Recently, The Final Straw Radio interviewed two participants in “The Spaces Between” project. “The Spaces Between” is a writing project exploring what it means to be an anarchist outside the coastal hotspots of anarchy in the United States such as Oakland or New York. It looks at what anarchy in these places looks like (hint: it’s not all about burning barricades).

The Final Straw interview does an excellent job expanding on the ideas that brought about the writing project, the tour, what the participants have found thus far, and what they hope to ultimately accomplish with the project. It’s an important conversation and one that those of us in smaller—or not so “cool” bigger cities—can definitely relate to.

The announcement for The Spaces Between tour does a good job of explaining why such a project is necessary:

All too often as anarchists in the U.S. we look to places like Oakland or New York for cues of how to get it done. The problem with this being that most of us don’t live in anarchist-disney world, where anything is possible and everything is flammable, and we couldn’t afford the rents in Oakland anyway. This February and March we will be publishing a collection of interviews and essays from the spaces in between to bring to your towns!

This tour features friends from Denver, Colorado and Richmond, Virginia coming to your town to discuss what it looks like for anarchists outside those spaces with longstanding institutional left bases. We think there is a lot to learn from the less “glamorous,” towns and small cities where anarchists continue fighting in spite of it all.

Sharing our experiences of building, failing, rebuilding, fucking it up and sometimes winning, we hope to strike up conversations in your towns with your friends. Let’s talk community defense work, anti-police struggles, combating gentrification warfare, how not to let the liberals get us down and more.

We also encourage folks to check out the recently published zine that features conversations with anarchists from smaller regions including Evansville, Minneapolis, rural British Columbia, Modesto, Louisville, Athens, and Tucson.