{Patron only post} Book Spring rolls along! FULL TRANSCRIPT: my talk with bestselling author Elizabeth Lesser @ Graveside Variety (Patreon)

Hello loves!!!

Happy Tuesday. How's everybody faring as we head towards June?

It's commencement season, run-up-to-summer in America Season, run-up-to-winter Down Under season...I wonder how everyone is feeling. Even if you don't have a chance to read this entire transcript and comment on it, let me (and us) know how you are in the comments. I have lots of time to read and respond in the next few days.

It's summery times from Woodstock, NY. It's HOT here, yo. It's 82 degrees as I finish typing up this post in the cool kitchen.

Here's the front lawn at the moment...Bra Weather is HERE.

There's a HUGE Graveside wrap-up post in the works, and I'll write to you more about life itself in the Althing at the end of the month but meanwhile....

Time for a long read?

Ready to feel enraged and inspired?

Me too.

Last weekend I hosted the first of my three "Conversations With Authors" at Graveside Variety, co-hosted by the Golden Notebook, Woodstock's glorious indie bookstore right n the village, about a three minute walk from Graveside.

Liz Lesser is a huge local hero of mine, and many of you who were at CAMPERSAND - our Patron Retreat - in 2019 or 2023 will recognize her as the founder of the Omega Institute, where we all camped out.

It's like a talk with a fiery friend, a belopved aunt, a bosom beloved. She's just so goddamn good at talking with people.

Here's Elizabeth at TED (and here's a link to her talk):

We talked for over an hour and half and took questions from a WONDERFUL audience at Graveside (if you were there, THANK YOU).

We dove deep into feminism, the writing process and when it is and isn't okay to tell certain stories; we discussed what activism looks like right now.

The overarching theme? The power of stories, and what changes when women start taking the mic back.

Alex Knight, our merch queen from the UK and handy patreon assistant, has been through and cleaned up the transcript below, so hopefully it'll just read like a beautiful, long-form interview between us.....it's LONG. But it's GOOD. AND THANK YOU ALEX, WE LOVE YOU.

I quibbled a little bit about whether to thing this thing, and I decided to thing it because hell...the gig itself barely covered it's own costs and the venue needs the extra help this season. And you're all capped, right? You better be. (If you haven't gone and capped your pledge, for the love of the baby jesus, DO SO, info here.)

I also thought that maybe if I charged you for it, you'd be more likely to read/listen to it.

I dunno.

If you aren't in the mood for two more of these, tell me to cut it. (Though I do think the Leslie Jamison one is gonna be HISTORIC, and maybe we should Thing the Video, and get an actual crew in? Whaddaythink?)

For this time 'round, The Golden Notebook recorded a video just on an iphone held up by a pile of books (I mean....books! On theme!) - it's not incredible, the sound is a little off at times - but we're sending that video out to $5 patrons if you'd rather watch (or listen to) the hour and 40 minutes rather than reading it, or watch and read along.....that post just went out HERE. 

(Again, I always encourage you to hack the system. You're always welcome to shuffle around tiers to get what you want, then shuffle back around).

......

OKAY

Let's do it.

Here's a few BTS photos taken before the event...

The Golden Notebook POSSSSSEEEEEEE....

And I cannot say enough good about this bookstore. If you're ever looking for an indie store to purchase from direct, they'll ship. Here's thier site: https://www.goldennotebook.com/

That's me, Elizabeth Lesser, and Drew and Jackie from the shop. :)

Liz, deep in preparation....

The OTHER Liz (Grammaticas, working the front door, in front of the cookies she made):

Our book table....

A necessary close-up of the cookies made by Liz Grammaticas at the Graveside front counter....

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And before we hit the transcript....COMING UP....!!!

this one was LAST SATURDAY and we are working on the post!!!

SATURDAY, MAY 18 (that's THIS SATURDAY!!!)

I'll was in conversation with KATHERINE YESKE TAYLOR, author of She's A Badass: Women In Rock Shaping Feminism (which I was interviewed for!)

Stay tuned for the post....

AND STILL TO COME...and it's almost sold out...AND it's the last day of Graveside!

SATURDAY JUNE 1 I'll be in conversation with Leslie Jamison, author of Splinters - a memoir about Leslie's divorce, her love for her daughter, and "what it means for a woman to be many things at once—a mother, an artist, a teacher, a lover"

I'm sure we'll have ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to talk about there...

GET TICKETS HERE!!

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READNG LIST/LINKS....

Throughout the talk with Elizabeth, we touched on a number of different books, here's a quick little rundown reading-list for you all..

SOMEHOW: THOUGHTS ON LOVE by ANN LAMOTT

We opened the afternoon by reading out a beautiful piece of writing on Mothers' Day by Ann Lamott, and this is her latest book. I'm about to crack into it, I just put it by the bedside.

If you don't know Anne Lamott.....oh fuck, you should.

I read her book on writing, Bird by Bird, when I was in college, and it was a revelation about the creative process. She's also a great follow on social media (obviously). Here's the link to her facebook page.

A little synopsis for you...

In Somehow: Thoughts on Love, Lamott explores the transformative power that love has in our lives: how it surprises us, forces us to confront uncomfortable truths, reminds us of our humanity, and guides us forward. “Love just won’t be pinned down,” she says. “It is in our very atmosphere” and lies at the heart of who we are. We are, Lamott says, creatures of love.

In each chapter of Somehow, Lamott refracts all the colors of the spectrum. She explores the unexpected love for a partner later in life. The bruised (and bruising) love for a child who disappoints, even frightens. The sustaining love among a group of sinners, for a community in transition, in the wider world. The lessons she underscores are that love enlightens as it educates, comforts as it energizes, sustains as it surprises. 

FIND THE BOOK HERE

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DEAR SISTER, by MICHELLE HORTON

We talked about this one as an example of an incredible, truth-telling memoir....and if you missed it, I already talked about this book in the Book Recommendation post from a few weeks ago.

In September 2017, a knock on the door from police upends Michelle Horton’s life forever: her sister had just shot her partner and was now in jail. Everything Michelle thought she knew about her family unraveled in that moment. During the investigation that follows, Michelle learns that Nikki had been hiding horrific abuse for years.

Stunned to find herself in a situation she’d only ever encountered on television and true crime podcasts, Michelle rearranges her life to care for Nikki's children and simultaneously launches a fight to bring Nikki home, squaring off against a criminal justice system seemingly designed to punish the entire family.....

FIND THE BOOK HERE

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THE TENDING INSTINCT by SHELLEY E. TAYLOR

Elizabeth spoke about this book and how it contrasts with the traditional 'fight or flight' responses, instead focusing on 'tend and befriend'.

As Elizabeth says in the talk, the book itself is OUT OF PRINT, but you can still get the ebook here!

I've been discussing this concept with tons of people since having this talk with Elizabeth, and I think it's worth a post of it's own (with all my free fucking time, ha ha).

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CASSANDRA SPEAKS by ELIZABETH LESSER

This is Elizabeth's latest book, and helped to sort of guide and center our talk. Here's a little synopsis:

Humans love stories. We always have. We write them and read them, tell them and show them, learn from them and live by them. Throughout history, most of humankind’s origin stories, hero’s journey tales, novels, and films have been created by men. Embedded in the stories are the values and priorities we live by, and what we believe about women and men, power and war, sex and love. 

But what if women had been the storytellers too? 

What story would Eve have told about picking the apple? What would Pandora have said about opening the box? And what about the other stories from around the world that cast women as fickle, sinful, and untrustworthy? 

Find out more about the book and find links to buy HERE.

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BROKEN OPEN by ELIZABETH LESSER

Elizabeth read from this at the beginning of the talk - here's a little synopsis:

During times of transition, amid everyday stress, and even when we face seemingly insurmountable adversity, life offers us a choice: to turn away from change or to embrace it; to shut down or to be broken open and transformed.

