Still feeling the feels from Tuesday night's WAMentor conversation featuring Julianne Escobedo Shepherd
Hearing her story was really inspiring, being there with friends and fellow lady music writers/musicians/artists was really great, and getting a lot of positive feedback/follows on twitter after livetweeting it (JES said MANY smart and hilarious things, I wish I could have shared more of them). Actually, I've been getting a lot of followers both on here and twitter, which is cool because I could use the validation. The whole thing got me motivated to finally start that 'profesh blog' tumblr I just mentioned. It also got me motivated to recopy zines so I can trade with zinester friends and gift them to non-zinester friends, work on lesson plans for my guitar students, send some emails to friends, and work on some zine submissions. Which isn't actually that much, but it's a lot more than I've felt capable of lately.
One of the best things JES said: "Fucking namedrop. Everybody does it, don't be afraid." She was talking very specifically about namedropping colleagues when pitching a story to a publication, i.e., mentioning friends and connections at the publication in your pitch. I've been thinking a lot lately though about the idea of 'namedropping' as feminist/pro-TQPOC/WOC diy praxis, or at the very least, learning how to talk about who I look up to, hang with, and choose to write about and have in my life without feeling like some dude is gonna call me a poseur or punk social climber or some shit like that. Taking what JES as a sign that I should go forward with this experiment. (Well. That and all the Nicki Minaj I've been listening to lately, maybe, if I'm being honest.)