work at all. The work is more introspective. How much time do I need to spend with my family in order to feel like that is enough? Kel: Yeah, for sure. I think it's interesting when you factor in those other pieces as well to say like, in the work that I'm doing, how are my needs getting met, not just financially, but in community connection and in all these other different ways as well, that makes the formula even more complicated, right? Helen: It does. Kel: I know I talk a lot about doing volunteer work and the type of rewards that you get from volunteer work is very different than the type of rewards that you get from paid work. Helen: Yeah. Kel: So how do those things then play in together as well? Helen: Yeah. And the vast answer for a lot of people, well therefore I need to sell my services for a higher amount and the trouble is is that it's not that easy. Chances are if you're listening to this podcast and you are an entrepreneur you probably do need to raise your rates and and there is also an element there of, you know, what the market can withstand what people are ab

    44 min

  6. 09/11/2024

    Beyond the Garden: Permaculture as a Way of Life

    Like many people, I learned about permaculture as an approach to help me understand how to grow food in a more sustainable way. But Liz’s approach goes way beyond the garden. Liz Postlethwaite is a community artist and permaculture designer who has blended her love of both to create a unique course teaching permaculture principles to artists and creatives. As Liz explains, permaculture is all about creating regenerative systems, and the tools and framework provided by permaculture are applicable to different areas of modern life. Join me for a wonderful conversation with Liz learning about permaculture, it’s provocation and principles, and why this might be the perfect moment for permaculture to be more widely used as a tool for regeneration at a time when we desperately need positive action and change. Liz mentions a few other permaculture designers that I wanted to link here as well: Tyson Yunkaporta is an indigenous skolar (Apalech clan (Wik) Lostmob Nungar) working with Indigenous Systems Knowledge and collective Indigenous inquiry methods inflected with complexity science to resolve global existential threats and issues in regenerative design responses to crises. Looby Macnamara is a permaculture teacher, designer and writer who lives in Herefordshire with her partner and two daughters. Together they host Applewood Permaculture Centre, an education and demonstration centre. Dan Palmer hosted a permaculture podcast called Making Permaculture Stronger about regenerating permaculture design process together. The podcast saught to uncover core ideas about what permaculture design process is and bring them into open with a spirit of collaborative inquiry to reveal and walk down deeper and more powerful pathways toward life. You can support this project and podcast by becoming a paid subscriber here on Substack. If you have a person or project who you think is doing really awesome work in their community, please recommend them by emailing me at kel@novitasmag.com. TRANSCRIPT (please excuse the typos) Intro: Welcome to Novitas, a podcast exploring stories about living outside the capitalist paradigm towards collective liberation. My name is Kel Smith and my guest today is Liz Postlethwaite, an artist and permaculture designer living in the UK. While most people associate permaculture as a land-based practice, Liz has a unique approach of teaching her love of permaculture design through a course designed specifically for artists and arts organizations. She talks about the provocation of permaculture design, using systems thinking, taking inspiration from the natural world, and of course the permaculture ethics. I love this application of the permaculture principles outside of agriculture, and Liz's deep knowledge around the topics of sustainability, resilience, extraction, and regeneration come through in this wonderful conversation. I hope you'll enjoy. Kel: Hi Liz, do you want to take a minute and introduce yourself and maybe talk a little bit about how you came to permaculture practice? Liz: Well I always find it hard to introduce myself because I'm not quite sure what I do really but my name's Liz Postlethwaite and I'm based in Manchester, just north of Manchester which is in the north of England, in the United Kingdom. And I came to permaculture design, think about four years ago. I did a PDC about 12 years ago, a permaculture design course. I came to it on my gardening perspective. And as we'll probably talk about today, my practice as a permaculture designer is really around art and creativity. I'm an artist by trade, I'm a performance maker, a theatre maker. So it's been about bringing together permaculture design, which is originally a land-based design practice and a participatory art practice and trying to let them understand what those two things look like when they come together. Kel: Right, so I know permaculture as a practice can be a bit confusing for people because as you say, it starts very much as a land-based practice or gardening or growing food, kind of focused around that for most people, but then also covers a lot of different topics in areas. Can you give a brief primer on what permaculture is for you? Liz: Yeah, I mean, I think it's interesting because a lot of people do come to permaculture design thinking it's like just a land-based practice. And actually, historically, it was never intended