An interview with Sam J. Miller, author of The Blade Between and Blackfish City, on community organizing, how fiction can change the world, and finding joy during apocalypse.
The Wild Beasts of the World. Finn, Frank and Austen, Winifred. 1909
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Sam J. Miller is a writer of science fiction, fantasy, and horror, all told with crackling prose, unforgettable characters, and a dizzying number of cool ideas. The first story of his I read was We Are the Cloud, a queer cyberpunk love story set in a youth group home in the near future, and I have been a big fan ever since. I am not alone—Sam’s work frequently makes must-read lists and best-of anthologies, he’s won a Nebula Award and a Shirley Jackson Award, and been nominated for too many to list here.
His award-winning 2018 novel Blackfish City set a new standard for climate fiction, although that doesn’t come close to describing a book set in a post-apocalyptic floating city in the Arctic run by organized crime and artificial intelligence, where our hero rides atop an orca and has a polar bear as a sidekick. Sam’s latest book, The Blade Between, is a beautiful but conflicted love letter to the small town in New York where he grew up, and simultaneously a chaotic horror story about gentrification and the ghosts of whales.
In all cases, his work is deeply concerned with matters of justice and injustice, and often serves as an indictment of power structures that lift some up and hold most down. But remarkably, his work is never preachy or prescriptive, guided instead by empathy and an appreciation of the complexities of the world. Much of that insight comes from his former day job as a community organizer in New York, which he did for 15 years while working on his fiction in the late nights and early mornings.
I had a terrific conversation with Sam about his work as an organizer, his problems with apocalyptic fiction’s “pornography of suffering,” and how storytelling can serve a similar function as protest. Here it is, condensed and edited for clarity, as we do.
A technical note, if the full interview gets cut off in your email, you can always bring it up in a browser here.
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I remember when I first read one of your short stories, We Are the Cloud, I was taken aback by it, in a good way, because it felt kind of radical. A lot of your writing feels like it has this dissatisfaction or anger at power structures. So I’ve always wondered, to what extent are you doing that intentionally and to what extent do you see your writing as a sort of project of social change or your politics?
Well, approximately 100%. I mean, I do really feel like it’s all political. It’s all shit I’m pissed off about. You know, I have a lot of things that I’m angry about and a lot of ways in which I wish the world was different. And that goes back to being a 14, 15 year old kid when my father’s butcher shop went out of business because Walmart came to town, and becoming a vegetarian and learning about global capitalism and exploitation and the exploitation of human labor and animals. And then coming of age as a queer person in a super homophobic world, and dealing with a lot of the toxicity of masculinity and the expectations of boys.
So, yeah, that’s always been a huge motivating factor in my fiction, is the things that piss me off and the ways in which I wish they were different, or the ways in which I could imagine change happening. Or just bloody revenge on jerks.
So yeah, We Are the Cloud, like a lot of my fiction, came from the place of having been a community organizer for many years, working really closely with a lot of people who are in situations really similar to the ones that the characters of that story are in, and just being super infuriated at the way the world treats them. The way systems that are supposed to help them actually exploit and manipulate and marginalize them.
But also the kickass power of them, like the incredible strength and ability and sense of humor and creativity and all these other things that people have in situations like that. And so wanting to explore that as a superpower, as like, yes, people are in terrible situations, but those terrible situations often are the source of people’s awesomeness, or their awesomeness is formed in opposition to or in spite of, or in defiance of all of that. So yeah, people are magic, people are amazing. They’re also terrible, but that’s also a thing that I write stories about.
I know a fair amount about your career as a writer, but I don’t know that much about your career as an organizer, other than that you worked with Picture the Homeless in New York for a long time. Would you be willing to give me the broad strokes?
