It’s time to fight fascism with fire
Let’s start with a moment of extreme honesty: This fall, I was ready to pull the plug on Fireside. I’ve been doing this for four years now, and I was burned out. Fireside has been an amazing, wonderful, genuinely important part of my life for a long time. But it takes up so much time. I don’t get the chance to read very much anymore, and I haven’t written a damn word of fiction in years. And as you all know, it’s always a battle to keep funded. And I just felt drained. By September, I knew that I was headed toward total burnout, and I was starting to make plans to wind things down when we finished up Year 4.
Then Donald Trump won the American presidency.
Then literal Nazis came out of the slime they had been hiding beneath and started holding white supremacy conferences in the nation’s capital.
Then my friends and everyone in this country who are women, who are people of color, who are immigrants, who are disabled and gay and transgender and queer and all the other things that make this country amazing — they saw a threat, which they have always lived under, they saw that threat intensified and brought into public in a way that none of us have seen in our lifetimes.
Donald Trump is draining the swamp and re-filling it with a slurry of hatred, greed, and fear that is terrifying. And it’s not just in the United States. Brexit. Putin. Syria and Marine Le Pen and food riots in Venezuela. A man who is open about being a murderer is running the Philippines.
These are dark times.
A few days after the election, as I was processing what had happened, I knew I was going to keep Fireside going. The next four years are not about following our bliss. They’re about doing the work of resistance, whatever that means, and and however long it takes to smash the rise of fascism in the United States and around the world. I’m not feeling burnt out anymore. I’m feeling energized in a way that I haven’t felt in a long time.
We have a platform in Fireside to resist. The magazine has always placed a premium on telling the stories of the marginalized, of looking at the world through a lens of what we’ve fucked up and how it can be better. There is a power in that. A power of standing up, or being counted, of saying you will not remake the world in your hateful image.
We have big plans for 2017. They’ll start to unfold at the end of January, when we’ll be putting out the last issue of Year 4 and shifting to a new, more frequent publishing format. And we’ll be re-opening to submissions in the spring.
The next few years are going to be bad. It’s going to feel like everything we believe in is gone.
But we won’t give in to despair. Rebellions are built on hope, and I promise that Fireside will be a beacon of hope, of the vision of the world we want. The world that ALL of us deserve, not just the rich white men.
We will fight. And we will win.