just to be a land-based practice. And that's how permaculture design started to emerge. But actually, when Bill Mollison was exploring the ideas around permaculture design, he was acutely aware of the fact that he, in an industrialized culture that he was part of, had become disconnected from a connected way of being with the land. So actually what he was really interested in was, how can we live... Hhe used the word sustainably, but I know sustainable is a bit of a funny word now... How can we live our lives with the least impact on the planet and in a way that's connected to the planet? So I think that thing of people seeing permaculture design as a land-based practice, it is, but that's just one tiny part of what it is. It was always envisaged or envisioned as a way of designing all interactions that humans have. But I think what's interesting is for a lot of people, they come to it from food growing, because as soon as you start to grow a little bit of food, you realize that everything's interconnected. Kel: It's so true. Liz: So for a lot of people, like for me, food is, trying to grow food or growing food is a gateway to understanding the interconnectedness of things. Kel: Right. Liz: Yeah, does that answer your question? Kel: Yeah, for sure. So we know that permaculture is definitely more about growing food. Do you want to talk about some of the other parts that permaculture contains or touches? Liz: Yeah, so I think it's quite interesting. So I think one thing that's quite interesting to define is that people talk about like permaculture, like permaculture is this fixed thing that's set in stone and I find it a bit weird when people talk about permaculture as a noun. Because to me, permaculture is a verb, permaculture is something that you do, and it's a set of tools that help you make regenerative things. So in that sense, the provocation of permaculture design is about making regenerative things. And if we take regenerative to mean things that are connected or reconnected with the living systems and the kind of pulse of life that exists on this planet. If we're thinking about regenerative in the sense of practices that reconnect us with those life-giving processes, then that's the provocation. And I think it's really important to frame as well that it's only our industrial cultures that have lost connection to those life-giving processes. For millennia, that's how humans have lived on the planet and there's still many cultures and cultural practices that have got continuous tradition and continuous practice of being connected to living cycles on the planet. And I think it's interesting because then people often say well permaculture design is about appropriating kind of cultural traditions or knowledge that doesn't, that isn't ours to appropriate and to me if permaculture design is doing that then that's not permaculture design because that's not an embodiment of the permaculture ethics. To me, work share, Earthcare, People Care, Fair Share, to me permaculture design is about me from an industrialised culture recreating ways of being that are connected in a way that isn't about appropriating or taking other people's practices or other people's stories or things that aren't mine to take. Kel: Right, I think it's so important to be able to identify what is, you know, traditional ecological knowledge, what is appropriation, and then what is also like us learning how to live in a way that is more harmonious with the earth and that doesn't have to be appropriation, right? Liz: It's quite interesting, I mean I find it quite, I'm not really in a position to talk about this because of kind of my background, you know, it's not my knowledge or my place necessarily to talk about ownership of indigenous wisdom or different cultural practices but I think there's got to be a place... I really like hearing Tyson Yunkaporta talk about it and Tyson Yunkaporta is a permaculture practitioner and is really interested and really kind of deeply knowledgeable from a personal perspective and a personal heritage of the interaction between permaculture practices and traditional ecological knowledge and where those two things meet and where those two things potentially clash with each other. But we've got to find a way and we've got to find a way to be together and we've got to find a way to respectfully nod to other people's knowledge in a way or ask or have conversations with people. And I suppose that's about community-ship and about relationships and kind of how we share knowledge but don't own knowledge. Kel: Right, yeah. Liz: And I think there's sometimes this tendency that of like wanting to own certain knowledge without honoring the cultural practices that historically run alongside that knowledge. And that's really, really challenging. Yeah, it's just so complicated and a lot of the times like when you work, a lot of the creative people, because a lot of my work now is I've developed a permaculture design course for artists and creatives and for a lot of people when they start on that journey the question is, becomes a kind of design process of what does it mean wherever you are as an individual to be indigenous again, to be indigenous to place and I'm like a British person living in the north of England with Irish heritage. So how can I even start to think about what that might mean? Kel: Right, for sure. Liz: You know, so it's really, really complicated. Kel: Yeah. Can I ask a little bit about the course that you've developed? Liz: Yeah, sure. Kel: That's really interesting. So

