Ad Astra — Megan Kaminski

Ad Astra per Aspera

(To the Stars through Difficulties)

Kansas state motto

to take root among the stars

Octavia Butler

The Ad Astra Writing Project is a series of free community workshops that help participants build creative practices oriented towards individual and community healing, empowerment, and connection. Based in Lawrence, Kansas and made possible by a grants from the Hall Center for the Humanities and the KU Center for Compassionate and Sustainable Communities, the series invites participants to explore life practices that engage with and deepen connections to each other, their communities, and their ecosystem. Drawing on shared values of community and a desire to better understand ourselves and the place we call home, the events help participants explore and develop their own creative practices to help build and sustain a life worth living. More specifically, the project hopes to counter extractive and exploitative values and relationships with land and peoples (human and otherwise) and provide the basis for healing and connective relationships of interdependence, kinship, and care. This project builds upon my eight year tenure as the curator and co-founder of the now happily retired Taproom Poetry Series.

Through partnerships with the Lawrence Public Library, the Sunrise Project, Land Institute, the Tallgrass Artists Residency, the Bank in Matfield Green, and other place-based community arts and humanities organizations across the state of Kansas, the Ad Astra Project is growing, with projects that expand outside of our home community in Lawrence, KS. Some guiding texts and theoretical framework for this ongoing project include adrienne maree brown’s emergent strategy, Donna Haraway’s Staying With the Trouble, Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, Anna Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, Timothy Morton’s Humankind, Kathryn Yusoff’s A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, Michael Marder’s work on plant thinking and vegetal being, and Octavia Butler’s Earthseed books. You can follow the project here and through the project’s facebook page.