1. Dirty hands

Fiona Munro tells me we will roll back the greenery, like a carpet, cutting the stems where they emerge from the soil. After we dig up the sweet potatoes, we can unroll the greenery again, laying out the broad leaves as mulch to protect the earth. “I think it’ll work,” Fiona says, smiling. And so we start laughing and joking and feeling a bit tired. We are pushing to finish the harvest before tonight’s freeze.

When I started coordinating the project that became Solidarity Garden Voices, I did not know much about agriculture. I knew less about community gardening. To be honest, I had (nagging, unspoken) doubts: could local community gardens ever produce enough to impact a nation’s food systems?Footnote ¹ A year later, hands in the dirt, it is not like I had answers for food access or corporate-focused agriculture systems. But Fiona taught me to harvest sweet potatoes. Dusty Bacon taught me to ask for help. Danielle Chynoweth showed me how attending to food logistics can move us past individualism toward mutual aid. Along the way, my questions got more nuanced. What do I mean by enough? By “us”?

The organization Solidarity Gardens is a coalition of local government, nonprofits, farms, and other community members. Starting in 2020, this organization pursues food justice by supporting people in growing crops for their communities. Solidarity Garden Voices is a collaborative community storytelling project I facilitated that collected, wove together, and performed true stories from the organization’s network. By telling these stories, Solidarity Garden Voices planted questions and plans inside a practice of learning from one another’s lives. It also celebrated how touching the earth together can refigure social narratives and practical relationships.Footnote ²

Deep collaboration means centering an awareness of what I do not know. That nurtures an attentive respect for the knowledge around me. On campus, inside academic fields that seem largely disengaged from what other fields (and communities) are asking/wanting/living, I can become “entrenched in the circuit of my own truth.”Footnote ³ Knowledge silos behave purposefully: they create hierarchies to rank who is an expert, who is hired and paid, and who is not.Footnote ⁴ Inside this market, I feel pressure to shout my expertise.

Off-campus, a Voices project that tells community stories is not about what I think. It is not about what you should think. It is about many things, including an intertwined ecosystem of our lives growing together. Creative Writing pushed me to use my training to build an audience. I want to work instead to build a stage for stories from my neighbors in these community gardens. That means tending to relationships and being responsible to the people I work with. That means listening deeply to the stories entrusted to me.Footnote ⁵

After harvesting sweet potatoes, I sit on the floor, some 50 printed pages scattered nearby. These are some of the true stories contributing authors have shared. I am arranging them into a theater script. I pick up a page where an organizer talks about helping start Solidarity Gardens. That is in 2020. As the pandemic heightened local food insecurity, this coalition came together to grow and deliver two weeks of groceries to anyone who asked. I put that story next to someone wearing winter gloves to the grocery store, not sure what is safe to touch and feeling so alone. What happens if we perform these two together? I usually weave at least three stories into a scene—what else would I add? Sitting on the floor, I want to stop. I am exhausted. I am worried I will not be able to arrange these stories in a way that feels powerful and true to contributing authors. Soon, I will ask for input from these collaborators, but I signed up to arrange this draft. I respect these people. I love their stories and the resonances where they twist together like roots inside the ground. I pick up a page and read a story for the fifteenth or eighteenth time, trying to listen.

I learn from Black Studies, Black Feminism, Critical Race Theory, Queer Studies, and Indigenous Studies.Footnote ⁶ Sarah Keeton suggests, “We come to knowledge, active, emergent, in relation, co-constructing our reality.”Footnote ⁷ In relation. Our reality. Universities (and other institutions) can alienate us from our collective emergent knowledge-making.Footnote ⁸ My university might aim (and sometimes succeed) in creating knowledge and possibility, but it also aims (and too often succeeds) in creating a brand of knowledge that is focused on oppression, extraction (bell hooks), settler colonialism; on the creation of a certain type of person who is categorically above another.Footnote ⁹ In facilitating community storytelling, I am working toward collaborations that confront these oppressive systems by centering and supporting the ways that communities are always already “co-constructing our reality.”Footnote ¹⁰ I am learning from a variety of vibrant traditions whose theoretical frameworks emphasize different possibilities and pitfalls in storytelling. Aja Martinez defines “counterstory” by what it does, by the specific ways story forms (parables, testimonios, composite characters, and more) can foreground minoritized perspectives in the face of majoritarian systems that bury them. James Joshua Coleman’s “de-storying” emphasizes that communally sharing stories of queer joy can actively “unimagine” dominant narratives of erasure and fatalism.Footnote ¹¹ Ojibway playwright Drew Hayden Taylor resists a form of storytelling in which a settler state asks an Indigenous author to become a window into their own community for settler viewing.Footnote ¹² Kahnawake Mohawk scholar Audra Simpson centers refusal, emphasizing that some stories are not to be shared with some audiences or at all. I learn from specific communities engaging distinct storytelling practices (and theorizations) as part of growing what they need.Footnote ¹³

