We're teaming up with Pansy Collective on May Day / International Workers' Day / Beltane for a free screening from @Elememts_of_MA's docuseries, followed by a community potluck!

The Elements of Mutual Aid is a four-part, independently produced documentary series putting a finger on the pulse of community-led survival projects confronting crisis with care. We'll be watching the first chapter together, which includes interviews with Reclaiming Our Homes, Justseeds, Klee Benally, and more.

Alongside the documentary, Pansy Collective will be selling merch to fund the installation of a free vending machine for Plan B and Noloxone in West Asheville!

If you are able, please bring reusable plates and cutlery along with a dish (vegan and gluten-free preferred). Because we will be eating outdoors, the potluck is weather dependent, but the film screening will take place rain or shine.

#MayDay #MutualAid #QueerSouth #TheElementsOfMutualAid #FeministBookstore

How do we reverse the suicidal course of capitalist society and build a liberated world?

This weekend we're teaming up with @pmpress to host a virtual conversation between Jarrod Shanahan, author of the recently published essay collection "Every Fire Needs a Little Bit of Help," and writer Eman Abdelhadi. Together they'll reflect on Jarrod's book and the last decade of US struggles—including Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and the George Floyd Rebellion—alongside the rise of Trumpism, the alt-right, and an apocalyptic shift in popular culture.

Register for this free event and find your copy of "Every Fire Needs a Little Bit of Help" at https://app.hi.events/event/7035/every-fire-needs-a-little-bit-of-help. Not able to attend in person? Sign up and we'll send you the recording to stream at your convenience!

#EveryFireNeedsALittleBitOfHelp #GiveTheAnarchistACigarette #FeministBookstore #FirestormCoop (- L)

OMG Firestorm is turning 18?! Lift a glass (or maybe a bottle 😉) to the end of our youth. We're celebrating the milestone with a limited edition shirt from one of our favorite seditious artists—KRIME.

Starting today you can preorder one of these gorgeous gorgon shirts on our website for $36. They'll be printed by the good folks at Black Moon Ink on a 100% combed cotton tee from AS Colour, a company focused on high-quality, longer-lasting apparel. These shirts are tough enough to wear reading critical theory, but cozy enough for a fantasy novella!

Place your preorder before Sunday, May 3rd at https://firestorm.coop/products/24878-firestorm-birthday-t-shirt-preorder.html 📦

#FeministBookstore #TurnCopsToStone #Gorgon #FeministMythology #FirestormCoop (- L)

This Sunday, we're excited to host Argentinian anarchist Tomas Rothaus, author of the recently publish memoir "Another War Is Possible," which takes us on a wild, bumpy, and beautiful ride through a lifetime of resistance.

Joined by a member of the @crimethinc collective, Tomas will discuss the lessons he learned from veterans of the Spanish CNT, his first experience trading blows with police in the streets of Paris, and his adventures slipping across borders to participate in epoch-making riots. "Another War is Possible" is the first of three explosive books Tomas is publishing with our friends at PM Press!

Register for this free event and find your copy of the book at https://app.hi.events/event/7033/militant-anarchist-experiences-in-the-antiglobalization-era. Not able to join the event live? Register anyway and we'll share a recording to enjoy at your convenience!

#AnotherWarIsPossible #AnarchistHistory #FeministBookstore #FirestormCoop (- L)

Like a lot of small businesses in our region, Firestorm has been in financial distress for the last year. Hurricane Helene was our tipping point, but local cost of living increases, inflation, and higher occupancy costs are huge contributors. In simple language: our sales are down, our costs are (way) up, and capitalism is the worst.

With less than $15k in financial buffer left, we've projected that our co-op will no longer have the resources needed for normal operations by the end of July.

⚠️ What We're Doing

Over recent months, we've analyzed our situation and explored possible interventions. We're planning to modestly increase store hours, refresh our Sustainers Program, explore new advertising opportunities, better promote our bulk / B2B sales, research grants for unfunded work done by our members, and look for new pop-up gigs. More immediately, we're planning a big sale for mid-April and we've requested and received a temporary reduction to our mortgage.

Our hope is that a handful of short-term measures will buy us time to pursue the longer-term shift in revenue needed to stabilize Firestorm. If we don't succeed, our nuclear option is a cut to pay. As a horizontal co-op we set a payrate democratically, so no changes take place without buy-in from our whole team, but moving away from a living wage runs counter to our collective health.

⚠️ What You Can Do!

If Firestorm surviving and thriving is important to you, we welcome your support. Here are a few ways to pitch in:

🌈 Buy your next book from us, or tell someone who buys books about us! Not a physical media person? We also sell audiobooks through Libro.fm.

🌈 Join our Sustainers Program, starting at $10/mo! Members receive discounts on books and can access free shipping, a monthly book subscription, and other great perks.

🌈 If you work in an organization that coordinates book-related programs, reach out to us about bulk purchasing (we offer discounts!)

We extend our huge appreciation to everyone who is already supporting our co-op financially, or otherwise! We've only made it this far because of you.

