March Readings!
This month we are diving into three spectacular texts that bring forward crucial themes of resistance building especially pressing in our present world-moment.
Octavia Butler's ~A Few Rules For Predicting the Future~ pushes us as readers to consider what it takes to learn from the past while counting on surprises.
Mia Mingus' "Hollow", first featured in ~Octavia's Brood~ will push us this month to other worlds as a revolution banishes disabled folks to another planet where our characters must decide to build in this new community, or journey across this new land in escape.
And finally, featured in ~The Winds Twelve Quarters~, Ursula K. Le Guin, guides us through the short story, "Those Who Walk Away From Omelas," as we land in a seemingly utopian city. Here, we follow our characters as they discover their sense of bliss has depended upon the suffering of a single child, and their adventure commences as they instead must choose to leave behind this grave injustice and the safety of the world they once knew.
Each of our texts implore us this month to ask: what are the worlds we imagine and how do we bring them into the present?
Who Are We?
The Stories Between is an alumni reading group that meets virtually each month to discuss shared texts. As we dive into each reading, we connect with each other, build community, and explore important themes of feminist theory, speculative fiction, past/present/future, bodies, identities, autonomy, and much more.
We are better together and stronger than ever in our vibrant GWS community.
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GWS Staff Picks!
Recommended By Amber
This month I am diving into How Far The Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures (2022) by Sabrina Imbler. In this book, the author poses a series of essays that explore the connections between humanity and nature, exploring the interconnected relationship between humans and the ecologies that reside around us. From themes of sexuality, adaptation, survival, imaging, and grief, Imbler implores us as readers to understand we are more connected to the systems that surround us than we might imagine, and importantly, that we are better always surviving in community.
Recommended by Dr. Kate Phelps
I recently read Disabled Ecologies: Lessons From a Wounded Desert (2024) by Sunaura Taylor. In her book, Taylor tells the story of the Tucson aquifer and describes a crip kinship with the expansive ecological water system flowing beneath her wheels. She challenges ableist ecologies and the logic of abandonment, arguing that people with disabilities already demonstrate “lives well lived” and are necessary knowledge makers and keepers in creating new forms of solidarity, community, and care. As she digs into the archives and speaks to members of the Indigenous and largely Mexican-American communities that have felt the shared impacts of an injured landscape, Taylor puts forth an “environmentalism of the injured,” and bridges human and nature in a call for a future focused on caring for multispecies disability.