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The place is in a three-floor walk-up on Webster Street, and you find it by navigating a building that feels like it’s mapped for a video game, all industrial corridors and the smell of old machinery, until you reach a door that could open onto a “school of magic” (so says a sign taped to the wall) or nothing at all. Inside, there is a man who calls himself Hunchback for reasons that have to do with his spine and a keen sense for marketing, and a woman who goes by the Whiskey Witch because she used to sling whiskey and comes from a line of fortune tellers and belly dancers. There is art made from discarded paper and plastic and meat trays sterilized for block printing, a series called “Friendly Floats” that a thirteen-year-old fell in love with, and an upcoming exhibition by an octogenarian stroke survivor who painted himself back from the dead. There is a pride flag at the door, and a “no assholes” policy that functions as both ethos and business model. They stock zines in a punk shop on the east coast of Ireland and a market on the Lower East Side, because when Jess or Travis travel, they take their things and say, ‘hey, we’re doing this,’ and other places seem to want a window into whatever this is.

This is Worcester, Massachusetts, the second-largest city in New England, and people here can have a chip on their shoulder, myself included, about our place in the world because, as Travis says, you don’t walk through Providence or Hartford and question whether it’s a city. You do here. There was a television show about a woman trapped in this liminal space of a place, and they didn’t shoot a single frame of it in the actual city, but that didn’t matter because the idea of Worcester—the miserable Worcester, the Casey-Affleck-with-a-Dunkin’s-cup-full-of-regrets Worcester—had already solidified into myth. The other Worcester, the one where a group of artists got laid off and needed to make rent so they began a series of one-off markets called Punkcake and let it mutate through venues and pandemics and incarnations until it landed here, in this room where people discover the art in their city and in themselves—that Worcester is harder to find if you’re not looking, and easier to dismiss even if you are.

The people who run this place are transplants, a Worcester cardinal sin. Travis came from Connecticut with his reservations intact and bought a house here because he could afford more in Worcester than in Natick. Jess grew up fifty yards from the Worcester line, in Holden, which is close enough to claim adjacency but not quite membership. They talk about the city the way people talk about difficult mothers: we can say what we want about her, but if anyone else does, they’re dead. There is a crab-in-the-bucket mentality, they explain, the warring tribes of Scotland, the impulse to tear down anyone who starts to rise. Paradoxically, it’s the friction of resisting this death roll that creates the spark to move the work forward. Because when no one is doing something in Worcester, when there is a vacuum where a thing should be, it becomes your job to do it. You don’t wait for permission. You start in a parking lot.

I asked them about art in times that feel heavy, because this is the kind of question you ask now, in 2026, when everything carries the weight of everything else. Jess got weepy, which she does with a beautiful ease, and said that creating is a radical act of claiming yourself back, that when we don’t value creation we get into trouble, that looking at history, you notice who they arrest first–the artists, the people telling their truth. Travis said that if you don’t get the feelings out, what you think becomes what you are, and if you think you’re doomed, you’re doomed. He said you only need permission from yourself, which is a nice mantra, but the truth is that some people need more than permission. Some people need a room with a pride flag on the door and art made from trash and a college kid making zines next to an elder-queer’s show of Lewdy Nudies. Some people need to be told that the thing they made—the sketch, the comic strip, the collage—means they are an artist, too. Some people need a place where the stories they tell themselves about who they are can shift, just slightly, into something more than just merely survivable.

We tell ourselves stories in order to live, Joan Didion wrote, and these days it feels something like a warning. Perhaps the danger is in the stories we stop questioning, the myths we accept because they’re easier than the alternative. The myth of the miserable Worcester, the myth that artists should pay for shelf space and be grateful, the myth that this city is only ever almost something else. In the room on Webster Street, they are building a longer table instead of higher fences, and if you ask them why, they will tell you about noblesse oblige—those who can, should—and about a young trans kid who saved up and bought art for the first time, and about a bicycle repair tech who came in not knowing what to create but who left having made something, and how they keep coming back to collect and to make art. They will tell you that the point is to get the thing out there, to capture the culture before it disappears, to remind you that you are living in the good old days right now, even when it doesn’t feel that way. Even when it feels, specifically, like the opposite. This is Punkcake Alterno Art and the Hunchback Gallery where the collective built a home. This is Jess Curtin and Travis Duda and how their radical love for the art of being alive is punk as fuck and contagious as hell, and maybe couldn’t have happened in just this way any where but right here.

Dani: I live in Worcester now, but I am not by Worcester’s definition of Worcester. I’ve only been here for three years. I’m coming at this pretty fresh. I know both of you only from social media, so I’m here to learn everything I can in about an hour of your time. If you wouldn’t mind just tell me a little bit about yourself, your background?

Travis: So I, too, am not a lifer. I, too, am a transplant, and I’ll never be of Worcester. You are of Worcester.

Travis motions to Jess with a nod

Jess: Worcester adjacent. I’m of Holden, but, like, 50 yards from the Worcester line. Our house was the last house before you crossed over into Worcester.

Travis: So chronologically, I think this story starts with Jess.

Jess: Back in 1971. I’m from the town next door and I grew up in Holden, went to Wachusett [High School], basic 70s nerdy kid, had the Dorothy Hamill haircut and the whole nine yards.

Have you always been an artist?

Jess: I’ve always been creative. I come from a long line of, like, creatives and fortune tellers, belly dancers, burlesque on mom’s side. Dad’s side, very Swedish, hard workers. So there was sort of a mix there. But we had piano lessons growing up and we were always doodling. My mom just encouraged us to vignette everything. We’d go to the beach and it was, I think she just didn’t want us to annoy her, so she’d be like, okay, draw a box in the sand, this is your house, decorate it. I’m gonna come back in an hour and we’ll talk about what you’ve put in your house type thing, which is hilarious. We just sort of grew up having arts around us. My folks didn’t have a whole lot of money, but my mom was tied into every free event ever. Then I went to college for teaching. I’m a special ed teacher by trade.

Is that something that you still do now?

Jess: Now I teach teachers. The company in the clinic that I work for was bought out by a corporate education entity, which is kind of wild, but I still get to teach teachers and now Travis and I in the guise of Punkcake want to get art to people and make sure everybody has access to it… I can’t remember when we started, but Darcy Schwartz, who ran ArtReach in Worcester, had brought me on knowing that I was a special ed teacher, she had students with some rather specific needs. So I started teaching for her. Zines came up. We pulled in Travis, and Travis and I started working with a group of young individuals and just teaching them how to take the ideas that are so complex, so colorful in their heads and get it on paper. I was the writing person. Travis did a lot of the digital end and the art, the layout. Last week, we just spent a day at Worcester Academy, we ran two sessions of zines. So, yeah, art’s always been somewhere in my life. I think, you know, we took it for granted growing up, it was just something to be celebrated. It’s supposed to be there. I drive by people’s houses or I go into people’s houses where they don’t have art on the walls and I’m like, what happened here? Did someone steal your art? Why are there so many blank walls?

Travis: Not even posters.

Jess: I taught in Connecticut. I moved overseas for a number of years and then came back. Infiltrating a community as an adult is so hard so I started slinging whiskey. Who wants to talk to a special ed teacher who’s roaming around a building? But if you’re giving away free whiskey...So I have the moniker the Whiskey Witch, is what I go by sometimes with Madame Punkcake on the Punkcake side.

Travis: The Whiskey Witch turned into the Punkcake parking lot. She was hosting some of the original markets over at Ralph’s [Rock Diner], collecting a whole bunch of weird vendors, and then also pairing it with local punk bands, so you had live music with all these local makers.

That’s how Punkcake got started?

Jess: Essentially. Actually, the very first Punkcake had started because there was a lot of our artist friends working for a company that bought a machine and laid off a bunch of the artists, so they needed to make rent. And at the same time, my husband is a musician, and his bands were only playing in Boston, and there’s no fucking parking in Boston. So I was like, why can’t you just play out in Worcester? And he’s like, well, no one books us. So at that point in time Beatniks was down on Park Ave. I went in and said look I’m tired of driving to Boston, can I book a show here? And then a bunch of the artists that got laid off, I said okay we have the show and you guys can set up some tables so why don’t we do it? and we said what are we gonna call it? We’re gonna sell cupcakes and have punk music. The old George Carlin routine stuck in my head, like when you’re cleaning out your fridge you find a lump could be meat could be cake it’s meatcake and so we kind of riffed on that. We got some punk. We got some cupcakes. We got Punkcake. And that’s how it started. It was supposed to be a one-and-done to just to kind of help everybody, and 13 years down the road, here we are. It’s been a number of different iterations. We got too big for Beatniks, moved over to Fiddler’s Green, the Hibernian Center, which was great. We had a ton of people. But we had to charge a fee that made vending not accessible to everybody who needed to vend. Ralph’s let us take over their flea markets one Sunday a month. Then we were able to be like, all right, throw us 10 bucks so we can give the bands gas money. And our friends with bands were really great. And they’re like, yeah, yeah, we see what you’re trying to do. Just cover our gas and maybe get us a beer. We did that for a long time. We did that until the pandemic. And then the pandemic, we shifted a little bit. We tried to do a couple of things online. Travis and I, at that point, were teaching for ArtReach, and we slowly started to move more into the realm of education and art. And also at that point, other markets started to pop up, which is awesome.

Travis: I’m a transplant, and I found my way to Worcester kind of inadvertently. I had my reservations about the city, which I’m on record. I got cars broken into when I was visiting here from Connecticut when I was younger. So I never thought Worcester was going to be my place. And at the time, I was getting married and my ex-wife and I bought a house here because we could afford more in Worcester than we could anywhere else. So, I found my way to Worcester. I’ve kind of been entrepreneurial my whole life. I knew I didn’t want to have a normal life. I was working for a civil engineering company as a graphic designer supporting a staff. That was killing me, because during my nights I was designing stuff for bands. I come from a music background. I used to play in bands. I used to print t-shirts. I just, I loved that mentality. I got really into comic books and I started deciding that I was gonna write comic books and then my business partner and I did Boston Comic-Con 2014, maybe 2015, and up walked this lovely lady and her husband attracted to one of our things at our booth. We just start shooting the shit. We instantly connect. It becomes oh my god. You’re in Worcester? I’m in Worcester! We should hang out. I went to Punkcake and realized this is that community I’m looking for. It’s a lot full of weirdos. I feel at home. And then because I had that comic book background and digital layout background and just had a growing interest in zines, we were like, we could make a Punkcake zine. So back then we did a few issues kind of cataloging everybody that’s around us, who’s doing cool stuff, no real plan, just seeing what came together. And then, when lockdown happened, we’re like, we have all this energy. Jess, you positioned it very cool. Kids in the future are going to need actual references. And so we need to catalog our experience because at some point, someone is going to need to research this and your first-hand experience is going to be valuable to that person doing that research.

Jess: So it’s a group of middle school individuals. We were seeing them online and basically asking them to keep quarantine diaries and it could be comics, it could be just drawings, it could be pulling stuff off the internet so it could be remembered. We told them you might be somebody’s primary source.

We never think of ourselves as the sources of history, but I’m sure Samuel Pepys didn’t either and we’re reading his diary three centuries later.

Travis: And that was an inspiring moment for them. So we put together a couple of quarantines and that was a way to stay unified through that awful time. And then even then that proved to be real arduous for what we were trying to do. Jess and I would talk about trying to do different things, but nothing seemed to sit right. Fast forward a couple more years, you’ve got the Merch Witch stuff going, I’ve been focusing on the design company that I run, and then I’ve had this growing interest in a gallery. I’ve had this growing interest of providing a space for local creatives to show their wares, sell their wares. Long story short, put more money in artists’ pockets that avoid some of the other players in the city like to take the money from the artists. Like they’re making money off the artists so that the artists can make scraps. And that to me is fine for those people, but not necessarily the way I want to live my life, nor is it the only way money can be made.

An anti-capitalist art gallery?

Travis: I think that’s what balances the space out. I have a good sense of the community we’re serving. We don’t want it to be too serious because some of those folks with those anxieties won’t come in if it’s too organized or whatever. So the point is to just stay open and welcome, and that’s to me what Punkcake is. And so when this space became available, I realized it was more than the design company could handle. Jess and I had been talking about what’s next for a while, and this kind of presented itself as an obvious what’s next.

And Hunchback Gallery is born?

Travis: Two years ago this month.

It’s a beautiful space.

Travis: I got a lot of help.

Jess: There was definitely a community thing. But you really are the driving force of this, but when people walk in, there’s a gasp, like there’s an audible (Jess mimes the breathless awe you feel coming through the door), and it’s not so much shock as, it’s almost like a piece of themselves that they didn’t even know was missing.

Travis: So to activate the space and to provide more community opportunities, the zine program kind of made sense to come back. Once a month we are putting out tables and just inviting folks to come down and work out your feelings. Come just hang, bring your own project. Just opportunities to provide community as a place. We have a cool clubhouse, let’s fucking use it. And not charge people because the idea of a second space is becoming so hard to find. And a place where you can go and not have to pay to exist is just not very prevalent these days. There’s lots of different ways to make money in the world and it’s never been my intention to make my millions off my friends. Money can’t buy happiness. We all see how pissed off Elon Musk is.

So there are things that you can show value as long as everybody gets their piece of the pie. And that to me is essentially what this is, right? I’ve worked my tail off to get myself and my organization to a point where I can offer something. I could have built bigger fences. What the fuck is the point of that? I built the longer table because with more people here to share the load, now that’s more people buying into the greater mission. That’s more people seeing themselves in this organization, whatever variation it is. And that’s how we’re all going to get farther.

And then to me, I have a background in Worcester now and some community art organizations and the local mural festival I was a part of, those to me were all tapping at what that sense of community is. But my opinion of Worcester really is like, we are the second largest city in New England, right? People love to fucking tout that. We don’t walk through Providence or Hartford and question whether or not it’s a city. You do here. So we have this chip on our shoulder where we think we’re something better and we try to steal ideas from other people. Truly we are our own fucking sense of weird. So just to kind of trail back to what we were talking about when you walked into here. One of the greatest compliments that I can hear, and I hear it every now and again, is “oh, this is like old Worcester”. Yeah, and I’m like, oh fuck, I wasn’t here for that.

It almost feels to me like there are two split Worcesters. Because the Worcester that I see other people seeing–the nothing on the way to Boston or the Berkshires– I’m like, I don’t see that. I came to Worcester. I found punk rock. I found community. I found people coming together, building things. The stereotype of Worcester is the miserable lifer, huffing butts and ain’t everything just a piss. There was a whole television show about a gal being trapped in this miserable city of Worcester. That is not the Worcester that I know. But it is the idea of Worcester that a lot of people here cling to in spite of themselves. And it befuddles me that we have a deep, amazing punk root in this city that The Establishment of it doesn’t want to embrace, because when cities do embrace that, they bloom and grow. Good things come to them. Thriving communities of artists and thinkers and entrepreneurs come to them. So like what do you think it is about Worcester that keeps that thinking in play. What is holding us back?

Travis: We are big enough where you can go outside and not know all your neighbors, but we’re small enough that you can see the impact of your work. So if you have something in mind that you want to do, all you really need is permission from yourself, and you can go fucking do it. Start on the streets, start in a parking lot. So like, Punkcake started and grew. I think that’s one of the powers of this place.

Jess: Yeah, I think the media is so fond of saying, we’re almost like Boston. We’re almost like this. And I can remember, Travis, it was like two summers ago, somebody did a big article on traveling from Boston, like the group that travels from Boston or Manhattan out to Tanglewood, and we need to give them better reasons to stop in Worcester. And our whole group was like, fuck you. We’re not Boston. We’re not Tanglewood. And we have so many varied communities inside Worcester, but there are some communities in Worcester that want to be a Boston. They want to be the culture stop between Manhattan and Tanglewood. Okay, well, I mean, you can’t shape all of Worcester. We’re freaking huge, and we’re weird, and we’re glorious, but in ways that make us our own, and Worcester has never wanted to embrace its own grittiness in a celebratory way. It’s always been all “oh, Worcester sucks, Worcester blows, I’m trapped here.” And that’s a story that outsiders tell and then people inside believe it and get mad instead of really just throwing up your middles.

Travis: It’s like your mom, right? You can say shit about your own mom, she’s your mom, but if anybody else talks shit about your mom, they’re fucking dead.

Jess: We were somewhere in Boston and Sean Connelly was opening one of Lenny Lashley’s shows, maybe. And he said something like, oh yeah, I’m from Worcester. I know. And people were like, boo. And I’m in the back like, fuck you. But that’s people, as soon as they hear Worcester vs Boston.

Travis: All of that shit together, I think that makes us who we are, and that’s that chip on the shoulder I was describing. You once described Worcester as the warring tribes of Scotland, and I think that is extremely true.

Jess: Everybody, it’s like the tribes in Scotland, everybody wanted freedom, but the clans wouldn’t work together to achieve it. And everybody in Worcester wants to elevate Worcester.

But then we hold ourselves back. Like why can’t we get our shit together?

Travis: You get a crab in a bucket mentality where as soon as you start rising, people that didn’t get what you got. (Travis reaches upward and brings back down a potentially successful imaginary crab) That’s one of the secret sauces of this place, is that I’m trying to be a unifier. Punkcake to me is a unifier. We have hip-hop kids in the city. We have smart tech kids in the city. We have punks. Like you said, there’s two Worcesters and I think that’s true. I think there’s actually way more than that. I used to feel extremely similarly to you, where I had my rose colored glasses on and everything was beautiful. And now I’ve been here 15 ish years and like, I still love this city. I’ve never felt connected to a place like I feel with Worcester, Massachusetts, but now I’ve earned my “Worcester Sucks” in a lot of ways.

She’s let you down as much as she’s lifted you up?

Travis: But in some regard that’s an earned feeling. I feel that way because I care about it so much and because I see the potential and I see that community that is here.

Jess: You’ve also done the work. There’s that too. And I think there’s a lot of folks who don’t necessarily do the work. They stay with one view of Worcester or one line about Worcester. Whereas, I feel like our crew, we’re so good at hopping in and out of different communities. We have folks who are jumping in and out of different communities, and then there are folks in Worcester who stay in their one lane. It’s a terrible analogy, but It’s very New England all around though.

Travis: But it’s also in that New England sensibility where, like if you pop your tire out west, people will stop and they’ll feel so sorry for you, but you’re changing your tire by yourself. Out here, they’re going to stop–

They’ll change your tire while they call you a cunt for getting a flat tire?

Travis: They’re going to berate you. They’re going to call you an idiot but your changing your tire together. I think that, to me, is the truest sensibility, where we’re all real rough. We have to survive this winter shit, and we have to do it with some regard of a smile on our face. So to kind of tie into what we’re doing now, we brought back the zine, and then it stalled again. We were doing our zine nights, and that felt good, but it needed more structure, it needed more purpose. So all of this shit is now kind of coalescing…Punkcake Zine can provide an opportunity to be that independent, creative magazine, that rag that Worcester Magazine used to be and Pulse never really was, but there’s just nobody covering the culture.

The papers that you’d pick up outside the club, the big square papers, like LA Weekly, Phoenix? That all seems to be disappearing…

Travis: We have, so we have Happiness Pony, but I don’t know how frequently they’re producing. No, there aren’t a ton of independent people releasing stuff. We have folks like Dirty Gerund [Poetry Show at Ralph’s Rock Diner] that are starting to do their own zine, which is rad. Like, I would love to see more of that.

Jess: Things are disappearing. We have our zines in a market in the Lower East Side [of Manhattan]. And they’re really popular there because they are into the hype. And yeah, because no one is showcasing anybody. And you can open it and see that it’s not the same music. Getting coverage. It’s not the same old artists who are getting, you know, another article. I’m excited to be bringing it back. And it’s funny, you and I always talk about education. You know, we have recently started doing a class here on how do you make with stuff you have around the house. That’s been the other drive of Punkcake, to make art accessible, to make sharing your art accessible. Punkcake’s never had a brick and mortar. This is the first time we’ve ever had a home outside of my basement. So it was always like, we’re going to go here and do a thing, and make that space accessible. But Travis is, when you looked at this, and it was like, look at all the space. We can make so much accessible. Sometimes that gets me into trouble, because I’m like, we’re going to do this, and we’re going to do this, and we’re going to do this, on top of full-time jobs and families.

Travis: So, I got divorced a couple years ago and after that I had a little bit of money from selling a house. So I did a little bit of traveling that I never had the opportunity to do. And I came into contact with these places out in the West Coast, out in San Jose and San Francisco. There’s places in New York City. There’s a place in New Orleans. Like there are similar style setups. The one I was most inspired by is this place called Art Boutique out in San Jose that’s unfortunately closed now. But that guy managed to merge art, comics, merchandise, and he has a whole back room that he throws punk shows, and we can’t do that here quite yet, but It’s the ultimate goal. Some of my good friends around here are stand-up comedians, so I want to be able to lift those guys up. I used to do a podcast. I used to do all this other shit. I’m an entertainer at heart, so I want to do some more of that shit, there’s just only so many hours in the day and so much money in the pocket. But I see Hunchback Gallery as an opportunity to provide artists a space that they can sell their art, and I don’t charge them space. I’ve done some other things in the city where I had to pay for shelf space to show my work, and then I wasn’t making money, so it would cost money to show my stuff, which is fine. They’re a business. They’ve got to make money. But as an artist, it becomes a barrier.

It kind of feels like an MLM, like you can be your own business. And here, you pay me, and now you’re your own business.

Travis: In a way, it kind of is. You pay them, and they get a cut of every sale. I just want to be nice. I’ve had a lot of negative experiences. There’s a lot of people I will not work with. There’s a lot of people that are out here vulture fucking eating artists alive. I can run through the list, right, but it doesn’t serve. What it does is it recognizes all the things I don’t want to fucking do, all the ways that I can help my fellow artist and my fellow human the best I can and really just provide I don’t want to be the only game in town. I want six of us around. I want like, because now with six different art groups doing different shows, you are now showing fucking big ass beacon in the sky, Worcester is an artist city, and allowing artists to do cool things. We all plan on the same weekend, Paul and Emily are fucking great at that. They’re amazing. Instead of recognizing that we’re competing, which in some ways we are, but some ways we’re not, those guys put together to show all the stuff that was happening. It was like them recognizing, hey, there’s all these things going on. So instead of just advertising our own, let’s advertise all of them. And the opportunity or the likelihood that somebody coming in will want to go to more than one art market is pretty goddamn high.

Jess: They’re rewarding people for making it out and about, which is just awesome. I love it.

The scrappy energy is what I really love about it here, is that people will not wait for permission. They’ll see something that needs to happen and be like, well, I got some stuff in the garage.

Travis: I love it. It underlines the potential here. And it’s how do we lift up the the odd that we are? Right like compared to the normies. We are the weirdest. That’s fine. How do we galvanize the weirdo and arm the weirdo to fucking face life? Provide them opportunities, provide them spaces, provide them just potential. And sometimes it’s the know-how.

Jess: I’m thinking of Max. So our very first zine night, we had showed people how to take a piece of paper, fold it up, and make a zine. And now typically we also have bowls of zine shells. You can come in and just grab one and go. And they created two pictures. That was it. Now they come in, fold up a zine. They’ve made coloring books for their partner, and they’ll walk out having made a few zines in an evening.

Travis: Yeah, they feel so connected that they’ve hit me up individually to come work in the space because they needed a space to go work. They’re that rad.

Jess: It’s just so very cool to be able to provide the support that also moves artists along. And they now consider themselves an artist. They didn’t at first. And then they came in with their partner and their partner bought their first piece of art from one of Travis’s shows. And now Max considers himself an artist. He’s giving art as gifts to people. And, it wasn’t just Zine Night, but it was being exposed to all the various styles and levels of art. It’s that you can come into any given event, just folks of all ages kind of milling around seeing art that a lot of places in the city won’t show or wouldn’t have thought to put together a show with that theme. Love Worcester Art Museum. It’s amazing and we need all levels of art. Kids need to go in and see antiquities and find art. But it is a very different experience.

It’s very different, if you’re looking at that as a child, if you’re looking at like a John Singer Sargent, it’s kind of hard to imagine yourself making that. Whereas when you come into a more eclectic gallery and you see all the different ways that things can be art, it’s very different.

Jess: And that’s what I wish Worcester would embrace. Like they’re so proud of the museum and they should be. Worcester should be as proud of places and touting places like this right alongside, because...

What’s the difference between fine art and folk art except for access and esteem?

Jess: And esteem is something that you can give! You can raise anything. We’ve had kids come in. Like this girl, thirteen or fourteen years old, and she’s walking through, and she sees Travis’s Floaty Friends series, and falls in love with them. Then we get to introduce her to Travis and he presented her with a print for her to take home. And then that day, while all the older folks are chit-chatting, she’s working away on these little tiny canvases and making things. But she got to meet the artist and gallery owner, and it wasn’t in a big museum. This is like, oh, that’s a dude in a sweatshirt and a beanie. And he created something really cool, and now I’m going to sit and create in the same space.

Travis: I wanna be clear, we’re standing on the shoulders of other folks that tried to do this. Nine Dot Gallery is a direct inspiration, what they were able to do over there was spectacular. And Sprinkler Factory. Sprinkler Factory to me…Birgit and Louie, I adore them immensely. So, when somebody says this is like Sprinkler Factory, that to me is another one of those big compliments, because we lost one of our biggest places where you could do this type of work. It provided that eclectic opportunity.

So, I gotta ask. I’ve been so curious? Why Hunchback? Where’d the name come from?