To put it personally, I am delighted and inspired by my academic discussions on campus. Every month, I am also so stifled by my university’s assumption of itself as the (primary) site of knowledge that I consider leaving academia forever. I ground into Public Humanities. Into community gardens. Into places that value more knowledge and knowledgemakers. In facilitating community storytelling, I am working to understand my scholarly position as a meeting place where my studied skills join wider community projects enlivened by so much I do not know.Footnote ¹⁴ I am trying to engage with and be responsible for my lived communities as we co-construct life paths.

I tell myself: I do not know. I do not know. On campus, as hierarchies encourage us to trumpet our expertise, this litany can feel like a threat. Like self-effacement. As Fiona teaches me to harvest sweet potatoes, it feels instead like delight and possibility. It joins with listen deeply. Listen deeply.

2. These streets are loud—Can we borrow mics?

My friend and fellow PhD Candidate Dusty Bacon told me about Solidarity Gardens in 2022. We would walk for miles through Champaign-Urbana, IL, sometimes past the gardens themselves, spitballing connections between this coalition and our research. Dusty was already volunteering with them. After several months, we applied for a grant through iRegen, a regional regenerative agriculture initiative that offers seed funding. We also asked to meet with Danielle Chenowyth, Cunningham Township Supervisor and a Solidarity Gardens leader. Drawing on 10+ Voices projects I have led previously, I proposed a collaboration inviting people to share stories of how these gardens are rooted into our lives. I would arrange pieces of these stories into a script. Actors would perform it in our communities.

Danielle liked the idea. iRegen funded us.Footnote ¹⁵ A growing group of collaborators drafted lists of people to talk to: farmers, volunteers, organizers, and people who eat what is grown. We discussed what questions might invite people to talk about community gardening as a relationship to earth and each other. I wrote drafts of these questions, and we revised them.Footnote ¹⁶ I wrote a project description and invitation for Solidarity Gardens’ newsletter, and people sent in stories. Others shared stories through in-person interviews. I started putting together a cast of performers. We picked a performance date: Solidarity Gardens’ 2023 Harvest Festival. I stressed the hell out: a fluid project like this has people joining and dropping out as they juggle their many commitments, and I was in charge of making sure we finished something on time. I also went to events like Cunningham Township’s Back To School Fair, helping Solidarity Gardens distribute free produce and asking if folks wanted to hear about Voices. This led to key contributing authors who shared stories from perspectives we otherwise would have missed. For example, one woman liked the idea of Solidarity Gardens, but she had never heard of them. She shared ideas for outreach.Footnote ¹⁷

Through these steps, the project Solidarity Garden Voices invited people to share and to listen. It built a stage for different expertise already at work in our community. Joining us for a performance, you would hear experiences of America’s segregated cities constraining racialized relationships to the ground. What kind of space do neighborhoods have for community gardens? You would hear about favorite foods. About learning to garden. About capitalist structures keeping someone far from their own body. About fear leading us toward separate stockpiles and community gardens, teaching that when we need help, “someone shows up.”Footnote ¹⁸

Instead of people making arguments, Voices supports people in sharing insightful stories about their own lives. Such stories have vast implications. A gardener describes sharing the earth’s sprouting abundance with a visiting family and feels a shift in how they themselves relate to America’s scarcity narratives. An organizer invites us to live with them as they navigate institutional frustrations, emotional exhaustion, COVID-19, and the joy of a new program becoming possible. In each story, we see one lived reality of what is possible and what is important. An emphasis on arguments risks removing an “I think” from all its interwoven “I ams,” “I dos,” and “I cares” – from the community life paths that this thought comes from. Listening to and sharing stories can invite deeper relationships and collaborations.

