Episode 12: How A.B.O. Comix is Challenging Prisons Through Art

This podcast is created by the same people who bring you the Street Sheet, San Francisco’s street newspaper.  This year's April Fools Day issue hits the streets of San Francisco full of comics that were compiled and submitted by A.B.O. Comix, a collective of creators and activists who work to amplify the voices of LGBTQ prisoners through art.

On today’s episode, we speak with Casper Cendre, the director and a co-founder of A.B.O. Comix,  a project dedicated to supporting queer and trans artists in prison and creating a world beyond our carceral system. A.B.O. Comix 5th comic anthology is available now on their website! This book features accomplished cartoonists and first time doodlers in an effort to amplify the voices of LGBTQ+ prisoners . Proceeds from this anthology go back to the contributors so that they can access commissary & gender affirming items, healthcare and legal support.

GET INVOLVED!
You can find ways to get involved on the A.B.O. Comix website! You can volunteer to be a penpal to one of the many incarcerated artists the collective works with, or buy some incredible merch to support their work, including comic anthologies, prints, T-shirts, and more. You can also offer up your skills to find out how to best support this project!
https://www.abocomix.com/

A.B.O. Comix also has a Patreon! When you donate to the Patreon you not only get some awesome perks, but you also know that your money is going directly into commissary accounts for incarcerated artists, as well as toward supporting the visionary work of the collective.
https://www.patreon.com/abocomix

You can also offer up your skills to find out how to best support this project! Send them an email at abocomix@gmail.com

WEATHER REPORT
Mia Pixley uses her cello, voice, and music performance to study and represent aspects of self and other, community, and the natural world. You heard “Good Taste” off her album Margaret in the Wild. You can see Mia Pixley perform live at Cesar Chavez Memorial Solar Calendar in Berkeley on April 16th at 6pm!

To find her music and learn about upcoming shows, visit miapixley.com

SUPPORT THE PODCAST
Support for Street Speak comes from our listeners! Please donate to us online at https://coalition.networkforgood.com

Transcript

Quiver Watts  0:10  
You're listening to Street Speak, the podcast answering your burning questions about poverty and homelessness. This podcast is created by the same people who bring you the street sheet. San Francisco street newspaper.

TJ Johnston  0:24  
Our annual April Fool's Day issue hits the streets of San Francisco today, and it is full of comics that were compiled and submitted by ABL comics, a collective of creators and activists work to amplify the voices of LGBTQ prisoners through art. On today's episode, we speak with Casper sundre, the director and a co founder of abo comics.

Casper Cendre  0:48  
Hello, my name is Casper. I am the director and co founder of ABO Comix, which is an abolitionist publishing collective, dedicated to amplifying the voices of LGBT prisoners. We started in 2017, and did a comic anthology featuring queer artists on the inside. And now we're in our fifth year, we just published our fifth annual comic anthology of queer prisoner artwork, and we're delving into all sorts of different projects. Now, we have started sending out a monthly newsletter to all of our contributors. On the inside, we've got a mailing list of several 100 people now, who we regularly send updates and resources and art and poetry, and all sorts of stuff and a newsletter. We're starting up a podcast called Teleway 411, which will feature long form interviews with our incarcerated contributors. And we're branching out into publishing as many books as we can. So just getting as many stories out there into the universe of focuses memoirs, their poetry, their graphic novels, comics, research manuscripts, basically, whatever people want to publish, we're just trying to eliminate gatekeeping a little bit from the industry and help people get their voices out there.

Quiver Watts  2:12  
Thank you. And I'm curious, what drew you initially to comics, because something that like really jumps out when you're going through the anthologies is that there's a lot of light hearted content and also a lot of devastating content, which like, maybe falls outside of like people's assumptions about what comics as an art form are. And could you speak a little bit about why comics?

Casper Cendre  2:38  
Sure, I wasn't super into comics, actually, when we started up this project. I had really enjoyed some when I was in high school, I went to Comic Con every year, I was really immersed kind of into that world. But I had never made a comic before. It wasn't something I was super familiar with. But my other co-founders were very big in the comic industry. And, um, I was more on the activist side doing prisoner advocacy work. And I got really into the sort of zine culture of the Bay Area when I first moved up here into 2017. It overlaps a whole lot with sort of like the LGBT culture in the Bay Area. So I found myself at zine festivals a lot, meeting creators in the Bay Area. And so my friends who are really big into comics, noticed that a lot of my inside pen pals are really big into art. So we just kind of went and branched the two together, and I fell in love with comics as a medium for storytelling. I had recognized previously how incredible it can be to link visual imagery with either poetry or storytelling or something like that, and how impactful it can be. But I didn't really it didn't really resonate with me until maybe a year after we started doing this project, how beautiful the medium really is, at expressing people's truths and their experiences. So why comics? I think it was just kind of a little bit of a happy accident between the friend group that I had and the advocacy side at the time, but it's grown on me so much that I realized it's probably the best medium we could have ever picked to try and work with people inside prison to help them express themselves tell their stories and have like a really good time doing it because it you know, it branches together so many different art forms. And it lets people try so many different things in one storytelling device that I feel like people are gaining so many different skills at once, trying so many different things. And it's obviously put out so much incredible work in the last five years that I don't know, it just kind of ended up being like the perfect mesh of, of things. So I'm just I'm really excited that happy accident came to be.

