How We Turned Our Activism Into a Book
Our friendship and our organizing partnership began on the same night, in November of 2014. We met by chance when we both went to see our mutual friend Jamie Topper perform music she’d composed, on instruments she’d built, to accompany a physicist’s lecture on dark matter. She introduced us to each other as “both climate people” just before her concert began. We were both activists, feeling alienated and discouraged by the climate movement. And we were both 30 at the time, so family planning decisions were starting to feel both more pressing and more impossible.
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Our first conversation, whispered in a dark auditorium, was about these fears, disappointments, and longings. And as we felt an instant spark of friendship, we recognized the power of sharing feelings as key to our organizing model. Since then, we’ve been bringing people together at house parties across the country for conversations about the reproductive crisis that is climate change. We built a website, began recording people’s testimonies, and helped groups organize their own events. We found that people badly needed to talk. And since then, researchers have repeatedly proved that these concerns are global: We’ve just facilitated part of the conversation.
Our participants have shared their stories with each other and with the wider world through video and written testimonies. Amid the din of statistics, graphs, and thousand-page committee reports, the lived, spoken truth has the power to cut through the noise. These conversations—about reproduction and parenting and family—have taught us as much about this country’s climate-changing present as its possible futures. And through this project our trust, friendship, and shared understanding has deepened.
Because we’ve always approached this work as a two-person change-making unit, and because we had already built a foundation of sturdy trust, the prospect of writing a book together—a highly personal and highly political book that lays bare many of our generation’s most intimate hopes and fears—was less daunting than it might otherwise have been. This is not a book that could have been written by either of us alone; it needed us both. The real point of both the organizing work and the book itself is that social change is collaborative.
In our writing—both the process and the tone—we have tried to model how people with different individual experiences (including ourselves and more than 30 interview subjects, as well as the hundreds of people we’ve spoken with in our organizing work) can come together to create something bigger than themselves, and bigger than the challenges that we face. Our analysis gathers power not despite intergenerational conflicts, or the so-called ‘Mommy Wars,’ or the imagined binary between parents and non-parents, but because of that variety of experiences.
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We are both writers in the other parts of our lives, which also made the prospect of this big project easier. And despite that we are both creative and opinionated people, our devotion to our shared mission—and the fact that we’d built the entire intellectual framework together—helped preempt any conflict around taste and aesthetics that might arise if we tried to write, say, a New England murder mystery (possibly our next collaboration).
We’ve always worked together remotely (Meghan in Rhode Island, Josephine in NYC and then Chicago), so the fact that much of our collaborating happened directly in a massive GoogleDoc was not too unusual. But one essential step we took at the beginning of our writing process was to spend a week together in a little house in Western Massachusetts, during which we outlined the whole book. It was one of the more generative and more exhausting retreats either of us had ever experienced—talking through ideas from early till late, whether we were staring at our laptops, seasoning soup, or stomping through the woods.
Activism can look a lot of ways, and we’ve both done a good deal of marching, knocking on doors, flyering, and giving speeches over the course of our lives. But the Conceivable Future project has always been about having conversations, about connecting the deeply personal feelings with the explicitly political work. It’s always been about tone. Conceivable Future conversations are intimate and delicate, even though they have a lot of political power. We have had to learn to facilitate our organizing events in a warm, non-judgmental, invitational way.
So when we set out to write this book, we already knew the tone we were striving for: We wrote this book as if we were hosting a house party for our readers. We won’t tell you what to do with your questions about having and raising children—there is no ‘right’ answer to the Impossible Question the climate crisis poses to us—but we share everything we’ve learned, and offer strategies for living a grounded life of climate action. And we remind ourselves and each other that the purpose of sharing these feelings is to create solidarity—among parents and non-parents, among all of us who care for generations to come, in every capacity. The climate crisis requires all of us; our love and connections are the on-ramp to the urgent political work of changing institutions.
Our friendship has evolved and deepened through a tumultuous decade. While we’ve been organizing, the atmosphere has been heating, the climate movement has been gaining both strength and opposition, the US has teetered at the edge of democratic collapse, and we’ve weathered a global health crisis. At the same time we’ve supported each other through relationship joys and turmoil, family growth and loss, quite a few job transitions and moves, and many iterations of our own family plans. We text each other song links and snark, as well as logistics.
If we’ve learned one thing, it’s to include the complexity, to make space for all the contradictions, tensions, and silliness that each day offers. In this way, The Conceivable Future, the book, is the best version yet of our collaboration: big enough to include the range of themes and the variety of stories we’ve learned, the right medium to share the care, nuance, and craft of what we do. The book is also a complete expression of love: by, for, and about love relationships. We see love relationships as both the treasure we work to protect, and the best tool to make the change we need to see in our lifetimes. For some, activism can look like pressing a book into loved ones’ hands.
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