In the New York Times bestseller Broken Open, a beautifully crafted blend of moving stories, humorous insights, practical guidance, and personal memoir, Elizabeth Lesser offers tools to help us make the choice we all face in times of challenge: Will we be broken down and defeated, or broken open and transformed?

Find the book HERE!

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This is the book that Elizabeth discusses below...the book that she wishes she could "redo". Having read it, I can tell you that I devoured it whole...but I also understand what she means about trying to bite off too much with one book. It's packed.

Here's the blurb....

The author of the New York Times bestseller Broken Open returns with a visceral and profound memoir of two sisters who, in the face of a bone marrow transplant—one the donor and one the recipient—begin a quest for acceptance, authenticity, and most of all, love.

A mesmerizing and courageous memoir: the story of two sisters uncovering the depth of their love through the life-and-death experience of a bone marrow transplant. Throughout her life, Elizabeth Lesser has sought understanding about what it means to be true to oneself and, at the same time, truly connected to the ones we love. But when her sister Maggie needs a bone marrow transplant to save her life, and Lesser learns that she is the perfect match, she faces a far more immediate and complex question about what it really means to love—honestly, generously, and authentically.

https://www.amazon.com/Marrow-Love-Story-Elizabeth-Lesser/dp/0062367633

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And finally - THE ART OF ASKING......

I know I keep plugging it. But it's damn good.

This one pops up in the conversations now and again... if you haven't read it yet, you can find it on my store HERE in the US, or HERE in the UK.

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And WITHOUT FURTHER ADO.... the full talk between me and Elizabeth...

And some photos from the talk itself are interspersed below....taken by Liz Grammaticas.

INTRODUCTION FROM DREW (THE GOLDEN NOTEBOOK):

One of the major reasons we have independent bookstores is community.

We all get together, we share things. That’s what has made Graveside so special, and we have been so honored to get to do events here at Graveside. This place is special. I think since you have been here before, you all know that. When Amanda reached out to me to say, 'we want to do something to send off Graveside in collaboration with you guys,' we were like, 'yeah, whatever you wanna do!'

And she’s put together a fabulous line up of three conversation, the first today kicking it off in truly spectacular fashion, with the unbelievable Elizabeth Lesser.  

Amanda Palmer: This is going to be a very freeform conversation, including a Q and A at the end that can be....vast. I don’t have anywhere else to be today, I don’t know about you. It’s Mothers’ Day and it’s real weird.

So we thought we would open by reading some things... Do you want me to read first?

Elizabeth Lesser: That is a very incendiary piece you have chosen.

Go ahead, you read it first, then I’ll calm it all down.

AFP: Nice.

Liz Lesser, steering the ship.

Who here knows this incredible writer, Anne Lamott?

So....Anne Lamott has written really brutally and beautifully about motherhood, and continues to write to this day, as you can see. This is Anne Lamott’s new book, [Somehow: Thoughts on Love] which I just found out, coincidentally, Elizabeth Lesser picked for her curated selection. So full circling, without having known that, I posted something this morning that Anne Lamott shared today, which is a recycled but really great Mothers’ Day reflection.

{from Anne's Facebook, you can find the post here}

Here’s my annual Mothers’ Day post, only for those of you who dread the holiday. Dread having strangers, cashiers and waiters exclaim cheerfully, mindlessly, Happy Mothers’ Day! When it is a day that for whatever reasons makes you feel deeply sad.

 I told Neil last year that I didn’t think I’d write it because I always get so much hate mail, and he says, it’s never stopped you before. But this year, I’m also trying to convince people to buy my brand new book. And I worry that publishing this piece is not an effective sales strategy, but it seems to help a number of you every year, so here goes.

This is for those of you who may feel a kind of sheet metal loneliness on Sunday, who had an awful mother, or a mother who recently died, or wanted to be a mother but didn't get to have kids, or had kids who ended up breaking your hearts. If you love the day and have or had a great mom and happy, highly successful kids, maybe skip it.

I did not raise my son, Sam, to celebrate Mother’s Day. I didn’t want him to feel some obligation to buy me pricey lunches or flowers, some obligatory annual display of gratitude. Perhaps Mother’s Day will come to mean something to me as I grow even dottier in my dotage, and will find myself bitter and distressed when Sam dutifully ignores the holiday. Then he will feel ambushed by my expectations. But he will retaliate by putting me away even sooner than he was planning to — which, come to think of it, would be even more reason for me to resist Mother’s Day.

But Mother’s Day celebrates a huge lie about the value of women: that mothers are superior beings, that they have done more with their lives and have chosen a more difficult path. Ha! Every woman’s path is difficult, and many mothers were as equipped to raise children as wire monkey mothers. I say that without judgment: It is true. An unhealthy mother’s love is withering.

The illusion is that mothers are automatically more fulfilled and complete. But the craziest, grimmest people this Sunday will be many mothers themselves, stuck herding their own mothers and weeping or sullen children and husbands’ mothers into seats at restaurants or parkettes. These mothers do not want a box of chocolate. They may have announced for a month that they are trying not to eat sugar. Oh well, eat up.

I hate the way the holiday makes all non-mothers, and the daughters of dead mothers, and the mothers of dead or lost children, feel the deepest kind of grief and failure. The non-mothers must sit in their churches, temples, mosques, recovery rooms and pretend to feel good about the day while they are excluded from a holiday that benefits no one but Hallmark and See’s. There is no refuge — not at the horse races, movies, malls, museums. Even turn-off-your-cellphone announcers are going to open by saying, “Happy Mother’s Day!”

You could always hide in a nice seedy bar, I suppose. Or an Emergency Room.

It should go without saying that I also hate Valentine’s Day, even those years when I’ve had a boyfriend or some random husband.

Mothering perpetuates the dangerous idea that all parents are somehow superior to non-parents. Meanwhile, we know that many of the most evil people in the country are politicians who have weaponized parenthood.

Don’t get me wrong: There were a million times I could have literally died of love for my son, and I’ve felt stoned on his rich, desperate love for me. I felt it yesterday when I was in despair. But I bristle at the whispered lie that you can know this level of love and self-sacrifice only if you are a parent.

What a crock! We talk about “loving one’s child” as if a child were a mystical unicorn. A majority of American parents secretly feel that if you have not had and raised a child, your capacity for love is somehow diminished. They secretly believe that non-parents cannot possibly know what it is to love unconditionally, to be selfless, to put yourself at risk for the gravest loss. But in my experience, it’s parents who are prone to exhibit terrible self-satisfaction and selfishness, who can raise children as adjuncts, like rooms added on in a remodel. Often their children’s value and achievements in the world are reflected glory, necessary for their parents’ self-esteem, and sometimes for the family’s survival. This is how children’s souls are destroyed.

But my main gripe about Mother’s Day is that it feels incomplete and imprecise. The main thing that ever helped mothers was other people mothering them, including aunties and brothers; a chain of mothering that keeps the whole shebang afloat. I am the mother who grew to be partly in spite of my mother, who unconsciously raised me to self-destruct; and partly because of the extraordinary love of her best friends, my own best friends’ mothers, and from surrogates, many of whom were not women at all but gay men. I have loved them my entire life, including my mom, even after their passing.

The point is: have a beautiful, wonderful Mothers’ Day, if it is a holiday that brings you joy. But just be conscious that for many, many people it isn’t. Proceed accordingly. Deal.

.........

AFP: And with that, I wanna pass it over to Elizabeth Lesser, who I consider one of my art-moms, memoir-moms, neighbour-moms, comfort to me, inspiration to me, caretaker of me, and amazing human being.

EL: I recently interviewed Annie Lamott at the Bardavon, for the beginning of this book tour, and I always feel I’m in this role of, as Neil says, settle, tone it down. That seems to be my role in life.

Okay, so I thought I’d read something from my book Broken Open, about parenting.

