Trespassing

Antonia Malchik
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Trespassing is a podcast version of the newsletter On the Commons, about ownership, private property, and what we lose in the privatization of the commons antonia.substack.com

  1. ٢١ يناير

    Healing Long Covid

    If you’re new here, welcome to On the Commons! Some places to roam: * How, and and why, does anyone own the earth? * The limitations of meditation and lure of silence. * Walkability when a problem is systemic, or: you can’t solve for traffic. ✔️ Join over 7,000 On the Commons readers. Upgrade here. One of my oldest and closest friends, a roommate from my undergraduate days, is a public school art teacher in Minneapolis, Minnesota. During the Twin Cities’ current federal government-driven violent crisis, she is part of a team arranging rides for kids, raising money for rent assistance, etc. She has given me permission to share her Venmo if you are looking for a way to contribute: https://account.venmo.com/u/AlisonShipmanThompson Recently, I stopped at the county landfill to tip my recycling into their dedicated bins. The region I live in doesn’t have much recycling. Cardboard, paper, and aluminum cans. No plastics. We used to have glass recycling but the person who owned that equipment got ill, and nobody else has been able to find enough market for the recycled products from glass. I pay for a weekly compost service, which makes me feel a little better, especially when I order compost from them in the spring and bury seed potatoes in it. Going to the landfill is both gut-wrenching and surreal. When I was a teenager, the dump was a pit in the ground. Now it’s an ever-growing small mountain. A few years ago, the county I live in purchased 90 more acres to expand the landfill, a reality that’s a bit of a brain-twister: arable, beautiful, life-giving, and expensive land is needed so that we can dump our waste, probably most of which is the result of entirely unnecessary consumption, including my own. All I can say is that most of that waste stays local. There is no out of sight out of mind; you can see the landfill just off the main highway. The recycling bins are near the appliance dump: a growing hill of dishwashers, washing machines, stoves, and refrigerators backed by stands of spruces and lodgepole pines. I often see Bald Eagles at the dump. While the sight is sad—it’s obviously the trash that draws them there—a Bald Eagle never fails to be majestic. The soul bows, as I wrote once, at the sight of that grand white head, or the speckled one of a juvenile, those enormous wings almost unmoving through the air, staying aloft with only an occasional downdraft. This time, I glanced around for Ravens and instead saw a Bald Eagle fly to the top of a tree. Then I looked more closely, my car still running with Nine Inch Nails on the CD player, and couldn’t help saying out loud to myself, whoa. I counted fifteen Bald Eagles roosting around the appliance area of the landfill, occasionally lifting off to soar over to another tree. Fifteen Bald Eagles. When I was a kid, I could not have imagined such a sight, at the dump or anywhere else. From consuming DDT in fish and other dangers—like the lead from hunting bullets that linger in animals the Eagles eat—Bald Eagles were in crisis. It was something we learned about in Montana schools, or at least the ones I attended. A passing mention: they were an endangered species but the adults had it covered, we were assured. They were fixing it. I’m going to turn 50 this year, and for about the last decade those long-ago lessons have been one of the most hopeful things I carry with me, somewhat unexpectedly. Bald Eagles were delisted from being endangered in 2007, and though we obviously live in a world run by a domination ethos, one that does not value life and in which there are very few adults “fixing” anything, a dominant culture whose soul does not bow to Eagle overhead, whether in the wilderness or at the dump, I now see Bald Eagles quite often. As a child growing up in Montana I can barely remember seeing even one. A week or two after counting fifteen of them at the dump, I was away for a weekend with some of my closest friends, near home but out of town, with long views to the mountain ranges and over farm fields. Two of my friends kept spotting Bald Eagles flying back and forth over the fields, and resting in the trees across the road. I took a few very bad photos of said Eagles. We cooked food and smelled the snow and two friends taught me and another to play pinochle. All my friends but me ventured out for forest walks and cross-country skiing. Much as my physical and mental self ached to be moving through the woods, I am only just beginning to feel a bit of strength and stamina return after at least two years of being flattened by Long Covid, and recovering from a hip surgery in October. The reality of Long Covid has been maddening. I’m tired all the time, struggle with brain fog, really feel like I shouldn’t be driving but where I live it’s almost unavoidable, and want nothing more than to lie for hours in the sun by a river. Any river. Last summer I regretfully canceled my volunteer wilderness trail crew commitment and didn’t sign up for a single barbed wire fencing removal weekend. My entire being desperately needed wilderness, and barbed wire removal in particular is one of the world-repairing tasks I like doing most, but I knew I couldn’t handle the long miles of hiking into camp, much less the longer days of manual labor. Long Covid has no real fixes from medicine yet. I am very fortunate to have a number of friends with extensive experience on both sides of medicine, both providers and patients. They have advice, and send me scientific studies and reports of treatment trials. I try different remedies. So far, what’s worked best has been excrutiatingly slow, gentle exercise, along with any long hours I can spend by myself lying on rocks near running water, doing nothing at all. I hesitate to say that nature cures, even though I believe it does and research backs that up, but it feels like about the only thing that might work in the long run. The slow, frustrating reality of trying to heal Long Covid—which I don’t even know is possible—reflects a little too closely the slow, frustrating nature of trying to heal the scars left by several millennia of domination cultures and subsequent intergenerational traumas. If we could just get a start, I keep thinking, the way I finally got a start on slow, frustrating exercise by grumbling my way to the community gym last month because the sewer backed up into my basement and I needed a place with a shower. But all those forces of domination and commodification, they don’t want to give room for a start. They might lose profits, and they might lose power, and for people whose only sustenance, whose only meaning, comes from those two things, the thought of losing them probably feels like death. The rest of us have to find our way to stopping them anyway. And in the meantime, as I try to remind both myself and readers here, there are people all over the planet getting a start on healing, on revitalization and life-giving practices, on reclaiming the commons despite forces that want nothing but more extraction, more oppression, more pain and poison and harm. The only reason humanity has survived this long is that enough people have fundamentally refused to give up caring, no matter how slow or how frustrating its results might be in coming. While hanging out on the couch of the house my friends and I were staying at, where Bald Eagles flew across much prettier landscape than that found at the dump, I thought about longstanding debates over what is deemed “natural.” About why wilderness was invented in the first place, and why protection of it is fought for: quite simply, because the dominant culture can’t seem to help destroying everything else. I had an essay published recently in American Prairie Journal with the title “Where Land Repairs the Soul.” (My essay is on p. 38, or 40 on the Issuu platform; excellent reading throughout this issue!) Among the subjects of enclosures of the commons and the meaning of wilderness, the essay was really about belonging. About what it would take for every person in every place to feel, even for a few moments, what it might mean to belong to land. Not to own it, not even necessarily to use it. Simply to belong to it. That sense of belonging comes easily to me out in the million-acre wildernesses around where I live, where I take photos to share here, photos that try to evoke some of the incredible sense of rest and being-aliveness those places give me. But if I take enough time and give enough attention, I feel it, too, at the dump, watching a Bald Eagle soar and knowing right through the soles of my feet that under and even within the appliances and mountain of trash, everything is alive. I can never disentangle myself from interconnection with it all even if I wanted to. And I don’t. I don’t want to. Learning to repair both the world and our individual selves might turn out to be one of the greatest gifts humanity has ever received, right below the gift of this miraculous planet herself. I wish the repair weren’t necessary, but it’s a process worth doing well. Who knows what this landfill will look like in a hundred years, or five hundred, or a thousand, what world the Bald Eagles’ descendants might know. Your trash might be a Bald Eagle’s treasure, and in some strange way it’s mine, too. Until March 31, 5% of On the Commons revenue will be given to the 2026 James Welch Native Lit Festival. Last quarter’s 5% went to Firekeeper Alliance. Receipts of revenue return can be found here. On the Commons seeks to reclaim the commons, and to revive our sense of home and responsibility to the same. In keeping with the commons, it has no paywall. To support further research, please consider a paying subscription. Get full access to On the Commons at antonia.substack.com/subscribe

