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This is not in order of what I like best of all, it's just things I'm thinking about. and I'll add more and more.

Februarys list - to March - to April

mid may

a friend of mine may be has multiple personality disorder. Sometimes I try and think that we all just have different personalities inside of us, and maybe hers are just more extreme. Last time I saw her, she gave me a zine called I've Got Angels in my Head. It is by Billie Rain, who is also involved in a project called Planting Seeds. and has a short movie on the internet you can look at (I actually haven't been able to watch it yet because all I have right now is dial up, but I bet it's good) video The zine helped me to understand that what she is dealing with is really different from me, and that it probably isn't helpful for me to minimize her experience. That there are ways I can relate my experiences without minimizing hers. Sometime I just want everything to be not so hard. I don't want to accept that my friends have been through such terrible shit, even though I know they have. I recomend this zine, even if you don't know anyone with multiple personalitys. It also has things that are good for understanding abuse survivors in general, and helpful things for survivors. like these pages:
forgiving myself
letter to friends

early may

1. drawings in the window of DogEared Books in SF.

2. National Abortion Federation. This site has a lot of good information about abortion, and also they have a hotline that might be able to help people find funding sources if they can't afford their abortions. The hotline number is 1-800-772-9100. There used to be a group called the Fund For Women who helped people pay for their abortions. I can't find info about it, but you could try asking Planned Parenthood. These places almost always need volunteers, and people to set up chapters in their areas.

3. revolutionary or utopian novels because they help us imagine how societys could be formed and some of the problems that might come up, even if they are cheesy sometimes. The one's a know are kind of old, but I still love them.

The Free, by M. Gilliland

Woman on the Edge of Time, by Marge Piercy

The Dispossessed by Ursula K Le Guin I love Ursula Le Guin, partially because her early novels were from before the feminist movement really go going, and they were really pretty male centered, and then she got some criticism about that, and she also was thinking about that more, and she changed things. Her book of essays is really down to earth. I love her. I love anarchist feminist older women role models.

ursula le guins website

4. Books that give us knowledge of how people have struggled in the past, what they were up against, how they fought , and what we've won.

Stone Butch Blues, by Leslie Fienberg. This book is so good.

Stonewall. (a review) "Since 1969, the word Stonewall has been synonymous with gay resistance to oppression. Yet remarkably, the full story of the Stonewall riots has never been told. Now historian Duberman profiles six early activists, whose lives intersected during the turbulent event that was to become the defining moment of the burgeoning liberation movement." This one I read outloud with a friend of mine when we were on a long car trip. It was good that way.

From Act Up to the WTO This one I'm reading right now. Sometime I think people who grew up going to the big protests everywhere, or who are growing up in the shadow of those protests, haven't gotten to do a lot of the kinds of things we used to do. More locally based, smaller actions and organizing. this book talks about different tactics and ways people were organizing and resisting in the decade before the big WTO protests. It is good to know about, and can help us figure out effective things to do now.

5. Submissions needed for a project of writing and art by people who have had a parent die. to see the call for submissions

here is a little bit about the person putting this project together:

I’m a 29 year old attorney and activist and teacher. My activist, legal and scholarly work mostly focuses on racial, gender and economic justice, especially transgender rights, welfare, and prison abolition. I grew up in rural central Virginia with my mom and siblings. We were poor and my mom was an alcoholic and smoker who died of lung cancer after a year of illness during which my sister and I cared for her. She died right after my 14th birthday, my sister was 16. My mom grew up poor working in pulp mills and box factories in New Brunswick, Canada. My dad is a bipolar Jewish German holocaust refugee. After my mom died I lived with two foster families and graduated from high school a year early and left Virginia. My non-academic writing explores themes of loss, memory, fractured family, class shifting, erasure and isolation. I’ve been feeling like when this writing works for me, it connects all these different lives I’ve lived and that my parents have lived, about which I can get very little information, and which are full of trauma and forced forgetting. It’s a piecing together process that helps me create some kind of witness, some feeling that these things happened and mattered even though no one speaks of them and the witnesses are dead or silenced by our distance from one another. I do this writing for myself, but I’m interested in what comes when I share stories like this with others who have lived through similar stigmatized and life altering experiences.