First of all: Hello!

I love Mothers’ Day, but my problem is I feel many men are mothers. Fathers’ Day always feels like an add-on, like yeah, now we have to have Fathers’ Day. But if to be a mother - the kind we put up on pedestals - is to be someone who cares, and gives you the kind of love that creates a runway for you to have a beautiful self esteem and a good worthy life, men and dads do that all the time, friends do that. So as long as Mothers’ Day includes all people and genders, I’m all for it.

So when I wrote Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow, a whole big part of the book is about being a parent. So the book talks about a phoenix process. That’s what I call when you get beaten down by life, and then rise from it better. That’s what I call the phoenix process. I’m just explaining it because the word comes up here.

If you would like to be broken open, if you want to pursue a phoenix process of the highest order, I would recommend raising children. Parenthood is a clumsy yet majestic dance in the flames. When you parent, you fall in love with a person who’s always changing into someone else, and who you know will leave you. Yet most parents will say that they’ve never given themselves to anyone as fully as they have to their children.

Parenthood is a career with the crazy-making job requirement of simultaneously surrendering to, and letting go, of someone you love, over and over and over again. It’s a never-ending journey down a wide river of worry and love. You get in that boat with your kids, and you never get out. They get out, they build their own boats, and row into their own destinies, but you stay in the original boat. Always their parent, forever caring, and forever kvelling, a useful Yiddish word that describes how parents express pride in their children.

Sometimes the act of parenting is an awe-inspiring adventure. Your heart expands to accommodate a vastness of feelings so tender and unselfish that you step boldly into the nobility of your true character. And sometimes parenthood is tedious, yet unpredictable, demanding yet ever-changing. Just when you get the hang of sleeping upright in a rocking chair, and changing dirty diapers, your child sleeps through the night and poops in the potty, and your job description changes. It’s a lot like the comedian George Carlin’s complaint: Just when I found out the meaning of life, they changed it.

So you go back into on-the-job training, and by the time you’ve mastered communication with a tantrum-throwing toddler, and become addicted to the warm, wet smell of your little one after a bath, he squirms away and goes to kindergarten. And now you have to learn to deal with playdates, and social studies reports, and parent-teacher conferences. And then school plays, and little league games, and friends, and hurt feelings, and that shifting boundary between granting them freedom and giving them direction.

And soon they are teenagers, and there’s no manual for that. So you take it one day at a time. One difficult decision by difficult decision. And finally, if things go the way they ought to, your children leave home, they leave you, and they push off into the future.

Parenting, in all of its stages, is a spiritual path, with mythic twists and turns. If your spiritual goal is to embrace life, moment by moment, in both its rapture and its pain, then parenting offers you that opportunity every day.

Holy texts throughout the ages tell us that the truth is to be found between the seeming opposite sin life. Between your own will and a greater will. Between limits and liberty. Between the call to care for others, and the need to care for yourself. In the parent-child relationships, these concepts become supremely real. And you get excellent feedback all the time, from a pint-sized spiritual master: your own kid, whose specialty lies in teaching you how to keep on loving, even when you’re tired, scared, confused, and pissed off. Isn’t that what every seeker is after? At each stage of your child’s growth, you’re given ample opportunities to use parenthood as a mirror. You get to see exactly where you fall short in the most graphic ways. Are you self-absorbed? Do you resist putting the needs of others first? Or do you err in the other direction? Are you a martyr, a guilt-tripper, a co-dependent smotherer? Do you fear change? Are you impatient? Jealous? Comparative?

Whatever it is that wants to be transformed in your psyche will be revealed as you parent. If you accept the challenge, parenting becomes a perpetual process of change, a dynamic experience of being broken open by love.

AFP: Well, here we are. How old are your kids now?

EL: They may be older than you. One of them is about to be 48.

AFP: I’m 48.

EL: Okay. And one of them is 46. And one of them is 43.

AFP: And you’ve got grandkids too.

EL: Yeah, one of them turned 15 yesterday.

AFP: We have so much we could talk about. I feel like we could talk for a couple of hours just about parenting. And we’ve got this book, this is technically the book that I was gonna center this conversation around, but everything is about everything.

And then there’s The Art of Asking, which is a book that I wrote more than 10 years ago, and is starting to feel like a distant fever dream to me. I don’t know how it feels for you opening up Broken Open, which you wrote how many years ago?

EL: 20.

AFP: Do you read it and sometimes think, wow, if I could go and do a revision, there’s a lot here that I would amend a little bit, and tzjuj, and make a little bit more nuanced?

EL: Not that book. I really feel it’s like a great friend of mine out in the world. I wouldn’t really feel I could change it. I don’t even know how the hell I wrote that book. I had kids, and a full time job... But the book I often look at and think I’d really like to change, I should not have let that get out, is my book Marrow, about my sister Maggie who died. That one, yeah, I would change all sorts of things.

AFP: What would you change?

EL: Well I would have made it half the size, it’s really too long. It’s sort of two books in one. I was in the middle of writing one book, and then my sister got sick and I was her bone marrow donor, and we went through this process of trying to clean up our relationship before the transplant, so that maybe our cells would get along once mine got into her body. And I should have made it just about that. But I made it about all sorts of other things, too. 

AFP: I do that. I have that same problem. I’ve started calling it... What’s the suffix when you have an affliction? An -ism. An -itis. I have And Another Thing-itis.

EL: I do, too.

AFP: If I actually have your attention, I just can’t fucking stop talking. And that’s the problem with writing a book, is that you have this power. And especially if you’re already a published author, and you know someone’s gonna read it, you just sit there going, 'And another thing! And this thing happened, and this thing’s on my mind, and I just wanna tell you everything!' And you can really get in your own way.

EL: That’s why Omega Institute is an institute about everything. It’s one thing for an institute to be about everything – it’s like, yeah, we’ll get a teacher in here who talks about what’s going on with COVID in the world, and somebody who’s talking about angels, and if it’s angels then it’s also gotta be about your shadow. But in a book, that’s not a good idea.

AFP: Maybe I should start an institute.

EL: Don’t do it!

AFP: I can’t even handle my 50 person venue, it’s leaking cash!

Maybe we could talk about the thing that’s really on my mind, that I wanna ask you about. And it’s threaded between things that you write about in this book, Cassandra Speaks. I’ve read your other two books as well, and this is sort of more a general manifesto, whereas those two are more specifically memoir. And we’ve also talked about this before, but... When writing, at what point does rage graduate from hurtful into helpful?

EL: Yeah. Well, first of all - I’m gonna sound like Bill Clinton - you have to figure out what you mean by helpful. You can help by burning a house down, if your point is to get an open field. So it depends on what you want your help to do. It’s a really big question, it’s a really hard question. 

Cassandra Speaks: When Women Are The Storytellers, The Human Story Changes. That’s the title of the book. So I always have to keep in mind, what am I doing here?

So I started the book out of rage. Rage about the lack of the feminine storyline in history, and the way history has been told. History is not what happened, it’s who tells the story. And the story of what it means to be human, and how humans should behave, and what our goals should be, and what our values are, has been told over all the years by men.

That doesn’t mean if women had told the story it would be this great marvellous flowery story, and we’d all be la la la. Women can be bitches, and mean, and competitive. But there’s an aspect of womanhood that has been radically left out of the human story. And I do believe that if it had been a more balanced storytelling and value system over the millennia, we would not be in the mess we are in.

AFP: Amen.

EL: So my rage that still exists, did exist, and actually the backlash now is bringing it back even more! And if you think, 'oh, it’s so much better here now,' it’s not in many places in the world. It is brutal and backwards and awful, and rage-inducing. But to write only from rage just creates more rage. And sometimes I wanna be water. Sometimes I wanna be fire, sometimes I wanna be water. And I wanted this book to have enough water in it that it would heal even as it burned some shit down. And that’s really hard, and I’m sure I both succeeded and failed.

