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| Interview with
Mitch Hall and Beverly Red Interview by Jenna Glatzer
In 2000, Beverly and Mitch founded a non-profit organization.
Checkmate--Winning Strategies for Environmental Peace, exists to promote
ecological balance and nonviolence toward animals -- human and non-human --
through research, humor, and thought-provoking, iconoclastic publications.
Checkmate Press, which resides within the non-profit, published its first
book, Ignoring Binky, The Life and Times of Victor Evertor, in 2001. Through a series of discussions, we investigated what we could
contribute to the environmental movement. We kept coming back to questions
about the mentality of the multinational CEOs who were making such destructive
decisions. How could they ignore the facts and put the whole earth,
including themselves, in jeopardy? What forces shaped their characters?
How were they different from us..., or were they? Once we did our
research, we wanted to tell people, especially environmentalists, about the
rampant narcissism among our corporate leaders. Since the facts are so dreary, we decided to make a comic book. We call
it a graphic novel because that is the new designation for it in the book trade,
and it is political. It is also an alternative comic book. Yes. You might be interested to know that Binky is genealogically
linked to Jiminy Cricket, but due to environmental degradation with PCBs and
ionizing radiation, Binky is a biological mutation, we are sorry to say. Fortunately,
the moral teachings have been passed down to him intact through the generations,
including the influence of the Blue Fairy (see the original Pinocchio story, not
the movie). The word "beef" sets us off like a couple of swimming E-coli (see http://www.stewartartists.com/Pages/jjecoli.html).
In fact, beef-eating is a metaphor for planetary catastrophe. People
eating hamburgers are consuming the planet just as the CEOs are. Thirty-five
pounds of topsoil are lost for every pound of beef eaten. The 500 richest
individuals in the world are wealthier than the poorest three billion people
(one-half of humanity). The term "checkmate" comes from chess, a hierarchical game in which all other pieces can be sacrificed to save their king and eliminate the other king. Etymologically, "checkmate" means the king is dead. For thousands of years human societies have been playing an adversarial game to conquer nature and one another. The resulting ecological crisis has reached the end game stage. The pawns in this game have included conquered and enslaved peoples, oppressed workers, women, children, exploited animals and plants, the waters, air, and earth. Most people wish they were among the ruling elites who are the big winners. However, if those in power succeed in checkmating the earth, all life loses. The challenge of the environmental movement is to find a new model to stop this zero-sum game altogether and end the violence implicit in it. Through the name Checkmate, we are stating our conviction that the king -- meaning armored, aggressive male domination as the ruling principle of social life -- is unviable and obsolete. Environmental peace requires justice for all living beings and their support
systems. Checkmate advocates a conversion of humanity to nonviolence
and living according to the needs of the earth. Random House was begging us, but we turned them down. We decided
that since Ignoring Binky was sure to sell at least 500,000 copies, we
wanted all the profits for our non-profit. Thus we established our own
press. Also, we wanted to work 80 hours a week (we have a strong work
ethic) and prostrate ourselves before reviewers and wholesalers so that we would
have no time to do what we really love to do, which is write books. Interviews, reviews, press releases, public speaking, radio talk shows,
public access TV, web site with links, Amazon.com, brochure, business cards,
book signings, publishing articles, testimonials. This question leads us to our holy book. We read 1001
Ways To Market Your Books by John Kremer, which is 900 pages,
memorized it, and have recited it to page 378, so far. Among other
marketing books, we read The
Self-Publishing Manual by Dan Poynter, joined the Publishers Marketing
Association and went to its conference in May, 2001, involving three very
informative days of workshops for small publishers. Basically, we learned
that to succeed as a small publisher, you have to become a "shameless
self-promoter," which comes as naturally to us as getting a personal call
from Oprah. Beverly read Getting
It Printed by Beach and Kenly in order not to sound like a complete
idiot when requesting quotations. Then she used the internet to find a list of
the 45 book-only publishers in the USA and went to each of their web sites,
chose six, and sent requests for quotations from them. We chose the one
with the best looking sample books, an excellent quotation, and importantly, the
only one with an environmental policy statement. Humor is the center of our universe. We believe that when people are
laughing, they open up to ideas. Also, the issues we cover in the book can
be depressing, and we wanted to give people a chance to laugh about it all. Our next comic book is about meat eating and factory farming and how this thread leads into almost every door in America and back out in the form of animal abuse and other violence. A forthcoming non-fiction book is intended for people who are scared by all
the violence, disillusioned with public policy, and looking for a safer world.
It will be about unviolence. Nonviolence has been a strategy, not a movement.
Unviolence refers to undoing the roots of violence. The book will
connect the dots between the hamburger and the electric chair. ORDER THESE BOOKS BY CLICKING THE LINKS: Ignoring Binky by Mitch Hall and Beverly Red 1001 Ways To Market Your Books by John Kremer The Self-Publishing Manual by Dan Poynter Getting It Printed by Mark Beach and Eric Kenly
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Mitch
Hall and Beverly Red are radical, vegan, ecofeminist, nonviolent, anarchist
writers.
Mitch is a
sociologist, with degrees from Columbia University and the University of
Chicago. He is the author, editor, and translator of many publications,
and writer of The Healing Drum: African Wisdom Teachings, based on
oral history interviews he conducted in French with his co-author, a
Malian musician. He was a Peace Corps volunteer in Africa, a Fellowship of
Reconciliation peace and environmental organizer in Europe, and has taught at
Stanford University and Goddard College. Mitch also practices and teaches
chi kung, standing meditation, and polarity therapy.
