five things I believe to be true
And you don't need to agree with me.
Hello friends! This is Ursula Fan Club, where I write on a weekly-ish basis about what I’m writing, reading, and seeing in the world. If you’re interested in speculative fiction, climate, ancestral stuff, textiles, living in a human body, and balancing a creative practice with <whatever this is> *waves wildly around*, you’ll probably like it here.
Hi, hello, I hope you’re doing ok. After this week of weeks, here is a list of five things I have been thinking about.
Trump is not more popular than ever. News and voting maps are painting a picture of a red wave sweeping the country. The right gained ground in new demographics and in blue states. Trump won the popular vote for the first time. These things may be true, but it’s obscuring the fact that he won 74.6M votes in 2024 and 74.2M votes in 2020. In other words, Trump won this election by just 400,000 more votes than last time. That’s not even half a million votes. That’s nothing.
The left has serious work to do. The Democratic Party has forfeited its trust with working people by not naming and prioritizing their needs, and it has repeatedly tamped down debate and counter narratives from within that seek to address those needs (*cough cough* BERNIE *cough*). I’m talking cost of living and affordable healthcare, the threat of gun violence, or fear of job loss due to automation, AI, or no reason at all. (Never mind the votes of no confidence due to the Biden administration’s arming of Israel and funding genocide.) I am angry at Biden for not making way for an open primary; at Obama for his censuring of Black men as if they’re children; at Pelosi or Whoopi for pointing fingers outward, never inward; and for Harris for not being braver, stepping away from the Biden agenda, supporting Medicare for all and halting support for Israel, proposing bigger ideas to energize voters. I wish she could have won on abortion rights alone, but she didn’t and in retrospect never could have. We live in a racist, sexist, conservative country, but Trump didn’t win because he had overwhelming support; he won because the left lost theirs.
America doesn’t have the answers. Just because the U.S. can’t figure something out doesn’t mean humanity is doomed. Honestly, take your pick of all the things we haven’t figured out—gun laws, abortion rights, carbon drawdown, universal health care, affordable housing, accessible public transportation—and I can point to a country or community outside the U.S. who is doing a better job at it than we are. Good ideas are out there and are possible.
It’s not my job to read the news. Staying on top of every single big and little thing Trump will do over the next 4+ years is not bearing witness or a marker of virtue or value as a citizen. It is a hijack of my attention. And my attention will be directed towards my immediate community and mutual aid where I can affect the most direct, meaningful change for those who are most at risk by this incoming administration. I will read, listen, and watch the news, but I will do my best to maintain sustainable boundaries for myself.
Books change worlds. If they couldn’t, the right wouldn’t be banning them left and right and policing libraries. My art matters and I refuse to be paralyzed by this moment, the way my writing was ground to a halt by Trump’s election when I turned 30, the primaries in 2019, the pandemic in 2020.
This week, I have been thinking about the art made under fascism and dictatorships and what it these ancestors can tell us about the work ahead. I think of Hans Fallada’s Every Man Dies Alone, where a man drops small notes of resistance into communal spaces. I also keep coming back to this painting by Hannah Höch, “Three Faces,” that we saw at Berlinische Galerie last spring. It was made in the early 1940s in Berlin, the capital of Nazi Germany near the start of WWII, seven to eight years into the Third Reich. Nazi Germany framed all modern art as degenerate but this art was made anyhow. This art is not protest art, but by its very creation and existence, it is just that.
What I’m writing
I wrote and released the 2025 reading list for Book Club for the Planet, the climate change book club I’ve organized for nearly five years, two months ahead of schedule.
What I’m reading
Hagstone, which feels like a distraction read but is also about women, witches, bodily autonomy, earth art. Feels relevant.
Went to the bookstore and picked up M Archive: After the End of the World by Alexis Pauline Gumbs and Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance by Nick Estes. I ordered used copies of Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy; it’s time for a re-read.
What I read
I finished Ancestor Trouble, which was exactly what I hoped it would be and more. This book is a really thoughtful reckoning from a white person on her ancestors’ role in white supremacy and generational trauma, and I was repeatedly impressed with how Maud both holds compassion and curiosity for her ancestors—her mother and grandmothers, specifically—while also holding them to account for their actions and inaction that caused her and others real harm.
A helpful thing
My little sister launched a small batch witchy candle business! I’m so damn proud of her, not just because the candles are GORGEOUS and smell incredible, but also because she got this off the ground after two+ years of chronic illness, personal loss, a fucking brain hemorrhage (?!) that kept her in the ICU for nearly a week this summer… just, wow. My baby girl has been through it but through it all has forged new tools and is sharing that healing with others through these candles. You can shop her candles here; I’ve ordered the Power candle and the Moon Folk Ritual candle.
Thank you for this. I am also drawn to the art of the Weimar Republic and art that was deemed degenerate by the Nazis, and I found myself, toward the end of the last Trump presidency, writing a novel loosely inspired by the women of the Bauhaus. I put that novel away for a while but am now back in it, which feels timely. Our work does matter — keep going, keep going.
Absolutely with you on the importance of continuing to build tangible, real-life community and help people out on a local scale, instead of getting completely sucked into the news cycle, doomscrolling and paralyzed from your creation, sharing, mutual aid.