AFP: So had you had experiences throughout all of these books, and also throughout being a public person - leading an institute, and having a mic frequently - where you have stepped up to the precipice, and then had to back up, and stepped up again when it comes to utilizing your personal growth story to make a point, because of the lack of anonymity? Because people know who you are, they know who your ex-husband is.

EL: Who knows my ex-husband?

AFP: I mean, this is one of the problems that I am personally running up against, as a memoirist, as a songwriter, as a writer, as a public person, is I have spent my life telling my own story, but also gathering the stories of so many other people. I started as a ragey little teenager, and then 22-year-old and 25-year-old, barely conscious of other women’s and other people’s stories. Not really understanding that wanting the job as a writer and a performer and a musician meant that I was going to become the receptacle, and the confession booth, for thousands and thousands of other people’s catastrophic, traumatic, horrific stories. And in many cases, for whatever reason, because our culture is shaped the way it is, the only receptacle for certain people’s stories, because they couldn’t tell their families, their pastors, their sisters, their kids, their churches, their whatever. But for some reason, they could tell me, the musician. This clown, punk rock musician. And also, I welcomed it. I sat there at the signing table and I said, 'I will literally talk to you about anything,' which I assume is the kind of energy that Omega also invites. Absolutely come on in and talk about your darkest shit.

And then the flipside, as a memoirist, as a writer, as a songwriter, is to take all of that information, and synthesize it into a story, a memoir, a song, a book.

And one of the things that happened when I got into a relationship with a really famous person was I found myself just flailing around, trying to figure out what was and wasn’t allowed. What was and wasn’t appropriate. What was and wasn’t hurtful, or helpful. And just spending my time desperately trying to define that very question that you asked, which is: what is helpful? If I stand up and I just shake my fist and I rage and I scream at the top of my lungs and I just pull a Diamanda Galás, Courtney Love, hyper-punk-rock, burn-it-down attitude, there are definitely many who will follow along. There’s a lot of audience for that.

And then the flip side of me on the other extreme is like, if I’m just a good Buddhist, and I meditate and do yoga, and just sit here and hold space for people in this workshop, and sing my ukulele songs about just being at peace with everything, there’s an audience for that as well. And I have found myself kind of darting between the two extremes, wondering, how do I define helpful? How do you define helpful? You asked the question, perhaps Bill Clinton asked the question - bless him, and his penis. But what is helpful to you in deciding what is helpful? When you write a book like this, and then you go out and you tour it, and you talk to the Ann Lamotts, and you talk to the other people out there who are memoiring and are desperately trying to figure out, especially as they get older, what do I take from this story to give back to the world, to actually help the world out?

EL: Well first of all, there is no pat answer, so if you’re expecting that. Sorry. It’s such a living question. It is a question I’m always living into as a writer.

How many of you are writers of anything, books, songs? Yeah. So it’s the question - whether you’re writing memoir, or fiction, or journalism - how much of yourself to put in, and your self always drags other people in. My poor kids, they’re like innocent bystanders dragged onto my pages. My sister once gave me a shirt that reads ‘Be careful, or I’ll put you in my novel.’

So my first book, The Seeker’s Guide, was very much about my years at Omega, and I thought, I’ve been a canary in the mines of the human potential movement, so I’ll make it easy for people. I’ll tell you what I think works and what doesn’t. And it was mostly didactic. And I put some of myself in, and then people would say, 'I loved that book. I didn’t read much of it, I just went to the stories about you.'

So I thought okay, with the next book I’m just gonna write the stories about me. And Broken Open was published a year after that famous memoir by James Fry... Was that his name? He was on Oprah, and half the book was a big lie, and it became the bestseller because she pushed it, and then it turned out he had made up half the book, and so all the people in the book sued the publishing house, which was my publishing house at the time. So I had to get release statements from everyone in this book, in Broken Open, including my kids and their friends. It’s hilarious, I still have those letters from the kids in that slamball story. It’s just so funny.

But what wasn’t funny was what I wrote about my ex-husband. And a big part of the book is about how I was broken open by a dissolving marriage, and a divorce, and that was a story that appealed to so many people. And I had to take out, because he did not want me to mention, the main part of the story, which was an affair. And I had to take it out because he wouldn’t let it go in. And I was like, wow, this is gonna be weird, I’m gonna publish this book, and it’s gonna have a big missing chunk. But whatever, I can’t put it in. I can’t. 

And I’m really glad I had to do that. Because I don’t know what people think, some people have said to me, 'Oh I knew that’s what it was.'

AFP: I knew that. You say a lot by what you don’t say in that book.

EL: So I did a lot of not-saying workarounds. But I was glad. So what helps and what hurts... Some people write books and memoirs not to help people, lots of people write books not to help people. That’s fine, you don’t have to write a book to help people. That just happens to be my purpose, is to heal. Not that I always do it, but that’s my purpose. And sometimes the truth heals, even if it’s hard truth. But only my truth. I can’t put someone else’s truth in there, because that’s not mine to do. So it is an editing process, constantly, to figure out how much of the story is mine, how much can I tell. I always get permission from people, always, now, whether the publisher wants it or not.

AFP: Yeah, I had a great editor for The Art of Asking, Jamy Ian Swiss. And we had a lot of code words, and we developed an internal language for what was going on in the process of me writing this book, including throat-clearing, which I did a lot of. 'Before I get to the point, I just need to apologize, because this and that,' or, 'I’m gonna just set this up for a second.' And all of that, if it could be deleted, just fucking delete it. Just say what you’re gonna say. Don’t waste your readers’ time. And also score-settling. Because I would just have to get in there and, again, 'just while I have your attention, and you are reading my book, just so you know, this motherfucker...' 

And again, I’m really glad I had him holding me accountable. Because I always knew. I always knew when I was going into try and stick the knife in, or settle a score, or set the record straight, and make sure that everyone knew that in this particular situation, I just need to make it clear once again, I was right, they were wrong. And it’s not a good look!

And one of the things that I have actually found most useful as a writer is reading other people’s memoirs. So thanks, Golden Notebook, for always having all memoirs in stock, and dangling them in my face. There are so many bad memoirs, and I’ve read a few really bad memoirs, and I feel like the hallmark of the bad memoir is the constant score-settling. And now that I’ve gone through this process, and can really smell it immediately, I find myself reading other people’s memoirs and saying, 'this is an un-generous book.' And I often find myself thinking, when I read the memoir of a musician or an artist who’s still in their 30s, or even their 20s, and they’re just settling sore after score, I just find myself going, 'God, I wish you had written this book ten years later. Because you just wrote it at the height of rage, without water. It’s just fire and anger, and it’s not a good look on you.'

EL: An example of a really good memoir is a book you have there, Dear Sister. Were any of you in this room when this author was here? I was interviewing her here for this book, and boy, that could be a rage-settling book... but it isn’t. And this is the story of a local woman, from Poughkeepsie, who murdered her husband because of his brutal abuse, and went to jail. And her sister wrote this book, because her sister took the little kids and raised them while she was in jail. And somebody asked her, 'what was your relationship like, and what’s it like now, with the parents of the young man who was murdered, the grandparents of the children?' And she gave the most beautiful answer of being water. 'These kids lost so much. They lost their father, they lost their mother to jail for all those years. I didn’t want them to lose their grandparents. So I did everything I could to make sure that they were well-represented.' And I knew that she didn’t really necessarily feel that way, but she was protecting real people, not just her success as a writer.

AFP: I wanted to talk with Elizabeth about this book. And this is also such a beautiful example of how community and bookstores and the interconnectedness of things just flows importantly off the internet. I ran into Elizabeth, it was when you came over to my house. So the event happened here, and had I known how great it would have been, I probably would have moved heaven and earth to be in town and come to the event, but I just wasn’t following the plot. And then Elizabeth came over to say hi, and basically recapped the chat that happened here, and I was fascinated, but didn’t actually put it on my to-do list to buy the book, I just sort of mentally clocked, 'oh, what a fascinating story, and wow, this woman was actually here at Graveside, and her sister was there with her.'