Without missing a beat, Travis bends over to accentuate the pronounced outward curvature of his upper spine.

Travis: What was it? Turn your pain into purpose. I used to do t-shirts for bands and I was always hunched over my computer like the hunchbacks I was working. Quasimodo kind of was a character I enjoyed growing up because people didn’t know how amazing he was and they wrote him off for something and that to me is kind of like my story in a lot of ways and then I kind of I don’t mind acting the fool or letting people make their own judgments because they can make their own decisions all they want. I’m going to keep doing what I’m doing anyway. And eventually they’re either going to catch up or fuck off and I don’t care either way. At a certain point, you have to wave your own flag, because everybody else is going to wave it for you if you don’t. And that’s why I’m so weird about making sure everybody else gets credit, because Hunchback, yeah, it’s because of my spine and my jankiness. But what has become is this beautiful mishmash of weird people, odd people, that have a similar passion, that just want to do cool things with their life. They want to just be a part of something. A lot of times I felt like an outsider in my life, where I had friends, feel like I had to convince those friends to like me. And even still, they were only doing it as a gesture of kindness, not necessarily because I was interesting. It’s my own fucking shit, right? Recognizing that.

Imposter syndrome?

Travis: 110% to this day. But I thought, if I make a clubhouse that’s so cool that everybody wants to come hang out with me, I won’t have to feel that way. And I can’t have a clubhouse that doesn’t let some people in, that doesn’t feel like the kind of clubhouse I want to be a part of. Though, I will say that there’s now a little bit of a change in that. There are some people not welcome here, and they know they’re not welcome here because they don’t want to be here in the first place. We have very differing views. The fact that we have a pride flag on our front door probably is enough to signal them. My line is assholes. My design company has a very specific no asshole policy. We fired clients for being assholes because it’s not worth my energy. I started this networking group because I wanted to find other people that weren’t assholes. So I started No Jerks at Redemption Rock [Brewing Company] All of that built to this. I would love to bring that shit back. I want to find more opportunities. I want to build that community, not to be the guy that fucking builds it, just because that’s cool.

Jess: We had a couple of meetings where it’s like we got to be real. There’s so many things as creatives that we could do , that we want to do. We had to really think through and understand what really matters to us. Which is kind of why we’re doing the change in Punkcake now. We did two years of education, of showing people what zines are.

Travis: Now that there’s a little bit more people that know the lingo, we’re going to bring back our zine. We’re going to try to find different beats, people to cover different beats of the city to capture that culture. But we also don’t want to control what that narrative is too strongly, because the narrative of the city or narrative of the culture is going to lead the progress of the book. We also just want to see who fucking shows up. What weirdos are gonna come in that night and want to come hang with us and what are y’all interested in? Maybe there’s stuff that we don’t even know? There’s all this shit happening where no one person is going to know everything. So how can we capture what we can? I also have this kind of reoccurring mentality of how do you know you’re living in the good old days while you’re in them? And every fucking day that you live is the good old days. There’s going to come a time when we look back at this specific time with such affinity. And I’ll be honest, this shit is stressful. Like a lot of this stuff’s coming out of my pocket. I am not as financially well off as some people might think or the outside perception might be, like, this shit hurts. But as painful as it is, I wouldn’t want any other challenge. Like, I know for a fact from other points in my life when I was poor and doing the thing that I really wanted to do, this is me living my dream. But to me, that’s what our zine is going to be. It’s going to be an opportunity to capture more of those stories and provide them.

Jess: And there’ll be other zines. Travis has put out other zines. And Punkcake will shift, as part of that whole DIY community. And that kind of goes with not having to follow any rules, because Punkcake can be whatever it wants to be for a little while. I feel like Hunchback is sort of our steadying partner. A rudder for a larger community. And that allows other people to come in who can do things for a short period of time. If we want to bust out and help other folks make another zine, we’ll absolutely do that, and the zine will be called something else. But I think our showcase one, where we’re showing off the cool shit in Worcester, will probably stay Punkcake.

Travis: We’re calling ourselves [Punkcake] Independent Publishing now, too. So we want to encourage folks to release their own zines. Some of the Dirty Jarend folks came here early on, and we encouraged them to do one. We had nothing to do with their production of their zine. It just showed up here one day. And I tell you, the sense of pride when I saw them walk in with their zine, I’m like, you guys fucking did it. You guys did it. That’s the kind of stuff we want to encourage. But to Jess’s point, this is going to be that mishmash that we have cake, we have punk, we have weird kids in the city. Punkcake, here you go.

Jess: And it is interesting how many folks in other places love this little window. Like I mentioned, we’re in a market in New York City. We are in this little punk shop on the east coast of Ireland. It’s like a punk thrift shop. Because whenever we travel, I take our stuff and like, hey, we’re doing this. And other places are doing it. Other places, I think, are, and it’s nothing against them, are striving to make themselves look polished. They’re striving to make it like, oh, we’re going to make enough money and we’re going to bind it. And we’re just like, no, our time is spent finding cool shit and trying to raise up our folks and just do something neat.

Yeah, because at the end of the day, it’s also like ephemera. The culture that the zine represents is only going to exist for a brief amount of time, and then onward we go.

Travis: And realistically, like, the reason we changed up the way we’re doing this scene is because these are also excruciating to put out. It’s mostly Jess and I hounding people for it. So as an opportunity to be like, can we do this better? We switched up the zine night to try to provide that opportunity for folks to come in to recognize what it means to be a part of it. So like our goal right now, I don’t know if you want to tell people, but I don’t mind saying like our goal is to put out once a quarter, right? So every three months we release an issue. So every zine night now has purpose. The first one is the start where we’re giving like releasing stories and getting people assignments. The second one is what we’re finding and actually potentially putting together a layout. And then the third one is actually production and stapling and figuring out how we’re going to distro this shit. And like, so now we have a team of all, we’re all volunteers where nobody’s making money off this shit. If anybody’s making money to buy more toner for our printer, so we can make more copies. That’s the point. The point is to get this shit out there.

Is there a regular zine night? When is it?

Travis: We have switched it to Tuesdays. So, look for it on a Tuesday.

Jess: As soon as we put out the reel saying we switched it to a Tuesday, I would say, five different people contacted us and said, thank God, now I can come. So, and what’s exciting is, and I was gonna let you know, I’ve had two other artists since that, since we’ve changed the structure, and structure puts some people off and structure will draw some people in, but zine night was fun, people came, we had snacks, you had access to all sorts of materials, we had one local creator who never made a zine, but every time she came in she would make a piece of art, but people are excited to be part of the team, because that’s a different feeling Like you can come in and make something and it’s fun. And if you don’t have access to all of that stuff at home, hell yeah, come here and do it. That’s one of the reasons that we want to have some open, you know, open times. But this, the work smarter, not harder, like how do we help other people help us help other people that, you know, that’s kind of got away from me there.

I also love the symmetry of something community made for community benefit.

Jess: And people are excited to come. And be a part of that. We used to have to chase people down and say, your art is so fucking good, can we, could I just come and take a damn picture of it and put it in the zine? And it was like, oh yeah, maybe, maybe. Now people are like, the zine’s starting back up? Oh, okay, I’m gonna submit, I’m going to give it to you. I’m like, excellent, I’m so fucking tired of chasing people. But as an educator too, I’ve been chasing like, you know, students and teachers for like 28 years, so.

So to close things out, the other question I knew I was going to ask…and in the world that we’re in, I think it’s an appropriate one: In times where everything feels heavy and serious and maybe people might think that using their time or their resources to make art is frivolous, what would you say to people about the place of art in the revolution? The place of art in the time of struggle?

Jess: Fuck, art is revolution. This is where I get weepy, partially menopausal. I’ve been a crier from way back when. Do I cry every Saturday when I come in?

Travis: It depends on how deep we get.

Jess: I think art is so essential to us as humans, and we’ve lost, a number of folks have lost that. Art is, creating it is like this radical act of claiming that part back. Communication, art, sound, just living with it. We need it. We need it as humans. And when folks don’t have it, we get into trouble. When we don’t value creation, when we don’t value art, that’s helped push us down the path to where we are. Looking back at history. Who do they arrest first? Like, that’s the expression of what is inside of us is so essential to us as humans. We need it. And that’s whether you are cutting stuff out of a magazine and making a Valentine on a record. We need it, and I think it’s art and creation that are going to remind us of what is worth fighting for. Which is ultimately ourselves, our souls. I know I’m getting super deep after being so freaky all morning.

No, go for it. Dive in.

Travis: But it’s huge. And I think, like, it’s these times that inspire some of the most expression, right? Political songs, or just how creative folks get with political signs. I think it’s always going to be there, because it’s an outlet for us as humans to get these raw feelings out. There’s value to that. There’s multiple values. There’s a value of sanity, where if you don’t store all this shit in your brain, you’re able to actually think of other things. So yeah, it may feel like you’ve spent an hour doodling on a page. But if you can breathe again, now you can go do some real work. Or you can just do some of the harder work, or however you want to look at it. I’m a fucking guy that gets paid to doodle. I’m a professional doodler. I’m a professional pixel pusher, right? I very strategically did this. There’s a lot of really heavy thinking that has to go into my job, strategic shit about being a good designer and communicator and all this shit. But at its core, I make pictures for a living. And it’s because I didn’t want to give back any other way. And I think that there’s so much power now. It feels like we’re not being seen or not being heard or feels we don’t have a future. You got to fucking get those feelings out of your body because what you think becomes what you are. Like if you think you’re fucking doomed, you’re doomed. But if you can get that heavy shit out and then hopefully find the light…well, we’re not doomed if I can do this. That’s how we get to progress And a place like this, folks will come in, and then they don’t necessarily talk, but they do create.

Jess: And every so often somebody says something, and then everybody in the room comes over and looks. And that act of creating together is akin to eating together, like sharing a meal because food is so essential. And when you eat with somebody, you’re sharing that experience of feeding your body, feeding your soul. It is so necessary, maybe even more so in times like this, because everybody feels so And, you know, my crew, including myself, we’re all a little neuro-spicy, and so we all have our quirks, and we have become this sort of welcoming place where folks who are usually, they create alone, whether it’s because they don’t actually like to have people around them, or they don’t like noise, or places smell funny, or it’s just a comfort thing to come together and just be in a room, your own thing has become important to them. Yeah, now, more so than ever, if money were not an object, I think this place would be open every day and there’d be a...

Travis: Because I would want to pay somebody! That’s the goal.

Jess: It would be open for people to come in, see art, access art, and there would always be a place to make it. Enjoy it and make it. It was a hard decision, to take zine night and change it, because we would put the zine library over there and people could come in and read and there was food and then you could sit and create whatever, just come and be part of that community. With the new structure to zine night, I think that we’re going to be able to take our community out to a larger community and there’ll still be people creating, but we’ll figure out a way to do that as well. It’s essential. Any type of creation is so essential, especially during these absolutely shit-tastic times.

Travis: We ran some very specific days where we put out the supplies, like on the blackout day we stayed open and provided that opportunity, where it wasn’t to sell anything. It’s just like, y’all, if you want to find community, it’s here. You need to create. You need to get some feelings out. Come do it here. That to me is essentially what this serves, where you need the permission from yourself to let those feelings out and I feel like that’s some of the opportunity we can provide here. How important is that? Fucking detrimental to who we are as humans. I know me personally if I don’t create something every day I don’t feel human and I know that there’s other folks like me out there and it’s just to encourage those people to do that. You only need permission from yourself.

Jess: I know we tend to roller coaster. Very flippant, but also heavy. I mean, art is heavy. Art is everything. Like, art runs the gambit. I mean, isn’t that life though?

It’s a joke that’ll kill you?

Travis: Nobody makes it out alive.

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If you want to learn the soul of a city, you listen to the people building its foundation from the ground up, brick by community brick. In Worcester, few voices carry the quiet, unwavering authority of Parlee Jones. For over two decades, she has moved through the city’s core not as a politician or a figurehead, but as a gatherer, a shelter manager, and now, as the driving spirit behind The Village—an afrocentric community center that has become a vital organ for cultural learning and collective care.

Our conversation unfolds within the very space she helped cultivate, a building humming with purpose. Upstairs, the Caribbean Carnival Association plans their next event; downstairs, the non-profit Earn-A-Bike repairs and provides bicycles for their community. All throughout, the distinct energy of organizations like Worcester Roots and The Healing Garden intertwine. It is a physical manifestation of Parlee’s philosophy: that progress is a collaborative architecture.

She arrived back in Worcester in 2000 as a single mother navigating systems that claimed to help but that clearly didn’t care, and that lived experience of systemic gaps now fuels a vision that transcends them. The Village isn’t just a building; it’s an ongoing answer to a need, offering everything from Black history education to whale-watching trips, from Kwanzaa celebrations to revolutionary reading groups featuring works by Assata Shakur, Octavia Butler, and Patrice Lumumba.

Parlee speaks with the hardened clarity of someone who has sat across from power—mayors, superintendents, councilors seeking a photo-op—and maintained her focus on true accountability. She views the political system with a healthy skepticism, noting the distrust that keeps voter engagement low, yet she insists on hope, or at least hoping for hope. For her, the work is about fostering hope without illusion, and building strength without spectacle. It’s about discerning between genuine allies and those who would use community as a prop.

Beneath the discussions of grants, programming, and collaboration lies a simpler, more profound current: the imperative to make people feel safe and loved. Parlee’s mission is to carve out spaces where prioritizing connection and community care is the norm, not in an effort to shut out the chaos of our times, but to be in direct conversation with it. Her revolution is one of persistent welcome, a belief that the most resilient future for Worcester is woven in these threads of daily connection, cultural pride, and the courage to care for your neighbor—not just in moments of crisis, but consistently, creatively, and without fanfare.

Dani: I first became aware of The Village and of your work in 2022 because you hosted Knitty Council (a grassroots city council watchdog group that meets regularly at The Village)

Parlee: Ah, it’s still here. Yeah, yeah.

So I wanted to learn more about how you came into community building in Worcester and what it’s been like and felt like for you.

You know what the killer is, is that I’ve been doing it for such a long time and we’re still in the same place, unfortunately. And there was folks doing it before me. And there’s going to be folks doing it after me. And it’s like I’ve done this interview a couple times. And I’m honored and humbled to do it again with you today. And I guess I’m pretty consistent over the last 20 years because we celebrated our very first Bob Marley Birthday Bash 20 years ago. So we’ve been celebrating Robert Nesta Marley for 20 years in Worcester, starting at the Worcester Public Library, and so that’s how long I’ve been in community.

Have you been in Worcester all your life?

So I was born in Leominster and then moved to Worcester when I was probably three, and I’ve been here ever since. But I like to say that I did a 10-year bid in Brooklyn. Both of my children were born in Brooklyn, and that’s where I discovered culture and all of that good stuff. You know, being proud of Black history. I’m always proud of being a black woman and black history, but in Brooklyn, it feels like it gave me a sense of freedom and strength and courage to teach others right to provide something that that wasn’t be provided and I think that’s what was the kickoff of me was when I came back home after living in Brooklyn for 10 years rent got a little crazy life got a little crazy and two babies and struggling to get on the J train with a double stroller if you’re familiar with New York another thing. So I said, let me go back home and figure this single mom thing out. And there was absolutely no Black history being taught publicly in schools, anything. So I took it upon myself to just do little things. Starting in Black History Month, because that’s an easy one. We know Black history is 365.

I just want to orient us on a timeline. So, when you came back from Brooklyn, about what year was that?

2000 and I have two babies and back in Worcester after living in this big city and trying to figure out my life with these two little people and housing and everything that goes along with being a mom, you know, that I don’t have to tell you. And so my sister had an apartment at Abby’s House. So, you know, Abby’s has these amazing seven, two bedroom apartments that are absolutely beautiful. And my sister was living there and they let me double up with my sister before double up became a thing. And double up means two families living in the same house. And then she moved out and I was able to keep that apartment. And in Abby’s there was a beautiful little lady named Lydia De la Cruz who was probably four feet tall and a firecracker of a person that really helped me through whatever I was needing to get through at the time. You know, single mom, newly single mom, two kids, trying to get a job, trying to work through the system and get what was supposed to be mine. I’ll never forget a woman at the welfare office, a Black woman. I was trying to figure it out and stay home with my kids for a minute. They were like two and three. There’s 15 months between them. But she told me, ‘honey, don’t use welfare as your husband” at a time where, you know, I’m vulnerable, I’m trying to figure all this out. I’ve worked and put into the system my whole entire life and here I am just leaving a yucky situation, coming back with my kids and this is supposed to help me along and you’re telling me not to use welfare as my husband. So Lydia walked me through that and actually was able to appeal because [the worker] wanted to mess with my money too. She helped me advocate for myself. And I did get an apology from [the worker]. It was one of the most pitiful apologies I’ve ever heard in my life. But it is what it is. The systems are not going to change. That’s why we have to do what we need to do in order to take care of each other.

Did you stay involved with Abby’s House?

Yes. I actually got back on my feet. My first job in Worcester was with the Worcester Head Start program. And then I got my own apartment, moved out of Abby’s House. And Abby’s invited me to come back and be their shelter manager. So I was the shelter manager at Abby’s House for 17 years.

When did that tenure come to an end?

When we started this venture. In 2020. March 2020, actually. It was the beginning of a lot of things back in that time, you know, and COVID and all of that stuff that came along with that. But I actually lost a grandson.

I am so sorry.

Thank you. At the hands of the only Black midwife [in Worcester]. That’s what I thought [she was]. But it’s a lie. She’s a horrible person. She did some horrible things that night and my eternal Oma only stayed with us for nine days. And so I’m very passionate about birth work also. I make sure that people get what they need. So anyway, that just totally changed everything for me and we had started working with, are you familiar with Stone Soup?

No. No, I don’t think I am.

So this amazing building was built in 1886. And it was a single family home. And then at some time, it became like women’s housing. And then it was actually Athy Funeral Parlor, which Athy is still alive in the city. There’s still a business in the city. Then it became The Teacher Store and if you lived here in the 70s and 80s, The Teacher Store was a thing. You would get all your school supplies at The Teacher Store. Right here, in this little spot right here. Yes, and then it became Stone Soup Artists & Activists Collective.

Parlee places a Stone Soup bumper sticker between us on the table top and slides it my way.

I feel like I’ve seen those stickers my whole life and had no idea what they were.

So Stone Soup Artist Activist Collective was a collective of organizations and people that were doing amazing work. Worcester Roots is still in the building and they have been around for a while, since Stone Soup. Earn-A-Bike is in our basement and they like to say they came with the building. And then we came in. Unfortunately, we can measure time by the death of Black men at the hands of the police. So George Floyd comes around, and Worcester is the second largest city in New England. And we don’t have a Black community center. We have plenty of Black churches. We have a couple organizations. But we didn’t have a place where we can gather.

So when you started The Village only a handful of years ago, there was no black community center in Worcester?

No. There were back in the day. So I came up in Worcester in the 70s and the 80s, and we had Black Elks, we had Miss Black Worcester, we had Miss Third World, we had Prospect House, which was the biggest black organization, which actually turned into the Willis Center, and then it was dismantled. So we are here. We are here and we are grateful to have this amazing building. It’s such a beautiful building and so it’s our turn.

So now that you are here, could you tell me a little bit about what goes on at The Village, the programming that you offer, or just how it all works?

Yeah, definitely. We are an Afrocentric cultural learning and healing center. So we like to say what we do, we teach black history, teach women’s history, we teach whoever’s history needs to be taught in the moment from a human lens, we would like to say. Because there’s not a lot of places that teach Black history, especially in our schools, to our youth, to even adults, to new immigrants. They don’t know the story of African-Americans. And it’s so key to what is happening in the world right now. Our stories and our resilience and the things that we’ve been through will help the whole world through, especially this United States. So, we teach Black history. We do healing. We do all different modalities of healing, from Reiki to sound baths to just conversation. We have community conversations. We have BIPOC women healing circles. We do trips. We do two trips to the beach every year, one in July and one in August to Salisbury Beach, and we’ve been doing that for about 20 years. The very first time I did it was at Abby’s when I was there, and we had women on the bus that were like, “my gosh, I haven’t been to the beach in seven years”. I need to go at least three times a summer, if I’m not there more. You know, because it’s so healing so we’ve been doing that for 20 years and our newest thing which came about through The Village is we buy out a whole whale watch boat. Every two years, because it’s a very expensive trip, and we’re not expecting to make money on it, we buy out the whole boat and bring five busloads of neighbors to Gloucester to get on the boat. And so far, we’ve seen so many whales, porpoises. We had a mama porpoise and a baby porpoise the last time we went. So this year coming up, 2026, we’ll be going. We will be going if we can get that cheap boat the last cheap day before it turns into the summer rates. We try and get that last date so we only need to charge $25 a person to get on the bus. And when you get on the bus, you get a raffle ticket, you get a goodie bag, snacks. Then we have fun on the bus, then we get on the boat, we have a ball on the boat, and hopefully everybody’s falling asleep on the way home.

So that brings me to the practical question of, how do you fund all of this?

My daughter [Sha-Asia Medina] has gotten every grant that she’s written, knock on wood.

And that’s where we are right now.

Where we’ve seen so many challenges to educating on Black history specifically, have you seen more obstacles to finding funding?

Not yet. We’ve decided to just be quiet, but not quiet. We’re still going to do what we do, but not as loud in certain spaces. We’ll be loud where we need to. We’re not going to stop being loud or supportive and truthful. Always be truthful, right? We’re always going to speak truth, wherever we are. And sometimes that’s not an easy conversation. How do we protect ourselves from hate and still do what we need to do? And protect others when they’re in our space. Sometimes when we have events, like we’ve had a lot of pro-Palestine events here, or just pro-human. I’m not even going to call it pro-Palestine, it’s pro-human. We don’t want people being murdered. They had some stuff that was coming with them, but we had somebody on the door to make sure we knew who was coming in the building, which we can do. Worcester in general, like the politics are so ugly. I don’t want to be on anybody’s radar unnecessarily, you know, from the PD to some of these politicians. You know, we like to say we’re not political, but how can we not be political, you know? And is it political when we just care about each other? How do we just care about each other, living human beings, and wanting what’s best for other families? What is that then?

Do you find engaging with Worcester politics worthwhile after watching things kind of stagnate for so long, this past election being specifically disappointing?

Horrible. Just Horrible.

Any words of wisdom for those of us who are going to need to find the stamina to do this for another 25 years maybe?

I was actually at a meeting this morning with the superintendent and the mayor to talk about what’s happening with the schools. Mainly everybody were focused on how many staff have gotten attacked.

Tell me a little bit more about that.

The report came out not too long ago. There was an article in The Telegram that talks about the data and violent incidents in the schools. And if you read the article, you see there’s a couple of school committee members that we know are openly racist and will never vote for the people. So they are the ones that leaked this [report] and wrote most of the stuff in the article without really doing any research. So, I still have one finger in the cookie jar, right? If we call it a cookie jar, or maybe the snake pit because I like cookies. Snakes, not so much. So I, again, Black history, right? Everything that Black folks have done to lead up to our little right to vote. I don’t fully trust this system. I will never fully trust this system, but I’m going to keep a little finger pinky in there, because that’s part of keeping hope alive, right? But at the same time, I’m open to building other systems, like building our own community-based systems, like mutual aid and the free fridges, whatever else we can do to take care of each other. I don’t know what else that looks like, but I know it’s going to have to look like something.

What are your thoughts on the voter piece and voter engagement? Trying to get communities to take their power back through the ballot box. Do you feel like that’s just something white people say to make ourselves feel better? Do you feel it’s possible?

I don’t know. I know that young folks are disenchanted. You know what I mean? That’s the generation that we need to come on and do this. I know that my own only do local [elections]. Thank goodness they do local. But they also see hands-on the changes and the challenges that happen. I don’t know. I just vote because it’s a little piece of what I can do personally. You know what I mean? I don’t even know if it matters. But for me, there’s so much more you could do. That’s like folks that go to the MLK breakfast and they can check that off. I’ve done everything for the year by just going to the breakfast and then you don’t see them anywhere else. So I get it. I get it.

If there are people reading this, who don’t know where to go or where to start. They’re looking around and maybe they’re not as familiar with Worcester or maybe they’re just in their own personal bubble and they’re not familiar with community organizing, community building, mutual aid. Where do you think are good places for people to enter that space?

For white folks, I always suggest my beautiful people at SURJ which is Showing Up for Racial Justice. So you can work through topics of privilege and things that will make you uncomfortable or say crazy things when we are together, right? SURJ does a lot of good work. Worcester Interfaith with Roberto Diaz does a lot of good work. The NAACP Worcester with Fred Taylor does a lot of good work. Neighbor to Neighbor does a lot of good work. Love Your Labels does a lot of good work. AIDS Project Worcester does a lot of good work. In the schools there’s

Racism-free WPS. So there’s definitely people doing the thing. There is also SAGE [the Worcester Solidarity And Green Economy Alliance – formerly the Worcester Green Jobs Coalition] They actually meet here. There are so many, and then the thing is to make sure that all these organizations stay connected.

Yes. With so many different organizations involved, is there any kind of steady organization between them? Communications, conventions, summits?

That would be amazing, right?

But it doesn’t exist at the moment?

That we know of? No. And I know that it’s quite a task to try and put that all together. I’m open to being a piece of it, but it’s a lot. That’s a lot. But it would help. It’s like, what agencies, even if they’re traditional agencies, who’s really doing the work out there, right? They’re getting all the money, and are they doing what they’re supposed to?

