Miguel Guevara: Michael, you have written a book titled The Wind Cries Freedom. What kind of weird title is that?
Gotta be honest. I was having trouble coming up with a title. While mulling, I heard the Hendrix song, The Wind Cries Mary. I had also just read Arundhati Roy’s memoir, “Mother Mary Comes to Me.” I recommend both. I adapted them. Maybe I was hoping some of their talent would come my way with the title. Who knows?
The subtitle is An Oral History of the Next American Revolution. I of course kept the name Revolution for a Participatory Society for your political organization. After all, you published all this, or most of it, anyway, Miguel, in your time and place. You are the interviewer. I am only the channeler, messing about here and there with small changes to bring it to my times.
MG: You tasked me with asking questions in the book. Why?
I don’t understand the question. With no interviewer, there would be no oral history. You are the interviewer. You did it, and got it to me, somehow…
MG: And now you tasked me with doing another interview, here, with you. Why?
If I say for the fun of it, will you get mad? How about, because interviewing myself seemed like an even stranger option? Or, well, I sought it to clarify some stuff in an interview, how about that?
MG: And my name?
Guevara for Che. Miguel because I felt conflicted when I began the project. I wondered, should I include any name other than yours? The history comes from your parallel future. Should I have furthered that formulation by taking no responsibility, or should I have acknowledged my being a co-author in the sense, at least, of editing and arranging the content for my time and place? At the outset, I wasn’t sure what to do. Your name is, well, your name. You explained it in the Introduction. My having included my name, I am still not sure about why I did that. Except everyone said I must. Not least the publisher.
MG: So am I modeled on Che, or on you, or what?
Neither. No one. Your name pays homage to Che, at your parents choice, as you explained in the Introduction, but as far as I can see your words don’t seek to reflect his views at all, or mine either. You ask questions that any sensible, well informed, active and empathetic interviewer would ask. You elicit lessons and you don’t insert your views. Your interviewees provide the oral history’s substance by way of their “alt earth” experiences. I channeled it all with only minor tinkering.
MG: I live on a different earth, an alt earth?
Here is the explanation, as I understand it, which is, honestly, not very well at all.
In your time and world, you, Miguel Guevara, began questioning eighteen prominent revolutionaries about their then unfolding Revolution for a Participatory Society. From the resulting interviews, you pieced together an oral history, and not only published it in your world, but somehow sent it to our time, via me, it seems.
So, yes, you live on an ‘alt earth’ whose initial divergence from our earth seems to have shuffled people, morphed names, tweaked events, and mostly shifted everything in time. Alt earth’s defining institutions up to your mid 2026 or so, was almost the same as our defining institutions up to our mid 2026. To dwell too much on what happened is headache material. When we are in 2026 you are decades further along.
MG: What about the interviewees’ names?
Your oral history came to me without names. So I had to add them. Some I chose to do homage to some of my world’s people or to people I have known and learned from. I wanted to do more of that, but too much and it got pretty trippy.
MG: That’s what you found weird? Okay, whatever. What determined the interviewees’ backgrounds?
I assume you chose them so their different trajectories would provide diverse viewing angles. With that in mind, you probably felt that they needed to have experience in community, workplace, and campus organizing, in anti war work and electoral politics, in Hollywood, religious, sports, and legal organizing, in race, gender, class, and ecological organizing, and so on, all in accord with how they addressed many different facets of the years in question. So I kept all that as it came to me.
MG: I get that to do an oral history you need an interviewer and interviewees. And I get that the latter should provide accounts from many angles. But why do an oral history at all? And why one from the future?
What can I say? The future beckons. And I suppose you wanted and I certainly wanted to present a hopeful, positive scenario that can inspire while it also conveys lessons. Reports from the future could make revolution plausible and possible. Since The Wind Cries Freedom is about a revolution that hasn’t happened for us, it had to be in some future. To make the history plausible starting from where we now are, it had to be about the pretty immediate future.
While I was first working on the book I was also maintaining a left website called ZNet and so while working, each day I received many Trump tales. That was true years later as well, when I was no longer working on ZNet but still working on the book while Trump 2 was wreaking havoc.
Writers wailed about horrible prospects, often finger pointing in a circle of hostilities. I thought that was de moralizing and so in place of all that I wanted to write about positive options and plans, yet even among programmatic essays at the time, including mine, the overwhelming focus was understandably on combating Trump. On warding off rising fascism. Writers, including me, sought to salvage sanity and prevent devastation. Essays about winning a fundamentally better future had never been in ample supply, and with Trump as focus, such optimism got even more lost for awhile. And so arose my agenda.
MG: So you chose to offer people make believe? Why would you opt for that?
First, why do you consider your world’s history make believe? Regardless, second, I thought a congenial and positive book could be a good vehicle for conveying the personal dimensions of change along with its strategic lessons. I knew I lacked the ability to write a story-type dramatic novel, so I thought about going halfway by writing what was for me familiar but also required imagination.
So The Wind Cries Freedom is technically a novel, but presented as a non fiction oral history with people telling their stories and views. Substance is its focus. And anyhow, who is to say that a non fiction oral history isn’t just what it is, conveyed from you to me via some unconscious linkage, and then from me back to you via the book’s pages?
MG: You had me ask the questions, but you had to dream them up. And you had to provide imagined events, and answers, and so on. That seems like a lot of work. Was it?
