What is the Derrick Jensen Reading Club?

A couple of years ago I had an idea I’d never encountered anywhere else. I began by thinking about how long the writing and production processes are for books. Then I started thinking about the way I write, about how when I write most of the early book is pretty finished (but still needs an editor's work before it's ready to be in a book). For example, when I'm on page 150, pages 1 - 145 are pretty much final draft. When I'm on page 200, pages 1-195 are pretty much final draft.

Then I began to think about how interested I am in process, and how excited I've been when I've seen early drafts of other writer's work, or heard early versions of musician's songs (Lynrd Skynrd's Free Bird, for example, was at first just a ballad, and the song never worked for audiences until they combined it with a long jam).

And I was thinking about how in the nineteenth century many writers would serialize their novels, and then with Charles Dickens, for example, everybody would gather around the newspaper stands excited to see whether Little Nell was going to die.

Thus was born the Reading Club. Here’s how it works. Each night before I go to bed I upload the most recent version of what I'm working on to a website. I also upload all essays, letters to the editor, and other things I work on that normally most people never get to see.

The subscription website contains a few directories that open into various projects I'm either working on or have recently completed. There is a section for each book, a section for some otherwise unpublished interviews, a section for some photographs I take occasionally of wild creatures around here.

Just so we're clear, over the past several years my output has been pretty constant at about 750-1500 pages per year (at 275 words per page). If I'm on tour or something obviously I don't write much if at all, but other times I write more. So most days there will be an update. But not all. When I'm on tour we might go as long as two weeks without an update. But most days it's a couple of pages.

Right now as well as many essays, short film scripts, and so on, the reading club has an anti-zoo book I wrote immediately after I finished Endgame, two novels I wrote in 2005 (for which my agent is currently seeking publishers), and a nonfiction book about shit and other waste products I’m currently writing with Aric McBay.

Here are teasers about the anti-zoo book and the two novels. Each one is the proposal my agent is using to shop the books (but the anti-zoo book has found a publisher).

Anti-zoo book: This is the much-anticipated collaboration between award-winning writer Derrick Jensen and similarly-acclaimed photographer Karen Tweedy-Holmes.

This book, with a working title Are Thought to Exist in the Wild, is a deeply moving exploration of what zoos are and what they mean, both to the animals inside the cages and to the animals—humans—watching them. The lyrical yet biting prose combines with the beautiful and heartrending photographs to provide an unforgettable portrait not only of life on the inside but of our relationship to the wild. (Note: the photographs aren’t on the website.)

Of course the book is more than this. Derrick takes us on a wild ride exploring how we perceive; the relationship between zoos and pornography; the real lessons taught by zoos; the relationship between sensory deprivation, insanity, and the living conditions of modern humans; wild animals you can see in a McDonald’s parking lot; the relationship between sea lions and the cold wind that blows over the ocean; what it would be like to enter into long and fruitful relationships with nonhuman animals, both domesticated and wild, and to revel in the bouquet of radically different intelligences to which they can introduce us, each in his or her own time, each in his or her own way. One of Derrick’s gifts, as readers of his other works already know, is to bring all of these seemingly unrelated topics together, combine them with his often poignant, often humorous, often startling personal stories, and form them into a deeply moving, even life-changing whole. Add to that Karen’s stunning, elegant photographs, and readers of this devastating, mind expanding, and ultimately healing book will never again be able to see animals in the zoo, or themselves, the same as they did before.

One of the novels, called Songs of the Dead: This novel continues the trajectory set forth in Derrick Jensen’s immensely popular and highly acclaimed books A Language Older Than Words and The Culture of Make Believe.

Jensen is known for his beautiful writing, fiercely intelligent philosophy and politics—he’s been compared to both Foucault and Mumford—the range and depth of emotion his work evokes in his readers, his ability (as a reviewer for Publisher’s Weekly put it) to both break and mend readers’ hearts, his strikingly creative use of form, his skill at seamlessly (and shockingly) interweaving seemingly disparate narratives, his capacity to keep readers turning pages, and his ability to tell a very good story.

