A Love Letter to the Boston QTAPI Community
A collection of stories, offerings, and events to highlight how we take care of each other.
We are exploring love and caregiving in our communities as a tool for raging against injustice, capitalism, ableism, and systemic oppression. Love and caregiving are more than just a means of survival but a part of the process in which we can re-imagine a future we want to carve out for our communities.
Care is political. Care is long term. Care is community. Help us highlight the stories of how you and yours practice care and love.
Read more about our analysis around caregiving and our offering of love to you in our mini zine!
Stories
A multimedia collection of stories around the question: As QTAPI, how do we care for each other?
Gatherings
Gatherings around collective care and telling our stories to bring the QTAPI community together
FAQs
how are you approaching caregiving? what is your analysis?
We created a mini zine with our analysis around caregiving and the sources and movement elders we drew upon to dream this project into being. Check it out here!
what do you mean by collecting stories?
We’re collecting multimedia art and/or written narratives to the question: how do we care for each other? These stories will be published online and celebrated at a public community event.
These can be as long or as short as you would like! Some examples of other stories we have published are at the Story Project blog.
how do I submit stories?
Please attend a workshop/community gathering if you would like to submit a story! We will share further details there.
why caregiving and the QTAPI community? what does this have to do with organizing?
We think that care is and always has been political. Whether that’s caring for kids, caring for family, chosen family, and/or community- care cannot exist without creating the conditions in which our people can thrive. We are thinking about care and caregiving in the framework of collective care and the work of disability justice organizers, and want to explore the ways our community has been practicing and will continue to practice this model of care.
what if I’m not an artist?
We want to get to know you and share space even if you don’t consider yourself an artist! Part of our thinking behind offering generative arts and healing workshops is to offer ways for folks to access their stories and creativity even if you don’t regularly do so. We hope to make the process of telling your story accessible in community!
what if I want to lead a community offering/workshop?
You can contact Dianara at dianara@aarw.org and cc Blue (blue@aarw.org). Thanks for your interest!
by and for QTAPI!
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Dianara (she/her) is Director of Narrative Strategy at AARW by day, and essayist, poet, and dance enthusiast at night. She is a queer Pilipina and Puerto Rican, and has found and given immense care in communities of Pilipinx women, femmes, and non-men. As Director of Narrative Strategy, she leads storytelling projects that support AARW’s organizing strategy, as well as works on campaign communications and internal narrative alignment. As a creative she explores all the ways she learned to be natural, and excavates all the little ways in the past she learned to take her own power.
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Blue Nguyen (he/they) is a Vietnamese non-binary lesbian poet and community organizer based out of Boston, MA. He is an artist-in-residence at AARW. In his free time he enjoys creating mixed media art using anything he can find in his apartment, singing bird songs to the moon, exploring the caves in Stardew Valley, and writing sapphic penpal letters. They have been nominated for Best of the Net Anthology and Best New Poets Anthology. Their poetry can be found at The Mantle Poetry, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Protean Magazine, Prolit Magazine, DEAR Poetry Journal, Peach Mag, and more. You can find them on Instagram: @blue.ngu and on Twitter: @queerqhost.
