publishing house Posts

There's a nice remembrance of George Willoughby by the Brandywine Peace Community's Bob Smith over on the War Resisters International site. George died a few days ago at the age of 95 [updated]. It's hard not to remember his favorite quip as he and his wife Lillian celebrated their 80th birthdays: "twenty years to go!" Neither of them made it to 100 but they certainly lived lives more full than the average people.

I don't know enough of the details of their lives to write the obituary (a Wikipedia page was started this morning) but I will say they always seemed to me like the Forrest Gump's of peace activism--at the center of every cool peace witness since 1950. You squint to look at the photos at there's George and Lil, always there. Or maybe pop music would give us the better analogy: you know how there are entire b-rate bands that carve an entire career around endlessly rehashing a particular Beatles song? Well, there are whole activist organizations that are built around particular campaigns that the Willoughby's championed. Like: in 1958 George was a crew member of the Golden Rule (profiled a bit here), a boatload of crazy activists who sailed into a Pacific nuclear bomb test to disrupt it. Twelve years later some Vancouver activists stage a copycat boat sailing which became Greenpeace. Lillian was concerned about rising violence against women and started one of the first Take Back the Night marches. If you've ever sat in an activist meeting where everyone's using consensus, then you've been influenced by the Willoughby's!

Robin wrote a little about the New Monastic movement in a plug for the Pendle Hill workshop I'm doing with Wess Daniels this Fall.

Here's my working theory: I think Liberal Friends have a good claim to inventing the "new monastic" movement thirty years ago in the form of Movement for a New Society, a network of peace and anti-nuclear activists based in Philadelphia that codified a kind of "secular Quaker" decision-making process and trained thousands of people from around the world in a kind of engaged drop-out lifestyle that featured low-cost communal living arrangements in poor neighborhoods with part-time jobs that gave them flexibility to work as full-time community activists. There are few activist campaigns in the 1970s and 1980s that weren't touched by the MNS style and a less-ideological, more lived-in MNS culture survives today in borderline neighborhoods in Philadelphia and other cities. The high-profile new monastics rarely seem to give any props to Quakers or MNS, but I'd be willing to bet if you sat in on any of their meetings the process would be much more inspired by MNS than Robert's Rules of Order or any fifteen century monastic rule that might be cited.

For a decade I lived in West Philly in what I called "the ruins of the Movement for a New Society." The formal structure of MNS had disbanded but many of its institutions carried on in a kind of lived-in way. I worked at the remaining publishing house, New Society Publishers, lived in a land-trusted West Philly coop house, and was fed from the old neighborhood food coop and occasionally dropped in or helped out with Training for Change, a revived training center started by MNS-co-founder (and Central Philadelphia Meeting-member) George Lakey It was a tight neighborhood, with strong cross-connections, and it was able to absorb related movements with different styles (e.g., a strong anarchist scene that grew in the late 1980s). I don't think it's coincidence that some of the Philly emergent church projects started in West Philly and is strong in the neighborhoods that have become the new ersatz West Philly as the actual neighborhood has gentrified.

So some questions I'll be wrestling with over the next six months and will bring to Pendle Hill:

• Why haven't more of us in the Religious Society of Friends adopted this engaged lifestyle?
• Why haven't we been good at articulating it all this time?
• Why did the formal structure of the Quaker-ish "new monasticism" not survive the 1980s?
• Why don't we have any younger leaders of the Quaker monasticism? Why do we need others to remind us of our own recent tradition?
• In what ways are some Friends (and some fellow travelers) still living out the "Old New Monastic" experience, just without the hype and without the buzz?

It's entirely possible that the "new monasticism" isn't sustainable. At the very least Friends' experiences with it should be studied to see what happened. Is West Philly what the new monasticism looks like thirty years later? The biggest differences between now and the heyday of the Movement for a New Society is 1) the Internet's ability to organize and stay in touch in completely different ways; and 2) the power of the major Evangelical publishing houses that are hyping the new kids.

I'll be looking at myself as well. After ten years, I felt I needed a change. I'm now in the "real world"--semi suburban freestanding house, nuclear family. The old new West Philly monasticism, like the "new monasticism" seems optimized for hip twenty-something suburban kids who romanticized the gritty city. People of other demographics often fit in, but still it was never very scalable and for many not very sustainable. How do we bring these concerns out to a world where there are suburbs, families, etc?

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• In Japan Half The Top Selling Books Are Written On Mobile Phones
  Half of the top ten selling works of fiction in the first six months of 2007 were composed on mobile phones... Mobile phone novels... have become a publishing phenomenon in Japan, “turning middle-of-the-road publishing houses into major concerns."
  (tags: publishing)
• "Why can’t we be Friends?", Kirk W finds Quaker video on YouTube
  It’s a good mix of earnest effort and teenage humor. They’ve got the Quaker Oats gag in there (several times) but they manage to get past that. They even have some of our Friends in it.
  (tags: comment)
• Video: Quakers Rock (via QuakerQuaker.org)
  High school history project video . "Why the Quakers in the Middle Colonies of the Colonial Era were better,.. a very funny film staring superspeed native beating and a transvestite Scarlett O'Hara." Warning: Oat jokes, non-PC humor. (via Kirk W)
  (tags: quaker quaker.youth quaker.depictions)
• Peter B on reading Marcus Borg on reading the Bible
  That’s me in a nutshell—my personal faith and practice in five simple sentences—and the first bit could just as well have been a quote from George Fox with the language updated and the thee’s and thou’s taken out.
  (tags: quaker quaker.liberal quaker.christianity)
• Sheffield Gordon on the relationship of individual and community
  If we fail to make the distinction between community, fellowship and friendship [then] we will allow ourselves to become subsumed into the overwhelming individualism of our age, and we will become merely another political action group.
  (tags: quaker quaker.witness)
• Six Apart sells its LiveJournal service to the Russians
  "The company continues to lead in the blogging and social media industry with the Movable Type Publishing Platform, the TypePad hosted blogging service, and Vox, a free blogging service for friends and families."
  (tags: tech tech.movabletype)

Yesterday I got a call from a publicist for CBS News's 60 Minutes. They're running a story tonight on "Deserters," U.S. military personnel who have fled to Canada rather than serve in Iraq. She was requesting that I talk up the program on Nonviolence.org (I have here: CBS News Covers New Conscientious Objectors. In nine years of publishing the peace site, I can't remember ever getting a call from a publicist before. I've talked to reporters from major news networks and papers, and I've talked a booking agent or two to arranging appearances on radio shows, but never a publicist.

A few years ago I felt led to take up the ancient Quaker testimony of plain dressing. I've spoken elsewhere about my motivations but I want to give a little practical advice to other men who have heard or even gotten ahold of the "Gohn Bros." catalog but don't know just what to order. I certainly am not sanctioning a uniform for plain dress, I simply want to give those so inclined an idea of how to start.

Quakers Uniting in Publications, better known as "QUIP", is a collection of 50 Quaker publishers, booksellers and authors committed to the "ministry of the written word." I often think of QUIP as a support group of sorts for those of us who really believe that publishing can make a difference. It's also one of those places where different branches of Friends come together to work and tell stories. QUIP sessions strike a nice balance between work and unstructured time, it's has its own nice culture of friendliness and cooperation that are the real reason many of us go every year.