#WorkerCoop #FeministBookstore #SolidarityEconomy

It would be hard to think of a more influential book over the last 5 years than Dean Spade's "Mutual Aid." It's a perennial bookclub pick, there’s an even chance it comes up in any conversation about local organizing, and we regularly hear customers enthusiastically recommending it to each other.

It’s also a book that’s worth revisiting, and Dean does just that in this new edition, starting with a 38-page preface that’s good enough to print as a standalone zine. When the book was first published in 2020, part of its incredible appeal was that it emerged directly from urgent conversations and collective actions that readers themselves were part of. This new preface again brings the text into our moment and serves as a critical intervention against the cooptation and pacification of mutual aid 🔥

https://firestorm.coop/products/23866-mutual-aid.html

From the new preface: “My hope is that ‘Mutual Aid’ helps more people join with others in taking risks to care for people in crisis and dismantle the violent systems that are endangering all life and have already prematurely ended the lives of so many. What we need is not just individual or small-group acts of redistribution and care-which are no doubt meaningful-but to create entire voluntary, horizontal, decentralized systems of living together that do not operate through profit, scarcity, and extraction…

Our only chance at freedom is to break from the liberal hope that elites will act for us, and begin to take direct action and care for each other right now… Any particular part of the work we take up will, inevitably, be inadequate to address the crisis-we can't possibly give out enough money, tents, water bottles, masks, hormones, babysitting shifts, abortion pills, or bowls of soup for the level of crisis that the systems we are living in are creating. But we can do this care work with a focus on bringing more people into the struggle, creating new ways of surviving that are autonomous from our opponents' deadly supply chains, and building more capacity for our fights on every front, so that more of us are ready to join every riot or strike in reach and to risk everything for each other.”

#MutualAid #FeministBookstore #FirestormCoop (- L)

One of the most consequential trials of Trump's second term begins on February 17th, and our friend Des is in the middle of it with a box of zines.

Join us in Asheville on Sunday, Feb 15th at 5pm for a teach-in on the Prairieland case. We'll begin with a brief presentation of background information, the situation of our friend Des, and the latest updates on his trial, with a special emphasis on the implications for the movement to abolish ICE and defeat fascism in the US.

Our collective will then facilitate a discussion on how this case might inform our thinking about violence, nonviolence, and state repression in this moment of growing opposition. The final segment of the teach-in will be a space for participants to engage with the Free Des Solidarity Week by writing a letter, creating art, or developing materials to educate others about the case!

This is a free event, but we ask that you bring a donation to support Des' legal defense fund. Given the topic of this conversation, consider the recommendations we've made at https://firestorm.coop/news/expect-surveillance.html

#FreeDes #ZinesAreNotACrime #PrairielandDefendants #FeministBookstore #FirestormCoop (- L)

Snow day! ❄️ Grab your sled, because Firestorm will be open today and (hopefully) tomorrow from noon to 7pm, but our annual winter break starts MONDAY. We'll be closed from February 2nd through 10th to get some rest, catch up on other projects, and maybe even read a few books!

During our break Firestorm won't be open, but unlike in previous years, we will still be shipping in-stock books ordered through our website. So if you're snowed in today, don't panic (or risk your life)—you can grab that next Margaret Killjoy novella at firestorm.coop 📦

Note: since the weather is still weathering, consider calling the store before trekking in if it looks dicey.

#FeministBookstore #AllegedSecretAntifaHeadquarters #FirestormCoop (- E + L)

We're trying something new in 2026 to help us (and you!) ditch Meta.

We know from personal experience that, paradoxically, logging off can make it hard to maintain IRL connections. So much grassroots activity only seems to get advertised on social media—and for spaces like Firestorm, there's a trap in thinking that Instagram is the best place to reach people, even when they live right down the street.

But there are alternatives... if we build them!

Follow us to a place without data harvesting, shadow bans, and right wing trolls. This week we're launching a new broadcast thread on the Signal app, specifically for events at Firestorm. Sign up and you'll get event announcements + a weekly roundup reminder (no memes, no side chatter—strictly event details!).

Since most of our events are in-person, this new thread will primarily be useful to locals. For more local community events, we also recommend the Asheville Radical Community Calendar (DuckDuckGo it! IYKYK)

#FeministBookstore #QueerSouth #FirestormCoop (- L)

Now that we're in the 2025 home stretch, our collective is shifting from retail hustle to reflection. This was a tough year, on lots of levels, but our public messaging has mostly focused on political concerns rather than the difficult financial position we've been in since Hurricane Helene.

Thanks to strong community support and a grant from the Southern Power Fund, our co-op started 2025 with what we thought was a generous buffer. But between Asheville's slow recovery and worsening conditions for low and middle income folks nationally, we're seeing sales far below those of previous years—and we've burned through our reserves trying to bridge the gap. Our collective is still analyzing the situation, but it's clear that the Q4 turnaround we'd hoped for did not materialize, and we're now headed into late winter on thin ice.

We value transparency, so this post is intended to be a heads up that our project is increasingly precarious. We'll share more information in January along with an outline of how we plan to address Firestorm's financial sustainability. In the meanwhile, we appreciate your continued support and hope that you'll keep us in mind when you're buying books! ❤️‍🔥

#FeministBookstore #HurricaneHelene #FirestormCoop