Yeah, so when I first moved to New York City, I worked in publishing. I had a job at a book packager that was creating, like cookbooks and lifestyle books. And this was also, you know, late 2001, early 2002, so there was a lot of really active work being done around the response to 9/11. And fighting back against the push for war, and the really rampant abuses of the civil rights of immigrants, especially immigrants from the Middle East. And so I was sort of having this day job of putting together a Christmas cookbook and night job of going to meetings and planning protests. I once had a breakdown of like, trying to find the right piece of art for Santa Claus to go in the lower left hand corner of the page, and I was just like, my Jewish relatives are spinning in their graves.
I got laid off in the economic downturn of 2003, started doing activism full time, and fell into community organizing. And was really fortunate to end up with Picture the Homeless, which is a great group that was founded and is led by homeless people. They’re about coming together to fight for solutions to the problems they face, and to really ensure that that organizing is led by homeless people. And so it’s not about people who have never experienced homelessness, but studied it in college, or people who are civil servants with good intentions, but no experience of the realities of homelessness, making decisions, shaping policies that homeless people will have to live with.
I was there for 15 years exactly, and got to just do the most amazing work and organize some incredible protests and help support some great campaigns and we ended up effecting well over 100 concrete policy and legislative changes from really small stuff to pretty big stuff. Ultimately—and I think this is something that happens to a lot of people, especially in community organizing, which requires a huge amount of emotional and physical labor—I had reached a place where I was just like, I think there need to be younger, better people doing this work now, because I’ve acquired the cynicism that I had observed and hated in older organizers.
Do you have any particular points of optimism or pride from that period? Or on the flip side, is there anything in particular that you feel disappointed by coming out of that work?
I think that spending any amount of time in or around the nonprofit industrial complex leaves you with a really sour taste in your mouth. It’s just really, really hard work that is underfunded and under resourced. And especially for people of color, people from low-income backgrounds. There’s no safety net, there’s no retirement funds, there’s no 401K’s. And I had seen some really amazing organizers who didn’t get to grow old, because they got to a certain age and the work killed them, or they had to bail out of it.
You have to acknowledge that the whole way the 501(c)(3) tax code is structured is to prevent organizations from effecting systemic change. The question then becomes, do you believe that within the extreme limitations of day job activism, that you can create change? And as long as you believe that, then that’s great. And then you reach a point sometimes where you don’t, or you think that the sacrifices it asks are too much, the framework for change is too limited. So those are the things, the cynicism, the anger, the resentment, the things that I walked away from that I don’t love.
But what I do love, and the best part, is always the people. I got to meet and work with so many amazing people who inspire me to this day in so many ways, and who I still count as friends. Just so many great people. People who are dealing with unimaginable trauma on a daily basis, and still come to the office every day committed to fighting for nonviolent social change. That’s the kind of thing that makes you feel like, yes, the world can be changed. Even if I can’t do it right now in this way.
I think I recall you saying on a podcast something along the lines of, you’re not really writing to convert people or convince people of something. You’re writing to energize people who are in the fight. Am I getting that right and is that still how you feel?
This is an insight from activism and organizing. When you’re marching down the street with a bunch of people and you’re chanting something, you’re not really doing it to change anybody’s mind. Because the people who are like sitting in their cars fuming that you’re blocking traffic, with their he-who-shall-not-be-named bumper sticker. They’re not going to be like, oh, I never thought of it that way.
Your sign is so clever...
Exactly. I’ve made a shit ton of protest signs in my day, and I’m proud of many of them, but I’m under no delusions about their ultimate effectiveness. But, you know, I was at a protest the day after the 2016 election. And we were all stunned and shocked, and what made that protest amazing was just seeing the way that people who were scared and upset and angry—the way that they responded was what was energizing, and why we were there. Not because we thought people were going to be like, oh, well in that case, let’s do another election. No, what’s important is making people feel like the thing that they believe, the thing that they’re angry about, that there’s other people who are out there saying it. And therefore, if they say it, if they act on it, if they do something, then that’s great. And it’s safe to do that.
