Additional writing appears in Washington Post, World Policy Journal, the Toronto Star, TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, Canadian Woman Studies, Critical Ethnic Studies Journal, Scholar & Feminist Journal and numerous book anthologies.

Robyn Maynard: This is a dangerous question to ask me! [laughs] You have no idea how much Star Trek content didn't make it into the book based on the amount that I actually talk and think about Star Trek in my everyday life. For me, in the Star Trek world, The Next Generation universe is this world free from want — this world in which the divisions of race and gender are now seen as foolish; in which capitalism and the senseless destruction of the planet is seen as foolish; that people have what they need. They don't have a cash economy. It's not based on extreme wealth and poverty. Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson embody and express how practice makes different. This necessary book is a model—through the shared process of two brilliant thinkers it gifts us clarity to see rehearsals otherwise and elsewhere.” The beautifully named Rehearsals for Living is a gift conjured by a pair of brilliant scholars during the dark days and months of the pandemic, lit by a powerful resistance movement, fueled and rendered magical by a profound and challenging dialogue that offers ways to collectively think and be and act in a chaotic world.”Get Rehearsals for Livingfrom Haymarket: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1880-rehearsals-for-living The epistolary form allows a vulnerability and closeness that wouldn’t have been possible in any other genre. The book, however, still manages to be immensely scholarly, journalistic, historical and theoretical all at once. Both writers use the intimacy of their domestic lives to reflect on the larger political and social phenomena around them. Rehearsals for Living by Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. Published by Knopf Canada. These aren’t just two women talking about the world’s problems, but share real stories that braid the political with the human centric approach to liberation. Across the pandemic-imposed distance, Leanne and Robyn begin a new iteration of the practices they’ve enacted in their labors and loves for years—this origin rises in letters, in which they take account of (and consequently bear the physical, emotional, and intellectual burdens of that accounting) the intimate and public violences committed by our governments upon our peoples, lands, waters and non-human relatives. In these letters, Leanne and Robyn constellate our brightest wounds and scars, but refuse to waste their energies of love and imagination on fixing or salvaging the Nation/State. Instead, they reorganize the trajectories and shapes of those constellations—retelling stories again and anew, of who we have been and might yet be again. ”

Robyn Maynard: The title has so many different meanings. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, who wrote the foreword for our book, describes abolition as "life in rehearsal." And that's really a way of thinking about the kind of world that we want to live in — about the kind of world that freedom could mean.I've read a lot of books about activist issues. I think they're important, and teach me to question myself and our collective culture, and fight for change. These books are not easy, fun, or enjoyable to read. They're hard. Really hard. They present uncomfortable truths, force you to challenge ingrained assumptions, and present you with startling stories and statistics. This book falls in that category. Leanne, you write to Robyn that it's never enough to just critique the system, a name or oppression. We have to create the alternative on the ground in real time. How important is this building of the alternative?

Betasamosake Simpson and Maynard spoke to Shelagh Rogers about the conversations that led to Rehearsals for Living. Betasamosake Simpson is a Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar, activist, musician, artist, author and member of Alderville First Nation. Her books include Islands of Decolonial Love, This Accident of Being Lost, As We Have Always Done and Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies. This book must be read for its future vocabularies, its political intimacies, its careful assemblage of the materials of our activisms, and its generous and fulsome thinking.”Please join us for the Lansdowne Lecture with Rehearsals for Livingauthors Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. Leanne Betasamosake Simpson is a renowned Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar, writer and artist, who has been widely recognized as one of the most compelling Indigenous voices of her generation. Leanne is the author of seven books, including her 2021 novel Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies, which was named a best book of the year by the Globe and Mail, and was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award for fiction. When I read Emergent Strategy earlier this year, I remember sitting with the wisdom of Octavia Butler referenced by Adrienne Marie Brown throughout. I remember repeating to myself: "Everything you touch, you change. Everything you change changes you. The only everlasting truth is change. God is change." And although I knew that envisioning change was essential to radical abolitionist work, it was hard to find comfort in change as a constant. It might be the Virgo (or mental illness) in me, but I didn't really know how to find peace in continuous world-changing, world-ending, and world beginnings. Liane, you say the absence of hope is a beautiful catalyst — and you reference Mariame Kaba's idea of hope as a discipline or a practice. Can you talk about hope as a practice?