In Des Moines, Iowa in 2021 and 2022, during the Joe Biden administration, Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) water protectors Jessica Reznicek and Ruby Montoya were sentenced to 8 and 6 years respectively in federal prison for destroying millions of dollars of oil pipeline and construction machinery that is destroying the planet. Both principled activists were outrageously hit with a terrorism “sentencing enhancement” that has “been applied almost exclusively to defendants with ties to overseas extremist groups like the Islamic State group or al-Qaida or to domestic extremists like Cesar Sayoc, who pleaded guilty in 2018 to mailing pipe bombs to members of Congress” and now with Luigi Mangione, alleged assassin of health insurance executive Brian Thompson.
Most Revolutionary — the first serialized novel of this substack with characters such as Jenna Ryzcek, Jasmine Maldonado, and Alecta O’Roura-Chavez, inspired by the actual activists Jessica Reznicek and Ruby Montoya and the elected progressive leader Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, among others — attempts to explicitly and directly illuminate and surpass the topical moment in imagining and reimagining a parallel and new revolutionary world, one in which revolutionary consciousness, imagination, and acts might bring about a far more livable and humane planet.
As if the progressive populist sphere of consciousness and action were engaged in novel struggle against establishment power and oppression, Most Revolutionary envisions and dramatizes a revolutionary and far more humane world in face of the current human, animal, and ecological extinction-level events of climate collapse, nuclear threats, and genocide. These systemic calamities, among other forms of pervasive death and destruction, are perpetrated by concentrations of all-too-often bigoted financial wealth and its brutal club of military and police state power.
Stories help change the world one way or another. Grounded in the real and lifted by imagination, Most Revolutionary is a story of, by, and for revolution, including revolutionary ways in which people view themselves and the realities and possibilities that we all help create, or fail to in increasingly dire ways. Most Revolutionary is a story for a good and livable future, if there is to be any one at all.
“Since pure art makes for acceptance, it tends to become a social menace in so far as it assists us in tolerating the intolerable.” -Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form
Most literary agents, editors, and publishers of fiction, for ideological reasons ironically, look to cultivate and publish relatively “pure art” or art that goes just so far within well-worn limits, little expanded, and no farther. Or art that does not challenge certain of the most central and sensitive levers of unjust power. My art is not “pure”. And aims directly for what centers of unjust power strive mightily to keep taboo.
It’s not as if there are no pure art moments in Most Revolutionary. In fact, the entire structure and countless sequences are lines of pure art; that is, tried and true aesthetics. The problem for conventional decision-makers in fiction is with what the pure aesthetics are wrought to convey.
The Energy of Story
Whether in Hollywood or in magazines, on stage or in high lit, in graphics or memoir, story creation can be greatly assisted by using key story tools (not rules) and by understanding key story details (not dogma) found in the most widespread and popular, commercial and literary renderings of story.
Lively, exciting, and vital but too often unacceptable impurities infuse Most Revolutionary, and other such liberatory novels, from beginning to end.
So I serialize Most Revolutionary here, along with more liberatory fiction, criticism, and commentary in both prose and script forms.
Most Revolutionary: During a killer Iowa blizzard, fearless DAPL militant and radical plant nursery grower Sabia Perez first saves then kidnaps the stranded President to ransom a better world.
I’ve also serialized the anti-Empire, anti-Trump novel Loop Day:
Two low-level Oval Office aides must relive the day of their deaths over and over again, in a doomsday time loop that will end only if they foil the plan to assassinate the insane President and save the world.
I’ll save the liberation lit manifestos for later [update: see the many topical political and literary commentaries throughout this site] and for now let the art speak for itself. It is anyway its own form of manifesto — and liberatory partisan cultural event and experience — an attempt to live wholly in the world, and to change it, to revolutionize it, one powerful story at a time.