Readers around the world have grown to recognize and relate to Jensen’s distinctive style in which he explores a theme through a tapestry of deeply moving stories and provocative analyses, all centered around a unifying narrative. Oftentimes this central narrative has been deeply personal.

Part of what sets Songs of the Dead apart from Jensen’s previous works is that in this case the central narrative around which all other stories and analyses revolve is fictional. The primary story involves a character named Derrick, superficially (but only superficially) based on the author. Derrick begins to “fall through time”: he can be somewhere and suddenly he will see what was happening at this place ten minutes or a hundred years ago, or what will happen in this place fifteen years from now. It’s not like Back to the Future, where someone must go into the past to make sure the present doesn’t change. He can’t affect what he sees in the past, he can only see and learn from it. He can see the land’s memories, and through them perhaps change the future. And one of the memories he sees is of a woman being struck, then kidnapped. He begins to try to help this woman, and learns she was murdered by a serial killer. Before long, in one of the episodes of falling through time, he sees this serial killer dumping his own body, and the body of his girlfriend. Their first response is to flee, but soon they grow to understand that there is a reason the land has been opening up its memories to him, and realize they must return to their home and stop this killer, even at the possible cost of their own lives.

As readers have come to expect from Jensen’s work, this book is multidimensional, and feels a bit like traveling beneath the earth among tree roots, as they twist their way into soil, rock, river beds and accompany fish, insects, discarded tires, cellophane wrappers, animal minds, history, and human instinct on a strange and interlocking journey. This book explores gender relations, how to keep passion alive in a relationship, how and why the various plots to assassinate Hitler failed, how parasites such as rabies raise the question of “who’s in charge?”, where dreams come from, the causes and effects of misogyny and genocide, environmental collapse and reasons this culture is killing the planet, and what it would mean if the God of the Old Testament were real, and as nasty as He seems. The book also reaches back to our collective childhoods, to the reality of magic in life, and explores how nature has spoken with us and how we must remember and renew these conversations.

This is one of his best books.

The other novel, called Lives Less Valuable: What are sane and appropriate responses to outrageously destructive behavior? 

This question is at the center of Jensen’s novel, Lives Less Valuable. The novel brings together four primary characters: Malia, a longtime environmental activist who has lost faith in the possibility of systemic reform; Dennis, her co-worker, who believes that if enough people just have the right information, they will know what to do; Eddie, a young street thug haunted by the loss of his little sister to leukemia; and Larry Gordon, CEO and primary stockholder of Vexcorp, a corporation that manufactures bulk industrial chemicals. 

Early in the book, Malia is mugged by Eddie and his two friends. In her anger at being attacked by the people she works to protect, she compares them to executives at Vexcorp, and says, “Why do you think I’m here? Do I look like I belong in this neighborhood? People are dying. And you, you’re big enough to beat me up. What are you gonna do, take my money and cure cancer?” In that moment, Eddie is not impressed, but in the weeks that follow, he thinks about what she said. Late one night he comes to her workplace, with something to say: “We talk about Vexcorp like it was real, like it’s a person, but it’s not. It’s nothing. It don’t exist except we make believe. So I got to thinking there’s got to be somebody pulling strings. And the ones pulling strings don’t fight face to face. They’re punks.” And, he says, there is only one way to deal with punks.

He has a plan. In fact he’s already begun it: “We drove up there. . . . He’s in the trunk.” He has kidnapped Larry Gordon.

Malia, torn between her personal code of nonviolence and the revolutionary activity she has convinced herself is necessary, must now choose. Should she help Eddie? Should she help Larry Gordon? To choose the former is to not only cross the line into violence but to possibly destroy her own life. To choose the latter is to make clear where her real loyalty lies. As Eddie says to her: “This is not real to you. You think this is a big fucking video game. Somebody dies and you put another quarter in and you get another person. You don’t feel pain. You don’t feel loss. What do you care? They’re just fucking quarters. Well, I got news for you. People feel pain, and then they die. I saw my sister go through pain, and then I saw her die. My sister. It’s not your family that’s dying. If it was, you would know what to do right now.”

