The original plan was for Kai Cheng Thom and I to talk while she was in town to deliver the keynote at the Growing Room literary festival, but plans change, don’t they? So we talked on Skype instead, about creative ways to sustain communities in midst of crisis, the importance of choosing love, and the hard choices that witches make. This was a really healing episode for me to record, and I hope it brings some of that same energy to you. Also, here are some links:

• You should be following Kai Cheng Thom on Twitter, for a start. You can find out about all of her books here, including the wonderful I Hope We Choose Love, and you’ll probably also want to read her beautiful new piece about how queer and marginalized communities can take care of one another during COVID-19
• We mention the vital work of Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, especially her book Care Work.
• Read about why teachers should do a bad job of putting their courses online.
• Learn more about the history of scrapbooking as counter-publishing.
• The podcast episode I mentioned featuring Jen Sookfong Lee is the April episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast.
• Kai Cheng and I both heartily recommend Larissa Lai’s The Tiger Flu.
• Read more about Indigenous futures and the dystopian now.
• Kai Cheng also recommended reading up on what bell hooks has to say about love.

The podcast theme song is “Mesh Shirt” by Mom Jeans off their album “Chub Rub.” Listen to the whole album here or learn more about them here. Kai Chengs’s theme song was “Piece of Me” by Britney Spears.

Secret Feminist Agenda is recorded and produced by Hannah McGregor on the traditional and unceded territories of the Squamish, Musqueam, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations.

In this week’s minisode we’re celebrating #WorldObesityDay by talking about how everything you thought you knew about obesity is wrong and also why fat people are brilliant and gorgeous and worthy of celebration. Links!

• Here’s the original post by Sofie Hagen on reclaiming #WorldObesityDay
• Here’s why “Everything You Know About Obesity Is Wrong”
• And here’s what went into this week’s killjoy survival kit:
  • The Open Letter from students opposing the suspension of the Graduate Option in Gender and Women’s Studies at McGill
  • The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson
  • Girl Zines: Making Media, Doing Feminism by Alison Piepmeier
  • Avatar: The Last Airbender
  • The Wet’suwet’en Support Toolkit

The podcast theme song is “Mesh Shirt” by Mom Jeans off their album “Chub Rub.” Listen to the whole album here or learn more about them here. Follow me @hkpmcgregor and tweet about the podcast using #SecretFeministAgenda. Want to email me about your killjoy survival kit? Send it to secretfeministagenda(at)gmail(dot)com.

Secret Feminist Agenda is recorded and produced by Hannah McGregor on the traditional and unceded territories of the Squamish, Musqueam, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations.

Last week I went to Iron Dog Books after hours to hang out with co-owner Hilary Atleo and talk about settler-colonial mind-fucks, problematic favs, the pleasures of queer feminist sci-fi, why cities thrive on independent arts businesses, and whether or not grapefruits have gotten sweeter. Here are some links!

• If you want to learn more about Iron Dog Books you can find them on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.
• For more on Wet’suwet’en, read this fabulous list of resources put together by genius and poet Samantha Marie Nock.
• Here are some links about authors that may or may not be problematic or, as I say way too many times in this episode (I was clearly in a literal #mood), “trash”:
  • Robert A. Heinlein
  • J.K. Rowling
  • Mahatma Gandhi
  • Roald Dahl
• Here’s a little bit more context on property tax relief for small businesses
• And here’s the Allusionist episode on Apples!
• And finally, the links to Hilary’s book recommendations:
  • Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie
  • The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells
  • Empire of Wild by Cherie Dimaline
  • Fur, Feather, Fin–All of Us Are Kin by Diane Lang
  • The many works of Shaun Tan
  • Bitter by Jennifer McLagan

The podcast theme song is “Mesh Shirt” by Mom Jeans off their album “Chub Rub.” Listen to the whole album here or learn more about them here. Hilary’s theme song was “North Side Gal” by J.D. McPherson.