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  2. ١٥ يناير

    How bad does it have to get

    Following is a revised essay originally published in 2021. People leave home for all kinds of reasons. This essay is not a judgment; the relevance of this question— “What would it take for a person to leave?”—never fails to fascinate and sadden me. Friends sometimes ask me how long I’ll stick it out in Montana. It’s natural, I suppose, to wonder why, if the politics of a place is oppressive or repressive, one doesn’t just move. And yet, when you feel that you belong to a place—not that it belongs to you, but that you belong to it—picking up and leaving isn’t a light notion. As a born-and-raised Montanan who’s the daughter of on the one hand a born-and-raised-Montanan, and on the other of an emigre and exile who was not allowed to see his family or return to his home country for nearly twenty years, the questions of home and belonging are almost always with me. When I read or watch news stories of refugees, whether from Syria or Honduras or elsewhere, all I can think of is how bad it has to get to force a person to pick up sticks and leave home. My own Russian-Jewish grandparents were refugees in the Ural Mountains during the Siege of Leningrad. It wasn’t a choice they made willingly, and it’s one many people didn’t survive. How bad would it have to get for me, for you, to turn your back on your home and know you might never be able to return? How many people actually choose to leave their homelands? What imagined countries do they carry in their hearts? —- These subjects, of home and belonging, are trickling around the world, finding outlets in places I didn’t expect to see them. I keep coming across conversations of community and the drawbacks of fierce individualism, and the damage that absolutist private property rights cause. I bump into these concepts in random places, and just in the last few weeks an essay of mine about private property versus the health of the commons, published five years ago on Aeon, went from around 6,000 Facebook shares (where it had stuck since it came out) to nearly 70,000. It’s clearly hitting some kind of nerve, though where exactly, I don’t know. One of the recent readers of that essay shared a music video that they’d helped to make to advocate for preservation of a waterway in India, teaching me the concept of “poromboke.” In their comment on the essay, they explained: “The Poromboke is a medieval tamil agrarian revenue term that denotes lands reserved for shared communal uses. Such lands cannot be traded or built upon, and yield no revenue to the crown or the government. The term and its legal essence have survived well into present times. But the quality and health of the Poromboke commons began its decline when the property making agenda of the British colonial masters collided with the notion of the commons. Perhaps because it was strictly not property that could be traded, it began to be seen as worthless. Today, the word poromboke has degraded culturally to refer to worthless persons or places.” One of the lyrics of the music video they shared sticks with me: “After Ennore got its power plant, acres of ash, but river scant.” The whole ensemble reminds me of a short video I shared a few months back, about sand mining in Cambodia for Singapore’s expansion that ruins island fisheries. Sometimes we don’t even need to flee home. Sometimes, maybe most often, someone steals it from underfoot. —- I listened to an interview with Stephen Jenkinson recently where he talked about being a citizen of the soil. It came up partly in a discussion on individual rights—the eternal pull between “freedom from” and “freedom to”—and dovetailed strangely on my watching of Adam Curtis’s documentary Can’t Get You Out of My Head. There is something freeing about knowing that you can’t have everything exactly as you wish, that you owe something to the communities around you. I know Montana has a lot of narrow-minded people and especially narrow-minded politicians. So does everywhere else. But it remains just about the most beautiful place I have ever been. It’s my home. And I don’t see why I should let the Christian nationalists and uber-wealthy and resource-extractors have all of this life-richness to themselves. Besides which, most people can’t afford to just leave, and the rivers and trees and wildlife certainly can’t pick up and relocate somewhere else. I can’t imagine living far from the rivers that have so often saved me. If I think of myself as a citizen of the watersheds I rely on, the dynamics of this place and its struggles look very different. It’s worth fighting for, even if I lose. The roots will remain. Some stuff to read or listen to: * This two-hour episode of Backcountry Hunters & Anglers Podcast & Blast with conservation biologist and Aldo Leopold scholar Curt Meine was so interesting I might have to listen to it again: “We’re at an inflection point because the convergence of concerns can no longer be avoided. . . . The long-term has hit the short-term.” * Scotland Outdoors talked with a former paratrooper walking the coastline of the UK. If you need another reminder that physical and/or real-world interaction can help restore a faith in humanity, this episode has it: “What [people] do to go out of their way to want to help you is quite phenomenal.” * I also loved this Scotland Outdoors episode on the importance of land connection for refugees. It presents a number of ideas I’d never thought about before, and reminded me of Jonathan Stalls telling me about the group of Iraqi refugee women he often walks with in Denver, and the kind of community they’ve built. * The growing problem of rural America as a dumping ground for corporate waste, by Alan Guebert in Farm Forum. * American Scholar has a pair of essays pinpointing the disconcerting idea that people might be willing to forego any attempt to fight for liberal democracy if given enough physical comfort, one on China and one on Russia. * The Smarty Pants podcast rebroadcast a fun interview with historian and Women Warriors author Pamela Toler about the ample evidence for women warriors throughout history and some of the ways that past historians pretzeled evidence to erase the existence of women who were honored for their fighting abilities. * I keep forgetting to share this piece from The Guardian cracking open the idea of the literary canon and pointing out that Māori have a canon, too. * Using ethnography and the insights gained from the close observational skills of mushroom hunters to inform AI development and improve medical diagnostics, by Anne Harris and Lisa Herzog in Aeon’s sister magazine Pysche. * If we needed another reminder that highways are destructive and that you can never, ever solve congestion by keeping people dependent on cars, Arch Daily has a good article about highways and their futures. (I have never been to Houston and knew it was car-centric but not that one highway has 26 lanes?! And that after it expanded, traffic increased by 30% — “induced demand” is the name for that phenomenon.) Get full access to On the Commons at antonia.substack.com/subscribe

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    Everlasting mythologies: Anglo-Saxon identity

    The following is a revised version of an essay originally published in January 2022. Many years ago, late into Barack Obama’s presidential administration, maybe in 2015 or even early 2016, I had a long messaging conversation with an acquaintance about some of the right-wing movements and talking points that had become prevalent over the previous few years, specifically the fear-mongering over “they’re going to take our guns.” “They” being liberal people or, more specifically, Democrats. Guns being in America of course not just a tool or even a weapon but an enormous and lethal flashpoint of a longstanding culture war. Why, I asked this acquaintance, did people keep believing and investing emotion in “They’re going to take our guns” when for the previous eight years it simply . . . hadn’t happened? How did people keep believing in this fear month after month, year after year? In response, this acquaintance gave me the first good explanation I’d yet had about echo chambers and the dissolution of our information ecosystems—long predating the rise of social media, which further weaponized forces already in motion. Over Facebook messages, she gave me a long, detailed history of her own upbringing in Rapture-oriented Baptist culture. In her childhood, she told me, no matter how many years went by, the Rapture was always just around the corner, God always just about to bathe the world in blood and flame, and spirit the righteous to heaven. The key, she said, was that the adults in her world managed to keep the fear of impending doom fresh and alive, month after month, year after year, down to her entire school sobbing in terror one morning when they’d been told the Rapture was coming shortly after noon that day. “During the formative years of many conservatives’ lives,” she wrote me, “this was the experience.” A constant drumbeat of being told that the end of days was just around the corner, and a nonstop fear of the future. Whatever people were told was going to happen, she said, was always in the future, and the future was always to be feared. It was one of the best and earliest explanations I’d read—aside from Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer, as I wrote about a while back—that showed how deeply identity is involved in choices and decisions that from an outsider’s perspective make no sense. Ever since then, I have intentionally looked for works and projects that either explain or engage with identity. Real identity, the way that our perception of ourselves, and of others in relation to ourselves, dictates how we’ll vote or even what we’ll believe. It’s why this anthropology article about the blow to identity when steel mills in America’s midwest closed down being just as important as the blow to income sticks in my mind, as does this personal essay about growing up in a Christian homeschooling evangelical world that trained children to be warriors in American culture battles—and to win those battles in legislatures and courtrooms. It’s why this essay from Aeon about echo chambers and epistemic bubbles has ended up being the one I recommend to people more than almost any other. I can’t think of many more entrenched identities in America and several other countries (I’m looking at you, Russia) than whiteness. Religion, wealth-based hierarchical structures, patriarchy, anti-Semitism, and human supremacy over the rest nature are the only identities I can think of that have deeper roots. Kelly Brown Douglas’s 2015 book Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God tries to get to the source of this identity and its staying power. Referring frequently to her own identity as a Black woman and mother, and position as an Episcopal priest, Douglas begins her book looking for the roots of “stand your ground” laws, which in many U.S. states allow someone to shoot another if they feel threatened; the book centers around the case of Trayvon Martin, a teenager in Florida who was killed while walking home by a man who used the “stand your ground” defense. She pins those “stand your ground” laws to ideas of American exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny, and traces them not back to 1776 or even 1619, but much further, back to the first century CE and the writings of Tacitus, a Roman general who wrote A Treatise on the Situation, Manners and Inhabitants of Germany, commonly known as Germania: “In 98 CE Tacitus published Germania, which has been called ‘one of the most dangerous books ever written.’ Perhaps it is. The danger is not so much in what Tacitus said, but in how his words have been construed. In the brief space of thirty pages, he offered an ethnological perspective that would have tragic consequences for centuries to come. This perspective played a significant role in the Nazis’ monstrous program for ‘racial purity.’ It is the racial specter behind the stand-your-ground culture that robbed Trayvon of his life. “In Germania Tacitus provides a meticulous portrait, based on others’ writings and observations, of the Germanic tribes who fended off Rome’s first-century empire-building agenda. . . . Perhaps what is most significant, at least in garnering the attention of political architects for centuries to come, is that Tacitus portrayed these ancient Germans as possessing a peculiar respect for individual rights and an almost ‘instinctive love for freedom.’ . . . According to many later interpreters, Tacitus was describing the perfect form of government.” Douglas’s arguments track through the conflation of idealized Anglo-Saxon society with Christianity in England, and how early English immigrants brought that attitude to North America intact because they thought that even the reformed English church wasn’t Anglo-Saxon enough: “The English considered themselves the descendants of the Germanic tribes identified by Tacitus. They believed that these tribes were their Anglo-Saxon ancestors. . . . Notwithstanding the fact that some of Tacitus’s ancient tribes were probably of Norse heritage, these reformers generally agreed that corruptions entered into English church and society with the Norman conquest in 1066. Popular belief held that the Normans adulterated the very English laws and institutions that served to protect individual liberties. . . . “The Pilgrims and Puritans fled from the Church of England to build a religious institution more befitting Anglo-Saxon virtue and freedom. They considered themselves the Anglo-Saxon remnant that was continuing a divine mission. They traced this mission beyond the woods of Germany to the Bible. Thus, they saw themselves ‘as the Israelites in God’s master plan.’” This faith, Douglas reiterates later in the book, is crucial to understanding the lasting power of American exceptionalism: “Not only did the early American Anglo-Saxons believe their mission to be one of erecting God’s ‘city on a hill’ but they also came to believe that they essentially had divinity running through their veins. The Protestant evangelicals in particular believed themselves to be as close a human manifestation of God on earth as one can get. In general, however, the religious legitimation of America’s exceptionalist narrative suggests that to be against Anglo-Saxon America is to be against God.” The crux of Douglas’s arguments lie in the development of whiteness as treasured property—property created through the myth of Anglo-Saxon exceptionalism (which she calls the “wizard behind the curtain of white supremacy”), mixed with belief in preordained Christian dominionism: “Whiteness in this respect is not simply cherished property, but it is also sacred property. . . . Within the religious narrative of America’s exceptionalism, anything that cannot pass the test of whiteness cannot get to God.” I’ve thought a lot about humans as property—women most universally, and slavery worldwide, reaching back thousands of years and continuing through the present day; the philosopher Aristotle described an enslaved person as a property with a soul back in the 4th century BCE—but until I read Stand Your Ground (and later, thanks to a recommendation by Sherri Spelic, Cheryl Harris’s 1993 paper “Whiteness as Property”), I hadn’t thought much about how the creation of a class of people as property to be treasured and protected easily turns everyone else into something to be controlled, something—not someone—that becomes a threat when it invades the space or entitlements of the treasured, protected class. A key component of property rights, Douglas reminds us, is the right to exclude, which “ultimately ushers in the stand-your-ground culture.” “This right to exclude inexorably gives way to other fundamental rights—the right to claim land and the right to stake out space. These rights, Harris [Cheryl Harris, in “Whiteness as Property”] points out, were actually ‘ratified’ at America’s beginnings with ‘the conquest, removal, and extermination of Native American life and culture.’ From then on, she says, ‘Possession and occupation of land was validated and therefore privileged’ as a white property right. . . . These rights of exclusion, land, and space are the defining characteristics of whiteness as treasured property.” Stand Your Ground lacks direct reference to the Doctrine of Discovery, the 15th-century papal decree that, as I’ve written about several times before, forms the continuing legal basis for much of America’s outright theft of land from Native American nations. I wish Douglas would have examined the intersection of the Doctrine with mythological Anglo-Saxon supremacy because they became deeply intertwined, but in general her points still hold. According to Douglas, it’s in the ancient idea of the Anglo-Saxons as some sort of mythically perfect society and people that we find the roots of much of America’s founding ide

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  4. ٣٠‏/١٠‏/٢٠٢٥

    On greed: how much is enough?

    If you’re new here, welcome to On the Commons! Some places to roam: * How, and and why, does anyone own the earth? * The limitations of meditation and lure of silence. * Walkability when a problem is systemic, or: you can’t solve for traffic. ✔️ Join over 7,000 On the Commons readers. Upgrade here. A few days ago, I was sitting by this river, near a U.S. Forest Service cabin where I went recently for a sorely needed offline, off-grid, off-network recalibration. It’s been too long since I sat in the woods by myself for a few days. Late October, the larch trees have yellowed, turning mountainsides bright and the woods full of unexpected sunshine even on gloomy days. Larch in autumn is a spirit-lifter, an anti-demon spell, a joyous shaft of light when the world is shifting dark. It snowed the first night I was at the cabin. I trekked down to the river carrying my coffee the next morning before sunrise, happy despite knowing that in my rush to pack water, food, sleeping bag, and books, I’d grabbed a coat too thin and decided against snow boots—a mistake and I knew it, as the hole in the sole of the thin canvas shoes I’ve been intending to replace reminded me. Ravens flew down the river and high above the trees, more than I usually see at this place. I could hear more further off in the woods and wondered what was keeping them so social. I wondered that for the next three days and never got an answer. They sounded not anxious exactly, but somewhat like me getting my stuff ready to stay in the woods and my kid packed up to stay at their dad’s: busy, harried, organized but frazzled. The river at that spot is wide, its rapids gentle but the rushing tumble of water strong enough to be heard a long way off. I watched some rapids tumbling around opposite bank from where I sat, the burble and leap over hidden rocks tricking my mind into thinking they looked like two otters playing in the water. Wait, I thought. Those are two otters playing in the water. I recently spent several days pitting, pureeing, and dehydrating a vast amount of plums picked from a friend’s trees—trees so heavy with fruit that after an hour of filling my bucket, the branches looked untouched. My friend had already picked and dehydrated his own many batches of fruit leather from his other trees, which ripen earlier, but I’d been too busy with the rest-of-life, the crises and plans and bureaucracies and commitments that translate into too little time in the garden and out foraging. But this one bucket made it into my home, my fingers purpled dry by the slicing and pitting and feeding to the blender—a many bladed monster that, as I texted to the friend I’m renting a furnished house from, looks like something from a horror movie. In the kitchen now is enough fruit leather and dried apples—from another friend’s August generosity—to see my kid and me through the winter if we’re not too greedy. How does one get that way? Too greedy. Or perhaps the question is, how does a human, or a whole society of humans, lose perspective on what is enough? I recently finished Caroline Dodds Pennock’s book On Savage Shores: How Indigenous Americans Discovered Europe, and in it Pennock described briefly the value of cacao beans in Mesoamerica in the late 1400s and early 1500s, which were a form of wealth: a turkey egg or avocado could cost three beans, a small rabbit thirty. Only the very wealthy could feast with gourds of cacao to drink; when resource-hungry European people came, claimed, and took, they took so much that even just reading about it felt like watching land being actively drained of life: gold, emeralds, brazilwood, cacao, people. And yet, as many Indigenous people of the time noted after having spent time in the “noble” houses of Seville and Lisbon, no matter how much wealth was siphoned from their homelands, it did nothing to change the circumstances of ordinary European peoples. The poverty of the majority of people’s lives was often remarked on, especially when contrasted with the opulence of royalty and their hangers-on. How much is enough? What breaks a belief in kinship and reciprocity—how does one lose the knowledge that it is mutual care, not taking more for ourselves, that gives the best assurance of security? I’d like to have a functional health care system that doesn’t bankrupt people, and to not worry about food and housing, but beyond a certain point can’t imagine an amount of money that would replace the kinds of relationships woven among people, and between humans and ecosystems, inherent in nature sharing gifts so wealthy that even multiple families can’t use them all—like my friends’ plum and apple trees, or the potatoes and strawberries I grow, or the wild huckleberries throughout the nearby mountains—and in people sharing them with one another. Maybe “enough” is forever undefinable, guided only by that clear thread of relationship and reciprocity, of what keeps life life-ing. There were in fact two otters in the river. I watched them for a long time, absolutely filled with delight. They tumbled and rolled upstream, all along the far shore, their sleek bodies and tiny whiskered heads popping out of the water every few seconds, their slim tails flying up to dive back down. I wanted to step into my real skin, like a Selkie, and swim across the freezing water to join them. I wanted to not feel the frozen ground so acutely through my thin-soled shoes, to be indifferent to the bite of chill wind through my inadequate coat. I wanted to dance a song to Moon that night and to know each Raven by name, and to soar with the Bald Eagle who circled over the river downstream, toward the new-snowed mountains. I wanted these minutes to be my entire life. I was, in fact, greedy for them to last forever. On the Commons has no paywall, in keeping with the ethics of plum trees and rivers. Telling these stories takes time, resources, attention, and, most importantly, care. Please consider supporting this work with a paid subscription. From a distance, like here in Montana’s North Fork valley, the larches—or tamaracks—turning yellow in autumn look like the warmth of a fire, a controlled burn, but when I’m deep in the rain-shrouded woods draped in the deep green of fir, spruce, and pine, an autumn larch is a streak of sunlight. Get full access to On the Commons at antonia.substack.com/subscribe

