Anarchist Burial & That Skeleton Key: Death Project Updates
Another round of How to Bury an Anarchist books went into the mail last week, so many more copies have been arriving at their new homes. We LOVE that you’re already writing in about the book. Keep it comin’. Note: If you are writing to the author, just put Fíona in the subject line and your note will go straight to her private inbox. (The same goes for everyone at Bacchus: put their name in the subject line and your message is routed directly to them.) Since all those books are arriving, a reminder: the little skeleton key tucked into your package opens the Anarchist Death Project.
You’re all amazing with your notes on it ~ we love it too. The idea was too cute for Madame Simone to resist, wethinks. (Let's hear it for moms and their totally alarming reserves of tiny objects! Ha!) Of course, there is no actual cemetery-gatekeeping here; the key is just a fun little part of your order. Yes, we want you inside! If your order of How to Bury an Anarchist somehow escaped Bacchus workshops without a key, shoot us an email and we’ll send your cemetery password.
If you’re just catching up now:
The Anarchist Death Project is the practical infrastructure for taking death back from the state and the death industrial complex. For all the apparatus accumulated around dying, the dead still belong to their people. Bodies can be cared for, graves dug, land tended for burial, decisions made before institutions make them for us. Laws can be read closely enough to discover where authority actually begins and ends, where funeral-industry procedure is masquerading as law, and where neither has any business being involved at all. There is an enormous difference between knowing what authority claims and assuming it possesses more authority than it does.
That territory is where the project lives…
How to Bury an Anarchist is where this all begins:
… This handsome hardcover book is about death, authority, funerary sovereignty, and what becomes possible when the wishes of the dead are taken seriously without surrendering them to anyone.
The Anarchist Death Project is where those questions come back up, carrying forms, field guides, practical knowledge, and dirt under their fingernails…
The Project has two parts:
The Parallel Deathcare Library is where you'll find zines, print magazines and, coming soon, videos by your graveyard accomplices. The zines are free to read or download and are formatted so you can print them yourself as little zines to distro…
As to the videos..
Your graveyard accomplices will also be showing you:
how to dig a grave
how to wrap a body
how to sew a shroud
wild-forest / wild-garden land with burial in mind
establish and tend a private burial ground
work with land through conservation easements & permaculture for human composting, burial (or any other purposes)
a sky burial
a body sent off to sea
and much more.
Second part of the Project portal:.
End-of-Life Forms: The Paperwork of Dying.
This one is an enormous… undertaking.
Choose your country, state, province, territory and start there.
The portal walks you through the forms and documents where you live, what they do, what you need, where to get them, how to complete them, and what gives them legal force.
Canada, the United States including the territories, and part of Europe are ready now; the rest will be up this week, with all other areas following shortly after.
the humans behind all this….
Fíona, Marina, and those rascals at High Noon Hills Natural Burial Ground & Conservation Cemeteries have researched and built the Anarchist Death Project. You already know Fíona and Marina as part of Bacchus Editions, our lovely writers and publishers; their lives with deathcare, land and the dead extend well beyond the press, alongside the High Noon Hills crew. Among this lot you will find burial-ground keepers, death doulas, death walkers, death midwives, conservation-easement tenders, wild-foresters, funerary artisans, and death threshold dancers. In other words, this is not abstract literary or academic interest for any of them; they tend land, care for bodies and the dead, accompany families, and know firsthand where death collides with the state, bureaucracy, and the funeral industry.
Though we can lean over the presses and thank them ourselves, we want to do it here too! This is a monumental amount of information, research, and straight-up work. Everything that comes out of the Anarchist Death Project carries that intimate knowledge of bodies, land and the dead into exhaustive research, then brings it back out again as something practical, usable, and freely available to everyone. We are immensely grateful to them.
Because the fact is, anarchism that cannot enter the material conditions of life is of no use, especially when those conditions become increasingly troubling. Death is one place where the state and industry have been remarkably successful at making their presence appear natural, even inevitable. They are not. This immense overreach has produced an extraordinary surrender of knowledge and autonomy around something humans have been doing for considerably longer than either institution has existed.
The Anarchist Death Project works in the opposite direction. Know what can be done without them, and beyond them. Know where legalities begin and end, what is actually required, and where everybody merely assumes it is. One aim of the Project is to protect people living at the margins, including queer people, those with chosen families, and outsiders whose lives and relationships do not correspond to the arrangements the state expects to find.
You are your own authority.
This project exists to helps keep that authority in your hands, and in the hands of the people you love and trust.
And lucky us, Bacchus Editions gets to host and publish this extraordinary thing! The Anarchist Death Project, and everything growing out of it, has become a major part of our publishing efforts, and we could not be happier about that.
So, one more time for everyone opening those packages:
hang on to that skeleton key!
If How to Bury an Anarchist has just arrived, take your code over to the Anarchist Death Project and find your way around the graveyard.
If you have been meaning to pick up the book, copies are in the bookshop and, at the author’s request, every copy comes with the Understanding Deathcare magazine and, of course, your crypt-creeper key!
Get your death in order. Come find us if you need a hand.
Then get back to living.
XXXX,
Bacchus Editions
Find Your Way Around the Graveyard
How to Bury an Anarchist
The Anarchist Death Project
The Parallel Deathcare Library
End-of-Life Forms: The Paperwork of Dying
Start Here: Before the State Decides Who Speaks for You
Brainstorm Your Death
Understanding Deathcare