Secret Feminist Agenda is recorded and produced by Hannah McGregor on the traditional and unceded territories of the Squamish, Musqueam, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations.

This week’s minisode is a little more leisurely than last time, as I think my way through empathy fatigue aka burnout in the face of crisis, and whether hopepunk is a possible way through feelings of numbness and overwhelm. And to accompany this slightly longer episode, here are some unusually concise links!

• Anne Helen Petersen’s “How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation”
• Alyssa Hull’s “Hopepunk and Solarpunk: On Climate Narratives That Go Beyond the Apocalypse”
• Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene
• Some more context/background on hopepunk
• Sara Ahmed’s Willful Subjects
• Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism
• The Sandy & Nora podcast!
• The online Queer Zine Archive
• Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House

The podcast theme song is “Mesh Shirt” by Mom Jeans off their album “Chub Rub.” Listen to the whole album here or learn more about them here. Follow me @hkpmcgregor and tweet about the podcast using #SecretFeministAgenda. Want to email me about your killjoy survival kit? Send it to secretfeministagenda(at)gmail(dot)com.

Secret Feminist Agenda is recorded and produced by Hannah McGregor on the traditional and unceded territories of the Squamish, Musqueam, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations.

To make up for the very mini minisode, here’s an extra-long interview with extra-awesome human being Dina Del Bucchia! We talk about poetry, publishing, cats, farts, and basically everything in between. Here are a million links!

• First! Check out the rest of Dina’s stuff here on her website, and then subscribe to her awesome podcast Can’t Lit, and then buy all her books! Also go see her (and me, and everyone) at the Growing Room festival this March. ALSO also, check out the archives of Poetry is Dead. ALSO ALSO also, go to the Real Vancouver Writers’ Series.
• Want to read more about Cheer on Netflix? I really like this Atlantic piece on how harmful cheerleading is to the athletes and this New Yorker piece on the deceptions of cheerleading.
• If you want to know what’s up with the UBC MFA, here’s an article.
• Dina mentioned the Millennial Line comedy and poetry series.
• The Roland Barthes book I was referencing is Image~Music~Text.
• Laura McGrath’s article is “Comping White”.
• Adèle Barclay’s new poetry book is Renaissance Normcore. You can listen to her episode of Secret Feminist Agenda here. (I said it was the third episode but it was the eighth, whoops!)
• Read up on McClelland & Stewart’s Spring 2020 poetry collections.
• Here’s a pertinent article about Margaret Atwood being co-awarded the Booker and how that win may have betrayed the biases in how awards evaluate literary merit.
• You can read the More Canada report online, if you want.
• Oh, and here’s the Cherie Dimaline profile from Quill&Quire.
• Read more about Caroline Calloway!
• We chatted about small presses, including Arsenal Pulp Press and Europa Editions, which is responsible for publishing Elena Ferrante in English as well as Muriel Barbery’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog.
• Remember the viral short story “Cat Person”? Well the author, Kristen Roupenian, got a $1.2 million advance for her short story collection, You Know You Want This, which has also been optioned by HBO.
• Speaking of publishing being completely wild, here’s an explainer on what’s going on with American Dirt. Instead of reading this apparently very bad book, you should read Valeria Luiselli’s stunning Lost Children Archive.
• We talked about Rupi Kaur’s impact on poetry sales in Canada, and The New Republic declaring her “the writer of the decade” .
• A few more pertinent links:
  • Cats can have little a salami, as a treat.
  • “The Revenge of Monoculture: The Internet gave us more choices, but the mainstream won anyway”
  • Alicia Elliott’s A Mind Spread Out on the Ground
• And, finally, Dina’s comedy recommendations!
  • New Eden
  • A Black Lady Sketch Show
  • Fleabag
  • Back to Life

The podcast theme song is “Mesh Shirt” by Mom Jeans off their album “Chub Rub.” Listen to the whole album here or learn more about them here. Dina’s theme song was “Disappear” by Mazzy Star.