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    Hope is the heartwood

    If you’re new here, welcome to On the Commons! Here, we explore questions as varied as: * The disastrous and ongoing legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery, the epitome of ownership’s claim “I took it; now it’s mine” in the form of “I saw it; now it’s mine.” * Is it possible to consume without exploitation? * What is wrong with Russia? ✔️ Join over 7,000 On the Commons readers. Upgrade here. Watch Duty, a non-profit providing real-time information in wildfire country—information we previously got from the U.S. government’s now-eviscerated EPA through InciWeb—will receive this quarter’s 5% of On the Commons paid subscription revenue. Firekeeper Alliance, “committed to reducing suicide rates among the Blackfeet Nation and other Indigenous communities in Montana,” will receive next quarter’s 5%. (Accountability: this page shows receipt of revenue return from each quarter.) Some years ago when I still lived I upstate New York, I began working at a sawmill. I had two very small children at the time, and had never intended nor desired to be a full-time stay-at-home mom, not to mention be one and working at the same time (due to the full-time stay-at-home mom reality, most of my work happened in the middle of the night, a capacity I no longer have). But I was doing exactly that, and rapidly dying inside because staying at home with children all day is not, to put it mildly, my calling in life. One of my kids went to part-time preschool twice a week at a nature museum, which also offered adult classes like beekeeping and wild foraging, both of which I took—out of curiosity but also to stay sane—along with rustic woodworking, an activity I’d never imagined myself doing. I am the kind of person who can’t be trusted with a table saw or even, frankly, a spirit level. The rustic woodworking artist who taught the class introduced me to New York Heartwoods, a micro-mill run by a woman (coincidentally, also from Montana) who’d bought a Wood-Mizer LT40 and specialized in milling wood from downed and diseased trees on public and private land. Working at the sawmill a couple days a week—interning, really, since I was there to learn and wasn’t being paid—helped keep me from going completely numb, from depression and dissociation from life, and it got me into research on embodied learning, but I was also intrigued by the mill’s mission: the owner only worked with fallen or scavenged trees. The point of the mill was to introduce circularity within the wood milling system, which fit right in with efforts I’d been making toward supporting local food systems and fending off long-term despair over single-use plastics. We worked with a lot of city Ash trees felled by emerald ash borer, and Cedar that had been cleared from farm fields. I spent one entire day planing Cedar planks for someone who’d rescued them, already milled, from her family’s farm and was making an art installation out of them. Another time we spent most of a cold, snowy day dragging out enormous old beams from a fallen barn, taking them back to the mill to be sawn into boards that would be lightly sanded and used to make shelves. The mill’s shady, forested yard was full of beauties, every one of them cared for, whether already milled and kiln-dried or not. I don’t ever plan on moving away from Montana, whose forests are full of soft-wooded Pine and Fir, Aspen and Spruce, but do sometimes miss working with hardwood. One day, we were milling reclaimed beams from an old barn for a client. Old barn beams are a pain because they’re often full of nails—long, heavy, rusted nails that are hard to spot. We ruined a few blades as hidden nails made it through and wrecked the metal, and finally gave up. That barn beam went back to its owner, or maybe to a scrap pile, joining the piles of beautiful wood resting around the property, testimony to one woman’s commitment to making sure their lives continued. It only occurred to me later to wonder why we hadn’t taken the time to look for and remove the nails ahead of time, why we sacrificed several saw blades and in the end the beam itself rather than take the time to remove as many nails as we could find and make the wood workable again. It obviously would have been a waste of time, but then again, the entire endeavor could be classified a waste of time, if all we use for measurement are the standards of capital and efficiency. A couple months ago I succumbed to the urge to crawl through all the essays and posts in this newsletter, starting from the very first essay in late summer 2020, about Marcus Aurelius and my own cognitive disconnects around the U.S. invasion of Iraq, when my older sister was still in the military. I ended up deleting almost 200 out of nearly 300 essays and posts. Some were from before Substack launched its Twitter-like Notes platform, and were brief photo + quote + sentence or two “walking compositions,” a practice I’d migrated over from my deleted Instagram. Many posts I thought were pointless, and others need more revision work. The ones I kept, I’m slowly revising and recording audio for, since I only started doing audio versions in late 2023 (I’ve made my way through nearly 20, starting from the beginning). Many of the posts and essays I deleted, I saved in offline Word documents, collecting them by theme. By far, the largest of these collections is one I’ve labeled “Abundance and Commodification,” with over 40 pages of text. Some of what I’ve rewritten here about my time working at a sawmill are lines scavenged from that document. Out of all the writing I do on the commons, the complementary topics of abundance and commodification—of food and seeds in particular, but of everything in general, including labor, creativity, and ideas—overwhelms the amount I have written about land ownership, which surprised me because I feel like I never shut up about land ownership, and repeat myself to a tiresome degree. Something about rereading all of those words and stories, and collecting together the ones that I felt needed more editing, or perhaps shaping into a larger, more cohesive project, reminded me of my faith in storytelling, how deeply I believe in its power, and in the world’s need for it. For more stories, stories with heart and truth, as many as possible from as many different perspectives as possible, especially from voices, people, and places who’ve been heard the least. Every iteration, not for the purpose of telling anyone else how to feel or what to think, but sharing the unique experience of what it is to live one’s own individual life. The joy, the pain, the traumas, the grief, the love, the visions and losses and hope. I don’t think we can ever have enough ways to help ourselves feel what it’s like to live in someone else’s experience. Yet it often feels like the world is awash in stories. Good stories, important stories. Stories we need to hear and stories we need to tell. Fantastic fiction that opens up possibilities for imagining different ways of living; investigative reporting that unfolds the truth of the world. I have been floored by the work of brilliant documentary filmmakers, by novelists who are bona fide geniuses, many of them personal friends. And what changes? It is very easy for the path opened up by that question to lead to despair. I’ve been there myself more than once—I’m there myself more than once on any given day, and I don’t think it’s solely a genetic half-Russian Jewish fatalism. It’s looking at the world, and humans, as clear-eyed as possible. It’s seeing people I believed in and trusted coopt genuine need and good causes for their own benefit; it’s seeing the hard work of millions crash against the walls of capital and power. But down that path is also possibility. My father used to say, and still does, that the biggest problem in the world is lack of imagination. He meant a capacity to place ourselves in other people’s lives and experiences, a capacity for empathy. It’s both true and bigger than that. Every story shared is a chip in the systems and structures that seem unbreakable and insurmountable. Most of the time we don’t see what’s changed until long after the fact. Real life isn’t a Hollywood apocalypse movie with sudden shocks to the system and people screaming for the walls. We’ll never know what cracks it all open. But those stories, that work, looking at life slant and seeing what can change, that’s how the light gets in. After taking my first rustic woodworking class, I couldn’t get enough of working with the diversity of hardwoods that grow and fall in the U.S.’s northeast. I learned about the different high-end uses of varieties of Maple, and how bad Black Locust smells—there is no other way to say it but that Black Locust smells like ass—but also how useful it is. Black Locust is so hard that it can be used in decking. It’s like cement board. I learned how bacteria and fungi cause spalting and how beautiful its black lines are lacing through decaying stumps or sawn boards. In midwinter, the mill’s owner sent me on a day-long chainsaw safety course, where, after several hours of learning to care for chainsaws and safety equipment and looking at photos of people who’d had horrifying accidents, I stood in knee-deep snow and cut down a Pin Oak. I decided I never wanted to use a chainsaw again because I am clumsy and it was terrifying. The entire project of New York Heartwoods was at core anti-capital. It was inefficient, time-consuming, space-consuming. Slow. Laborious. It was an enormous amount of work simply to find markets for the wood products, much less retrieve the trees and logs and mill and kiln-dry and shape and sand it all. That entire day one employee and I spent planing someone’s recovered stack of Cedar planks? The client probably could have bought something similar from IKEA for far less money

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    Oligarchy: the power of wealth

