Fred Dewey, our friend, has written a new book

Without The Consent of the People by Fred Dewey, IFSF Publishing, Spring, 2026. $20.00

Fred’s written a brand-spanking new book I’ve just published—”Without the Consent of the People.” It’s the kind of book, I promise, that you can dip into anywhere and get something out of.

Fred wrote it while he was still alive and I’d promised him I’d get it done. And then he died—poof, he disappeared in June, 2021. And so those of us who loved him and believed in him formed a group in his honor, The Fred Dewey Legacy Project (FRDLP)*, the thought being that we would continue the work he was already in the midst of doing; running the literary arts organization Beyond Baroque; organizing Neighborhood Councils in LA; helping create The Poet’s Wall in Venice; finishing his first book, “The School of Public Life”, a kind of invitation to rethink and revive public spaces all the way from Los Angeles to Berlin.

It seemed to all of us when Fred died so unexpectedly that there wasn’t just one way we could honor him, there were a multitude of ways, including the new manuscript he’d labeled “for Brooks” and left behind on his beat-up Apple laptop.

A year went by, the manuscript hiding silently inside Fred’s laptop, as if it was weary of the pandemic and didn’t have the will to ever, ever become a book. Finally in late 2021, Fred’s 10-year old nephew Gordon found a way to electronically retrieve the manuscript! We were in business! We could on, from mourning our late friend to celebrating him!

Thus, our small but devoted FRDLP group reconvened and after a first reading of Fred’s hefty manuscript we came up with two provisional titles—”Prairie Fires” and “Empire of Rackets”. WIth a huge assist from Sue Spaid of our FRDLP group, I published a pamphlet-like excerpt from Fred’s bool-length text, “I Did Not Consent To” in 2022, knowing the Fredbook as I’d come to call it, needed further editing, as Fred was sometimes prolix, i.e wordy.

In late 2024 Jeremiah Day, Fred’s dear friend and colleague now living in Berlin, took over editorial supervisor of the manuscript Fred had left behind. Our FRDLP group, knowing Fred had a loyal following in Europe, having given ‘table readings’ of Hannah Arendt’s work in Berlin. Brussels, and Paris to enthusiastic readers, encouraged Jeremiah, Sue, Erik Davis, a ew friend of FRDLP to complete the ‘shaping’ of Fred’s manuscript. And now at last, after 5 years of work, we have a brand-new book from Fred Dewey, Without the Consent of the People.”

Ezra Pound’s observation that “literature is news that stays news” is apt, it seems to me, regarding Fred’s concerns, which were wildly holistic—art, poetry, American history, domestic and international politics, film, the vicissitudes of culture and community activism, the close examination of the power structures of prevailing economic interests, the possibilities of people having their real voices become actualized in our daily civic life. Having recently re-read Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense” and Franz Fanon’s “The Wretched of the Earth”—both books so important to Fred—I’ve come to believe that Fred’s through-line in this book is both realistic and and full of hopefulness. He’s able to both identify the absolute necessity of recognizing and then reconciling the many, often ugly, differences among us, doing the real and imaginative work that could make us all real citizens of a world we’d actually want to live in.

*(FRDLP members—Jeremiah Day, Renee Petropolous, Lucas Reiner, Brooks Roddan, Sue Spaid)