I think it’s similar with fiction. I would love to believe that a beautifully written story about somebody who goes on a journey from climate change denier to climate change activist would inspire somebody to make that journey. But I also feel like that’s kind of a naive belief, and not really how that typically happens.
I think that it’s definitely possible that somebody who hasn’t made up their mind might make up their mind differently. But typically, I’m writing more for the person who’s like, I think that sounds really interesting. Or I wanted to believe that there was a future that isn’t an ocean full of plastic fragments, and then I read that story about a future where genetically modified fungus has been developed to do everything plastic does, but be biodegradable, or whatever. To tell the stories that can make people think that there’s hope, that there’s possibility, that there’s a reason to get involved. So yeah, you had it mostly right. For me, I’m not really talking to the people who are probably, at least ideologically, my enemies.
There’s this great book Twitter and Tear Gas by Zeynep Tufekci, and she writes about Occupy and Arab Spring, and how a big part of their point was that they created these little communities that reflected how the people wanted to live. You know, there were like, cashless transactions…
Libraries…
Yeah, exactly. And that reminds me of how, in a way, writing stories can be like that. You’re carving out these little worlds for people who want the world to be better, even though it’s not.
And those hopefully will be incubators for people who will make the world better. I think that the far right has historically done a really good job of creating little incubators for people who are going to go out and change the world. And I wish they weren’t doing such a good job of it. But yeah, that’s the power of a space like Occupy or even Twitter. As much as it is annoying, social media can be a place to come together with people who can inspire and excite you about transforming your feelings into action.
Yeah, definitely. I wonder, when you were growing up, did you find your politics and your interest in fantasy and sci-fi and horror to be related? Did they feed into each other at all?
I don’t know. Who can say what’s going on in here? I do think there is a similar sort of giddiness I get from great speculative fiction and great activism and that sense of possibility. You know, like the first time you encounter Octavia Butler or Ted Chiang or Ray Bradbury, when you’re like, oh, you can do this?? Oh! And that’s similar to the idea of like, oh I’ve never met these people before and I’m sitting down planning a protest with them and I love them. So I think it definitely comes from a place of being unsatisfied with reality and wanting to imagine a better reality. And books have historically been an escape and a safe place when I was a little queer boy in a small town where shit wasn’t safe. So I think that there’s definitely similar wellsprings to them.
OK let’s talk about some of your books. I want to talk a bit about Blackfish City because I really enjoyed it and I think about it a lot. What made you want to write a book about, I mean, it’s not solely about climate change, but it’s a lot about climate change, or at least post-climate collapse. And how did you come to your particular approach to it?
Yeah, that book came from like, a ton of places. The real sort of nucleus of it, where the city of Qaanaaq came from, was a short story I wrote called Calved, which was published in Asimov’s, that is about a person who is displaced from a sunken Manhattan and ends up in this floating city. And that was really about American xenophobia and the fact that most of the immigrants coming to America from Central America are coming here because of environmental and economic devastation wrought by the United States on their home countries and their home economies. And so the irony of like, we fucked up their countries, we fucked up the environment, and then when they come here, we give them shit about it, when it’s our fault, right? So imagining what happens when the American xenophobes are the ones who have to go somewhere else because their homeland has been destroyed and then get treated like shit for trying to find a halfway decent life. And so that cyclical nature of oppression was part of it.
But also, I obsess a lot about climate change, I think a lot about mass extinction, I love animals. And thinking about the horrors that we are unleashing on the planet is really upsetting to me on a daily basis. And it’s legit the kind of thing where you’re like, it’s really hard to justify life, and staying alive and feeling good about the future, when this is the toll of human life and human existence. So that’s just sort of a general constant backdrop of my brain of like, we are monsters, we deserve to go extinct. But also, I was responding semi-consciously to a lot of the zombie apocalypse narratives and The Road by Cormac McCarthy, which I hated.
Ooh I would love to hear more but go on.