    If you’re new here, welcome to On the Commons! Here, we explore questions as varied as: * The disastrous and ongoing legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery. * Is it possible to consume without exploitation? * What Is Wrong With Russia? ✔️ Join over 7,000 On the Commons readers. Upgrade here. Watch Duty, a non-profit providing crucial real-time information in wildfire country—information we previously got from the U.S. government’s now-eviscerated EPA through InciWeb—will receive 5% of On the Commons paid subscription revenue from now until the end of June. Messengers for Health, founded “to improve the health of Apsáalooke (Crow Indian) men, women, and children using solutions that respect and honor Apsáalooke strengths, culture, stories, and language,” received last quarter’s 5%. (Accountability: this page shows receipt of revenue return from each quarter.) “Oligarchy is based on the notion that those who are unequal in one respect are in all respects unequal; being unequal, that is, in property, they suppose themselves to be unequal absolutely.” –Aristotle, Politics, 350 BCE My last year of college, I applied for a coveted internship at a relatively prestigious literary magazine in St. Paul, Minnesota. When the acceptance arrived, I was excited for all of a few hours. Then it came home to me that the internship—as is the case for most internships—was unpaid. The editor who’d interviewed me seemed surprised when I called later to ask about the possibility of even a small stipend. It was the final semester of my final undergraduate year. I’d taken the previous semester off of university and moved back to Montana to be an adult around for my younger sister, who, at fifteen, was in high school and living for the most part alone (long story). Before that, I’d been working up to five different jobs at a time to support myself through college. The week I was offered the internship, I went for a long walk with someone I’d been friends with since our first confused, heady days of freshman year. He bought me a sandwich and listened to me angst about whether or not I could afford the money—and the time—to work at a job I’d probably enjoy but for which I wouldn’t be paid. It wasn’t possible, I already knew that, and at the end of our walk we parted at the door of the family diner where I’d been working as a waitress the previous year—a job I took because making tips got me a lot more rent and grocery money than the coffee shop I’d worked at my first two years of college. So I turned down the internship and waited tables instead. Every now and then another waitress and I got together at her apartment to paint our nails and watch Xena: Warrior Princess and I tried not to think about who got the assistant editing position I’d been so excited to be offered. The advantages of wealth and privilege get mentioned a lot but not usually with much substance. I’m not sure how many of us truly understand how wealth accumulation turns into power, influence, and status—the literary world is only one small example of how the financial freedom to work for free gives a person entry and connections in all directions, from publishing opportunities to awards and grants to the strange situation that’s evolved in the past couple decades where “writer” is in many places equated with teaching workshops almost more than it is with publishing, or even with the act of writing itself. But this isn’t only about the writing world. It’s about money, and power, and their feedback loop. It took me months to even sit down to write a first draft of this essay because the subject bumps against one of my own failures of imagination: it’s very hard for me to understand how millions, or even billions, of people don’t understand how accumulation of wealth leads to accumulation of power, and how the combination leads inevitably to large-scale human oppressions, environmental degradation, and almost every kind of injustice and inequality. The combination of power and wealth has always led to the failure of societies, and in their current iteration are leading quickly to the failure of the human species. In the month or two before the November 2024 U.S. presidential election, I picked up David Herszenhorn’s book The Dissident: Alexei Navalny: Profile of a Political Prisoner, about the Russian dissident and anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny. Navalny became internationally known after surviving an attempted poisoning, likely ordered by Russia’s top leadership, and then running for president of Russia against Vladimir Putin. But the core of his work was always about corruption. His investigations and fiercely productive blogging activity focused on business deals that benefited government officials, their families, their friends, their friends’ families . . . almost always at the expense of the Russian people and Russian land, whose natural resource wealth of oil, timber, and minerals was not-so-quietly but very quickly privatized by those already in power, for their own gain, in the years following the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union. Those who benefited most from the privatization were, largely, either those who had held power in the Soviet Union, or people connected to them. Vladimir Zelensky, an actor and comedian who was elected president of Ukraine after starring in a very successful comedy show about a teacher whose anti-corruption rant went viral, resulting in him unintentionally becoming president, came to fight internal corruption and the influence of Russian wealth and power as the real-life leader of Ukraine. Navalny was most likely murdered for his anti-corruption work. Zelensky’s country was invaded in 2022 and continues to battle an army of Putin’s soldiers, many of whom were forced into fighting. I’ve heard plenty of stories of disobedience turning into forced conscription that I can’t even share publicly. And in January 2025, the U.S. government faced, and quickly folded to, a hostile corporate takeover in which the wealthiest person in the world for months wielded the power to fire anyone employed by the government, from wilderness trail crew workers, to people monitoring clean drinking water, to core staff running the power grid of the entire Pacific Northwest. Everywhere you look, a combination of wealth and power seems to be battling to control more of the same—and winning. Of course I want to burn it all down. Don’t you? The problem with that is, as I’ve written here several times before, whenever entire systems and structures are burnt down, it is nearly always those most at risk, those who’ve suffered most, who end up suffering more. The accumulation of wealth leads to rule by oligarchy, but it also provides those with power the means to protect themselves from inevitable resistance, even mass violence, the French Revolution notwithstanding. Whatever system arises from the rubble, those who’ve previously accumulated wealth usually have the means to maintain their power structures, or rebuild them all over again. In his book Black Sea, Neal Acherson described the strange self-protective quality of wealth through the behavior of Polish nobles whose resistance to reform led to the Third Partition in the late 18th century and the dissolving of Poland as a country for 123 years: “To the end of their lives, many of these Targowican barons failed to understand what they had done. They kept their vast estates, travelling now to St. Petersburg and Odessa rather than to Warsaw and Krakow. They had lost the political influence they had enjoyed in the old commonwealth, but to be appointed Marshal of Nobility in some Ukrainian county was not a bad substitute. . . . The fact that they themselves were secure and prospering could only mean that all was well with Poland too.” To put it in more familiar terms: in the 18th century, the Polish nobles f****d around and everybody else got to find out. In The Sociology of Freedom, co-founder of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) Abdullah Öcalan—who has been incarcerated in a Turkish prison since 1999, many of those years in isolation—tracked the question of power back at least 5,000 years, to the beginning of people’s ability to begin controlling and accumulating surplus “product”—food for the most part, but also other people’s labor. Wealth, in his writing, is the ability to accumulate and hoard the resources that people need to survive, including food and work. Power comes from control over that wealth: “The fundamental characteristics that have marked the central civilization from its very beginning and determined its character have remained essentially unchanged for five thousand years. . . . One characteristic that remains stable whatever the differences or forms adopted is the monopoly’s hegemonic control of surplus product. . . . We must take care to understand the monopoly. It is neither purely capital nor purely power. It is not the economy, either. It is the power to use organizations, technology, and violence to secure its extortion in the economic area.” Much of the power in wealth is about who owns what, which translates into who controls and dominates what, especially land, water, food, and the right to pollute the commons we all need for survival. Vandana Shiva—who’s been working on seed and food sovereignty in India for decades—has in recent years reiterated what can never be said enough: “If you control food, you control people.” The U.S. government’s determination to wipe out buffalo and destroy land relationships through iterations of theft so as to force people and Native Nations into dependence in recent history is proof enough of this (its goals in this respect are explicit and well documented); and if you read about enclosures of the commons over the past 800 years of British history, you’ll also run into plenty of examples of entire villages of p

