AC Discussion | Creating More Hours: A Temporal Commons
On April 12th, Amanda Huckins, Carolyn Erickson and Eden Erickson, Maritza N. Estrada, and Kelly Seacrest sat down for a conversation about mutual caregiving and its potential as an embodied practice to build solidarity within creative communities.
Read through an abridged transcript of their conversation below, and share your thoughts in the comments section.
Title of Discussion: Creating More Hours: A Temporal Commons
Panelist 1: Carolyn Erickson
Panelist 2: Maritza Estrada
Panelist 3: Kelly Seacrest
Moderator 1: Amanda Huckins
Date of Discussion: April 12th, 2024
List of Acronyms: [CE] = Carolyn Erickson; [ME] = Maritza Estrada; [AH] = Amanda Huckins; [KS] = Kelly Seacrest
Transcript
[AH] Hi everyone! I’m Amanda Huckins and I'm Amanda Huggins. I co-organized Creating More Hours: A Temporal Commons, which was a series of workshops here at Generator Space designed to help expand our time and our resources by building community and systems for collaborative childcare and combining those things in a layered creative practice.
So we've got Maritza Estrada, Kelly Seacrest, and Carolyn Erickson and Eden Erickson here to answer some questions about their experiences in the workshops and also some broader topics too.
I'm just going to ask everybody to introduce themselves and talk more about the reason they agreed to participate in the workshops or lead a workshop
[ME] Hello. My name is Maritza Estrada and I led a letter writing workshop. I was so interested in this project, because of the work that I do professionally. I work with a lot of minors, migrants. We work with language, and learning a new language, and how that impacts placement stability. I also write poetry and mixing those two sounded really appealing.
[KS] My name is Kelly. Anytime Amanda asks me anything, I'm there because she's so incredible. I'm an educator, I co-founded with my husband, Wild Learning, which is a self-directed democratic learning space in Lincoln. I work with kids every single day. And so when Amanda was explaining her ideas, and this whole project, it seemed so aligned with things that I'm really interested in.
[CE] Hi, my name is Carolyn. My daughter Eden and I went to the music workshop. I've known Amanda forever and had kind of the same response of yeah, let's do it.
[AH] Thank you all for sharing. So, my first question is kind of a broad one. Can you all talk a little bit about your relationship to caregiving? What are your strongest memories or guiding thoughts related to caregiving?
[KS] I would say I was really lucky. Both my parents and grandparents were great caregivers. My dad actually stayed at home when I was younger. My mom had the full time job. I think that experience showed me how gender roles play into caregiving, and that those roles aren't fixed. My grandfather too loved babies, loved growing roses, and loved poetry. They both demonstrated how gender can be expansive, without ever actually talking about it explicitly. They were such amazing caregivers. I recognized a lot of my friends’ moms stayed at home as a kid and I think that got me thinking about who’s typically assigned the role of caregiver and how that looks in my own family.
I’m also an educator and was a public school teacher for almost ten years. So much of that work is caregiving too.
[ME] I’m going to echo what y'all are saying. I think my relationship with caregiving, especially within my culture, is one thing that I'm trying to redefine. In so many cultures, you have to give your all and lose yourself in that process and always give, give, give and we have to also take care of ourselves.These past few years, I've been trying to figure out what that word means. We hear the word “boundaries,” or we hear “self care,” but to me it means redefining so that we can give care to other people while also finding a balance. In my work professionally, I have to travel for cases involving minors who might be experiencing housing insecurity or other serious issues and there are moments when I have to remind myself that it’s okay to take time to care for myself. I think that's what poetry does.
[AH] I heard everybody talk a bit about how caregiving relates to identity and the idea of creativity as a place where a sense of self exists beyond caregiving as a fixed identity. So, I was wondering, in what ways is creative practice a part of how you care-give for yourself or other people? How do you infuse caregiving with creativity?
[KS] Yeah, I was an art teacher and I think there's that obvious connection. I think the art classroom tends to be a space where things are less rigid. There's less expectation for kids and so kids can show up more fully themselves. The art classroom almost feels like a reprieve from the day and a space where kids who are having a hard time or not fitting in can gravitate to. I never went to the teachers’ lounge over lunch because there was always a group of kids who felt safer eating in the art classroom rather than the cafeteria. Holding space for creative making is really restorative.
