@hex@kolektiva.social2026-06-06 11:56:43
I gave the Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness crew the significant challenge of trying to make me sound coherent in this interview with Inmn Neruin. I was managing some pretty significant sleep deprivation and a mild cold, but I think it turned out pretty good (despite my best efforts).
But I did talk a lot about my trauma related to some of my experience living in #rural areas, and in doing that I was definitely not as careful as I could have been to talk about that as a trauma experience rather than as reality. Some people get trapped in rural areas, but other folks live there because they find beautiful things.
Not only is #RuralOrganizing critical (Trumpism grew out of areas neglected by "the left"), but rural living can be beautiful and rewarding. I briefly mentioned growing up throwing knives. A friend of mine lived way out in the woods, and there's something special about having a playground that spans several square miles. Intertwined with the old settler colonialism, antisemitism, *phobias, and isolation, that is at the heart of a lot of my personal rural misery, there's also a joyous and feral thing that taught me a lot and, I think, helped me organize more fearlessly. That thing is both individualist and collectivist, in different ways, and I don't think it's well understood without experiencing it. There's far more nuance than I was able to offer (and I definitely could have been more careful not to play into anti-rural stereotypes).
I think I said, "no one wants to live there." People do. You do. So let me try to fix that by giving you a chance to talk about that. I also talked about how slow things move, how nothing changes, but there are also sometimes opportunities to change things in huge ways specifically because structures don't exist to stop those changes. So while I'm bumping this zine and interview, also I want to use this as an opportunity to welcome my rural comrades to help fill in the gaps:
What draws you to where you are?
Do you choose to live in a rural area vs urban, and why?
Is there any other thing I've said that you would like to correct?
What other things should folks know?
https://www.tangledwilderness.org/features/near-death
