Teach Out Gathering Time
Sunday, February 19. 5:00-7:00pm PST
Zoom Link: https://zoom.us/j/98619398760
Meeting ID: 986 1939 8760
Our guiding question/call for unit seven comes from Tricia Hershey, author of one of The Teach Out's favorite books of 2022, Rest is Resistance: A Manifesto...
Imagine a world without oppression.
Take more time here. Visualize softness.
Breathe deep.
Envision a world centered in justice.
Stay here.
For Unit Seven, we will make our best effort to embrace this call. We will do so by pairing the work of two innovative, joyful creators: essayist Tressie McMillan Cottom and poet Ross Gay.
Each week will involve each of us committing to take a moment of respite, to read a pairing of one of Cottom's essays alongside one of Gay's pieces. Soak them in, read them...not on the run and preferably not on a screen. Sit, make some tea 🍵 , or drink 🥃 , or whatever you most enjoy. Allow the works to wash over you, opening up your center of imagination. Engage them fully.
This Sunday, 2/19, we will gather with fellow Teach Out community members, and share space to talk about the first pairing.
What avenues did these pieces offer us to think about liberation?
About justice?
About ourselves and our communities?
What imagination space did they open up for us?
I've been asked, many times, what ways one may "get involved" or "what we may do" as we live in the wake of so many sites, systems, and acts of injustice (as I write this, headlines of Memphis fill our media and imagination spheres and the US is actively gunning down unidentified objects over at least three different US states). We often talk about organizing, long term committed community relation with others.
We will vigilantly continue our commitments around these goals.
It's time to also think about how we forge imaginations that resist what we've been limited to see, hear, & create; to explore how we think about cognitive, aesthetic, and artistic revolutions that have re-formed what it means to be human and to demand justice.
OUR READINGS
1. Tressie McMillan Cottom, "Thick" from Thick (p. 1-32)
2. Ross Gay, "The First Incitement" from Inciting Joy (p. 1-10)
COME ONE, COME ALL!
Invite your friends, your colleagues, your community. All are welcome.