On Community

and the feminist book club

a wee digital collage innit.

“Serendipity is the oxygen that let’s community breathe and last” from On Community by Casey Plett.

I was peeling potatoes at a community meal recently and yapping about things i liked and at one point mentioned i wasn’t too keen on poetry unless it makes me giggle and someone shared a silly little poem with me that they had read in Dyke News.

I love silly little poems.

So i went to nab a copy of each issue of the newsletter in Category Is Books.

A mini book on the card spinner by the door caught my eye.

I had picked up a copy of On Community by Casey Plett. I liked Little Fish by her.

And I read most of the essay on the bus before work the next day.

I’ve been thinking about community so much recently. More consciously and actively than i have before anyway.

I’ve been feeling very guilty that I’ve not let more people support the feminist book club behind the scenes.

And that i’ve not been communicating why i have created it the way i have more explicitly.

I think doing that now might help connect us all a little more and sustain this community we’re in far beyond me.

Ass. You. Me. type of thing.

We’ve got really big. and that’s great, but it’s also got me thinking what has worked really well and what needs more help to grow further. Develop for our needs and wants now, not 5 years ago. And sustain the growth and quality of the club for, hopefully, another 5 years.

Consistency is probably something i say the most when people ask why the group is popular. which is something that is shared with other groups that continue well.

I can make the group meet consistently because i know i can’t do it every month. If i can’t find the time, the energy, the money to meet every month, then there will be other people like that too.

So let’s not try doing that just because that’s generally what other book groups do.

I’m also not someone that’s got a background or education in english literature, writing, librarianship, gender studies (one class doesn’t count). But i love reading and feminism, and knowing we need more connections to do more with each other, creating changes in our lives.

It seems like a no brainer to me that a book club, that is a feminist book club, will be ‘doing’ as well as reading. What’s the point of reading about misogyny, sexism and the patriarchy and then doing fuck all about it? However i think i can be more direct about the doing, i need to communicate this more. other than some of the books that explicitly say ‘a feminist guide to…, a feminist lens on…” etc i can probably better highlight why we’re reading about a japanese librarian who magically knows which books to suggest to people (it’s important to recognise how reading and books can impact your life and change perspectives, the importance of a library, acknowledging that reading cosy ‘easy read’ books can be seen as care and rest during the winter months, its feminist to care and support each other through more depressing times etc etc). The book club is feminist because i’m a feminist, we’re all feminists, and any books we pick will be read with that lens.

What i’m keen to change is how we choose what we read. Up until now it has been a mix of suggestions from everyone and then we vote for a few that we’ve whittled down to meet a criteria (which is mostly thats its cheap to buy, easily found and/or available in a library catalogue somewhere) or i pick it. But sometimes a lot of books we can be reading more of, we don’t. things get misses, people feel left out of being seen or heard in some one else’s words and could then feel disconnected. So now we’re taking suggestions on theme and making sure we are more varied in writers and writing. For example we have had queer women in fiction and non fiction being asked for and suggested but it has never ‘won’ a vote, so it gets lost. In May we will be having a focus on queer women in the book we read, but still meeting the low cost, availability checks.

If you’re in a book club and want to meet up with other people that like books and reading then we’re going to be talking about the book. Not just getting together and drink wine. there’s plenty groups and places you can do that if that’s what you want to do. socialising is very important too. but not the main point of this book club. I’ve not had the best relationship with drinking in groups for most of my life (drinking life… which tbf was a young teenager in rural Scotland) so the group has remained, like it was initially set up to do, a place to meet outside of the pub.

It’s really important that this feminist book club remains free. Actively using the library space, the library catalogue and library resources builds up a conscious habit away from always spending money. I am very much for paying people for their work, but i am also very much a big believer in sharing and supporting away from a capitalistic mentality. Which is hard, i am very bad in many areas in my life for frivolous spending, but i can help nurture in myself areas where i make more of an effort to access knowledge and enjoyment for free.

I don’t think I’ve ever communicated that the book club is definitely a place that you will make friends. Because maybe it’s not. you might. I have made some really, really good close friends in the last 5 years. Mostly by picking up on something someone’s said during a book club night, saying that i’d love to chat more about what they were expressing over coffee or after at the pub with people from the group, and going from there. You will get to know faces, hopefully some names if you’re good at remembering them. Maybe if you turn up a few times you’ll recognise someone when you’re out and about other places in the city like at the cinema, or a book launch or a protest even. Knowing you are seen and supported in your views and likes and hobbies by others, and the intersections of these are important at bringing trust and respect to feminist approaches to life.

And i guess myself. i rarely give myself much credit for getting to the stage of the book club where we’re searching for seats for 49 people that have turned up one night! I really needed to focus on building what the club has become during lockdown because i was so, so isolated. But i wasn’t dying and i wasn’t witnessing death and loneliness around me. But i needed to connect and build those connections to sustain me whilst my life changed.

I have always felt that world was strange and odd and so awful to girls and women especially. It started so young, like in primary school, being able to lead groups and projects, making myself part of the student council and not realising i was the only girl, enjoying ballet and dance and climbing trees and getting good and praised for building things out of wood - and then not being allowed to dance with another girl or not being allowed to say no if i boy asked you to dance at a ceilidh. So i made sure i was going to change that. and that girls will be good and better if necessary. and still create care and kind spaces for boys, who were as confused about these social rules as we were. and still are. I’m mad i’m still doing this today because so much of the world we’re living in makes so fucking sense and can be cruelly unkind, but i’m also so much happier at what societal things have changed since the 90s.

the feminist book club in Glasgow might be a place that can support one of your many communities you find yourself in and wanting to develop more and elsewhere, i hope. And i’m happy if that’s from afar, or if you tried it and never came back. because trying to find what’s for you, and ultimately what’s not, will develop and strengthen connections and trust and care in so many other communities you are in and lovingly a part of, need it too.

So even though planning and consistency are the core which keeps communities active, we need to make room for serendipity, to breathe life into us and keep us going.

like silly little poems from dykes.

(Any maybe none of the above is news to you but i’m glad i’m learning to share and open up more through writing, so thanks for reading this through!)

Some new things coming up for the Feminist Book Club this month (feb 25):

• The collage night in February is using recycled archival library newspaper magazines to create art and poetry to helps us get creative for pretty cheap and have another excuse to just get together. This month we are also joined by a local art project (Soft City) with a feminist city focus, sharing and learning more about our connections to Sauchiehall Street.

• Margaux Vialleron is writing some letters with us later in the month, which is something new to explore with the club and being with each other again to discuss her book’s themes of friendship, consent and loneliness and even city living, in a new way!

More about the book club is best found on Instagram