[ME] I had a reading teacher who was the escape teacher for lunch. I appreciate teachers who do that. I think for me, in the workshop I led, I tried to find those things that help us connect to form or genre. The letter was what I had in mind. Anyone can write a letter, or can come to the letter at some point in their lives, even as children. I remember my first experiences of writing a letter and the form the dates, the salutation, and the closing. It’s the premise of language and keeping in mind that every person has their own language and their style and their form. There’s so much possibility in language, and in finding a language that’s your own.
[AH] I appreciate that. It sounds like you’re all talking about bringing people into a space of possibility that allows them to participate without having to know or follow all the rules. I think the first step in building community is noticing how uncomfortable everyone is without a script and then saying, can we rebuild our own script in this space? Is that a way that we can connect with each other?
I wanted to connect something you told me, Carolyn, about the reason you came to the music workshop. You said you wanted to expose Eden to trying something new. Could you talk a little more about the value of trying something new?
[CE] Well, you were talking about possibilities and for me, kids will find their own possibilities, but having a space that intentionally integrates children takes the stress out of it. I wanted to expose Eden to this thing and open her up to new people because it’s kind of a role reversal almost.
[AH] Right. Art spaces aren’t built for kids so adults are constantly trying to impose certain behaviors on them. I think having a space where the kids are actually setting the tone makes it so much less stressful and more possible to try doing things differently.
[KS] Yeah, the default is that children need to be controlled, or children need to exist in a separate place from adults. With Wild Learning, our tagline is, “kids lead the way.” That's a huge shift, where, while sometimes I have to embody authority around safety, a lot of the time, I'm there as a facilitator, observing and assisting the kids.
We talked about openness, and I was lucky enough to be a part of some organizing projects in Lincoln. Amanda, you started The Commons. Other people did mutual aid projects like The Dandelion Network. In some of that work there was this rigidity of adults only meetings that start at seven sharp and no kids allowed. I think that approach closes down so many possibilities. What if we make gathering more open and flexible and acknowledge there's going to be spontaneity? It does feel weird at first, but once you get into that mindset, you feel like you can breathe and parents can show up with kids and they can leave when they need to leave. That kind of flexibility in creative organizing and community building is really important.
[ME] I echo that. I think the architecture of this project allowed for that kind of openness. When I led my workshop, we had a table in the center of the space, and then a kids area where a cardboard box was being built into like a home. Amanda brought wristbands and at certain points during the workshop, participants would trade wristbands and cycle between writing their letters and taking care of the kids. I thought that was neat, because when those participants came back, they had missed portions of the workshop. And I remember pausing, and looking at everyone and saying, “Okay, that’s a reality of caregiving; our attention is often pulled in different directions, so let's welcome our friends back and catch them up.” I thought that was a really neat component of just how, like this experiment happened.
[AH] Thank you so much for sharing that. It's funny, I thought a lot about how we would get people to switch from workshop activities to caregiving without having to completely interrupt and be like, “Now it's your turn, you're the next on the list!” But ultimately, every workshop ended up looking different. Some were incredibly chaotic and fun. Some were more structured. And that was really helpful. It was helpful for me to see that certain components worked well in certain workshop structures and which components maybe didn’t.
So much of how workshops were structured involved thinking about how we can make them work with parenting instead of against it. How can the workshop space be more like the experience of parenting or caregiving or responding to children? That included how people cycled between doing the workshop and caregiving, how the physical space was set up, what the weather was like that day, how long the workshop lasted and how all of those things can influence the experience of caregiving.
I’m also curious to know more about examples you've seen of adults and children collaborating to meet everyone's needs for care, recreation, creativity, play and community. Do you have dreams about how that could look?
[CE] I think for me, I'm super protective. Getting comfortable with the idea that somebody else can take care of my kid and that it will be fine is also getting comfortable with the idea of collaboration. I’ve been the person she’s gone to for so long, it's so nice to see that she's comfortable with other people. She's open about everything and seeing that helps me feel like I can be too.
[ME] I lived in Phoenix for three years and there’s something about the desert landscape that taught me a lot about community collaboration. If you think about it, the folks that first inhabited the desert and others that were displaced in that area, had to rely on each other for food, for water, for shelter. You talk to your neighbors and check in with each other. I had so many neighbors who would ask if I needed anything. That was new for me and I now I bring it with me into my work. Sharing resources, even in small ways, can make a difference.
