Wednesday, April 22 at 6pm at the library, join Bay Area writer, journalist and wildfire survivor Dani Burlison in a discussion of her recent book Red Flag Warning: Mutual Aid and Survival in California’s Fire Country (Editors: Dani Burlison and Margaret Elysia Garcia). We’ll discuss how wildfire affects communities, including our own, and what we can learn about living with fire from Indigenous Californians, community organizers, mental health care workers, environmentalists, fire analysts, sustainable loggers, parents and more. This event is sponsored by Friends of the Montclair Library.
The book’s collection of essays and interviews explores the ways these fires take root and impact rural and urban Northern California; it examines our relationships to place and community and to understand the importance of mutual aid, organizing, community care, land stewardship and resilience. Red Flag Warning covers the stories not frequently found in the often disaster-porn obsessed media and exposes what is lost in the news written by parachute journalists.
Readers are invited to examine what fire can and does mean to them, what it means for us to reimagine the world, to prepare for the worst and to examine flames through different lenses. Contributors include Manjula Martin, Hiya Swanhuyser, Zeke Lunder, Lasara Firefox Allen, Margo Robbins, Kailea Loften, Redbird Willie and more.
Dani Burlison (she/her) is the creator/editor of All of Me: Stories of Love, Anger and the Female Body, and the author of Some Places Worth Leaving. She has been a staff writer at a Bay Area alt-weekly and a regular contributor at Yes! Magazine, Chicago Tribune, KQED, and elsewhere. Her journalism, fiction, and personal essays can also be found at Ms. Magazine, Earth Island Journal, The Rumpus, Portland Review, Hip Mama Magazine and in various anthologies and zines. Dani teaches and lives on unceded Southern Pomo land in California.
Friends of Montclair Library 