To change the world
with Liberation Lit
In 2021 and 2022, 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 in Iowa 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.”
Most Revolutionary (the first serialized novel of this substack) with its eponymous characters Jenna Ryzcek and Jasmine Maldonado, imagines and reimagines a kind of new and parallel revolutionary moment, one in which revolutionary consciousness, imagination, and acts might bring about a far more livable and humane world — in face of the current human, animal, and ecology extinction-level climate collapse and nuclear threats, genocide, and boundless other forms of death and destruction perpetrated in large part by concentrations of all-too-often bigoted financial wealth and its brutal club of military and police 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 of the world that we all might help create, or fail to in increasingly irreversible 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 the obvious reasons, 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.
Proving the point repeatedly, and yet again, over the course of a year, 150 literary agents — the gatekeepers to editors and publishers — said “No” to my most recent transgressive liberatory novel, Most Revolutionary, despite complimenting its various features.
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.
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 of the USA to ransom a better world.
I’m also currently serializing 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 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, possibly even revolutionize it, one powerful story at a time.
