Soft Rebellion: Remembering Our Place in the Living World

For the past several years, I have been writing about Soft Rebellion.

It began with The Mycelial Art of Soft Rebellion, an essay that became something larger than I expected. The work continued through essays on power, extraction, cultural amnesia, ecology, imagination, resistance, community, and the strange work of remaining human inside systems that continually ask us to become less.

Like the mycelial connections I yearned for, this essay has traveled beyond the places where I first published it. The Mycelial Art of Soft Rebellion was republished by Kosmos Journal, where it appeared as a “Manifesto for a Slow Resistance Movement” (Kosmos Journal), SAND, and other social media blogs. Other pieces rooted and moored through communities and conversations, and the language of Soft Rebellion has found its way into the work of people creating their own responses to the times we are living through, forming independent Soft Rebellion initiatives, and using the ecology of the language as a rally point to anchor in, explicitly inspired by the writing.

Over the few years since, readers have written to me asking for more: more depth, more connection between the essays, more room to explore the questions that the shorter pieces could only begin to open.

I have begun to see that the essays themselves are the bones of a larger work, one that now asks for the fascia and sinew of book bindings, the inkblood of illustrations and words that carry impact beyond breath.

The book will gather them together, but it will not simply collect what has already been published. Some pieces will be expanded. Some will become doorways into new writing. Connections that were invisible when the essays stood alone can now be followed. The questions that have continued to trouble, haunt, and enliven me can be given more room.

This is the work I want to bring into fruition now.

What the Book Covers

Soft Rebellion gathers a body of writing concerned with the relationship between power and the living world, and with the ways our cultural stories shape what we believe is possible.

The book moves through questions of extraction and belonging, cultural amnesia and remembrance, ecological intelligence, resistance, imagination, community, attention, grief, pleasure, reciprocity, and the forms of relationship that become possible when we stop measuring our lives entirely by the demands of an extractive culture.

At its heart is a question that has followed the writing from the beginning:

How do we remain human, relational, imaginative, and alive when so much around us is organized toward exhaustion, disconnection, and the concentration of power?

Distilling the Ethos of the Writings into Written Form

Soft Rebellion ~ Remembering our Place in the Living World hopefully will meet your heart in a 9-inch by 7-inch, cloth-bound hardcover book, resting comfortably in your hand at an estimated 300 pages.

It will unfold across chapters that expand the terrain of the original essay: Refusing the Script of Fear, Sanctuary Networks, Disobedient Joy, Slowing the Machine, Decentralized Emergence, Rituals of Rewilding, Disrupting the Spectacle, and Turning Disinformation Into Openings. Read the essay here

Why This Book, Why Now

The conditions that gave rise to these essays have only become more pronounced. We are living through overlapping ecological, political, economic, technological, and humanitarian crises, while power continues to concentrate in institutions, corporations, governments, financial systems, and increasingly in the infrastructures that govern data and artificial intelligence. The effects of these conditions are profoundly uneven.

For many people, the question has moved beyond understanding what is happening. It has become a question of how to live inside it without surrendering our capacity for relationship, imagination, pleasure, attention, and care.

This is the terrain of Soft Rebellion.

The book is interested in the places where another way of being is already taking root, often quietly and below the threshold of spectacle. It asks what we might learn from mycelium, from ecosystems, from old forms of communal life, from bodies, from grief, from beauty, from slowness, and from the ordinary acts through which people keep making life together.

What Has Already Grown From the Work

The book is being made from writing that already has a history.

The original essays have been published and republished, including in Kosmos Journal. (Kosmos Journal ) They have circulated through communities and conversations (Auroville ), and readers have carried particular ideas and phrases into their own lives.

The writing has also helped inspire an independent Soft Rebellion initiative, created by Rebellious Dreamers as a space for women to gather, learn together, support one another, and explore forms of creative and peaceful disruption. (Rebellious Dreamers )

That matters to me because it means the work has already become something other than a collection of my words. It has entered relationship.

Now I want to see what happens when those pieces are gathered into a single body and given the space that a book allows.

Where the Book Stands

The essays exist. The thinking has been germinating in my felt experience and those who are kith and kin for years. The source material is already substantial, atmospherically developing more so each day, and what remains is the alchemy of bringing the book itself into the living world.

This means returning to the years of published writing, reading everything again with the whole body of work in view, deciding what belongs, developing what needs more room, writing what is missing, following the connections between pieces, and shaping the manuscript into something coherent without sanding away the wildness that gave rise to it.

Then comes editing, artwork, book design, typesetting, proofing, printing, and fulfillment.

It also means making actual space in my working life to do this.

I am a self employed writer, ritualist and single mother, living in a body that asks for particular forms of tending, which means that my labor has never been separate from the work of caring for the vessel that carries me through the world.

