January 2023 – Knitted Wit

Mia Birdsong, b. 1973

For our second year of HerStory Book Club, we are starting in much the same way we finished 2022. Our final theme for 2022 was breaking the burnout cycle many of us find ourselves in, and our first theme for 2023 is building community to feed our souls. Starting and ending with hope and purpose seem like good ways to bookend our club, and we hope you find January’s book and author as inspiring as we have.

We are starting our New Year off with hope and love as we feature Mia Birdsong and her transformative book, How We Show Up: Reclaiming Family, Friendship, and Community. This book discusses how building community and fostering deep personal relationships with others enhances our own lives, and how modern American society, so steeped in its particular brand of individualism and white supremacy, leans away from deep connection instead of toward it. The particular focus of this book is on communities that encompass marginalized folks, such as Black and brown people, the LGBTQIA+ community, poor, displaced, and houseless communities, and single mothers, to name a few. The way the people and communities that Birdsong interviewed for this book show up for each other is a lesson to be learned for all of us longing for belonging in our disconnected age.

This book is hopeful and beautiful and inspiring. It’s hard to listen to and hard to put down, all at once. It inspires us to hold a mirror to our own lives and think more deeply about how we are working on our own communities, and how much more we have to gain from deepening those communities than from building more walls around our own places in the world.

Mia Birdsong is a writer, advocate, speaker, community member, mother, partner, friend, and thinker. Her work centers the marginalized and explores what is possible if community was centered more in our lives. Her communities are many and wide-ranging, and through them, she has found deep meaning and love and support. We could all learn a thing or two from her work and her example. Our colorway, How We Show Up, was inspired by the lovely interconnectedness of the book cover, and we hope to knit our communities together using this yarn during this first month of 2023.

Books by Mia Birdsong: