2026 (forthcoming)

Poetry

• “Pines”. Feral Publications. Winter 2025/2026.

Short Stories

• “Vaguely Transphobic”. Disco Kitchen Vol 3. Spring 2026.
• “Spore”. Ascendency. Spring 2026.
• “Express”. Spare Parts (ARTificial). Spring 2026.

2025

Chapters

• Chapter 28: These Anarchic Bodies. Rural Education and Queer Identities. Rural and (Out)rooted. Spring 2025. link

Newspaper

• “We No Longer Have an Excuse” - The Bridge, January 22, 2025. link
• “Vermont Has an Opportunity for Action” - VTDigger, July 13, 2025. link

Podcast Episodes

✨ Highlight of my year!! I got to be on Modern Anarchy! Check it out. Nicole is amazing. ✨

• Episode 201. Relationship Anarchist, Jasper Brown - Modern Anarchy. link

2024

Newspaper

• “A Recent History Lesson” - VTDigger, October 10, 2024. link

pre-2024

Newspaper

• Writings for The Rake VT link

Bear with me as this part gets set up. ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ

Right now, I am actively applying to residencies and writing contests. If you’ve got a cool project, reach out to me, I’d be interested in hearing more!

I left Substack recently for a variety of reasons - platforming hate speech being only one of them. My work will be available in several different places. All publications will be listed on my Publications page.

For short, unedited thought pieces and lists, you can peruse my Notes.

My self-published work will be available on jasperbrown.itch.io.

I also recently established a presence on Chill Subs: https://www.chillsubs.com/profile/jasperbrown

My hope is to be a collaborator. Writing does not exist in a vacuum. It is but one way to share a story. I’m open to all sorts of opportunities as long as they reflect my values.

Topics of Interest

To get the juices flowing, here are some things I’ve written about / obsess over. Of course, the list is non-exhaustive, but you’ll get the drift.

• environmental collapse and climate change
• off-grid living, tiny houses, community land projects
• covid (long covid, prevention, research, etc.)
• fascism and its relationship to larger picture issues (like collapse)
• science fiction and fantasy - short stories, longer form, graphic novels, all of it!
• paganism, ancestral work, Earth-based spirituality
• human rights (antiracism, trans rights, disability rights, land back, etc.)
• anarchist thought

Email: jasper.b.brown {at} proton {d0t} me

Note: This originally was posted to my now-defunct Substack in April 2025. What I wrote here has now largely come to pass, and thus it’s now more important than ever to have it available for people to read.

What I am about to espouse is not anything novel in the activist world by any means, but it is something that I feel now more than ever is important to remember. I was talking with my partner the other day about whether or not to attend a rally. It would be the second rally in a month that we would’ve attended, and while it was a great way to meet people in our new region with similar values to us, I was not entirely excited to go.

Part of this was because the rallies - like the ones I’d attended in a support role in the last three years - were all about getting the crowd riled up, but then nothing apart from more rallies were being scheduled after that. There was a level of fatigue in this process - always getting angry, letting off steam, but then ultimately nothing productive coming from it apart from more anger to harbor for the next one.

It hurts to imply something is unproductive when the goal is to unlearn the systems that put a premium on how much we contribute to society and what that looks like.

What I really mean is this: there is a key difference between changing people’s minds (which, arguably, is one function of a rally) and changing people’s behavior (something a rally isn’t wholly designed to do).

We are at the point where we cannot only be focused on doing the former, and need to put more effort into doing the latter. It’s time to work with the minds of the people that’ve changed: encourage them to adjust their behavior to align with their new values - or even obstructing the behavior of others actively putting their energy into continued harm.

One simple and very effective method of obstruction, for example, is clogging phone banks. Folks can make it hard for others to report information to ICE by coming up with fake concerns to share with their tip line. It can be silly or even serious. This was a recently used tactic that made ICE’s tip line run busy just this afternoon! All participants needed was a phone and a sense of humor, and a bunch of friends who had 5-10 minutes to harangue operators (and get those friends to invite 5 friends and so on).

Another example of obstruction is a familiar one we have already seen: having a protest outside of a Tesla dealership, where one of the components was preventing people from getting into work or buying a Tesla.

What can organizing that look like internally? Maybe people agree to block the parking lot so Tesla dealers have to walk from further away. Maybe it’s shaming those going in to buy Teslas until they leave. Maybe it’s - as has been done - painting penises on the Teslas in the parking lot to make them worthless to potential customers.