Soft Rebellion has been gathered in this way. Slowly. Season by season. From years of listening at the edges of things, writing from the liminal, following threads through research and remembrance, returning again and again to the language until it begins to breath. There are gifted editors and designers whose careful hands help tend the manuscript. There are proofs to read, pages to shape, files to prepare, paper to choose, books to print and carry across the threshold. There is the invisible labor of bringing a living thing from the dark of imagination into the hands of another.

And there is the strange arithmetic of making a life while making a book.

Every hour given to this work is an hour I cannot give to the work that ordinarily keeps the hearth fed. To fund this book is therefore to fund more than its tangible making. It is to make room for the tending itself: the hours of writing, listening, revising, researching, gathering, and bringing forth.

A book asks for time in much the same way a garden does. It must be worked, watered, weeded, left alone, returned to. It requires hands.

Already in place

* The existing body of published essays

* A developing manuscript structure

* Years of reader response and engagement with the work

* Existing publication history

* Wider Soft Rebellion initiatives growing from the writing

*Editor: Ginger Eager

What's taking Form

We are gathering, an illustrator/designer, and an eco-conscious printer and distributor who work heart and hand with the ethos of our book project. As soon as we have confirmed them, we will be honored to name them. And there is the continued exploration into the already expressed ways we can become more mycelial, interwoven in our convictions for equanimity and collective care.

Because funds raised through GoFundMe become available as they arrive, work can begin vetting these inspired craftsfolk during the campaign rather than waiting until January. That gives the book several months of actual development time before the Spring Equinox publication goal; it puts your generous support in the hands of the artisans; it connects the altars of supporters and creators to bring our project fully into a community of care.

Why Crowdfunding

I am choosing crowdfunding because I want to make this book independently, and it's important.

It means retaining creative control over the writing, editing, artwork, design, production, and publication rather than reshaping the work around what a conventional publishing process believes will sell.

It also means allowing the people who have already read, shared, discussed, and carried this work to participate in its next form.

The economics of independent publishing are straightforward: books cost money to make, and creative labor is still labor. The $25,000 goal is intended to cover the actual costs of bringing Soft Rebellion into physical form while creating enough room for me to devote substantial time to the work itself.

Any funds beyond the essential publication costs will allow the book to become more fully realized through artwork, design, production quality, and additional editions or resources.

No AI

The goal is not simply to pay for copies of a book. It is to create the conditions for the book to be made by hearts and hands, 100% Human.

No generative AI will be used to write this book. The essays from which Soft Rebellion is growing were written before generative AI became part of the publishing landscape, and I want the book to continue in that tradition. The writing comes from years of reading, research, practice, observation, conversation, lived experience, dreaming, and sitting long enough with a question to discover where it wants to go.

What Your Support Makes Possible:

Your contribution helps cover:

* Writing and research time

* Developmental and copy editing

* Artwork and illustration

* Book design and typesetting

* Printing and production

* ISBN and publishing costs

* Digital editions

* Packaging and fulfillment

* Platform and payment fees

Suggested Donation Levels

Because GoFundMe does not offer built-in reward tiers, we will track these manually. After donating, we will use your email you used to sign up to send you a form with your name, email, donation amount, and mailing address so we can make sure your reward reaches you.

Level Suggested Donation What You Receive:

Stretch Goals

If the campaign reaches its initial goal, additional funding can help the book grow beyond the essential publication plan.

Possible stretch goals include:

* Expanded artwork and illustration

* A more elaborate physical edition

* Additional print runs

* An audiobook

* Expanded digital resources connected to the book

* Community conversations and readings

* Copies made available through libraries, community spaces, or other forms of shared access

* Contributions toward the Soft Rebellion scholarship and community work

The final stretch goals will be announced as the campaign develops.

Risks and Challenges

Independent publishing always contains variables that cannot be completely controlled.

Editing, illustration, design, printing, and shipping may take longer than expected. Printing costs can change, particularly for international orders. Proofs may reveal problems that require another round of production. Fulfillment can become complicated when a project crosses borders.

The campaign is structured so that work can begin as funds arrive, which gives the book a meaningful runway toward the Spring Equinox, but the publication date remains a goal rather than a promise that every part of the process will unfold exactly on schedule.

If something changes, I will tell you.

Join the Making

For years, these essays have been finding their way into the world in pieces. They have been read, shared, republished, carried into conversations, and taken up by people making their own forms of response to the times we are living through.

Now I want to gather them.

I want to spend the time necessary to follow the threads between them, to write into the places they left open, and to make something that can be held, returned to, underlined, argued with, passed between hands, and carried into whatever comes next.

Soft Rebellion has been growing for years. The Spring Equinox of 2027 is when it comes to fruition.