Riot Woman

I’ve admired the work, songwriting, and guitar shredding of musician, writer, and organizer Amy Klein for years. Amy is an incredibly thoughtful, inspiring, and knowledgeable Brooklyn-based artist and and in this episode she shares powerful reflections about building a life and vision as a feminist musician and writer.

In this conversation Amy and I cover a lot of ground, including how she discovered Riot Grrrl in the 3rd grade by stealing CDs from her older sisters room; the influence and inspiration of the book Girls to the Front and how it encouraged her to move from the online community of feminists she built thanks to a blog and tour diary to a real life community with the Permanent Wave group she founded and helped run for several years; how skills from being a performer translated into skills for being an organizer, especially as an introvert; the importance of making things happen, the power of women’s political rage in public; the value of having difficult conversations in person and the pitfalls and danger of online culture; and the lifetime process of creating art that feels authentic to you.

In this conversation Amy is really frank and vulnerable about what she’s learned as an organizer and feminist, especially about confronting racism within feminism as a white woman, so i hope that you’ll listen carefully.

Throughout this episode, Amy and I make reference to many different books. We’re both writers and avid readers and books have shaped both of our lives. Here are the books we talk about and books relevant to our conversation topics:

Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution by Sara Marcus

Your Art Will Save Your Life by Beth Pickens

Bluets and The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson

The works of Kathy Acker

Good and Mad by Rebecca Traistor

Eloquent Rage by Brittney Cooper

White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo

The experiences Amy shares around organizing highlight a really important factor of building movements and creating social change: So much change actually comes from the small actions and risks we take every day, the ideas we try, and the relationships we build. These may not coalesce into social movements that get written about in the media or talking about on NPR, but they can make a tangible difference in peoples’ lives and have a lasting impact that does on for years. As such, I hope that this episode also serves as a reminder to keep going, especially in these times that are extremely tough.

You can find Amy on Instagram at @amytiger and her music on Bandcamp, as well as via the Don Giovanni Records website.

This episode features the song “Half Lie” by Taleen Kali. Riot Woman artwork and logo by Aurora Lady.

Aurora Lady is a Los Angeles-based artist and visionary who is not only a bad ass feminist illustrator, stylist, glitter make up artist, and fashion designer, but one of my creative guides. She is a constant source of inspiration and someone I can trust to hear me out and give feedback on my wildest ideas and biggest, boldest, scariest, hairiest plans. She’s always there to push me towards creative follow through, which is such an essential person to have in your life. She’s been a supporter of this podcast from the first moment I imagined it and its also the creator of the Riot Woman logo!

One of Aurora and my first significant hangs was at a local copy shop in Pasadena where we copied, collated, and stapled our zines together to get ready for the 2014 LA Zine Fest. Hanging out with her I felt the same kind of energy I felt when my friends and I stayed up all night getting our zines ready for the Portland Zine Symposium in the summer of 2001 and 2002, but tempered with the perspective that comes with having lived a bit more.

Fitting to our friendship-origin story, in this conversation we talk about zines as educational building blocks for feminism, discovering punk when we lived in rural places, forging feminist community via Live Journal and how that’s different than Instagram today, making friends in LA (or anywhere) as an adult, and how we “signaled” our feminism and relationship to Riot Grrrl as teenagers and twenty-somethings through fashion, as well as the radical influence of Courtney Love.

We also process the resurgent trend of all things 90s and discuss the trap and difficulty of chasing nostalgia. Finally Aurora shares her advice about how to develop your art and what you’re about as an artist (and it has nothing to do with Instagram).

You can find Aurora on Instagram at @auroralady, browse her awesome t-shirt and one-of-a-kind wearable art in her Blue Shop of Death, and sign up for her fantastic weekly newsletter where she shares all kinds of insights into her process as an artist and cool projects she’s working on.

This episode features the song “Half Lie” by Taleen Kali.

Corinna Rosella of Rise Up! Good Witch is a writer, zine maker, anthropologist, herbal magic maker, tarot reader, and the host of the Rise Up! Good Witch podcast who hails from Northern California and is currently based in Joshua Tree.

Corinna and I met in Portland, Oregon in 2000, where we moved from rural areas on opposite sides of the country when we were at the end of our teens. We were drawn to the opportunity to take part in radical activism, punk feminism, and live on the cheap—trust me, it was a different time in Portland back then!

We were part of a very dysfunctional radical feminist art collective and it taught us both a lot about how feminists and radicals can hurt as much as support each other. Since then we’ve grown as both people and as feminists since that time and having this conversation was a powerful reminder about the possibility of healing and forgiveness.

On this podcast we discuss how Corinna found Riot Grrrl and zines at the advent of the internet while the punk community in her home town was actively unsafe due to misogyny, racism, and abuse, and how she later discovered plant medicine while living in a Portland punk house.

We also explore how her intersectional understanding of feminism expanded and evolved and how it informs her practice of witchcraft. We also discuss the ongoing challenge of understanding a concept intellectually and activism applying it to your life, the necessity of mitigating the harm of privilege as white people and how to embrace that journey, resisting cultural appropriation and working to decolonize witch craft and plant medicine, and critiquing life under capitalism while building a sustainable business.