At the Harvest Festival, we set up chairs and tables and borrowed microphones. Most contributing authors came to listen. They brought family. Friends. Other people learned about the performance online or through flyers at the library next door. After the performance, we hosted an open discussion where anyone could take the mic and speak. One person commented how important it was to see “the heart of Solidarity Gardens.” This coalition involves more than a dozen organizations, and the performance helped us experience how all the labor comes together into growing and distributing food. Another audience member discussed future plans. A third stood up with tears in their eyes and two small kids at their feet, saying they would have “found their people.” They asked, “How do I get involved?” An organizer waved: “You talk to me!” Here was our community, weaving itself in real time.

That is the goal. To support communities in their own ongoing endeavors.

For me, moving responsibly toward this goal means shifting my practices toward what I might call Public Humanities methods and methodologies. No two Voices projects unfold the same way. They sprout from interactions between what I can do as a facilitator and what collaborating communities want.Footnote ¹⁹ I work to be responsible within a community. Then, I trust what we are doing together. When people talk about designing research, I remember Ocean Vuong: “The rules, like streets, can only take you to known places. Underneath the grid is a field—it was always there—where to be lost is never to be wrong, but simply more.”Footnote ²⁰ In a sense, Voices practices collectively getting lost as part of being more. I hold onto that when I am overwhelmed. This is not a bus, and I am not driving. I work hard to make sure the script’s finished, the performers are ready, and the microphones are borrowed and plugged in, but the reality of what we are performing, why, and where is emergent, relational, and community-driven.

3. I am going to need more than bars and co-ops

I did not know Fiona or Dusty when I moved to Illinois in 2019. I did not know anyone in the state, just like I did not know anyone in Oklahoma when I moved there to teach high school in 2014, or in India when I moved there to teach in 2011, or in Massachusetts when I moved there to study in 2006. Along the way, I told people I was Californian (I mean, I hug trees). When they wanted more, I said I was a teacher. When they asked about my background, I said my family was English, Hungarian, German, Polish, and Mexican.Footnote ²¹

Cherokee scholar Daniel Heath Justice suggests that the United States’ mobile, settler colonial society involves replacing community identities with “some vague notion of inherited ethnicity.”Footnote ²² As institutions, ideologies, and social practices cut apart “relationships” and “one’s obligations to kin and place,” people like me are maneuvered to be primarily responsible for capitalist identities like workers and political identities like citizens. Footnote ²³

In moving around to study and build a career in the ways I thought I was supposed to study and build a career, I felt the loss of relationships and places. I walked across campus and recognized a friend – only to realize, no, she is six thousand miles away. She is not here. Or I am not there. I vaguely understood these losses as a necessary part of something called growing up.Footnote ²⁴ I tried to repair the damage by diving into school communities. In undergrad, my life focused on campus. Then, I threw myself into the social role of a teacher, mediated as it is through hierarchical school systems and the identities such systems encourage/construct.Footnote ²⁵ In many ways, I was happy. I made good friends. Found amazing mentors. Teaching seemed rewarding, even while I burned out. It is inspiring and humbling to support people as they grow. I organized poetry clubs, discussion clubs, hiking clubs, and collaborative storytelling clubs.Footnote ²⁶ I was also increasingly, crushingly lonely. When I moved, heartsick, to Illinois, I consciously set out to build community in a way I would have never done.

I did not know how.

I did things Americans do when they move to loneliness in a new city: dance classes, gym memberships, maker spaces, a housing co-op, and bar trivia nights, even though I honestly do not love bars or trivia. I reached for the practices I could imagine.Footnote ²⁷ In discussing Yankton Sioux ethnologist Ella Cara Deloria’s novel Waterlily, Justice suggests that a community with strong social ties is not a chance harvest or luck of the draw. It is the result of a community that has practices for weaving social ties and reweaving them when they are inevitably frayed. As my loneliness, my research, my Public Humanities organizing, and my joy at community become more and more intertwined, I recognize how Voices has always aspired to be one such practice. A way of coming together to weave community.