Quiver Watts  5:19  
Yeah, that's wonderful. And something that I feel like is a big overlap between the work we do at St. Louis. And the work that you're doing is like this, what you said about supporting folks and expressing themselves and telling their stories? Why does it feel important to you that folks inside prisons have the ability to express themselves and communicate? And how do you see that fitting into sort of more of the organizing work that you had been involved in before?

Casper Cendre  5:46  
Well, prisons, in a lot of ways are so isolated from the rest of the world, whether that be kind of in a physical space, a lot of prisons are definitely set apart from like bigger cities, out in rural areas, physically apart from other parts of society. But then also, they're so isolated in just the fact that communication is really difficult. A lot of people lose contact with friends and family, when they're frustrated, they lose the ability to communicate in any sort of effective way, because they're limited oftentimes, to just simple letter writing. And if they don't have the capacity, or the means to acquire stamps, and paper, and all of that stuff inside prison, basically, they are just completely shut in this own little universe. And I think so often, when we're talking about prisons and prison life, it is about people on the inside without actually including them in the conversation. And so I think it's really important if we're doing something like storytelling, or if we're doing something like acquiring information about the reality of something like prison life, that we actually have to include the people who are experiencing it in the conversation. And I think so often, that's overlooked, unfortunately. So centering the people who are really experiencing this and what they're actually going through, and what they want to say about their own experiences, is something that's really important and integral to our mission, I don't want to speak on anybody else's behalf, I don't want to assume what they're going through or how they feel about things. So letting people actually have the platform to speak, their true experiences, whether that counters the sort of common narrative, or what other that enhances it, you know, it's just I think it's really important to just let people say, what they really think and what they really believe in what is the most helpful for them on the inside. So that's why we kind of just let people have complete free rein over their artistic practice, I don't do a whole lot of heavy editing of people's work. If they asked me to, I'll do grammatical edits, or things like that, if they want me to do some editing, I'm happy to work with them on that. But for the most part, I just let people create whatever they want to create, and then just try and get that out into the world for people to see a lot of people inside prisons. You know, there's a lot of gatekeeping in the publishing industry, because things have to be sort of, quote, perfect, to be able to be published, you know, they have to be grammatically perfect. They have to have like a good story, our good art, you know, objectively, or subjectively, whatever you want to say. Their, their practice has to be up to a certain level for a lot of publishers to take it on. So I don't want that to be the case with abo comics, you know, I want people of all artistic levels to be able to practice something and to share their stories. However they want to however they want to share it.

Quiver Watts  9:12  
Yeah, that's, that's really wonderful. I'm curious, because I know the last time we talked there, where you were sort of central to a lot of the relationships and holding a lot of relationships with people inside. And I'm curious if you have a team now that are holding some of those relationships or also just if there are any connections that you've made with folks inside that you want to speak about. Like how how have your relationships with people inside changed you is another thing I'm curious about?