That’s a philosophical back and forth I have with myself. Because, if all the people that want to do good work leave those official channels, does that create its own sort of power vacuum problem.

Well, some of them are going to leave. Some people are system people. We’ve got plenty of gatekeepers that will keep it going. That’s one thing that is never going to change. The system will always be there. Right? It’s always going to be there.

Until it’s not?

See, that’s hope, right? That’s the piece. We have to keep that hope alive. If we give up hope, even in this crazy voting world, like, if I’m not voting. If you’re not voting. Then all the icky people are just going to keep running and winning.

We see it over and over again in this city, only certain areas and populations are really making these decisions through the vote due to disproportionate turnout. Does that feel like a reflection on that hope maybe?

So if all the good folks have now just woken up, right? To see what’s happening and to want to change it. Then why [did they] go vote for Joe Petty? What change are you trying to see, people? Like, you’re saying the same shit.

Seeing some of the combinations of yard signs were truly baffling this year. Do you feel people are checked in to what’s going on?

This was definitely a telltale election. It really, really was. It was horrible. There was a lot of disappointment. We have all these folks like Worcester Indivisible–

Wait, Worcester Indivisible or Indivisible Worcester? Because there’s two separate groups.

Both of them I wish would reach out to my people at SURJ because I think that coming out of the George Floyd protests everybody is like you “need to come out and march.”

Let’s dig into that. Protests and demonstrations. What are your thoughts on protests and demonstrations in today’s world?

Protests are going to do what it does. You know what I mean? It’s a way for people to release what they’re feeling. A lot of good conversations can happen in those spaces. A lot of good things can start coming out of those spaces. But protests without next steps? It’s just a way to let off steam. I don’t think we’ve reached protests where we’re tearing down stores. You know what I mean, really?

Or even just acts of civil disobedience. Yes, Dr. King led marches, but if we contextualize those marches as to where they were marching to and from and what they were doing at the time. They were committing acts of civil disobedience. So do you feel like we’ve maybe lost the plot a little bit if we’re holding permitted protests?

Yeah, because while King was marching, there were definitely folks that were plotting other things. Malcolm was like, “we’re not going to do that”. Kwame Ture was like, “and marching for what?”, You look at like the [Black] Panthers, you look at folks that wanted the challenge in a different way, and they were just taken out. Fred Hampton was murdered December 4th, 1969. And he was doing it right. And what is right? What is the right way to protest? What is on your heart? And what are you protesting? Are we protesting the price of milk? Or are we protesting another Black man being shot down by the police? And where do they intersect? And what do we do at the intersections?

But in that heat of that moment, the milk doesn’t matter as much as the life. So if you are out here for the milk and you wasn’t out there for the life, I’m looking at you. Like, do I want to walk next to you? Do you really think Black Lives Matter? Or are you just worried about the bread? So that piece is what had me step back a little bit because I know some beautiful, amazing accomplices, forget allies, I’m looking for accomplices. I’m looking for John Brown, right? I am looking for John Brown. That’s my standard. And Worcester does have some amazing community allies and people that just want to do good. And they are, little by little. And hopefully they add up, you know? Dropping off food at the fridge, and telling the Mayor, “I’m looking at you. I’m watching your ass. I’m not happy with you.” Does it matter? I don’t know, but I’m not going to be just smiling in your face.

It matters to me. It matters to me that there’s still people doing it, because if they’re not, then where are the standards? Who’s going to be held to account? Who’s going to do the holding?

Okay so, we do Juneteenth, also. We’ve been doing the flag raising for maybe five years now. In the first two years, we would raise the flag at City Hall. Oh my gosh, the way that everybody, all those little city councilors ran for the picture. Candy Carlson? Are you fucking kidding me?

So the next year, I was like, I’m done with this shit. We’re not doing this anymore. We invited who we wanted to be in the picture. And Manny Jae Media turned the camera to the folks that didn’t get invited right at the right moment. So no, I’m not. I’m not taking a picture with you. I’m not. I don’t need to be in the pictures. I’m good. You won’t use my face.

To be used as a prop?

As a prop, period, end of story. That was a problem. We all have to, and it’s scary sometimes to stand up for what’s right, but we just gotta do it. Mayor Petty never comes to my events. I don’t want him to, until he can act right. And I see people get all excited because he came to their events. Why? Why’d you invite him? What has he done for you?

We just need to remember that we belong to each other. Nobody else is coming to save us. And just be kind. Be as kind as you can… Unless there’s a reason to be mean. Like, you don’t have to be nice to everybody.

Never a truer word. So, end of the year. 2026 on the horizon. What’s on your radar for the year?

So for us, we celebrate Kwanzaa at the end of the year. So it’s the seven days after Christmas that goes from the 26th to the 1st. And it’s a way to celebrate unity, collective work and responsibility, faith. We come in and we celebrate at that time because these are reminders. Unity is a reminder. Collective work and responsibility is a reminder. Peace is a reminder. Cooperative economics. All of the things that we need to be doing on the regular, that we should be doing, we celebrate at the end of the year. And taking all of that into the new year, regardless who’s in office. Like, regardless who’s in office, we’re still going to make sure we do whatever we do. We’re still going to go to the ocean. We’re still going to teach Black history. We’re still going to celebrate BIPOC women. We’re still going to celebrate women. We’re still going to teach babies.

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I sat down with Jay Gaudette a.k.a. Harley Queen to talk about Worcester’s drag scene and why they feel its heart beats, not in competition, but in community. A veteran drag artist who has watched the city’s queer scene evolve from a handful of performers to a full calendar of shows, Harley is the architect behind what they fondly call beautifully “stupid” chaos. This is the ethos of Funhouse, the open-stage drag show they developed, which is poised to celebrate its 4th anniversary on November 20th at Ralph’s Rock Diner, long known as a sanctuary for Worcester’s punk and counter-culture spirits.

“It’s gotten so stupid. And I say it every show,” Harley confesses, with a slight laugh that is both conspiratorial and proud. But this “stupidity” is a radical act. Conceived as an antidote to the barriers to entry that can make the drag world feel exclusive and out of reach to some newcomers. Funhouse is a “brave space”—their preferred term over “safe space”—where there are no auditions, no eliminations, and the only mandate is creative courage.

This philosophy has transformed the show into a vital incubator for Worcester’s talent. It is the fertile ground where artists like Gem Stoner first took root, a name now a fixture of the local scene. Worcester’s recent Draglesque Festival in August (the first of its kind in the city) became an inadvertent tribute to its influence, with a running joke that nearly every performer was introduced as a Funhouse alum. “I think it was very, very cute,” Harley notes, a quiet pride evident in their reflection.

Yet, beyond the glitter, the gags, and the satire lies a deeper resonance. In an era when queer identity is relentlessly politicized, from drag story times—a niche Harley has unexpectedly and prolifically filled (even illustrating the children’s book I Don’t Know by local author Kristy Kielbasinsky)—to broader societal fears, a space like Funhouse is inherently significant, especially as we look to the future of Worcester’s drag scene. Harley’s vision remains clear and deeply rooted. In a world often obsessed with scale and spectacle, Harley Queen is rebelling, proving that the most powerful revolutions are built not on competition, but on collective, courageous, and stupidly fun self-expression.

Dani: So, for any readers who maybe aren’t as familiar with Harley Queen, give yourself a little introduction.

Harley: Well, I’ve been doing drag in Worcester for, I want to say 10 years or at least almost 10 years. And yeah, I’ve kind of seen the entire drag scene grow from like pretty much just five or six performers to like just drag shows in every venue, well, it seems like every venue, but every queer friendly venue in the city pretty much has a drag show now. And like, it’s been crazy to see it grow as much as it has been. And then, yeah, I decided to take part in that and do the open stage show, Funhouse.

Yeah, Funhouse is coming up on its fourth anniversary, correct?

It is, yeah. Next month.

From conceiving the idea and partnering with Ralph’s to now, what have been some of your observations in the growth of the audience, the performers? How has the show come along from how you imagined it to now?

It’s gotten so stupid. And I say it every show. Just like the performances, the audience interactions. And like, that’s what I want. Is for it to be just a fun, stupid show. And that people can just kind of relax and not have to worry about it. And I’ve started calling it instead of a safe space, it’s a brave space. It’s like if you’re offended by anything, you know, you can just close your eyes or close your ears or, you know, leave. But yeah, because at the end of the day, all it is is just silly, stupid fun. And one of the things I love is I don’t really think any of the performers in the open stage care about the competition aspect, which is what I wanted. I wanted it more so for performers who don’t get booked. So they are looking for a stage. They want to perform. Because nowadays it is kind of hard to get booked because you have to know a person who knows a person. You have to be super buddy buddy with a producer.

That actually leads into another question that I had, which is, Worcester has other competition-formatted drag shows. What is it that makes Funhouse not the [Worcester Pride] Pageant and not [Worcester Drag] Gauntlet?

There’s no audition process. Funhouse is first and foremost for those people who watch the shows and go up and go to the performers and be like, I want to start doing this. Like, where do I go to start doing this? Because, you know, when you do the gauntlet, you could get eliminated and be done for the rest of the series. With Funhouse, I really wanted it to be more about those people who want to dip their toes into drag or burlesque or like really anything that they just give people a stage to do what they want to do.

So a big element of Funhouse, it sounds, is [that] it’s more experimental?

Oh, yeah. Because I tell my performers every time there is a theme. But like if you just want to get on stage and be gay and do whatever you want to do, like that’s fine. It’s an open stage. It’s people who sign up and don’t get paid. It’s a tip spot. So I’ve never felt right about telling people what they can and can’t do, if I’m not paying them.

Fair point. Where you have this more open and experimental aspect to the shows, do you see a lot of people joining in for a one off experience? Or do you see people mostly starting at Funhouse and continuing with their drag journey?

Oh, it’s been both. It’s not even people saying I want to try this once and be done, because usually they’ll come back for another round at some point. But drag takes a lot of work and it takes a lot of energy. So it really isn’t for everyone in the sense that like, it does take a lot of energy and a lot of people, especially nowadays, just don’t have the energy to keep up consistent appearances. But there have been a lot of performers, like Gem Stoner comes to mind, and there’s been a few other people who have kind of really made a name for themselves in Worcester that started at Funhouse.

And Gem has branched off to do some of her own regular shows.

She’s like the poster child of MB [The MB Lounge, Worcester’s oldest continuously operating gay bar]. But yeah, it really is like a toss up. You never know where someone’s gonna go with their drag journey after doing Funhouse. We have this new queen, Toni Tonic, who I’ve been seeing, they come to Funhouse and I was just like, she’s really polished for someone who is absolutely new. And I’m like, I think she’s gonna make a name for herself in Worcester as well. As well as like Brandy Rain, who everyone loves to see on stage because she’s so funny. Just these performers who love to do Funhouse and love to come back. And I would love to see them in more things out in Worcester.

You were saying with all of the effort and the energy that someone has to pour in just to start getting ready to do drag, I would imagine that there must be such a huge barrier to entry for people who don’t have an open stage in their area. Was there one operating in Central Mass before you started Funhouse, that you know of?

I think the closest open stages I remember were back in Boston. There was the open stage show on Monday nights at Machine. And I believe. I mean, there’s got to be open stages in Providence, but like there were none in Worcester. Like none so local that you didn’t have to drive more than an hour.

So I would imagine that, well, you’ve stated that you watched this scene grow over the last several years. It sounds pretty fair to say that you took a hand in helping it grow. I heard that was pretty evident in the lineup for Worcester’s first ever Draglesque Festival this summer.

I think the Draglesque Festival did a great job at, you know, repping Funhouse. Both Lady [LaRouge] and Joey March came up to me, because I had left after my performance, but they’re like, yeah, it became a bit that for every performer that came on, we would introduce them as, oh, they got their start at Harley’s Funhouse. And I’m like, wait, so it’s pretty much the entire Draglesque Festival lineup that got their start at Funhouse, which I think was very, very cute.

Were you involved in the planning of the Draglesque Festival, or did Lady and Joey approach you after it was already underway?

They approached me. So I didn’t help put it together or anything. I didn’t produce any of it. They just asked me, like, do you want to do the story time and then perform later in the day and I’m like, absolutely!

You did some artwork for the story time too. Tell me about that.

So it’s been a while. I used to do merchandise commissions for drag artists and burlesque artists and others. I’ve done wrestling merch and roller derby merch.

These are all touching universes.

Right, exactly. But yeah, I used to do all this artwork and it is something I am known for. And so I was asked like, do you want to do some art for the show? And just make coloring pages of some of the performers that are going to be there. And I’m like, absolutely, sure. And it was fun to take an afternoon and just go at it. And I always love drawing myself, so.

In addition to Funhouse and your other 21+ shows, you’ve become quite the prolific drag story time reader, as well. That was actually the first time I ever saw you. At Grafton Pride story time when my daughter first came out.

And I don’t know how it happened, because in my head I’m like, oh, I’m terrible with kids and I can’t read. So to have become one of the go-to’s for a drag story time, I would have never guessed that that’s where my career would lead. But I love doing it. I do get a little nervous because there’s an in-between age that I don’t know how to talk to because at some point, the Goo Goo Gaga speech, it doesn’t work for like that middle group. I’m like, okay, teenagers, I got you. Toddlers, I got you. This middle group, I’m sorry. I don’t know the words to use. I don’t know the tone or the cadence. They usually say whatever and you just roll with it. Like I usually just repeat what they say.

Honestly, a good kid tactic. With drag story times having been so politicized, is that something that you have found yourself being more involved in? Or do you think that it’s just anyone possessing a queer identity is just politicized no matter what?

I think Yeah, I think it is anyone who has a queer identity. And it’s mostly people who are visibly queer. But then there are issues that arise when people find out that someone that they didn’t think was queer is. I’m even dealing with something similar within the community, it’s not as threatening, but like people just want to get involved in other people’s romantic lives. They just want to know what’s going on and it’s none of anyone’s business.

The reality TV show of it all, kind of?

The reality TV show. Maybe that’s what it is because I’m not watching these reality TV shows. But I can imagine maybe, yeah, they’re turning the brain into mush and everyone needs to know what’s going on. And it’s just like, listen, if you’re not in the relationship, If you’re not looking to date the person, it’s none of your business. And that’s the way it is with the bigots trying to police the queer people. It’s like, listen, what we do on our own is our own thing, you know?

It’s just like if you’re thinking about it more than us, like maybe, maybe the call is come from inside the house. I don’t know. I don’t know what to tell them. Then there’s like the whole bathroom fear of “oh, I could be sharing a bathroom with a transgender.” It’s just like, yeah. And you probably wouldn’t know. You’re probably not going to know. I think the fear comes from sexual harassment in the bathroom. And I’m like, well, here’s the thing. Anyone can do that. It does not take a transgender person to walk into the bathroom and sexually harass someone.

You started Funhouse in 2021, so it was already a pretty fairly charged political climate. Do you feel like it lends itself to people who want to buck the system, express their frustration with what’s happening? I know it’s silly fun, but do you also see many political statements?

Oh, absolutely. There’s not many politically based performances that happen at Funhouse, but there are some that happen. Because next month for the anniversary, I’m not doing a theme, it’s like an open theme/do whatever you want, I’m sure we’ll probably see more politically based performances. For the most part, a lot of people like to stick to the theme. To have it be on theme and also political, sometimes it’s hard to come up with a concept. So I’m sure that if I didn’t do themes, we’d have a lot more political performances. But yeah, no, there have been quite a few political performances.

And Ralph’s has a history rooted in the punk rock community here in Worcester. Is that something that factored in? I feel like drag is very punk. Do you feel like that factored into choice of venue? Or making you natural partners?

Well, it’s actually so funny because I think the first time I went to Ralph’s was for my birthday and I went out in drag and I was just like, I want to go to this punk dive bar and I want to be in drag. And if anyone has a problem with it….because I didn’t know what the dynamic was going to be. I didn’t know if I was going to be met with like, oh my God, you’re so pretty. Or like, what the hell is this thing doing here? But I got there, and I was very welcomed. And I didn’t even go upstairs, but I looked around the venue and I was just like, yeah, if I ever have a show, I want to do it here. Cut to four years later and Bill Shaner calls me to ask if I would do a reoccurring show there. And I’m like, are you, are you kidding me? That’s what I wanted. This is the venue I wanted for a show. And I didn’t think that I would ever get that. And now you’re calling me to do a show here. It’s perfect. It was a match made in punk heaven.

So for next month’s anniversary show, you’re doing an open theme. Is there anything else that you’d like folks to know, since it is forthcoming?

I’m also doing a 50-50 raffle. Because I just found out what that means. I’m doing a little prize raffle for this month. So, I went up to a friend and I asked him, “does that mean it’s a 50-50 raffle?” And they’re like, no, a 50-50 raffle means that you get half the money and the winner gets half the money that is put in towards the raffle. I was like, oh, thank God I haven’t been promoting it as a 50-50 raffle. But now that I know what it is, I’m like, wait, why don’t I just do that for the anniversary show? So yeah, call me stupid. I’m doing a 50-50 raffle for the anniversary and I’m still trying to think of other special things that I want to do because I do like to throw out random surprises. For one of my shows, Let Them Eat Cake, I had a cake made for the performers. And then also like I had a store bought cake for the audience. And I like during my performance and just handed out slices of cake because, you can’t have that theme and not give the people, let them have cake, you know?

Would keep me engaged! Is this your first show that you’re producing? Harley’s Funhouse, or did you have production experience before this?

I’ve had production experience before, just not like solo. And oddly enough, I do find it easier to produce alone, but that could also just be related to producing styles. And if I found a co-producer that kind of matched my style, then it might be easier. But I’ve done Jailbreak at the Bull Mansion back when they were doing shows. And I had a co-producer on that. For a lack of better words, it just wasn’t well received by the community. And I thought it was about me. I was like, “Oh no, people don’t like me. They don’t want to come to my show.” But looking back, I’m like, “Oh no.” Cause when I first did Funhouse, the first night we had a packed house, I was just like, I was not expecting this. I was expecting it to be a complete failure. I was expecting no one to want to show up to my show because I’ve done this before. And yeah, no. It’s all about listening to the community and understanding what they want to see.

It’s been very successful. What would you say is kind of an unexpected challenge in this success? Have you run into things that you hadn’t expected?

Yeah, I mean. Thankfully, there hasn’t been a lot of drama amongst performers that do the show. But, and this is part of the bit that makes it work for this show, it does overwhelm me a little bit when I kind of lose control of everything. And I just sit on stage and I laugh because just like, what is going on? I don’t understand. But, it’s all in good fun. I think the main thing I have had some issues with is people wanting to get to know my personal life a little bit more. And I’m just like, listen, I’m on stage. That’s all you need to know about me. I’m here to entertain you. Um, and Yeah, my personal life is my personal life.

People kind of confusing Harley with Jay and Jay with Harley?

I don’t want to tell people, oh, we’re not friends because it can be funny. I was in a bad mood a couple of months ago and I went out with my best friend and I’m just like, you know what? I’m just going to be a bitch to everyone. Like forgetting that I have this, what’s the word? Forgetting that people like know who I am and my reputation. I have a reputation in the city. So, he’s hyping me up. He’s like, “yeah, you’re going to be straight up evil.” And then I turn around and this older trans woman comes up to me and just pours her heart out and says how happy she is that I’ve created a space that she can feel safe in and what I mean to her. And I instantly went into public figure mode and said how I’m happy she likes it and like you’re wonderful you’re great this and that. I turned back around to my best friend laughing like “oh I forgot you can’t you can’t be a bitch because of who you are” and I’m like yep yep. So no one’s gonna get bitch Harley I guess.

As someone who is producing for that audience, as someone producing entertainment and programming from the queer community to the queer community, where would you like to see things develop in the future?

I’m not sure. Honestly, I kind of just love how we are right now. I feel like there are people who want [Worcester] to be more like Boston and Providence, but I think we’ve lost the plot. Where we haven’t realized Worcester is its own entity. We might not have the huge shows and the huge audiences that Boston and Providence get, which to usual people, that equates success. It’s like, oh, huge audiences, huge shows, big names, but I pride myself on listening to the community and getting to know people. What we lack in big shows and big names, we have so much more in community. Everyone knows everyone. There’s a lot of support. A lot of people who I book from Boston or Province, that’s the one thing that they comment on: how close knit of a community and how supportive of a community Worcester is. Whereas like, it’s not so much like that in Providence. It’s a very “the grass is greener” kind of situation. In theory, I would love to have Worcester be this big drag city, akin to Boston and Providence. But on the other hand, it works so well being a close knit community and everyone just supporting everyone. So I don’t know. I don’t know what I would change or what I would like to see for the future of Worcester. Because I think, I don’t want to say we’re at our peak, but we’re certainly maybe going in the right direction. Yes, we’re going in the right direction.

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In that way $5 a month is an investment in the community’s sense of itself as such. Make sense? That’s something alt weeklies used to provide, and the hedge funds currently stripping local journalism for parts could never. Anyway. Enjoy! —Bill

Dani Killay is a fierce advocate for progressive values (aka basic human decency), whether she’s testifying at city hall, supporting queer and trans youth, or loudly questioning the manhood of our local law enforcement. I’ve edited our conversation for length and clarity. 

Liz: What brought you to Eureka Street on the day ICE showed up there? 

Dani: So I had attended a training for the rapid response team and Eureka Street was actually the first time I had gone out to a notification, an alert that there was ICE activity in Worcester. I did the training to begin with because I just felt like, if I have the capacity to be doing anything to help, I wanted to be. 

And what did it feel like to be there? 

Wow, that's actually a harder question to answer than you would think. I guess probably because it felt like a lot of things. As a woman, I was furious. As a citizen, I was disgusted. And just as a human being, it was hard to watch. Yeah.

The reason that I wanted to help document what is going on is not just because of my views on immigration, but more importantly, I was raised that if you see something wrong, you say something at the very least and you do what you can. And I was also raised that no matter who is in the administration in this country, no matter what our military happens to be doing, any of the stuff that is out of our immediate control, regardless of that, you hold the country to the standard for the people. That you love the country because of the people in it and that it’s very fragile. And if we do not guard against abuse of power, we lose it. And we're just seeing the erosion of institutions, we're seeing the dismantling of the Constitution of the United States and I fear that people are not treating that with the weight that it deserves. 

A lot of the rhetoric around Eureka Street has been talking about Rosane Ferreira-De Oliveira as a mother and a grandmother and caregiving for an infant–and those are sacred relationships that the government should not be manipulating or severing. But you showed up with a very different gender lens on the situation, talking about why women there had more balls than the guys in uniform. What brought that to your mind at that moment?

Honestly, I don't know if that thought is ever that far from my mind. I am constantly seeing people that are born into some sort of privilege, whether that privilege is that they're male in a patriarchal world or their skin color allows them to move through the world without the worries that other people with minority identities have to consider. But I'm looking around at the people I see doing the work, the people I see in the street, the people I see helping the community. And then I see the people that hold actual tangible power. They are sitting there decked out with equipment and guns and the power and authority to actually do something. And their answer is a robotic, blank, “can't help you, can't do anything.”

The group that showed up to Eureka Street before all the cops showed up, it was like three middle-aged moms and some retirees. The idea that some group of highly organized sleeper cell antifa showed up to Eureka Street to cause trouble… No, it is retired women from the Interfaith Network. It is moms. And we're the people that have that kind of availability during the day. So when people are like, don't you have jobs? And it's like, yeah, I'd love to have a job. But have you seen the cost of child care in this country? I'm just watching guys that are decked out in bulletproof gear and have training and pepper spray and zip tie cuffs and guns. And there are masked men in the street who will not identify themselves and are removing people and showing up with assault rifles on residential American streets to remove a grandmother. I'm pretty sure she was on her way to work to just clean houses. 

To be facing all of that and to have been thrown around by these unidentified guys, to have them physically wrestling me in my pajamas. Because I had no idea, I literally dropped my son off at school and I went to the address for the alert literally in my pj's. I'm doing everything I possibly can and getting pushed around, told to shut up, being grabbed. I had my arm locked in with Roseanne's arm and one of the guys that showed up with a mask was grabbing my arm trying to wrench it off of her. And they were threatening to pepper spray us. And I took it as a complete deliberate threat when he said, “you know, it could break,” referring to my arm. 

After having been through that, seeing my local police show up and immediately side with the men in masks kidnapping a mom off the street, after watching us be assaulted and then doing nothing about it—and then worse—lying about it. Immediately watching the city come out with a statement that was a lie.

What gave you the courage to be the person who locks arms, who is right in the thick of it, who's shouting back?

I know it's going to sound like a corny answer, but my parents. “Activist” is such a loaded word, but apparently it's what I am. I don't feel like I set out to do that. I feel like I was forced to do it because I don't feel like I have another option that I could live with. My father spent 20 years in the military and I was always taught that you don't know right and wrong from ordinances and laws. You know right and wrong from being a human being and that you stand up and you do what's right to the best of your ability.

What causes did you see your parents stand up for?

They were big on civil rights, civil liberties. And I was always raised that the absolute worst thing you could be in life is a racist. That was always a part of my education about our country and our world. My father grew up between Massachusetts and rural Louisiana during the 40s and 50s and he never specifically told stories about that time, but I have to imagine that it definitely shaped how he saw his priorities in this world. My father talked a lot about how these hate groups that we have in this country, how they organize.

