11:15-12:45
Abortion Access for All
For centuries, people have been receiving and delivering abortions. Through the current framework of the United States, this practice has been stigmatized, criminalized, and pushed to the margins of polite conversation. In this panel conversation, Hannah Matthews (author of You or Someone You Love) and Abbie Strout-Bentes (executive director of SAFE Maine) will discuss abortion access in a gender expansive framework, including the function of abortion funds. Care kits will also be available for free at the talk.
Abbie Strout-Bentes (she/her) is the Executive Director of Safe Abortions for Everyone (SAFE) Maine, a nonprofit fund that provides financial support to people seeking abortions in Maine. Abbie previously worked at Mabel Wadsworth Center in Bangor, as a clinical assistant and led the organization’s community engagement and advocacy efforts. Abbie has spent the last 15 years learning from reproductive justice leaders and uses that framework in her efforts to ensure abortion is available for everyone in Maine.
Hannah Matthews is a writer and an abortion care worker, funder, and doula based in Portland, Maine. Her work has been published in or is forthcoming from the New York Times, ELLE, Esquire, TIME, Jezebel, McSweeney’s, Teen Vogue, and other publications.
Organize Your Workplace: What Is a “Workers’ Inquiry”?
Workers’ inquiries are a tool for grasping power in the workplace that can aid organizing efforts and develop workers’ own class consciousness. In this workshop, participants will learn about various strategies for developing, implementing, and circulating worker’s inquiries through historical and contemporary examples; partake in group reading and listening exercises; and craft a sample plan to use workers’ inquiry in an organizing context.
The presenter will speak about their own organizing efforts and their recent workers’ inquiry “Class Composition in the Cafe Sector: What do cafe workers in the United States think and do while at work?” at https://notesfrombelow.org.
Kevin Van Meter is author of Guerrillas of Desire: Notes on Everyday Resistance and Organizing to Make a Revolution Possible; co-editor of Real World Labor, Fourth Edition; and Uses of a Whirlwind: Movement, Movements, and Contemporary Radical Currents; and is currently working on his next book Reading Struggles: Working-Class Self-Activity from Detroit to Turin and Back Again.
Story Time with Samara Cole Doyon (For Kids!)
Little ones are welcome to gather in our kids area with Samara as she reads her book Next Level. This is a fun and open gathering that celebrates neurodivergence.
Samara Cole Doyon is a poet and award-winning children’s book author with Haitian roots, living on unceded Wabanaki/Abenaki territory. She is a neurodivergent mother of neurodivergent children, continually learning more from her progeny than they could ever learn from her. Samara earned both a Lupine Award and an International Literacy Association Award for her debut picture book, Magnificent Homespun Brown. Each of her books has received a coveted starred review from Kirkus, and her most recent picture book, Next Level, was a runner up for the Best Black Joy category in the 2024 Black Kidlit Awards. She works for Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance and lives with her husband, two children, rescue pup, and tabby cat in central Maine.
1:00-2:30
Planting a New Landscape: Plants, Animism & Empire
Four folks with backgrounds in land, plant, and people-centered work will discuss topics ranging from animism and the liminal relationships within landscapes; the colonization of expertise; the symmetrical violence empire inflicts onto the land and onto marginalized bodies; who “invasive” plants and insects are in our ecosystems (human and otherwise); how permaculture can subvert the capitalist engine; the lie that “nature is for white people” and local efforts to repair the disenfranchisement of black and brown people’s relationship to the land and water.
Jesse Labbe-Watson is the founder of Midcoast Permaculture Design and co-founder of the Maine Ecological Design School. He is a landscape designer, farm planner, adult educator, and construction contractor in these various trades since the mid-2000’s. As an activist, he has worked in labor organizing, anti-globalization, direct action forest defense, permaculture, and food sovereignty for most of his life. As a spirit worker, he keeps many gods and no masters. He likes to build bridges across differences to unite people and party across all the liminal spaces.
Aaron Parker is an organizer at Mt. Joy Orchard in Portland, a nurseryman at Edgewood Nursery in Falmouth, an educator on perennial horticulture here and there, and a podcaster at Propaganda By the Seed.
Rae Sage, aka “The Water Witch of Waldoboro,” is a bodyworker and organizer, radicalized by their existence at the intersection of blackness, femininity, and queerness. They spent 6 years in the Air Force viewing the work of empire first hand. As a farmworker, Rae encountered both the lack of labor protections and the broader politics of food, coming into deeper relationship with land, water, and plant allies through time spent with them. Rae co-organizes a BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ Farmer and Farm Worker Affinity space and enjoys writing, napping, and dreaming in their spare time.
August Sender is an herbalist, organizer, educator, and anarchist who loves wildness, bodily autonomy, and bloodroot flowers.
Maine’s Radical & Hidden Histories
When we talk about Maine’s history, as it is recorded in the printed word, we’re looking through a colonial lens. There are thousands of years of oral history before this land had borders, before racial animus, before treaties and genocide. This panel of local historians Meadow Dibble (Atlantic Black Box), Andy O’Brien (“Radical Mainers”), and Rebecca Pritchard (Jeremiah Hacker: Journalist, Anarchist, Abolitionist) highlights untold stories, whether of cooperation, organized labor, or stories that challenge our cozy mythmaking by implicating Maine in the Atlantic slave trade.
Meadow Dibble, Ph.D., is a writer, researcher, and antiracist historical recovery advocate working to surface New England’s suppressed narratives through her practice Public History & Education Consulting, LLC. In 2018, she founded Atlantic Black Box, a grassroots public history project that empowers communities throughout the Northeast to research and reckon with the region’s complicity in the slave trade and the global economy of enslavement. Meadow serves as Project Lead on the Place Justice Project for the Permanent Commission on the Status of Racial, Indigenous, and Tribal Populations.
Andy O’Brien is a historian, freelance writer, and communication director for the Maine AFL-CIO. He was a Maine State Legislator and managing editor of the former Rockland-based Free Press. He writes a monthly column called “Radical Mainers” about labor history and liberation movements in Maine and writes for Amjambo Africa about policies impacting immigrant communities in Maine. He is also the co-founder of O’Chang Comics and Puckerbrush Animation.
Rebecca Pritchard is the author of Jeremiah Hacker: Journalist, Anarchist, Abolitionist. She first met Jeremiah Hacker through his newspaper in a research library in Portland, Maine, and this cantankerous journalist from centuries past has been something of a muse ever since. If she writes another book, it will probably be about Jeremiah Hacker. When not writing or working her day job, Rebecca can usually be found outside watching wildlife and birding by ear.
2:45-4:15
A Conversation on Rematriation in Wabanakik & Shared Survival
This will be a free-flowing dialogue with Alivia and participants about rematriation in our region.
Rematriation is the nurturing of our innate power and gifts.
Rematriation supports the expression of our power from within and is reciprocal in its care of our relatives, human, and more-than-humans. In this matriarchal way of belonging, humans are not the masters, merely relatives and caretakers.
The land and its kin have rights in an cyclical evolution grounded in our respective cosmovisions/creation stories and the struggles of our ancestors. In this framework of care and reciprocity, power then becomes transformative.
—written for the Eastern Woodlands Rematriation Collective
Alivia (she/they) is a citizen of the Penobscot Nation and co-director of Niweskok: From the Stars to Seeds, a collaboration of Wabanaki food and medicine providers, rematriating the Penobscot Bay region as an Indigenous foodhub.
Coming Home: Radicalized by War & Incarceration
A panel of activists whose experience in the US military helped spark their principled commitment to liberation and their lives of activism after coming home. Without reducing these multi-faceted humans to simply veterans, their shared experiences will be a jumping-off point for a wide-ranging conversation about how these repressive, regimented, inhumane structures can cause people to challenge the imperial narrative and seek out a different path. One can be a veteran of the military and also as a veteran of liberation struggle.
4:30-6:00
A New World in Our Hearts: Authors Madeline ffitch & Margaret Killjoy Talk Radical Fiction
Novelists Madeline ffitch and Margaret Killjoy join in conversation about fiction that explores radical values, ideas, and possibilities. Their session will include readings from both authors as the launchpad for a conversation about the anarchist potential of fiction.
Madeline ffitch is the author of the short story collection Valparaiso, Round the Horn and the novel Stay and Fight, which was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Lamda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, the Washington State Book Award, the LA Times Book Award, and was the 2023 Ohio Center for the Book pick for the National Book Festival. She is the recipient of an O. Henry Award, and her story “Seeing Through Maps” was chosen for the 2024 Best American Short Stories anthology. ffitch’s writing has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, The Paris Review, Granta, Tin House, and elsewhere. Her novel about Appalachian antifascism is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. She writes and organizes in Appalachian Ohio.
Margaret Killjoy is an author and anarchist with a long history of itinerancy who currently calls Appalachia home. She is the author, most recently, of the Ursula LeGuin Prize-nominated novel The Sapling Cage and of the Danielle Cain series. When she’s not writing, she can be found organizing to end hierarchy, crafting, or complaining about being old despite not being old at all. Her podcast, Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff, discusses anarchist forgotten histories.