Considering how communities grow leads me to recognize what communities know. And reconsider what knowledge is. Opaskwayak Cree scholar Shawn Wilson discusses an epistemology in which knowledge is not seen as belonging to an individual. When I start thinking about that, to be honest, it is wild. So much of my academic training shores up systems that fundamentally encourage, defend, and pursue knowledge ownership. Right now, I am logged into three article databases, all paid, all through my university library at an institution that pays and charges a lot. Most people I know are against a banking model of education, but general advice on campus still emphasizes that my CV should demonstrate me amassing publications, awards, and knowledge, so I am a proven producer who is worth buying on the job market.

Then Wilson describes an epistemology in which knowledge is not even the kind of thing that can be individually owned. I listen. It is a relief like breathing.

(All this is confusing for me to navigate. I am trying to steer into that confusion. Cherokee scholar Rachel Jackson suggests if we are “disoriented” by working to engage Indigenous cosmologies in our academic writing approaches, we can take that disorientation “as a good sign and follow it.”Footnote ²⁸)

On the one hand, I find it incredibly important while facilitating community storytelling to insist that stories belong to the people who live them. There is a long, awful tradition of academic projects stealing, misusing, erasing; and otherwise doing violence to stories. I feel a weighty responsibility to be accountable to my collaborators and weave the stories they share into a performance they recognize as true to and respectful of them. That is why the first revised draft of Solidarity Garden Voices went to contributing authors, asking if there was anything they wanted to cut, add, or change. I do not know how to weave the duty of community except by working to live up to the duty of community.

At the same time, Solidarity Garden Voices is not a script, performance, or video recording. While those are the “deliverables” I led with when requesting funding, they do not fully reflect the shared work and relationships of what a project is. The gardens are a collaboration of people growing food to share. Voices is a collaboration of people growing the shared space between and throughout our stories. Voices weaves stories together: you hear some thoughts from one speaker, thoughts from a second, more from the first, some from a third. This practice attends to resonances, relationalities, multi-voiced interpretations; the collective nature of experience and action.Footnote ²⁹ Voices is an ongoing commitment to engage with each other. Do not the knowledge and possibilities it stages live inside these engagements?

Collaborators find it powerful to hear their words performed in conversation with others’ words. Even participants who did not share a story often hear themselves in the performance, as with someone who approached me after Solidarity Garden Voices: “I didn’t contribute something, but that woman at the end talking about fear—it was like she was talking to me.” Can someone own the mutual space where we recognize ourselves?

Coming together to hold words in our mouths and taste them with our ears is a powerful way of recognizing mutual space. Oji-Cree scholar Joshua Whitehead writes, “The very act of putting breath to language, of making sound, is an entry into community-based care.”Footnote ³⁰ He says oral storytelling enters into “the building of futures through the interlacing of our histories.”Footnote ³¹ I could see someone reading this as a large claim. How could speaking aloud carry such power? Then again, think about a conversation with someone you trust. Were there moments when you felt recognized? Felt met? Felt held? Think about a community conversation you have been part of where the group thought through where you all were and where you were going. Being together to exchange stories and build relationships can attend to the sounds of our voices, the place of our meeting, the presence of community members we miss, or community members we are trying to avoid. Sharing stories and talking together can be a “collective event,” “emergent.”Footnote ³² Voices never goes exactly how I or anyone else planned. It is touched by all our hands.

4. Our tools

I want to end by thinking about practices and tools and how we keep developing them. A lot of people I know are not sure what we can do with Public Humanities. I am not sure. But I think we can learn how to move by staying attentive and responsible to our communities, relationships, curiosities, commitments, abilities, hurts, and hopes – by trusting our anger toward damaging systems and our dedication toward liberatory possibilities.Footnote ³³ You do not have to know what you are doing to let yourself start trying.

Here are some of Voices’s movements, leading toward questions I find useful in growing practices and tools. I am suspicious of commodified best practices.Footnote ³⁴ As we work inside the realities and needs of our communities, I want instead to invite you into the garden to share what my collaborators and I are doing. To consider, in conversation with us, what you want your research to be, to do, and for who. Another time, I would love to be invited to your garden or print shop or – I do not know – Hack Space Cafe to see what you and your collaborators are doing. Maybe we will weave community threads between us.