My dad was a white guy, an all-American guy. So having that look and branding, he really had access to the inner thoughts of a lot of all-American guys. It’s never been a secret to me that these organizations exist, that they're highly organized, that they have been telling white nationalists in this country for decades to run for office, join the police force, join the military, legitimize yourself. And that it's our responsibility as white Americans to stop it. I hate to say it, but I have thought so many times in the last couple of years, I'm just like, thank God my father didn't live to see this. It would have absolutely broken his heart.

My mother always involved me in whatever charity or volunteering work she was doing, which for her mostly consisted of organizations that helped women, specifically women leaving abusive relationships.

I also have kids and I have both the desire to let them know how things really are in the world and to kind of protect them. And I try to fight that impulse because it comes from a good place, but a lot of kids don't ever get to live in ignorance about how this country works or about racism. How are you striking that balance? Have you told your kids about what it was like that day? 

We don't really have the option of protecting our children from the realities of the world. I have four kids. My oldest two children are Hispanic. As Brown kids, they need honesty. And three of my children are disabled. My older two are disabled and Brown. And then I have another child who is disabled and transgender. So our house is on fire from many different directions. I've had to have conversations with my two oldest kids because I am afraid that they're going to be out in the world as visibly not white and something like this is going to happen to them and they also won't be able to communicate because they're Deaf. It's dangerous to be Deaf and policed and I can't tell you how many times I've seen news stories where a boy my son's age, looking like my son, has been shot by a cop for no reason. I'm terrified that he's going to either not hear that he's being spoken to or he will try to use the one and only way of communicating that he has– sign language–and that one of those two things will be grounds for him to get murdered in the street. And that the person who does it will have qualified immunity.

And then my 14-year-old daughter, she's Deaf and transgender and she's a tiny little nugget of a person. So it's also super terrifying on that front. And I have to toe a line of not scaring our eight-year-old, but also explaining the things that he overhears in the world.

I mean this on a really practical level: How do you manage your anxieties for the country and for your kids? 

I think it's so funny when people use the word woke and they're like “oh these woke people” because I'm always like, what's the opposite of woke? We can't sleepwalk through life. Like yeah, I have seen a truth about my world. I cannot unsee it. I have to behave according to my core values as a person and it may mean being inconvenienced, it may mean losing relationships I thought were real and important and having to find out that they're actually quite superficial, and that's fine. Those people can move on with their lives. But for me, I have to be in community with people who also give a shit. And honestly, just having that community here in Worcester has been absolutely life changing for our entire family and we only moved here three years ago.

How did you build that community?

We decided to move from our rural town after 2020. My daughter came out and then all the shifts in the world. We just did not feel safe or comfortable where we were anymore. We felt very isolated and vulnerable, and so we decided to move to Worcester on the recommendation of a very good friend of mine who I'm going to name drop because she runs CASA Worcester, Julie Boditch. She introduced me to the organization Love Your Labels through the Queer AF fashion show. And it just snowballed from there. This is my third year helping to plan the Queer AF fashion show. I now work at Love Your Labels and it has been my gateway to communities throughout Worcester that are coming together, doing the work. I now have a network of people in my life that I know are rock solid. They show up for each other. They do what needs to be done. And I don't know that I've ever truly had that. I have thought that I've had it before.

Before I got involved with LUCE, I had been involved in the (trans) sanctuary city resolution in January and people don't always get the chance to actually live up to what they think they would do. So part of me is kind of grateful: myself and my network got system tested. 

I recently read this New York Times article about a rural Missouri town where like 80% of people voted for Trump. And then ICE detained a woman from Hong Kong that people know there as Carol. And somebody in the article said, “I voted for Trump and so did practically everyone here, but no one voted to deport moms. We were all under the impression we were just getting rid of the gangs.” And this makes me feel insane because it's like, what did you think would happen? But something is going on where people think, “the immigrants that I know are fine. They're individuals to me. But I still want to see mass deportation.” Do you have any insight into what is going on there and what people can do to kind prevent this disconnect? 

I totally understand what you mean. And do I see the disconnect? Absolutely. Can I in some kind of intangible way understand where they're coming from? Yeah, a little bit. We are being bombarded by a propaganda network from so many different angles and I think that it's really pleasant and it's easy and it's simple to believe the simplistic things that are being fed out over the general airwaves. Those people voted for Trump and for mass deportations because they've been made to believe that somehow that will improve their lives. I would like to hear any of them actually explain to me how that will result in a measurable improvement in their lives. But that is the carrot that's dangled out there. It's a playbook that's been used by authoritarian and fascist regimes and leaders over and over again. It feels like we have a country where half the people are saying there's nothing really that wrong and the other half are like, I can't believe this is what it's come to. But if you look at it, it's pretty easy to believe that this is where it's come to. The last 40 years have pretty much brought us on a straight trajectory here. We have had the middle class whittled down over decades and then we've told the white middle class that the reason you have been diminished is because these minorities got some of what you're supposed to have. And if we can just put them back where they belong, everything will be great again. We'll just go back. I don't know, was everything ever great? Like where is this great place that everyone wants to go back to? Was it the 20s and 30s when we had the Great Depression? Was it Jim Crow? Was that the perfect time? Was it when people with vaginas couldn't vote? When was the perfect time? Was it the 400 years of slavery and genocide against Native Americans and African Americans? America's always been great about lying about our history.

In January, you commented publicly on executive orders targeting trans people and the harassment of Councilor Nguyen. And you said you don't want the government dictating how you can parent your child. I would love to hear you explain the connection between cruelty toward immigrants and cruelty toward trans people. 

Divide and conquer, right? If we're all in our little groups defined by these minority identities and then even more ideally, pitted against each other for time, attention, and money, we're just a bunch of little dominoes, all easy to knock down. We need to make ourselves a monolith because liberation, all liberation is intertwined. When I stand up for someone who maybe doesn't share a single identity marker with me, I'm still standing up for my kids. I'm still standing up for myself. We all have the right to the same, the same and equal treatment under the law. If that is not the most critical principle in America, if it is not that all men are created equal, that we all get the same treatment, we all have the same power, we all have the same say… [If] that’s what they want us to believe, I want to hold them to that for everyone because whether we're talking about the rights of trans kids and adults in this country or whether we're talking about immigrants, we're talking about how we allow human beings to be treated. 

I think that it's incredibly dangerous for anyone to not realize that these are test groups. What you allow to be done to anyone else, you are allowing to be done to yourself in the future. It's just a fact. It's just a fact because if they can do it to them, they can do it to you. They found a reason to do it to them and if they want to, they'll find a reason to do it to you. You might think that you're so far up that ladder that you can't be affected by these things, but let me remind you, you can become a member of the disability community in a heartbeat. Then you're right down here with all of us fighting for the basics.

People ask a lot about how to get involved and literally the most important thing I want people to take away from this conversation is that you get involved by showing up and we are waiting there to accept you. No judgment, no gatekeeping. You do not need to credential yourself. You do not need to have experience. You do not need to bring skills to the table. If you feel alone in the world, come join us.

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Grace Sliwoski is director of programs at the Regional Environmental Council, or the REC (which I learned mid-interview is pronounced “R-E-C,” not “rec”), an comprehensive engine for food justice (including food-related joy) around the city that includes both static and mobile farmer’s markets.  We spoke on Zoom for 35 minutes, so I’ve condensed our conversation quite a bit. Grace got us started by sharing the history of the REC: 

Grace: We were founded in 1972. A group of citizens in Worcester came together to file a lawsuit against the city of Worcester over the location of a landfill that was going to be sited in Green Hill Park, which they felt was an equity issue. It was, and still is, a low-income neighborhood. They came together and formed under this name for the purpose of this lawsuit, which was actually unsuccessful. Fun Worcester fact: There is a landfill and there is trash in Green Hill Park, but it's buried. The folks who kind of coalesced around this moment decided to keep organizing and working together around environmental justice issues in the city of Worcester. Some of the folks involved really worked on cleaning Lake Quinsigamond. They worked to bring municipal recycling to the city of Worcester. And another component of that work that really picked up a lot of energy in the 1990s was around lead poisoning.

At the same time there were folks involved who were kind of looking at the other side of the coin of environmental equity. Environmental justice is about sharing the burdens of problems in our environment in a way that is fair and also ensuring that the good things in the environment are accessed in a way that is fair. Green space and the ability to grow food are a part of those good things that we want for everyone. That's sort of how the REC started to see community gardens as urban environmental justice work. 

Liz: People around Worcester know REC from maybe a farmer's market or the plant sale, but could you briefly describe the full breadth of what you do? 

The first is the Community and School Gardens Network, which is our oldest food-based program. And we support a network of over 80 community and school gardens in the city of Worcester. It's free to be a member in our network. We don't own any of the land of the gardens. Many of them are located in public housing or nonprofit organizations that serve different clients. Some of them are neighborhood gardens, some of them are urban farms. The other half are school gardens, the majority of which are in Worcester Public Schools. We give away 10,000 seedlings every spring to all the gardens in our network. That's what our plant sale pays for. 

The second is our youth program, YouthGROW. That's actually how I came to the organization. That program works with high school-age youth in Worcester. All of the young people who work with us are paid an hourly wage and they maintain several farm sites. We have a farm site here at our office, the YouthGROW Farm. We also have a raised bed youth garden in Grant Square Park and a rooftop garden in Polar Park, the WooSox Farms. They build job skills, they learn how to grow food. 

And then the third is the Community and Mobile Farmers Market program. This program was founded to address some real gaps in the food system in Main South, specifically for folks being able to access not just fresh produce, but fresh produce that was affordable. Since we started operating farmer's markets, it's always been a core value that we've offered resources for folks who are paying with SNAP. This is something that we privately fundraised for for many years, but now the majority of the customers who shop with us use a program called the Healthy Incentives Program, which is funded at the state level. If you receive SNAP, you are automatically enrolled in HIP, so you get an automatic refund when you shop at eligible farmer's markets, farm stands, and CSAs. 

But a lot of people can't get to a farmer's market easily where they can use their benefits. So this is where the mobile farmer's market comes in. It's exactly what it sounds like. Like an ice cream truck but with vegetables. We have 13 weekly stops in Worcester, including Out To Lunch. And then we are also in Webster and Southbridge. And then we coordinate the Beaver Brook Farmer's Market on Fridays and the University Park market on Saturdays. And at those two markets, we don't sell food. We get the permits, we help with promotion, we try to bring community and family resources, voter registration, earn a bike, kind of complimentary partnerships. 

The first time I had an apartment where I could grow a garden, my neighbor put his head over the fence and was like, does the grocery store not have all the vegetables that you would want? I acted like he was kidding even though he wasn't. How would you explain why people garden? 

First of all, I would say that most folks who are gardening in our network are not subsistence gardeners. And so they're interested in eating the food they grow and some folks are really skilled and can produce a lot of food, but you know, urban growers, you're gonna be supplementing the food you grow with food you buy. So that can't be the only reason that you're doing it. Going to the youngest age group we work with, preschoolers, I really see just the incredible benefit for young children in being able to be outside in nature. We've heard from Head Start teachers that there's almost nothing that you can do in the garden that is not aligned with preschool curriculum because they need to be figuring out how to interact with the world, how to touch things, how to count, how to smell, how to recognize food. 

We hear a lot about the garden being an important space for socialization and relationships and connecting to folks. I think we really saw that during the pandemic, where people were experiencing the impacts of isolation and the garden was a safe space where people can be outside, where people can develop relationships that cross language barriers, that cross age gaps, that cross cultural barriers. I tried to do a focus group last fall with some of the older adults at Elm Park Towers and I was asking them questions indoors with an interpreter and just getting nothing. And then we went outside to the garden and we walked together and we did not speak the same language, but I got so much more. 

And I would also highlight gardens as peacemaking spaces. My parents are the founders of the Saints Francis & Thérèse Catholic Worker and the street that I grew up on, Mason Street, had a lot of urban blight. My dad did a series of murals on the boarded up windows of the laundromat building and then there was a vacant lot space where he got permission—I think he got permission? Maybe he didn't—but we had a renegade garden there. Personally it made me feel good to see beautiful things on the street that I lived on. And I think the research bears that out, when they talk about the violence and disorder that people see in these spaces. I think gardens are such a brave act of pushing back against that in a positive way. My parents and other people on the street worked on bringing in art and gardens as a way to take those spaces back and to show that they were cared for, that the people who lived in the community were invested in them.

I would love to hear about how the different options in the plant sale reflect the diversity of the city.

Some of the cultural crops that you see offered are a reflection of our community gardeners. We have a number of community gardeners from Nepal and Bhutan [at] some of the larger format gardens who have made specific requests. Our farm coordinator Tom, his mom's side of the family is from Puerto Rico, so he's been really interested in trying to cultivate some more Caribbean crops to see if we can adapt them for the New England growing season. And this isn't sold at the plant sale, but aji dulce is a pepper that's pretty popular in different Caribbean cuisines and we've grown those on the YouthGROW farm and they don't even make it to the mobile market. People who live in the neighborhood will come and pick them up here. Valeria, our farm mentor, is from Burundi and so she has a lot of expertise in crops that are popular there, but there's a lot of crossover between the crops that they use there and also in Brazil and some of the other communities where there's large populations in Worcester. 

There are a lot of farmer’s markets (that are wonderful) where you can buy things like alpaca wool mittens and fancy jam, and then there are markets where you can buy a giant sack of potatoes and onions and carrots and actually get your groceries. And I appreciate the latter so much. I’d like to hear about REC’s commitment to accessibility and food justice in the choices you make for your markets. 

When we first started operating farmer's markets, we wrestled a lot—continue to wrestle—with the challenge of how to make these projects sustainable for farmers, and helpful and affordable for the community. Because we know farmers are not getting rich and that it's important for them to be paid a fair price for the work that they're doing, for the food that they're growing. And also that many, many people in our community are not purchasing fresh produce, not because they don't want to purchase it or because they don't know how to prepare it, but because it is unaffordable and they're making impossible choices with budgets that don't provide enough. That customer base, low-income folks who are purchasing their groceries, it's not a tourist experience. They purchase large quantities of food, they're great customers. Everyone is welcome to shop at our farmer's markets and we want our farmer's markets to be successful and thriving. 

Know someone we should talk to for this series? Send us a line at billshaner@substack.com.

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Grace Ross is a community organizer, activist, and co-founder of the Massachusetts Alliance Against Predatory Lending, a coalition that includes the Worcester Anti-Foreclosure Team, where Ross is chairperson. Both organizations exist to keep people from losing their homes to byzantine legal processes and/or scams. If you or someone you know is dealing with foreclosure/eviction, you’d do well to have Grace on your side. I’ve condensed our very long conversation and edited it for clarity. 

Liz: For folks who aren't familiar with the Worcester Anti-Foreclosure Team, or WAFT, what do you all do? 

Grace: The Worcester Anti-Foreclosure team was started in 2008, when it became apparent in the wider world that there was a historic number of foreclosures coming. Of course, we didn't know that it was about to get even worse. But in 2008 it felt pretty bad. And the Worcester Anti-Foreclosure Team started with local community folks who knew there was a problem. And we started going out door-knocking to talk to people. When there's gonna be a foreclosure auction, you can see it in the newspapers. So we started collecting lists and door-knocking and talking to people. 

The statewide organization, the Mass Alliance Against Predatory Lending, was started first. I was one of the founders of that. Those of us who started that had been told by someone--one of the few people who actually knew anything at that point--he said, “follow the money.” So we went and followed the money. And what we knew was that the primary source of money, like for the hedge funds and uber-wealthy folks, was coming from predatory illegal loans. And that it was such a huge part of the financial makeup of the world that it was gonna crash the market. So we knew that we were following a money trail of illegal lending that was bad enough it was gonna crash the market, but even the folks who watched the market were saying it wasn't going to. 

[WAFT] tries to support people, to work together to save their homes, and not just reverse illegal foreclosures, but actually make our way back to the beginning with the illegal loans. If WAFT wins, what we win is a huge financial windfall to our communities. When people buy a home, they usually invest every single cent they've got. And when that home gets foreclosed, they lose one of their three fundamental, unalienable rights, which is the right to your home: life, liberty, and real property. When they wrote the Constitution, they meant your home, your farm, small business. So one of our three fundamental rights. But to get there, to win, we would have to get a lot closer to justice around housing. And a huge amount of money that's been stripped from our communities has impacted small business development. When the school-age population is being thrown out of their homes a lot, it harms the school performance of every single kid in that school when the class turnover is a lot in a short period of time. So this is one of those places where you're dealing with a foundational building block of what it means to be a community and a civil society. 

Can you walk me through what that looks like for a homeowner facing foreclosure?

Ralph Gants, who became the chief judge of the [Massachusetts] Supreme Judicial Court, coined the phrase “doomed to foreclose.” Day one, you think you've signed a loan for 30 years and you've been assured you can afford it. But it turns out the person in the room with you knew you couldn't afford it, and had you sign it illegally anyway. And at some point you ran into trouble.  People always think it’s a personal problem, like somebody lost a job, there was a divorce, whatever. But that's not true, 'cause you were carrying a debt that was far beyond affordable from day one. 

Massachusetts allows foreclosures to be done by auction. More than half the states require judicial foreclosure, but we don't. So you go through a series of notices and they go to court to see if you're in the military. And if you're not, you're not allowed to go to that court case. Eventually you get a notice saying “we're gonna do an auction.” They show up, they do something that's not a legal auction, but has all the trappings of looking like an auction. I think of the 130,000+ foreclosures in Massachusetts in the last 20 years, probably maybe two handfuls were done legally, all the rest of them were illegal and actually don't even exist legally. But in Massachusetts, your right to own your home and your right to live in your home are two separate areas of law.

And since you don't get a right to court before the foreclosure, most people, if they know to stay in their home, their first guaranteed day in court is gonna be for an attempted eviction, which then puts us in the same system that tenants are in. For the homeowner, if they've gotten in touch with WAFT and learned their rights, they know there was no legal foreclosure. They have been shown how to read the documents to show there was no legal mortgage. But instead of being in a court that decides those things, they're gonna be in a court that's just talking about whether you have a right to live in the home, what's referred to as possession. 

The housing court [situation] came out of the moratorium for evictions, which we all fought for [during] COVID so that people could have a home to quarantine in. They suspended all the due process rules, and it was supposed to be short-term because they had to restart all these cases. And so they went, “Oh my God, the caseload is too big. We're not gonna be able to reopen as a court.” 

So they asked to suspend your rights to notice, to defend yourself, to ask for discovery and get the legal evidence that you need to defend yourself in court, [and] your right to be heard, your right to appeal, the right to an impartial judge. All those rights got suspended, but they're suspended to this day. 

A lot of what you're doing is educating people about their rights, as you mentioned. And I have to imagine it's incredibly daunting for the average person. 

People come and they almost always think it's an individual problem. They go, “so and so died, we lost our income, blah, blah, blah.” Court is a very isolating experience. Most of the time people are alone in court arguing something in front of a judge, totally intimidating. And it can feel like it's your individual fight. And it's very much not. But it’s having the confidence to have to stand up by yourself in front of a judge. We used to always have a crew of folks in court for every hearing. It's been hard since COVID to organize that. But even if somebody's just giving you a hug and now you're going up in front of the judge by yourself, it's hard to feel like you've got a whole army of people behind you, even if you do.

When WAFT puts out  a call for people to come to a specific address on a specific day, what takes place when people show up there on the day of an eviction? 

Any time that one of our three unalienable rights are taken, the courts are supposed to pay attention to how the “sentence” gets carried out. The housing courts are supposed to make sure that even though you've, in theory, lost your right to live in the home, they're supposed to be making sure that you're still protected through the process, even if you're gonna be evicted.

So by the time we're asking folks to show up, we've already got a court judgment that is pretty much guaranteed to have been illegal and wrong because the foreclosure was illegal. So an eviction from a house that couldn't have been legally foreclosed is also wrong. But we're only working with those folks. Tenants face this all the time, and they should have their rights to a safe eviction also. So we ask people to show up because if someone's gonna show up and potentially put their hands on you, you should have witnesses. 

People are much less likely to get hurt or have their stuff stolen. If you've got witnesses, it's much less likely that people who are supposed to be following the law will act out. Some of the folks who come to evictions are willing to actually put their body in the way of something if something that's gonna happen is gonna be criminal, criminally illegal. So a fair number of folks are willing to do that. And that's allowed us sometimes to stop an illegal eviction just based on that. 

It's only the bricks and mortar, so to speak, that the court is ordering to be taken away from you [not your belongings]. So they have to hire a moving and storage company to take your stuff and put it somewhere safe that's bonded and licensed. In Worcester for many years they've been using a company that is not legally licensed, therefore could not be bonded. And they dumpster people's belongings. They will go through and find your valuables and take them. And right now we've got one or two truckloads of stuff that's been in the wind since September 10th.

But now that we've got the right to not be evicted by somebody who could harm you, we're beginning to see them use warehouses that actually might be operating legally for the first time. So it's having an additional beneficial effect. The concept was that it would be a civil eviction. The police would not have a role that would criminalize the situation. And that as long as everybody is following the law, folks would leave under a legal order carried out legally and have their possessions safely stored. 

Now when folks show up, we have all sorts of variables we have to take into account like, is this person who's threatening to physically move you trained to not do it in a way that could potentially kill you, like George Floyd. That's where the state law came from, was to make sure that we don't have any George Floyd-style lynchings going on in Massachusetts. So we're trying to protect people from those folks who aren't trained, aren't certified, and could harm them. 

And are you a lawyer by training? 

No. 

How did you acquire all of this knowledge?

Well, I'm a community organizer. And I always found no matter what issue I was helping with, people organize around that by reading the laws. Our laws are required to be written in plain English, but the reality is it's daunting for people to try and figure out what law applies here? And what does it mean? 

When this fight started, it became clear pretty early on that when people have invested every last cent they own in their home, which most people do, and if it's under attack and you feel like, well, if I could pay a little bit more, maybe I can save the home, people basically get stripped of all their wealth. Every cent they've made in their lives that wasn't spent on food and gas and heat is in their house. So they lose everything. So we figured out pretty early on that people were not gonna be able to afford lawyers. And that created an unusual movement of people working together not on policy change, which is what we're used to thinking of is how you alter things, but literally on enforcement and enforcement is the courts. So our movement mostly works with protest and court action. And the last movement that did that was the battered women's movement. And before that, of course, the Civil Rights movement, which was expert at combining protest and legal action. 

That's a lot of good inspiration.

Yeah. We walk in those shoes.

Just to add one thing to that, it's not surprising because these practices of overpricing the home and charging people more than it was worth for a loan, were actually first instituted to stop Black freedmen from owning any property coming out of slavery. So that we happen to be in the tradition of the Civil Rights Movement is not surprising.

I was reading about the law that passed last July to make equity theft illegal. When someone is behind on their taxes, the city can put a lien on their home, sell that lien to a private company, and then that company can take the entire value of the house, or it could–

So these are property tax foreclosures? 

Yes. 

It's very frequent compared to bank foreclosures. I hadn't heard it called that. Our representative, John Mahoney, has been lead sponsoring a bill to end that on behalf of the Mass Alliance Against Predatory Lending for at least 10 years. But the legislature wasn't interested, nobody cared. And the vulture companies that came in to take that property because Worcester sold the tax titles, they would come in, they'd wait a year, so now you're $16,000 under, way back on your taxes, instead of $3,000, let’s say. And then at that point, they'd go into court, and now people couldn't possibly pay it off. Nobody has $16,000 sitting in a bank account somewhere. And so they would foreclose and take the full value. So it wasn't Worcester that was taking the full value. They were selling it, they were selling it to private vulture companies who would go, when Mahoney's bill, our bill was getting heard in the legislature, they would go to the legislature and say you can't change this law, it would ruin our business.

You seem really determined and obviously you would need to be to do this. 

Relentless, I think, is the term that's usually used for me.

Whenever I do these interviews, I try to think about an uncharitable reader or a resistant reader, and try to ask – 

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the resistant reader, the attack meme is you bought too much house and you set yourself up for this situation, and now you're just reaping the fruits of your overreach, your attempt to own more than you should own. And of course, it's easy for women heads of household and people of color to get told that they own more than they should own, right? So it fits right into that pattern. And you can only get to that thinking if you don't have the backstory, right? 

If you remember when the market crashed, [Alan] Greenspan, you know, who was considered the guru of our economy, was brought in by congress. And they said, man, what happened? How did you not predict this? And he said, well we blew it. So they knew this, but they didn't understand the meaning. And when someone said, you bought too much house as Mr. Morris, [a WAFT client]  who represented himself at the Supreme Judicial Court got asked one of the standard oppressive, racist, sexist comments of, “Well, what do you expect to live in a house for free?” And as Mr. Morris said, “I didn't buy too much house. I bought too much debt and not enough house.” 

My last question is sort of a moral question. What you would say to someone who is like, “Listen, it is so hard to buy a house. Can't I buy a foreclosed home?”

Well, bad or not, we're gonna win. And then you're gonna lose that home. Because the fact that  it's that cheap should be a signal. You get what you pay for. If you're buying a foreclosed home that was illegally foreclosed, if we get justice, you're gonna lose your title. So you're buying bad paper, as they call it, and shouldn't do it. If you value your own investment in the home, then you should know that. 

And the other thing is, what makes you think if you're buying a property that was foreclosed and cheap, that they're not gonna foreclose on you? People don't understand that these properties have usually been flipped numerous times. Why do you think you are gonna get the only honest lender out there for your purchase when that property has been consistently targeted by predatory lenders? They're setting you up next. 

Know someone we should talk to for this series? Send us a line at billshaner@substack.com.

