Durham Author and Activist adrienne maree brown On Navigating Relationships With Care

adrienne maree brown: Loving Corrections | AK Press; Aug. 20

When the author and activist adrienne maree brown moved to Durham during the pandemic, one of the first things she did was befriend a tree in her backyard. The ritual, suggested by a friend, helped brown ground herself in the new space. 

“Anytime people give me flowers, after a couple days, I would go lay the flowers out around the tree, adorn the tree. I put some bird feeders up in the tree so that everyone knew to come visit,” brown said on a recent Zoom call from a bright office. “It’s become quite a sweet little ecosystem back there over the time that I’ve been here. Every time I do any ritual inside, there’s a part of it that gets brought outside and left at the tree.”

That practice, of making the internal work you’re doing on and for yourself flow into the way you relate to the rest of the world, is central to brown’s latest book, Loving Corrections. This collection of 20 essays (and a few closing spells) is an encouragement that working on yourself—specifically with an openness to being corrected—is an important part of fighting for collective change.

brown has spent the last two decades facilitating organizing and movement work, and that career is central to her writing work. She’s edited and written seven essay collections prior to this one, including 2019’s Pleasure Activism, which was a New York Times bestseller. She’s also written two science fiction novels, and both her collections and her fiction are in conversation with great imaginative writers like Octavia Butler (whose Parables series, brown estimates, she’s read 85-ish times), Ursula K. Le Guin, and Audre Lorde. brown has also hosted several podcasts (she currently runs How to Survive the End of the World with her sister, Autumn) and appeared on dozens of others, including Krista Tippett’s On Being. 

brown also facilitates movement meetings all across the country. 

“Different organizations,” brown says, “would ask me to come and hold the space, hold the room, hold the meeting, set the agenda.”

Facilitating these meetings, brown began to notice a distressingly common pattern: when disagreements came up, people who shared a common goal would sometimes turn on each other, gossiping about issues instead of directly addressing conflicts. 

“We know how to go talk about each other, but we don’t know how to come talk to each other,” she says. 

brown recalls one meeting in which a man consistently dominated the conversation. 

“He was someone they all loved, we all loved,” she says. “But the way he was moving in the space was really out of alignment with everything we said we believed about equality, about sharing of power, about sharing this space.” 

Everyone else involved—people with power and personal stakes in the organization—kept coming to brown, frustrated but unsure how to change the situation. 

“As a facilitator, I don’t want to have to just be like, ‘Hey, here’s everything you’re doing wrong,’” she says. “I want to figure out ‘How do I help shift culture?’”  

This—and countless other experiences—prompted brown to write about how to disagree well. 

She’s been writing about strategic movement work for some time: in 2017, she published Emergent Strategy, a guidebook to help activists find new frameworks for movement work by looking to nature; ever since, she’s been curating a series of books on how to do movement work in this era. 

“One of the aspects of emergent strategy that really mattered to me was this idea of ‘How do we relate to each other, and how do we relate to the earth in a way that actually makes sense and works for us?’” brown says.

The Emergent Strategy series includes several books on the relationship work that goes into activism. Loving Corrections continues down that path in what brown calls a practice toward healing.

“All of those feel like books that brought us on the path towards this one,” she says. “Loving Corrections, for me, is ‘What are the ways we need to be in relationship with each other that allow us to course-correct and put ourselves back in alignment with each other and with the earth?’—before we have to reach a place of having a massive battle.” 

If the subject matter sounds heavy, brown holds it gently; affirming her belief in the reality of these changes and noting her own growth as well as that of people like her mother, a white woman, whom brown has seen break down many of the structures that previously served her.

The collection begins with an address to men—“mostly a note to straight, cis men”—encouraging them to listen to women and not to fear the “incremental demise of patriarchy” and a few essays that offer encouragement to generally privileged groups like white and abled folks. Other essays address social media users, weed users, or movement funders, asking them to be thoughtful with all of these tools and open to listening about their effects on the people around them.

