Peg Kerr's Journal

I have been thinking about defiance over the past week.

A half mile from my house, a homeowner has put four-foot high standing letters in their front yard that light up at night. The letters spell out "RESIST." I see them every day as I drive by.

A friend sent me a link about a non-profit, Unidos MN, that was holding Legal Witness Training at a church in Minneapolis. The organizers originally expected an attendance of about 150 people. So many people registered, however, that they ended up moving it from Holy Trinity to Central Lutheran.

Fifteen hundred people showed up.

I was one of them. The purpose of the training was to recruit volunteers to agree to receive text alerts when word came from the dispatchers that ICE was doing a raid to arrest immigrants. People go out to serve as legal witnesses, to hold police responsible and to share rights information with those being arrested, and to be there as moral witnesses, to let immigrants know that they are not standing alone.

The presentation seemed well thought out. The organizers stressed that the intention is not to provoke confrontations, but, they admitted, sometimes these things can go badly. Most raids occur between 4 am and 8 am. They advise letting someone know when you are about to go out to witness a raid, just in case. Make sure your phone is passcode locked, and not openable with biometrics (I privately thought it might be better to carry a burner phone).

It all sounds daunting. But the reality of what is going on in this country is daunting. Can I stand by and do nothing? What SHOULD I be doing?

The whole experience led to a lot of thinking about what we are facing, about fascism and the duty to resist. I kept thinking how familiar it all seemed and poked at that thought until I found the connection.

You see, I spent seven years writing daily with a dozen other writers in an online collaborative story about people living in a fascist regime and taking it down in the end. I'm talking about Alternity. I wrote stories about people who resisted covertly and others who resisted openly. I wrote about people who worked within a cruel bureaucracy, trying to save as many as possible. I wrote about people who bought into the regime because of the power it gave them, addicted to the thrill of being able to force others to do what they wanted. I wrote about people who left their lives behind to fight openly, and how some won, and some sacrificed everything.

Writing Alternity was the best preparation I could have imagined for living in these times. We wrote about the insidious nature of propaganda, and groupthink, and about being betrayed by family and friends and the despair of watching people you love willingly swallowing poison and turning against you. We wrote about the little accommodations to evil that are so easy to make and the terrible things that those little compromises can slowly lead you to do. We wrote about the erosion of morality and the building of courage. We wrote about what happens to people when everything is falling apart all around them.

I look around today and almost marvel: we're living it. We are in the beginning stages of Alternity. When we wrote the story, we assumed that of course it will never happen here. But now we see fascism on the rise, and what are we going to do about it?

What am I going to do about it?

I remember reading Corrie Ten Boom's autobiography when I was a kid. I thought about the movie I saw about Sophie Scholl and the White Rose. Absorbing those stories led to a kind of moral exercise, a thought experiment examining the question, "What would I do in that situation?" Of course, you think that you will be brave. You will stand up to the powers that be to protect the oppressed innocent; of course you will.

Yet, my finger hovered for an inordinately long time over the sign-up button below the question on the app: "Are you willing to volunteer to be a legal witness?" I felt sick. I felt afraid. It is still difficult to believe that this is actually happening. And yet I know, from writing Alternity, that fascism builds its momentum by convincing people that its power is overwhelming. You must stand up from the very beginning to say, "No."

I have come to deplore JK Rowling and all the hatred she represents. And yet I found myself thinking: "Am I a Gryffindor or not, dammit?"

In the end, I haven't yet committed to being a legal witness, but I will be attending the next training to learn more. I may yet sign up, or I may find another role, another way to assist. In the meantime, I've used my position at my job to pass much of this information along to church leaders to let them know about this initiative.

I learned this week that courage can seem easy when all you're doing is dreaming about what-ifs. It is a lot more difficult when you are facing the necessity of being brave in real life. And it is going to get much more challenging. We are just at the beginning.

Worse is yet to come. So the defiance has to start now.

About the design: one of the things I picked up in my reading this week was the historical tidbit about why red lipstick was so popular in World War II. Apparently, the word filtered out from Germany that Hitler hated women wearing makeup. When women were invited to join his entourage on his retreats, there was a strict dress code that they couldn't wear makeup, particularly red lipstick.

So American women started adopting red lipstick as a marker of resistance to fascism.

