I hope I can show you some of the gratitude I feel.
Thanks to Kim Smith for all the ways you’ve supported me and taught me about thinking, vulnerability, trust, ambivalence, care, and challenge, and for your inspiring and infectious capacity to hold complexity and find potential in hopelessness and tangled attachments. Thanks for renewing my interest in Spinoza and Deleuze several years ago (and teaching me so much about them), for helping me be curious, for endless stimulating conversations, and for reading early drafts and offering incisive comments and encouragement. Citations and acknowledgments can’t really do justice to the ways you’ve shaped the ways I think and move, or to the ways this book has been shaped by our encounters.
Thanks to Seb Bonet and Jennine Downie for your incredible patience and support, for extending yourselves and/or shaking me in so many ways, and for inviting me into your lives and role-modeling intentionality and generosity, among many other things. Thanks, Sacha and Stella, for teaching me how to play again and for your fierce resistance to being treated like children. Thanks to other hyenas, past and present: Colton, Sharmarke, Jac, Fletch, Mary, Mark, and Jesse for engaging in weird and wonderful experiments of collective living. Thanks to Isaac Rosenberg and Meg Neufeld for your encouragement and friendship, for reading early drafts, and for being present with me. Thanks to Richard Day and Joan Donaghey for your intellectual and material generosity, for being solid and messy at the same time, and for letting me hit my own head against many beams. Thanks to Bob Lovelace for offering teachings with relentless patience, humility, and care for people and place. Thanks to my MA supervisors Warren Magnusson and Rob Walker for teaching me, in different ways, to think patiently, impatiently, and deeply. Thank you, Ana Maria Peredo, for supporting me and others, and for creating convivial spaces within an academy that can be so isolating.
Thanks to friends, mentors, and collaborators, political and intellectual and intimate, for engaging in so many great experiments: JJ, Matt L, Danielle, trish, Dani, Gillian, Wulfgang, Kelsey, Daley, Bradley, Julie Anne, Joshua, Mik, Greg, Jennie, Captain, Jet, Carol, Eric, Noah, Jenny, Katie, and so many other influences and supports and inspirations, too numerous to name. Thanks to all the incredible collaborators and mentors in the Anti-Violence Project, OUST, the UVic Men’s Circle, Camas, the People’s Apothecary, Dinner for Troubled Times, Food Not Lawns, GRAFT, the Social Spaces Summit, the Purple Thistle Institute, and other quieter experiments.
Thanks, Jeanette Sheehy, for exploring so much of this with me early on, for grappling with patriarchy and sad militancy before we had words for them, for centering friendship, and for continuing to inspire me with your weirdness and spikiness. Thanks for having the courage to sever ties when they no longer served us and remake them when they did.
Thanks to my sister Jesse for her consistent love, kindness, and incredible humour. Thanks to my parents, Rick Montgomery and Susan Baker, for decades of unconditional love and support, even when my choices and commitments seemed baffling. Thanks for your willingness to let me explore and make my own mistakes, and for all the ways you’ve helped me thrive through struggle and grappling with thriving.
carla, thank you for role-modeling joy and conviviality and helping me orient to it, and for gently helping me unlearn the ways that sadness and rigidity suffused so much of the ways I went about organizing, relationships, and theory. Thanks for your fierce kindness, spikey commitments, awe-inspiring intuition, and the incredible ways you nurture and tend relationships (including ours!). Thanks to Chris, Zach, and Lilah for hosting me countless times, sharing space with me, and being open and welcoming in ways that made me feel like I somehow always already belonged among you (thanks also to the red couch in the bunker!)
carla has a few folks to give her deep gratitude to:
I have to begin by thanking my philosophy prof from back in the day because he loved Spinoza and introduced me to his work. There are so many people, like my college prof, who are of all ages, who have inspired and supported this work—many of whom stretch back my entire life (50 years!). So generally I want to express my deepest gratitude to all the encounters that brought joy and learning into my life – especially on the front lines of struggle. You’re all in my heart. Thank you!
Thank you to the Purple Thistle Community—especially all the youth, Matt Hern, and Am Johal—I am forever grateful for all I experienced, the trouble we caused, and all the unlearning we did together. Thank you to the Common Notions Documentary crew, especially Corin Browne and John Collins. Making the film with you two at the same as writing this book was a gift!
I also want to share my deepest gratitude with: Gustavo Esteva for expanding my understanding of friendship and hospitality. Madhu Suri Prakash, for sharing your wisdom with me. Mike Davis, for inspiring me to write and your boundless kindness. Rebecca Solnit, for responding with an incredible amount of delight and encouragement. scott crow, for having an emergency and generous heart at a distance.
My east-van kin and friends, thank you, Anita, Emily, Kelley, Dana, Hiromi, Gin, Laura, Savanna, Meghan, Iris, Corin, Nicola, mia, LeyAnn, Vivienne, Carmen, Khelsilem, Selena, and Helen! I especially want to say thank you for supporting me (and my family) while I became less and less available for visits while I worked on this book. Thank you all, sincerely, for sending along encouragement when I needed it most.
My Friends-Kin far away from here, thank you, Lily (and family), Maya, Tamara, Astra, Kelsey C, Dani, Jeanette, Piers, Hari, Mike Jo, Richard, Melissa, Kim and Son, your generous encouragement and inspiration from a distance were and are a constant support.
Thank you to my sister, Candice Wright, for singing “Joy Will Find a Way” most of my life (and in extension a shout out to Bruce Cockburn for writing it).
For the concrete support during the book writing, my deepest of gratitude to: Julie Flett, for years of careful, gentle friendship (the shared love for our boys!) and modeling what it can look like to do meaningful creative works. Lisa Prentice, for our collaborative healing journey that worked with my body to be stronger. Tasnim Nathoo, for your grounded thoughts, your early readings of the book, and incredible advice. Sylvia McFadden, for deeply feeling what we mean when we say Joy—thank you for the ability to hold onto conflicting feelings and for making kin with us. My daughter and most favorite person in the world, Lilah Joy Bergman, for teaching me how to be in the moment and trust emerging powers, how to be kind and fierce, while setting solid boundaries, and how to love my friends with my whole heart—I am still learning. My son, my muse, and bestest friend of all time, Zach Francis, for teaching me how to trust, how to support autonomy and self-determination while also being solid and caring. Thank you for walking with me and teaching me about pace and keeping me (somewhat) cool by teaching me about rad aesthetics and sound-art. Chris Bergman, my partner, a wizard, a patriarchy buster, and my other best friend for the past 25 years, thank you for loving me unconditionally all these years, for undoing with me all along the way, and in the best way possible. Eternal gratitude for bringing laughter and play front and center into our life and helping me see and feel the wonderment in the everyday!
Nick, thank you for saying YES! when I suggested that we write something about Joyful Militancy back in 2013; I could have never written this book without you, but you know that. Thank you for almost always traveling to me and making collaboration accessible in doing so. But mostly thank you for trusting me, making kin with us at the bunker, and holding and supporting me through a big barrier of mine. Your kindness and openness, your desire to work through the hard parts and celebrate the small joys are all inspiring, contagious, and deeply appreciated.
And finally, from us both, much gratitude to Chris Bergman for feeding us good food and taking care of us in many other concrete and subtle ways while we wrote this book. You are an embodiment of much of what we write and affirm in this book, and we love you.
Introduction
There are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt.
—Audre Lorde1
People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints—such