And then I was in the bookstore, and saw the book, and was reminded, and picked it up, thinking, 'oh, maybe I’ll read this, and I’ll add it to the other 60 books on my to-do list that are by the bed.' And it just so happened that I wandered into the bookstore a couple days before I went to Kripalu for a gift to myself. I had not given myself the gift of going offline and being alone for about three years. So I booked myself into R and R at Kripalu in Western Massachusetts, and they’d probably be horrified but I call it a yoga hotel. It’s a beautiful yoga hotel, but you can just check in, and for three days eat good foods and do yoga, and I used it as an opportunity to shut my phone off and put my phone in a drawer.

And I brought the book, and I don’t know if you do this but I brought nine books for a three-day trip. Because I could. I put them all in he suitcase, to see what would call to me the first night that I had nothing to do and was allowed to just read, which I miss so much now that I have a child and it’s always one thing after another. And I picked it up, thinking, 'I am sure this book’s gonna be horrible, it’s written by a local author.'

I went in with so much angry judgement, going, 'oh, it’s some local book.' And within four pages, I felt a kinship with this woman, and her experience, that I almost found overwhelming, and I did nothing else for the next three days but just go to yoga classes, eat food, go for a walk, and I read the whole book on the trip.

And maybe I felt it as a writer, maybe I feel it as a reader, maybe I feel it as both, but I do feel that there is a lot of score-settling that wants to happen, and she needs to just back up. But she says a lot without saying a lot.

But I got about half way through the book, and I did something I never do, which is I took out a pen and I started underlining things. I never do that, and I didn’t know why I was doing it. I couldn’t imagine that I was gonna open it up and read it to somebody else, or go back in thirty years. I wanted to physically mark up the passages in the book that told back to me, in some kind of strange, emotional time machine, what it actually felt like for me to be stuck in New Zealand, with no prediction, no co-parent, no understanding of the future, and a scared little kid in the back seat of my car, making everything up as I went along. And her descriptions in this book of what it felt like to all of a sudden have her life upended, having just gone through a divorce herself, just settling into what she thought was gonna be the calm moment post-divorce, getting out of her relationship with an addict, with her 8-year-old, and all of a sudden a 2-year-old and a 4-year-old kid, with a mom in prison and a dead dad, are in the back of the car. And she still needs to figure out what to make for dinner, and what to tell them about the lost toy, and how to create a reality for children, when the horror of the world is one inch from your face.

And I found myself thinking a lot about you, and a lot about memoir in general, and how the story doesn’t need to be the same. The details don’t need to be the same. But a good memoir, a good writer, can somehow tap into an emotional collective experience that nothing else really can, that journalism can. And what you said about the book, where the people just wanted to get to the story, this is also what I’ve learned about songwriting, is that people don’t wanna hear generalized, universal bullshit. They wanna know what happened to you, and how it felt. And somehow in that detail of that one moment with the kid screaming in the back of the car, and hoping that you’re gonna make every traffic light to get to the visiting hours at the prison, and what happens to your heartbeat in that moment... It’s unbelievably weird, but we can identify ourselves, somehow, because we’ve been in a similar enough emotional moment.

I don’t know what the question is in there, but I think it’s something to do with memoir, and also safety and protection of those details. Because what I found myself wanting to ask you, and wanting to ask Michelle, was when these kids, this 2-year-old and this 4-year-old, when they’re 10 and 12, and 16 and 18, and 48 and 50, are they going to exonerate this book, or are they gonna feel that their story was somehow ripped away from them by Michelle Horton?

EL: I have grown up kids now I can ask this of. I’m sorry they’re not here. I have three sons, and two of them find everything about me, and Omega, and my books, to be very amusing, and they have a bemused appreciation for it. Then one of my sons drank the family Kool-Aid and is a therapist, and a teacher, and a mindfulness teacher, and he’s the one I can talk to, because he likes to process everything, and he lives in California, so I go and visit him and we talk about all the things that I’m interested in life. And he’s the one who I have talked to about, 'what’s it like to see yourself in my books? And what’s it like to see your parents’ marriage dissolve in a book, even though you were a little kid when I was writing about it?' And as you can imagine, he said it’s very weird when people will come up to him and they’ll get to know each other, and like, 'that’s your mother? Oh my god, I love that book! Oh, that’s you? That was you, that little kid who was afraid of dying, and then you had that talk with your mother?' And he said it’s both an honorable thing - I’m a character in a book! - and also he doesn’t like it. Both are true. Which is a good reason not to put too many facts about your children in a book. General stories, adorable stories, that’s good. I did not reveal all that much about my kids, and who they are. And also, I wrote about them when they were younger. They’re older now. And I always ask their permission, their consent, to be put in a book. And I don’t write about them any more, because they’re grown-ass men. 

But you know, I write in Cassandra Speaks about a meditation practice that I teach, that I call Do No Harm But Take No Shit. And the posture in Buddhist meditation is strong back. You spend a lot of time working on strengthening your back in yoga and meditation. And because your back is strong, and you know who you are, and you’re not easily knocked over by life, then you can have a soft and open heart. If all you have is a soft and open heart, and a slouched sense of self, then you’re gonna get knocked over. But if all you are is strong, you’re an asshole, because you’re strengthening your ego all the time. So it’s both. It’s a strong back, and a soft front. Both of them. And sometimes you need to make your back stronger, and sometimes you need to make your heart softer. But most of the time, it’s almost a physical prayer. May I do no harm. I got that saying from my sister, who was a nurse practitioner, the one who I was a bone marrow donor for. And when she died, I found this needlepoint in her office that said, Do No Harm - which is the oath that medical practitioners take - But Take No Shit - because nurses take a lot of shit. But I thought it was very Buddhist, very much like the 'take no shit' is your strong back, and the 'do no harm' is your soft heart. And you need both of them. And when you’re a writer, you need both of them. And I often will check in with my body when I’m writing something, like is this too rageful? Is this only take no shit? Where is the soft heart? And the same thing with putting something in that isn’t yours to tell. Checking in with both those questions.

AFP: It’s the same thing being a parent. It’s the same tightrope. This is the tightrope that I see all of my parent friends doing. My parent friend circle are all dealing with babies to ten-year-olds at the moment, and you have to do no harm and take no shit from these fucking five-year-olds. Because they’re watching us to know how to be, and every parent I know is constantly teetering between being a disciplinarian and a pushover. And it’s hard! It’s hard to be right in the middle there. You never get it right.

EL: I mean, look at the whole world! Look at what’s going on now as we look at Israel and Palestine, it’s like do no harm and take no shit. Who should give in, who shouldn’t give in? If it was easy, we’d all be back in the Garden of Eden.

AFP: What a mess! This seems like a good time to take questions.

Audience: Have you ever heard of Robin Lim? She’s a pretty famous midwife who was CNN’s superhero, and she changed the infant mortality rate in Indonesia. This morning she wrote that mothers or women are the stewards of world peace. What do you think of that?

EL: I agree. I agree with that. At least, I agree with giving us a chance to see if that’s true. It may not be. But it’s a very complicated answer.

I ran a conference series at Omega called "Women In Power". I started it twenty years ago before women’s conferences became so ubiquitous, and I thought, I’m gonna put these two words together: women and power, because it makes everybody so uncomfortable, including me. I don’t know what I think about women and power! And the idea was, could women do power differently? That was the question. And one of the first speakers I had was Eve Ensler of The Vagina Monologues, and then Eve and I started putting these conferences on together, it became our joint effort for many, many years. And sometimes Eve would call me late at night, and she’d say things like, 'I hate women! What are we doing? Women are bitches, I hate them! This woman did this to me!' So it’s not that women are all enlightened beings full of peace and love all the time, but I do think our care instinct - whether it’s biological or beaten into us because we had to be the caretakers for millennia - it doesn’t matter to me why, it just is the truth.