You know, the idea of the apocalypse is constantly invoked in science fiction, but it’s usually some bullshit that’s never going to happen, as opposed to the very real thing that is happening right now, right? Because the zombie apocalypse, we can enjoy those narratives without thinking, oh, I really should stop creating zombies. You know, The Walking Dead doesn’t make anybody go like, oh let me change my behavior. But climate change apocalypses are like, we’re doing it right now, every time we fucking get a Starbucks. So I wanted to sort of reroute an apocalypse narrative into—no, think about the shit you’re doing.
But also the other thing that I hate about a lot of those narratives, especially The Road is just the pornography of suffering and the utter fuckedness of it all, as opposed to like, well no, there are still gonna be some awesome things, and there might be some new awesome things. And even when we’ve lost all of this, there’s still the potential for change and for coming together and for building community and fighting back. So, you know, it was about responding to, inverting and also like, undermining the apocalypse narrative.
I’m glad you brought that up because one of my favorite things about Blackfish City is the fact that you make it very clear that there’s still joy in this world. There’s one part in particular where one of the characters and his grandfather are talking and then all of a sudden, they see two seals bump chests, and they just laugh for a second. So even in this city that is horribly fucked up in all these different ways, this grandfather and grandson are still like, “oh look, seals!”
Even if they’re both terrible people.
Yeah, right.
They’re still people.
I wonder if you could talk a little about why you are so averse to that kind of disaster porn and why you’re so insistent on including the fact that this is just part of life for people and they’re going about their daily business.
I think part of it is just, it’s boring, right? The unrelenting heaviness and misery. We just watched Mare of Easttown, which in many ways is a staggering achievement, and in many ways is just so fucking grim and bleak. It’s like, oh, and then this person got into a car accident. Oh, look, the baby didn’t drown in the bathtub, and that’s the happy ending to this episode. And so yeah, it’s easy to make people feel things if you go that route, and many people really appreciate and value that opportunity to feel things. So it’s legit, but it’s not what I want to do.
A big part of it is, I’m trying to psych myself out here. And if I can psych somebody else out, then that’s great. I’m trying to tell myself that there’s hope, that there’s possibility. And I don’t want to tell a narrative that’s just like, everything is terrible. Let’s have a few moments of joy and beauty in amongst all the horror that will inevitably swallow us—because that’s what life is! Life is misery with pockets of joy and bliss and beauty and whatever else we look for in life. And stories are where we can imagine that. So yeah, trying to trick myself, and if other people get tricked in the process, bonus.
Similar to that, I was thinking about how there’s always this debate in science fiction of whether it’s too optimistic or pessimistic, right? One thing that’s cool about Blackfish City is that it’s very hard to define clearly whether it’s dystopian or utopian. Where do you fall on whether science fiction needs to be more of a tool to present a bright future or whether it should be something that scares the shit out of us?
I mean, my particular axe to grind with a dystopia/utopia conversation is that life right now is utopian for many people. There’s lots of people in the world who enjoy unimaginable comfort and abundance. And there’s tons of people for whom life is utter dystopia, rivaling anything in The Walking Dead. And working with homeless folks in New York City, I was able to see that every day. So I don’t think there’s ever been a point in human history where that hasn’t been the case—utopia for some and dystopia for more. And it’s also hard for me to imagine a future where that’s not the case, although I would love to. But no, I think that that’s just how life is going to be.
If you’re living in dystopia, it’s a function of who you’re hanging around with or who you are, not what the world is like, and so I’m trying to say, here’s what life is like for this person who’s socioeconomically disadvantaged versus someone who’s super wealthy and powerful—and you know what, neither one of them is happy or they’re unhappy over different things. When I say that people are living in utopia and enjoying unimaginable abundance and comfort, that doesn’t mean they’re not subject to heartbreak and grief and loss and mourning and frustration. So yeah, everybody’s screwed. That’s where I’m coming from. That’s where my stories end up.