“I see this work, this idea of Loving Corrections as a way of answering that long-ago problem and that long-ago question, which I saw happen so many times, which was: ‘Can we just say what we actually know to be true?’” brown asks. “‘Can we say it to each other in a way that fosters more connection, rather than less?’ And this, for me, is strategic.”

Stepping back to consider the scale of the changes she suggests we can achieve makes things feel daunting. But brown’s strategy in our time of heightened emotion is to treat despair or fear as data. 

“Watching the genocide play out in Palestine, I have been like, ‘I feel despair, I feel hopelessness, I feel sadness,’” she says. “I’m letting that tell me, ‘Oh, that’s something I really care about, being a part of people who don’t solve problems through violence. I really care about being a part of a global community. I really care about what happens to people who don’t have resources. I really care about reproductive justice.’ So much is unveiled about what I actually care about, because I feel so much grief—and then that grief also guides me to the next place.”

Despair can also lead to curiosity, which in turn guides her work. 

“What would have to change for us not to be in this despair?” she says. “I think a lot of people who end up doing social change work, they’re rooted in heartbreak and despair, and wanting something different for their family or community. I know that that is it for me. Each of these loving corrections, every single one of them, is rooted in real conversations.”

Facilitating movement work brought brown to the Triangle many times before she moved to the area from Detroit; a move she describes as “reverse migration.” 

With family history from both sides tracking back to the Carolinas, she landed in town with a ready set of friends and collaborators. Four years later, unsurprisingly, she’s already involved with local activism. 

“Durham is rich, rich, rich with people who are thinking about the future of the world and offering up tools and resources,” brown says. “If there’s a renaissance happening anywhere right now, I think Durham is it.”

One of those friends is Alexis Pauline Gumbs, another Durham-based writer and activist, who has contributed a book to the Emergent Strategy series. Gumbs and brown have been friends since their college days in New York (“We knew each other as babies, and hopefully we will know each other as elders,” brown says). This year, they’re releasing books on the same day, August 20, for the second time. 

Gumbs’s book, Survival is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde, is her sixth (not counting the contributions she’s made to two essay collections that brown edited). 

“It’s an Alexis-style biography of Audre Lorde, which means it’s poetic and imaginative and beautiful and deep, and I think it’s going to go really well with what Loving Corrections is all about,” brown says. The two are holding an event called Love Is a Promise, which will be moderated at the Hayti Heritage Center on August 15 by author Prentiss Hemphill. 

“Our work almost always is in conversation and flowing back and forth,” brown says. “I hope that people come swim with us in these big ideas.”

(If you miss that event, brown will be talking to Thick author Dr. Tressie McMillan Cottom on August 29 at Flyleaf.)

brown has been drawing parallels between sci-fi and movement work since the very first collection of essays she edited, Octavia’s Brood. That parallel continues to be a compelling lens through which to look at social change. 

“When Octavia’s Brood came out, we said that all organizing is science fiction, because we’re trying to create a world that we haven’t lived in yet,” brown says. “I think Loving Corrections is like a bridge between this current inflammatory crossroads that we’re at towards a world in which we all can feel belonging—and we don’t have to feel like we’re constantly surrendering a right or sovereignty or safety or peace in order to belong.”

The conversations in Loving Corrections are clearly meant to be had between those working toward a common liberation, but brown doesn’t want us to write anyone off. Throughout the collection, she’s clearly wrestling with welcoming people with different or underdeveloped imaginings of the next versions of the world. How do you welcome people into movement work if there are some differences in the way you envision the future? How do you move past a competitive, binary view of who’s part of things?

In my favorite essay in the book, brown digs into her relationship with Ursula K. Le Guin and the noted sci-fi writer’s boundless imagination as a way to invite everyone into imagining a better world. 

“We are in a battle of imaginations right now, where there are some people who imagine a world where we are all dominating each other, and where we’re really disconnected from the earth except as a resource we extract, and where everything is punishment and militarization and control and the accumulation of mass wealth for a few people,” brown says. “But there’s another thing that’s being imagined, and that is a world where we are actually sharing the resources, where there is an abundance for all people, where everyone gets the space to be who they truly are, and where people can feel safety and belonging and dignity.”

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