Later, Larry Gordon attempts to convince Eddie, Malia, and Eddie’s friends to spare his life. He is a father, he says, an honest man imprisoned by the wealth and position he inherited. Further, Vexcorp is not only vital to the economy, but is no worse than any other corporation. He asks Eddie: “What are you going to do, kill all of us? There were twelve members on that board. And then what? Are you going to go company to company?”

Enter Dennis, returning unannounced and unaware to the office. Now his loyalties get tested. Whom does he protect? Whose interests does he promote? Does he call the police? He tells Eddie that democracy does not include taking the law into one’s own hands. Eddie responds: “Whose hands should we leave it in? Yours? Gordon’s?”

This book does not pretend to provide any single answer to the question of appropriate resistance, promising instead an unflinching exploration of the complex territory surrounding responsibility, resistance, despair, and ultimately, agency.

Conditions:

Members of the group will be allowed to download these documents, under conditions spelled out below.

•  You recognize that everything on the website is a work in progress, and that I reserve the right to change my mind about anything I write. These are NOT final drafts. I may express things in these drafts I later find appalling and remove. These are NOT final drafts.

•  Because these are works in progress, you agree that you will not share any of the documents with anyone without my explicit permission. You ABSOLUTELY POSITIVELY WILL NOT POST OR DISTRIBUTE OR SHARE ANY OF THIS IN ANY WAY WITHOUT MY EXPLICIT PERMISSION. If you ask, I will probably allow you to share individual parts with family or close friends, but they also MUST NOT POST OR DISTRIBUTE IT IN ANY WAY WITHOUT MY EXPLICIT PERMISSION. Failure to abide by this will result in immediate termination of privileges (with no refund of fees: for fee schedule see below). If it happens too often, I will simply stop offering this service.

•  You also agree that even if you let your subscription lapse that you WILL STILL ABSOLUTELY POSITIVELY NOT WITHOUT MY EXPLICIT PERMISSION POST OR OR DISTRIBUTE OR SHARE IN ANY WAY ANYTHING YOU DOWNLOADED OR SAW OR READ WHILE YOU WERE A SUBSCRIBER.

•  I want no criticism or editorial suggestions. I cannot stress enough how unhelpful I find criticism or editorial suggestions from people I don't know. I only accept criticism or editorial suggestions from my closest friends (and then only when I ask) and the book's editors. Praise is welcome. Also, if you happen to see an incorrect fact or a typo, I would appreciate learning of those. This latter is NOT an invitation for criticism.

•  This subscription is a fee service. For payment of your fee you will receive a password that will be changed monthly. You agree that you will not share this password with anyone else without my explicit permission.

•  The documents will be in Word format.

All that out of the way, I think it will be fun.

Costs:

Here are the fees for the subscription
One month: $10
Six months: $35
One year: $60

You can either subscribe through PayPal or by sending a check.

When you subscribe, I will send the link and a password. This password will be changed monthly. So long as your subscription is current, I will send you the password for the new month. Because a subscription entitles you to download everything already on the site, I will not be able to offer refunds.

As an additional bonus for being part of the Derrick Jensen reading club, so long as your subscription is current, you will receive ten percent off any purchases you make through my website. If you send me a check, simply remind me that you are a member of the club, and deduct ten percent from your check. If you pay through PayPal, send me an email reminding me, and I will send you back a check or cash for the discount. Also, I will occasionally offer special deals on books or CDs only to club members.

Also, when any reading club members renew their subscription, they will get free months added to their subscription. Here is how it works: if you renew before your current subscription ends, you will receive the same number of months free as your current subscription. I know that sounds complicated, but an example should make it clear. If someone signed up for six months, and then right before their sub runs out they sign up for an additional month, they would get one month (paid for) and then six extra months (free), for a total of seven months. Then if at the end of that seven months they sign up for an additional six months, they would get six months (paid for) and one extra month (free: one month this time since their most recent previous sub was one month).

Payment:

To join, click the appropriate PayPal button below.

One month: $10

Six months: $35

One year: $60

Or Send Checks to:
Derrick Jensen
P.O. Box 903
Crescent City, CA 95531