There’s this incredible science experiment that was done, that nobody ever hears about. You know how about 50 or more years ago, the idea of fight or flight became part of our vernacular? Under stress, humans either fight – lash out, aggress – or flee. Either literally run away, or sort of detach. And that came from these studies that a psychologist did in Harvard, he brought hundreds and hundreds of people into his lab, he simulated stressful situations, he measured their hormones, their blood levels, to see what happens under stress. And he came up with the term fight or flight.

Well, it turned out a woman at UCLA just about ten years ago checked it out, and realized only men had been brought into the lab! And this is true with so many medical experiments over the years. We’re just beginning to bring women into the lab for heart disease, for all sorts of things. So she replicated these studies on women, and she came up with the phrase tend and befriend. Under stress, yes, some women, almost all women, sometimes had a reaction of aggression when being aggressed upon, but mostly women’s instinct was to tend to the most vulnerable in the community. Stress, war, conflict? Let’s take care of the vulnerable, or befriend, which is creating circles of caring.

So you come home from a really hard day at work, you call three of your friends, 'this happened, that happened,' whereas a male instinct is more just to retreat into himself, and not talk about things. And her point wasn’t hat one is right and one is wrong. Her point was that, how come tend and befriend has not been talked about as a normal human reaction to stress? Why aren’t we saying that under stress we also tend and befriend? Therefore, let’s not just have military colleges, let’s have tend and befriend schools, where we learn how to tend and befriend better!

So I actually wrote to her, this woman who did all these studies, I wrote to her when I started Cassandra Speaks, because I wanted to get the book, it’s called The Tending Instinct, and it’s out of print. And the same year, Danny Goldman’s book Emotional Intelligence had been published, and because a man from Harvard wrote it, it was like, woah! And nobody bought her book, The Tending Instinct. And I said to her, 'My editor at Harper Collins wants to reprint your book, do you want to reprint the book?' And she was like, 'No. I’m done with this. You got the new people. I’m tired of this, I fought too long, no.' She was just so deflated from the whole thing. Because she really thought tend and befriend was gonna get into our vernacular. But when I bring it up, people are like, 'yeah, I think maybe I heard about that, but I don’t think so?'

Anyway, long story to say: yes. Yes. When women stand, not just taking over power for power’s sake, but to do it differently.

Audience: Do you think we’ll get a women’s signature on the constitution eventually?

EL: You mean equal rights amendment? Yes. But we have to keep at it. We have to remember that when push comes to shove in difficult times, women and marginalized people will always just get pushed to the side. So all of the advancements we make are tenuous. We have to keep at it.

AFP: I can’t quite remember, but I think when I came across the "tend and befriend" concept, it was probably through your social media some years ago. Or maybe it wasn’t, maybe I’m confabulating that in my head. But I remember seeing that and thinking, oh my god, there’s science behind it. I know this to be true. And rage boiled up in me, and still boils up in me when I think about this, and the fight or flight narrative, and the tend and befriend narrative, or whatever. The evidence just sitting in front of us of how men and women should and do create an ecosystem really calls to mind what has happened to me as a woman in the entertainment industry.

Because one of my rage spots is that since the beginning, my way of operating has been called into question and ridiculed, always, by the men in the industry. Including crowdfunding, including spending my time and energy the way it seems very obvious to me to spend my time and energy, always tending and befriending, trying to put the community first, trying to spend the money on the fanbase and the community, and the people and their stories. This is what we should be spending our time and money and energy on. And the men running the record labels going, 'bitch, you’re crazy. That’s not gonna get us to fourth quarter.'

And I would sit there going, 'No, there’s science! You will even make money! If it’s about money, and the profit margin, and making your fourth quarter, trust me. If we take care of this community, and these people, they will fucking show up and buy the record when it’s out next year. Believe me! I know I’m a woman, but trust me, it could work this way. We could all get what we want.'

And I would just feel so patronized and punished for wanting to look at the world through a different lens. Not just the usual moving-units capitalist structure that the dudes were used to, but a different approach. A community-based approach. And it still happens to this day.

I feel like people think that we are crazy when we take a tend and befriend approach to a business, to a venue, to town politics, to whatever, to how we tell the stories. And I really think that if we’re gonna get out of here, if this is gonna be true, if progress is gonna happen, it is gonna be in this area of recognition. Like Elizabeth said, especially that it is not that there is a wrong and a right, and a masculine and feminine, it’s that there is an ecosystem, and every bit, and every approach to the ecosystem, is there for a good reason, and that it all needs to be recognized as part of a greater whole. And I feel that we have gotten ourselves into this mess, like Elizabeth talks about beautifully in the book, because we’re looking at one ray in the spectrum, and focusing on only that, and ignoring all of this other stuff that helps, that works. And yet it’s dismissed. 

EL: I’ve just remembered her name. Shelley Taylor. That’s the UCLA woman.

AFP: Did she ever come back? Or did she just stay deflated in a cave?

EL: I just had that one email exchange with her. She just said no, I’m not interested.

AFP: And so the book didn’t get republished?

EL: No.

AFP: So I would say it’s the next gen’s job to just take the science and the research and run with it, and get it out.

EL: Right, it probably needs new science. Who’s a scientist here? Who wants to do this?

AFP: We’ll take it to Harvard.

Audience: We can start hashtagging tend and befriend.

AFP: Since reading about it, probably like Elizabeth, at talks, with groups, in blogs, I’ve talked about it. Because it makes sense to me, especially in the context of crowdfunding. This venue is fucking crowdfunded. This venue wouldn’t have been able to exist without a bunch of people all over the globe saying, sounds like a good idea. You mean you’re gonna put a thing in your community that’s gonna help people and be a bastion for queer avant garde art? I may live in Germany, or in Australia, but I’ll totally give you ten bucks, go for it. Write a blog. And that’s how and why we’re sitting here in this space.

EL: Thank you.

AFP: Thanks to these people.

Audience: So just thinking about the topic that we just got through talking about, a lot of times we can feel it in our bodies, what makes sense. Even if it’s something we support, our bodies are communicating a message. So my question is what are some of your personal practices that help you stay connected to your voice, to be able to combat these forces? And how also are you simultaneously building your power from an organizing perspective, to be able to address some of these things in the short and long term?

AFP: Before you give the mic away, can I ask, organizing, power... I’m asking for clarity.

Audience: So the example of music industry that you gave, and what you are facing as an individual artist. I’m sure other artists feel the same way. And what does that look like in terms of organizing an individual power in the collective base, to be able to chip away at that over time 

AFP: That’s a great question.

EL: Well, I always feel - and I’ve experienced this mostly at my organization - that if I think I’m alone, if I think it’s just me, I think that’s such a human thing to think it’s just me, this is just my timidness, or I’m paranoid... You say you feel it in your body, so not paying attention to my body, not honoring what’s going on in me, and the voice in my head saying, 'don’t make a big deal about it, don’t talk about it,' or feeling not safe, or not able to talk. If I just stay isolated in just me, and don’t check it out with other people, then I lose my power. But every advancement that I’ve made in my own small universe, my organization, where I’ve spoken up against power even though I’ve been afraid, it’s because I’ve checked it out with other people, gotten validation. I’m having the same experience. And it doesn’t have to turn into a movement, it just moves me to know this isn’t just about me. It’s almost reversed egotism, when you think it’s just about me, you’re trapped in your own little head. And when I get out of it, I only can get out of it by checking my story with other people’s stories. And that gives me a lot of power. So I’m not a very private person, and I don’t care if people know about my story, my weakness, my strength, my weird desires, my lust for power. All of the things I’m not supposed to have. I just tell it. And I tell it to people who I know might set me straight, or validate me. So I would just say, talk it up.