    35 min

  7. 08/30/2024

    Grassroots Community Support During the Current Housing Crisis

    In this episode of the podcast, I chat with Meghan Sheffield, a friend and co-conspirator living in Cobourg, Ontario. For the first issue of the Novitas magazine, Meghan shared an intimate and beautiful article about her experience working with her community to support a growing unhoused population in her hometown. Meghan and I talk about a lot in this episode: grassroots versus agency support, de-stigmatizing what it means to be unsheltered, unpacking her experience providing on-the-group support, the impact of the rising costs of living on the current homelessness crisis, and more. We mentioned a few different organizations in Cobourg and Guelph that I wanted to link: Green Wood Coalition uses a community model of caring to walk alongside people living with poverty, mental and physical illness, drug dependency and disability. You can find out more about them on their website at https://www.greenwoodcoalition.com. Hope House Guelph increases the well-being of vulnerable adults, youth and children through the provision of immediate relief and ongoing support. They operate and advocate on the belief that poverty, food insecurity, inequality, health and community are all interconnected. You can learn more about Hope House on their website at https://www.hopehouseguelph.ca. You can support this project and podcast by becoming a paid subscriber here on Substack. If you have a person or project who you think is doing really awesome work in their community, please recommend them by emailing me at kel@novitasmag.com. TRANSCRIPT (please excuse the typos) Intro: Welcome to Novitas, a podcast exploring stories that show us how to live outside the capitalist paradigm towards collective liberation. Sometimes when I talk about these stories, I like to think of them as potential solutions to the problems of capitalism. But other times, certain stories don't feel like solutions at all. In the case of the homelessness crisis we are currently facing in late-stage capitalism, it's hard to imagine what a solution might even look like. Homelessness is a complex and multifaceted problem that is tied intimately with mental health, financial inequality, class struggle, and more. My guest today is Meghan Sheffield, a friend and co-conspirator living in Coburg, Ontario. In the recent issue of the Novitas Magazine, Meghan shared a beautiful and contemplative piece about her experiences supporting unhoused members of her community. Her piece honestly shifted my perspective. And I was so excited to speak with her about her story directly. We shared a wonderful conversation together, but only later did I realize that the audio didn't record very clearly. So I ask your forgiveness, dear listener, but I couldn't bear to re-record. And I think when you listen to our conversation, you'll understand why. Kel: So, Meghan, thank you so much for being here and taking the time to chat today. Did you want to start off by giving a brief introduction of who you are and a little bit about your piece in the magazine? Meghan: Yeah, sure. Yeah, thanks for having me. My name is Meghan Sheffield and I am a mother of three and also like a lifelong writer and that has been the bulk of my like fairly freelance heavy career has been in writing and I started off in newspaper journalism like right at kind of a moment when I was like oh wait newspapers are really dying and since then have yeah had the opportunity in so many different ways to explore, research and talk with so many interesting people in a variety of mediums. And yeah, I live in Coburg, Ontario, just right on the north shore of Lake Ontario. And it's a small town. It's about 20,000 people. It is also the county seat. It's the biggest town in our region. I would also just sort of situate the place where I live because it's so relevant to my piece in the magazine. Yeah, because of so many of those factors, the housing crisis has hit really hard here as in so many other places. And I think that here where I live, it has been a real... It has signaled major changes in the community, even because this isn't, you know, visible poverty, people visibly living unsheltered is not something that was common before just a few years ago. Kel: Yeah, for sure. It's really interesting. I think so we just relocated back from Owens Sound down to Guelph. And when we talked to a lot of people about, you know, what what's going on with the city, how things changed and everybody, everybody mentioned homelessness as a critical thing that has changed within the last kind of five years of us being gone. And I think you're right, because it is visible in a way that it wasn't before. Like you knew there were homeless encampments around, but they weren't front and center. You knew there were people that were unhoused but you didn't interact with them on a daily basis. So it was largely an invisible problem and now has become a visible problem. And it's interesting