Aid & Abet

Last weekend I attended the 5th Women, Action, and the Media conference in Boston, sponsored by the Center for New Words. I had a great time! I’ve been to the conference a couple of years in a row, so I’m starting to get to know a bunch of people, and it’s a great place to see old friends, like Debbie Rasmussen from Bitch Magazine who moved from Oakland to Portland last year, or former Clamor editor Jessica Hoffmann, who lives in LA and works on make/shift magazine, or DeAnne Cuellar from San Antonio’s Texas Media Empowerment Project. Just really great to be around super inspiring women doing all sorts of great projects.

This year I presented a workshop with Nell Greenberg of RAN on publicizing your book or project if you have little or no money. A lot of what I do through Aid & Abet is not rocket science – you can really do it yourself if you have the time and motivation. The workshop went well and I’ll try to post the outline and resources here in case you couldn’t make it.

There were plenty of highlights from the weekend. The keynote address on Friday night was by Helen Thomas, introduced by Ann Friedman from The American Prospect as the queen of “not shutting up.” Helen Thomas has been a journalist since the ’40s (!!), has been a White House correspondent for 57 years (covering every administration since JFK) and is famous for challenging Bush on the invasion of Iraq when few others in the press corps would. She was great, and humorous, and I appreciated seeing her talk.

Throughout the weekend I went to a bunch of workshops, including one on writing book proposals, and a really interesting panel on immigration, which covered questions like: is immigration a feminist issue? It included former Clamor contributor Irina Contreras. Brownfemipower blogged about the workshop and reprinted her remarks, which give you an idea of what was talked about.

One small side note on the panel. In the panel, Irina (I think) had talked about pitching a story to KPFA about an immigration issue and felt that the pitch was not taken seriously. It led to a bunch of other remarks about KFPA and Pacifica. And while I think that Pacifica certainly has its (very serious) problems, I think the issue here is not that Pacifica is the enemy. The issue is that there aren’t enough outlets like Pacifica, and that many of the programs at KPFA and other stations are coordinated by hardworking volunteers. The issue is a structural one, about the accessibility of the media, and that should be included in discussions along side of “why aren’t our issues being covered?”

Oops – I almost forgot to give a shout-out to the other great progressive and radical publicists that I met over the weekend. This is such a needed field – with so many amazing radical projects out there, it’s important to have publicists that understand our particular needs and our community – and it’s great for me to feel welcome in that community of people who are already doing it. Particularly nice to see Gail Leandar-Wright and Ina Howard-Parker!

I had a great time, and am planning on attending next year, though I am vowing right now never to take a red-eye again.