The starfish is included because of that old story about the man who walks along a beach, throwing starfish back into the water after a storm. When asked why he bothers, that his actions are useless because there are so many starfish littering the beach, the man picks up another starfish, throws it in, and says, "I made a difference to that one."

The ouroboros (the snake in a figure 8 devouring its tail) is included in the design because it was Voldemort's symbol of the regime in Alternity.

Central images: Men in black jackets with "Police ICE" on the back converge on a front door decorated with a Christmas wreath. Lower center, semi-transparent: an ouroboros (a snake curled in a figure-8, swallowing its own tail). Bottom center, over the ouroboros: an open white rose. Behind the ouroborus, lower left corner, a hand tosses a red starfish (center). Lower right corner: tips of a woman's fingers apply fire engine red lipstick to a pair of lips (directly over the starfish).

Defiance



Click on the links to see the 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022 and 2021 52 Card Project galleries.

Sometimes these digital collages come together really easily.

This was not one of those cards. I spent about two hours on an approach that I ended up scrapping altogether and then spent another two hours coming up with this.

This is entirely appropriate because it is about something that has given me fits of agony for more than the last quarter-century: writing.

After I finished The Wild Swans, I made several attempts to start a new novel, without success. One attempt was the Ice Palace Book, and one was a sequel to Emerald House Rising. I agonized and flailed and wrote scads of entries on LiveJournal and Dreamwidth about my writers block, but I never figured it out. It's not surprising, really: I was attempting to work full time, raise a family, and manage a household (of which the three other members all had ADHD). And write. My back brain just didn't have the bandwidth to do anything creative. And so after a lot of grief and self-flagellation, I effectively put my writing away (picture it locked away in a trunk) and didn't attempt again to write anything publishable for almost twenty years.

The Alternity Game helped. That convinced me I could still write. Soul Collage and this digital card project helped, too. That showed me that I still have a creative side.

Several years ago, I extricated from a pile in my office the four chapters I'd written that were meant to be a new Piyanthia novel:

Chapter One

Reynardo was correcting student exercises when Bevan paid an unexpected visit to Freneca Hall and asked to see him. That must have been the reason, he decided later, that he was foolish enough to be glad that his old schoolmate had come.

An apprentice directed him to the south solar, where Bevan had been ushered to wait. It overlooked the garden, and he was standing at the window when Reynardo opened the door. It was a fine clear morning in early summer, and just below the window outside, bees were making a low thrum in the yellow patch of sweet lord’s buttons that Master Lionel tended so faithfully. Whenever Reynardo thought of the interview afterward, that was part of the memory: the warm, heady perfume of the garden in full flower, and the drone of the bees in the background, soporific and faintly menacing.

With some diffidence, I passed them on to Delia to read. "Mom! You should do something with this. It's really good! I want to see you finish it." I thanked her, and didn't do anything about it, but that raw encouragement continued to lurk in the back of my mind.

For the last several years, I have been having coffee every Friday with three other writing friends: Eleanor Arnason, lydamorehouse and naomikritzer. When the pandemic came, we switched to meeting over Zoom every Friday. They have all published more books than me and certainly have had more successful writing careers; we've had different life paths. But they did me the great courtesy of still considering me to be a writer too and gently encouraged me to keep revisiting the idea of writing--for publication or simply for fun. Lyda formed a writing critique group last year and assured me that I would be welcome to join.

And so I did. I dusted off those four chapters and ran them through the critique group, where they were well-received. But I wrote those chapters twenty years ago. How could I pick the book up again, particularly after failing so miserably the last time? I had no idea what happened next.

Then Lyda and Naomi told me that they were getting together an hour a day four days a week, on Zoom, simply to write. No talking. Just showing up and clicking keyboards. Would I like to join? No pressure. Just show up if you want, and if you can't, no sweat. The invitation was out there for several months. I kept making excuses. I got a concussion. I needed to recover. Ack, could I do it?

This past week, for the first time, I showed up.

I have written 1,231 new words on a book I began twenty years ago. Here is the opening of the new chapter I started this week:

Chapter Five

Of course, joining the players involved a certain amount of negotiation—and wrestling with his inner pride—over one issue: money.