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    Repair

    To new subscribers—welcome to On the Commons! To those of you who’ve been around a while, welcome back! Today’s post comes to you amidst birdsong. I recently wrote an essay for Psyche/Aeon’s “one thing that changed me” series that’s probably the most personal thing I’ve ever published. If you came here from that essay, I’m very glad to see you here. This newsletter is generally not the space for that kind of personal essay, but I hope you’ll give it a try and explore what it means to be part of a commons—including our relationships with one another. On the Commons has no paywall. Paid subscriptions support the research and writing, and help keep it an open commons for all. “Ma’am, watch this.” Two teenage boys stopped me on the footbridge, right where they’d been jumping into the river. One of them was about to attempt a backflip off the railing, and the other was betting it would turn into a belly flop. I stopped, and thought briefly of my father’s childhood stories—growing up in Leningrad (now called St. Petersburg) in the Soviet Union, he and his friends jumping (illegally) from a bridge into the Neva, near the Peter & Paul Fortress. Living under a dictator, a life structured around fear, rigid rules, almost nonexistent interpersonal trust, and waiting in hours-long lines for bread. And still, laughing, challenging one another, unwilling to resist the lure of the water. The boy jumped, did not belly flop. “That was actually pretty cool,” I agreed with the other kid, and went on my way. I’d been sitting at the other end of the footbridge for a while, on new stone steps that the city had just had put in to make access to the river at that spot easier, and to repair the worrying degree of erosion from years of people walking up and down the slope. Although there are easier access points and several public docks all along the river, the ends of the footbridge see heavy use, people drawn down to the water with dogs, with kids, with themselves. But it was a steep slope and slippery from time-ground dirt eroding away from the bank. In ten years I’ve gone down to the water at that spot maybe two or three times. In the week since the steps were finished, I’ve been down them, walking into the water, sitting on the lowest steps doing nothing, almost every day. The steps didn’t change how I relate to the river—I visit it at plenty of other points that have gentler slopes and docks to sit on—but they did transform my relationship to it at that particular point. I feel invited now to sit with the water, drawn to greet it. From what I’ve seen, a lot of other people do, too. When I was a teenager—over thirty years ago now; I’ll be fifty in less than a year—this river was not one people swam in. My younger sister says she used to go in, but it wasn’t common. It was so polluted, so contaminated from nearly a century of pollution leeching from the rail yard’s containment ponds, that in decades past it used to catch fire. In 2009 a years-long Superfund cleanup began on the river, which runs wide and slow right through our town from its outlet at the lake, eventually down to Flathead Lake, all the water collected in this basin eventually funneling out to the massive Columbia River watershed. Superfund, for those outside the U.S., is a designation implying a degree of pollution that might take decades, more likely centuries, to repair. The first time I visited the new steps was with a friend who was in charge of that Superfund cleanup. Like many of my friends, her work —cleaning up oil spills in rivers for the railways—is far more interesting and important than mine. To remedy the extensive contamination, the river was drained completely. Blocked at its outlet from the lake and the water removed. I’ve seen pictures but hadn’t moved back home by then. It’s hard to wrap my head around the enormity of the project. In late 2014, the year after the initial cleanup completed (there have been small leakages and spills since then; the rail yard area remains a Superfund site and the river will likely always be at risk), a several-mile stretch of the river was designated non-motorized. Now, as soon as winter begins to loosen, the water is popular for paddleboarding, kayaking, swimming, jumping off the footbridge at that one spot where the water’s deep enough to do it safely for most of the summer, and now, with the new steps down to the water, for those of us who simply want to sit by it, let it welcome our feet and our thoughts. An invitation to rest. The river will never be the same as it was before the rail yard was built and contamination started to seep into the water, at least not for generations beyond count. Not everything can be fixed. But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to repair. Recently, the novelist and physician Abraham Verghese came to give a talk at our local community college. The region I live in is not, to put it mildly, a place where people of that stature and renown come to speak. We might never get to listen to someone like him again in person, but the hospital sponsored the talk (a friend quipped, I’m sure rightly, that it was probably cheaper than doing what they needed to be doing, hiring more nurses), and it was close to sold out. Verghese was a generous and thoughtful speaker, full of compassion and insight. Before answering questions from the audience—packed with people who worked at the local hospital or their relatives, including some of the friends I’d gone with—talked about his childhood in Ethiopia and the books that shaped who he became as a writer as well as a doctor. And then he spoke about being a doctor serving HIV/AIDS patients in Tennessee in the early 1980s, when HIV was terrifying and unknown—it hadn’t even been labeled human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) yet—and had no treatment. It was at that time, he said, when he began to understand that, for all the medical profession’s fixation on curing illnesses, there is an equal or perhaps even greater need to understand what “healing” means. There was no cure for his HIV patients at the time. The end was known and usually not far off and involved a great deal of suffering. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t work with healing, for them and their families. I’ve been thinking about that ever since—curing versus healing, along with Verghese’s calm, generous presence with this tired audience tucked into an often huffy, even angry, and stunning little corner of Montana. I think it’s what I want to say when I talk so often in this space about compassion and caregiving, whether it’s in our interpersonal, private relationships, or with the world at large. Why the ethos of “burn it all down” makes me chafe, knowing as I do—and most of us should—that when worlds fall apart, those who suffer most are those who are already suffering most, those who always have suffered most. Dismantling structures of oppression and violence requires building and repairing alongside collapse, lest we simply allow the same harms to grow in the ruins. Not easy. Still necessary. It made me think of Chloe Hope’s work—as an end-of-life doula and carer of baby birds at a wildlife sanctuary—and her writing at Death & Birds. What is at the core of life in the end but death, and the compassion and care that is its cosmic twin? But also of Sarah C Swett’s regular journeys with milkweed and mending on The Gussett, which fascinate me, as if her foraging, spinning, and weaving represent a life I was meant to live, the ways that nature can be literally woven into our lives if we learn how, and allow her to do her work. Heal. Mend. Repair. So many words we have to acknowledge damage, and what we might attempt to soothe the harms that linger. As a handful of people here already know, I’m in the midst of a marriage dissolution that is almost finding its way to an ending, which of course for both me and my spouse will be another beginning. It’s been a slow, painstaking process focused on prioritizing our two teenage kids, and repairing of friendship and a different kind of partnership after 26 years of marriage. It surprises me with a shock of gratitude on a regular basis that we’re able to do this with a focus on mending, rather than rending one another apart. (That’s probably the last thing I’ll ever say on this subject except that it’s amazing to be able to make a legally binding commitment essentially as a child that requires a career in accounting and a PhD in psychology to undo.) To be surrounded in life with people who heal, whether rivers or relations, animals or animosities, is a kind of magic. I’ve learned the hard way that not all those who speak with reverence of the importance of relationships think it’s equally important to live by it, and am all the more grateful for people who live true to those expressed values. The first time I sat on the new river steps by myself, one warm evening after a busy day, there were no other people nearby. I allowed myself a tiny proprietary twinge because, although I recently gave up my seat on the town’s Board of Parks, I was there for the years of planning and permitting of these steps and it felt good to know I’d been a tiny part of something built for the good of the public, a miniscule contribution to repairing our local commons. A yellow warbler sang from a willow tree draped over the water a little upstream. The particular psithurism that comes from a breeze catching on the branches of lodgepole pines and larches drifted from the opposite bank. I wish I could bottle that sound for people, or record it effectively. It fills me with a feeling that change is coming. It always has, ever since childhood. There is something about the way the needles of those trees shatter the air, maybe, that gives it a different sense than wind among aspen leaves, or old oaks. Something . . . impending. Some