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Claire Schaeffer-Duffy is an activist and freelance journalist. She and her husband Scott offer hospitality to people in need through the Sts. Francis and Therese Catholic Worker in Worcester, which is also their home. Claire is program director at the Center for Nonviolent Solutions and a member of the Worcester Multi-faith Coalition for a Ceasefire Resolution that has been making good trouble at city council meetings. 

Liz: I want to start with your petition before the city council. When there's a very contentious situation like Gaza that's been in the news for months, what tactics allow a group like yours to get people's attention or to even expand their thinking?

Claire: Well, I don't think [that] to ask for a ceasefire in the context of a war that is documented [to be] destructive and brutal for civilians is contentious because ceasefire is ceasefire. It is bilateral, it's both sides. It's stopping the armed hostilities. It's not a judgment of who is right or wrong or who gets what. It's basically, let's pause the slaughter so that we can save human life. So I don't really see that as a contentious act or ask. That's one response to the question. 

But how do you motivate? I think with our coalition, we wanted to speak from that place of the moral voice, the faith traditions—and all of them do—that see that every life is a universe, which is what one of the coalition members Sarah Lerman-Sinkoff said when they spoke before the city council, they made that quote. During our organizing, our Jewish members, when that quote came up, they said, oh, that's in the Talmud or one of their Hebrew scriptures. And then the Muslims said, yeah, we have the exact same phase. And, you know, the Christian or Catholic framing is all life is sacred. So to kind of start from that moral, expansive place instead of more partisan language that doesn't always reach people, we felt that we had to pull from our faith leaders because this war is a crisis of both bodily harm, obviously, to Palestinians and Israelis. But it's a crisis on the collective conscience because when you have so much destruction, so much killing, everybody is affected, especially when it is not opposed, when there's silence in the face of that destruction, there's kind of a withering of the collective soul or conscience. 

I personally was deeply influenced by my own informal study of peaceful nonviolent campaigns at the Center for Nonviolent Solutions [that] we had done back in 2016, a multimedia presentation on the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. And it was a project to uphold nonviolent social movements. And when you go into their stories, which are fascinating and not upheld enough, you see that people really are very tactical. It's not a vague kumbaya peace that they're speaking about. They're really thinking, who do we need to move? What are we focused on? So that was part of the current within me. I was deeply motivated by a walking tour of Worcester's peace history that the Center for Nonviolent Solutions also does. And in researching that tour—I wasn't the primary researcher, Kathleen Moylan was—but we take people down Main Street and we tell moments in the city's history where people, not necessarily committed pacifists, but they employed nonviolent tactics to speak up for the oppressed.

And again, to see how that worked, how that didn't work, what they were up against, I found it a kind of lineage that I wanted the city to stand on, publicly saying, “ceasefire.” And in our group, we had some extraordinary organizers that were influenced by their own experience. One of the people had worked in labor organizing. Another one of our Jewish members had worked with If Not Now, so they had come out of a well-informed grassroots group in terms of developing a communication strategy: What's gonna be our presence in the corridor before we go into the chamber? So there was a lot of skill at the table for the multi-faith coalition.

Thirteen [Massachusetts] cities and towns have passed ceasefire resolutions. I'm a board member of Mass Peace Action, and it is through that network that you get information statewide. And so that was another important strand of influence. And similar with our Muslim members, I should add that they have quite a network of through their mosques, so each community that came to the table came with their own networks. It’s a great asset when you're trying to organize, to have the person sitting there representing much more than themselves or their personal passion.

There were lots of strands of influence. A lot of the organizers are women and although we never have articulated it, and I can't speak for all in the group, I think some in the group have been haunted by this war's impact on women and children because it's been so heavy. You know, when you hear there are no maternity wards, none functioning in Gaza, that is enough [for] anybody who has given birth to children and knows what that entails to say for the love of God, ceasefire. You can't do this to a community, just make it impossible for them to function the way that our species functions. We're not talking rights here. We're just talking about fundamental existence. 

I appreciate your reframing about how it's not contentious to call for a ceasefire, and I understand what you're saying. And also, those who oppose a ceasefire resolution or oppose ceasefire have all kinds of rhetoric on their side as to why that proposal is controversial or offensive. I get very overwhelmed in interpersonal conflict around these issues. I know that over the course of your life, you’ve been very brave. You've been arrested a number of times, you've spoken out on other issues that arouse a lot of emotion in people. And I would love to learn what inner or external resources you rely on to weather those disagreements or those conversations.

Well certainly I am quite a fearful person. I'm a middle child. My husband's a middle child, and we both say we were not the kids that were like, “I don't care what you think, family! I'm just doing whatever.” But we've both been to war zones. And when you see the consequence of what violence means for human beings, for their communities, you can speak in very particular ways to people that I think can be heard, so that it is not ideology, it's expressing the conviction that God wants humans to have life, to thrive. We're not made to exert so much time and resources into the destruction of each other.

This conflict has been framed in existential terms. If this side exists, then, it's an existential threat for us. And I look at the war and say, well, what security’s in this? In this context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, what security have you laid forth for your community? It's a very fragile one. And it necessitates a huge outpouring of resources for your military, like a constant keeping up of your guard because your neighbors are not at peace with you. In March of 2023, we, the Center for Nonviolent Solutions, hosted a webinar with three Israeli women who had been advocating for peace, for ceasefire, one of whom had a [child who was a] combatant in Gaza, and one of whom works in a Palestinian-majority city in Israel, and she's been a long-time peacemaker. One  is an Israeli feminist. But in organizing this webinar, Rachel Ben Dor, a women's group that helped, as she described it, [when] the pressure from these mothers influenced the Lebanon ceasefire in 2006. And in the course of talking with her, you know, she was a very lively woman. I really liked the vibe of her, but it leaked out: She said, you know, my husband has PTSD from a previous war. The poet's son went into the Lebanon war, and he's altered. And so I felt that, you know? You spend so many years trying to raise children well, and they just get broken from the war needs of a state and generation after generation. 

So I'm afraid, of course, but the other part of me is also angry ‘cause good lord, anybody that has spent any time raising children, you work your damndest. And then to have it undone seems so unfair to me. I have interviewed so many women for whom that's been their story. And so there's fear, but then there's also, honestly—you get pissed off. 

It's my observation that groups on the right, in the United States at least, are quite good at coming together around a particular effort despite differences among their coalition. And I don't always see that, at least on the secular left. There's a tendency to get bogged down around language or a pursuit of ideological purity. And I'm wondering what a multi-faith coalition can teach us about progressive solidarity. 

Well, for myself, I'm a faith-based activist, and I come out of the Catholic Worker tradition where the effort is to take one's text and try to inflect them in the world as it is. And I think there is in every tradition that strand, so there's in what's called engaged Buddhism, Thích Nhất Hạnh was a stellar example of engaged Buddhism. And I'm sure one could say there's engaged Judaism, there's engaged Islam, thinkers who see their faith tradition as offering language of concern for the oppressed. You know, it's not a tribal orientation. So I think that with the faith traditions, there's a lot of emphasis on how we work with that good old ego that causes us to bump up against each other and get defensive and get focused on our small selves, when really, God is inviting us to be concerned about the common good.

Of course, religion has been very divisive and very exclusive and fostered tribalism, no doubt about that. But I think in its best sense, all of those traditions offer teachings that help to deal with the ego conflicts that will come up. And [these traditions] take you beyond ideology, because ideology is time-bound. It's very, very, very limited in perspective and very reductionist. And I think any faith tradition is not about reducing people. It's not about categorizing and circumscribing the human being, because this is a kind of violence to do that to anybody. And so I think our faith traditions offer a larger view of how you consider the people that you are working among, and also those who disagree with you. I don't mean to sound trite, but we are all God's children.

So one works within that frame. It's very different than an ideological stance where some are enlightened and some are not, and may God deliver me from those who are not. My husband is always saying this: I have to go on my own truth, as I see it. But  I also recognize that I don't have the full truth, by any means. To be true to one's conscience—I think our faith traditions invite us to do that. And, and also to have a much more, much more spacious view of the other, we are suffering from this really reductionist fear bound view of, of each other. It's just deadly.

And I think it's exacerbated by the ecosystems of rapid communication. We're in a world where reaction is the first articulation, and really we all have reactions, but can we sit with them for a little while before we blast them out there? I think our faith calls for more patience, more humility, and always, always a sense of—I would just speak for myself—who are the ones that are being denigrated right now? And it changes. This is  what I was interpreting from Ta-Nehisi Coates’ book The Message, that people in the rapid-fire world of talking heads kind of got baffled. He was saying, don't assume that a people who, in a historical phase are oppressed and endure terrible suffering, that they will not also perpetrate it at a different point. That we have to sort of see ourselves with more humility. With our faith traditions, at least in mind, you recognize that the capacity to do harm, to do terrible harm, is there in you. You're not exempt from that. And for me, that was not an abstract claim after I went to Bosnia. Because when I interviewed people in Bosnia, you could see how social conditions reduce people to do things they never believed they would do, like turn on their neighbor, not help their neighbor, because it would cost them so much if they did that, or because they were so afraid. They just did. And you could feel how displaced and disoriented everybody felt with themselves as well as with each other because of what the violence had had reduced everybody to. And when you see that, or at least I—I won't say you—when I saw that, I recognized how Cain could kill Abel. It's possible. And that doesn't lead me to acquiescence or despair. It leads me to mercy and to realize, don't do this to people. Don't impose conditions that reduce them to this state. This is not what God wants.

That is a really good transition to a quote that I found in your writing, a Peter Morin quote:  “We're working to create a society where it is easier for people to be good.” I love that. What it brought to mind for me was Bill's writing about the unhoused population in Worcester and also about prison abolition. Could you talk more about what that quote means to you and how it's informed your activism?

Well, I've been a Catholic Worker since I graduated from the University of Virginia. I actually did my thesis on the movement and so I entered it intellectually and then moved to a community in DC. I think it means many things. It means what I said before, trying to ease the burden that violence puts on all of us perpetrators, victims, and that violent systems put on all of us. It means responding to the excluded ones or to anyone personally, you know, not categorically. This can be you know, with our guests who stay here at the Catholic Worker, 'cause we have the people in need who come and stay. Not a romanticization of [them]. It doesn't mean you can't be real with people, to believe that God exists in everybody. 

With one of our guests who stayed years ago, a young person, this person is accused of terrible murder. We correspond and there's beauty in that person also. To realize that that is always there, redemption is always possible. God wants redemption. This is what it means to create a society where it's easier for people to be good. You have to have as a first premise a belief that this is what God wants. That the capacity for good is in everybody. Just as the capacity for cruelty is in everybody, including ourselves. And we live simply. We try to live in community [which] is the sharing of resources. Not you know, trying not to be greedy. But I certainly am. And what is it Kurt Vonnegut said? Refuse to participate in mass slaughter. Get that down and you're doing pretty well.

I don't know that it's possible for anyone in the United States, at least in capitalism, to not be complicit, but we all have to do our best.

Yes, that's right. And the more we see the price of that system on human beings, if we can find alternatives and, and you know, I was saying to my oldest son yesterday, you gotta find your yeses too. Because he really struggles with this. There has to be a lot in life that you're saying yes to. It can't just be, this system is terrible and this system is terrible. I certainly can go that way and think about that a lot, a lot, a lot. But I think God wants us to be happy. Not in a facile way, but to know the joy of creativity, the joy of community, the joy of music, the arts, literature. So there is this resistance to systems that dehumanize, but also take time to celebrate all that is so marvelous about the human experience. And I, you know, I'm, I'm grateful for the work of Robin Kimmerer. She's writing Braiding Sweetgrass, but she—

I love that book!

She talks about how you have to love what you love, and that makes you wanna preserve. Right? People love their kids. And so they do a lot of things because they love their kids. And I think this is a little bit of a challenge sometimes with the left. You have to love your community. You're not speaking out of just a bunch of denunciations. You really wanna see them come together, work together, work for the common good.

Know someone we should talk to for this series? Send us a line at billshaner@substack.com.

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Worcester Speaks #7: Giselle Rivera-Flores

Giselle Rivera-Flores is director of communications for State Senator Robyn Kennedy and a writer who focuses on literature and identity. She has managed a co-working space, created STEM enrichment activities for children, and hosted the local “Don’t Touch My Podcast” with Jennifer Gaskin. I would be delighted to have just one-tenth of her energy.

Liz: You have two sister Substacks, Hispanic-ish and Stories That Grow. Can you describe them and how they relate to each other? 

Giselle: Yeah, of course. Hispanic-ish became a Substack mostly because I wanted to give the perspective of what it's like to be American Hispanic and where I'm born and raised in New York. My parents come from the island of Puerto Rico. People are like, oh, that's kind of cool, but in the eyes of the American narrative, it's problematic. I face challenges and adversities that are unique to my experience. I've been told, go back to where you're from. And I'm like, well, Puerto Rico is part of the States, so I'm from here: America. Where would you deport me to? It's a Substack about those kinds of complexities and those weird nuanced conversations that have to be had. 

And because I read a lot, I've been vowing myself to read more, and Latinx authors, and promote those narratives a lot more. Because I think that they're undervalued and they're not spoken about as often as some of our [other] American great writers. And so I started the sister Substack to focus mostly on writers, what they do, their stories, and to do reviews. 

Your first pick for Stories That Grow is the classic The House on Mango Street. Why start there? 

I think it's the first time I've read a story that sounded so much like my neighborhood or sounded so much like the language that my peers used when I was growing up. And again, I grew up in Brooklyn. I went to high school in Forest Hills in Queens. So even in New York, I kind of treaded that line, where my neighborhood at home was very Hispanic or half Hispanic, half Italian [and] I went to [school] in Forest Hills, which was predominantly Jewish and higher income. And then there's just so much about it, the gender roles that are played and are visualized through the story, but also this yearning of, this is where I come from, but this doesn't have to be my future. I don't have to become a statistic for someone else. I can still create my own path in this world, and I'm not bound by the pains that my ancestors have experienced or the challenges of oppression. It's a quick read, but it's also in a language that I think resonates with a lot of people. 

You say in the intro to Stories That Grow that narratives from Latinx authors are “connecting readers to perspectives that challenge, inspire, and deepen understanding.” And I'm curious what kinds of challenges or inspiration or understanding you hope your audience will find.

It's a mixture of things, of breaking down the barriers or stereotypes here in the States. I think part of that is that people often tell the Black story at the beginning as, oh, they were slaves, but it's so much more than that. Black people were not just slaves, they were so much more than that. There was a history before becoming enslaved that is never really spoken about. And so I think that the Black perspective is often seen as a tragic one. And I think that's the same thing with a lot of Latin people because we come from that mixed background. Puerto Ricans are a mixture of Taínos, which are natives to the island of what we know as Puerto Rico now, but it was considered Borinquen at the time that they occupied it, Spaniards and Africans, because of the slave trade. And so that's what creates people like me, Puerto Ricans. And so those stories tend to be very negative. We come from enslavement, we come from struggle, and they're not often told in a positive way. There's so much joy, there's so much history, so many traditions that we carry that come from our ancestors. And so I want this to be a portrayal of honesty of both, yes, there's pain, but also, yes, there's joy and we still carry those traditions to this day. I'm hoping that readers—and even myself—I hope that I gain some knowledge by reading some literature that I have not picked up yet. 

I'm curious if when you're writing for the blog is the audience that you have in mind, a Latinx audience, not a Latinx audience, or anybody? 

I think the education piece to me is really important because it's for everyone. I know that within my own communities, there are some biases. We experience colorism at a high rate. There are some discrepancies within our own communities that come from the conditioning of colonialism. We've been preconditioned to understand that if we don't look European, then we're ugly. If our hair’s not a certain texture, then it's bad hair. So we grew up with these narratives that have been force fed to us for so many years. I mean, not even years, right? Centuries. And then you start to realize, wait, this is actually wrong. And I think that the only way we can do that is by hearing these stories. Oftentimes we're secluded from our own stories because they haven't been amplified. And so we become isolated from the truth. 

And I often think about anyone's story. How do we learn about the Holocaust? Only by learning from survivors and [their] family members. And so I think this is something that is educational for all of us, including the Latin population, because oftentimes we're secluded from our own stories because they haven't been amplified. And so we become isolated from the truth. And like I said before, precondition to these narratives about who we are. And I think that keeps us in a bubble of misinformation, which I think it's fucking problematic as hell. But it drives me crazy because these are conversations I have with my own family. Half the time, Liz, I'm like, whatcha guys saying? They're like, well, I'm not Black. I'm like, of course you're Black. And so these are Thanksgiving conversations. It’s me getting upset. 

And so these are things that, just within our own cultures, I hope break down because we have to understand that we're assimilating to a culture that wasn't intended for us. And because we've been raised in this culture, we often don't see that. You got to get an outside perspective to really understand it. 

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You hosted a podcast with Jenn Gaskin and I got the sense that you have a really great creative partnership. Could you advise people on how to build and sustain creative partnerships or creative friendships?

Yeah, of course. So I've been friends with Jenn for probably 10-plus years. And the podcast came about because at the end of the day, I would send her voice memos and I would just be bitching, to be honest with you. I would just be venting about the stupid shit I read online. Or I was in a meeting and someone blew my mind because I was like, that's racist as hell. And so we would go back and forth on voice memos at 10, 11 o'clock at night, and my husband was like, you guys need a podcast. I'm tired of hearing you guys every night. Just fucking record it. And so we decided to record it and see how it went. And we did it for four seasons, and we're still in the process, but unfortunately, as you probably know, Jennifer's husband passed last November and so it's been a really, really bad year. We recorded one or two episodes, but I didn't want Jenn to feel pressured. 

I think from the creative side, the best thing that we have, and this is weird, but so honest, is that we work off of our strengths. So we come into partnership, but we're not dictating what the other person needs to do or how they should sound. We come in as us, so we stay authentic to who we are and the things that we're talking about. Oftentimes, if you heard the podcast, we laugh, but we're also like, this is traumatic. What the fuck are we laughing about? This is trauma, Jennifer. And she cracks up and I crack up. But that's like, I feel like that's a real conversation we have all the time, probably with no cursing on the podcast, but those are the conversations. 

In 2019, you were really candid in a MassLive article about often being the only Latina in the room. And you were saying that most things in Worcester are created by older white men. Five years later, is that still true? Are you still feeling that way? 

Yeah, I still walk into many spaces as the only Latina. Even before that article, which I totally forgot about, I would always feel very uncomfortable. I was always working with older white men. And I think that some of that, when I say, oh, that's not bad, is me saying it's not that they're older white men, that's the problem. It's me trying to say it's the narrative that comes along with it. Oftentimes it's set up that way intentionally, and it's taken me years to really fully understand that narrative. Yeah, this is intentional. This is why it was built, this is why boardrooms don't look like people like me or Jennifer or men of color or trans people. And anybody that's not fitting the mold of a white middle aged man is usually not in these positions of power or in leadership. And so I still truly believe that. I feel that that has not changed. 

And then with my nine-to-five [as director of communications for State Senator Robyn Kennedy], I see it in the halls of the State House. I see it in leadership positions.

A lot of the DEI talk that I've seen, sometimes it makes it worse because you're just hearing people say “we value diversity.” And it's like, do you, though? 

I thought I had more hope in our systems, that these things would actually start to shift. But to your point, we're only shifting in phrases that we use. I argue about this all the time, and it gets me really pissed off because I tell people all the time, this is not diversity. Just because you have one woman on your board doesn't mean you're a diverse board, because at the end of the day, your policies are still hindering a group of people. If you're hindering a group of people based on your policies or on a local nonprofit board and where you're not distributing funds accordingly, the distribution of your funds isn't diverse. 

Like I said, I still experience these things. And to go back to the other question, at first, I used to think it was a problem. Now I find it as an opportunity once I'm in these spaces to open the door for other people. At first, I was like, oh, I'm like the token brown girl. I'll be the token brown girl for a little bit. I'll play that game for a little bit because I'm going to bring a few more people in this room, and then I won't be the token brown girl anymore. And now this whole shit's going to change. You can have me on this board, but if you don't listen to my perspective or my feedback or include my voice, then you're not inclusive, which is counterproductive to being diverse. 

You're in some pretty influential spaces. 

If you're anything like me, you kind of have to bite your tongue sometimes. The best way to do this is by helping create policy that changes this. Cursing someone out right now is not appropriate, and flipping a table's not appropriate, but also not playing into that game is also not appropriate. I don't want to partake in that. I see that you're doing things to hurt my community and other people's community. And so instead of being so loud and shouting about it, it's best to work in a way that I can help dismantle that, if that makes any sense. 

That's being strategic, it sounds like. 

Well, we'll see. 

I noticed in a bunch of places you refer to yourself as an entrepreneur. Entrepreneur is not a term that I see in a lot of progressive spaces, and I'm wondering how you understand that term and its political connotations. 

I probably should change that at some point on platforms, but I see it more as I come from a business background. And so I created a lot of businesses, online businesses or in-person businesses. I had a studio downtown, which was a co-working space predominantly for BIPOC people, for photographers and stuff like that. And I ran that for five years. I also had the Learning Hub, which was a STEM afterschool programming event that I used to do for a couple years, and then it went downhill during COVID because the schools were closed, libraries were closed, we couldn't have access to the kids. And so that kind of closed off.  

I took [the label entrepreneur] as an opportunity, as someone who takes risks to create or find solutions or build something meaningful. But I understand that it has a negative connotation with capitalism and all of these historically negative components of our society. 

Small business owners have always been labeled in that way. But even at that, when we think about it statistically, it's like 70, I think it's like 74% of Latin communities are entrepreneurs or have created a small business of some sort. And so that is not a story that most people hear. And so when you think of an entrepreneur, you think of the gross people that we know today, the Elon Musks of the world, the Jeff Bezos, they're like the entrepreneur, the elites. But if we can take back that word and use it as a tool of empowerment, I think that it gives our people a new perspective and a new label that allows them to say, yeah, I am a creator of this kind of solution. 

It's always, again, the elite white man is an entrepreneur, and then they look at you and they're like, oh, how's that hobby going? Well, that hobby is making my family a living. We're living off of this hobby. So it's no longer a hobby. 

How did you make the pivot from running your own businesses to taking this communications role with Sen. Kennedy? 

So while we were doing the studio and Learning Hub, I worked for myself all those years because all those things were kind of part-time. The studio was my husband’s. I had just kind of helped manage it. The Learning Hub was after school, so I had plenty of time. Since 2011 or 12, I started doing a lot of digital media around the city and trying to pick up clients. And so that's what I did for a living until about three years ago. And when I first heard Robyn, who was just Robyn Kennedy at the time, and she was running on her platform, and she sounded so progressive, so smart, so considerate, which was mind blowing to me because I rarely ever say that politicians are considerate, are compassionate. I can't name [anyone] outside of Bernie Sanders. I can't name more than five people. That's just not a word that I associate with politicians.

We connected and we talked and I said, I'd love to do what I do for clients, but I'd love to bring it to you and I'd love to do your digital media, your photography, your website, all these kinds of things. So we were like, alright. And so we started that partnership and I still worked for myself when I was working on the campaign, and then we won."

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Worcester Speaks #6: Nate Sabo

Nate Sabo works in real estate and is a member of both the Zoning Board of Appeals and the Canal District Neighborhood Association. If you haven’t read Bill’s reporting on Nate’s role in scuttling an extraneous gas station, you can catch up here.

Liz: I’d like to start by asking about the Zoning Board of Appeals and what drew you to that particular facet of city government.

Nate: I moved to Boston in 2010. I moved to Worcester in 2019. I wanted to get more involved in the local government, local activities, local things like that. And my background's in real estate, so zoning and planning were kind of a good opportunity to do that. And I learned after a short period of time here that there were some struggles with those areas of Worcester. I thought maybe I could provide some expertise and help.

How would you characterize Worcester's zoning and real estate issues?

Well, I might get the year wrong, but it's been 40-ish years since Worcester zoning was revised. So it's a 1970s, early 80s mindset for planning, for a city that has changed. The city itself has changed dramatically. And what people think is good city planning has changed dramatically. So because of that, almost every new development or anything of any size and scale comes before the zoning board 'cause they need some kind of variance or special permit to do what they wanna do because the zoning is so outdated.

So what does that version of Worcester look like, that dates back to the 70s and 80s? I imagine it's very car-centric.

Yeah. A lot of it has a requirement for two parking spaces per unit, things like that that just don't match up. You can't build something that's dense in the urban core that meets the parking requirements in our zoning in almost all cases, unless there's been some kind of overlay district that was added on later as an exception.

For folks who haven't had the opportunity to interact with their local zoning board, can you give some examples of what you all are asked to consider?

It runs a very wide gamut: the individual who maybe built their porch three feet over the line and needs an exception or wants to add on to their house and needs a two foot variance 'cause it's too close to their neighbor's yard. Because the other big piece of the zoning is the lots in Worcester. Most of them are very old, you know, a 150-year-old definition. And the zoning in the 70s has these requirements for step-backs from the side yard and front yard and things that are virtually impossible and don't exist today on most of those lots. So if you wanna make any change to your house, it immediately doesn't comply with zoning law. So you have to come to the zoning board to get an exception to that.

That's very inefficient.

Yes. Extremely inefficient. And then that ranges all the way up to some of the large multi-family developments, whether it's parking or setbacks again or things like that come before us. And then there's some special things, like all gas stations have to come for a special permit.

I wanted to ask about your and Jordan Berg Powers’ work, along with a whole community coalition, to stop another gas station in Worcester. It sounds like a rare triumph. Can you tell me more about what was at stake there and your role in it?

Well it's interesting because in the last two years or so, I think there's actually been three gas station permits come before the zoning board. One a couple years ago kind of was struck down in the same way as the recent one. You know, it didn't make sense. The neighborhood turned out. And then another one was allowed probably about a year and or so ago. And you know, this last one was kind of maybe the most egregious, you know, it was right in the middle of a neighborhood next to houses in a watershed area where the runoff could potentially go into a conservation area. [There are] much better uses, like there was by-right housing. You could build housing on the site instead of a gas station without coming to the zoning board. So this was one that really just made no sense.

Also, I think over those two years, the community and some of us on the zoning board have done a lot of research and found that per capita, Worcester has two or three times the number of gas stations in most cities. We don't need more gas stations in Worcester. And most of those gas stations are in what I would call environmental justice areas. There's not a saturation of gas stations on the west side. They're in lower income business corridors and things like that, that affect lower income, economically challenged people in most cases. And the health effects [of] living near a gas station continue to come out to be deadly, frankly, to people that live close to a gas station.

It struck me reading about that hearing that people were reacting to a proposal that was pretty obviously a scam in a couple different ways. And I see people getting sucked in by scam promises all the time. But something allowed this faction of the community to come together and be like, no, not today, we're not falling for this one. Do you have a sense of what the magic formula was?

Well, with anything in Worcester politics, whether it's with the zoning board or the city council, the only way to get people to listen is if you have 40 people show up and shout about it. Sometimes the city council still doesn't listen. Sometimes zoning boards still don't listen when those people show up. But the city councilor that represents that neighborhood had them well organized. It's the first time I've ever remembered them taking out extra seats. And that's step one. And then step two, it was going to the root of how everything controversial in Worcester goes: Well, we'll just continue it to the next meeting until people forget about it or it goes away.

And this was one of those things that I thought was so egregious. I was like, we don't need to do this again. Let's settle it here. And even with that, it was kind of engineered where the gas station [proposal] was able to be withdrawn versus not approved, which is actually a big difference because if it had gone to a vote and been voted down, they couldn't come back for two years at all for that special permit. But now that they were allowed to withdraw, they could actually come back again with that same or similar proposal with a different makeup of a board or, you know, on a night when Jordan and I weren't there, you know what I mean? Like, they could come back and potentially get that approved again.

Do you think that'll happen?

I don't think it'll happen. The Garrett's Family Market guy, I don't think he realized some of the things that came out. I was looking at him during the hearing and I don't think he wants to come back and personally go through that again. I don't think he realized there was going to be that kind of opposition to it in Worcester.

You are also involved in the Canal District Neighborhood Association, is that right?

Around the time that the new parking plan for the Canal District related to the ballpark was getting rolled out, the people that live here kind of found out about it. And at that point in time, there weren't a lot of people living in the Canal District, so everybody was focused on the businesses. Now that's changed dramatically in the last five years, but we kind of organized as a neighborhood to say, hey, you know, this is really gonna impact us. We want some input into this. And as we did that, I got to know some of the city councilors including Councilor [Candy Mero-]Carlson, and she said, hey, can you kind of organize the neighborhood? Because we need to be able to come to the residents.

So we went through a big process with the parking and we got a few things for the neighbors, but it basically went forward as is. And we started having some neighborhood meetings and trying to address other concerns, and Councilor Carlson didn't like what the neighborhood had to say, so she just stopped showing up to our neighborhood meetings when we were having them.

It's not really an active group. There's still emails that go out, but we kind of frankly gave up on meetings because without the city councilor and the police and some of the other city groups that just wouldn't show up, it became kind of pointless to have the meetings. And even when they did show up, they say, okay, we're gonna look at this, or we're gonna do this, and then come back at the next meeting and say the same thing.

Did you get the sense that maybe they came to it with the assumption that it was theater?

Oh, a hundred percent. A hundred percent.

Yeah. I'm curious to hear your thoughts on the ballpark and how it's changed the Canal District.

So we moved here about five years ago from downtown Boston. [The ballpark] was kind of one of the motivating factors that actually got us to move here. Now fast forward five years later, I have a better understanding of the city and what could have been done with that money and how much it costs and the impact it's had on the Canal District. Like, I wonder if the city had put $160 million into something else, how much of a positive impact that could have had on the Canal District and the whole city. I mean, if we spent that $160 million to encourage housing development five years ago, we wouldn't be in a housing crisis, but instead we spent it on a baseball park.

There were a lot of promises tied to Polar Park, that it was going to be awesome for all the small businesses. And now there’s just nowhere to park. There was a brief moment when I moved here like eight years ago where you could park in a vague, unpaved no man's land. If you were willing to bottom out your car, it was perfect. Do you feel like the ballpark has come through on any of the promises that were made?

A few of 'em. I'll answer that and I wanna come back to the parking, 'cause parking is another one of those issues that could easily be fixed that we just don't change. So I think the ballpark's lived up to maybe having people have a different perception of Worcester, like that there's something going on in Worcester that didn't previously exist. I'm not sure that's from people that live in Worcester, but the people that come from out of town to the game. There's those nice restaurants and there's the ballpark, and there's the public market, and Birch Street Bread.

But the issue is, the parking plan that was implemented when the ballpark opened. Long story short, there was a lot of discussion, a lot of change, and it was like, we gotta put some parking plan in place. The season's starting, we'll put this plan in place and we'll change it [later]. In five, four years now, there's been no adjustment. It's the same plan that was put in.

If they changed the plan, what could be done to make it better?

One of the things that I say all the time now is, we made a parking plan in the neighborhood that applies to really about 40 days a year. There's 60 ball games now, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday games. Parking's not really a problem in the neighborhood on those days. It's really Friday, Saturday, Sunday, every other week during the summer when they're home. But the whole plan is built around those 40 days when there's a ball game. And the best example is that they made two-hour on-street parking everywhere, so that if you were going to the game, you had to park in a lot and you couldn't park on the street. Well, the way the Canal District works [according to] a lot of the businesses, two-hour parking isn't enough time for someone to go to the hairdresser. The parking doesn't work if you come to maybe shop at Crompton Place and have dinner and grab a beer somewhere after that, [it] takes more than two hours. It makes sense on game days to have that, but the reason that we got these new fancy parking meters was because you could change it. You could have two-hour parking one day and four-hour parking the next. You could make easy adjustments, which have never been made.

The other big piece that's about to change in the Canal District is there's thousands of new people moving in with the new development. On game days, there's police to direct traffic and things like that. There hasn't been any change to traffic control or the streets or anything like that to account for what's essentially gonna be game day traffic every day once The Cove and some of these other buildings fill up.

Yeah. Is there a plan in place that you know of to get all of those new neighbors organized?

So, not yet. So District 120, which is one of the new developments that has 85 affordable housing units, was supposed to be part of a five-phase plan. Well, the economics changed for building, and it's no longer a five-phase plan. Boston Capital that owns the land is trying to sell it. And as part of that plan, there was a parking garage and a temporary parking lot for that building. Those didn't get built. So now you've got 85 affordable units that have like eight parking spaces, all of which are handicapped parking places. And when the people moved into the neighborhood, there's nowhere for them to park. If you're paying hundreds of dollars to park your car a month, it's not affordable housing.

Is there anything else Worcester-related that I haven't asked about?

Yeah, there is. I've been pretty outspoken about it, but I probably haven't talked about it: Eric Batista as city manager. There was some optimism that we'd actually get a qualified city manager who had experienced managing a city, and instead they put someone in who'd been a project manager two years before, who didn't have the skills, and didn't have the abilities. And when you couple that with the city council and some of the people on city council, it just makes it so dysfunctional that you can't really get things done. There's a rumor that we've heard from multiple areas that Councilor Carlson and Councilor Ojeda, and probably Batista, have some plan to get us off the zoning board.

Who's the “we” in that?

Jordan Berg Powers. Councilor Ojeda has come before the board twice and felt because we disagreed with him that he was disrespected by Jordan and me. And you know, there's that faction of Councilor Carlson, Ojeda, Mo Bergman, Kate Toomey, where if you disagree with them, you've disrespected their role as a councilor.

A very democratic mindset.

Yeah, exactly. They don't have any interest in representing all of their constituents.

How are you thinking about moving forward now that you and Jordan have this information?

Well, I don't really know. It's just come to light in the last couple days. We heard it from multiple sources, I would say. And it doesn't seem that there's a mechanism to immediately get us off the zoning board. You're on for a term and I don't see how you just remove people from the board. So it's probably something they can do at the end of the term and just make sure they don't reappoint you.

[Nate had previously mentioned that he may soon take an opportunity to move to Toronto.] Does that add to your sense that maybe that you're gonna get outta town or does it actually make you regretful about getting outta town?

Probably makes me regretful about getting outta town. One of the other reasons that Candy Carlson doesn't like me is I was a big supporter of Rob Bilotta for running against her last year. So once that happened, you know, she went around telling people I was nuts and all sorts of things. So, you know, leaving and not being here to work on Rob's campaign, who's a great candidate, who cares about the people in Worcester, who's thoughtful, who isn't someone I agree with on every issue, but as someone who I know will listen to people and try to improve things for everybody in Worcester versus the current councilors we have who don't have any interest in that, for the most part, outside of a handful.

Have you ever considered running for city council?

I have, yeah. Probably if Rob hadn't run last time, I would've run against Candy in District 2. Rob's a much better candidate than me, I'll put it that way. You know, he's grown up here and knows the city better than me and has the connections much more so than I do, and has the right mindset. But I wouldn't have let Candy run unopposed.

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Samantha Olney is the founder of Worcester harm-reduction group Homeless Addicts Leadership Organization (HALO). You might recognize her name from previous editions of Worcester Sucks and/or recall her powerful testimony before city council about the rights and needs of Worcester’s unhoused community members. 

As always, I’ve lightly edited the following conversation to make it nice to read.

Liz: Last February you very bravely filed a petition with city council to allow tents in city parks. I'd love to hear what moved you to take that step.

Samantha: So me and my boyfriend, we've been homeless now for three years, in a tent. And in one year, we were moved by Quality of Life 21 times, I think. So something needs to happen and it wasn't my actual intention or goal to have a park where we can just [live], you know what I mean? But there needs to be some kind of space where we're allowed to be. And I mean, obviously [the petition] didn't go as planned. When we filed the second petition for a sanctioned encampment, it got a lot closer. We need somewhere to be, and Quality of Life does not help the situation, I don't think.

What are those interactions with the Quality of Life team like?

They tell us we have 20 minutes to pack up our stuff and they bulldoze it. And with a tent, you know, it's not really possible. So we actually moved into Shrewsbury. Shrewsbury, they're a lot better to us. We were on the power lines. We just had to move, but right now we're sleeping in a truck. But we were there for I think, like four months, as long as we've been anywhere, so yeah.

What kind of damage does it do to your stability when you have that 20 minutes to pack up? You must end up losing a lot of your belongings.

Oh yeah, everything. We mainly try to keep our bed because being comfortable when you sleep is probably the most important. Clothes we can always get. But it's just hard when you have to start over from scratch every single time. And then even the tent itself, 'cause a lot of times you can't get the tent 'cause there's everything else that's in it, you know? Usually we like to move before we're supposed to move, so that way we don't have to deal with that. 

We try to think ahead, but I remember—the Blackstone over by Walmart, there's an off ramp of 146—they literally bulldozed it and you could see the tracks going straight into the Blackstone River. It was insane. They told the people they had 20 minutes to pack up and it was snowing. Like, I just couldn't believe it. Luckily, the one time that we had to deal with Quality of Life [on] the day of, we had a group of people that came to help us move. And it took us four hours to move two tents, but we had a whole group of volunteers to help us. 

Do you think Quality of Life was like, we can't do this if there are witnesses? 

I think so, because Bill Shaner was there too. Like, there's other people that aren't the homeless that they could just push around and do whatever they want. Like just throw away all our stuff and treat us like not humans. And you know, they just couldn't do it. It's not just the city. It was the rubbish removal people, what's that company? They do dumpsters. I don't know. They had a dumpster. They had a front end loader. They had a bulldozer to clear up two tents. 

That must be really intimidating.

Oh yeah. Especially when they show up with a bunch of cops and then they start running everybody's names. So people on the streets, we have warrants, and I had a warrant at the time, so I had to leave because they started running everybody's name. And so either I go to jail or I can have my stuff. I had to leave my boyfriend to clean up everything with the volunteers. And it's not right that they do that when they know we're all in a vulnerable situation. So what are they gonna [do], cycle us in and outta jail? And then we end up back on the street when we come out. There's nowhere for us to go when we come outta jail. And even the shelters [are] packed.

And they're gonna open up the shelter again, by the RMV. But that's only temporary. I go to the Supportive Housing and Services meeting with the city every month. And they were talking about it—they have three months that they closed down and they have more trouble closing down and opening up than they would if they just were able to keep it open year round. And they can't do it because of the state. So it’s not like the city wants—like, I can see both sides. ‘Cause I'm in these meetings with these people and they do seem genuine with their empathy. But we can't wait years for these places to be built. You know, the day center that's supposed to be open? You know it was supposed to be built what, like three years now? And the tiny house thing. That's insane what they're trying to do for that. It's not like real tiny houses. They're like apartments. Which, that's great. But we came back with a proposal to the city for a sanctioned encampment. I worked with Etel [Haxhiaj] and Thu Nguyen on this. And I created a proposal and I presented [it] to the city manager and he was like, oh, it's great, but we can't do it 'cause we need a provider and we won't get one. 

A provider would be a property owner? 

Like Open Sky or SMOC. But why do we need that when we can outsource all the services? Do you know what I mean? I created a 40-page proposal on this. I worked so hard and it’s for them to just shut it down. I reached out to Open Sky. The president of Open Sky goes to those meetings, so I know him and I emailed him and he's like, “I'm gonna refer you to these people,” like somebody that works under him. And they never got back to me. So it’s a dead end and I don't know what to do. 

I rewatched the video of you speaking in front of city council and I was struck that you had to say “as fellow humans,” and I’m wondering how you were feeling when you had to stand up there and remind them of your humanity. 

It sucks because we shouldn't have to. Recently my backpack was stolen and it had all my school stuff in it. It had my wallet in it. So I called the police. They told me they were not gonna send an officer to take my report. And this was in Worcester. And then over in Shrewsbury, we had our stuff went through and somebody stole some stuff. We don't even know what was stolen. And we know a backpack went missing, but nothing really of importance. And the cops came, they went to Shaw's, they reviewed the cameras, they treated us like human beings. So when we were packing up all our stuff in Shrewsbury, I was like, thank you for treating us like humans. And they go, but you are. So it’s such a contrast when we have to deal with Worcester [compared] to the town. 

That's a really interesting thing to hear you say, because one of the bad faith narratives that I hear come up in Worcester is that unhoused people are being “sent by the towns.”

No. So one thing that I can say is people go to detox and they get left out here. So that does happen. But they're not being sent by towns to come stay in Worcester. 'Cause I know myself, when they came and they asked me, I'm like, I grew up in Oxford and I came out here and then I became homeless. It’s not like I came out here to be homeless. There's not this array of services that they can't offer me in other towns. I can get those services in towns. You know, there's probably shorter waiting lists in the towns. And they treat us better. They don't have a task force specifically for this. I understand that there's more of a homeless problem in Worcester, but they just need to learn how to deal with it better, I think.

Yeah. I wanted to ask what you think the city should be doing or have done already to prepare for the winter?

I mean, it's great that they're opening up the shelter again. And that it's not like Hotel Grace was where it's only [when it’s] 32 degrees or lower. That was absolutely atrocious 'cause it was cold even if it's 33 degrees. They should be looking at more non-congregate shelter options. And I know that it takes the attorneys and the funding and all that stuff. But why is it multiple years of these projects that can't get pushed through? There should be somebody focused on just that. Maybe having a specific group of people or a specific person focused on just that job. Because it's a huge problem. It's just getting worse. 

I went into Union Station the other day and it's like a shelter right now. It's terrible. I can't even use the bathroom. I went into the women's room and there's like three stalls. You got people hanging laundry up in there. There's like 15 people in the bathroom. I'm like, this is insane. And then the men's room, there's only one stall. So you got people who are just sitting there waiting to use the bathroom for like, god knows how long. And then, you know, you got people getting high in there. 

Have you had to spend time in any of the congregate shelters? 

No, I won't.

Can you tell me why?

I just hear terrible, terrible things. I know people who are there and they talk about the staff, how they take advantage of the clients, how they treat them. Like it's a prison. It's not—you go there on your own choice. Why are you being treated like that? And then you got the male clients that are trying to sleep with the female clients. I know people who have been there for years.

I understand you're part of HALO Worcester and I would love to hear more about the organization.

Right now I'm in school, so it's kinda hard. But so I started a nonprofit last year in September. Have you ever heard of VANDU?

No.

So in the 90s there was a surge of AIDS and an opiate epidemic in Vancouver. So they created the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users, which was where I got the idea for HALO. It's a book called Fighting for Space. And what they did was they got all these drug addicts and homeless people together and they advocated for themselves. So that's where I got the idea for HALO and trying to advocate for ourselves 'cause that's what we need to do. Nobody's gonna do it for us. And we're the only people that know what we need 'cause people can tell us what we need and tell us how to do it, but we know better. It's just like when people go into recovery, it's better hearing it from somebody that's an addict or in recovery themselves. Lived experience.

Yeah. I understand HALO is doing harm reduction. Can you explain what that means?

I guess meeting people where they're at and helping them to move forward. Harm reduction gets a bad name, like enabling people, but people are gonna use, and it's better to make them safer. So our fiscal sponsor, what they do is every Monday they go to the Walmart area and Main South and they hand out syringes, the Narcan, food, clothes, whatever donations we can get. We're kind of in the same situation where we're not gonna tell you you have to stop using. It's up to you, you know? For myself, I started HALO using, and it gave me a purpose. When you find your purpose, you find your reason to stay off of whatever it is, you know what I mean? It's more powerful that way. So we're not gonna tell you you have to be clean.

That makes a lot of sense. You were saying that sometimes people try to tell you what you need. What do people get wrong?

“Oh, just go to the shelter.” That's the biggest one I hear. “Oh, why don't you go to the shelter?” Shrewsbury cops asked, “Why don't you go to the shelter?” And it's just not a good place. And even if I went there, what's gonna happen? I'm just gonna be stuck in a shelter. I don't have an income. I mean, I get welfare and that's not enough. I'm going to school and I'm waiting for disability. And then once I'm done with school, I won't need it. My mom [and I] talked about it, using the system for what it's intended for, so that way I can get by. But yeah, that's the biggest thing everybody tells me is, “Go to the shelter.” “You just need to get clean.” “Go to the shelter. You'll be alright.”

“Just get clean” seems like a real understatement.

“Just go to detox.” It might seem like that to some people, but if you've never experienced it yourself, you'll never know what it's like to have to think about these things. 'Cause sometimes it's do or die. I couldn't go to detox, I had to get on the clinic. I was clean for a year and a half on the clinic, and I would go to detox and I would just leave three days later. So I couldn't do detox. I was in programs as a kid, so it reminds me of the programs, then I know I can just leave. So I leave. And I did way better on the clinic. When people tell you what you have to do, it's like you don't wanna do it. And then, you know, you get defiant. And even as an adult, like people don't wanna be told what to do.

Not even children like to be told what to do! Literally no one likes that. Can you tell me what you're studying in college and what you're working toward? 

Engineering. 

What do you want to do with the degree?

I wanted to do oil, originally, civil and environmental. But it's so much math. 

I might switch to electrical engineering because it's a lot less math. It's still math, but it's a lot less. And I've been looking at jobs like SpaceX and Tesla, because it's at least a hundred thousand dollars a year. I wanna get a masters.

Is there anything else about your life or your advocacy or your nonprofit that you'd like to share?

We're people. We deserve the same that everybody else gets,  the same respect. We don't deserve to be dehumanized. I've held a sign for a long time and people just look at you on the side of the road like you're scum. And it sucks. You know, you get those nice people that really make your day. But people just need to understand we're people too.

What do you think leads people to have such a strong negative reaction to another person in distress? 

I don't know, because I've had that feeling too. I've been in that situation where you think they're making bad choices, so they're just a bad person. But you don't know. Until I was in this situation, I really couldn't empathize with people who didn't have their shit together. And now it's like rock bottom has been here for a while. 

I tend to wonder, if I'm driving down the road and I see someone holding a sign, maybe I start to think that could be me and that idea freaks me out. Or people start to think, wow, it's not fair and bad luck could have brought me to that position instead of this position.

A lot of people don't realize. I wasn't always housed, I had places to stay, but I wasn't always on the street either. So when I finally was on the street on the street and I had nowhere else to go, all my options were run out. I never would've thought that that would've happened to me. I guess I took it for granted, you know? And I came from a nice family. My parents took very good care of me. It's not like I had a very bad childhood. And so it can happen to anybody. And especially today, it's like one paycheck, you know? You lose your job, get in a car accident, anything. 

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This month’s interviewee is Gretchen Felker-Martin, Worcester-based author of brutal, inventive, deeply moving novels.

Manhunt (2022) presents a post-apocalyptic New England teeming with feral men, whose testosterone has turned them into rapacious beasts. The central characters, trans women Beth and Fran, must hunt the man-monsters, seek community, and fight a TERF take-over to survive. Reading the book had me curled up on the couch like a terrified shrimp (and laughing aloud at a JK Rowling cameo). 

Cuckoo (2024) combines the stomach-turning monstrosity of conversion camps for queer and trans youth with actual stomach-turning monstrosity. It’s one of the most viscerally upsetting books I’ve read, and one of the most beautiful. 

(As always, I’ve lightly edited this interview for ease of reading and to hide how inarticulate I am when nervous.) 

Liz: Worcester gets a cameo in Manhunt. How else the city has influenced your writing?

Gretchen: Well, I've lived here since 2007, so it's been the backdrop to my life for about half of it at this point. I love Worcester. I think about it all the time when I sit down to write fiction. I would say that this landscape is one of the closest to my thoughts in my heart. I actually have a book that's set in Worcester coming out in a couple years.

Have you been public at all about what that book is about? 

So it won't be out until the earliest 2026, but it's called “Mommy” and it's about a relationship between a young sex worker and her much older girlfriend.

And this is also going to scare the hell out of me?

I hope so.

In a piece in TIME, you wrote about why we watch and read stuff about violence and death. You write, “Our body needs these vicarious violent delights in order to process real ones the same way some birds swallow stones to help them digest tough grains and fruits.” That's really beautiful. Has spending time with violence and death in imagination changed your relationship with real mortality?

Yeah, absolutely. I became a really hardcore horror person after my grandfather passed away. We were very close. It was really rough on me, and I found that the only thing that really helped was experiencing extremity through film and books and television. And that was a really transformative couple of years for me. And since then, it's affected my sense of morality, my values, my aesthetic sensibilities, and taste. I would say it's had a very comprehensive impact on me.

Does that extremity extend to other genres? Or is this horror specific?

Well, I think once you get into horror, you discover that the genre is very porous and that it inflects a lot of other great art. The example that I usually go to is the Coen brothers’ Barton Fink movie where Nazi-sympathizing serial killer burns down a hotel while gruesomely murdering a bunch of people and dumping a woman's bloody carcass in bed with his friend. And you would seldom see this classified as horror, probably never. But to me that seems unarguable. Where else would those things happen? So I think horror inflects most great art.

I'm curious to get your thoughts on representation and the demands that an interest in representation puts on authors. Seeing ourselves reflected in art is a basic human thing, I would argue, but I observe a trend where people are wanting the trans character or the queer character, whatever category, to have an unblemished soul and a frictionless existence. Do you feel that? Are you aware of this demand and do you give it any thought whatsoever?

I'm definitely intimately aware of this trend among fiction readers and to some extent professionals in the publishing industry. And fortunately enough, my editor cares about it about as little as I do. I'm not interested in reading or writing pamphlets about “it's normal to have two mommies” or whatever. I'm gay, I know all that. The people that I'm writing for know all that. They don't need to be told, they don't need their hands held, and I'm uninterested in doing it for anyone who doesn't because they're not going to like my stuff anyway. 

I also find characters without interior conflict or serious flaws to be really uninteresting. You know, my favorite books are like The Name of the Rose, where the sweet ingenue monk novice character gets a woman killed by waffling back and forth about what he should say about their night together. Or Perfume, which is famously about a remorseless serial killer.

I think that all of the great characters of literature are seriously flawed, difficult people, because when it comes right down to it, every human being has serious difficult flaws. That's what I'm interested in writing about. And I do think that it's moving and powerful to see yourself on the page and on the screen, but I also think that as adults, we place too much weight there. And then too much weight again on this being an empowering experience or an uplifting experience. And we create this trap for artists and audiences where everyone is continually kind of in a big circle of gentle hugs.

Your novels do not offer us a gentle hug. [But] both of your books offer really beautiful depictions of community, and Cuckoo really nails the creepiness of the nuclear family as an organizing, mandatory structure for society. And I'm curious, would you ever write a book about a single protagonist, or is that just not the project for you?

My third story, my novella Black Flame, is actually about a single protagonist.

Did that feel like a very different process for you?

Absolutely. It was a big change. And it was a challenge, but I'm very glad I took it on and I think I will do it again in the future. The chance to be so comprehensive about one person and to have this whole event pass through the filter of their fictional personality was really cool. I very much enjoyed it and got a lot out of it.

I'm curious if you ever gross yourself out while writing. Like, do you ever need to go take a deep breath and drink some ginger ale?