Secret Feminist Agenda is recorded and produced by Hannah McGregor on the traditional and unceded territories of the Squamish, Musqueam, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations.

I’ve set a new record in this, the first minisode of 2020, for just how mini a minisode can be. Turns out? pretty mini! But that’s okay, it’s a new year and we’re being gentle with ourselves.

• This week’s topic was inspired by this tweet.
• And here’s the thread of great responses about how people are being gentle with themselves this January.
• Finally, Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror, specifically the essay “Always Be Optimizing,” has been challenging me to rethink how we try to optimize our own lives. You can listen to an abridged version here!

The podcast theme song is “Mesh Shirt” by Mom Jeans off their album “Chub Rub.” Listen to the whole album here or learn more about them here. Follow me @hkpmcgregor and tweet about the podcast using #SecretFeministAgenda. Want to email me about your killjoy survival kit? Send it to secretfeministagenda(at)gmail(dot)com.

Secret Feminist Agenda is recorded and produced by Hannah McGregor on the traditional and unceded territories of the Squamish, Musqueam, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations.

This week I’m talking with Dr. Tina Sikka about her work in feminist science studies, from feminist analysis of geoengineering to the intersections of race and the diet industry. This is one of those episodes where I probably learned as much as you’re going to. I love these episodes! Come learn with me. Also, links:

• You can find Tina’s work at her website; she specifically references this new Wired article about gender and geoengineering as well as her Jacobin article, “Against Twenty-First Century Race Science”
• We give a brief definition of standpoint theory, but to read more check out the work of Sandra Harding, Donna Haraway, and Helen Longino
• The idea of strategic essentialism comes from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (sorry for all the Wikipedia in these show notes!)
• We talk briefly about Jia Tolentino’s new book, Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion
• Here’s an article that contextualizes the high maternal mortality rates in African American women as a public health crisis
• I reference my interview with Dawn Serra a few times, so here it is in case you missed it!
• Tina recommends this article on the intersections of fatphobia and anti-Black racism in responses to Lizzo
• Here’s something on shifting definitions of whiteness in U.S. history
• This interview that Kat Chow of NPR’s Code Switch did with Chickasaw citizen and Native American Studies scholar Elizabeth Rule helps to explain the idea of “blood quantum” and how it encompasses both the “one-drop rule” and the state policing of Indigeneity
• And here’s an article that rightly compares the over-representation of Indigenous children in Canada’s child welfare system to the residential school system
• I mentioned the episode of Another Round called “I got Indian in My Family,” which features Kim Tallbear on Black and Indigenous kinship
• This article provides some more detail on the story of Russ George dropping iron dust into the ocean (and the general dangers of rogue geoengineering)
• Last Wikipedia link, I swear: environmental racism
• And here’s an article on why the Madrid Climate Conference didn’t go as well as it needed to
• And, because these links were a little depressing, let me leave you with some hopepunk: “The narratives we construct, the stories we tell ourselves must acknowledge that, while there’s a scientific consensus that the atmosphere is warming due to our fossil fuel emissions, many aspects and extents of climate change remain uncertain. Writing non-apocalyptic climate change narratives can make room, intellectually and emotionally, for our failures to act sooner.”

The podcast theme song is “Mesh Shirt” by Mom Jeans off their album “Chub Rub.” Listen to the whole album here or learn more about them here. Tina’s theme song was “Cloudbusting” by Kate Bush.

Secret Feminist Agenda is recorded and produced by Hannah McGregor on the traditional and unceded territories of the Squamish, Musqueam, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations.

This minisode is about taking stock and resisting the urge to turn our own lives into listicles or “best of the decade” featurettes, but instead residing in the messy and complex abundance of it all. You know, just some low-stakes early December thoughts. Also, here are some low-stakes early December links:

• Much of my thinking about abundance, canonicity, publishing, and artificial scarcity comes from Richard Nash’s “What Is the Business of Literature?”
• On the topic of media coverage, best-of lists, and what gets left out (and why!) you should read this excellent twitter thread by the brilliant Jen Sookfong Lee.
• That’s it! Two links! That’s all you get! I’m going to a party now!

