The Twin Oaks Trilogy: A Review

by Raven Glomus

This week is book review week at the Commune Life blog.  I will post reviews each day (Monday, Wednesday, and Friday) this week.

Today I want to look at three classic books, all about Twin Oaks, written when Twin Oaks was five, fifteen, and twenty-five years running.  Obviously, since TO has now been going on for 53 years, they are all a bit out of date.  Still, they give a good deal of insight into the beginnings of the longest running secular commune in the US.

Two of the books are by Kat Kinkade, who helped found Twin Oaks. The third book (actually the middle book) is by Ingrid Komar, who was the mother of a Twin Oaker and decided (with the blessing of several Oakers) to ‘update’ the original book.

The three books are A Walden Two Experiment, Living the Dream, and Is It Utopia Yet? Together they catalog the first twenty-five, twenty-six years of the commune’s existence, basically the first half of the years of Twin Oaks.

 A Walden Two Experiment is a good book for people thinking about starting communes as well as anyone really interested in Twin Oaks history.  Kat also gives some flavor of how the communal scene was happening in the sixties, ie, people dropping out, setting up a ‘commune’ and finding it filling up with people who didn’t want to work–and sometimes didn’t want to do anything.  Twin Oaks started as a bunch of people influenced by BF Skinner’s book Walden Two (Skinner actually wrote the preface to this book) and began a sort of behavioral experiment.  Part of how this played out was that Twin Oaks had more structure and expectations than most ‘communes’ and that seems to be part of why it lasted while other experiments fell apart.  In between the bits of history and Kat Kinkade’s stories, she talks about how the founders worked on “shaping equality behavior”, what they came to in terms of cooking and food, building structures, dealing with membership and turnover, raising children, dealing with illness, cars and trucks, pets, getting along with their neighbors, dealing with interpersonal relationships, and the way that sex worked at Twin Oaks.  She focuses on the first two years there–which is really useful since this is often the make-it-or-break-it period for communities.  She claims that Twin Oaks almost didn’t make it and that the “Breakthrough” was when they dropped the entrance fee that they had been charging and said, “Let them come through.”  She feared that the community would fill up with “irresponsible drifters” and, instead, got people who really wanted communal living and were willing to work for it.  She even gives the date when she thought things changed: “December, 1969”, two years into the experiment.

I think that Ingrid Komar’s book is useful but suffers from several things, most of all being the ‘middle child’.  Where Kat Kinkade’s first book is great for early Twin Oaks history and appeals to commune starters, her second book is as current as any of these (if a quarter century out of date) and talks a lot about how Twin Oaks actually runs.  Living the Dream covers a particular slice of history in between that is probably only interesting to folks who want even more of the TO story.  In addition, it’s more academic than either of Kat Kinkade’s books and is written by someone who was never really a Twin Oaks member.  The outsider perspective is both a strength and a weakness. Plus being a member parent, she ends up writing a defense of her son in the book. She critiques Twin Oaks egalitarianism as being “simplistic” and “A naive infantilism”.  Yes, there are problems with the way that Twin Oaks does equality, but, to me, Ingrid Komar comes off as being a bit too partisan and having her own axe to grind.  Still, if you want to get as complete a picture of the history of Twin Oaks as possible, this is a worthwhile book to read.

Kat Kinkade’s second book is probably the most accessible of the three books. Among other things, it comes with a bunch of amusing cartoons inside, written by Jonathan Roth, a former Twin Oaks member.  This is less of a history book and more of a ‘ how things work at Twin Oaks’ book. Not that there isn’t a lot of Twin Oaks history in this book.  She recaps the first five years and then goes into more recent (for her) developments.  She talks about why she left Twin Oaks and why she returned–and, perhaps more interesting to communal history folks, she left to start East Wind and so there is a bit about the beginnings of East Wind in the book. But it’s her descriptions of how Twin Oaks works that makes this book so useful.  She talks about the governance system and the labor system.  She talks about Twin Oaks growing and building and their ambivalence about doing it.  Even if this book is a quarter of a century out of date, I can tell you that most of it still rings true.  There are also mini-biographies of members who made a difference, builders and planners.  Kat Kinkade also talks a bit about her ambivalence about the community, and an ambivalence that led to her leaving Twin Oaks again a few years after writing the book.  And finally, she talks about the events that led up to the founding of Acorn, something she was also part of.  (I am sometimes in awe of Kat Kinkade.  As someone who has helped found a couple of communities, neither of which lasted long, it’s amazing to realize that Kat was part of founding three communities, all of which are going strong still.)

It may be apparent that Is It Utopia Yet? is my favorite of the three books.  I will say clearly that if you only want to read one of these books, read Is It Utopia Yet?  Even just browsing through it and looking at the cartoons will teach you a lot about Twin Oaks.  I would only suggest that you read all three of these books if you really want to understand the DNA of Twin Oaks, how it was built and what went into the first twenty-five years of its existence.  Still, there are enough of us communal true believers that it’s good to know that this detailed history is out there.

On Wednesday, I will review The Token, a book about dealing with diversity written by someone who understands a bit about community living (and serves on the Editorial Review Board of Communities Magazine).

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