because coming from Owen Sound, there's also a homelessness problem there. And so I think it's just kind of showed me that it really exists everywhere. I think reading your piece in the magazine really opened my eyes to the fact that this is everywhere and it's happening in a lot of our towns and cities. These days, it's much more of our friends and our neighbors and people in our community that aren't able to afford housing anymore. Meghan: Yeah, that's right. Yeah, it really is. It's people who are from here and people who I went to high school with and my, you know, my neighbors who used to live on the same block and now don't have housing. Like it's it's really, it's close to home. And I think there is this mythology that people are coming from elsewhere and that often comes up like if there's like discussion of increasing resources or increasing services, people will say no, no, it will attract people. And it's like - We don't need to worry about attracting! There's plenty of people with needs right here. Kel: Yeah, for sure. Meghan: And actually, it's important, I think, to dispel that myth by reminding ourselves and each other about the connections that people have in the place where they live. For sure. I do, and just as you do, people do not move forward because there's a promise of, you know, a new shelter opening up elsewhere. They overwhelmingly, human beings, want to be with the people whom they know and they trust and they have that network of relationships with. And that is overwhelmingly the case, regardless of your housing status, I think. Kel: Yes, for sure. How did you first get involved with supporting unhoused folks in your community? Meghan: Yeah, well, I should say that the support that I do or participate in is is totally like non-professional. It's totally on it on a neighbor-to-neighbor basis. Kel: That's the best kind in my opinion. Meghan: Yeah and I'm just like happy with that like this is just not um, it's not my industry and it's you know and I understand that there are yeah there are people for whom this is both their paid work and unpaid work and you know there's just like a whole... you know, it's just really important that there be structures and safety nets that are well funded. And I'm not necessarily part of that. You know, and so I would say, like within my family, I have family members who do work in kind of like community building and you know across class and community outreach, street level outreach and harm reduction right in my family and so you know it's not stretch for me to connect with some of the same folks but a couple of years ago there was a sort of like a political campaign within the municipality to - it was called Shelter in Peace - to ask the municipality to have a moratorium on enforcing bylaws against camping in light of the fact that there weren't enough shelter beds. And so that and that actually, just to back it up a little bit more, that stemmed originally from a roundtable meeting, a community-wide conversation, kind of like a listening circle where each person in the room got to speak on the topic, I think it was on the topic of homelessness. And folks who were unhoused came, and folks who were housed, you know, there was like town councillors and Green Party members, and I don't know, it was just like a pretty wide cross-section of the community who turned up together to talk about this and talk about, some people had ideas, some people had experiences, some people had fears and campaign to advocate for Sheltering in Peace came from that community conversation. And during that meeting, I was sitting there and, you know, listening and it was actually at that meeting one of the people who was currently unhoused sharing his experience. I realized we went to high school together and he's sitting beside a town councillor who we both went to high school with. Kel: Right. Meghan: And there was something like there was something just like really, yeah, it hit me, of the things that we discussed. And yeah, the connection, the real human connection, the way like, oh, we all started at the same place, same high school. And yeah, it was so hopeful to all be in the room together and ideating that way. And also they came in a personal level. So that was a real gap, a gap in my experience of just like being in solidarity, you know, standing at a podium at the town council meeting, you know, next to someone who was like sharing her experience of being unhoused and yeah that was, I would say that that was like a pretty like critical turn of events. Kel: Do you remember who organized that meeting? Was it municipality or someone just interested in like, was it an organization that started the meeting? Meghan: Yeah, it was definitely not the municipality. Kel: Right. Meghan: It was an organization called Greenwood Coalition. My dad is actually the executive director so that same way it allowed listening and each person to have a chance to speak. Kel: I think even having everybody in the same room i