Voices builds stages for overlapping stories here in our community. For me, this is against social structures that focus so much of our attention on a few stories from celebrities, Netflix, and “geniuses.” It is against an academic conceit of single-authored expertise and toward interwoven contextual knowledge. It is toward spaces for listening deeply to people who ride the same bus. It is a methodology for staging performances of here, where here grounds into some kind of community that makes it practical to collaborate. If you are excited about Solidarity Gardens from where you are reading on Indigenous land near Tucson, that is awesome, but it is a long walk to come to harvest sweet potatoes. I can still ask:

Voices brings theater and writing tools to places they do not often go. This is against academic siloing and toward transdisciplinary and/or undisciplined approaches that honor and engage many knowledge traditions. It is toward using university resources and tools to empower knowledge that academia often devalues. I was the first humanities facilitator to apply for an iRegen grant. We found productive resonance between my approaches to stories, their engagement with agricultural research and food systems, and expertise from farmers, grocery store workers, community organizers, agricultural lobbyists, poets, scientists, and more. More personally, I taught high school theater for years and loved it, but I grew frustrated with rehearsing words from famous people. I also study writing and narrative structures. So when I ask how can I help my communities hear more of our stories, theater, and creative writing tools feel close. I brought those tools and sat with a Voices contributor who was trying to tell a true story she had never shared. First, she wanted to hear about my fiction: talking about that helped grow trust. Then she started asking questions about narrative structure: where do I start? There is so much – what do I include? I offered strategies: “Sometimes I start in the middle and explain how I got there.” “Sometimes I use an object or location to tether the story, a touchstone we can keep coming back to.” She adapted my suggestions, making them her own as we worked to tell the story the way she wanted. I wonder sometimes about being “too involved,” but writing also teaches me that saying what I mean is hard. She asked for my suggestions, appreciated my support (like I appreciate everyone who helped revise this), and wanted to see her story on stage. After the performance, she asked me to introduce her to the actress who performed her story. The two sat together, sharing, learning, growing, and feeling their connected strength.

Voices invites community members to give their words to each other. A theater student once told me, “There is so much I need to say but cannot because I do not have the words. Then I memorize a speech and open my mouth, and the words are there because someone else wrote them.” This student turned to art to help say herself. I do the same thing. Now, I open my mouth, and the words I need are there because she said them. As Alok Vaid-Menon writes, “Becoming ourselves is a collective journey.”Footnote ³⁵ Voices help us open space for each other as we open space for ourselves as we open space for each other. This is against an individual stable definition of subjectivity and toward our mutual co-construction.

Voices invites contributors to hear their stories on another community member’s lips. This does not replace people speaking their own stories, which I consider a necessary practice. But it does open another space for people who do not want to be on stage but want their story told. Jackie Abing, a PhD Candidate in Anthropology who has become a dear friend while contributing to and performing in Voices projects, describes our process as accepting invitations. Coming to a performance is accepting an invitation “to become part” of a community of witnessing. Performing is accepting an invitation to “embody” the story someone entrusted to you.Footnote ³⁶ Contributing a story is trusting your community to carry a piece of you. These invitations and acceptances lived together, create a “material space of empathy” that “comes with a responsibility.”Footnote ³⁷ This is against an ethics of objectivity and toward an ethics of care. It is against a whole bunch of interpretative binaries (true/false; valid/invalid; agree/disagree; good/bad, as it relates to a story or worldview) and toward reciprocal accountable relationships that honor where each person is and what they bring.

I know I need my community to recognize myself. I spent so long trying to fit into he. Pretending it did not hurt. Naming my genderqueer identity is wonderful, but it is also powerful to hear myself in the voices of family and friends. When a friend says they – easily, lovingly – it is a reminder that I am seen. That we are in a supportive, powerful community together. When I hear a friend telling someone about my work with Voices, it is a celebration.

Have you ever gotten to hear someone who cares about you saying a piece of your story? Carrying a few words of who you are? We can do that when we are asked for one another.