Q-booxs

We invite you all, to the next Q-booxs book club meeting. This time we will talk about burnout, something that affects all of us, at some point in our lives and especially affects queer folks.

WHEN: 22.08.2023 (Tuesday), 5:00pm–7:30pm
WHERE: Azyl Library, Lipowa st. 13, Lublin
MODERATION: Erika, Filip Kijewski
ACCESSABILITY: The meeting is organised on the ground floor, in a space without obstructions. The meeting will be accessible for both polish and english speakers. Fragments of the book will be translated into polish, per personal need of participants.
ENTRY: FREE

We will talk about our individual experiences with burnout with the use of fragments from the book “Overcoming Burnout”. We will attempt to abolish the mentality of separating the body and mind. Instead, looking holisticly at the issue of burnout. We will look at the psychological, physical and “spiritual” ways it affects our bodies and attempt to look at as many connections as possible, between it’s numerous aspects. We will ask questions about how burnout affects our way of being, both as individuals and within the communities we are part of. We will tackle the subject of grief and trauma, looking at them as teachers, that can show us a new way of looking at our desires and needs. We will also talk about how living in a patriarchal society affects us, and how those very tendencies, we try to escape, creep their way into spaces, which are supposed to be safe.

“Overcoming Burnout” by Nicole Rose, is a collection of blog posts, published by the books’ author, during her recovery from Costochondritis. The author tackles the paradox of organising in radical spaces, while maintaining a not-at-all radical approach to mutually supporting each other, the process of grief and accepting loss, the interactions between power structures, repression, class and identity, the issues concerning grassroots, horizontal and self-organised groups and communities, drawing upon years of personal experience in organising. She also tackles the myth of productivity, from the perspective of a self-described workaholic.

Nicole Rose, has been active within the anarchist movement for more than 20 years. Throughout the years, she’s fought for animal, human and earth liberation in the so-called “United Kingdom”, including a campaign to close down the largest animal testing facility in Europe. At age 21, during a sweeping wave of repression against that movement, she has been sentenced to 3,5 years in a high security prison. That is when she dived deep into herbalism, using the limited number of plants available, to sustain her throughout her sentence. After being released from captivity, she started supporting other anarchist prisoners, caring for them directly through prison visits, as well as through publications. As Solidarity Apothecary, she has been active, at a mobile clinic in Calais, assisting refugees that were forced to camp there by the policies of Fortress Europe. After the outbreak of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by the Russian regime, she assisted those fleeing the war, through providing them, with much needed support. Other than “Overcoming Burnout”, she also published “The Prisoner’s Herbal”, a book aimed at familiarising prisoners with herbs, which are available even on the barren grounds of prisons and penitentiaries. She also published “The Medicinal Herb Colouring Book” and runs the “Frontline Herbalism Podcast”.