Hello north american online anarchy world! After this project’s last post on anarchistnews there has been some reflection. The formerly designated ‘small town anarchists’ zine is now going to be referred to as ‘Small Anarchist Population” zine, or SAP for short. ‘Small town’ is a playful term that some people where this anarchist resides use to contrast our experiences from ‘where stuff’s happening,’ or the places that anarchists move to. Being from somewhere that is also relatively small in population in terms of American cities, it makes sense in our context to use this language. Perhaps for this project there should’ve been more consideration for people who live in large cities with little/no anarchist scenes, or those who actually live in literal ‘small towns.’ Well, there wasn’t such consideration, but now there has been: so Small Anarchist Population it is!

For those who don’t know what the heck I’m talking about, here’s the original call for submissions:http://anarchistnews.org/content/%E2%80%9Csmall-town%E2%80%9D-anarchists… . Also here are two paragraphs from it:
“Not all of us have moved to the next big thing. There are plenty of anarchists living in cities where they went to school, raising families in small hometowns, or moving to wherever they find work. While not hotbeds to radical activity, we believe that there is interesting potential to living in small towns, or starting to build something in a city ‘from scratch.’ Furthermore, longstanding presence in one area builds relationships, allows us to stumble into resources, and increases the chances of our ideas spreading throughout the populace. You can’t have a social center if everyone’s just going to move in a year.

This project is meant to bring to the table small town potential for anarchists, discuss the pros and cons to longevity, as well as provide room for sharing experiences, running ideas by each other, and even simply coping with being amongst almost zero other like-minded people. We also hope to challenge the narrative that in order to be doing something one must move to ‘the next cool place.’ This is meant to be an ongoing project, one where a person makes suggestion in one issue and someone else tries it out and writes about it in the next. Ideally we’d publish this bi-annually, but we’ll see how it goes.”

The original final date for submissions was September 1st, 2014. Black Seed has the same submission date for their issue #2, and since we’re all obviously going to be writing fiercely-thoughtful-yet-down-to-earth texts deepening green anarchist thought, it seems like a good idea to push back the submission date. From henceforth, SAP’s deadline for issue #1 is October 1st.

A quick note: I understand that the experiences one has from living in a small rural area differ immensely from those who live in a big city with no anarchist population. What ties us together is (as far as I am aware) an unexplored potential. This project’s aim is to point towards that potential and see what’s there. If you are from one of these places and scoff at this zine’s broad scope and decide to work on your unique area’s potential in contrast to the hotbeds, then I have been successful.

You can send your submissions and questions to smalltown@riseup.net .