bookstores

Amazon Bookstore in Minneapolis has announced that they'll be closing their doors at the end of June. Founded in 1970 on the front porch of a women's housing cooperative, Amazon is one of the oldest feminist bookstores in this country. It's a different verse of the same sad song of the difficulty in sustaining projects committed to independent/social justice work, thought,
and culture.

According to the announcement:

Here in Northeast Portland is a place called In Other Words Women's Books and Resources, a nonprofit bookstore founded in 1993. I've only lived in Portland for a year, so most of what I know I've learned from talking to people and reading news articles, like this.

A few nights ago I went to a screening of a short documentary called Moving In: A nonprofit feminist bookstore and the politics of place. The documentary, created by Dawn Jones (who's on the board of Bitch; photographed below), examines the bookstore's 2006 move, which resulted from being economically displaced from their original neighborhood, to a historically African-American neighborhood. The film is fantastic; you should see it if you have the opportunity.

I started my day brunching with Tammy Oler, a contributing Bitch writer who recently moved from Denver to Brooklyn. We met at a Middle Eastern restaurant in Brooklyn, where we drank too much coffee and geeked out about nonprofit organizing and online versus print publishing.

After, we strolled through Fort Greene Park where we stumbled upon a bizarre looking beetle/bee of sorts that neither of us could identify. Eh?