We’re taking a small detour for this month’s missive by bringing things close to home.
In a special edition of Resplendently Citational, we’re excited to bring you a conversation with Kailea Loften and Kate Weiner of the community publishing project Loam.
In addition to curating Resplendently Citational, Kate has been working with Kailea for nine years. Together, they’ve co-edited dozens of print publications at the confluence of culture and climate justice. More recently, in partnership with Heyday, they co-edited an expanded edition of Compassion in Crisis: Building Disaster-Resilient Communities (CIC), a “grassroots guide to disaster preparedness.”
In the midst of getting ready for the May 19 launch of the latest edition of Compassion in Crisis, Kailea and Kate sat down with Loam Marketing Strategist Viva Wittman to reflect on the creative collaboration at the heart of CIC.
Kailea Loften is a mother of Tahltan, Kaska, and Black American ancestry. A forever small-town girl, she is a lover of everything slow and subtle. Black tea with honey and cream, long walks regardless of weather, and the scent of rain in the air are a few of her favorite things.
Kate Weiner is an environmental writer and student of community herbalism. As a 2025 Strange Foundation Resident, 2024 North Coast Project Participant, 2023 Editorial Fellow at the Center for Humans & Nature, 2021 Artist/Activist-in-Residence at Boulder Public Library, and 2018 Spiritual Ecology Fellow, she has devoted the past decade to creating work at the confluence of culture and climate justice.
In this conversation, Kailea and Kate dive into the brass tacks of sustaining a decade-long creative partnership, finding your people and growing your herd, and transforming moments of uncertainty into sparks of creative inspiration. (This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.)
P.S. Want more Loam love? Sign up for their six-month print missive subscription and stay tuned for the Compassion in Crisis Mutual Aid is Love tour this May/June!
VIVA: The two of you have been collaborating for almost 10 years! What is the value of working with a long-term creative partner?
KAILEA: One of the benefits of working with someone for nearly 10 years is that you’re able to be a lot more decisive together. Kate and I have a good understanding of each other’s creative desires: where they overlap and how they differ. We have gotten equally good at getting clear about where we’re willing to compromise and what our individual hard lines are.
One simple question that we will ask each other when we come to a head — maybe because one of us doesn’t love a direction or one person might feel really strongly about something — is, Can you live with this? It’s a simple question, and one we continue to use over and over because oftentimes, you can live with it. And every now and then, if someone can’t, that person will state, Actually, I can’t live with this. If someone brings that forward, we’re pretty good at pivoting.
VIVA: I love that. It’s a shorthand for compromise.
KAILEA: Exactly. We’re good at shorthand compromising.
VIVA: And at this point, you know each other well enough that you don’t need to necessarily have a whole conversation.
KATE: Another gift of long-term collaboration is having pretty good systems in place. Especially with Compassion in Crisis coming out soon, it’s really wild to think that was the first big project we worked on together almost eight years ago now. And our processes for communication and creative partnership are so much stronger now.
VIVA: Kate, in many ways, Loam is your brainchild. How was it to meet Kailea and decide that you were in a space where you were ready to bring on a collaborator?
KATE: Loam has always been a collaborative project. It’s definitely true that it was an idea that I had and wrangled friends into joining, but it’s always been about the collective. And what’s so sweet is that one of Loam’s earliest co-stewards, Nicole Stanton, was actually in our most recent issue, sharing a beautiful essay on wildfires and home and the ethics of evacuation.
Kailea and I have often talked about how our coming together was the one time the algorithm really worked! I found Kailea’s Instagram at a moment when I was feeling adrift. I was part of a cohort that won the Brower Youth Award, and it was so exciting. I got to connect with some of the most amazing people!
I also had the experience during the awards ceremony of a stranger diminishing me for my approach, in part because it was more “femme.” And even though my 33-year-old self doesn’t necessarily resonate with that 22-year-old version of me, the comment was deeply impactful at the time. I felt like my softness and femininity and love of beauty were somehow wrong or unserious.
And then when I stumbled across Kailea’s social media feed, which was so beautiful and also so wise and thoughtful and creative and fierce, it felt like a real homecoming. She was somebody I was deeply inspired by and who spoke to something I’d longed to hear voiced.
It’s wild because the first time we ever collaborated was actually the first time we met in person. I flew to California and we co-taught a workshop together.
This past year was maybe the most difficult for our collaboration. We definitely had some bumps as we navigated working with an outside publisher for the first time. But I feel so lucky that when there are challenges, we can work through them. Our experience has for the most part been really easeful, full of understanding, and aligned. I don’t take it for granted.
I feel so lucky to have found Kailea. She’s incredibly thoughtful and stable and creative and truly a moral compass.
VIVA: I love that. Kailea, you were talking earlier about how collaborating keeps you disciplined. And I find in my own collaborations that I am much more willing to disappoint myself than to disappoint my collaborator. You two have a really strong output together. Kailea, what was it like joining Loam, and how does it feel looking back on those early days eight years in?
KAILEA: As I was listening to Kate share, I was reflecting on the way that it just always felt meant to be. We’ve shared a lot with each other around how we have internalized or experienced the world growing up. We were both really wrapped up in books, and I was just reflecting the other day on how, for most of my elementary school years, I wanted to be a librarian. I spent most of my recesses in the library.
Kate and I both come from homes that are dedicated to books, writing, and the endless pursuit of curiosity about what reading can open up inside of you. And so there’s something to be said about being from families that offered that gift to both of us.
When I was a teenager, I wanted to go into advertising because I was really interested in the narrative possibilities that exist in putting ads together for magazines. I now realize as an adult, I don’t want to work in advertising — Loam is, in fact, an ad-free independent publisher — but so much of what I was trying to get at, that I didn’t have language for, was wanting to put out material that could tell stories and change people’s minds. And that’s really what it was about for me when I was a teenager, obsessively looking at magazines and trying to read through the possibility that exists in a long-form ad campaign spread across issues. It was about the bigger story being told, but you had to piece all the ads together to get the whole story. And that was what I wanted to do. I wanted to somehow help create these long-form stories for people.
When I first came across Loam’s Instagram, and later signed up for the newsletter, I felt an immediate curiosity and resonance around what Kate was sharing. And then I was at Canticle Farm in Oakland, and there happened to be a physical copy of a Loam magazine. I said to my friend Morgan Curtis, Oh my God, I just came across this account online, and I was wondering if this is an actual print magazine. This is so cool. And then Morgan said, Yeah, it’s amazing. I also signed up for the newsletter, and this person just writes these newsletters every day. I don’t even know how they do that! We had that conversation, and both of us were amazed at Kate’s output. I had picked up the magazine, and Morgan said, You can take it with you.
So I took it home with me. I still have it. And I remember flipping through the pages, and thinking, I want to make something this beautiful. How do you even do this? I had made one magazine before, so I was already in the mindset of thinking about all the components that go into magazine-making, but I didn’t yet understand how you could do it more consistently. The project I worked on was truly a one-off, but I had already fallen in love with the process. So, finding and joining Loam was a real homecoming for me as well. It felt easy to slip into. And I remember feeling amazed that Kate wanted to talk to me. I don’t even remember how we first started a conversation, but I do remember thinking, I can’t believe this person would be interested in talking and working together on something. And the collaboration just grew organically.
I remember in the early days, I would have these ideas, like I’d go to bed and I’d wake up and have an idea for something for Loam. And I would text Kate, What do you think about this? And then she would text me back and be like, Let’s do it. That was how it all started. And honestly, it’s basically stayed the same. One of us has an idea, texts the other person, and then we just figure out how to make the thing. Even if we’ve never done something before, we’re like, Okay, let’s just figure it out together. So I would say the gift of finding each other is, as Kate said, with age, you become more aware of how rare it is to find someone who has a real deep orientation to the work. Not an orientation that’s taught, but a real personal orientation to the why of what you’re working on together. Because, as we all know, you don’t go into independent publishing to make money; you do it because you’re literally brought alive by it.
There have been many years when both of us have worked for free, and when I’ve considered, Could I ever stop working on this? It always feels like a no, because I don’t know what I would do with myself if I didn’t have this creative space to pour into.
VIVA: One of the containers in the Loam universe you’ve poured into is Compassion in Crisis, a disaster preparedness project you first started working on in 2018. What were the seeds for Compassion in Crisis? And what inspired you to come back to the project?
KATE: We share about this in the intro to Compassion in Crisis, but when we first started working on CIC, we were pretty new in our creative partnership. But I knew I loved working with Kailea and always felt really inspired, engaged, and excited. So I reached out to ask, If we were to work on a project, what would feel most alive? And Kailea brought forward this idea.
VIVA: And where did that idea come from, Kailea?
KAILEA: It came from being in the throes of postpartum and coming on the heels of two really big fire seasons, which is something I’ve written about and is woven throughout some of the narrative pieces in the book. Within two days of learning I was pregnant in 2018, an urban firestorm swept across Santa Rosa, California, 20 minutes from where I lived at the time, and I had to consider evacuation.
In our newest iteration of Compassion in Crisis, we have an interview that features three organizers from the island of Maui. And one of them is Autumn Rae Ness, who I always think of as someone who introduced me to organizing and the legacy of being a mother who organizes. I met her shortly after she had moved to Maui from Japan in 2013. She had given birth to her daughter on Maui, and she had lived through an earthquake and subsequent nuclear meltdowns.
In her interview, she talks about how when you experience an event like an earthquake while pregnant or after having a baby, the way the event imprints on your nervous system is different. It’s something that you ultimately can end up carrying with you if you don’t take the time to process and unpack it. After all, the body of someone who’s caring for and/or carrying a baby is so sensitive. And so a lot of what I was going through at that moment in time, when Kate had initially reached out, was really similar to that experience of being pregnant and then having a newborn, and the whole experience of stepping into parenthood being marked by these bigger, large-scale events.
For me, wanting to dive into disaster preparedness and community response was a part of how I was trying to work through and process a lot of the anxiety and fear that I was holding in my body at that moment in time.
How the project has surprised me is that people have responded to it in ways that have helped me. I think Kate and I both feel less alone. So much of the foundation of our projects and how we approach our work at Loam is based on us being highly sensitive people who didn’t have certain language or patience always provided to us growing up, certainly not when coming of age in our fields, which prioritize being overly awake to what we’re living through right now.
In 2018, as a highly sensitive person, meeting Kate and being in a new friendship and working relationship with her, it felt profound for me to find someone else who was as aware of what we’re all going through as I was. Putting out the book helped us connect and broaden our reach to other highly sensitive people.
So that’s been the biggest thing — learning and finding out that there are so many of us who are deeply attuned to this moment in time and who care in a way that, until recently, we’ve been told is deeply uncool or overreactive.
VIVA: Just to kind of break the fourth wall for a second, Kailea, you and I are sisters. And in 2018, as you mentioned, you were pregnant with your son, my nephew, and I remember the first project you did with Kate was your essay, Mothering Into the Anthropocene.
That was a project that I remember reading, and thinking was such a profound reflection of the experiences that you’d had leading up to writing that piece. And Compassion in Crisis feels like an organic offshoot of that.
It’s been cool seeing how beloved this book has become, how much of a resource it’s been in people’s lives. With that said, what is your hope now for how this expanded edition will live in the world?
KATE: First of all, Viva, I’m really glad you remembered that essay. That was such a beautiful one, and something that for years people would reference. I think it really reached a lot of readers.
In terms of Compassion in Crisis, I hope that this expanded edition helps normalize conversations on disaster and death. I also hope that it can be a tool for connection and relationship-building. One of the beautiful things about getting to co-edit this book and having it be such an incredible tapestry of different voices and contributors is that it carries the imprint of so many hearts and hands. And I think reading through the book, you feel that. So I hope that it inspires people to truly be in relationship with one another, to nurture neighborly bonds, to either seek out a movement home or deepen their roots. I would love for it to be a companion for connection.
KAILEA: We like to call the book a holistic disaster preparedness guide. And part of that comes from breaking away from the traditional idea of what it means to do preparedness work, which is oftentimes centered on an individual person or an individual household. The book invites readers to widen that perspective and consider how a community can orient towards and prepare for disaster by centering those who are most vulnerable.
Preparedness is about urgency. When you bring in that word, “preparedness,” there is an energetic quality of rushing. Because of that, the first version of the book we came out with was pretty small. We wanted it to be something that would be really easy to move around with.
This version with Heyday is still concise, but we did bring in more prompts for the reader to engage with directly on the page, or to gather around with people in their community — take the prompts off of the page and into conversations with those in their household or neighborhood or organizing group. We’re hoping that people will engage with the material. There’s the cut-and-dry content, like, This is how you prepare for X, Y, or Z events. But then there’s all of this other material that’s woven in that we’re hoping will invite people into much broader conversations, both with themselves and with other people, that can help people start to think about how to create community-wide preparedness strategies based on the context of where they live.
So with the book, we are threading a needle and trying to offer material that’s easy and digestible for urgent moments, but we’re also trying to support people in starting much deeper, long-term conversations with their communities.
VIVA: Kate, you touched on this earlier, but this book specifically delves into death. You interview Michelle Carrera, a death doula and disaster organizer, and that conversation around death is one that isn’t very common in preparedness circles. Can you talk through your decision to go there?
KATE: I think death is implicit in any conversation on disaster. We live in precarious times when the conditions can change really suddenly. So often there’s a fear that in speaking to death in some way, in facing it, you might conjure it. And so it feels freeing to name this is a hard fact of life, and part of the disaster preparedness process.
Being in conversation with death pushes you to clarify your priorities. It affirms just how precious our time here together is, how very important and fleeting this moment is. It’s both an inevitability, ever-present, and something that is so often erased. And because that experience of erasure can create dissonance, naming death can help soften that some.
KAILEA: Not only do we lose our loved ones, but we lose places when disaster strikes. What we’re trying to help the reader arrive at is an understanding of change as a part of living, as a part of time.
Another hard fact of what it means to be human and go through life is greeting change. When we’re lucky, the places and the people we love dearly change slowly, and we get to have that long-arc experience and welcome transitions in a way that maybe feels more familiar.
But more often than not, we are greeted with experiences of having to face change coming at us in hard and fast ways.
One of the people we interviewed for Compassion in Crisis, LinYee Yuan, studies relational architecture in the context of our manmade environments. And she brought in how absolutely important it is that within architectural spaces we’re designing for the death of the environment. She said that oftentimes we don’t plan for change, we don’t plan for decomposition, which makes it harder when we have to navigate the inevitable dynamic of change happening.
She helped us understand that environments we build should be able to serve us for certain moments in time. There’s something to be said about needing to create environments that can decompose so that we can rebuild in a way that can meet us in the current context we’re situated in. I would say we were braver in this second version of the book that we put together, because we leaned more directly into the realities of death than we did previously.
I think it has something to do with the fact that we’ve both matured. We’re no longer in the time of life when one is considered a young adult, and we both have had to let go of people and places that we loved in the last eight years, since we started on this project.
VIVA: What you both are saying really illuminates how critical it is for all of us to strengthen our relationships at large. We’re going to need one another when it’s time to navigate death and change, and collaborating is such an enriching way to connect.
It is so rare to find the right collaborative partner, but any tips for people who are looking for their creative soulmate?
KATE: Know the value of what you have when you have it! I feel such deep appreciation for Kailea, both for everything we’ve been able to create together and for everything that’s to come. I just feel like working with Kailea makes all my ideas so much better. And sometimes when I’m getting stuck on something that’s not that important, it’s good to remember what actually matters. And to me, it’s the relationship.
Also finding someone who has generosity of spirit is super important because we’re doing this work during really unstable and fast-changing times and weird shit can come up. Both of us have dealt with big moves, navigated long extended periods of potential evacuation — experiences that are emotionally charged and physically draining. To have someone who has generosity of spirit as a creative partner, who can hold space for humanity, honor the times we’re in, and come back to the bigger picture feels like a huge gift.
KAILEA: For me, it’s just being willing to lean in. I think we collectively struggle to know how to share space, time, ideas. And in order to have a long-lasting collaboration, you have to be willing to share.
I also say that I treat Loam as an entity unto itself, so it’s not personal to me. Of course, my ideas and my thoughts and my feelings shape the entity that is Loam. But I think one thing we do a good job of is letting Loam be its own... It almost feels like a person. It’s like its own vortex or space, a container of sorts that things exist within, and it leaves space for us to be our own individual creatives outside of Loam. We don’t ask for the other to give everything to Loam, which lets it truly be a shared space.
I get excited when Kate comes to me and brings me something that’s her own body of work, her own idea, her own side collaboration with someone else. She’s her own person. So I really try to continue to honor, hold space, and celebrate when she has something that’s her own, not assume that just because we work so closely together that we’re always going to bring our ideas to each other. Leaving space for autonomy is really important.
At this point, our collaboration is a creative marriage. The first thing I’ve woken up to these last eight years has been a text from Kate about Loam. I go to bed with Loam, and I wake up to Loam. The only other person I do that with is my actual husband, but Kate and Loam are literally right there in my mental creative sphere, every day. Loam bookends my day. And one of the things I’ve thought a lot about with my marriage to my husband is that it’s labor, and I think you can apply that to any close partnership you have with someone in your life. It is work, it’s something you give to because the benefits that you reap are so rich. But you should never for a second think it doesn’t take work. It takes practice, it takes energy, it takes attention.
The relational dynamic between us takes watering. And like Kate said, when we have had moments where we’re really struggling to figure out how to compromise, where there’s a rough patch — you put the work in.
I would like to remind people that collaboration is not a bed of roses. Kate, in 2022, we had a conversation with a lawyer, where we were putting some things on paper, and I think the lawyer asked, What do you want? What’s your goal? And I was like, Wow, my goal is to still be doing Loam in 20 years.
And so now that we’re coming up on our 10-year mark, the fact that the 10-year mark isn’t even the end mark for me, it’s beyond. What we will be making together in 10 years remains exciting as something to reach towards. So I think the tip is: lean in and buckle up. Just say yes, just go for the ride.
KATE: That’s so beautifully said, Kailea, and I’m laughing because it’s true. I do feel like I text you almost every day of my life. You’re such a present part of my day.
One last thing I want to add: Viva, now that you’re on the team, we’re a family business! Having grown up with my dad in a family business, you learn so much about what it means to be with people for the long arc, because it’s such a different dynamic. You learn about what it means to love somebody, to navigate bumps, to try to not take things personally, to just keep showing up for one another. So it’s special to me. It’s been so sweet having Kailea and now you on the team, and I’m like, Loam gets to be another kind of family business, and a family business is a special thing.
