I attended an event last week facilitated by the inimitable Evelyn Burnett of the ThirdSpace Action Lab. Evelyn opened the afternoon asking us all to locate ourselves in the room and practice “present body awareness” with the question, “If your soul was a work of art, what would it look like?”
That night I had wild, imaginative dreams about my soul being both art work(s) and sex toy(s). I reposed Evelyn’s question, “If my soul was a sex toy, would would my pleasuring feel like?” Upon waking, I spent time learning more about ThirdSpace Action Lab and thinking about my sexuality and my community’s sexualities as third spaces. I started this blog to explore the sexual climate of northern Minnesota. This third space and my writing practice have boldly queered themselves since the beginning six years ago.
And…in the first half of 2025 I’m tapping new flavors of sensual, risky creative, inclusive, radical community and Queer Intimacy with Place with new friends committed to reimaging investment and “disrupting cycles of disinvestment” here on the bigLake. Aligning with the values, action, and practice of the ThirdSpace Action Lab, our community collaboration around transformative imaginings, action, and pleasure focuses on celebrating the liberation of BIPOC, queer, trans, disabled, gender expansive bodies.
Back to my dream-
Standing in the middle of my bedroom, surrounded by inner and outer circles of folx, I watched others investigate and appreciate the lil free pleasure library (LFPL) I’d built. Some gawked, others howled and cat called their affirmation, finding themselves in the small yet subversive third space. In dream reality, I highlighted moments when the lil free pleasure library (LFPL) activated sexualities as third spaces and started rewriting narratives around the possibility of a “rebuilding [houses of] pleasures”.
Evelyn, as a black women, centers neighborhoods, celebrates “liberated space as movement building, activating people through transdisciplinary collaboration, narrative change/storytelling, and civic engagement as conscious community development.”
As a white person, it’s especially important for me to sit with the racist realities in Duluth that translate to BIPOC folx owning almost nothing in this city. Third Spaces in both our waking and dreaming worlds must be liberatory for all beings. As I pull out tracing paper and put ink down, draw blue prints for small yet subversive third spaces that allow us to transcend what we have been taught, we dream together. Yes yes yes to wilder re-imaginings.
Recommended reading-
M Archive by Alexis Pauline Gumbs- infinite gratitudes for radical black feminists and ethnopoetic imaginations that reach from the ocean floor to the treetops
Loving Corrections by adrienne maree brown- especially the essay on Ursula K LeGuin who is the wizard of dreaming new worlds
What Are You Dreaming? To the Best of Our Knowledge episode