Last year, I shared a terrible essay with my writer’s group. One of my colleagues asked, “what is this really about?” (Excellent question, Roberta!) I thought about that for quite a while. Community, I decided–or, to be more specific, my desire for community. I wasn’t sure how to proceed with that essay, and so I let it sit while I wrote and revised other things. But now, looking at the list of things left to write for my second book (the manuscript is due in June–wish me luck!), I can see that it’s time to start working through the scattered research materials I’ve been collecting. I decided to start with Casey Plett’s wonderful little book, On Community, partly because another colleague, Tanis MacDonald, posted about it on Instagram. I could not have chosen a better jumping-off point.

On Community is one of Biblioasis’s Field Notes series–short books, or long essays, the titles of which all begin with the word “On”: On Class, On Writing and Failure, or the forthcoming On Oil. So far, I’ve read two in that series; both were excellent. A new item has been added to my bucket list: write a book for that series. I doubt that’s going to happen, but you never know. As the Victorian poet Robert Browning wrote in one of his dramatic monologues, “Andrea del Sarto,” “Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, / Or what’s a heaven for?”

So, what makes On Community so good? The breadth of research, for one thing. Plett includes people I’d heard of, like Robert Waldinger, but she also brings in others I knew nothing about, or who I didn’t know had written about community. But also I appreciated Plett’s acknowledgement of the complexity of community–the way it includes and excludes, the way it is “equally capable of cruelty and health in the way of many ordinary things, mundane actions that happen every day with the capacity for both salve and sickness,” to quote her thoughtful words. “Humans need community, but there’s no good assuming it’s always a conduit for goodness.” As Plato says, and Derrida through Plato, it’s a pharmakon, both cure and poison. As a trans woman, Plett has experienced a lot of exclusion and rejection from communities, as well as inclusion and acceptance, and she is aware of how complex and fraught and necessary community is. The alternative, bleak and lonely isolation, is unthinkable, even if that’s what many of us experience now, given the epidemic of loneliness in our culture.

I loved Plett’s notion that community is a verb, too, and her argument that we are entitled to be wary around strangers even as we need to be open to them as well. And I loved the call she makes to her readers at her essay’s conclusion–that we should try to do the unthinkable, which includes working towards becoming part of something larger than ourselves.

I’m happy I read this, and if I can make that terrible essay into something worth reading, and if it ends up getting included in my book, and if you happen to read it, you’ll see the influence Plett’s On Community has exerted on my thinking.