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    Art harder

    If you’re new here, welcome to On the Commons. Here, we explore questions as varied as: * The disastrous and ongoing legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery. * Is it possible to consume without exploitation? * What Is Wrong With Russia? ✔️ Join a community of 6,900+ On the Commons readers. Upgrade here. Messengers for Health, founded “to improve the health of Apsáalooke (Crow Indian) men, women, and children using solutions that respect and honor Apsáalooke strengths, culture, stories, and language,” will receive 5% of On the Commons paid subscription revenue from now until the end of June. (Accountability: this page shows receipt of revenue return from each quarter.) My mother sent me a birthday card years ago that I have put above my desk everywhere I’ve lived since. On the front is a reproduction of a painting by Deborah DeWit Marchant, dated 1994: a woman, brown-haired and pale-skinned like me, is sitting in a booth at a diner, next to a window. On the table in front of her are an empty plate with what looks like the remains of pie, a glass of water, a cup of coffee, and an open book. Her left hand rests against her face and she is reading. The street looks wet with recent rain. The woman’s hair is even braided back, as mine almost always is. The painting is titled “The Artisans Cafe.” There’s a sense of peace in it I’ve always loved, a sense of allowance—this woman can sit there getting lost in a book, no other demands on her attention for at least a little while. For years I’ve looked at that picture with both longing and an internal struggle. It speaks to me of the kind of permission to rest that too few people in this life, including me, feel they can allow themselves. I’ve been caring for others since I was four years old, when my younger sister was born, and when I look at that picture I see a moment for myself when everyone is fed and occupied, all the dishes are done, and the floor swept, the laundry folded and put away, the endless tasks of housekeeping and people-caring soothed and calmed and, for the moment, finished. Complete. It’s a moment that never comes. Maybe it’s the pie plate that gets me. This woman has eaten, and has time to enjoy her book, and her coffee while it’s hot, and doesn’t even have to wash the plate. What a luxury. I long for the moment in that picture nearly every day. It takes a lot of mental effort to give it to myself once in a while, breathe into the moment, any moment, even while the laundry remains overflowing and last night’s frying pan is waiting to be scrubbed and the peas need picking and the strawberries weeded and forms filled out and the bank account stressed over . . . In the original draft of this, I followed that line with a list of all the things I’m behind on, everything that keeps piling up, but those details aren’t important. Each of you has your own list, your own burdens and worries and piles of laundry. None of it will ever be caught up on permanently, much as I long for that moment, and in the midst of it all is my own work, which has been intensive for a while and will be for a few months more. An essay for this newsletter about the conflation of wealth and power that I keep needing to cut down (really, there’s no need to quote every book on this subject I’ve ever read but it’s hard, and do you really want to know exactly how Aristotle advised overthrowing oligarchy? yes, probably), essays for non-Substack outlets, and a lot of editing. A lot of editing. Over the past six months I’ve been helping my friend Kathleen McLaughlin, longtime journalist and author of the fantastic book Blood Money, with a new anthology of essays by Montana writers she’s putting together for University of Oklahoma Press. It’s been a project she’s been shepherding for over two years and it’s finally taking “holy crap this is real” shape. I have an essay in it, but far more interesting to me is that I’ve been working with over twenty writers copy editing and helping develop their essays about Montana. In over twenty years of copy editing, which I mostly do for K-12 textbook publishers, it’s one of the most satisfying and challenging projects I’ve ever worked on. It’s interesting being immersed in this editing just at the moment when what is marketed as artificial intelligence—but LLMs, or large language models, are not in fact anything of the sort, not yet—is being pushed as capable of taking over work like mine and I wonder, between rounds of essay edits, if I should take up the manager of the local tire shop on his persistent job offers. That job comes with health insurance and in America that’s far more precious than gold. There are many levels to the speed of this technology’s adoption that are worrisome but out of my control, from people’s willingness to believe it truly is revolutionary simply because they’re told it is, to a complete bypassing of the reality that most of these systems are built entirely on stolen labor and stolen work—my book is among thousands used to train the LLMs with neither compensation nor my permission—and deployed not to improve people’s lives but to further bloat tech companies’ profits, to the deep, disturbing willingness to withdraw the possibility of creative work (much less income for it) from human beings who sorely need it. A subscriber here once recommended this post to me, by science fiction and fantasy author Catherynne M. Valente, about artificial intelligence and creativity, that I’ve hung onto, while watching people who, for various reasons, justify the use of a product built on stolen labor and being used to replace the creative work not just of writing, but of editing: “It can and will get ugly. But oh my god, people won’t stop writing or creating or performing, and they won’t stop coding, either, not the ones who love it and are passionate about it, certainly not because AOL Instant Essayist can, too. That s**t is compulsive. From hands on a cave wall to these words on this screen, we cannot stop trying to express ourselves, and if one thing about our d******k monkey dance on this call of salt will never change, it’s that. The unending plaintive scream of people trying to connect, to be heard, to be seen, to be known, to take what is inside us and make it manifest on the outside. . . . Take away art and we’re going to art harder just to spite you.” It’s also a really funny essay (while managing to be both slightly depressing in its realism and also empowering in its “f**k you we’re going to be human anyway” manifesto), so I’m going to quote another paragraph just because: “This is not the optimistic part of the essay. Sorry. This the god dammit we spent literally all of science fiction telling you not to do this can you actually not for once part of the essay. Oh you’re definitely doing it anyway? And shoving me in my locker afterward? Perfect.” For those who’ve never done it, this might be hard to believe, but editing is at least as creative as writing is. It is art. There is something almost indescribable about helping a writer tell their story or find how to say what they want to say in the best way possible, and in the way that is truest to who they are. It’s psychology and architecture, sociology and tailoring. It’s working with live wires of human storytelling all the damn time. A writer I used to be friends with once told me that he thought my work as a copy editor simply involved “fixing commas and stuff.” I laughed, but was surprised at his assumption, since I figured he had to have worked with copy editors on his own writing once in a while. I do fix commas, true, but it’s a very small part of my job, which is far more about communication and storyweaving than it is about grammatical rules—which I know well enough to, frankly, not care. At least, not unless I’m being paid to. I’ll never correct your typos, unless you want to pay my hourly rate. Copy editing is, for me and the copy editors I’m friends with, the people I respect, something far more in-depth. Something vibrant. It’s working with language at the level where it lives, before it gets pinned down in a dictionary like a butterfly specimen on a corkboard. This really came home to me working on this recent project. So many writers, each with their own voice, style, strengths, and stories to tell. Editing is never just working with words or narrative; it’s approaching that narrative as an animal whom you have to get to know before touching. That animal could be affectionate, happy, traumatized, wild. Anything. The animal is alive and individual, their own self. That’s the point. It’s working with who the writer of that narrative is, and the readers they want to reach. Sometimes, sadly to me, that means accepting when a writer is allergic to revision and balks at editorial feedback, meaning I only do the bare minimum. Frustrating, especially when there’s talent and potential, but I can’t force people to do their own stories credit. I just accept that they don’t want to know their work any more deeply than they want to know themselves and move on. Other times, it’s the delight of working with someone who’s never published before and is eager to learn how to bring the best out of their own story in their own voice; or the delight of working with longtime, professional writers who feel the same. There are copy editors who will dictate to writers how to shape their story, but it makes me happy not to be one of them. It’s more fun. This anthology project has eaten up an enormous amount of my time and energy over the past six or so months. It’s reminded me why I almost never teach or lead workshops: giving feedback in the way I do comes from the same creative place my writing does. I give of myself to other people’s work the same as I give of myself to my own writing, or to my kids, and I have to be

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Trespassing is a podcast version of the newsletter On the Commons, about ownership, private property, and what we lose in the privatization of the commons antonia.substack.com

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    Antonia Malchik
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