Love, Hope, & Joy

Love, Hope, & Joy

From Rulerless

An Anarchist Anthology

May 1st (International Workers’ Day), 2022

From fighting for freedom to plain ol’ living, this new anthology explores every facet of anarchic existence via its themes of love, hope, and joy. Open up these pages to experience three dozen fantastic poems and ten fascinating works of fiction and nonfiction alike, curated to inspire and elate whilst still not shying away from the darker sides of life.

Rulerless hopes you enjoy this collection and encourages you to share it with all those whom you love, who give you hope, or who bring you joy.

You can download the digital edition here.

The print edition is coming soon.

Love, Hope, & Joy is the second and final Rulerless publication before the press goes on indefinite hiatus. To all of our amazing and wonderful supporters out there: thank you so much for being a part of this. Several of you have very kindly expressed interest in helping this little press continue, but while Rulerless may return in some form eventually, there are no guarantees. For now, and perhaps forever, it is shutting down due to a variety of factors in the Editor’s life. It’s been a wild year making all this, y’all, and the times will continue to be wild from here on out, no matter if Rulerless is a permanent fixture — as much as a human creation can be — or mere dust in the wind. Keep fighting, yes, but more importantly, keep living. Keep hoping, keep loving, keep being joyous. Solidarity.

“We live in capitalism; its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.”

Ursula K. Le Guin

A Letter from the Editor

This past year and a few months of making Rulerless has been a wild ride. You may know that I initially wanted to make it a triannual magazine, then switched to the idea of a yearly anthology, but ultimately decided that I don’t have the energy or resources to have it be a serial publication. I’m going into college soon and my life is constantly changing in a million ways, most of which are very exciting. So, though Love, Hope, & Joy was initially just the theme of “Rulerless Volume I,” it’s now the subtitle of a standalone anthology—and one that I believe is utterly gorgeous. The beautiful, creative minds that have conspired to make this book possible continue to astound me.

Anarchism is a surprisingly difficult theme to build an anthology around. When I first started Rulerless, I expected most submissions to be revolutionary ballads proclaiming outright the evils of capitalism and statism, condemning authority with every word. And I have gotten those. But most of the submissions I’ve accepted, in both this and the Inaugural Issue, have been simpler: poems enamored with existence and life, tales about people just living their lives, containing but an undercurrent of anarchy. This is good, in my opinion. We need stories about revolution, but it’s more important for us to have stories about life—the kind humans have been telling since the dawn of time.

“Love, hope, and joy” is an easier theme to build an anthology around, because those are emotions all of us, anarchists or not, experience all the time. Still, it’s not the most plentiful genre at the moment; far more common are stories about broken worlds, dystopias, bleak futures without even a speck of hope remaining. Those stories have been told a lot over the past century or more (in my lifetime being most popular during the 2000s-2010s trend of YA dystopian novels). What we need now more than anything are tales of survival and perseverance, stories that remind us what we’re fighting for. Because people don’t typically become anarchists out of simple socioeconomic calculations or by abandoning all hope for humanity. Anarchists are anarchists because the freedom we seek gives everyone so much more room to give love and be joyous, and we have the hope that such a world is possible.

Byron López Ellington
Founder and Editor, Rulerless

There are 4 Comments

"You can download the digital edition here" - the download link does'nt work !

Thanks, loves

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