    41 min

  8. 08/08/2024

    Disability Justice and Art in a Post Capitalist World

    Maria Epp is an artist, a mother, and an advocate for those struggling with disability, both visible and invisible. Maria shares her art and writing online, also lending her energy to her local community in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Her journey has been one that many white settlers can relate to on Turtle Island: uncovering the legacy of genocide and oppression, understanding what it means to practice active anti-racism, and using this knowledge to reconnect to community in a time of hyper individualism that doesn’t always make space for disabled folks. Maria’s art in not only a tool for connection and storytelling, but for processing grief and exploring personal ancestry as well. You can find Maria's work and writing on Instagram at @MariaEppArt and on her Substack thehungryhouse.substack.com Maria’s art and writing is also featured in the first issue of Novitas Magazine and you can read her piece, along with others, in that first issue available at https://www.novitasmag.com. There are a few copies still available if you’d like to order one. You can support this project and podcast by becoming a paid subscriber here on Substack. If you have a person or project who you think is doing really awesome work in their community, please recommend them by emailing me at kel@novitasmag.com. Thanks for listening! Notes: Maria’s mentioned Artbeat Studio and their residency program. You can find more info about Artbeat at https://artbeatstudio.ca TRANSCRIPT (please excuse the typos) Intro: Welcome to Novitas, a podcast that explores stories about living outside the capitalist paradigm towards collective liberation. Each podcast episode features a contributor from the print magazine, which you can find online at www.novitasmag.com. Today's guest is Maria Epp, an artist, a writer, a mother and parent living in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Maria lives with hidden disabilities and mental health challenges. Her art and writing are a part of her journey to unpack the history of ableism she has experienced within the context of colonialism, white supremacy, and capitalism. I feel honored to have been on part of this journey with Maria since 2020 when we met online as part of a unschooling community. Maria's work speaks to me on many levels, as a parent, as a white settler living in so-called Canada, but also as someone who is working to undo the narrative of colonial culture on a deeply personal level, exploring history and ancestry, and finding the pieces of our own lineage, the ones that have caused harm, but also the ones that can help us reconnect. Maria and I shared this conversation asynchronously, a different approach to dialogue that I really enjoyed. It allowed me time and space to consider her responses when thinking about the next question I wanted to ask. In a conversation centered around disability justice, it felt very liberating to adjust the interview format to meet our different needs. I hope you'll enjoy the conversation. Kel: So if you could start by sharing a bit about yourself, anything that feels specifically relevant in relation to your piece in the magazine. Maria: Thanks for having me on your podcast and for inviting me to join this incredible collection. I am really inspired by you. Yeah, my name is Maria Epp and I am a white woman from Manitoba, Canada. I have two young people, 14 and 16, and I'm married to Nathan. We've been on a self-directed learning journey for sort of like almost as long as we've had kids. And we've also been on a journey of detaching from or facing ableism and disability since before I got married actually. It's basically always been a part of our family life. I guess I wanted to talk about this topic of disability as it pertains to the future because I just need to see myself and others with more visible our humanities are all welcome and celebrated and you know it's not like an exclusive club that gets to quote survive. So that's kind of where I wanted to come from and I wanted to give a bit of background on how hard it was to be a mom with young kids and to you know struggle in building resources and community and some of the struggles that a lot of moms that I talk with struggle with and just envisioning. I mean, I don't come up with that many answers as it comes as it pertains to parenting, but I do start to build. It's just a very, very small taste of what it might look like to not be rushing off to a office job or some location far away from where all your people are. Kel: Yeah, for sure. Thank you. I think one of the reasons that I really love doing the magazine as an editor was that I was introduced to a whole bunch of amazing topics that I think about or on my periphery but don't always come to the forefront of my life because it's not something I deal with directly. So disability justice definitely falls into that category because I'm an able-bodied person. But I’m also like really aware and think it's really crucial. And we've talked about this before, that when we consider disability justice, specifically about like imagining in the future, there's this cool thing that happens where when we center people with disabilities and design systems and communities around those needs, we end up being super inclusive for even people who don't have disabilities and just creating like kind of better systems that meet the needs of more people. I wonder if it has to do because there's so many invisible ways that people are dealing with either mental or physical disability that we don't address. So when we build systems for our future that are more inclusive, we end up including more people than we maybe even originally intended to. Maria: Totally, Kel. This has really radically changed the way I see the world, the way that I walk through the world, move through the world. And so much so, like, every time I embrace and accept, radically accept myself more, the more I expect the world to also embrace and focus and center on not only my needs, but the needs of all sorts of disabilities. So we went to like a museum this summer and all I could look at was how is this space accessible? How is it accessible to children? How is it accessible for people with high sensitivities, people with mobility aids? Like I was just analyzing criticizing, critiquing, I guess, every aspect of the space. And I was overstimulated. So I was looking for places for escape and noticed that they did have a little quiet room where you could put a headphone on and block out the noise and stuff. Because even though it was a low lighting kind of environment, the noise level was pretty high because there was a lot of children. The disability justice movement like within disability spaces is a multifacetedness to it. And so if I have fibromyalgia and you are autistic and deaf, like you're going to have very different needs than I am going to have. And so there's no monolith of like, this is what disability means, you know? But I think in general, yeah, like when we're centering the needs of more bodies, more people have access to spaces, which means more, there's a richer way for us to all experience the world. Another example that like I don't really talk about in the paper, but I've run a community newsletter in Winnipeg here and we are like in a very low income neighborhood. And there's a high percentage of elderly who are often, they're kind of housebound and lacking like available like technology. So they are somewhat, one of the populations that this newspaper focuses on because we want to give them access to goings on, you know, like current events, community, you know, resources, phone numbers, ways to get their needs met. And so we do a printed version of the newsletter and it's the only one in the city and it's free. And so we basically say it's a low barrier access to community news. And I've never really seen it as part of disability justice except now I do because it is so like countercultural because a lot of the world moves to this digital online space, assuming we all have access to that and have money and have, you know, the technology brain that can like access the right pages and stuff. So there's a lot of assumptions there, which isn't always the case for all of us, right? I guess this is where intersectionality comes in because as a white body person, I go into spaces and see the missing, you know, how are my needs not getting met? And then I feel emboldened to often speak up or, you know, speak up on behalf of my children and like feel a lot of privilege to have my voice heard. Not realizing that the things that I'm speaking up for might not be what is needed in my community. So to be very cognizant of the needs of all people, like of all races. I guess that's what I'm learning from the books and the authors that I'm reading, who are primarily black and brown. And they're talking about how the disability rights movement centered white disabled people and the disability justice movement is about centering black and brown BIPOC. Where are their rights and their bodies not allowed to go? Where are their voices not allowed to be heard? And centering that as the most important voice to lift up. So yes, my needs matter. And I'm able to focus on them because often in an able-bodied, ableist world, sanest world, everyone who has any kind of visible or invisible special need is discredited and, you know, ignored. But even within those spaces, it's really crucial to uplift and center the needs of BIPOC. Kel: I love that it always comes back to this intersectional lens, even when, you know, we start from different angles that we always seem to come back to the same perspective that we can't just look at these different issues in silos, and we really, really need to explore them all together. So thanks for bringing that back as well. I wonder if you could talk a bit about how the role of art and writing has played into your journey as you've kind of gone through the process of uncovering all of

    31 min

  9. 07/18/2024

    Project Knotwork: Merging community and education through project based self-directed learning

