Launching on substack, 11 may, 2021
Launched in 2021, The Break is a newsletter housing my writings on cultural activism and organising, amongst other things. In this ever-evolving repository, you’ll find a regular supply of essays, reviews, profiles, vignettes and experimental writings, as well as some original photography. And I have plans to expand it to include other forms of critical and creative content, from dialogues and collaborations to guest contributions. Watch this space!
For the moment though, I want to explore and share my love of stories with you — and the stories behind the stories — especially those overlooked and outlawed within corporate media. And just like this love, my notion of what constitutes a ‘story’ is sweeping. It might be a fleeting look or gesture that captures my attention, or a media representation, a radical cosplay, a (mini)comic or zine, a vandalised wall painting, or an activist happening. (Hailing from Belfast, you’ll also notice a recurring engagement with legacies of partitions and ‘peace walls’, adversarial politics, and building solidarism within conflicted communities — local issues resonating globally.)
Sharing the news, intricacies, knowledges, and synergies of these snapshot stories and storytellers provides its own radical joy. But I’m attentive to the bigger story too. What do these stories tell us about the interlinking forces and fictions — neoliberal capitalism, white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, cisnormativity, anthropocentrism, to name but a few — (mis)shaping our world? And how will they help us escape, survive, and un/make it?
I’m talking here, of course, about the transformative power of storytelling. A universal activity capable of helping us reorient our relations (to each other and to the world), challenge the status quo, and incite (and effect) radical change.
Yet as I explore in The Break, transformative power is collaborative, not monologic. That is, it’s not enough to simply tell and share stories. To be revolutionary, they must be heard, felt, and — as all good consciousness-raising activists understand — absorbed into the mind and into the heart. Indeed, like all good stories, the story of activist-storytelling has more than one side: sharing, listening, responding. A dialogic, participatory process evoking call and response rituals, noted for their ability to connect storytellers — be they speakers, musicians, artists, cosplayers — with audiences, allowing the intangible to become tangible, the improbable possible. To hear the call of a (counter)story is to open and enter a transformative space of empathy, learning, and understanding. It is to create a position from which to better — more usefully — respond to the injustices, oppressions, and crises marking us and our world.
And this, if anything, is my hope for The Break. A space to rethink our ideas of what stories are — their forms, temporalities, textures, surfaces — and who gets to create them. But also, their utility in activism. Invoking — calling upon — the spectre of a radical reading room, I imagine The Break as a ‘from below’ space, ringing with unsung outlaw stories and subjugated knowledges. A critical celebration of all things radical, grassroots, and DIY. Through these encounters, I seek to enact and encourage a refusal, a rejection, a radical rebuttal of the toxic, hostile, and suicidal status quo. A response equal in measure to the power, love, and urgency pulsing through the call for international revolutionary action. And I would love it if you joined me in this break-out enterprise.
Subscribe to The Break today!
Some people have asked me why I chose to call my newsletter The Break. And, as perhaps expected, I’ve done so for a few reasons. To evoke the sense of breaking away from and breaking out towards, when thinking about my experiences with academe and this new venture.
But it also speaks to my deep love of the sea, especially its big waves, from Nazare to Pe’ahi and closer to home, beloved Mullaghmore. (I’m from an island, after all.)
I write more about it in a forthcoming essay, and about how the numinous sea speaks to the crises marking our existential condition.
Subscribe to The Break to find out more….
Ellen Kirkpatrick. 