There is a line in Blackfish City that I always really liked, in this moment when the characters are like, holy shit everything is about to change right now. You call it “Terrifying, but also thick with magnificent possible outcomes.” And I wonder if you’ve experienced moments like that and also, what do you think it takes to get to those points?
I mean, I think that a lot of it is personal and a lot of it is individual, and I think that those moments come along occasionally and they are often connected with like trauma or crisis or transition. I went to the Clarion science fiction writers workshop in 2012. And that’s a six-week intensive workshop that’s in San Diego away from your life and job and family. And a bunch of people in my class ended up getting divorced after that. Because when you step away from your life like that, you suddenly see it differently and the things that you had grown accustomed to, and maybe the things that you didn’t love, but you had made your peace with, you can suddenly see differently. So those moments of transition where like, maybe we got fired, maybe we lost someone we love, maybe we got dumped, suddenly, it’s like we’ve been jolted out of the way we thought the world was. And that can be a really powerful moment for transformation.
And the same thing happens in the world, like a political moment. I think that a lot of times elections serve as that moment of oh, now I’m scared, or now I’m empowered and excited. You know, I think that in a lot of ways COVID has been that. Like, oh, we’re not traveling on jets anymore and we actually don’t seem to be suffering as a result of it. So maybe some of the wasteful habits we have have changed. I feel like my relationship to nature changed when I was not in the workaday grind all the time. So I think that moments of societal transition can also be that.
But often it’s like, who is best positioned to take advantage of transformation? It’s the wealthy and the powerful. I feel like there was rhetoric around 9/11 of, oh, the old geopolitical order is crumbling and now we’re going to see the potential for new alignments, and what actually happened was just racism and xenophobia and anti-Islam and war and militarism and military profiteering just surged. So I think the potential is there for change and usually the change is taken advantage of by the people who are financially the most able to. But that’s not always going to be the case and it’s not going to be the case for everybody.
Okay, one more question on Blackfish City and that is about one of my favorite lines of yours, which is, “Every city is a war.” And that whole passage is such an amazing insight and such a different insight than the way a lot of I guess rich liberals tend to view cities as these paradises of perfection and openness.
Coexistence, diversity, everyone’s happy, I can get all the good food I want…
Look at this amazing Ethiopian restaurant I can go to, yeah. But I think that’s very counter to the way that like ordinary ass people experience it, so I am curious if your thinking has changed much on that over the years. Do you still agree with that sentiment?
Oh yeah. Oh yeah. And you know, it’s like, who are you and where are you in the city and in the ladder of the city to see it that way or not see it that way, right? You know who knows that it’s a war? The people who can’t pay their rent and are about to get evicted because their landlord doesn’t give a shit about them as people. And so that’s a war right?
We we want to tell ourselves that everyone gets along great, but it’s a lot of competing interests for scarce resources. It’s a lot of struggle for power and dominance. You know, I ride my bike in New York City and it’s a nightmare city to bike in, and every cab driver is at war with every bicyclist. And the wars between putting pressure on politicians to create more bike lanes to make it safer, versus demolishing bike lanes and making the city better for drivers is real.
So yeah, I definitely think that’s still the case, but I also think that that doesn’t mean that the other narrative isn’t true. That this is the city where all the people can get along and we don’t hate each other because of who we are, or if we do, we know not to say that or let that lead our interactions, right? We’re still going to be civil to each other, we still understand that no one is garbage. And that everyone has the power to fuck you up if you insult them. It’s a model of coexistence, and a model of collaboration and an active, beautiful experiment—at the same time as it’s a cutthroat, brutal conflict.
Do you ever see a world in which a city is not a war? I think some people might think of this as like a post-capitalist age or a post-scarcity age. Can you imagine that? Or do you think it’s just always going to be a slog like this, with good stuff and bad stuff?
