Soft Animal Bodies: written essays on living softly in a hard world, and experiments in creating more of the world we want to see
Hi sweet friend!
Welcome to this corner of the internet. I’m Iris (they/them)
This newsletter is twofold: one part exploration and experimentation in creating a co-owned, community-oriented business model, and one part personal essays of my life as a queer, non-binary, autistic person, who is both very into hiking long distances in nature and also intensely invested in the outcome of each season of Love Island.
I’m a cofounder of Rest Day Creative, which is an anticapitalist, cooperatively owned microagency for brand foundations and systems. We create messaging, design, and operational structures for divergent thinkers and values-based businesses so they can exist within a business ecosystem that is truly rooted in tangible care: for themselves, their communities, and the people they love.
Rest Day is made up of three creatives who decided community care was our biggest priority, and we set out to create a microcosm of what that can look like at work (think: universal wages, a four-day work week, reparational giving, menstrual leave, and more). Our work helps businesses find their own versions of values in action through branding and systems, which includes transparently talking about how we do it, like I do here.
As I mentioned, I’m also queer, genderqueer, and autistic. I’m a writer in my thirties who lives in Portland, OR. I’m a hiker of long and short distances. I’m single and non-monogamous, and some of my relationships look a little different than the norm (by design).
This newsletter is both the written unfolding of our business as we build it, and the intimate explorations of my personal landscape as I live them, and if you so choose, you can read about all of it, or just the parts that interest you.
The Newsletter
This space exists to write about Rest Day in real time, to make our experience (and our experiments) as a team as transparent and accessible as possible. We hope to show what’s possible, potentially become a community resource, and be able to be mutually resourced by a community of people invested in the idea of what we’re doing.
This space also exists to explore what it’s like being in this body and mind as a queer person, as a genderqueer person, as a writer, as a hiker, as a disabled person, and as a person with intersecting privilege in all of those pieces of me. It’s about my inner landscape, it’s about getting serious about what matters, and not taking ourselves too seriously in the process.
Signing up automatically allows you to receive both newsletters, but depending on your preference and interests, you have the opportunity to change your preference to receive one or both after subscribing.
Soft Animal Bodies is a reader-supported publication.
All writing and the full archive will remain free, but paid subscriptions are what allow me to continue to sustainably write, and are a tangible way to support our business’s pursuit of equitable work structures.
100% of earnings from paid subscriptions goes to building and sustaining our worker cooperative, Rest Day Creative, and is shared equally amongst our team.
A portion of all shared income also goes toward our team’s redistribution and reparations fund, and we each choose organizations and causes to give to on a quarterly basis. My portion of funds goes to organizations that support Palestinian liberation, Black, Indigenous, and AAPI causes, trans rights, and environmental advocacy.
Some posts may be paywalled if they are particularly intimate in nature, which is primarily for my personal wellbeing and not as means to require payment. If you are a free subscriber and want to read any of the emails, let me know and I will grant you access, no explanation needed.
Consider becoming a free or paid subscriber as a vote toward the idea that mutual care in work and out is possible.
The Topics
Soft Body Personal
In my personal essays, I’ll talk about topics including:
Late-in-life queerness, gender non-conforming and non-binary identity, late-in-life autism diagnosis, and looking at personal identities through many different layers and lenses working backward from adulthood
Long distance hiking for the express purpose of making snacks taste better, and loving hobbies that don’t always love you back
Platonic life partnership, non-monogamy, relationship anarchy, and what it’s like being single and disabled and trying to create alternate structures of care outside of romantic partnerships (even though I really, really love to be romantic)
How those care structures sometimes work better (or don’t) when they go beyond just a person we have sex with, and sex sometimes works better (or doesn’t) outside of romantic partnerships
Reading and recommending a high volume of books, and while some of those books may be about important discourse™, I am also genuinely proud to report that a large percentage will probably be queer rom-coms
Fiction writing and the process of very slowly writing my own queer rom-com set on the Colorado Trail between an autistic non-binary hiker (surprise!) and a city-boy trans man
Consuming lots of media, especially television, and how that television often plays out in problematic ways and runs counter to personal values…but is just so delicious?? (See: the entirety of Too Hot to Handle and Love Island and Love is Blind and Selling Sunset)
If you don’t care to read about any of the above (or if you know me and reading about me having queer sex feels patently uncomfy), you can still subscribe and then feel free to click the unsubscribe button at the bottom of any of my emails to change your settings to only receive newsletters about Rest Day Creative and experiments in cooperative business.
Rest Day Creative
Even in the more radical spaces I might find myself in, worker cooperatives aren’t usually discussed in much detail, but I know they have to spark interest and curiosity for others like they do for me, which is why I decided to chronicle our experiments in real time as we shift our business model in this direction.
We know our way is not the way, by any means, but we hope we might inspire some consideration of the alternatives.
In my writing about Rest Day Creative, I’ll talk about subjects including:
Navigating equal co-ownership of a business between three people from interpersonal, structural, and legal perspectives
Implementing universal wages, and the paradigm shift of divesting exact output and “fairness” from the ability to survive at a basic level
Interdependence in work, beginning with the assumption that we are all worthy of having our fundamental needs met regardless of output, and we are all accountable to each other for care
Our extensive list of employee benefits and community initiatives, the whys underneath them, which ones we started with, and our plans to implement additional ones over time
Structural ways we cross-check our values, from creating financial accessibility, to prioritizing rest and play, to navigating human inevitabilities
Note: My day job at Rest Day is our copywriter, and I create the messaging and many of the structures, systems, and policies that our work is built on and extends to the people we work with. I’m a writer there and a writer here, but that said, all writing about Rest Day Creative (and otherwise) in this newsletter is my own, and while our team has shared values that our business is based on, my thoughts and opinions here are not indicative of the beloved people I work with.
No matter what, whether you subscribe or don’t, pay or don’t, thank you for reading, and thank you for being here!
xx Iris
The name Soft Animal Bodies is of course a nod to the great Mary Oliver and one of her well-beloved and arguably most-known poems, “Wild Geese.” The poem reflects so much of the foundation I hope becomes clear as I write here: despite the heartbreaking realities of the world we find ourselves in, in spite of the narrow moralities we’re trained to live up to, there is still space for belonging in our bodies, in relationship with ourselves and each other, in creativity and exploration, and with the natural state of being that we are always a part of, even when we forget. It is with utmost respect for her work and legacy that I chose this name, and I hope my writing gets to be some echo of her brilliance to help us continually remember.
You can see the full archive here as it grows.
Photos by Rylee S. Paxton.