[KS] I mentioned with mutual aid organizing or creative spaces, there are some incredible models of how parents and kids can be made welcome. There needs to be a level of flexibility and openness. Kids are people and they deserve to be in public. They belong in public spaces. And so I have a lot of dreams about building more supportive spaces where kids are respected and families are supported. That takes a shift in thinking. It takes imagination, and there are also real material conditions and material realities that we need to grapple with while we think through how to make those shifts.
I think that does kind of reach back towards mutual mutual care. It's learning to, instead of walking into a space and thinking, how do I conform to the rules of this space, I think it’s much more interesting to think how can I be responsive and spontaneous when I see someone who needs care. What would happen if when we were in public, like at a concert or at a talk, and somebody had a baby, and the baby started crying, the entire room was primed to just take a huge, deep breath together. What would our society be like if everybody’s response was that baby needs calming and I need to keep calm too. What if we prioritized responsive and spontaneous caregiving as a cultural norm?
[Audience Member] Can you talk more about the ways in which collaborative caregiving and sharing labor and resources can change material realities for people from different economic backgrounds?
[KS] Yes, that's a very large question and I and I love it. We can think about it on different scales. As individuals, we're individually buying our own stuff and working our own stuff. So, what if your neighbor also is buying their own stuff? Do we both need to constantly buy more? Or can we share some of that stuff we’re accumulating? So there’s the smaller scale question of how can I share my resources on an individual level. On a bigger scale, I mean, capitalism is terrible, and it's destroying everything, but we can agitate and sort organize around larger needs. What does it mean when the public education system won’t negotiate with teachers’ unions for pay raises? What does it mean when local government says, “it’s all for the kids” and then can’t make strides in creating supportive housing for single parents or meeting families’ basic needs? We can organize around those issues and our demands should keep increasing as our vision of what a just world can look like comes into clearer focus.
[Audience Member] Thank you all so much for this conversation. I actually came to the cookie decorating workshop and had an experience where I saw that somebody else’s kid needed some care and I was like, “I'm a mom, I know what you need.” But I didn't feel totally comfortable stepping in. And that’s such a weird thing, because that's why we were all there. That’s what we were there to do. And that small realization was really powerful and I think it will give me more courage to now show up for myself and other people in different ways.
[AH] I feel the exact same way. And I think that’s a good place to close for today. Shout out to Amplify Arts. This project was part of the Alternate Currents cohort program, of which I'm a member. Generator Space has been an amazing place to use throughout this project, so thank you Amplify and thank you to all of our panelists for this really amazing discussion. Good night everybody.
*This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
About the Panelists:
Carolyn Erickson's main role is Mom now but she's always been mothering- whether it be with her friends or plants. It’s her default mode. Outside of that, she enjoys crafting of any kind and being in nature. Eden Erickson loves to play and eat (especially fruit). She loves to learn new things and play outside. She loves cats and zebras.
Maritza N. Estrada earned her MFA in Creative Writing at Arizona State University. Estrada’s recent poem “Audience” was published in the Academy of American Poets—the nation’s leading champion of American poets and poetry. Born in Toppenish, Washington to Mexican parents, she calls Phoenix, Mexico City, and Paris, home. ¡Liberar Palestina!
Kelly Seacrest is an educator and artist. With her husband Peter Stegen, she founded Wild Learning in 2020, a Democratic Self Directed learning place for kids. As a facilitator at Wild Learning, she supports kids' learning by practicing democracy, engaging in conflict resolution, creating curriculum and being playful with them. Kelly also practices her art and loves painting, drawing and printmaking.
About the Moderator:
Amanda Huckins is a Nebraskan poet whose work has been published in booklet form as "Trying to End the War" (merrily merrily merrily merrily, 2017) and featured in A Dozen Nothing (adozennothing.com), among other places on paper and online. In her weekday hours, Amanda is an Early Head Start educator and participates in building the brain architecture for social emotional and cognitive development in infants and toddlers. In addition to her paid work, Amanda is a grassroots organizer who works alongside fellow community members to build self-determination, forge non-transactional relationships, and create radical free spaces (such as past DIY spaces The Commons in Lincoln, NE and Media Corp. in Omaha). She is also a letterpress printer who produces posters and other ephemera in her garage print studio, where she teaches typesetting to anyone who wants to learn.