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Have you ever found yourself questioning something you once believed strongly?
The very first person I told about my new pronouns was my roommate, a punk vegan chef, in our crowded Montréal apartment in 2011.
Come see my upcoming talk Oct 24 in Boise, Idaho (or via Zoom)
Dear reader; In late 2022 and early 2023, I wrote the first draft of my memoir about coming of age among anarchists in Vancouver and Montréal. Once I finished it, I put it in a drawer for a very long time.
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After publishing my essay about my life as an anarchist a few weeks ago, I got a message from a stranger on Instagram that read: “I’m trying to decide if you’re secretly a centrist.” I told her that I had a whole pile of essays and podcast episodes where I openly shared my politics, but she told me she wouldn’t read anything of mine until she decided whether we were sufficiently politically aligned (which seemed a tad cart-before-the-horse to me).
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When I was twenty, I moved to Montréal & pretty quickly fell into a group of friends who were activists like me. I hung from the top of a tripod to block the front doors of a bank that financed Alberta’s tar sands; we blockaded a highway with our bicycles to protest a proposed pipeline; we travelled to Ottawa a couple of times, once to show solidarity with the Barriere Lake Algonquin First Nation and once for a Free Palestine rally. We made shoplifting into a sport, cooked vegan food for homeless people under the banner of Food Not Bombs, and sang labour songs to the thrum of an acoustic guitar. Before long I discovered that my new friends were anarchists, and I started to wonder if I was one, too.
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Jason Myles is the host of the podcast THIS IS REVOLUTION, a musician (Bitter Lake, La Fin Absolute du Monde) and a dad that resides in Mexico. We corresponded about his new mini book, I WAS A TEENAGE ANARCHIST.
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