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.
After the Allied Media Conference is over, I'll be driving back from Detroit to Portland, stopping for more Bitch fundraising/outreach/discussions along the way. As before, I'm hoping to organize a fundraiser (a house party, dance party, music show, tap dance off, whatever) and a Feminism In/Action discussion in each city.
I knew I was close to home when I started hearing corn crop fungicide commercials on the radio.
I got into Minnesota a day early, because I took a wrong turn leaving Chicago and by the time I called the folks I was supposed to meet up with, they laughed (kindly) and told me to keep heading West, as it would've taken another two hours of backtracking to get there.
Clearly I'm not one of those people who can keep my blog up-to-the-minute, but I want to mention two more things about my visit to Detroit, even though I'm actually two states beyond at this point.
Before I left town, I had lunch with some staff members of Labor Notes, an incredible and radical organization/magazine that provides a forum for union activists to honestly examine problems within the labor movement (i.e., not just ever-weakening labor laws and employer offensives, but problems like weak unions and union leaders not doing their job). Similar to Bitch, they're a nonprofit organization that publishes a magazine. They also publish pamphlets and books (including one of my favorites, The Troublemakers Handbook: How to fight back where you work and win) and organize a bi-annual Labor Notes conference. I highly encourage everyone to read what happened at their most recent conference in April. There's some f'd-up stuff going on in union organizing these days.
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