Gratitude & Enabling Paid Subscriptions

Reading a writer's work is a form of love

Dear Readers,

Thank you so much for all of your support of this newsletter over the past year - I decided to get more “serious” about my Substack gradually, at first thinking only to use it as an archive of pieces formerly published by online magazines that are now largely defunct, as well as the text of an occasional speech or other public speaking event. Then, as I started to feel the potential of Substack for finding, creating, and sharing long form written pieces, I got excited, and started to experiment with posting longer-form, literary essays. To my surprise, these pieces took off! Some readers even started to pledge monthly or annual payments, which I didn’t even realize was an option when I started out here.

Today, we find ourselves in an increasingly dire political situation, particularly for trans women of colour like myself, among other highly targeted groups. As a trans woman writer and a practitioner of somatic healing and group process facilitation, I find myself longing to use my various platforms (both digital and otherwise) to extend the reach of not only my literary work, but the lessons I’ve learned when it comes to advocacy, facilitation for the purpose of social movement-building, Transformative and Restorative Justice, and collective trauma healing to strengthen social change.

As you may have noticed, over the past two weeks, I’ve started a series of posts that break down the theory and application of concepts related to group psychology and conflict facilitation for social change. I intend to continue these series relatively frequently, on topics including but not limited to: effective leadership, giving and receiving feedback within activist and advocacy circles, narrative strategy for social changemakers, politicized trauma healing, practical approaches to police and prison abolition, mental health first aid for activists, somatics, and more. It’s my hope that these pieces, which will all be grounded in my 15 years of experience as a former social worker and currently practicing group process worker, somatic coach and teacher, healing justice practitioner, mediator, and relational theorist, will be helpful to anyone interested in supporting positive social transformation. In particular, leaders, organizers, facilitation and complexity theory nerds, somatics and trauma theory nerds, and politicized writers and poets will get a lot of this series.

I’ll also continue post occasional literary essays here, and maybe even some poetry (who knows? The times call for poetry!), as well as snippets of ongoing book projects - I’ve got a few exciting ones coming up.

To support more frequent writing and sharing here, I’ve turned on paid subscriptions for those who wish to financially support this newsletter. I want to offer a HUGE thank you to all of you who have already followed, read, and shared my pieces, whether published here or for my columns in Xtra Magazine, or way back in my Everyday Feminism and Autostraddle days in the 2010s. I will continue to make the majority of the content on this newsletter free, as I believe strongly in the free dissemination and access to knowledge and literature. For those of you who want to make a financial contribution, thank you for this too! I commit to sharing at least one piece per month that is for paid subscribers - and I’m thinking about some fun extras I might be able to pull together, like Q&A Zoom calls or online workshops.

To each and every one of you - than you: for reading my work, and for all that you are. Thank you for believing in the possibility of a better world, and for choosing love. I still believe that world lives and breathes, I still believe we can bring it into being. Despite all that’s happened and all that we have lost, I still believe we can win, my dear ones. I still believe in love.

Yours,

Kai Cheng Thom