You aren’t letting me get away with my origins story, are you? You are like a ventriloquist’s much appreciated dummy who, however, refuses to go along with the game. Or perhaps you are like a puppet master refusing to admit your role. And I am the puppet. Not letting me have my fun. You won’t let me have my fun.
Whatever we are each doing, doing the book was in some ways less work than you might think. As far as format and style, I had no experience with anything remotely related, save myself having very often been both interviewer and interviewee. So I decided to just let it flow according to its own momentum and what the backgrounds and choices of the interviewees entailed.
Indeed, I found myself channeling the interviewees as if they and their events were actual and, presto, the book wrote itself, albeit rather slowly and with a mountain of revisions. If it needed new events or new people to convey some insight or possibility, the people or events would appear and take on a life of their own. When you asked your questions, the interviewees answered spontaneously. I later did some editing and relocating of replies, but in a very real sense I did channel what you and the interviewees produced. Who is to say otherwise?
MG: Okay, I’ll go along, for now. Did I interview each of the eighteen folks in turn, doing each in full and then moving on to the next?
That’s what i would guess happened. You would have made an appointment to get together with each interviewee, with whatever name they would have had in your time and place, and in a long session or two, maybe three, you would have completed each one’s whole interview and then moved on to someone else. Sometimes it seemed like you had more than one person present. Only later you would have taken parts from each interview and stitched various related parts into topical and issue-based chapters so that each chapter would have elements pulled from various interviews.
In contrast, at my end, the book emerged chapter by chapter. Each chapter combined material from at least two and often four or more interviewees whose contributions arrived in my head in parallel, a bit from one, a bit from another, all for that chapter, rather than a full interview from each interviewee arriving as source material all at once, in sequence.
In fact, at my end, the full interviews for each participant weren’t assembled as separate complete source essays until I had a pretty advanced draft of the whole book in hand. At that point, but not before, I just extracted from each chapter the contribution of each interviewee, and lumped it along with the rest from that one interviewee. That yielded 18 full separate interviews. I was actually surprised that each such full interview made sense as a stand alone piece even though they first appeared so piecemeal, just a bit at a time, higgledy piggledly.
I guess having the brief bio of each person in mind, and having each interviewee discuss his or her own experiences and thoughts meant that the fragments, when finally woven together, held together. Or maybe you really did do this whole project on alt earth, and then you somehow channeled it to me in the order I received it, an order that you chose, rather than in the order that you did it. Maybe I really am only a pawn in your game. it feels like that to me.
MG: What else is unusual about this book, different for you, different perhaps for everyone?
Every book exists unto itself and I guess each has some unusual attributes. I am not sure when this book will actually be published but there is already a website for it at — , and that is maybe a little bit unusual.
More, we may publish the source interviews that the book extracts material from for its chapters, and that too would be somewhat unusual. I have also thought to include a music video playlist online for each chapter as an accompaniment for the experience of reading the chapter. I don’t know if other books have ever done that.
MG: Interesting. I am guessing you don’t have any music from my past which would be your future, if it happens for you at all.
As I completed The Wind Cries Freedom, channeling its future voices, I turned eighty. In the years of journeying from under-aged neophyte to over-aged veteran, people close and far, events near and distant, books written or read, talks given or heard… and beats, melodies, riffs, and lyrics, paved my path. Since the people, events, books, and talks all impacted interviewee’s voices, but what about the songs?
I wondered, could a playlist of songs to hear one after another usefully accompany an oral history? My playlist for the purpose undoubtedly reveals my age, limited tastes, and time—and place—bound roots, but should you choose to adopt it for yourself and listen, I hope you will agree that each song’s message, sound, spirit, and original context augment the telling of RPS’s history. You can find it here:
MG: Alright, enough. Let’s get accurate. Stop playing around. What is the real history of this book. No play acting this time. When was it first written? Why? First Published? Then where’d you go? Then when was it rewritten?
Must I?
MG: Yes.
Okay. I started directly working on the oral history in 2016, maybe 2015. I did so because I wanted a new more congenial and more personal vehicle to convey the broad ideas that had accrued from my experiences and the lessons I had taken from others, from events, from history, and so on. My hope was to wind up with a book that could provide hope and insights to people realizing the need but skeptical about trying. An immediate precursor was a project titled 20 Theses for Liberation which is still online at www.,,,,,
I finished in 2017 and sent it to some publishers but with no luck. Some said it was a novel, we don’t do that. Some said it isn’t as novel-like as we like. We don’t do that. No one criticized the contents, just the package. I didn’t have much patience for that so trying endlessly, I self-published. But almost simultaneously I decided the project would be better as a movie or TV mini series. So I got relevant software, read some books about scripts and movies, and tried it. Once I had a script, I guess 2018 or 2019, I spent a few years trying to get famous actors, a director, or producers on board. I had some interesting interactions, but ultimately failed. It wasn’t particularly surprising, but also not particularly inspiring. So I gave all that to some friends who had energy for it, and they tried to turn it into a series for some time. They did great work but no one could attract support to make it real. And then it sat gathering dust, I guess.
Another few years and I somehow got the energy again. That was explicable. I guessed that with Trump 2 things were about to get horrific but also politically engaged—or, if not the latter, then nothing much would matter. But if the latter, then an oral history novel might make a serious contribution. So I started over, taking the existing revision and re-writing it. Partly updating, but also coming off all the film work, making it more personal with more back stories, more emotions conveyed, more motivations, and with strategic improvements as well.
So that became The Wind Cries Freedom.
Thanks Miguel, for the questions….