“You will share in the profits, of course,” Tavia said briskly, “after a month, once we’ve had a chance to see that you will settle in well with us.” And I’ve had the chance to determine that you’re useful was the clear implication.

Reynardo swallowed. “Am I to eat during that month? I fear my hose will be hanging quite loose if I cannot. Hardly a look that would appeal to the audience.” He offered her his most blinding smile. “And I always make it a point of pride to appeal to the audience.

Tavia’s lips thinned, and he could sense that she was suppressing a sigh. Perhaps profits had been rather low lately. “I will stake your belly during that first month. No alcohol, though,” she added quickly. Drunken louts, clearly, were not useful.

I still have no idea whether I can finish it. I have no idea of my way through. But now I am 1,231 words closer to the end.

You have NO IDEA what a big deal this is.

Image description: Background: a sketchified picture of a pathless forest. A crossroads sign stands to one side, but the markers pointing in various directions are empty. Lower left foreground: an open wooden trunk. A woman (Peg) stands beside it, peering inside. Behind the trunk and the woman, overlaying the forest hovers a semi-transparent image of a woman's hand holding a quill pen, writing. Upper edge: individual thumbnail images of three women on Zoom: Naomi Kritzer (left), Peg (center), Lyda Morehouse (right).

Writing



Click here to see the 2022 52 Card Project gallery.

Click here to see the 2021 gallery.

I was sick during our regular collaging time several weeks ago and then minnehaha K. was out of town. We finally got together and caught up several weeks at once. I'm still one week behind.

Week 9: Retreat
The Alternity players get together to relax and celebrate.



The Wordle is taken from a flyer my sister Betsy did that gives directions to the cabin where the Alternity crew had their retreat. I sprained my ankle while we were there, and synecdochic offered me some of her ace bandage to wrap it up. It just so happens that the sign of the Protectorate in Alternity is a green Ouroborus, so I took a sliver of the bandage and put one on the card.

Week 10: Sick
If I never eat another cough drop in my life, it'll be too soon.



Yeah. I got back from the retreat and spent the next several days in bed. Combination of recovering from the sprained ankle and fighting off the crud.

Week 11: Outlander
I swore an oath before the altar of God to protect this woman.



Fiona and I have been getting together to watch 'Outlander' and I've got her reading the books. The bicycle is a reference to a pretty fraught and revealing dream I had that week that tied into Outlander. There is a long explanation that ties this card together very tightly, but it's pretty personal, so Elinor Dashwood isn't going to explain.

Today, we posted the 63 codas for the characters on Alternity, and they are really well done, I must say!

And now that the game is over, the cast list is up!

Now it can be said:

The characters I played included the following (the ones asterisked are the ones I played from the beginning throughout the game. No asterisk means someone else initiated play of that character, but I held it at the end of the game):

Hannah Abbott, Terry Boot*, Amycus Carrow, Neville Longbottom*, Luna Lovegood*, Kingsley Shacklebolt, Arthur Weasley, Bill Weasley*, Fred Weasley, George Weasley, Molly Weasley*, Percy Weasley*

So! Are you surprised?

I think last night was one of the funniest nights we've had in the game. I was crying I was laughing so hard. We players were Google chatting as we threaded, and we had to keep admonishing each other to put down our drinks, because otherwise they'd get snorted out our nose.

So Dolohov is the new professor on staff who teaches Dark Arts. As of this year, all students are required to take Dark Arts, and there is a lot of anxiety and questions. Dolohov is requiring a textbook by the name of Intra Profundus (translation: Within the Depths), but unbeknownst to him, a publisher has just come out with the wizarding version of 50 Shades of Grey and given it the same title.

Luna Lovegood has some questions about her homework.

Don't miss the followup post, either.

Wasn't that exciting?

So...were you surprised?

has really been fun today.

Just sayin'.

Tonight is the Yule Ball. We are almost at the exact halfway point through the game. (Can you believe it? We have been doing this for three and a half years!)

This is an excellent summary of our story so far. I invite you to take a look at HP Alternity today! (You can best read the game by following alt_player's reading page.)

in Time Magazine, both the print and online edition.

And hey! It even mentions Alternity! Booyah!

Nostalgic 'Harry Potter - Through the Pensieve' Video



(Keep an eye on alternity this next week. Some big stuff is going to start happening!)