Yeah, absolutely. A lot of the things that I find repulsive come my own experiences, especially my experience with body dysmorphic disorder, which is an OCD family disorder that causes you to become fixated on real or imagined imperfections in your body to the extent that you can start hallucinating about them. So you'll imagine that your body is rotting and you'll actually start to smell it or you'll see a blemish and you'll start to interpret it as like an open sore or some sort of necrotic thing. So a lot of the time when I'm writing, I'm putting those experiences on the page, and that can be satisfying, but it can also be aggravating and activating too. And sometimes I do need to step away for a minute and, you know, go dunk my head in some ice water.

Yeah, I've admired your book's depiction of all of the creepy, nasty stuff that can happen in nature. I'm curious if you are into nature documentaries, science journalism… Where are you getting these images and this knowledge of what's possible?

I'm very much into nature and science. I think that in order to be any kind of author worth reading, you have to be passionate about a lot of things. And nature is one of mine along with film and comics and history. So I do watch a lot of documentaries. I do read a lot of science journalists. I'm friends with Asher Elbein who writes for the Washington Post and all sorts of publications. He has a wonderful newsletter called “Heat Death” where he talks about climate and ecology and the animal kingdom and paleontology in a way that I find incredibly engaging. And I've always been fascinated by animals and plants and biomes. Some of my favorite childhood memories are hunting for snakes and frogs in the woods, or just walking around, turning rocks over and seeing what I'd find. I've always loved ponds and pools. I love to sit next to them, look into them, and watch these little worlds unfolding in front of you. I think that nature is really bottomless in terms of what it can give you both an aesthetic experience and as an education about the nature of the world.

I want to know if you would diagnose what's wrong with my brain that I am absolutely unable to watch even the mildest horror movie.

You know, I think for some people it's as simple and as difficult to dissect as why some people like rollercoasters and some don't. I can't stand them. You couldn't cattle prod me onto one. I find them very upsetting and unpleasant. I don't know why, probably something to do with the fact that I'm not great about heights, but I love horror movies. I love to be terrified out of my mind. If I can find something that actually scares me, that's a great day. So I don't know why it works for some people only in the written word or only visually. Probably quirks of neurochemistry that we will never unravel.

You just said something about it being difficult to find something that actually scares you. Have you found anything recently that has actually scared you?

Let me see. I recently watched The Devil's Bath. I don't know if I would say that it scared me, but it did appall me and make me feel just absolutely nauseous, terrible. It's about the historical practice of a sort of a form of suicide by proxy among medieval women where they would kill a child and then immediately confess to local authorities so that they could be absolved before being hanged. And they would only do this if they were uncontrollably suicidal. Because of course, if you commit suicide under Catholic law, you go immediately to hell. So you're creating this emotional landscape where the only way out for these women is to do something really unimaginably awful. And it's about a woman who lives this way and how desperately she tries to do anything else before finally getting shunted into this miserable final option. And it's like watching an ultra slow motion car crash. It's so sad. It's so ugly, it's so repellent. It was a really incredible film.

That sounds like a hard watch.

It was, but I think we live in a world where hatred and antipathy towards children and denial of difficulty with mental health. Those are both very prevalent forces. I think it's a really timely film in spite of being about and really calibrated to the beliefs and morals of the 16th century.

I'm wondering about your Patreon, Deadlights Theater, and I know that you're bringing people together around film on Discord. Is that a complement to in-person independent theater like Worcester Cinema? Is it doing some whole other different thing?

Yeah. It's solely online on Discord. I stream movies on there which has been a really wonderful experience. I wish that we had some kind of in-person element, but it's just not practical. 

Is that open for folks to join?

Yes, it is.

And is it horror-focused or all different films?

I would say that it's probably 60-40 horror to non-horror. We watch a lot of classic film as well. We're in the middle of a Hitchcock month right now. And next month is found footage horror for Halloween. And then we have a Halloween Day marathon of cursed places.

Do you have anything else going on that you want to talk about?

I think the next thing I've got coming up is my next book, my novela Black Flame, which is about a really severely repressed Jewish lesbian who works at a film archive. And she's given the job of restoring a recently discovered print of a Jewish exploitation film that was thought to have been destroyed during the Holocaust. And as she spends more and more time with it, she becomes less and less able to distinguish between the world that it presents of black magic and orgiastic sex and intentional depravity and the world around her.

Black Flame comes out in spring 2025 from Tor Nightfire. You can pre-order it here.

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I’ve lightly edited and condensed the following conversation for clarity. If you have someone in mind for a future interview, let us know at billshaner@substack.com.

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Liz: I’d like to start by asking if you can just introduce yourself.

Maria: My name is Maria Ravelli and I am an organizer for Worcester Community Fridges.

Great. Can you share how long the fridges have been in operation and the basics for someone who isn't familiar? 

So, the first community fridge in Worcester was opened in January 2021. And it was opened outside of Fantastic Pizza in the Main South neighborhood. And the entire concept around community fridges is just an open access food-sharing hub, basically, where neighbors can interact with it by sharing food, receiving food. It's definitely grown a lot since the first fridge started. Right now in Worcester we have five community fridges. All of them are open 24/7 and open for anybody to give what they need and take what they can.

That's awesome. When we talk about the fridges, we're talking about mutual aid, and I don't think a lot of people know what that means or how it's different from charity. Can you explain that?

Yeah. So mutual aid is, to put it kind of lightly, just basically taking care of each other and resource sharing. When we think about a charitable model, there's a very clear line between the giver and the receiver and in mutual aid, and with the fridges specifically, we really organize with the intention of blurring those lines, right? So you are somebody that can both give to the fridge and take from the fridge at any time. And one of our bigger guiding principles that we really root this work in is encouraging everybody to give with care and give with love, with the understanding that at any moment we can also be dependent on these systems of care in our community. 

I know you're out tabling in the community a lot. When you say that at any minute, you could be the one who's hungry, who's needing some food, do people have a strong reaction to that? 

Yeah, I mean, there's definitely a specific demographic of person that has a really big reaction, like white older men. [They] tend to be like, “Whoa, what do you mean?” But one of the shocks to me is there is so much food waste that happens that there is enough food to supply everybody, regardless of your financial situation. Like, I'm somebody that I consider myself pretty food secure right now, kind of depending on the week, but for the most part, we're pretty food secure in our family. But when I go and do a food rescue and you are staring at three pallets’ worth of food that you would otherwise have to spend energy to go to the grocery store and buy, I am 100% also putting food in my fridge that I'm picking up.

And that's such a stigma that we have to unlearn within ourselves, right? Really encouraging people to understand like, this isn't about [a] financial demographic that you're meeting. There is so much food waste and we need to be moving this food in our community. There is the demographic of person that I talk to that are like, “No, that food is just for poor people.” And it's like, no. Like these are the Ben and Jerry eggs or whatever they're called. Like, this is $10 at Whole Foods. Just take a dozen, please, sir. 

That's really funny. Yeah, this brings to mind a week that sweet potatoes like happened and I opened the fridge door on Brooks Street and it was just all sweet potatoes. The entire fridge. 

So that was cool. That was from Mustard Seed on Piedmont Street. We encourage people, the day-to-day neighbor, to bring food when they can, if they have extras or if they're cooking a batch of something. We organize consistent food rescues. And then we also have last-minute food rescues where folks like Mustard Seed will call us and say, “We have 10 pallets of sweet potatoes. Can you help us out here?” And then we just get to work, we organize neighbors on our Discord. We put calls out to action on social media. We stop by the fridges. And if folks are like, “Where are these sweet potatoes?” We're like, “Do you have a car? Do you have time?” 

I don't know why, but the idea of an urgent need being around a very large quantity of one specific food always makes me laugh a little. Like, “listen, we've got a sweet potato problem.”

Sweet potato 911! One of the first bigger food rescues that we did—and this was before we had any formal partnership—the Walmart in Leicester called us and they were like, we have so many pallets’ worth of broccoli and pineapple. And this is when we had maybe five people engaged in this work. So we were like, all right, everybody, boots on the ground. Like, let's go [laughs]. And we went to this Walmart all in our little cars like this pulled up and my mom has a bigger car. And I remember her pulling up and she was like, she calls me Fern. And she's like, “Ay, Ferni, what have you gotten yourself into?” I filled her SUV with just broccoli. And I was like, “No questions, Mom, please.” 

So in the Worcester Community Food Assessment, they found that half of the survey respondents were aware of the community fridges—I'm quoting from when Bill wrote about this—and about 25% have used them, and that was actually higher than some state and federal programs. How would you account for that success?

Ooh, that's such a big question. We've looked at the assessment and I think that those numbers make sense. I think for the most part, we're all very conditioned to interact with food pantries, right? Or to interact with these more charitable models of moving food, [so] there's a lot of hesitancy about engaging in just, you know, getting handed food by your neighbor in this really kind of informal way. And there's a lot of relationship building there in that. It's vulnerable, right? It's really vulnerable work for a lot of people.

So I was personally surprised with that number 'cause I would've thought that it was higher. Honestly, just being at the fridges as much as I am and having conversations when we're tabling, people that come and they're like, “Oh yeah, I've heard of this before.”

But I think it's beautiful. I think it shows how much energy has been put into building this project for the last four years, that it's making an impact enough that the Worcester County Food Bank is putting this in their little assessment. 

Well, I was wondering when I saw that number, I was thinking this kind of has to be word of mouth, you know? I know that you guys are out in the community and tabling, but like, this is not a state program. Nobody's getting a letter from the state saying you should go to a community fridge. And I imagine that a non-stigmatizing form of food assistance is going to do better word of mouth than say, you know, a food bank where you're lining up for two hours and you're showing ID or whatever those situations are.

Yeah. Absolutely. One of the other ways that we get the word out about the fridges is we'll go to places where we know that folks are gathering and needing food. You know, when the winter shelters are active, whenever we have an abundance of anything or just something that I know folks will enjoy when they're hanging outside, I'll just pull up and I'll talk to people and I'll share food that way. So word of mouth definitely is big. And I think there's something that feels less intimidating, right? When a neighbor is coming and just saying like, “Hey, I got a bunch of ice cream. Does anybody want some?” And you're sitting there with them eating ice cream with them and just chatting about anything, right? Like, nothing that has to do with resources. Just like, how are you holding up? Just like a genuine check-in. That's going to encourage people to feel safer, hopefully. That's the hope, to feel safer to come to the fridge and knowing that there's no judgment, knowing there's no camera, knowing that there's little to no barriers to them just getting a snack.

Yeah. That sounds so normal. And at the same time, I think it's highly abnormal that someone would, say, encounter people who are unhoused and treat them as neighbors or interact with them as human beings.

For sure. And I think there's definitely a lot of unlearning that happens, right? When you're engaged in mutual aid work in general, but just when you're engaged in community work. It's like we really have to be mindful that these are our neighbors and all of our struggles are interconnected. All of our joys are interconnected, right? So whether we have disputes or whatever it is with these people, like, we have to live with these people, right? And that's really vulnerable work. 

So every time I've been at a fridge, somebody has said something to me like, “I'm just worried that someone's gonna take more than their fair share” or like, “Oh, I'll take eggs, but you know, some people take all the eggs,” or like, “Some people don't even need what they're taking.” I mean, every single time I get chatting! I would love advice for how to handle that conversation in a productive way that isn't like, “Well, you should know that's a myth.” How do we help people let go of that fear? 

I think the unfortunate reality is that's internal work that they are eventually going to have to face, right? And some people get the opportunity in their lifetime to really sit with themselves and be like, “Whew, okay, I need to reflect on why I am the way I am.” And some people unfortunately don't. But the language that we tend to use around that—I always come from a place of curiosity, right? So like, “Oh, I wonder if that person was planning on bringing it to some of their neighbors,” or “I wonder if that person is only able to come to this fridge once or twice a month and they're just kind of grabbing what they need for their family.” Like, I wonder what else can be true about what you saw. 

And what I always find really interesting about the way that people speak, because language obviously, you know, it tells you so much about a person, is that they see their interactions at the fridge as what the fridge must always be like. So what I say to people is like, come more, get more engaged into it so you can really see the beauty of it. And if you're somebody that has time, capacity, a vehicle, and you're feeling like you want first dibs, we have food rescues that need picked up, so join our work. And you take what you need to take too, and then you bring the rest to the fridge. Like, there's so much abundance in our community. You just need to experience firsthand what abundance in your community feels like. And you're only going to get that by engaging.

Yeah, that's really true. Can you talk a little bit more about the abundance of food in the community? I think we have an idea that hunger exists because there is a shortage of food and that's not true, is it?

I mean, we're all barely surviving under capitalism, right? It's a manmade issue. It's very easy if we had leaders that had political will to solve this. By addressing the housing crisis, by addressing inequitable wages. It’s a systemic issue. And we're all aware of that, and that's why it's not sustainable. Like the fridges are not the way that they're organizing now as this emergency response. It's not a sustainable way of organizing in the same way that food pantries are not sustainable. The only sustainable way that's gonna really uplift our community is, you know, solving these greater issues. And in order to do that, you really need to sit with the understanding that so many of our problems stem from white supremacy and capitalism and the patriarchy as a whole.

Those are such difficult conversations to have with people like Moe Bergman who have no idea when you say those words, no idea what you're talking about [laughs]. 

I'm curious when you say a food pantry is not sustainable, what do you mean by that?

We have incredible food pantries in our city and they are busting their butts. They are writing grants. They have folks that are there volunteering their time. If you talk to any food pantry executive director, they are barely making ends meet, right? Because they’re so dependent on grants, the nonprofit complex as a whole is really interesting to look at. But when you look at how it is affecting our community, like the actual people that are doing this kind of day-to-day organizing work, it's not sustainable for any of us. But that's how the system is systeming. That's us people that are called to do this work, like, I will do this for my community and we do this work for five years and then we're burnt out and we never want to look at a community fridge again, right?

And then it's the next group of people [who] come and do it. It's not about, like, we need to increase funding for food pantries. It's like, no, we need to dismantle white supremacy or really start reflecting on how that affects our communities. Truly. 'cause that word is so big, but it's such an umbrella term for everything that we're facing right now. But I think the first step is just being able to say that thing out loud in spaces where decisions are made.

Yeah. I'm imagining not every reader of this interview is going to see the connection between white supremacy—I'm with you, but can you connect those dots?

Yeah. So predating colonialism… [laughs]. When communities were abundant and food sharing was normal and folks lived so dependent and connected on each other, right? And then now we're living in this post-colonial world where everybody has this settler mentality of like, it is me in my family behind my house, and the food that I have is in my fridge. And that's for my family. We have completely become detached from our communities in a way that is not healthy, in a way that's not sustainable. And everything is connected, right? So when we think about mental illness and how many people that are experiencing mental illness don't have the support of their communities, and don't have sustainable housing options. Like everything is so connected to each other. And food insecurity is just kind of one of those symptoms of that.

I've noticed the semantic shift from hunger to food insecurity, and I noticed you used that term. I'm curious what the difference is for you. I feel like I'm gonna have a learning moment here.

Food insecurity. I don't know. I use the word food insecurity just ‘cause I personally don't have better language for it. But I really wanna encourage people to realize that food insecurity is such a spectrum. And food insecurity doesn't mean you open your fridge and there is literally nothing. Food insecurity can look like you don't have access to the right dietary options that you need. Food insecurity can look like “I don't have time to cook the meals that I wanna cook for my family.” Food insecurity can look like “I don't have access to like, culturally relevant food for my family.” It could look like “It's Friday and I have no energy or time to cook, but I also have no money to order takeout.” There's sometimes where I go to the grocery store and I have to be extra mindful, like, “Okay, I cannot spend over this amount of money 'cause I also need to pay my water bill.” Food insecurity looks so different for everyone. But I know that whether you know it or not, at some point in your life, if you are somebody that's living in this country, you have experienced food insecurity at some point in some space on that spectrum. 

Okay! I'm persuaded that is a better term for the spectrum you're describing than saying hunger. You won me over. 

I don't know if this is super connected but food brings us so much joy, right? It's that chronic stress of like, what's my next meal? Do I have the ingredients? Do I need to stop at a store? Do I have enough leftovers to last me for lunch and dinner tomorrow? Like, that constant thinking about what is my plan for food. That's a chronic thing for a lot of people. So it might not look like I'm opening my fridge and there's nothing, but it's that extra mindfulness of like, okay, I need to make sure that this food can last me until Friday. 

Related to food bringing us joy and being part of our cultures, one thing that I noticed is that people project a lot when it comes to food. When the [Worcester Community Fridges] Facebook group was still active, there was definitely a type of participant who would be like, “We really need to be giving everyone a bouquet of raw, organic kale and that is what everyone should want out of this fridge. And if you're donating popsicles, you are a bad actor in this space.”

Yeah. In the same way that when you're grocery shopping for yourself, nobody wants to just have a fridge full of kale. You can't make a dinner out of that, right? I think it was like two years ago we started the CSA fundraiser and it's been great. And we worked with a bunch of different farms and we really hustled to fundraise 'cause we were like, everybody is going to want summer, fresh, beautiful produce. And that was true. And the amount of food, the amount of just like leafy veggies that I just saw wilt in the fridge that summer, I was like, okay, maybe folks don't want just kale.

So everything is about balance. And the folks that do the food rescues are very good about knowing what food is kind of more requested at what fridge. Like Union Hill serves a humongous population of children. There's always kids riding their bikes. There's kind of like a park down there, Brooks Street as well with Kendrick Field there. So whenever we have popsicles or candy or bags of snacks and chips and stuff we always kind of are mindful to bring it to those fridges. There's just something that's really beautiful about sharing good snacks, right? And sometimes snacks unfortunately is just not vegetables for a lot of people.

And there's also a barrier that I noticed and, and that was something I had to reflect on too after we did that big push for the fundraiser, there is a barrier that comes with having a ton of fresh veggies. Not everybody that comes to the fridges has a kitchen. Not everybody that comes to the fridges has time to research a recipe and to cook food from scratch like that. We have an awesome neighbor—her name is Kate—that sometimes if she sees an abundance of something in the fridge, she'll take it and she'll cook with it.

That's awesome.

She’s a phenomenal chef. So folks are always encouraged to do that. Like, if you go and you see a bunch of kale and you have a really delicious recipe for that, feel free to take it and turn it into something that people will be able to eat right away.

Yeah, I love that. I was really curious when the fridges went from, like, you can't cook and put it in the fridge to sure, yeah, cook something and label it and put it in the fridge. Can you tell me about that transition? 

So that was almost a year worth of us doing… I'm gonna use the term “research” very lightly. It was us putting posts out on social media, us engaging in conversations with neighbors at the fridge, us as you know, a group of organizers, having conversations like, okay, do we have capacity to change this guideline that will inevitably kind of probably make more mess in the fridge? Because there's something just more messy about people opening food to see if it's yummy. I think it was at least nine months of us really thinking about it, moving slow, talking to neighbors right at the fridge. Like, what information do you need to have on a label? What would make food feel safe? Some people said, I wouldn't feel safe at all and that's fine.

But we had more people letting us know that ready-to-eat meals were something that they were looking for. And then sharing with us what information they wanted on those meals so that they felt comfortable taking it from the fridge. So yeah, that changed November 2022, I think. And then from there we were then able to start accepting food from caterers and restaurants. And we have a system now, if folks need labels, we can print and share labels with you. We have access to the label PDF right there if you want to use that. We have access to containers if people wanna hold on to containers. We have all of the resources to make food sharing in our community a little bit easier. But yeah, that was one of the things that I was so excited about 'cause as somebody that loves to cook. Any time I make a bunch of soup, it's like a humongous pot of it and I'm like, now I have somewhere to put it. Which is really beautiful.

If someone is looking to stop by a fridge, what should they know? What are all the ways people can help?

One of the things that we always say with the fridges [is that] it's deeper than food access, it's community building. It's participating in a system of care right in your backyard—so bring any talents, any passion that you have. We have folks that their main way of engaging with the fridges is by sharing their art. It's them decorating the fridge. We have this fantastic videographer, Alex O'Neil, who's working on putting a documentary together. And that's their way of sharing the story of the fridges. If you have time to do a food rescue, you can engage in the work that way. We have somebody that is like, my heart and soul. She lives in Main South and she is just full of life and just an incredibly gifted cleaner. She just is so thorough and she just takes all of the shelves out and she's there with her water and  that's her thing. We'll never say no to ways that people wanna share their time and energy with the fridges. 

Yeah. I'm curious how you've managed to also have your full-time job.

I'm really lucky in that I'm a teacher and a lot of the work that I do in my classroom blends really beautifully with the work that I'm doing in the community. Like in my classroom, that's a reflection of my community as well. So we're having conversations about participating, we're having conversations about power. We're having these really beautiful conversations that make me feel excited to then engage with the work because I'm like, now I have to walk the walk, right? And I'm also a mom. That has been, for me, this internal power source where I'm like, my kid is going to live in a community that feels better and safer than the one that I grew up in. And we're doing that by building a more beautiful community that is safer. So I'm very lucky that all of the different hats that I wear are kind of, you know, all working together.

I don't think it's that you're lucky. I think you're doing the work to make those connections.

Yeah. It's a lot of reflection. There's so much reflection that happens when you're engaged in this work. It's so much like, “Ooh, why am I noticing my shoulders tense when like this specific neighbor is coming by?” “What is going through my mind right now when I'm watching somebody fill their bag after I just put food in there?” “What is my attachment to power where I feel like I need to let that person know that they can only take one dozen eggs?” And a lot of it, from what I've learned, is [to] just sit and be quiet and observe and see what happens.

If you’d like to join Maria and the many others who keep the fridges going, you can learn more about how to participate on their website, which also features an explanation of the project’s values. Or just drop by any of the five fridge locations around the city.

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The subject of this second-ever Worcester Speaks is Jake Dziejma, naturalist program coordinator at the Ecotarium, where he’s a driving force behind the 25-member employee union. They voted (very nearly unanimously!) to join AFSCME Council 93 in July 2021. 

The following interview has been condensed and edited for clarity. If you have ideas about who should appear in this space next, let us know at billshaner@substack.com.

Liz: Could you please introduce yourself to the readers?

Jake Dziejma: My name is Jake. I have lived in or around Worcester my whole life. I love to point out where I was born to all the young people that I work with and they are bored by that. But I like to hike across Worcester. I find urban hiking very fun. And for work, I am a science educator at a museum and I also organize a union there. Not alone, of course, but together we organize the union. 

So I'm curious if you can lay the groundwork for what Ecotarium employees were going through, starting in like 2020 or so—just broad strokes.

Nonprofits are really interesting 'cause I think nonprofits everywhere [are] where like people really, really care about their work. And in nonprofits, people often are taken advantage of in a not-on-purpose way, but in a structural way where people are paid not enough money to do work that is very important, but also very exhausting. 

So we had layoffs at the end of 2018. And in 2019 things had not really been organized or picked up in a way that made a museum work well or made a good working environment. And over time there was talk about things needing to be better and then COVID hit and all the issues that were there only sort of amplified. 

I don't even know where we really started organizing on purpose. I remember we talked to a lot of different union reps or organizers with unions and there was a lot of talk about choosing different unions. And then I feel like momentum just carried us and then that's sort of how we got into the concrete organizing. 

I would love to hear more about the ways that the mission—getting to do something good in the world—is somehow used as a substitute for adequate compensation.

The way that I sort of put it sometimes is like, almost like a weird structural gaslighting sort of situation where you tell people what your job is and they say, “Oh, that must be the best.” “Oh, I would love to do that job.” “Oh, that is so cool.” And it makes you feel like a loser or a stick in the mud or what have you for wanting to have more time off or wanting to be paid enough money to really live your life or live in the city in which you work. I think that having a job that is fun and worthwhile can pay for itself a little bit. Like I don't have to drink myself to death 'cause I'm working some sort of service job where you're treated poorly all day long, but at the same time, we are very skilled workers who deserve compensation. 

That's grim. 

Like, our job is so fun. On Saturday I had to go hide plastic animals 'cause I knew that I would go find 'em later on with teenagers and they would think that they were too old and they actually had a lot of fun. So it's not all grim, but I think that is sort of the undercurrent. It happens in museums, it happens in zoos, it happens in all those jobs where people are like, “That's so fun. I bet I could do that.”

Could they though? It’s also like, it's very hard to find a job—if you have a certain set of politics—that doesn't feel like you're doing harm in the world. And I want to be clear that worrying about that is a sign of a certain amount of economic privilege. Like people who drive the Amazon delivery trucks—I am not like, “How can you work for Amazon?” But for those of us who are in a position to choose a career or choose a job, sometimes you feel really lucky for getting to do something that's not evil.

Yes. It's so funny you say that because a lot of people in my life are often telling me that I should find another job. And a few weeks ago my therapist was like, “Would you consider working for Amazon?” And I was like, “What have you…? We've been talking for years!” But like, I don't know, maybe the grass is greener at a job that I don't care as much about—

Oh my god, I have this thought all the time.

And I also think organizing a union, especially at a place where they actually are really rich and treat you badly would be a lot easier. [At the Ecotarium] now we have this union and people who are elected by the people who work there to be trustworthy and speak truth to power and stick up for them. And then it sort of turned around like, “Well, we don't have enough money to do that. We don't have X, Y, Z to do that.” And it's like, how much of this is true? I'm definitely not trying to slander the institution I work for, but at the same time it's like, well, how can we make it so you can afford to pay your workers enough to live in the city where they work? Because at this point a bunch of my coworkers have to commute from elsewhere and they can't find an apartment to rent in the city.