Casper Cendre  9:45  
Yeah, when ABO Comix started it was about 20 inside artists that we corresponded with on the regular um, that was It was like the initial first 20 from our call for submissions advertisement in 2017. And since then it's grown to almost 300 artists that we're in contact with regularly. So we receive hundreds of letters a month. And that's been something that has been consistently really difficult to keep up with, even though I'm really excited to say that, you know, over the last year or so we brought on our first employee, first employee paid employee, which is the most exciting thing that you know I've ever experienced in a job like this, is to be able to bring somebody on into this work. And I'm hoping that will grow and expand some more. And we have about 10 really beautiful, dedicated volunteers to help us out. But the work is still so overwhelming, there's so many people in prison, who just really need somebody to reach out to or an outlet or something. So there are so few advocacy organizations I feel who really, actually respond to people in prison, like without maybe just a template, which is something that has been expressed by so many are inside contributors as why they write to us kind of because we try to send individual personalized responses back to everybody as much as we can, we try to help out with whatever we can. And we try to amplify the voices of as many people in prison as we can. But we definitely center those sort of like human relationships as the focus of abo comics. So it's definitely community building, it's friendship building. And every single person who writes to us is very important. And we welcome them kind of into this like abo comics family, and try to foster those relationships so that people know they have somebody to reach out to, if need be, if there's a crisis, or they have somebody to reach out to with good news, you know, somewhere to write if they're coming home, and they're just really excited or if they need resources or something like that. So we try to foster these relationships with every single person who writes with us but that can get really overwhelming considering we're very small team. Some of some of the friendships that we've crafted though with folks in prison have absolutely been the most beautiful relationships, some of the most beautiful that I've ever had in my life, and they are definitely my best friends or like my poor family structure. And I'm really excited for a lot of them to be coming home within the next couple of years and hopefully be able to at that point, welcome them into the outside abo comics family as volunteers or as staff, or whatever level they want to participate in, or just friends, you know, lifelong friends.

TJ Johnston  12:56  
And now we'll take a quick break for the weather. Today's weather report is brought to you by Mia Pixley. Mia Pixley uses her cello, voice and music performance to study and represent aspects of the self another community and the natural world. Protectively whimsical and simultaneously melancholic, Mia's music music gravitates towards the beauty hidden in sorrow pain and loss and this beauty is potential to inspire curiosity wonder rebirth and reconnection to ourselves each other and the natural world. This is "Good Taste" off her album Margaret in the Wild

SONG

TJ Johnston  16:19  
Like the magic you just heard? You can see a Mia Pixley perform live at Cesar Chavez Memorial Solar calendar in Berkeley, on April 16, at 6pm. To find her music and learn about upcoming shows, visit miapixley.com. Now back to the episode!

Quiver Watts  16:43  
Just to like draw on this connection a little bit too, because we we also get some submissions to Street Sheet from folks inside, and also many of our contributors are formerly incarcerated as well. I'm curious if you have thoughts on like the relationship between homelessness and incarceration and just like, what is it like for people when they come home? And what does that what does that look like for the folks that you've worked with?

Casper Cendre  17:10  
Sure, I don't have a whole lot of data on folks who had experienced homelessness prior to their incarceration. But I do know that a lot of people who are returning home from prison, it is kind of a constant thing that they face, a lot of people coming home, unfortunately, have lost contact with friends and family or they don't have a strong support system in place coming home. Oftentimes, people you don't have a job lined up a house lined up, something like that, even though technically, that's supposed to be part of the parole system. A lot of times, it's it's just very difficult for people returning home. And so some of our contributors, we've only had a couple come home in the last couple years, but have been out on the streets almost immediately. And so something we try to do is when we know people are coming home, we do a bunch of reentry support, we'll do fundraising, we'll make sure that they have a hotel lined up for a couple days after they are able to come home. We try and provide as many resources and like phone numbers places to go as we can for people, but it can be really, really difficult. I think, you know, it's pretty much common knowledge that the recidivism rate is so absurdly high. Because folks coming home just it, you know, it's almost impossible for them to succeed. Unfortunately, there's so much stigma, it can be really difficult if they haven't acquired any sort of like job skills or education on the inside, to sort of just re integrate. And so a lot of people find themselves back on the streets and just kind of doing what they need to survive, unfortunately. And then, you know, I've had a couple friends come home, and a few of them pretty much just go right back into the system, unfortunately, because there's some sort of, you know, arbitrary parole violation, or if they weren't able to make it to a meeting on time or something, because some financial barrier, and then just, you know, right back into prison, unfortunately. So, it's really sad to see that there's not a ton of support for people coming home who, even if you kind of take the idea of like, well, prisons are supposed to be the rehabilitative process. So then once they come home, they've, quote, pays their debt to society or whatever. But still, it's like, you know, people should, I would think, be welcomed back into our communities and met with support and care. And unfortunately, that's not the case. So I can't speak too much as to like, what the criminality is of people experiencing homelessness. And what, how that affects people going into the system? I'm sure it definitely does. But I can definitely see people who are coming home from prison are experiencing homelessness at a very high rate.

Quiver Watts  20:13  
Thanks for that perspective. Um, and I'm curious about what, what made you decide for this to be like a queer centered project as well, because that is something that's so unique about abo is that it really is centering not just folks who are incarcerated, but specifically queer and trans people who are incarcerated. How does How do you think that changes the stories and reflections that you're seeing from folks inside? And how, how do you feel like queer and transmis maybe is criminalized or overlaps with the incarcerated folks that you're working with?