AFP: That’s a hard plus one from me. I could have said the exact same thing, and I would.

I still spend a lot of time on the internet, and I always have. A lot of my power came from the internet, and crowdsourcing, and using the internet from the early days to tend and befriend. One of the things that I was so excited about in 2000 and 2001, right when I was starting my band, was that I could blog, and tell my story. But that wasn’t the really exciting part. The exciting part was the comments. The exciting part was saying, I’m so confused, I’m so depressed, I’m so anxious, this thing happened, I’m going through this, it feels crazy, I feel crazy, what’s going on? And then dozens, hundreds, sometimes thousands of comments of people all over the world going, 'oh god, me too, thank god someone said it. Thank you for writing this, Amanda.' And I’d be like, 'You’re welcome... Should I write more?'

And I still keep up that practice. I’ve moved my website blog over to various platforms on the internet, and I’m going off on a little bit of a tangent, but your question was quite practical. I was a Berkman fellow at Harvard for the study of internet and society, I still am an affiliate there. I read and think about, and worry passionately about, how we are communicating with one another. How and where we are telling these stories. How they’re getting spread around. Where the comments live, and how they live. And Sophie Strand put this beautifully the other night: what our hygiene is in these departments. Because Elizabeth can say this in theory, but what does it mean? Are you calling your friend on the phone? Or are you making a post on Facebook saying, 'I rage'? And then who sees that post, and why? And when they comment, then what happens? And it may sound very nerdy, but I care so much. From the tend and befriend perspective, I care so much about who has power over these conversations. Who’s listening? Who gets to make money? What is profit-driven? What is happening to us insidiously, maybe without us noticing and looking?

And PS, the fact that we gathered all here in a flesh space to have this teeny conversation on Mothers’ Day feels very important to me. Because I didn’t have to do this event. I could have stayed home and done a Patreon post, and sat there in my underwear and answered the comments, but I think this is really important. I think calling our friends on the phone, and not just texting them, is really important.

Elizabeth will attest to this. I cold call my friends. I’m one of the last one to do it. I will die on this fucking cross! And the ones who are under 30 are like, 'oh my god, what’s wrong? Are you okay?' And I’m like, 'just calling. Wanting to check in. How are you? How am I?' Like the old days. Remember the 80s, when you’d just call someone because you were thinking about them? I think these practices are so important. I think we can easily - and have easily - gotten lost in just texting an emoji. It just doesn’t carry enough weight. You need to call. We need to get together.

And this goes off on a long tangent of needing venues in which to do it, digital and physical. We need book stores. We need Jackie, we need Drew, we need Liz, we need the Graveside Varietys, we need the Bearsville Theatres. We need Omega. We need Kripalu. And also, in an increasingly secular society, we need church gathering spots for our human conversation. We need these little mini churches all over, so that we can have a real-time, hygienic, honest, important, human conversation that is not just phone-based. I think this is so fucking crucial.

And everything else Elizabeth said. As I told her, I am trying harder and harder to take really good care of my flesh sack, and feed it good foods, and pour less alcohol into it. Being a mother really shifted that for me. I was due for a reckoning there. And I also find a lot of inspiration in my older friends. I love my friends in their 60s and 70s and 80s, because they give me an important perspective about where I’m headed, even just physically.

EL: It’s not pretty.

AFP: But I’m also in that sandwich generation right now, where I’m watching my parents in their 80s, and I’m watching my older friends head towards their 80s, and I am raising a child and am around a lot of young people, and I find myself thinking, it is really important to tell these stories. Even just me, shameless Amanda Palmer, I’m finding myself kind of hesitating about talking about menopause, because I’m perimenopausal right now, and it’s coming up at a lot of dinner tables, and I’m not always the one leading the charge. Other women are just like, 'I’m gonna fucking just talk about this, right here and right now,' and I’m like, oh god. Wow. I’ve been holding back in that department.

EL: Because you have a shame about ageing?

AFP: Because I’m afraid it’s gonna be off-putting. I don’t have a shame around ageing, I feel like I’m pretty fine with it. But what to converse about, at which table, is really interesting. What is allowed, what’s appropriate?

EL: Everything.

AFP: Right. And this is also coming from the mouth of a woman who spent 2019 going from stage to stage all over the world talking about having had three abortions, and a miscarriage, and a baby. But for some reason, being menopausal is maybe a little too squicky for you. So I’m, like Liz, just constantly pulling myself apart, and trying to learn, why am I thinking that way? What is this about? Where did this come from? What is up? And yeah. Hanging out with people like Liz, and the further travelled, the more wizened.

I think this is as important a practice to me as getting to the gym. 

EL: Are there other questions?

Audience: First of all, thank you for all of this, it’s very lovely. What’s been coming up for me is something I read on Instagram, saying that white women are so deeply conditioned by colonialism and the patriarchy, because of the privilege that we receive from being adjacent to that. How do we start to look at the roots of that, and how do we address that?

To your point, I had a conversation the other day and it was about the bear and the man, and I was like, number one the bear, but number two the man. And the woman was actually higher up on my list in terms of safety, and I think that that is something in terms of this idea that we have to conquer and to have power over each other.

AFP: The woman was higher up in that she was safer, or more dangerous?

Audience: More dangerous.

AFP: Oh shit.

Audience: Yeah. And I think that there’s this deeply embedded idea that women in power are actually in power over each other instead of together with each other, and with everyone. I’m just curious about any thoughts that you have on that.

EL: It’s a minefield.

AFP: Filled with bears.

EL: I’m gonna hand it over to Amanda, because I’ll tell you why. Because I work at a large institution, with a large staff, and the issue of men, women, black, white, gay, straight, I can’t tell you how many diversity inclusion consultants have come through Omega, how many trainings we’ve done, how many amazing conversations we’ve had in conferences, among staff people, and the past five or six years - interrupted by COVID - DEI and everything around it has been I’d say the major thrust of my life. And I’m no clearer than I was.

And I’ll tell you what gives me hope. My grandkids are so different than I am. The way they view gender, race, it’s so different. It’s not just, 'ooh, they’re such inclusive people!' They just have a very different lens through which they see the world. That gives me a lot of hope. I’m 71 years old. I can feel the parts of me that really don’t wanna change, don’t know how to change, and I’ve really worked at it. And part of what I’m doing now is saying, 'okay, next generation, would you please take this?' I think we’ve done our damage and our change as best as we can. And I’m so grateful, especially at Omega, that we have a younger staff now taking this work on. So it’s important work, I’m glad you brought it up, and I’m a really bad spokesperson for it, because I’ve been being schooled. I consider myself a student. I’ve been a teacher of many things, this is not one I can teach on.

AFP: Okay, couple of really interesting things just happened there. First of all, you said a lot that was important. This conversation is so hard to have, because as white women raised in privilege, getting up and making the speech about this maybe isn’t our job. I feel - especially in the last ten years or so - my job, to echo what Elizabeth said, is to really learn when to shut the fuck up. And to know, especially given what I was explaining before about my And Another Thing-itis, that I may think I have a lot to add to the conversation, because I have read my shit, and I’ve talked to some people, and I’ve done a workshop, and it can be very hard for me to just sit back and listen, and not make a comment. And I feel that that is the practice.