    Lane Clark is an unschooling parent living in Marquette, Michigan where she and two friends started a very cool micro school called Project Knotwork. In this episode of the podcast, Lane shares her experience building out a community space that was designed specifically for self-directed project-based learning but in a unique way brings together community members, the arts, education, and a hardcore DIY attitude. You can find out more about Project Knotwork at https://www.knotworkstudio.com or on Instagram @projectknotwork. Lane also shared her experience in the first issue of Novitas Magazine and you can read her piece, along with others, in that first issue available at https://www.novitasmag.com. There are a dozen or so copies still available if you’d like to order one. You can support this project and podcast by becoming a paid subscriber here on Substack. If you have a person or project who you think is doing really awesome work in their community, please recommend them by emailing me at kel@novitasmag.com. Thanks for listening! TRANSCRIPT (please excuse the typos) Intro: Welcome to Novitas, a podcast exploring stories that show us how to live outside the capitalist paradigm towards collective liberation. My name is Kel Smith and I'm excited to be joined by Lane Clark to talk about Project Knotwork, a self-directed project-based learning space and artist collective in Michigan. Project Knotwork is an amazing example of folks coming together to build intergenerational community from the ground up. I hope you enjoy the conversation. Kel: Do you want to jump in and start off by doing just a basic introduction? Lane: Okay, so I am Lane Clark. I live in northern Michigan up on Lake Superior, and I am a parent to two unschooled children who are ages 13 and 10, and they have never attended school other than nursery school when we lived abroad. And we have been navigating creating community in unschooling since we returned back to the US six years ago. And one of the projects we landed on in the last year and a half is a self-directed project-based learning group called Project Knotwork, which is learners from ages 10 to 15, 16, gathering together in a shared space in an adult-facilitated but led by them session-based group learning. So they have a theme and they choose where the theme will go and what will happen next, and myself and two other adults facilitating and support them in that, as well as a group of adults that share that studio, that are adult creatives who come and give them support and workshops and tools, literally sometimes physical tools that we don't have, and also teach them skills that us as the primary three facilitators don't have. So that's my focus. right now with their self-directed learning, but of course every day is an adventure and we are figuring it out as we go. Kel: Awesome. Is it a full-time program or is it like a certain number of days a week? Lane: No, it's not a full-time program. It's one day a week. It's on Thursdays. We are very lucky to have a pretty robust, one, a very large homeschooling community in general where we are and a pretty robust self-directed community. wide range of meaning. Part of the reason it's only one day is because myself and other many other adults have been creating community in other ways for them throughout the years. So I was part of creating well a co-op of self-directed learners that does meet two days a week one time fully outdoor in the woods and one time indoor in a kind of space that's rotating and in borrows basements of churches and things like that. and spend time in community with a much larger group of people. There's, you know, anywhere from 30 to 50 people, you know, at our gatherings on that day week. Our library provides programming for our kids on Wednesdays where there are book clubs that are facilitated there. And then on Thursdays we're at Project Network. So they have a kind of, in my opinion, full schedule, obviously. Not full by school standards, but... But pretty robust. Kel: Very full by my family standards. Lane: By my personal standards, full too, yeah, for sure. Kel: That's cool. So why do you think that there is this community that's kind of come together where you live? It's Marquette, right? Lane: Yes, yeah, we're in Marquette. That's a really good question. And my friends and peer adults here, and I have discussed that over the years. I think there's a couple of reasons. Where we live is physically very remote. We don't have any city nearby. There's no suburban kind of access to a lot of resources that might be available in urban or suburban areas. So when people move here, or stay here, either move here or don't leave, it's a choice. It's like a very intentional choice. You can't kind of access things accidentally. So a lot of the way people live is very intentional, whether that be their schooling choices, whether that be them being. somewhat off the grid, whether that be them being very like, there's a lot of people very outdoor sport focused here. And that's what drew them here. So I think living intentionally is a common thread of people I'm in community with in general, even outside of unschooling. And the piece about unschooling, I think one, I guess, very practically in Michigan, there are very few regulations around homeschooling. So just to put it plainly, there's no testing. You don't have to register with your school district. There's nothing like that. So there is more freedom to do things in a self-directed way than there might be in other places In addition to that, there's a very Midwestern kind of like live and let-liveness happening here There are more pointed school at home homeschooling communities here There are more specifically religious homeschooling communities here for sure. But outside of that, there's a very eclectic group of kind of Everyone has maybe different motivations, whether that be that it began with, you know, kind of anti-establishment kind of libertarian thinking, whether that be more, I wanted a more natural rhythm to our day. And those people kind of come together and overlap in the ways that we share value, which is in children having autonomy over their time and over their interests. Kel: That's really beautiful. Lane: Yeah, that manifests differently for all these families. And honestly, in Knotwork, we're navigating that a little in terms of finding that my children specifically, who are part of the program, are very used to controlling their own time and having autonomy over it. We've also invited children that we don't know as well and have a more school at home experience, and they are very disoriented by that freedom at first. And so that's been a beautiful challenge for me as an adult to recognize like, Yes, we can form all sorts of loose and close bonds in community, but until we're in direct relationship with kids and learners, we don't really understand the impact of what they're experiencing at home and how we can learn from that and also how they can learn from us. So that's been a challenge, but also really fun. Kel: Right, yeah. And I think a lot of spaces that I've at least make or break a space. So that's cool that you've identified it and are dealing with it rather than trying to avoid it, which I think sometimes happens. Lane: Yeah, one of my co-facilitators, her name is Amber, she's an artist, she brings a really, and she's a former educator, and she brings a really cool, intentional, philosophical point of view to things that sometimes my overachiever doer brain doesn't pause on, and I appreciate that. We've had some interesting conversations recently as we've introduced new learners to our group who we weren't in community with previously. And they're all great and we've been enjoying it, but there is conflict is obviously a really wide ranging word. It's not actual conflict in terms of anything unsafe, but it's new tension. And we've been talking about like the way that having conflict can be a form of intimacy if you're comfortable with conflict. It can be a way to... really learn more about people because especially kids, when they're feeling some stress, that can come out as behaviors that in typical society, we want to stop or control instead of ask questions about. But when we do ask questions about it instead, you do see like a guard come down. It's obviously not exclusive to kids, but I think in the way we treat adult to child hierarchy in our culture, we don't tend to get curious, we get controlling. And that's been a really nice reminder to me of the way that conflict can actually bring connection everywhere in my life, not just- Kel: That's what I was going to say. It feels like a beautiful representation of a lot of the challenges that us adults are dealing with, definitely post pandemic. As we're all coming, we're trying to come together from different lived experiences and different backgrounds. So I think that's beautiful that you guys are exploring that with the kids, but also hopefully they can take that experience towards- the rest of their lives as well. Lane: Yeah, hopefully we all can. Kel: So you've got other like the is it a co-op? So you've got the co-op. What inspired you to start Project Notwork above and beyond what you already had going on? Lane: Yeah, I know. Sometimes I ask myself these questions. You know, so as my kids have gotten older, they've been able to be more specific about. what is and isn't working in our flow and in our daily life. And it's been less about, when they're younger, you're kind of intuitively trying to follow their cues. But now they have lots of language. And my kids, as we came out of the more acute phases of the pandemic, were asking for some more structure in terms of not like evaluation of learning, but just like progression. So initially this began as a very kitchen table project where they were gathering with the families of the two other facilitators one day a week, a specific day we