I have some questions about the interpersonal side of organizing the union. I think we are all really conditioned to want to please authority figures. And in order to organize a union, you kind of have to get over that, right? 

Yeah. That's definitely, definitely true. I think about it a lot—how much speaking truth to power do I get when I know that the CEO sits 25 feet from me at all times? Whereas I think that if I worked at—and this is me postulating—if I worked at Trader Joe's or Starbucks it probably would feel a lot different if I don't see the CEO and who cares if they like me. Whereas it feels like here it still matters a little bit if they like me.

When I was reading about the Ecotarium and the unionization drive, I saw a WBJ headline from 2021 and it reads, “Ecotarium employees vote to unionize, despite museum opposition.” And this cracked me up because it's like, who is “the museum?”

Yes! We are. The trustees are not the museum. If we are not the museum, no one is. And maybe it's the animals. I don't know. Maybe they are 'cause they live there more than we do, but I guess out of things that are a museum, the animals first, then the workers.

I'm wondering about when you and your coworkers were brought to the point of wanting to form a union because you were feeling overwhelmed or under-compensated or both. How do you then do more work to invest in getting over this hurdle to hopefully have a better work environment? 

That's the big question. There's this new thing where people are fighting back against pouring their entire heart and soul into work, which I think is a good move because work is not going to love you back. People need to be spending time with their family and their friends and their hobbies and their things that are not work. But I think that it can swing really hard the other way where people are like, “I don't owe my boss anything.” Which is true, you and your boss are not friends. That is a power dynamic. You don't necessarily owe your workplace anything. You already show up. You're doing a transactional job, but maybe you actually owe things to your coworkers. And maybe you need to either stick your neck out for them or hold hands in such a way that no one has to stick out their neck alone.

It's really hard to sort of be like, “Yes, I know you were at work all day. Come to a union meeting 'cause I'm sure it will be fun and completely different except we'll still be at work and we'll be talking about work.” 

So your thing about sticking your neck out for the sake of your coworker—I find that really moving and I'm curious if that is among certain talking points or certain kinds of rhetoric that you've used. 

I've seen this great quote, it was something like “your union is not like a dues-paying service.” It is a thing that you pay into, but it is ultimately you and your coworkers. It's not a dues-paying service and I don't see your dues. All I get is more work [laughs]. It's hard to be like, yeah, I know you pay for this, but also you have to meet me a little bit more like halfway 'cause I can't do everything. Because there are a lot of people who work here. 

But one thing that we were talking about today as being an issue [and] feels relevant in a nonprofit: I think there are very, very few people who have the same job description as anyone else. So all the educators have a unique job description and position title. Everyone in admin, everyone in grounds. People having different job descriptions from each other I think really sort of pieces people apart in a way that would be different at a grocery store or a factory or whatever. And it makes it hard, I think, to organize in a nonprofit. 'cause everyone's job is just a little bit different. And they also know that if they step away from their responsibilities, there's not a lot of nets to hold them up. 

So like, I'm the one who runs my program. My coworker's the only one who is in charge of her program. So if that stuff doesn't get done, it just doesn't happen at all. And you just can see the hundreds of kids who want to do a Night Journey, like an overnight program, or like, my teenagers who have this experience that they're hoping is a particular way. And if I don't do it, then I may have closed a window for them in that time of their life.

It's a lot of responsibility.

It is. So I think that makes people less likely to either stick their neck out or give themselves more work 'cause they are already stretched so thin. You were asking me about interpersonal things though.

I was asking about what kind of rhetoric you've used to get people to buy in who maybe had some hesitation.

Yeah. It's mostly that sort of like, we can't really do too much to fix things, but they have to listen to us if we're all together. I listen to a lot of Pete Seeger, so I just mostly sound like an old person when I’m like, “Hello, fellow youth!” I look young, however the stress of this is crushing me and I only talk in old man things. Very sorry.

That’s great. And it seems effective.

I mean, enough for us to get a union. We were almost unanimously yes, except for one person. Which is so good. But since then we've had so, so, so much turnover that the original people who voted for it don't even work there anymore. People when they start, they still do seem willing, I think. I've seen the stat elsewhere that like Americans’ perspective on unions is very positive right now, but membership is still so low. So people are interested in joining, but we're still sort of lacking the community I think that good, healthy, productive unions have.

So maybe that's making people meet in person or, I don't quite know because I feel like we're already stretched pretty thin in terms of just keeping the paperwork, which is the worst part of any task. And just making sure we're not violating tax law. But I would love for there to be more of a structure and we're working very slowly on that. But I think four out of the four of us [on the executive board] have never been in a union before so it's a lot of building the bicycle while we're riding it.

So when you four, and perhaps more people, were talking with union reps, what were those conversations like and what were you trying to learn?

Oh, good question. I remember at this point, it was a long time ago, but I remember it was like 2020, 2021. So we were not meeting inside. We went to the Tivnan ball field and stood in the parking lot for a long time until it got dark and cold. Because at that point you can't bring an organizer to your workplace. I think? I forget. We were trying to get a sense of which union to pick and I don't know, I think we made an okay choice in some ways and in other ways AFSCME is very much the state employees’ sort of thing. So like, we don't have the state benefits. So in some ways I think we have sort of missed out on certain structures or certain skills that I think other private unions might have. But the individuals, why them? The individuals we worked on have been great. 

There's a union that has a lot of museums, it's like museum professionals or something. And I didn't get a great sense of what they were like. And my grandfather was a Teamster and he is still like a Teamster retiree. So I was like, yeah, Teamsters! But I think that they would've knocked everybody's socks off. Like I think that maybe they were too aggressive. Or we could have been sitting pretty right now, who knows? 

But as we were learning with the [Worcester Commenter’s Union] book club, Worcester does not have a strong union presence in a lot of ways, or a strong history. I guess that's terrible to say 'cause we know the St. Vincent’s nurses have won big and have been very strong. So I guess if I say that, maybe it snowballs the argument that Worcester's not a strong union town, which it can be. Maybe we just have to say it more and show it to each other more. I don't know.

Well, it was interesting in the first meeting of the book club, that assumption was supported by the text. And then someone spoke up and was like, “I'm a union carpenter, and we're doing great.” It’s like, oh, maybe we just have a very defeatist Worcester narrative?

Yeah. One of my coworkers was a union carpenter and now he works here and I think emotionally the job is a bit better, but he's like, “in our union it was super strong.” And I was like, yeah, I bet people showed up at meetings. Yeah, I bet people were banding together in a way that allowed them to be strong. But we can't put the cart before the horse here. 

Do people have maybe outsized expectations? Like a flip is switched: “Okay, we unionized, everything's gonna change.” 

It’s hard to sell people more work. Because you're like, yeah, vote yes. Like yeah, vote union. There's protection, there's safety, blah blah blah. And then we can have a lot more meetings and we can do a lot more work and maybe things will get a little bit better very slowly over time. But someday it'll be really cool. Which I think for some people who work in a museum, who see how long history is, that can be okay.

Can you tell me some of the things that you're hoping the union will improve for you all?

In a perfect world we have a lot more strength in community and when we say things are a problem, we are listened to.

We recently had a meeting where I was trying to inspire some sort of workplace action to get people to band together. I had just finished steward training and I read a lot of Labor Notes and I was like, okay, we're gonna try to find a workplace action. We need to find an issue that is deeply felt and universal and not contentious. So I was like, I know what we'll do. We will use sticky notes. We made a board and it was like, what is the biggest problem for your job for yourself? Something that's a major issue for your department. And then things that you see overall at the institution. And I was like, this is genius. We will write these down and then we'll know exactly what we need to do. But all the issues were like, understaffing. And I was like, ooh, that's a little bit harder to plan a workplace action around. It's just we don't have enough people here. Is there this somewhat misplaced expectation that we can just like, fix that overnight? Because that's not something that we can fix overnight. 

What other things do I hope will be better? I want people to feel more comfortable saying no to things that their manager asks them to do. We have been working a lot on boundaries and setting specific actionable boundaries because in nonprofit worlds it feels like you just have to give and give and give and like, how do we help people set boundaries? Like, how do you set this boundary of like, I can work one evening per week, or if I do this and this, then I need to get this day off, or something like that. [That] is sort of a gender thing where like women feel like they have to give and give and give. And nonprofits are made up of a lot of women. 

Caring work.

Caring work, absolutely.

Which is not maybe how you would describe your job, but I think inspiring young people falls under that umbrella. 

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Absolutely. 

I’m hearing about work that you're doing with your coworkers and it sounds a little bit like therapy. Does that ring true for you?

Yes, yes it does. I think a lot of the people who I work with do go to therapy and I think that it has unleashed this muscle within them where they will talk and talk and talk and talk and talk. And I'm like, I don't wanna silence you. This feels like a bad gender experience to be like, please stop talking about your feelings. We're working on coaching people: When you're meeting with your manager or your manager's manager about workplace problems, do not talk about your feelings. Talk about them as objective. Sometimes the issue is that your feelings are hurt and your feelings shouldn't be hurt at work, but how do we use brief facts and brief experiences to build a case for something? It feels bad to be like, “yeah, don't talk about your feelings,” but sometimes that's it. 

As someone who sends their kids to camp at the Ecotarium, I am struck hearing everything you're saying about staffing. And I'm like, wow, if more people worked there, it would be better for the whole community. And that strikes me as a very practical argument, not a feelings-based argument.

Absolutely. There are so many things that staff want to do that would objectively just make the museum experience better for everyone. None of the things that we are asking for are things that would make anyone's museum experience worse in any way. Like, we want coworkers that speak Spanish because none of us speak Spanish well enough to interact with the visitors. We want better captions in the planetarium. 

Also, we want enough pay that we can not be stressed, because I have coworkers who have other jobs so that they can afford their apartment. But one full-time job should be enough.

Know someone we should interview for Worcester Speaks?, let us know at billshaner@substack.com.

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It’s been four years, and Worcester Sucks is finally ready to tackle the second half of its title! I’m kidding—Bill’s tireless efforts to investigate Worcester’s sundry failings are of course a labor of love. But responding to recent events doesn’t always leave time to appreciate the people working to make Worcester the place you know and love. Here you’ll find the first in a series of interviews with notable Worcesterites. The goal isn’t to promote upcoming events or offer yet another platform for the powerful, but to have substantive conversations with people who think seriously about the city and, in various ways, invest in its success. 

Our inaugural interviewee, Jennifer Gaskin, was generous with her time and candor. I’ve condensed and lightly edited a long, in-depth conversation for clarity. If you know someone who ought to appear in this space in the future, send us an email at billshaner@substack.com with the subject line “Worcester Speaks.” 

Liz: Where might people in Worcester know you from? 

Jennifer Gaskin: So most people know me from being the founder and president of the Worcester Caribbean American Carnival Association, which I started in 2012 with my husband. Both of our families are from the Caribbean, my husband from Trinidad, my family from Grenada. We participated for many, many years in the Boston Caribbean Carnival and when we moved out here to Worcester we realized that there was a Caribbean community out here, but we weren't really being represented or seen. I think it culminated with my daughter. I think she was in like first grade at Greenwood Elementary School. And she had said to her friends that she was going to Trinidad for school vacation, and she said nobody knew what Trinidad was.

And I understand you're also an admin of the Mutual Aid Worcester Group?

I am. I started moderating in 2020, the first year that the mutual aid group started. And it's actually been a really amazing experience, just really being able to witness the community show up for each other. 'Cause that's really all mutual aid is—it's “I have something that you may need,” and standing up for each other as a community. And it's also given me visibility into a lot of stuff that's going on in the community that I otherwise wouldn't necessarily be aware of because I'm not connected to those different aspects of the community. And it's actually made me, in my mind, a better member of the community and more aware and more empathetic.

I think, you know, one of the things that really came out in Mass during the pandemic was food instability, housing instability, all of those things. I try to walk every day, but I'm not as consistent as I'd like to be, but I usually walk the Blackstone walking trail. And during the pandemic, I watched so many people have tents back there and living back there. I know people, when they think about unhoused individuals, they think, you know, “you're a drug addict. You're this, you're that.” No, these were people who got up every day and went to work but could not afford to live anywhere. I watched them wash their clothes in the lake, wash themselves in the lake, walk, ride bikes, whatever it was that they needed to do to get to work, but at the end of the day, not even having enough money to be able to live somewhere. 

I'm a member of the group and I've seen some of the best in people and incredible generosity there and I wanted to ask: How do you think we cultivate more of that?

That’s a good question. I think it's about being more vocal, right? Because when I think about myself, I'm fortunate in the sense that I have a career. I'm fortunate in the sense that I'm a homeowner. I'm fortunate in the sense that I don't worry about where my meal is coming from or having a car or whatever. And I could very well just go about my life and not care about anyone else. But I think when people see that people like me or, you know, other people who are in those positions, are still raising our hand and saying, “Hey guys, like, do you know this is going on? Like, this is important. We need to have conversations about this.” Because I'm not saying it from the perspective of I'm living that life, but I'm saying it from the perspective of I'm a human being and humanity is important.

And basic things like food and a roof over your head and medical care should be rights that everybody has. And it shouldn't matter what your socioeconomic status is. Your race, your sex, whatever, none of that should matter. Even when you're in a position of privilege, it's more so your responsibility to speak up. And I think that that's how we foster that in the community: When you have everybody speaking up is when responses happen. You can use the example of George Floyd. And like I say to people, nobody could turn away because we were all locked in our house so nobody could turn away. We all had to watch that. We all had to experience that trauma. And the entire world woke up and said, wait a minute. Like, people were protesting in Europe. And that doesn't impact their life in Europe but they said, no, this is about humanity. 

In the mutual aid Facebook group, sometimes we also see suspicion or judgment—that perspective of “well, I didn't have it easy, but I got through it, therefore you just must not be working hard enough.” It’s a perspective that is really uncharitable and unkind. When you see that—or you mentioned the trauma of seeing what happened to George Floyd—how do you repair your spirit? I know that the idea of self-care has been co-opted to mean buying things—

It's like everything, right? Like it's, oh, you got a massage. That's self care.

I’m curious if that idea has resonance for you? Or, how do you repair your spirit?

[I want] to tackle the first part where you were talking about, like, the whole idea of “pull yourself up by the bootstraps” foolishness. I remember there was a post, I don't even remember what the post was, what the person was asking for in Mutual Aid [Worcester], but I remember saying in that post, “do you guys realize that some people are too poor to work?” What does that mean? “I don't have the clothes. I can't wash myself. I'm not sleeping 'cause I live in a tent. I'm not eating.” How do you go to work? Or for example, even myself when I was a single mom–I had my son at 17 years old. How do you afford daycare? And to go to work, there was times that I was literally paying most of my paycheck to childcare. 

So how do you even get ahead in a situation like that, or this whole generation of children who literally, home ownership is like not even on the table for them, right? I think as far as self care for me, sometimes it's just disconnecting. We have a chat for the [Mutual Aid Worcester] moderators, and sometimes we're just like, “you know what guys? Like, I can't today.” Or if we go back to  the George Floyd conversation, I never watched [the footage] because I remember sitting one night watching 20/20 and they literally just showed little still clips. And I ended up under my covers, literally shaking with my covers over my head. So I knew self care for me in that moment was, “Jennifer, you're not gonna ever watch that video.” Right? Sometimes self care is just that simple as creating boundaries, right? Self care is disconnecting when you need to disconnect. Self care is saying that I'm not gonna have this conversation for whatever reason. Self care sometimes is just the fact that I get up and walk because I'm getting fresh air. I'm clearing my head, you know? Self-care could be my dog here laying on my bed with me. 

I don't know if you are aware, but my husband passed away in November, two days after Thanksgiving. And one of the things that him and I talked a lot about in the past two years is really, you know, cultivating your peace. And if something is not in line with your peace or is not in line with what you're looking to do or be or whatever, get rid of it. You're not obligated to anybody. And really, you know, as much as I grieve and I miss him, and all of those things, I am so grateful that I had somebody in my life that loved me enough to say, “Jennifer, you have to love yourself. You have to take care of yourself.” So now in my grief process, it's like, “Jennifer, you have to take care of yourself.” 

Because if I don't get up every day and face whatever it is in my day, then I'm not showing up for my children. I'm not showing up for my community. I'm not showing up for myself. 

So I have a follow-up question to all of this. You're clearly giving a lot to the community. When you say, I didn't watch the George Floyd video, like, you don't need to see it because you—

I already know. 

But that's not true for everyone. I'm imagining like really privileged white people saying, like, “well, I need to protect my peace.” 

Some people need to wake up. Some people need to watch that. When you say that, I think: I work in corporate America, and I have a really good relationship with my boss. And a lot of times we talk about our lives. She was one of the first people that I talked to the day that my husband passed away. And she was reflecting back on some of the conversations that her and I have had. So my husband was born in New York, but he moved to Trinidad at like two years old. And then he came back to the States in middle school. So when he came back to the states in middle school, you know, he had an accent. He was different, blah, blah, blah. So his way of fitting in was he went to the streets and he ended up being incarcerated for four and a half years. He went to prison at 19 years old to Walpole State Prison. You know what kind of people are in Walpole State Prison for a 19-year-old? And he did his four and a half years, he came out, we met, and he told me, “Jennifer, I'm never ever going back.” And I watched him turn his life around, but that wasn't an easy thing. I watched people tell him no over and over again. And even up until recently we would go out and people would just judge him based on how he looked. But to me, the way that you combat that, or the way that you get people to see you, is by showing up as yourself. He had tattoos, People would generally walk up to him and, you know, say to him like, “I can tell that you're an OG. I can see it by your swag.” But he owned that. That's not the only thing he was, you know what I mean? And he used to tease me and we would laugh 'cause my daughter would always say to him, “Daddy, you are not gangster.” And he is like, “Jennifer, that's what she's supposed to think of me. I'm her dad. That's it. That's all she's supposed to think of me, that I'm Daddy.” He still was authentic to who he was. And I think that that's how we force people with privilege to see us–by still showing up every day as who we are. 

And you know, I will never debate or argue with somebody who is willfully ignorant. If you just wanna be ignorant, you just wanna be a racist, you don't want to hear, like, I'm not gonna have that conversation with you. But if a person literally just doesn't know and wants to have a conversation, then I'm going to have that conversation. And, you know, like I was saying about my boss, like she's a white woman. Privileged, never really had interactions in the inner city or whatever. But when I talk to her and tell her my story, it opens her eyes. Like she’s said to me on many occasions, “Jennifer, I know it's not me, but I'm embarrassed by what you're saying to me.”So I think it's really just continuing to show up authentically, continuing to tell our stories, continuing to force people to, to deal with who we are. And honestly, who we are is inclusive of the trauma. Like, you can't separate our story. And when I say our story, Black people's story. Like you can't separate our story from the legacy of slavery. You can't separate my story as a Black woman from that. 

I did a TED Talk last year and I talked about how only a very small percentage of enslaved Africans came to the United States. But at the time of Emancipation Proclamation, there was like 10 times the amount of enslaved Africans here on the continent from them basically breeding Black women. They made it legal to rape Black women and have children, children who were born into slavery. And on the flip side, in the Caribbean, enslaved Africans’ lifespan was only seven years. So they just kept importing the slave into the Caribbean. But at the end, when emancipation came, there was only a small number. Even though the majority of the enslaved Africans went to the Caribbean and South America. At the end of the day, they had a fraction of what was here in the United States. So the brutality of it, you can't separate that. You carry that, you carry that trauma in your body. My ancestors carried it. I carry it. So you can never separate that conversation. So when people say, “oh, well that was like however many years ago.” No, it really wasn't because there's actually people who've died in the past, you know, 20 years that were enslaved. Maybe as children, but still. 

I feel like a lot of white people who are very privileged are frankly choosing not to see because it's everywhere. It's all around you. And you're choosing not to see. So I feel like a lot of it is putting yourself in their face. You're gonna see me.

That's a great transition to a question I had about an amazing line in the intro of your book, The Exit: Living with Urban Joy. You wrote, “When Black people celebrate white people go mad because they do not feel Black people are entitled to celebrate.” And I know from my upbringing that a lot of white people are really suspicious of joy. And I wanted to ask why you think that is? What's radical about joy?

Like I said, you can't separate a story from slavery, right? When in slavery, we couldn't even beat drums. Like, they didn't want us beating drums, they didn't want us dancing, they didn't want us congregating. They didn't want any of that. Because if we were doing that, we weren't working the fields. Because they brought people from all different places. We couldn't communicate a lot of time through language. So we communicated through dance and song and by connecting, you know, spiritually and culturally. So they block that. So now when we do it, it's like, “oh my God, what are they up to? Are they over there congregating to, you know, overthrow the slave master?” Like that mindset is still there. That if we are congregating somewhere, that there's some trouble brewing.

If you take the [Worcester Caribbean American Festival] for example, every single year it’s some foolishness about something that happened. You know, two years ago the parks department came about public intoxication. Are you kidding me? Have you been to St. Patrick's Day? What in the world? Even last year I got into—I shouldn't say I got into because I had probably two exchanges with the person because clearly they were ignorant. So I was like, I'm not going on with this. But [they were] essentially saying, “oh, well, when you have events like this, what does, what does that mean? Like “when Brown people come outside, when you have events like this, it basically cultivates violence.” Because people are congregating, that means that we have to be violent. And guess what? We are not. We are not. And frankly that is the part that I think bothers them the most. 

And even last year with the shooting, the shooting didn't happen at the event. The shooting wasn't even connected to the event. The shooting happened across the street. And there was just this rush to connect it to the event. No, that had nothing to do with anything that was going on. That has to do with the fact that we have inner city violence and gun violence on our streets and that we need to address it. That doesn't have anything to do with Black or Brown people congregating in one place. But the immediate response is to somehow connect it to that. But that comes from this idea that when we are congregating, we're somehow plotting to do something. When we really, for carnival, it's about celebration. It's about the joy of our culture. And frankly, it's about releasing all of the stress and anxiety and crap that we deal with on a daily basis. Let us have one day that we can dance and enjoy and have a good freaking time.

One year we had a birthday party in my backyard for my husband. [We had] music, we're cooking, we're having a good time, everybody's having a great time. My white neighbor called the police. 

“These people are having a barbecue.”

Oh my god. And they said, oh, our music, it was the music, it was a sound. And the police officer said, “I didn't even hear your music when I pulled up.” 

So in March, Bill did a post asking if there’s any point in doing politics in Worcester. This was after the school committee and city council elections. He was asking, like, is this a pretend democracy and is participating in it just wearing out good people? I’m curious if you have thoughts on this question. 

I could definitely see that perspective. And I can say probably right after that I probably felt that way too. But at the end of the day, if we do nothing, then we are saying we're comfortable. There's a Zora Neil Hurston quote–I'm gonna paraphrase it 'cause I don't remember exactly–essentially she says, if somebody is hurting you and you don't tell them, if you don't say anything about them hurting you, then they're gonna think you like it. Right? So if we say, oh, forget it, throw our hands up and don’t engage in the process, then we are saying we are okay with it, and we're clearly not okay with it.

And I get it because you do get worn down. I went back and spoke at the city council and I said, “I was here last year. Like, why am I here? You know, almost a year to the day, speaking again on you guys being discriminatory. Like, why am I, why do I have to keep coming here and having this same freaking conversation?” But guess what, if I have to go back again, I'm gonna go back again.

I think for Worcester, the problem is that people show up to a certain point, but it's usually the same people who keep showing up. And if you're going to talk the talk, you have to do the action. And what happened with the election this past election cycle is there was a lot of talking, but clearly people didn't show up at the polls because after we had a debrief session at The Village and one of the women in attendance mentioned that if, in every municipality in Massachusetts, if every woman and person of color voted, we could unseat every person or vote in every person that we wanted. Right? So that means that there was a lot of talking and not a lot of action at the polls. So the people who need to be held accountable are the people who didn't show up at the polls. And like I tell people all the time, people died for our right to vote, whether you are a woman, a person of color, somebody died for your right to vote. So I don't care if I'm voting for the flavor of the ice cream, I'm gonna go vote because somebody gave their life so that I could do that.

This is a real tone shift to the positive, but what is one thing that you’d guarantee about Worcester would never change?

We are a city, right? But there's also kind of a feel that we are a town, right? There's community, there's connection, there's, you know, engagement. I think that shouldn't change. That shouldn't change. We should always feel connected to each other. We should always feel like, you know, we're a community. I grew up in Boston in the 80s and 90s and early 2000s. Like, it wasn't an easy place to live, but the neighborhood that we lived in was a community. Everybody looked out for everybody. We knew each other. People knew your parents. Like we had a community within the city. And I think that that's something that I see in little pockets here at Worcester. And I think that is something that we should continue to cultivate and grow and, and that should always be part of the fabric of the city.

Yeah, that's good. Is there anything else on your mind these days that you'd like to talk about?

I think there's been a lot of conversations around, you know, the political structure here in the city. I think for me, I think we need to be looking more at solutions, right? I think the conversations that we need to be having need to be solution based, right? There's a problem. How are we solving the problem? 'cause what I think is exhausting is that we keep discussing the problem and dissecting the problem and dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. Like, when are we gonna start talking about solutions? When are we gonna talk about moving forward? When is, you know, when do we, to your point, turn the negative into positive, right? Like, why is Bill able to write for years this column and only focus on [Worcester] sucking? Like, why is there still so much material around it sucking? Like at what point are we gonna turn the corner and start talking about solutions and start talking about how we make a change? 

If you know of a cool Worcester person we should interview someone for this column, drop us a line at billshaner@substack.com.