Obviously, there is substantially more risk in these tactics and not everyone can participate in these specific activities. A successful protest, which itself is different than a rally, has roles for everyone. Maybe someone can’t be arrested because they’re the sole caretaker of their kids, but they still want to be involved - great, hand them a sign and station them further from where those who can take more risk are blocking the parking lot, etc. Is the risk absolute zero? No. But they have an out if they need it and are still involved. Their role is just as important as someone using spraypaint or yelling at Tesla customers.

Protests have a lot more complexity than rallies because there needs to be very specific goals and there needs to be group agreement around those goals. It involves more cohesion than agreeing to all show up on a sidewalk to yell at passing traffic and to have a couple speakers interspersed between. (Again, not to belittle this, but I think we are well past the point of this being the only way to resist.)

Building collective acts of resistance involves us to actually come together and make decisions as community. It’s not about waving our hands around to show how frustrated we are at the state of things and going back to our regularly scheduled activities.

Why do you think these rallies haven’t been broken up?

Why do you think the government wants to label Tesla vandals as domestic terrorists versus the people on your street corner with signs saying “honk if you think Black Lives Matter”?

Rallies by themselves aren’t threats to the regime.

By now everyone, more or less, is at least aware of the atrocities occurring within and beyond this country. People who like Trump are digging in. The ones who recognize his utter tyranny either have turned coats or have doubled down on their opposition to what he stands for. Minds, for the most part, have been made up. There are seats at the table for those who change their minds later, but we can’t sit around for dinner to get cold while we wait for them. (He says while inhaling yesterday’s room-temp noodles from a pot.)

Now is the time to act, to work closely in relationship with the people you trust and plan what you’re going to do. Not everything has to be with spray paint or an event where your physical body is on the line. This is where the personal behavior change I mentioned earlier comes in: make plans at work, in your neighborhood, in your household, etc. about what you’re going to do when Border Patrol knocks on your door. Who are you going to call? Who can you make agreements with? Notice that this is not an “if” anymore, but a “when.”

For example, my partner and I discussed today that we no longer will be crossing the border alone. We live a couple hours from one and used to cross with regularity. Now we save it for emergencies. We talked about it until there was consensus on what our plans were: what events constituted emergencies, if those would mean crossing solo to get help, and so on.

It’s also important to assess your personal risk level and meet in-person to determine what is in your power to do right now, in a week, in a month. Who in your network is best positioned to step forward when a Black man is being harrassed by the police or if a trans person is being strip searched at the border? What does care look like when the military begins to walk the streets of your neighborhood? (Again, not an “if” but a “when.” I don’t want to delude anyone with where my brain has been at regarding these things, and I know I’m not alone.)

Haven’t been in many group decision-making situations before where consensus is important? Educate yourself about the different ways this has been done throughout history. Understand conflict resolution, because there will be disagreements.

Part of why rallies, in my opinion, are the easiest for people to reach for as a method of group gathering is because it rarely requires more than a few decisions, often made by organizers without weigh-in from attendees. Strikes require union meetings. Protests, especially where more risk is involved, need everyone on the same page and to agree to certain roles in order to make sure they don’t go catastrophically awry. The Black Panther Party’s decision to offer a breakfast program to pressure political leaders into feeding children before school wasn’t the decision of one or two.

There’s historical precedence for all of this but, for the most part, it feels like we are still stuck in the first stage. The Trump administration is moving at warp speed but we are muddling through treacle. It is only to our detriment when boots (literally) hit the ground.

For context, during the 2024 election, I drew a card to gain insight about what lessons we would learn from the electoral process. I got the Devil card, upright. To me, that indicated we were going to lean into our most carnal instincts as a country, and that we were not really going to learn anything because we were too focused on what would “feel good in the moment” as opposed to what needed to happen long term. It also told me the country was collectively going to follow its instincts: its racist, sexist, and greedy instincts.

Putting aside the fact that Trump’s personality has a lot of overlap with the aspects of the Devil card, the outcome of the election when I drew the card in late summer 2024, was pretty clear.

Fast forward to New Year’s Eve, just a few days ago. The card I drew for 2026: X of Swords. (It was in its upright position, if you track that; I personally do depending on how the card tells me to read it.)

For those who do not know X of Swords, it is of a man lying on his back with ten swords lodged upright in his spine. It’s safe to say that he is dead. The sky above is full of dark clouds, but on the horizon it is light.

The X’s (tens) of any suit in tarot’s minor arcana - wands, pentacles, swords, or cups - tend to sum up everything you learn from the smaller-numbered cards of the suit. Each suit pertains to a grouping of themes, and the swords is the realm of the mind. It’s our thoughts and ideas. It’s the stories we tell ourselves or each other. Swords are rational where wands are passionate, cups are dreamy, and pentacles are materially practical.