I mean, I definitely see the potential to make certain aspects of that war less egregious, right? If everyone had the right to a place to live, that war would be less horrific. If everyone had a job that enabled them to take care of their family, that war would be less horrific. So I think that the terms of the conflict can shift and will shift, but it’s always going to be like a business owner trying to make a profit whose needs are directly opposed to their dishwasher, right?
I don’t know that in a non-capitalist or post-capitalist system that that would still be the case, and this is the old debate about what we think of as human nature. Is that human nature or is that conditioned by capitalism? When I think people are fundamentally selfish and exploitative and prone to making decisions that are in their own interests, even if it hurts others—is that real? Is that universal? Has that always been true? Or is that just because we live in a shitty system where you are incentivized to do all those things? I would love to believe that that’s the case and that there’s another vision of human nature. I’m not sure if I’m convinced of that. Or if my beliefs one way or the other make a fucking whit of difference.
But yeah, I could imagine it being different. And of course, when I say every city is a war that’s not a literal statement. It’s just that there are always going to be conflicting interests. Those conflicts, I can’t imagine those things not still being the case, even if they look super different.
Okay, let’s talk about The Blade Between, which is another one I really enjoyed and I have similar conflicted feelings about where I grew up as I gather you do. You did a really great job of capturing this fear and dread about our hometowns and also the places that we’re currently living, how they’re changing underneath us. It also feels like a really personal book. And so I wonder what made you decide to go down that road and take on those issues in such a personal way, especially?
That was a book that popped into my brain and really rose to the surface when a lot of complicated feelings and anger and sadness and frustration and guilt that had been percolating in inchoate form, suddenly crystallized into a story that I got really excited about.
The immediate impetus for it was my father, who really loved Hudson, and had been a really important part of its sort of landscape. And I hated Hudson and ran screaming as soon as I could. And so caring for him in his last years and coming to see the Hudson that he saw, and having to juggle those two Hudsons—the shitty homophobic bullying place, and the beautiful, cool place where everyone knew each other, and people were friendly, and had a sort of mentality of like, we are a community.
That really comes through, especially in the way that you treat your characters. You’re very fair and empathetic with your characters. I feel like when I read your books, it’s hard to tell who the bad guy is or who the good guy is. Even the worst guys make some good points sometimes, and even your heroes, like Ronan, for example, does a lot of shitty stuff, no offense.
So part of me just wants to ask who is the good guy in your books. But I guess another way to put that is, do you feel like you do have some people in your books who provide a moral compass? Or do you feel like they’re all just kind of a wreck in their own ways?
Yeah, everyone’s a mess. Everyone’s a total wreck. I was a cinema studies major in college and one of my favorite films is Jean Renoir’s Grand Illusion. And this quote, actually, I think is in The Rules of the Game. But one character says the only really terrible thing in life is that everyone has their reasons. And that has sort of always been my approach. There’s a quote from The Talented Mr. Ripley, where he’s like, you know, no one thinks they’re a bad person, whatever you do, no matter how horrible, it all makes sense to you. And so that’s always been my approach, that even the biggest jerk in the world believes that they’re acting in the best interests of themselves, of their family, of their country, of their company. And it’s my job to sort of bring humanity to them. Because otherwise, I’m going to go crazy with rage at this jerk or that jerk. I’m going to forget that they’re human.
At Clarion, one of my teachers was Holly Black, who’s an amazing writer, and she said, if you’re going to make a political point in fiction, you almost have to argue the opposite. Because if you just present that this is wrong, this is wrong, this is wrong, this is right, people are going to be bored and annoyed. If they agree, they’ll just be like, whatever. And if they don’t agree, they’ll be mad. So if you genuinely want to write fiction that addresses these complex issues, you have to give it the space to not be villainized or stigmatized, to be a legit perspective, even if you think it’s terrible. Because plenty of people have it. So yeah, that’s always been my approach.
