Dear Side Questers,

It has been a difficult month. I hope you are well and finding escape in art or music or something that lets you escape. Escape is Resistance!

I’ve been deep into research about Germany in WWll, and specifically the way everyday people resisted. The similarities are brutally astounding

I’d always known that people hid Jews in secret places, but I didn’t realize that they had nowhere else to go. That even the ones who made it out of Germany were turned back. I didn’t know the Pope granted them asylum in the Vatican and even encouraged the creation of false identity papers to help some families remain safe. It makes me realize the plight of refugees everywhere, that even now refugees and immigrants are looked down upon, hated and feared (even in Canada). Its not something that will change when we become the refugees, fleeing fascism and authoritarianism. Is it better to hide in someone’s attic for four years or risk escaping, only to be sent in some official capacity that ensures the baddies catch you and put you in your camps.

It’s a lot. But I do believe reading is resistance. I think we can learn from the past. Even fictionalized accounts of WW2 resistance, of which I’ve realized there is a LOT of. Our imaginations appear to have been collectively caught by the Holocaust in a way that leads to me to wonder, did we know this would happen again?

In contrast, I have a very well-educated friend in the U.S. who mentioned having just learned about the Reichstag fire. Our educations have not been the same, which sent me digging to discover where I learned so much about the Holocaust, because it wasn’t in school.

The weird thing? It was actually from growing up in the fundie cult. This was a big part of their story, and part of this was based in proving faithfulness via enduring persecution. This is a big part of cult psychology, making you separate and “better” than the rest of the world. It’s BIG red flag that’s been showing up in contemporary mega-churches in the U.S. and, increasingly, in Canada.

Okay, getting back to the point. They held up the cult members destroyed in the concentration camps as the example we needed to follow. We needed to suffer for our faith, so that the deity would love us. Job, all the way down. Thus, little bits of persecution were just practice for the Big Persecution to Come and over time, this gets embedded into your identity and whoopsie, turns out that’s exactly how socialization and propaganda works.

As a result, we had buckets and buckets of historical literature about the Holocaust that I was allowed to access (my reading was fairly restricted so this is a big deal). I’m struggling to realize that not everyone received this education, and I think it’s a big part of why this level of fascism-and following the exact same goshdarn pattern-has come ‘round again.

Remember during the BLM protests in the States when Antifa became a bad word and a lot of us were wondering how “antifascist” could possibly be considered a bad thing? Yeah. I’ve been thinking about that a lot.

At this point, you must be wondering, cool Jenn, so are you writing some sort of historical WWll fiction? Sort of. The Little Banned Bookshop is being pulled very strongly in that direction, though possibly not in the way you’d expect. I think if Gabby and the Bookshop are going to learn how to resist, they might need to visit the past. Maybe meet a German Shopkeeper and their Little Banned Buchladen.

I usually have this rule where I never talk about my works-in-progress, but this feels different. The Little Banned Bookshop feels, in a lot of ways, something that belongs to us rather than me, that it exists to give us some hope as we journey through troubling times. The human mind is wired to learn through story, and maybe, through stories like this, we can learn how to survive this together, with our humanity intact.

If we can still call it that in the face of what is happening…again.

I’m also escaping. Not outside to the woods, we keep having ice storms and there’s a terrible crust on the snow currently bashing in my shins. It’s the party pooper of the whole winter… until it starts melting, the sap running…

BUT I’m a member of the facebook group Wild Green Memes for Ecological Fiends (it’s one of the few groups that’s keeping me on the site) and every year around this time we have this event called the Charity Battle. There are several different animal or nature “gangs” and they all battle (by making increasingly unhinged memes) to raise the most money for conservation efforts (these are all visible at wildgreenfuture.org).

I joined character-based IcePack last year about midway and had an absolute blast. So many deep belly laughs. And I’m so glad that it’s come around again because I forgot how much fun it is and what a lovely antidote it is to all the horrors while also helping nature.

These memes are so embedded into gang and group lore that they rarely make sense to outsiders once the battle is more than few days in, but here is a silly sampler of mine to give you some idea of the unhinged nonsense we’re up to.

I don’t have much meme skill, so I mostly make 20-frame comic stories that keep me giggling as I make them, and then doubled over in laughter when the other fiends start commenting on them.

It’s the most fun you’ll ever have helping frosted elfin butterflies! Check it out here and if you want to help, please donate to my gang, IcePack: We have the LORE!

Like many others, the anglerfish recorded by National Geographic that surfaced into the light, only to die, captured my heart this past week. This has resulted in enough daydreams that it is firmly lodged in my imagination, but I’m not sure what that will come to, creatively, just yet. I have been enjoying this song by Paris Paloma about the same.

That’s all for this month, Side Questers. Fingers crossed that the first signs of spring will have sprung by next month, the sap will be running, and maybe we’ll all have something to smile about.