“Processing the Pandemic: Reflections on Well-Being from Below”
Length: prose, approx. 75 to 250 words
Due: by or before Sun, Jan 25
Email to: cbmilstein {at} yahoo {dot} com
I’ve been playing with the title—and focus—of this zine for a while, and am still not sure it’s completely spot-on. Yet I keep observing—often in detrimental ways to our own and others’ well-being—that whether folks believe “the pandemic” (shorthand for the onset of a cascading crisis in early 2020) is over, diminishes and rises again, or never ended, we never really processed how COVID-19 impacted us as well as social relations and the social order. For many, the figurative (and frequently literal) mask came off and then a sort of collective “fog of forgetting,” to borrow a friend’s phrase, took hold. So I was going to title this next zine, “Unprocessed Pandemic.”
But as many of you know, I’m a prefigurative-minded anarchist. I believe we should continually offer up visions for and experiment with forms of freedom, outside hierarchical structures, and inside the multiverse our own self-organized types of communal care, solidarity, self-governance, love, and so on.
So for now, I settled on the idea of looking for stories of how you—yes, you, my dear anarchist friends—are proactively “processing the pandemic,” now and/or toward the likelihood of future pandemics/epidemics (such as the words pictured here by @kit__bla in a gorgeous little zine they recently crafted).
Your anecdotes can span a range, from practices and projects that you kicked off since 2020 (public grief spaces, mask and purifier blocs, best practice guides, ones related to countering disposability and abandonment, autonomous health convergences, do-it-ourselves forms of physical and mental health care, etc.) to reflecting on what could have been, or was, or could be in the future, an anarchist versus statist and/or liberal response(s) to pandemics/epidemics, for example, or what does, or could/should, communal and public health care look like, sans states and nonprofits.
(For a folder of free PDFs of previous zines in this series, email me at the address above, or you can download them all at sheerspite.ca)
🖤🩷