    48 min

  10. 07/06/2024

    Introducing Novitas

    Welcome to the first episode of Novitas Podcast! My partner Shay and I dive in talking about our journey over the last few years exploring systems of oppression, capitalism, and share the story the led to the beginning of this project. You can find out more about the magazine at https://www.novitasmag.com. There are a dozen or so copies still available if you’d like to order one. You can support the project and podcast by becoming a paid subscriber here on Substack. If you have a person or project who you think is doing really awesome work in their community, please recommend them by emailing me at kel@novitasmag.com. Thanks for listening! TRANSCRIPT Introduction: Welcome to Novitas, a podcast that explores stories about living outside the capitalist paradigm towards collective liberation. These stories are about building systems and structures outside the status quo at the ground level. The changemakers featured here are not famous or rich. They don't work for Fortune 500 or large-scale NGOs. They are everyday people who are interested in making a difference in the lives of the people around them. Their stories are stories of inspiration for those of us who feel stuck in a system where we have no power or control. Some stories are small. Others are bigger, but each features the success and challenges of trying to make change at the local level in real, tangible and pragmatic ways. Kel: Welcome to the very first episode of the Novitas Podcast. I am really excited to start this journey. The first issue of the magazine was released this month, last month, I guess now. And the idea is to have the podcast each episode will give us the opportunity to kind of dive in deeper with each of the contributors to the magazine. But before I started talking to contributors, I wanted to give a little bit of introduction and some backstory to this project and myself. My name is Kel Smith. Over the last five years, I've kind of been on a journey to learn more systems of oppression, and how they operate, how they came to be, and what is my place in those systems. I've been writing a lot about this journey and sharing my thoughts through social media on Instagram and Substack, and I've been really fortunate to have the opportunity to learn from some amazing people on the internet, folks that I've connected with through those platforms. I am also a creative person and a community connector. So last year I had this idea to bring a lot of these people together from all over the internet to co-create a print publication and that's kind of how Novitas was born. But really that's just kind of scratching the surface of the story. Those five years have been an intense exploration and I wanted to share this introduction episode with someone who has been there through the whole process. My partner, Shay. Hi. Shay: Hi. Kel: Shay and I have been married for just under a decade. Um, actually I guess it's going to be 10 years this year. Um, we are very close. We run a home business together. We homeschool our kids together, and we spend most of our waking life together. One of the pieces of our relationship that I really love is that we spend a lot of time talking together. So while I've been sharing this journey about understanding systems of oppression online, I've also been talking about them pretty much every day in person with Shay. Shay: Which is why I don't read much of your blogs. Kel: That's okay, because he knows what's in them already, because he's the first person that I talk to. When I have an idea that hasn't solidified in my brain yet, I kind of bring it to Shay. So we've very much been on this journey together and I don't know if we can necessarily start from the beginning because... Shay: No, no, we don't have that much time. Kel: And I think if you went back to the very beginning, we could kind of pick apart pieces of our childhood and upbringing that have brought us to where we are now. But when I talk about the beginning, I often refer to unschooling kind of as the beginnings of my understandings of systems of oppression. So we started unschooling the kids six years ago, six and a half, and unschooling, I think, was a bit of a hard sell for me at the beginning because I was still very much kind of indoctrinated into the belief that kids need to learn through curriculum, through forced education. But you kind of were okay with it right from the outset. Shay: It was an easy sell for me because the system for me didn't do a whole lot and I feel like I learned very little in school. And I did most of my learning when I was outside of school and most of my learning when I graduated high school. There was one thing that always stuck with me and it was one time you said that the one thing about unschooling or de-schooling is that you need to learn to trust your children and that they'll turn out to be normal and hit their milestones at certain points and all that stuff. But the one thing that you taught me was that you have to learn to trust your children. I have always remembered that, days of frustration and stuff like that. Kel: During the disagreements. Shay: During the disagreements. I've always just come