The tens also indicate a completion of a cycle. Something has ended and it’s time to accept it, remember the lessons, and look to the next cycle just ahead.

So, what’s that say about 2026?

I took it to mean that the stories we tell about ourselves are no longer applicable to the situation that we are in. The stories of hope and progress and innovation - i.e., the ones framed around capitalism - no longer are going to serve us. The logical structure (i.e., cognitive dissonance) we’ve put in place to ignore the workings behind the curtain is going to break down. We are going to have to find a new way to think, talk, and narrate the story playing out in front of us.

Those who know me well enough are probably rolling their eyes - here he goes again about “collapse” - but I think the presence of this card indicates that many of us are going to be talking very frankly about it this year. Collapse (natural disasters, “mysterious” illnesses, fascism, etc.) will no longer be discussed as this far-off thing happening in colonized countries; such realities will be talked about in the first person.

Just today as I wrote this, Trump held a press conference about his takeover of Venezuela. (Let’s not delude ourselves that this was to “save” anyone from anything.) People in other countries - especially Mexico, Greenland, Canada, and Cuba - were wondering out loud on social media whether their homes were next.

We are only three days into the year, and we had a president bypass all his checks and balances (which, let’s be real, exist only in name) to take control of a country that has a resource he wanted.

I don’t know about you, but that’s a pretty blatant tell about what he and his billionaire buddies are thinking about the state of the world. You don’t snatch at resources unless you smell blood on the water. You don’t build luxury bunkers in Hawaii for fun. You don’t talk about moving to Mars because you think it’ll “just be cool.”

However, I digress from the original point.

When we dispose of the narratives we’ve told ourselves for years, and understand that the rationality by which we’ve lived is actually not all that rational, we will have space to actually talk about how we’re going to get through this. We can end this cycle of enforced madness and move towards something that’s more in line with what’s happening on that 5-dimensional chessboard I keep hearing about.

In truth, when we work out what it is we are actually facing as a global population, I think we’ll find that the moves being made are in plain sight.

2024

Nonfiction

• Zen Mind, Beginner Mind - Shunryu Suzuki
• Turn this World Inside Out: The Emergence of Nurturance Culture - Nora Samaran
• The Creative Act: A Way of Being - Rick Rubin
• Managing Psychic Abilities - Mary Shultan (x2)
• Peace is Every Step - Thich Nhat Hanh
• The Sixth Extinction - Elizabeth Kolbert
• Liberated to the Bone - Susan Raffo

Fiction

• The Buried Giant - Kazuo Ishiguro
• Meet Us By the Roaring Sea - Akil Kumarasamy
• Stone Butch Blues - Leslie Feinberg
• Whiskey Tango Foxtrot - David Shafer
• Head Full of Ghosts - Paul Tremblay
• Smoke - Dan Vyleta
• Nineteen Claws and a Black Bird - Agustina Bazterrica
• Fruiting Bodies - Kathryn Harlan
• The Heart Goes Last - Margaret Atwood (audiobook)
• Sacrificial Animals - Kailee Pedersen
• Gnomon - Nick Harkaway
• Her Body and Other Parties - Carmen Machiado

2025

Nonfiction

• Healing Resistance - Kazu Haga
• White Rage - Carol Anderson
• Pagan Visions for a Sustainable Future - various authors
• Love in a Fucked Up World - Dean Spade
• Learning to Live in the Dark - Wen Stephenson
• Pageboy - Elliot Page (audiobook)
• The Shallows - Nicholas Carr
• We Too: Essays on Sex Work and Survival - Various Authors
• Unmasking Autism - Devon Price, PhD (audiobook)

Fiction

• Road to Ruin - Hana Lee
• Girl One - Sarah Flannery Murphy
• Homegoing - Yaa Gyasa
• Persepolis - Marijane Satrapi
• The Woods All Black - Lee Mandelo
• The Butcher of the Forest - Premee Mohamed
• The City and Its Uncertain Walls - Haruki Murakami
• The Blackheart Man - Nalo Hopkinson
• There, There - Tommy Orange
• Never Whistle at Night - various authors
• Lullaby - Chuck Palahniuk
• Piranesi - Susanna Clarke
• Navola - Paolo Bacigalupi
• The Archive Undying -Emily Mieko Candon
• The City In Glass - Nghi Vo
• Not a Speck of Light - Laird Bard
• Recursion - Blake Crouch
• Pattern Recognition - William Gibson

Poetry

• The Mansuit - Zachary Schomberg (poetry)
• Dear God, Dear Yellow - Noor Hindi
• Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers - Jake Skeets
• The Infinitesimals - Laura Kasischke