Casper Cendre  20:56  
Well, it is a very sort of nice project. I, I got my start in Prisoner advocacy work with black and pink, who for folks who don't know, is a LGBT centered organization that works with people in prison to try and link up queer trans and HIV positive prisoners with free world pen pals. So I was on the leadership team with them for quite a while before abo comics came into existence. And again, the primary focus was working with incarcerated LGBT people, and myself being queer and transgender, that, you know, that very much resonated with me. At the time, I felt like queerness and trans folks were heavily criminalized. And I still see that so much. Within the prison system, we're a smaller percentage of the population. But there are, unfortunately, so so many queer and trans people on the inside. I've seen in the last couple of years that I've just reached out to us found our contact information, then, like, I didn't know something like this could exist, but it now makes me feel like I have the community. And I have a family. So, yeah, I think it was just it was very personal for me, and my lived experience to connect with other people who were kind of in, you know, a similar, similar mindset, similar situation sort of thing. And it's since branched out into, like, so many different things that I don't know, it's just, you know, I've in some ways, it's almost like I live in this microcosm, little bubble of like, queerness, that's my entire life. And sometimes I forget, that's not the rest of the world. But it's just people who had become sort of my chosen family, and who had really affirmed me in my transition, and really affirmed me in my identity. And people I just connected with on a on a very deep human level, I guess. So that's how that sort of came to be. I didn't mean it in a way that would never isolate other people from being or friends or anything like that, we actually get a lot of letters from people who are not LGBT in the system, but who want to connect with us. They like the work we do, who are allied are like, I've got a lot of queer friends. And I think this is awesome. I just want to tell you all you're doing great work, and we're happy to correspond with them and bring them into the family as well. And it's just all about kind of network building and not so much like exclusivity, like you can only correspond with us if you're queer or trans, but it's sort of like, you know, uplifting people who have been historically kind of suppressed and then bringing more and more people into it and sort of just like a, you know, lovey dovey sort of hippie way.

Quiver Watts  23:59  
That's so beautiful. Great. Well, that's, that's all my questions about the work. I want to leave some space for you to talk about anything that I didn't ask about. And then also, just hate the apology once more. If you could tell folks like how, how we buy it how, how to send you money, like what do we do to like support HBO comics, cuz I know everybody listening will want to.

Casper Cendre  24:28  
Awesome, thank you so much. It's so great to be able to see you to get to chat with you again. Yeah, how to support so you can go to our website, which is just a bo co mix.com. We have a ton of ways on there. We have a Patreon that people can go to patreon.com/abo comics, and that has a different tier is where you know you can subscribe and you can get a shout out in our podcast. You can get merch Are are all sorts of things. We are always looking for more volunteers because hundreds of people inside write us. And we only have at any given time about two to three people to respond. So that's something that's really helpful. We try to help people financially as much as possible. So we'll send out regular commissary donations, so people can access food, clothing, gender affirming items, art supplies, medical care, you know, legal counsel, all sorts of stuff. So if you've got like, $1 a month to spare, that can help somebody buy a couple packets of ramen, and commissary. So that's super, super helpful. Basically, like any sort of skill set, anything that you know people could do or have ideas about is super welcome. We definitely need more people helping out. So we'd be absolutely ecstatic to have anybody and everybody on the team. And yeah, so the fifth anthology can be purchased on our website. Again, that's just abo comics comm along with all of our other publications, we put out I think, like eight books last year by solo artists in prison. So we have, again, graphic novels and comics, we're working on a poetry book, we have a book about eg boards, we have, you know, just a ton of different styles of comics. So whatever you're interested in, I'm sure we have something we've got another 10 books on the agenda to publish this year along with the annual comic anthology. And this year's theme is going to be dreams. So people are going to be writing a lot about writing and drawing a lot about either their actual dreams inside prison or their aspirations or anything that speaks to that theme, so I'm really excited about that one. But yeah, plenty of ways to get plugged in. You can also just send us an email abo comics sense email.com or send us a message on our website.

TJ Johnston  27:10  
You just heard from Casper Cendre, co founder and director of ABO Comix, a project dedicated to supporting queer and trans artists in prison and creating a world beyond our carceral system. 

Quiver Watts  27:23  
Check out the Episode notes for more information on where to buy the latest comic anthology. Donate to this amazing program, or volunteer with abo comics. To hear your burning questions about poverty and homelessness answered on our show, visit our website at streetsheet.org and fill out the form on our podcast page.

TJ Johnston  27:42  
Thanks for listening

Transcribed by https://otter.ai