back to trying to worry about the kids but just let them be themselves. Because I see where we are now, six years into it, seven years into it, and I see progress and I'm happy with the people that the kids are becoming and all that stuff. Kel: That's it. One of the pieces that came out of unschooling for me that I really didn't expect but like it was never a focus when I started unschooling but it quickly became a focus when I started to understand unschooling and the implications of it is the ideas around adultism or childism and using age as a system of oppression. And not just, I guess, the difference between adults and children, but especially in modern education system, how kids are treated as lesser than compared to teachers, staff, whatever. And I think that was a big part of it for me when my mom says, so when are they going back to school? I can't actually imagine at this point in my life or their lives asking them to go back into that type of environment after they've experienced what it's like to live in non-oppressive relationships with adults. Shay: Yeah. I think they're smart enough that they could understand that they're not lesser than if they did choose to go back to the school system. But I know that it's not going to happen anytime soon. Kel: So one of the things that our unschooling journey taught me though out of that is that there are these kind of systems of oppression. And I often refer to unschooling as kind of the gateway for me unpacking a lot of that. There was a whole bunch of stuff that happened at the same time. There was the pandemic hit, we moved out to the country, the murder of George Floyd and the beginning of the Black Lives Matter movement. And then just my, I feel like my life for a period of time there became a whole, like just about educating myself. I think the anti-racism movement was a big piece of it for me because I didn't realize how many racist views I held. That I wouldn't have considered myself a racist person, but when I started to educate myself through like social media platforms during that period of time, I was like, oh s**t, I really am quite a racist person. I hold these views and I never intended to uphold these systems of oppression. And I think I wouldn't have been able to recognize that if I also hadn't been doing the work through unschooling to try and treat my kids with more respect and remove a lot of that kind of power over dynamic. There was a lot of unpacking. Shay: Yeah, there was. Kel: An immense amount of unpacking. Shay: Yeah, and I... I didn't consciously recognize that I was part of the systems of oppression. It was just like, how do we move forward? And I guess the thing that we have experience is with the children and the school system. Kel: Well, it's something that we have direct control over, right? Shay: Yeah. Kel: It's something that we can take control of in our lives, in our kids' lives. In a lot of cases, the systems that we're dealing with don't feel like systems that we do have control over because they're so big and they affects so many people. So when we talk about improving the lives of people of color or improving the lives of you know people of low income or that are experiencing homelessness, we don't feel like we have a lot of control over that. But we do have control over certain aspects of it and the obvious one is with our kids. But also I would say I don't know if it was in tandem but it feels like around the same time there seemed to be a very... maybe even a little before... there was a really obvious decision that we made as partners in life to try and not work for other people. Not work for... we could see like we talked almost ad nauseam about making money for other people and being treated like s**t at our jobs and not being valued as people and like Shay: job jumping... Kel: A lot of job jumping and trying to find a good place where like We just wanted to be respected as individuals and people and not have to suck up to people and not have to play that game. So I think that was even prior to the whole unschooling thing, but it seemed really clear that we were trying to opt out of that system as well. Shay: I think unknowingly, just trying to find the better way and then deciding. I think the homeschool and the self-employment thing was all in the same calendar year. Kel: And I don't think I would have considered myself anti-capitalist at that period of time, but I think there was during that whole shift, there was also like the whole shift with the unschooling and anti-racism. There was also a shift that I think we were both making towards undoing the cultural narrative around capitalism. Shay: I think we had like a massive shift. It may not have been the same calendar year, but I feel like i

    22 min
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Exploring stories that show us how to live outside the capitalist paradigm towards collective liberation. novitas.substack.com

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  • Creator
    subsomatic
  • Years Active
    2024 - 2025
  • Episodes
    10
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © subsomatic
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    Novitas Podcast