I'd never
been to Salt Lake City before, so I was excited to check it out. After
a long drive in from Denver, I was even more excited to be greeted by a
plate of vegan cookies, freshly-baked by our host, Courtney Maguire
(thanks, Courtney!). Courtney is one of the folks involved with the Female Empwerment Movement (FEM),
a new(ish) feminist group created in response to the high rates of
sexual violence in Salt Lake. FEM also helped organize and get the word
out of the evening's events, and I'm grateful.
I'm also grateful to Angela Brown, Meghann Griggs, and the rest of the folks at SLUG magazine,
who responded almost immediately to our call for assistance in helping
put together the discussion and fundraiser in Salt Lake. SLUG was
founded in 1989 and remains Utah's oldest alternative paper.
I'm up in Portland this week, visiting Debbie and hanging out at the Bitch office. I haven't been here in about a year, and it's amazing to see how bustling the office is—with interns and volunteers and new staffers (hi, Brian!)—while maintaining a relatively unfrenzied vibe, even though it's the middle of production on a new issue. This kind of calm, um, was never really achieved when I was working here. I'm going to try not to read anything into that.
When I moved to Madison to go to school several years ago, all I knew about the city was that people often referred to it as the "Berkeley of the Midwest" because of its history of radical politics. And while – like Berkeley itself – that intense thread of resistance is not nearly as palpable as it must've been back then, the vibe of the city is still very progressive. As one example, I don't know of any other city in the United States with as many worker collectives/cooperatives.
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