{"id":713,"date":"2020-05-07T10:52:17","date_gmt":"2020-05-07T14:52:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.stelliform.press\/?p=713"},"modified":"2020-06-14T18:06:49","modified_gmt":"2020-06-14T22:06:49","slug":"when-revolutions-too-quick-and-shallow","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.stelliform.press\/index.php\/2020\/05\/07\/when-revolutions-too-quick-and-shallow\/","title":{"rendered":"When Revolution’s Too Quick and Shallow"},"content":{"rendered":"

Michael J. DeLuca’s novella, NIGHT ROLL, is scheduled to be published in October. The book does an excellent job of expressing both the joy and struggle of rebuilding community after loss. In this blog post, DeLuca considers the message NIGHT ROLL brings to a post-pandemic world.<\/em><\/p>

The Future from Before the Pandemic
by Michael J. DeLuca<\/h2>

In 2017, thinking of 2020, I started writing a novella about everything that was scaring me then: climate collapse and its vast, unforeseeable array of consequences; anthropogenic mass extinction; systemic racism and environmental injustice; scorched-earth capitalism. The real, existential threat of white nationalism hadn’t yet sunk in. Global pandemic hadn’t even crossed my mind.<\/p>

Some of this novella I wrote at three in the morning. My baby wasn’t yet sleeping through the night, so neither was I. Let’s be honest, I was beside myself with sleep deprivation–but also with fear for his future. Also at three in the morning, I wrote my Reckoning 2<\/em> editorial<\/a>, mourning the future he could have had, acknowledging that I had no choice but to build one where he could thrive. <\/p>

NIGHT\nROLL comes out in October, just before my 41st birthday. It was\nalways a bit of an alternate history; certain technology and certain\nimpacts of climate change are just a little bit accelerated, for\ndramatic effect, and because of my aforementioned fears. Now, in some\nways, it’s a fever dream of what might have been. \n<\/p>

\"\"
Detroit’s Slow Roll<\/a> is a key inspiration for DeLuca’s NIGHT ROLL<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>

\nA new, single mother comes to Detroit\nfleeing sea level rise and refugee crisis on the East Coast, where\nI’m from. Lonely and isolated, she’s forced to seek community and\nsupport, like I was. She’s forced to invest in a place she doesn’t\nunderstand, where a lot of people far worse off than she is have been\nstruggling to survive for a lot longer. And despite odds, despite the\ncity’s crumbling infrastructure and indifferent, disaster-capitalist\nkleptocracy, she finds acceptance, love, family, and a future. \n<\/p>

I\nturned in final edits on March 13th of this year, the day before my\nfamily went into pandemic isolation. My partner teaches\u2014among other\nthings, media literacy\u2014at\na large public university about an hour north of Detroit. Classes\nhave gone all-online. I always worked from home. The kid is three,\npracticing letters and numbers at our kitchen table, learning to ride\na trike, eating anise hyssop and mint poking up out of the spring\nsnow in the yard. We’re fine, we’re safe. We donated our pandemic\nstimulus, and then some, to food banks and advocacy for immigrant\nchildren.<\/p>

Shortly after we moved here, I was introduced by the documentary<\/a> \u201cAmerican Revolutionary\u201d to the work of civil rights activist and community organizer Grace Lee Boggs, then approaching 100 years old. In the movie, she talks about how the work of justice is never done. She rejects the idea of revolution, despite the word being right there in the title, as too quick and too shallow. She’d been doing this work in Detroit for fifty years, through water shutoffs, white flight, Black neighborhoods bulldozed to build overpasses, helping build Detroit’s urban farming renaissance, helping build community and resilience that don’t depend on infrastructure or prosperity. Grace died in 2015, but I know what she’d have wanted us to do: listen to each other, take care of each other, keep learning, keep working.<\/p>

\"\"
Detroit’s bike culture is regenerative both in real life and in DeLuca’s novella<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>

A\nlot of the science fiction coming out in the next years runs a risk\nof looking cozy and quaint next to these real, live dystopian\nhorrors. And no doubt many of those writers are afraid for their own\nfuture. I’m lucky enough, privileged enough, that my family doesn’t\ndepend on income from my creative work for their survival. But I want\nto think of this pandemic, this time in which we’re all\nsimultaneously isolated and sharing a profound experience of grief,\ntrauma and radical change, as the greatest opportunity for the\ntriumph of the human imagination I’ve ever experienced. How will we\nremake ourselves? Science fiction has always been touted as a\nliterature of ideas, of possibility. This is its chance to be that in\nways we’ve never seen. \n<\/p>

I\nhope NIGHT ROLL still has the capacity to inspire, despite being set\nin a world where people can still hug strangers in the street. I’m\nconfident in its message.<\/p>

Detroit is suffering horribly<\/a> right now. Good people are dying. But it will rise again. It always has. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Michael J. DeLuca’s novella, NIGHT ROLL, is scheduled to be published in October. The book does an excellent job of expressing both the joy and struggle of rebuilding community after loss. In this blog post, DeLuca considers the message NIGHT ROLL has for a post-pandemic world.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":714,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,16,18,19,3],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\nWhen Revolution's Too Quick and Shallow ⋆ Stelliform Press<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Author Michael J. 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