The City We Make Together

A book about one of the most impactful projects I’ve ever worked on, City Council Meeting, is out today!

The book, written by the City Council Meeting co-creators and general awesome inspiring theater folk, Aaron Landsman and Mallory Catlett, is called The City We Make Together. It looks at how we make art with communities, how we perform power and who gets to play which roles, and how we can use creativity and rigorous inquiry to look at our structures of government and democracy anew. I’ve been hyping it to folks for years; I’m so glad everyone will be able to read it now.

I started working on City Council Meeting right out of college and kept working on it for 5+ years. I was the assistant director, but over that long period I did all kinds of things (like transcribe dozens of hours of city council meetings, cold call powerful people working in various local governments, and figure out how to get a lot of those blue books you used to have to write essays in for standardized tests and then learn how to make real-looking fake standardized tests and shrink wrap a ton of them — good times!). Aaron and Mallory taught me so much, connected me with so many, and highly influenced the course of my life.

To focus in on one thing I was taught/learned: one day, in either 2012 or 2013, Aaron sent me a book about how to write a book proposal and told me to read it. So I did, and shared what I had learned, and then we all worked together on writing a book proposal, for this book, for a very long time. And then… ten short years later, there’s an actual book, all published and everything! So be sure to get your copy of this long-awaited, quite magical book today.

(Speaking of 10 years ago, check out this retro City Council Meeting website: www.citycouncilmeeting.org and in the bottom right you’ll see a picture of a much younger me wearing a shirt I loved when I was 22, and doing the kind of being-a-facilitator-in-political-theater style of acting I still love doing today.)