Corinna is a powerful witch, writer, and healer and I loved being able to discuss all of this with her! You can find Corinna on Instagram at @riseupgoodwitch, support her and access her awesome monthly zines on Patreon, and visit her website and witch shop for her herbal tinctures and other magical products. For more wisdom on decolonizing magic practices and insight into all things witchy, check out her Rise Up! Good Witch podcast.

This episode features the song “Half Lie” by Taleen Kali. Riot Woman artwork and logo by Aurora Lady. Listen and subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, or Stitcher.

James Spooner is a visual artist, a parent of two, and a vegan tattoo artist who runs Monocle Tattoo in Los Angeles. James embodies the DIY spirit and has built his life around his punk rock values and is the creator 2003’s Afropunk documentary and is currently work on a graphic novel which is chronicles his experience growing up as a teenaged black punk in the California desert, entitled The High Desert. In addition to his website and Instagram account @spoonersnofun, you can now also find his comics featured in Razorcake magazine.

Afropunk speaks to questions around how Blackness is defined and expressed and it remains a relevant as ever. Like Mimi Nguyen’s zine Evolution of a Race Riot, Afropunk has profoundly impacted and helped shape and expand the conversation about race and punk identity and has remained a touch point for many throughout the years.

Hanif Abdurraqib captures the enduring need for the critique of racism within and beyond the punk scene Afropunk raised and the importance of the community James’ work helped build. In an essay entitled “I Wasn’t Brought Here, I Was Born: Surviving Punk Long Enough to Find Afropunk,” he writes, “Too often, the choice in punk rock and D.I.Y. spaces for non-white men [and I would add many other marginalized identities] is a choice between being tokenized, or being invisible.” As James says about Afropunk in our interview, “I set out to do the punkest thing I could do at the time, which was critique punk rock.”

Creating and touring with the Afropunk film, as well as organizing the subsequent festival of the same name (which James is no longer involved in) is just one example of James’ embodiment of the DIY spirit of punk and his commitment to keep creating and building community around his politics and interests. He has stayed true to his values throughout his many projects and as a parent. As he says, “A really big, important part of the punk scene I try to impart on people now is that punk audacity to just do things without permission.”

In our conversation we talk a lot about being teenagers coming into punk, especially because that is the focus of his book-in-progress The High Desert. We discussed how he discovered punk as an answer to the “perfect storm of adolescence” and the frustration of being one of two black punks in the high desert of California and the “racial exceptionalism” he experienced there. We also talked about how his experience changed when he moved to NYC as a teenager and met other black punks and punks of color.

We talk about the importance of embracing the “do it yourself” spirit of punk and moving from being a consumer to a creator. James’ determination to create a world for himself when he doesn’t fit in is the kind of spirit I love about punk and it comes through in his creative projects and as well as to his approach to parenting. Talking with James is to get excited about punk, and punk values, again and to see how those values can continue to inform your work, even as you move beyond and through punk.

This episode also includes my thoughts on the Bikini Kill reunion show I recently attended in New York City. I reflect on how for me the most important elements punk contributed to my life are community, relationships with friends, and the importance of DIY and social justice-oriented values.

This episode features the song “Half Lie” by Taleen Kali. Riot Woman artwork and logo by Aurora Lady. Listen and subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, or Stitcher.

Marlee Grace is a dancer, writer, podcaster, creative advisor, and the author of the book How to Not Always Be Working. She also runs Center, an artist residency and creative space in Grand Rapids, Michigan. She will be leading a dance and writing workshop entitled Composition + Practice in the Catskills May 17 to 19, 2019.

I first met Marlee in 2013 when she was just beginning her shop Have Company in Grand Rapids in Michigan. She discovered my book Grow, a field guide for success and sustainability for DIY creatives, and reached out about carrying it in the shop. She went on to build a very successful shop and artist residency selling creative, handmade goods. I reconnected with Marlee early this year over Instagram (of course) and was thrilled to find how she’s grown as a creative and uses her many platforms to create, as she puts it “containers for people to empower themselves.”

Much of her work is centered improvisation, self-reflection, healing, growing, and charting new paths for yourself, all themes that have come into my life strongly over the past month. In this episode we talk about the power of zines and DIY in a digital era; and how to disconnect (including her great IGTV video “Don’t Let the App Get You Down”); the necessary shift from Do It Yourself to Do It Together; surviving capitalism and valuing yourself in order to be generous to others; the importance of ritual and finding harmony between many interests; and reaching beyond punk in order to bring your work and values to a wider audience.

Marlee also discusses inspiration from people like Sarah Faith Gottesdiener, Dori Midnight, Mary Evans of Spirit Speak, and adrienne maree brown’s book Emergent Strategy.

This episode features the song “Half Lie” by Taleen Kali. Riot Woman artwork and logo by Aurora Lady. Listen and subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, or Stitcher.

This episode features musician, artist, and illustrator Tae Won Yu, of the band Kicking Giant. Tae was deeply involved in and influenced by the early Riot Grrrl and do-it-yourself scene in New York, Washington DC, and Olympia, Washington, where he lived for about a decade throughout the 1990s. Tae, and his music, art, and commitment to creating community and connection have long been an inspiration to me.

In this conversation Tae thoughtfully shares his unique experience with and understanding of Riot Grrrl, including how he first met Molly Neuman and Allison Wolfe from the band Bratmobile after reading about their zine Girl Germs in Sassy Magazine. We talk about the power of community, self-expression, and the empowering feeling of creating your own scene, identity, and movement. He describes participating in a moment that has been cited as one of Riot Grrrl’s inspirational turning points: Girl Night, featuring all women-front bands, at the International Pop Underground Convention in Olympia in 1991.

He also discusses how the generation of artists who lived in Olympia before him helped inspire Riot Grrrl and feminist art in the Pacific Northwest and showed him how to build a life as an artist. Those artists include Calvin Johnson and Candice Peterson of K Records, Nikki McClure, Stella Marrs, Slim Moon of Kill Rock Stars, Jean Smith of Mecca Normal, and Lois Maffeo.

Tae’s reflections are a beautiful tribute to the compassionate encouragement that existed in the early 1990s scene in Olympia and an example of creating a life for yourself as an artist and outsider.

You can find the re-issued Kicking Giant record, This Being the Ballad of Kicking Giant, Halo: NYC/Olympia 1989-1993, at Drawing Room Records. If you want to hear more about the early Riot Grrrl scene, Tae is also featured on the podcast Girl Germs, which focuses on Bratmobile’s first album of the same name.

Follow Tae on Instagram on his personal account @Taewonyu and his incredible archive of photos from the Olympia scene at @summer_guitars. This episode features the song “Half Lie” by Taleen Kali.

In this episode I catch up with Nicole J. Georges, a writer, illustrator, podcaster, and professor, among many other things. She is the author of the award winning graphic novels Fetch: How a Bad Dog Brought Me Home and Calling Dr. Laura. She also is a professor at California College for the Arts and is the host of the podcast Sagittarian Matters.

Nicole and I first met in the early 2000s when we both lived in Portland, Oregon, where we helped organize the Portland Zine Symposium. For our conversation we are joined by producer and Instagram influencer Ponyo Georges, a delightful Chomerianian, and discuss rock camp for girls, grunge as a gateway to punk, being part of a subculture in a small town, becoming intentional about what we do for fun and what we do for money, how getting paid for your art is a class issue, zines and intersectional feminism, and healing from punk damage.

Follow Nicole on Instagram at @nicolejgeorges and support her Patreon. Featuring the songs “Half Lie” by Taleen Kali. Riot Woman artwork and logo by Aurora Lady.

In this episode my guest is cosmic, femme, punk visionary Taleen Kali. Taleen is a musician, writer, publisher of the independent magazine Dum Dum Zine, and sound healer based in Los Angeles. She’s also the composer of the show’s theme music!

We talk about discovering punk through downloading songs from Napster; transitioning to playing punk as a classically trained musician; the immediate, accessible power of the Riot Grrrl manifesto and its lasting impact on our lives; the cognitive dissonance of living in a NYC punk loft venue while working for a luxury magazine; the visceral feeling of building creative community in LA; the importance of print in an internet-fueled culture; and healing, DIY, and the power of sound. She’s also joined by her adorable pup, LeeLoo Kali.

In this episode I catch up with Katy Otto, a drummer, writer, activist, and parent who hails from the Washington DC area and currently lives in Philadelphia. She has played in bands such as Del Cielo, Trophy Wife, and Bald Rapunzel and currently plays in the band Rainbow Crimes. She has also run the independent record label Exotic Fever for 20 years. Katy currently works as Director of Communications for the Juvenile Law Center in Philadelphia and has worked at a number of organizations dedicated to social justice issues – reproductive health and rights, sexual violence prevention, intimate partner violence, homelessness, and veterans’ issues.

During our conversation we discuss how Katy fell in love with drums at a Hole concert, being a girl drummer who quote “hits hard,” the administrative work of creativity, DIY touring, punk and sobriety, talking a “both and” approach to political liberation and reform, and punk, feminism, and the act of parenting, with bonus parenting advice by way of Ian MacKaye.

Featuring the songs “Half Lie” by Taleen Kali. Riot Woman artwork and logo by Aurora Lady.

This episode features Doctor Lauren Jade Martin, feminist sociologist of reproduction who researches the social impact of assisted reproductive technologies. Her first book, Reproductive Tourism in the United States: Creating Family in the Mother Country, is published by Routledge. Lauren is currently Associate Professor of Sociology and coordinator of the Women’s Studies minor at Penn State University, Berks and lives in Philadelphia. She was also the author of zines such as Quantify and You Might As Well Live and featured in compilation zines such as Evolution of a Race Riot.

In this episode I talk with Lauren about her discovery of zines and participation in Riot Grrrl culture in the 1990s, working in feminist social services, her academic work around reproductive justice and technology, being childless as women in our 30s and 40s, and how the do-it-yourself spirit of punk continues to influence her life. We also and speculate about the Bikini Kill reunion.

Find our more about Lauren at dandyprof.com. Featuring the song “Half Lie” by Taleen Kali.