And then to tie in with the theme of where to go in with your power when you’ve got it, and then what is helpful, this has been the paradox of my entire career. I’ve got a tool, how do I use it without fucking things up? Without fucking up the people around me? Without causing more damage? Because clearly I’ve done some things right, at some points. Wrote a book that people liked, have sang songs that have touched people’s hearts, whatever, make a list, check, check, check. Bu that doesn’t mean that I’m an authority in any other department. And so I think one of the things that we would probably both be in alignment here is the discernment of where it is even our job to speak with authority. What to do with our platforms, and our power? And in Elizabeth’s case, and maybe in my case too, help build a container. Help build a stage. Help gather, tend and befriend, borrow a PA from your friend Mike in the back, that will amplify other voices. Because that’s clearly what’s needed right now, is you take the mic. You take the mic. What the fuck is happening over there? You tell the story. It’s not my job. But I can hand you an expensive microphone, with a PA that hopefully works, because everyone back here is like, 'let’s make sure the PA works.'

 And when I think about my job upcoming, with the Dresden Dolls, and what we’re gonna do, especially as I get up and I fucking rage in full voice about my anger, my divorce, my crazy survival and trauma and triage story from New Zealand, I come flat up against, oh my god, is this naval gazing? Is this totally off-putting? Is this too egotistical? Is this unhelpful? Again, I come back to the thing that Elizabeth was saying about the story. Actually, that’s your job, Amanda. Your job is to tell your story alone. Not get up and say, 'I speak for all women.'

The other thought I have, the possibility that I will throw out there, especially with you listening, is that Omega could be staffed entirely by bears. And everyone would feel safe. 

EL: Great idea. I’ll bring that back to the staff.

AFP: Can’t you see it? Close your eyes and just see the grounds of Omega with peaceful bear yoga teachers. Bears in the kitchen. Bears doing housekeeping.

EL: It was only yesterday that someone told me about this bear thing on Instagram, that I didn’t even know about. So now I could answer you all intelligently, but I bet a lot of people in the room have no idea what we’re even talking about. 

AFP: Is anyone not following? Oh my god. So there’s a meme, it came up at one point that a woman said, in all seriousness, 'I would rather run into a bear while I’m solo hiking in the woods, than a man. I’d feel safer.' And this created what you could imagine it would create in its wake, which is a lot of arguing, and a lot of really hilarious memes. Especially memes of bears looking very confused, saying, what have we done to deserve this?

But like any good meme, it’s a great cultural Rorschach. Because if a woman said that and meant it, where are we?

EL: See what you’re missing online?

AFP: See what you’re missing by not being on Instagram all fucking day?

Audience: But in gay culture, a bear is a totally different thing.

AFP: Yes, oh those memes have been made.

Audience: I’d like to hear a little bit about Cassandra Speaks, and can you talk a little bit about where that book came from in you?

EL: Well, I’ve always walked these two parallel lines of really wanting to work on my own inner life, take responsibility and not project outward all over the place, and have my own personal integrity and growth. And at the same time, I’ve been very much a social justice activist feminist type person, and it’s the marriage of those two strains in me that have really been the core of my work, and my life. And I’ve been a feminist, I was raised by an active feminist, it’s just been a huge part of who I am, and so at these conferences I would give a speech every year, and one year my daughter-in-law, I’d come from backstage, and people would be like, 'Oh, can I have that speech?' And I’d be like, 'Yeah, I’ll email it to you, what’s your email?' And she was like, 'No. She’s not giving these away any more, she’s writing a book.'

And so, my idea was I was going to take these 15 or 20 speeches, and just easily make a book. Well, four years later it of course wasn’t that easy. And that was the genesis of it. The idea of, can women do power differently? The idea of, if we just work really hard, scratch our way to the top, whatever that top is, and then just recreate what’s already been happening, what’s the point? Who cares if it’s a vagina doing it or a penis? I don’t care. It’s more like, could we take the tend and befriend, and transform power? So that’s the nature of the book. And also this idea of going back into a lot of the old stories that guide our culture, whether they’re biblical stories or...

Audience: Cassandra.

EL: Cassandra, thank you, Greek myths. And Cassandra. I’ll tell this little story and then I’ll be done.

Cassandra was a Greek princess in a myth. She wasn’t a real person. And the thing is, none of the people that guide us - Adam and Eve, Jesus - we don’t know if any of these people existed. They were made up. Who made them up? Who told the stories? Men. It’s a one-sided storytelling, with a value system, A plus B equals C, from a male perspective.

So, for example, Cassandra was the most beautiful goddess in all of Troy, which was the enemy of Greece. And all the men, all the gods, Zeus, Apollo, all the mortal men, everyone wanted to be with her, but she didn’t want to be with anyone, she wanted to serve the goddess. She wanted to be a cloistered nun type person. And the god Apollo, son of Zeus, wooed her with a promise that if you’re with me, I will give you the gift of prophecy. You will be able to see into the future, tell everyone what’s gonna happen, and you can affect the whole world that way. And she wanted it, she wanted to be a prophetess, so she said yes. And she didn’t realize, being naïve, that she was agreeing to have sex with him right then and there. And when she refused him, he put a curse on her. He said you will see into the future, you will know what’s going to happen, but no one will believe you.

So she would say what was true, including she foresaw the war in Troy, Helen of Troy, she foresaw the whole thing, and she would tell the people, 'Don’t do that! Don’t do this! All of you are gonna die! All your sons are gonna die!' But they thought she was crazy, and they would not believe her.

So as I was reading that myth, something was happening in our culture with the young women gymnasts, and the doctor Larry Nassar, where the girls kept saying, 'This is happening to me, mom and dad! This is happening to me, high school, college sports coaches, United States Olympic coaches!' But hundreds of girls about the same man would say the same thing, and no one believed them. And I was watching the televised trial, and this incredible woman judge allowed each of the defendants to speak, each of the accusers. I think something like 120 girls spoke, the trial went on for days and days, and Dr. Nassar had to sit there and listen to each of the girls tell what happened to them. And there was such justice in them being able to tell their story. And then she gave him something like 280 years in prison. And I thought, okay, well I’m gonna call the book Cassandra Speaks, in their honor, in these young girls’ honor.

When women tell the stories, and the world listens... what if all the leaders in Palestine and Israel right now were women? I do think it would be different. I just do. I think we would come from a different place. So that’s what Cassandra Speaks is about.

AFP: I would say, to follow that up, this book [Dear Sister] on that topic is an incredible powerful book. Because it is a book, ultimately, about the failure of our justice system, and who gets to speak when and how, and who is believed.

And what we’re watching right now - not just with Israel and Palestine, but Stormy Daniels and Trump - what would happen if every woman who had had an entanglement with Donald Trump could just get up and speak for a couple of hours, to the public? And the true stories that would paint the picture, the real picture, of this man in power. And hopefully one day we will get to a more fair and just system, where women will be believed when they speak, and they will be given the containers in which to speak, the mics with which to speak. And that is our job, as a community, is to just make sure that at every point, whether it’s a giant institute like Omega, or a teeny little venue, or the places on the internet where these conversations can take place, that we fight for them.

And also today, I can’t believe I’m saying it because it feels crazy, but with the hammer of censorship possibly coming down very hard, very very soon, especially if Trump gets back into power, just not taking simple free speech for granted.

EL: Or voting. Please vote.

AFP: Please vote.

THE END

...............

While I've got you here, Americans....are you REGISTERED???

https://www.headcount.org/

On that closing note....

Don't forget that the dolls have shows coming up in WASHINGTON D.C.....OUR NATION'S CAPITAL, and we are setting up to STREAM FOR THE PUBLIC, FUNDED BY PATRONAGE!!!! There are tickets for both DC shows ( at the 9:30 club, June 14 & 15) HERE: https://dresdendolls.com/. We're also in Philly June 7 & 8.

MURCA

FUCK YEAH

Love from the kitchen, more soon.....

xxx

A

P.S. If you loved this and you want MORE....here's my podcast interview with Elizabeth from pre-pandemic times in 2019. It's called "BULLSHIT IS EVERYWHERE" and it's more true than ever.

https://amandapalmer.net/podcast/the-art-of-asking-everything-s1e1-elizabeth-lesser-bullshit-is-everywhere/

------THE NEVER-ENDING AS ALWAYS---------

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