“The Heart Is a Muscle:
XX Embodiments of Antifascist Grief”
Length: approx. 75 to 250 words
Due: by or before August 4
Email: cbmilstein [at] yahoo [dot] com
This next collection of (your) voices revolves around the rivers of rage and seas of sorrow that are distinctive to this moment. It aims to both name the myriad and specific types of grief we feel in light of neofascisms taking hold across this imperiled earth, and share stories of how grief fuels our resolve and generates new ways to struggle against fascism.
As prompts to help shape your contributions:
1. What’s particular about the form(s) grief and losses that you’re experiencing at present? How does grief feel different and even surprising? What is it bringing up for you? What novel or surprising losses are you suddenly facing?
2. How do you embody that grief? Where do you see and feel it?
3. Where are your feelings of grief over fascism leading you? What are they generating? What are they compelling you to do, want to do, or not do? And with whom? Or where? Or how?
4. In what ways has your antifascist grief showed up—especially publicly, politically, and/or collectively—as practices of “rebellious mourning”?
5. What example from your own life, circles, or communities can you share that embody a “direct action of the grieving”? How have our shared patterns of losses and griefs under fascism fueled rituals of resistance, community self-defense, collective care, and/or solidarity?
Please only send me pieces that speak to grief and mourning that explicitly arise from an anarchistic as well as antifascist impulse, and center on “antifascist grief,” not timeless or decontextualed grief (crucial as that is too).
#RebelliousMourning
#CollectiveWorkOfGrief
(photo: “mourn the dead & fight like hell for the living” sticker, Pittsburgh, 2025)