Actually, the novel that I’m working on now, I think finally does have like a real legit villain, but that’s mostly because it is a sentient AI. Insofar as a character is human, they’re probably redeemable, even if they will also die horribly on my watch.
There’s another big theme in The Blade Between, which honestly surprised me a little. You know, when I heard you had written a book about housing and gentrification, I was like, “Yeah, Sam’s gonna burn the whole fucking thing down!” And you do in a lot of ways! But there’s also a very strong message of mending rifts and healing. [SPOILER!] Toward the end, residents start a kind of truth and reconciliation commission.
How much of that do you think is actually possible? Do you think that there is a way to mend these divisions, but also just connect with and be kind to people who we might really hate at the moment?
So, yes, I do think that we have no choice but to figure out a way forward from conflict that is going to honor the conflict and acknowledge that the conflict happened or is happening. And I think that if you look at American history, you can see really clearly the consequences of trying to pretend nothing happened. And the fact that we are still dealing with white supremacy as a fundamental fact and driver and engine of American politics, is because we didn’t have the hard conversations and do the difficult reparations and sit down together to figure out that, no, we share this. Neither of us is going anywhere. So how can we figure this out?
So with gentrification, that’s something like working on it, paying attention to it, fighting for change around it. I would love for us be able to snap our fingers and all of the gentrifiers will go away, and all of the displaced people will come back, and everything will be great. But I don’t think that’s reality and I think that that isn’t even a desirable outcome, right? That if that did happen—well okay, it’s probably a desirable outcome [laughs]. But it’s not a possible one. And I think that what we really have to do is acknowledge that, no, if I’m a white person who moves into a community of color, I have accountability to my neighbors, I have common bonds with my neighbors, I have an obligation to be part of the community. And that means acknowledging that we have shared interests, and that we have to engage in dialogue.
This is why elections are unsatisfying outcomes to conflict because, okay, so this side won, but that just means that the other side is going to still be pissed and want to come back harder and do nasty shit to not lose next time, right? So there’s a kind of non-zero sum game that we need to be playing and that historically has been played, and that I think can happen. I think Cadwell Turnbull’s work is a great example of how that can happen in compelling narrative ways. And there’s models for cooperative economics and cooperative political systems that point towards that.
So I don’t necessarily believe that it’s easy. I don’t know that I would wager money on it being likely. But you know, we’re here to tell stories to make us believe that justice is possible, right? We don’t want every ending to be happy. But we want every ending to feel just. If the bad guy wins, there has to have been a cost, right? If the good guy loses, there has to be a victory, right? So as writers, as storytellers, we have the power to give people that. Justice is a thing that is not present in the real world and we can create the conditions for that. And so we model that, in whatever way feels honest and true and possible and powerful.
That is a great point to end on. Sam, I really appreciate it. This has been great. Thank you so much.
This was a pleasure. This was a great conversation. I appreciate you reaching out.
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Good interview right? What a smart person, what a fun person to talk to.
Well we are deep into Halloween season and fall in New England which is the best time of year here by leaps and bounds and kind of the only reason worth living here just kidding but not kidding. Last weekend we went to Salem for the day, which was pretty ill-advised as we did not realize the extent of the tourism Salem now attracts during October. There were mobs of people from like Texas or Virginia or Chelmsford, walking around in sparkly purple witch hats and shirts that say “Squad Ghouls,” eating hot dogs and going to haunted magic shows in tents. So it was honestly kind of horrifying and not really in a good way. As my friend Theresa said “sounds like where Halloween goes to die.”
But you know what, people were having fun so who am I to judge *wink wink* and we had a very good time too. Salem is still such a cool little town with great spots like Hive and Forge, which is owned by some friends of ours and HausWitch, where we picked up a lot of cool new witchy shit. You gotta support your local peddlers of dark arts and scented candles people.
I hope you enjoyed this interview as much as I did, and I also hope you are getting nice and spooked these days, within your own comfort level that is.
Tate