The podcast theme song is “Mesh Shirt” by Mom Jeans off their album “Chub Rub.” Listen to the whole album here or learn more about them here. Follow me @hkpmcgregor and tweet about the podcast using #SecretFeministAgenda. Want to email me about your killjoy survival kit? Send it to secretfeministagenda(at)gmail(dot)com.

Secret Feminist Agenda is recorded and produced by Hannah McGregor on the traditional and unceded territories of the Squamish, Musqueam, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations.

In this episode I’m talking to Max Collins, campus radio advocate and producer behind the new investigative podcast “Dragged Out.” We discuss about four thousand things, including: community-based podcasting, drag performance and gender, Vancouver real estate, funding/monetizing art, and queer community building across generations. Also I say some shit that just might upset Toronto listeners. Sorry Toronto listeners! Here are some links!

• First off, you can find out about all of Max’s work here.
• How accurate was my micro-history of podcasts? Compare and contrast!
• We discuss a lot of podcasts in this episode, and here are some of them:
  • Dragged Out
  • WTF with Marc Maron
  • Serial
  • Welcome to Night Vale
  • Within the Wires
  • Sandy & Nora
  • Missing & Murdered
  • Thunder Bay
• My explanation of Marshall McLuhan’s idea of hot and cool media wasn’t completely wrong, but read this for a proper explanation.
• And here’s a great article asking exactly how good RuPaul’s Drag Race has been for drag.
• My reference to building more space for kids and parents in queer community was inspired by conversations with friend-of-the-pod Zena, who has recommended this book on the topic.
• Finally, I’m hoping to do an episode about this book, but either way you should definitely be buying Hustling Verse: An Anthology of Sex Workers’ Poetry, edited by Amber Dawn and Justin Ducharme.

The podcast theme song is “Mesh Shirt” by Mom Jeans off their album “Chub Rub.” Listen to the whole album here or learn more about them here. Max’s theme song was “RAINBOW” by Gender Confetti.

Secret Feminist Agenda is recorded and produced by Hannah McGregor on the traditional and unceded territories of the Squamish, Musqueam, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations.

In this minisode I’m thinking through recent protests agains “gender identity debates,” which institutions need to have values, and how we sustain ourselves when doing organizing or activist work that can feel so completely exhausting sometimes. This feels like a sad episode to me, but also maybe a hopeful one. Also, here are some links:

• This is officially my final plug for the Vancouver Podcast Festival and Secret Feminist Agenda meet-up. I hope to see some of you there!
• For some context around the event at SFU, here’s the open letter I co-authored. Here’s some context around the TPL event and accompanying protests, and here’s an article about the SFU event being moved. And while we’re at it, here’s a little more context on Murphy herself.
• If you’re a Canadian library worker and believe that libraries shouldn’t platform hate, consider signing this open letter. While you’re at it, read “Neutrality in the Library? Don’t Give Me That Bullshit.”
• I don’t even know where to begin regarding academic freedom and its complexities, so I guess maybe we can start with the Wikipedia entry?
• If you don’t know what I’m talking about re: former Canadian Prime Minister and the muzzling of scientists, here’s a little context.
• Here’s Lucia’s absolutely beautiful Twitter thread in its entirety.
• And finally, here’s an absolutely perfect Baroness von Sketch Show bit about the comforts of baking-based television.

The podcast theme song is “Mesh Shirt” by Mom Jeans off their album “Chub Rub.” Listen to the whole album here or learn more about them here. Follow me @hkpmcgregor and tweet about the podcast using #SecretFeministAgenda. Want to email me about your killjoy survival kit? Send it to secretfeministagenda(at)gmail(dot)com.

Secret Feminist Agenda is recorded and produced by Hannah McGregor on the traditional and unceded territories of the Squamish, Musqueam, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations.