An Interview with Spolia Tarot Creators Jessa Crispin & Jen May

BY SELENA CHAMBERS

Jessa Crispin and Jen May’s Spolia Tarot Deck is a collaboration that, after three years in the making, was Kickstarted and quickly funded last December. A modern riff on Tarot’s history, it remixes the Raider-Waite-Smith system with that of the Italian Minchiate and Sola Busca decks, allowing readers to explore 94 fully illustrated (including elemental and zodiac) cards. Based on six years of research, the deck encompasses numerology, astrology, alchemy, world mythology, art and literary history, as well as the symbolic language of flora, fauna, and minerals. 

It is very much about reclaiming intellectual spiritualism, when art and science worked together to find the seat of the soul. By using esoteric systems like alchemy—whose seeming sorcery stemmed from the integrating creative explorations with those of the natural world—Spolia provides a creative pathway that doesn’t just lead to art making, but to the reinvention of more authentic selves. It has quickly become my go to deck, for reasons I write about here, in my review.

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Rich and complex, I wanted to know more about the behind-the-scenes making of the deck, and had the opportunity to interview Jessa and Jen via email. It was an insightful discussion on not just tarot, but on greater trends within it and without. The Spolia Tarot Deck can be purchased via their store.

Selena Chambers: What do you both feel modern Tarot is missing or getting wrong in 21st century revisioning? What’s it getting right?

Jessa Crispin: To me there is less playfulness. Also, not to be an asshole, but with a lot of decks there's this feeling of some artist or illustrator taking on the task because they thought it would be fun or interesting, not because they actually know anything about the history of the deck or its deeper meanings. So you end up with a lot of very pretty but ultimately meaningless decks. 

Jen May: There are so many tarot decks being produced right now - it’s totally overwhelming. Of course, we are now adding to the pile. We would joke while very slowly making the deck that by the time we were finished this current popularity of tarot would be over. There is probably some oversaturation. Some cashing in on the current Tarot/witch moment that is maybe not so great. At the same time, I think there is now a lot more variations in who or what is represented in the cards and who is creating the text, allowing “modern” tarot to be more queer, less binaried and less white than what is seen in some of the more "classic" decks or texts. That is a good thing, obviously.

SC:  From researching historical tarot, what visual/symbolic rubble does the deck recover and reclaim that 20th century revisionists tried to throw away?

 JC: Jen and I sent a lot of pictures back and forth, lots of paintings and symbols, lots of photos from trips to art museums, lots of Keanu gifs, trying to find visual representations that would be appropriate for the deck. So we're pulling from a thousand years of imagery, and not just from Western Europe, but Central Europe, Central Asia, the Middle East, and so on. 

I remember being in Florence and losing my mind over some Botticelli (because Botticelli is a fucking witch) and emailing Jen all these photos. Every line, every dab of paint has meaning to Botticelli, he was intentionally creating white magic with his art, using his painting as a literal ritual. And I was trying to imbue our project with the same intention. 

Because magic to me is not, oh, I'm going to burn some candles and then the gods will send me a lover of these exact specifications. It's where you put your attention, that creates your world. Not in a The Secret way, in a Simone Weil way. Tarot is just a way of guiding and bringing meaning to your attention.

SC: Collage is no stranger to contemporary decks, were there any concerns on how to keep the images fresh within this medium while staying true to the individual style and honoring that of Colman Smith’s?

JM: The process for each card started with Jessa’s emails. Usually after reading her thoughts on the card and taking some time to stare at multiple versions of the card I’d have some initial ideas - colors, pose for a figure, associations - flowers or setting. I’d start researching and gathering imagery and go from there. Every card is made from cut paper and physical materials. I guess it is important to mention that as some of them could be read as being done in Photoshop. The fact that it is created by hand with scraps and meticulously selected, cut and glued pieces of paper is important to me, and I think the meaning of the deck. I have archives of scraps of paper and images I’ve saved that I would use for some of the imagery, though often I’d need to seek out specific images for a card and would sometimes create the pose or figure I needed by doing a kind of Frankenstein operation and piecing together multiple figures.

I created some of the very bright, bold colors by altering images on photocopy machines. I spent a deranged amount of time at Kinkos in addition to the time at my desk cutting paper. I didn’t have a specific size or format I’d use so some of the images are tiny and some are 20” in height. I’d send Jessa photos as I worked on it and wouldn’t glue anything down until we both agreed the card was done. After all of the artwork was finished, I worked with my friend Tara Romeo who is a phenomenal creative director and designer and very patient person to take all of these non-uniform images and turn them into an actual, functional object. Without Tara the deck would still be a crazy pile of paper on my desk. 

I wasn’t very concerned on keeping images fresh or staying true to Pamela Coleman Smith’s incredible and iconic imagery. I was really just trying to convey what we saw the meaning of the card to be, which sometimes references Coleman Smith’s cards explicitly and sometimes does not at all. The process was both very practical, in trying to be clear with our interpretation while also remaining pretty intuitive.

SC:  What were the hardest cards for you to interpret and design?

JC: There were some cards that just felt like they took forever to truly come together. And we were daunted by the High Priestess, but really, she was I think easy once we started the actual work. I think Justice was hard, Scorpio took forever until it felt right. Justice was difficult only because it's not a card I care about. I understand its importance and I get its meaning, but when I pull it for myself, I roll my eyes. Like, yeah, great, this boring shit again. 

JM: The Scorpio card was a nightmare for me. I didn’t actually finish it and glue everything down until every other card was scanned and I absolutely had to. It always felt off or wrong. Being a Scorpio this felt like some kind of sad metaphor... The Devil wasn’t necessarily difficult to understand but it took me a while to find the right imagery. I originally tried  to make our Devil the most terrifying of all time with over the top spooky imagery. It wasn’t right. The more minimal image we ended up with is more effective.

SC:  How has the process of making your own deck changed, challenged, and/or reinforced the purpose of Tarot for you?

JC: I think it reinforced the idea for me that this is a serious pursuit. The whole Instagram witchcraft shit bothers the hell out of me. I hate a dilettante. Every color, every gesture, every flower means something and changes the experience. Things matter, words matter. It's okay to take things deeply seriously. But people treat tarot, astrology, and witchcraft like it's okay to just dabble in it, and that bothers me.

JM: Making a deck is a very specific way to interact with the tarot. It’s weird, I now feel too close and removed from it. I would agree with Jessa that it reinforces the weight of it, as does seeing it out in the world being used by other people.

SC: You have stated in both Creative Tarot and in interviews that you don't have a high tolerance for “magical woo-woo,” but Tarot’s association and tradition of divination for both occult and new-age purposes drops you in the Self-Care/ Witchcraft cottage industry Venn diagram. What are your thoughts on the rise of this witchy mainstream, or its revamped emphasis as self-care? 

JC: I should say I don't have time for magical woo-woo, but I do have time for the rigorous pursuit of magic and art. So I have very little to say to crystal mongers, but I do have things to say to people who have treated magic and mysticism as a serious intellectual and spiritual pursuit, like Ioan Culianu, Mircea Eliade, Frances Yates, Ficino, Botticelli, Servetus, St Teresa of Avila, St Hildegard of Bingen, Ernesto de Martino, and so on. And of course Maud Gonne. 

I don't think what we have is a true witchcraft revival. I think what we have is a fad. I do meet serious practitioners, but they are drowned the fuck out by dabblers. Tourists. In the way that everyone is a feminist while doing absolutely nothing to pursue or understand that ideology, everyone is a witch while doing nothing to pursue or understand that religion. 

SC: Jen, I know you said Tarot was new to you when you began illustrating for “Reading the Tarot,” so what has surprised you the most learning about this system? Has this project changed how you approach your art, now?

JM: I was a beginner but not a total novice. I knew enough about Tarot that there weren’t too many surprises. Learning the associations for each card - astrological, botanical, herbal, color, location (like, for example, Scorpio rule  "places where reptiles gather, deserted places, prisons and places of grief and mourning." Also "ruinous houses near water.") was really interesting and a part of the tarot I was not very familiar with. Jessa’s knowledge and research on these connections informed the deck in a very major way. 

I don’t think the project has changed the way I approach my personal artwork very much. This project was very much about learning to think about the meanings of the cards or certain concepts in a new very specific visual language. My own artwork tends to be minimal, delicate, and abstract with imagery drawn from the  natural world and cryptic references to popular culture. For the deck I had to make imagery that could be useful to people - bold, figurative, narrative work with a clear meaning. I very much consider the artwork a collaboration with Jessa, as I would have never made anything that looks like this deck if I did it alone.

SC:  It seems like one perk to making your own deck would be righting the wrongs. I especially appreciate the rescuing of Hekate from the Queen of Wands to give her full tribute as the Moon. What, if any, is the personal significance with this deity that lead to this upgrade?

 JC: I don't think either of us looked at this project as “righting wrongs,” just adding some variety. I think one thing that bothered both of us is how standard tarot decks have become. If you look at pre-RWS decks, there is so much variety. Both in what cards are included in each deck and in the imagery and associations. I've always been more attracted to the older decks than the modern, and I wanted to pull some of that variety back in.

As far as Hekate goes, all I can say is I was in Romania when I sent the email to Jen asking her if she wanted to do the deck. And when I was in Sibiu, which is this creepy and beautiful little town in Transylvania, there was this Hekate statue in the center of town. And I kept accidentally running into it. I would go what I thought was north, or I would take a different route, or I would go looking for something else, and then I would run smack back into this triple faced goddess statue. 

JM: While we were working on this card I became sort of obsessed by a section of the Hekate wikipedia page titled “The Nature of Her Cult” that read: “Regarding the nature of her cult, it has been remarked, ‘she is more at home on the fringes than in the center of Greek polytheism. Intrinsically ambivalent and polymorphous, she straddles conventional boundaries and eludes definition.’” 

I realize referencing a wikipedia page here may seem silly or dumb, but I was truly moved by it. I’m glad I saved the text as it’s no longer there.

SC: Another change I appreciated:  In the RWS deck, there are a few cards that are blatantly visually connected—The Lovers and The Devil; The Wheel of Fortune and The World—that seemed severed in the Spolia deck. Was this visual severing conscious? Was there a desire to give more independence to each phase of the Major Arcana?

JC: I am more interested in the number connections of the deck than these other connections, so, the Hierophant's ties to the Devil, the High Priestess's tie to the Hanged Man, and so on. To me, it was more about reforming those connections than thinking about it in the sense of removing these others.

But again, some ideas about certain tarot cards became standard and unwavering after RWS, and the modern understanding of the Lovers card, for example, never really rang true to me. I don't think the Lovers is about romantic love, I think it's Eros, which is different. And so to me, I needed claustrophobia, I needed airlessness, a total remove from the outside world, now your world is just this. Which I think Jen did a great job on.

SC: Alongside deities and historical figures are wonderful pop cultural attributions such as John Wick as the Knight of Coins. I’m curious if there are other contemporary references you two see embodying other cards that have maybe made either that work or that card make more sense? Maybe this is too easy, but it is fun to look at The Hierophant card and the nuance of leadership and tradition through the lens of The Young Pope.

JC: Yes, I definitely see the Young Pope as the fallen Hierophant. But our actual reference for that card was Hedwig and the Angry Inch. Jen and I went to go see that on Broadway together a couple times, and every time I would pull the Hierophant that day, which I found interesting. But there's something about that show that elevates, that show is a good spiritual teacher. And the sensuality of it and the pure feeling of it. Art can be a temple. It rarely actually is, but some are capable of it.

JM: We worked on The Star right after David Bowie’s death and he was an inspiration for the card. We associated Aquarius with the Kraftwerk album Computer Love. The Four of Coins is Mary Todd Lincoln. Six of Wands was the Kanye card. We talked about Cher constantly - I think Cher inhabits every card.

SC: Speaking of attribution: Jessa wrote a Tinyletter in 2017 casting Anthony Bourdain as the Queen of Coins. Since his death, it has been making very poignant rounds on Twitter as a prescient eulogy. From a synchronistic perspective, this strikes me as a wonderful example of where—without necessarily trying to use it as divination—Tarot’s interpretations and meditations end up ringing truer over the passing of time. How do you feel about that piece resurfacing in this context?

JC: I had already left twitter by the time of Bourdain's death, so I had no idea this was the case until you just told me. 

Really, I was just trying to write about what I thought was a fundamental misunderstanding about what Bourdain was doing, and the idea of Queenliness was the most useful way to do that. There are other ways to express that, through androgyny or empathy or whatever. 

What I am interested in is this investment in misunderstanding the person you admire so as not to have to embody their complications. As in, if you understand Bourdain to be all about the leather jacket and the foul mouth, that is much easier to copy and embody yourself than what goes into the actual quality of his work. That's something I see in our culture increasingly, this removal of context and complexity. We all want to be surface only. We want to be a brand. But there's stuff under the surface that we can't wash away. We can deal with it, by dealing directly with the unconscious, but we can't just change our outfit and become another person, and I do think that is a strong impulse in our culture.

You know, one of the reasons I left social media was because of this. I have seen talented writers wreck themselves on the rocky shore of Branding. And they volunteer for that. And why not – complexity does not give you an audience. It gives you soul, but actually it often gets in the way of money, power, influence. But it's an act of violence against your very self, and I'll never understand why so many people sign up for that.

SC: This is something I haven’t seen you speak about in regards to Tarot, but what makes Creative Tarot and the Spolia deck so magical to me is its pragmatism. I know you really admire William James, so I’m just curious what his influence on how you came to view Tarot and integrate it into your life as a keen psychological and creative tool might have been?

  JC: I don't know that I thought much about James as I was creating the deck, although he was someone who was very interested in life after death and magic and psychical research and so on. 

 But the thing I do take from his work in my everyday experience is: What good is this doing? It's nice to have a good idea or thought or fantasy, but what good does it do to the world? I think about him chastising St Catherine of Siena all of the time, his thing about how she cleaned the wounds of lepers with her tongue. His response was, okay, that's nice and all, but what does that do. How does that help. 

The longer I live, the less I think intelligence is important in a person and the more I think kindness is important. It's nice that you're smart and you have all the right thoughts and credentials, but what good are you doing in the world. I think about that all of the time.

---

Selena Chambers writes fiction and non-fiction from the swampy depths of North Florida. Her work has appeared in such publications as Literary Hub, Luna Luna, and Beautiful Bizarre, all with an emphasis on women creatives. She’s been nominated for several awards including a Hugo and two World Fantasy awards. Her most recent books include the weird historical fiction collection, Calls for Submission (Pelekinesis), and the anthology Mechanical Animals (Hex Publishing) co-edited with Jason Heller. Learn more at www.selenachambers.com or Twitter: @BasBleuZombie.

To Sow: A Short Story by Victoria Mier

VICTORIA MIER

One season, a long time ago, the rain never came. The crops grew stunted and crooked, like broken teeth. The townspeople fretted about the fields, about their empty bellies, about the bad omens. They tried to fix it. But despite the prayer vigils in the tiny stone church, despite the quiet sacrifices made under the hush of dusk to the gods they knew before, the harvest never came. Something else did instead.

Peggy Byrne was there. She saw the drought unfold, dry as bone and long as the list of Byrnes who had worked the land before her. When it was all over, the townspeople blamed her. They insisted she found it. She didn’t. Not really. Not in the way things normally get found, which requires looking. 

Peggy had been reaching into the chicken coop when it happened. She didn’t expect an egg to greet her hand, but she was praying it might. When her hand met dry straw and nothing else, just like every other morning, she stood, closing her eyes for a moment. The sound of the forest rose up around her, cicadas and wren in harmony.

Then a sharp crack. And another. Peggy opened her eyes in surprise, searching for the source of the noise, and there it was: pebbles being thrown against her fence, lobbed from the Kelly’s corn fields. Peggy stood up straight, shielding her eyes from the sun with one hand. 

“Bridgid? Katherine?” she called. The Kelly girls were always up to something. Only two summers younger than Peggy, yes, but it felt more like a millennia sometimes. 

No answer. Another pebble. Peggy stomped over to the fence. “You two better stop your messing!” she shouted. The drought had put everyone on edge. 

Another pebble, larger than the others, lobbed right at her shoulder. “Girls!” Peggy shouted, reaching down to pick up the stones. The last one had a perfect hole borne in the center. Peggy shoved them in her pocket, stepped through the fence in a fury of skirts and boots, and stormed into the Kelly’s fields. She heard giggles, which turned her cheeks redder.

Peggy jogged down the path through the stalks, charred brown with drought stress. They reminded her of a husk doll she had found in the bog one autumn—all shrunken and brown, like an apple left to rot in the sun. 

She stopped for a moment, realizing how far her anger had carried her into her neighbor’s fields. The giggling started up again, and suddenly, the stalks to her left shook like someone was walking through. She crossed her arms and faced where she was sure the Kelly girls would appear any moment. She waited, tapping one foot. 

And then, a shift: the air felt colder, heavier, she realized, and smelt of bonfires.The movement in the fields became more fierce, like men and their hounds were pushing their way through the stalks. “Bridgid? Katherine?” Peggy said, this time in a whisper, her arms coming uncrossed. The rustling intensified, just a few feet from Peggy. Fires and animal musk and the smell of a deep, dark and endless night under a full moon filled her nostrils. It was an ancient scent, from long ago.

She had to run. She did not know this herself, not really—it was someone else who lived inside her, another voice from deep in her bones, her great grandmother’s or maybe her great-great grandmother’s, screaming in her head about other botched harvests, about the times before Christ came to Ireland, the years they did not have enough corn to make the offering.

As Peggy turn to flee, whatever was coming broke out of the stalks in a roaring wind. It was a gale, like she had felt by the winter sea as a child, and she screamed and stumbled, falling back through rows of corn. 

For a few moments, she couldn’t move, her heart daring to crack her rib cage. The normal breeze had returned; she heard no sounds in the stalks around her. Her breathing slowed.

When Peggy finally got to her feet, she realized she could not see which way went back to the center path. She turned, just once—you see, that’s all it takes—and there it was.

A half-circle stretched before her, yawning like an open mouth. It curved away from Peggy, its path marked by rotten stalks of corn in a perfect spiral. In the center, a gaping slash loomed open in the earth, dark and moist as spring soil. 

A henge, she realized. The smell from earlier came back, with undercurrents of damp soil and rotting corn. Peggy screamed again, and this time, someone finally heard her— the Kelly patriarch, Cormac.

The townspeople discovered later he had been just a few rows over in the corn, inspecting the stalks for insect damage when he heard Peggy’s shout and rushed to her as fast as his aging legs would carry him. It was curious, they said, that he only heard the final scream. 

“Are you hurt?” Peggy heard over the stalks. “Where are you?” 

“I’m here! It’s Peggy, I’m over here!” she shouted back. Cormac crashed through a few more stalks, leaning heavily on his oak staff. Finally, he appeared near Peggy, breathing hard.

“Are you alright?” he asked, reaching down to help her up.

“I’m .. I …,” Peggy said, lost for words other than to jerk her chin in the direction of the hedge. Cormac turned, slow as sin, to his left and took in what the corn had been hiding.

“It’s back,” Cormac said, so quiet and hoarse Peggy almost didn’t hear him. 

“It was here before?” Peggy stuttered.

“Yes,” Cormac said, drawing himself up and looking 10 years younger for it. “A long time ago, Peggy. Before your parents, rest their souls, were even born.”

“What is it?” The henge’s mouth yawned wide ahead.

“I wish I knew,” Cormac replied. 

“What do we do?” Peggy asked in a hushed voice. Cormac stiffened at her inquiry, like he had been struck. The henge knew what it wanted. The henge had always been clear with its demands.

“I’m sorry, Peggy, I really am,” Cormac said in a whisper, reaching toward her with his gnarled fingers. She drew back. She understood now.

She grabbed the old man’s staff away from his hands. He gaped at her, mouth wide like a fish, before she slammed the staff into his knees. She didn’t flinch when he fell to the ground, or when she hit him once—just once; he had to be alive—in the head with the blunt end. She felt weightless, perhaps like she was underwater, as she dragged his unconscious body to the mouth of the henge. He slipped inside with a quiet whisper of fabric against soil. 

Peggy dusted her hands off on her skirt. She tied her hair back up. She remembered what her grandmother had told her about becoming a woman in the old days. Then she walked down the path through the stalks to her chicken coops. She reached into the coop, searching, until she pulled out an egg, at long last. It was smooth and brown and free of imperfections. Peggy cupped it in her dirt-stained fingers, holding it against her cheek. Then she slid the egg gently into her pocket and walked back the way she came. 

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On Leaning Into The Mystery of Tarot

BY MICHAEL STERLING

As a tarot reader, I get questions about the accuracy and authenticity behind my readings. Which is understandable, I suppose; people don't want to pay for something they're unsure of being benefited by. I explain to potential clients that accuracy isn't the point, but many persist in wanting to know if tarot can give them definitive answers.

The short answer to this question is: no. Tarot will not hand you "yes" or "no" on a silver platter. No oracle or source of divine inspiration will give you answers so concrete.

Would you really want that anyway?

Tarot pulls from the deepest stretches of our subconscious to pluck on the strings of what witches and occultists variously label intuition, "the Knowing", Spirit, etc. A reading isn't predicting our future, tarot helps us remember what we already know. Each card provides a portal to a set of memories and feelings that exist in both our conscious and unconscious minds. Laying the cards out is a tangible way for us to organize, manage, and explore ourselves. One could argue that tarot isn't all that "magical" after all (though tarot is absolutely magical, and I'll get to that later).

The average person probably doesn't research tarot enough to know that, though, which is understandable. The art of reading cards has been a part of occult practices since at least the 18th century, though many occult leaders and writers argue that cartomancy (the art of divination through cards) dates as far back as the ancient Fertile Crescent. In all of that time, tarot has remained in the cultures of the most marginalized and oppressed, as much of witchcraft and occult practice has.

People tend to be scared or believe that the cards are "bullshit", as a stranger attempted to explain to me; the dominant group has been the latter in more recent history. To the majority of society, tarot is a game of smoke and mirrors, and those who put stock in it are thought to be delusional. This delusion is a form of what the American Psychological Association refers to as "magical thinking."

According to psychologists, magical thinking is a form of non-scientific belief that attempts an explanation of the world around us. Superstition, ritual, and spellcrafting are just a few examples of belief practices that are labeled as delusional. This is seen as something that occurs normally in young children, however, due to their lack of logical development. But when present in the minds of human beings older than the age of 7, magical thinking is viewed as a form of mental deficit or illness meant to be corrected.

Some critics of this therapeutic standpoint argue that children had it right from the beginning. According to Alison Gopnik, writer of an essay for Slate titled "The Real Reason Children Love Fantasy", this method of viewing the world isn't a delusion of early childhood, it's evidence of the development of a scientific mind. Gopnik argues that children are "intuitive scientists" who freely theorize and explore their universe in a way that brings them joy and motivation. The theories are the most crucial part. She writes, "A theory not only explains the world we see, it lets us imagine other worlds, and, even more significantly, lets us act to create those worlds." Children aren't escaping or denying reality; they imagine, and so create, a better world.

Now imagine what we would be like if we encouraged this way of thinking as a form of healthy development. What if we collectively saw the lens of magical thinking as an evolutionary trait that has been present in us since birth, and have simply dismissed as society said it was "time to grow up?" This ability to shape our reality based on our intentions shouldn't be a stretch; when we focus on something and dedicate ourselves to the pursuit of it, we make it happen. Magical thinking isn't delusion; it is tangible hope for a brighter future.

That's what tarot and magic are: tangible ways for us to grasp onto hope. Hettie Judah writes about how witchcraft & the occult has, and continues to shape creative culture in her article for Frieze titled "How Witchcraft Continues to Cast Its Spell on Artists' Magical Thinking." She argues that magical thinking is not something specific to a point in human history, but is something that evolves as society grows and changes.

We create new rituals and collective spaces to bring our hope to be manifested; experiences such as placing padlocks for lovers on bridges, and the old rhyme that goes, "Something old / something new /something borrowed / something blue..." are a few that come to mind. Ritual and superstition exist in our lives, regardless of our subscription to witchcraft & the occult. We search for ways to understand our relationship to the Earth and the surrounding universe; that underlying truth has never changed.

Regardless of how "true" our magical thinking is, the more we search for a better world, the closer we are to finding it. Pulling tarot cards, praying, and performing ritual are ways in which we grasp at the world we want to live in. So next time, instead of asking a witch or a tarot reader if their work is accurate, lean into the mystery that led you to question the cards in the first place.

An Indie Rock Playlist for Halloween Chills and Thrills

BY ELIZABETH HART BERGSTROM

There's plenty of classic music to listen to at Halloween, whether you want to dance to "Thriller" or get nostalgically spooky with "The Monster Mash." For a different take, I put together a playlist of songs from some of my favorite indie rock bands about ghosts, vampires, and other Halloween frights. Hopefully this will please all your guests, including the most discerning hipster witches and La Croix-drinking ghouls.

A playlist featuring Tokyo Police Club, The Walkmen, Veronica Falls, and others

If you wanted to watch a few of the videos, here are the more interesting ones…

Music video by Yeah Yeah Yeahs performing Heads Will Roll. (C) 2009 Polydor Ltd.

Sleigh Bells offer a dark and dizzy live performance clip to accompany their Reign of Terror cut "Demons". The band's Derek Miller co-directs, with Gregory Kohn.

Official music video for "Afraid of The Dark" by The Frights. Richard Dotson: Producer, Director, and Editor. Peter Novoa: Assistant Director/Director of Photography Aaron Espinoza: Production Coordinator http://thefrights.com http://dangerbirdrecords.com

Red: A Modern Re-imagining of Little Red Riding Hood

BY SARAH PRISCUS

Red offers him the oatmeal cookies that she baked for her grandmother. He takes one, then lobs her entire body into his open mouth.

His canine fangs graze her skin and her blood drips onto his tongue as sweetly as summer Moscato.

Once she settles into the wolf’s stomach, she unlaces her scarlet Skechers sneakers and tosses them aside. For days, she just sits barefoot and cross-legged on the wolf’s gooey stomach lining.

She hums to herself. It’s bat-cave quiet. She opens her backpack and eats an oatmeal cookie, absently marvelling at how easily it crumbles under her baby teeth.

Loneliness sets in so she sets out in search of her already-swallowed grandmother. She wanders through the abdominal labyrinth until she finds Grandmother lying semi-dissolved in a low, growing pool of stomach acid. Grandmother greets her with a honeyed, dimming “hello.”

Red stares at how Grandmother’s legs look piranha-eaten, all bone and mushy cartilage. Half-skeleton and still sweet-faced.

She places an oatmeal cookie on Grandmother’s cadaverous lap. She doesn’t eat it. If she did, it would tumble right back out again.

Red leaves her.

She passes the time by pressing her ear to the slimy side of the wolf’s stomach, listening for sparrow calls and the rushing of water. A field of sheep. A siren.

Priscus 1

Her bite wounds scab over. Her eyes adjust to the dark.

Red realizes that she’s begun to breathe with the same rhythm as the wolf. Their arms stretch and scratch at the same time. Red cannot decide who is copying who. She prowls the fleshy floor in search of sunflower seeds or scraps of raw meat. Sometimes she slushes through a puddle of stomach acid and doesn’t really mind that it stings her skin.

Just as her acid bath is beginning to rise and burn, some well-intentioned man with an axe and ambition slits her swallower open. Red is yanked from her sticky home, and blinks mole-blind and paling in the sunlight.

The wolf’s carcass lies flat and broken on the dry earth. She and him have never looked more alike than in this moment, both bloody and matted with autumn sweat and gunk.

The man with the axe dries her sprouting body with a tea-towel. She gazes back to the wide wound slashed into the wolf’s body. Oh, she thinks, how dark it was in there - how deliciously, decidedly dark and damp. In that darkness - in that beast’s belly - there was power.

The forest is dark too, and the mist settles as a slick slime on her skin, so she wanders it, lightblind and soaking, until someone pulls her into the sun again.

---

Sarah Priscus lives in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, and currently study English and Theatre at the University of Ottawa. I have previously had work published in Rookie Mag, Atlas and Alice, and Every Day Fiction. 

When The Veil Thins: A Call to Heal

BY NICOLE HAYWARD-BISHOP

October 31st marks the celebration of Samhain—the day when the veil between the world of the living and the world of the dead is at its thinnest. It’s a night that is great for ancestral magick, banishing unwanted spirits, and connecting with loved ones who have passed on. 

It’s a night that offers an opportunity to do some soul searching and to ask our ancestors for guidance to help us heal and grow. 

Our family histories are like previous chapters in our own stories and opening the lines of communication seeking answers can gift us with the insight into ourselves and how to navigate our futures. Change and rebirth can be scary, and the idea of digging up the past and opening old wounds can be painful. However, if old wounds were truly healed you wouldn’t be able to open them. In order to truly heal we need to revisit the histories that we left behind in order to make peace and truly find that closure.

Take it upon yourself to recognize the areas in your development that you’ve been ignoring. Cut open those stitches that act as shields allowing wounds to fester and make peace. It’s much easier to walk away from things when shit gets tough. It’s much easier to close ourselves off from people or the parts of ourselves that scare us. Our darkness shouldn’t be seen as something evil and angry, but just areas that have yet to be discovered or understood like an attic full of unmarked boxes.

Samhain is a holiday that I like to think of as one big flashlight ready to cast light upon our dark. It’s up to us whether we want to pick it up, turn it on, and do some serious soul searching. Ask for guidance from your ancestors, search for answers in your family history and dig deep into the parts of you that should be celebrated and the parts of you that you have yet to discover. The most exciting and worthwhile adventure we can take in life is the journey of self discovery. Change happens whether we want it to or not, and the only thing that we have control over is if we grow as a product of that or if we dig our heels in the sand and refuse to budge.

Living in Canada, I take inspiration from the visual changes this time of year brings like the trees shedding their leaves in order to make way for buds of spring. Nature is always a great source of inspiration when it comes to the ebbs and flows of life. The same goes for animals like the sacred serpent who sheds its skin once it no longer serves, leaving it behind without a sense of remorse but an understanding that it has to go through change in order to move forward. Consider adding visual representations of the serpent to your altar as a way to heighten magicks dealing with this theme.

If you don’t know what kind of rituals to perform on Samhain there are lots of great resources online but really it’s about connecting to your intuition and letting that guide you.

Banishing spells are great to get rid of evil spirits or energies that are weighing you down. It’s easier to send things from the spirit realm back there when the veil is thinner, just keep in mind it’s easier to attract them too if you are breeding a positive environment for negative energies to dwell in so bring awareness to that. I definitely use this time of year to perform a few banishing rituals but I also like to practice deep meditation that’s positive, creative and visual.

I like to sit on the floor with a candle lit in front of me, dimming the lights in my apartment so I have just enough to see the pages of my journal.

I place items that feel inspiring next to the candle like crystals, flowers, and I pull an oracle or tarot card or two asking for clarity.

Sometimes I play music, but oftentimes I prefer it to be quiet and then I just visualize and think about the parts of myself I need to focus on and heal and the parts of myself I might not be totally honest about or sure of. From there I meditate and write as I go, sometimes pulling more cards for guidance. 

Once I’m done and ready to close my circle for the night, I run a bath with oatmeal, honey, and some essential oil infused salts and just relax, nourishing my soul and body, thanking them for the work they’ve done and putting them to peace for the night. With all of the emotional hardships ancestral work and healing can bring, it’s good to take them time to nourish ourselves and practice activities that feel calm and cozy. Sit and read a book, watch a movie, cook; whatever it is that helps you rejuvenate and heal.

That dreamy future that you wish for is attainable, it’s just about embracing your truth, learning from your past, and lighting the torch of knowledge our ancestors have gifted to us.

Blessed be.

An Interview With John Pivovarnick

BY ANDI TALARICO

John Pivovarnick’s novel-within-a-novel Tales from the Back of a Bus tells the story of a young author handling the aftermath of his book’s publication. Jake Maldemer, a young writer in 1980s Los Angeles, writes a series of tales featuring a protagonist named Jack Moses as well as an ethereal, spooky man named Kobold. But when Jake hits the road to promote his book, a man claiming to be Kobold finds him, and things only get weirder from there. It becomes almost impossible to separate fact from fiction as we’re guided through a Dantean LA landscape and later in the piece, New York. The work speaks to the confusion of identity, cognitive dissonance, shame-based fear, and PTSD. Fans of Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five or the film Jacob’s Ladder will feel right at home in these pages. I spoke with author Pivovarnick about the work.

I understand that you wrote much of this book some time ago, in the early 80s. What brought you back to it? What was the editing process like as you finalized this edition for print?

The story is pretty much as described in the afterword, moving that big honking filing cabinet and wondering "WTF is in here?" then spelunking in the monstrous thing.

The clincher, as it were, was finding those rejection letters talked about, too. The "its sooo good, no one will publish it" comments. "Too challenging." Too whatever.

The hardest part of editing was keeping it accurate to the timeframe. I hired an editor and he was like, "Did Jiffy Mailers exist in 1979?" and my answer was always, "They must have, because that's when that part was written."

There were also some characters I had a hard time not editing to fit today's standards. I had to let them stand [while cringing] because they were accurate and honest for the time.

What made you decide to finally move forward with the book's publication? Was there a moment?

The moment was getting similar rejection letters for Beneath a Glass Triskellion which Dave and I are still hammering away at. The thought being, let's learn this process so we're ready to go with these books when we're ready. There's quite a learning curve, as you can imagine. Luckily, I have a unique set of skills...

The story takes place in a city that both is and is not Los Angeles, in that it takes place in the physical and spiritual planes. What about Los Angeles made it available to you as a magical or ethereal realm?

I ran away to Los Angeles when I was 19, and it was both a magical/ethereal realm, and the drudgery of two jobs to make rent and no time to write. I took that bus ride to get that job. I ate at Ships a lot. Just the difference between growing up in Scranton, PA and finding myself in Los Angeles at 19 was quite the journey of discovery.

The act of writing is magical in the same sense the cards are magical or ritual is magical.

Your story is a frame narrative, a classic story-within-a-story, but because you also discuss this work being autobiographical, it's a actually a meta story-within-a-story-within-a-story...within a story? Jack is Jake is YOU, John. How did you handle the psychological gymnastics required to get within two characters that are both based upon your experiences?

Who said I handled them? I have a radio interview coming up next month, and my mind is blown about that.

Also, as a queer kid in denial, your life is all about getting in the heads of two characters that are both based on your experience. That's the closet in a nutshell.

One of the most potent aspects of the work is the main character's struggle over defining and understanding his sexual identification. What was it like, looking back upon those ideas in 2018 from a time when that was still a struggle for you? Do you identity as an LGBTQ author?

I'm an author who is gay, and my life informs what I write, regardless of characters, genre, or whatever. I always strive for representation in what I write, all the way around. I administer the Bechdel test to myself.

At Luna Luna, we're always interested in the cultural signifiers of witches and witchcraft. While Tales from the Back of a Bus doesn't deal directly with witchcraft, you've long been a tarot reader and witchy individual. Do you see a corollary between witchcraft and authorship in general? How does your craft or spiritual practice inform your work.

The act of writing is magical in the same sense the cards are magical or ritual is magical. They all bring about a state of mind that makes you open and receptive, to see. Ritual informs your being. The cards inform another person. Writing informs the readers. It's all the same process of seeing, understanding, and communicating. To me at least. My best writing happens when the characters take control and I'm reduced to just transcribing what they tell me--that's whether they're people, creatures, space aliens, or what not. That "divine madness" Plato was so hot about.

Anything else you’d like to let us know?

This is a weird, weird book. Even I'm astonished at how strange it is. But it's a pretty accurate representation of me and my mind and life process at the time, through a lot of transformative stuff--personal stuff, the Reagan era which was also the start of the AIDS crisis, coming out, shaking off my catholic school upbringing to embrace a wider mystical world. Mind blowing stuff that I was lucky to survive intact. Ish. Intactish.

More than any other element in it, I think it maps my transition from the childhood view that the world is safe and sensible to the more truthful world "red in tooth and claw" ready to chew up the unwary/unaware and spit them out. A simmering summary of this story, maybe, in which I come out transformed on the other side. My life is way stranger than the novelization of it.

---

Andi Talarico is Luna Luna’s book reviews editor, and a Brooklyn-based writer and reader. In 2003, Paperkite Press published her chapbook, Spinning with the Tornado, and Swandive Publishing included her in the 2014 anthology, Everyday Escape Poems.

She’s taught poetry in classrooms as a rostered artist and acted as both coach and judge for Poetry Out Loud. She also penned a literary arts column for Electric City magazine, and currently curates the NYC-branch of the international reading series, At the Inkwell. When she’s not working with stationery company Baron Fig, she can be found reading tarot cards, supporting independent bookstores, and searching for the best oyster Happy Hour in NYC.

What It Means to be Dead: A Ghost Story

BY BOB RAYMONDA

Tucked away along the sprawling boardwalk of the Jersey Shore, there’s an unremarkable stand filled to the brim with balloons of all shapes and colors. Jules, an immovable man with a respectable paunch, presided over this place. He was bespectacled and bearded in such a way that made him look like a low-rent George RR Martin and brandished the author’s same tired fisherman’s cap. He never said a word as the sun-pocked children passed by, handing him fives and tens and twenties from their ice-cream stained fingers, begging for a chance to destroy the colorful spheres behind him.

What the children didn’t see, as they flung their dilapidated darts at the wall, was that the man possessed no legs to speak of. Trailing out from underneath his taut black t-shirt was a tuft of smoke, approaching the facsimile of a tail. The smoke’s size and shape ebbed and flowed with the management of his stall. Almost bursting while he waited for the grubs to make their mark, and deflating again as he used his pent-up-pressure to replenish the cheap waxy balloons behind him.

At his side most days sat an ornery fading beach rat named Luellen, clutching a wireless microphone, and cooing at the sweaty vacationers in their stringy bathing suits and inquiring after their fattened wallets. She chain-smoked Parliaments and blew second-hand smoke into the face of her customers, her legs propped up on the stall in front of her. What she lacked in grace, she made up for in what Jules’ mother would have called gumption. The few times she was asked to modify her behavior, be it by their boss or one of her asthmatic tween marks, Luellen had lit up a new smoke, let out a raucous fart, and cackled in their faces.

Jules appreciated her give-no-shits attitude, but couldn’t let her know it. She assumed he was one of those old, queer types who spent all their time in their own head and couldn’t give a second of their day to anybody else. Jules didn’t have a tongue. It got ripped right out his head when he died and never came back when he became re-corporealized. He was tenuously tethered to the land of the living, as it were. 

Where others in his predicament would take full advantage of the freedom in his newfound form, Jules has chosen to remain mostly stationary. There would be no haunting the halls of an old manse or zipping along the depths of the ocean floor in his future. There would only be the alternating seasons of the same rickety beach where he spent his own summers growing up. But he didn’t mind, Luellen was good company and he’d always loved the way the smell of deep fried oysters mixed perfectly with the dull glow of the neon lights that surrounded him.

The biggest trouble with Jules’ immortal decision was when the end of the season rolled around, year in and year out, like clockwork. After the last of the balloons had been popped and the summer people had filled their cars back up with their sand-covered beach gear, he stayed put. After Luellen had retreated to her winter job behind the counter of a deli, serving up bland bacon egg and cheeses, Jules floated back and forth in his stall ad infinitum. 

During those days, Jules would wait for the sun to come up and finally take a moment to float away. He watched the waves swell in and out as the snow came and went. And he waited, for the next crop of kids to show up and require something of him. It was a lonely thing. He’d drift along the edge of the shore and wonder what it’d be like if he could still wiggle his toes into the harsh frozen sand underneath them. What it would be like to feel anything, at all, anymore. 

It wasn’t that he couldn’t touch anything, on the contrary, he could pick things up well enough, but he couldn’t savor anything, not really. He couldn’t eat a Nathan’s hot dog or drink a cold Bud Light without it falling onto the ground behind him in a pool of grey unsubstantiated mush. He couldn’t kiss his husband’s collarbone or feel the brief moment of joy as their hairy knuckles brushed into one another. It all felt so hopeless. 

At least, until Phil showed up.

It was like any other January morning: Jules moping about, restocking the balloons despite the cold when he heard a knock at the counter behind him. He spun around and saw someone wearing a long trench coat and a pair of aviator sunglasses. They were chomping on a cigar and chewing a piece of gum at the same time, and spoke with their teeth gritted, “Hey Skin, how much for a chance?”

Jules pointed to the sign behind him, $3 for 2 tries, $5 for 3. 

The stranger chortled, “What’s a matter, cat got your tongue?”

Jules, feeling sassy, opened his mouth and pointed to the bloody stump where his tongue used to be. Phil recoiled, but then stuck their head in even closer to Jules’ face.

“Holy Mary, mother of Joseph, what the fuck happened to you?”

Jules shrugged.

“You ever think of carrying around a little pen and paper so you can actually talk to people?”

Jules rolled his eyes, but reached into his pocket and pulled out a faded moleskin with a canary on the cover and a stubby brown crayon: Of course.

“That’s more like it. Name’s Phil,” they said, sticking their hand out, “How about you?”

Jules, he wrote before taking Phil’s hand in for a shake. It was cold. Cold like Jules’ hands were. Dead hands. Jules cocked his head like his pit bull, Tubsy, always would.

Phil let out a knowing smile. “Fifty or sixty years now, I think. I lose track. What about you?”

Jules held up all ten of his fingers.

“A baby then. Sorry I called you Skin, haven’t run into any others in a while.”

Jules shrugged again.

Phil reached into their breast pocket and pulled out a crisp twenty dollar bill. They slapped it on the table and hungrily took the fistful of darts Jules handed them. They didn’t make a single shot but didn’t seem to mind. Casually pinning the wall while taking puffs from their cigar.

Jules picked up his crayon again, wrote: You don’t like sitting still much, do you?

Phil laughed, “Never been too good at that.”
I can tell.

“Can I ask you another question, Jules, was it?”

Do I have a choice?

“Course you do, but I’m still gonna ask: why here?”

For the first time in what felt like ages, Jules’ wrist began to cramp up. He wasn’t used to writing this much, but asked: Where else would I go?

“Anywhere!” Phil exclaimed, giving up on their darts and sitting on the booth, patting the table next to them, “I know this lounge singer, Debby, who goes around at night singing in the empty ballrooms of every venue she never got to topline before she croaked.”

Jules hesitantly climbed up and plopped himself down. His tail wagged with excitement, and as soon as Phil saw it, they unbuttoned the bottom of their jacket and showed off a hazy tail of their own.

“And there’s this other friend of mine, a tax agent from Tallulah who summers in the lingerie section of a Wal*Mart outside Tacoma, for the fun of it.”

Jules scratched away: Sounds like you’ve got a lot of friends.

“I do! And that’s just in the States. There’s this old clown who runs a crust punk DIY venue in Berlin. And…”

That’s very good for them. It sounds like they’ve all had very fulfilling deaths.

Phil let out a big sigh, “You’re not getting my point.”

Jules cocked his head like Tubsy again.

“Forgive me if I’m overstepping here, but if I can hazard a guess, you lived here before you died.”

Jules nodded. So what?

“So, haven’t you wanted to get out and see any of the world?”

Jules shook his head, without conviction.

Phil stubbed out their cigar and spit their gum out in a high arc across the boardwalk. “You’re telling me, in the ten years since you’ve been a skin, you’ve sat here doing the same shit you did when you were one, and you’re still happy as a clam?”

Jules nodded, more and more unsure of himself.

“I call bull shit.”

Where would I even bother going? None of it’ll be any different than here. None of it will get me my husband back.

They sighed and put a hand on Jules’ back. Even dead, lifeless, and cold, it still sent a shiver down his spine. “Anywhere, Jules. You could go anywhere. And you can’t dwell on the skins, it’s bad for your complexion. And this body of yours? If you’d bother getting out once in a while, you’d realize it could be anything you wanted.”

My body is just fine thanks.

“Of course it is! But it could be something else too. Something more”

Jules gave Phil the Tubsy look again.

Phil put their hands on Jules’ face. Their pupils were giant and their eyes were green in a way you could get lost in. They looked at him, earnestly, said, “If you’ll take my hand, I can show you.”

Jules hesitated. Who was this ghost, anyway? And why should he trust them? He broke eye contact and fiddled with one of the darts that Phil never threw. He turned and sent it flying, himself, straight into one of the biggest balloons he’d blown up. A small wisp of mist leaked out as a little part of him escaped back into the world.

It was Phil’s turn to shrug and shrug they did. They rubbed their hands together and pulled their trench coat back in tight to their chest, blowing air on their fingers. “Suit yourself,” they said, as they stood up to leave.

As Phil drifted away, Jules thought about what they said. What was the point of staying here, at least during the offseason? He could always come back when there was work to do again if he wanted. He wrote a quick note and rapped his knuckles on the counter three times. At first, Phil didn’t hear him, and so he did it again. The whole stall shook, and it sounded like a thunderclap against the boardwalk beneath him. Phil turned back now, and Jules held up his sign: Wait.

Jules took one last look at the stall where he’d spent so much of his life and death. He’d miss it, but Phil was right. It was time for him to experience a little bit more of what there was out there. He had his whole death ahead of him and he was starting to look forward to it, despite himself.

Phil had a huge smile on their face as Jules appeared next to them. “You sure about this, friendo?”

Jules sighed, and scratched a final note: You’re really gonna try and get me to turn back, now?

Phil shook their head. Took Jules’ hand, warming him all the way up, and lead him finally away from the shore.

---

Bob Raymonda is a writer based out of New Rochelle, NY. His work has found its way onto Quail Bell Magazine, Peach Magazine, Syndicated, Potluck Magazine, & Yes, Poetry. In early 2015 he founded Breadcrumbs Magazine, an online literary and arts journal that fosters creativity and collaboration through shared inspiration. The project has grown into a community of over 200 contributors across the world in a wide variety of mediums, with more submitting all of the time.

Sarah Chavez on Death Positivity, Grief, & Intersectional Feminism

INTERVIEW WITH SARAH CHAVEZ BY LISA MARIE BASILE

Last year, I found myself in the midst of intense grief; I’d lost three people in a row —a friend, my mother’s partner, and my beloved aunt. Between the three losses, I had experienced the kinds of grief that come with both anticipation and violent surprise.

The grief was tidal, complicated, numbing, horrific, and, as it seemed then, endless. I couldn’t find my way out, and for some time, I questioned everything about life itself. Why do we die? Is there importance to it? How do we make it sacred? How can we talk about it publicly? How do we better care for the dying and for those in grief? How do make space for the discussion of it? How, as a nation, do we handle death—and how do our limitations and rituals intersect with race, gender, and class? I realized, too, that grief hadn’t ended there. I would experience it again, and again, and again. I couldn’t (and sometimes don’t) reconcile this, but I knew I couldn’t continue living in a hazy veil of denial and stigma and quietness.

A few things provided comfort to me. I began ritualizing my grief (I’d visit cemeteries, allow myself to experience the feelings rather than running from them, which I write about in my book, Light Magic for Dark Times). I also started diving into the death positive movement to not only honor death’s naturalness and inevitability, but speak to others who live and work in that liminal space—that space where death isn’t an uncomfortable topic to be tucked away but an important subject worthy of our time and openness.

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WE’RE DOING A PODCAST! @DeathAfternoon will be hosted by @TheGoodDeath, Louise Hung and ME! . . We are so excited about launching in October but, we need some help to make it happen! Check out our campaign and what we’ve got planned on @iFundWomen (link in the bio) . . We’ve been working for months on this and CANNOT WAIT to share it with you. . . PS - Taking a moment here to declare my eternal adoration of @lurchyeatings who created our logo 💜⚰️

A post shared by Sarah Chavez (@sarah_calavera) on Aug 24, 2018 at 11:38am PDT

Enter Sarah Chavez. I’ve admired her work for a very long time, even before it aligned with my personal views and realizations. Sarah is the executive director of the “Order of the Good Death” and she’s the co-founder of the feminist site “Death & the Maiden” (which I urge everyone to check out). She’s also the host of a brand new podcast, Death in the Afternoon, which you can support here.

Her voice is an important one—it’s feminist, inclusive, and compassionate, and she uses her voice to “to examine the relationship between ritual, decolonization and death itself.” You can read all about her incredibly important work here (and, if you’ve read Caitlin Doughty’s From Here to Eternity, you’ll find Sarah as a subject in that work).

Below, I chatted with Sarah, who kindly and generously offered some ideas around grief and death positivity. I recommend this read for anyone ready to encounter that intersection, in addition to its alignment with feminism, gender, race, class, and ritual.

I hope that in your journey toward exploring death and grief you find some light and peace.

LISA MARIE BASILE (LMB): How does grief intersect with the death positive movement? How can the tenants of death positivity help us move through that pain?

SC: Megan Devine, a clinical mental health therapist and author, recently said that she thinks we are more afraid of grief than we are of death and I think there’s a lot of truth to that. To stand by and bear witness to incredible pain that we cannot fix, makes most of us unbearably uncomfortable. Particularly if that grief stems from an untimely or violent death, because then we cannot escape the harsh reality that yes, anyone at any age - your child, your best friend, your partner - could die at any time. 

By having some level of comfort with discussing death and by learning how we can best support others in mourning, is a big part of being death positive.

What often happens is the people we depend on to be present to help us and support us through a death, (including medical professionals), are so uncomfortable themselves, or don’t know what to do or say, so they end up ghosting instead. This often makes the grieving process even more difficult, and can result in the grieving person feeling even more isolated or even suicidal. Death and grief is a painful but normal part of life; by recognizing that and treating it this way, it can go a long way toward helping our loved ones and ourselves navigate through all the pain.

What would our society look like if, instead of turning away, we could accompany and lovingly support one another through the experience of loss? 

LMB: Women are such a key component of the death positive movement. It's amazing, because women give life and they also help move people through death. For instance, my mother worked in hospice for a long time—and she was always asked for by the dying to come sit with them as they passed. Why do you think it is important for women, specifically, to take part in the death positive movement? How can women specifically benefit? I know this is very open-ended, but I'd love to include your thoughts directly in addition to linking to the many wonderful articles that tackle it.

SC: Not long ago dying, corpse care, and mourning was largely considered feminine work, that took place within the home. However, when death and dying became profitable industries, (the medical and funeral industries), and deemed something only privileged, educated men could do, it marginalized women, severing them from roles they had previously played for centuries, and pushed them into the role of consumer.

In result, our interactions with, and relationship to our dead, became mediated and staged via a system that was contrived by men, and which still largely financially and socially supports men. 

One has to ask, who is our current system serving? Surely not the people who are having to pay thousands of dollars for procedures and practices that distance us from one another, are often completely unnecessary and cause harm to the environment. Our deaths and the rituals surrounding death should be things that hold meaning and importance for us, things that support us, and we need to have the courage to ask ourselves and our loved ones, what those things are and why?

It is important to recognize that gender – as well as race, disability, sexuality and privilege – play a large role in determining our relationship to and experience of death and dying. For centuries our access to opportunities and spaces that have a direct impact on the quality of our lives and in turn, our relationship to and experience of death have been restricted. I believe we have the power to create healthy, meaningful, human-centered practices, not profit centered ones. I encourage others to reclaim these spaces and roles from the patriarchy, from centuries of colonization, and from capitalism. 

I view my work as a death positive activist as a feminist act – I’m advocating for others to reclaim these spaces and roles from the patriarchy, from centuries of colonization, and from capitalism, so that they can have agency over their lives, their deaths, and the death care of their loved ones.

Also, I think it is feminist AF to take control over what happens to your body when you die. We’ve had our bodies subject to standards, rules, and laws created by men our entire lives and we often modify our bodies to appeal to the male gaze so we can be “valued” in the patriarchal society we exist in. Be body positive AND corpse positive! Learn about all the options for body disposition. Ensure that your death reflects the things that are important to you in life – you can be of service to others by donating your body to science. If climate change and environmental issues are important to you, then look into green or conservation burial and forgo harmful procedures like embalming. Have your ashes turned into a firework, a diamond or pressed into vinyl. Do whatever you want, but let that final act be one you decide – don’t give that control away.  We should be empowered to make decisions regarding our bodies in life, and those rights should also extend to the body in death.

I find it interesting that many of the women entering the funeral business or leading the grassroots movement of death doulas or death midwives are women in their 50s and 60s. 

We live in a society that bases a woman’s value on a youthful, “beautiful” body, as well as in the child bearing (and child raising) body, but devalue or have limited places in our culture for older women. I think many of these women are striving to reclaim and imbue both of these important spaces (aging and death) with the meaning and value they deserve. 

There are many issues that are a big concern to me that demonstrate how feminism and the Death Positive intersect:

• Gender-based violence is escalating and our trans sisters of and women of color are especially at risk. Last year the Center for Disease Control released it’s findings that domestic violence is a major cause of death for women. Calling it, “a serious, preventable, public-health problem that affects millions of Americans.” Women are out here being murdered simply for trying to exist and have agency over their own lives. 

Who is Killing American Women? Their Husbands and Boyfriends 

The Link Between Domestic Violence and Mass Shootings 

• The U.S. has the highest maternal mortality rate in the developed world. 

We need better medical and mental health care and support for people experiencing miscarriage, abortion and infant/child loss. Most women grieve in silence because society often blames or shames women for these types of losses.

In the U.S. Black women are dying in childbirth at nearly four times the rate of white women. As for Black infants? They’re dying at about twice the rate of white infants. Racism is fueling these deaths. Not to mention the immense stresses on women raising Black and brown children. Knowing there’s a real chance that when your child leaves the house to go do something as ordinary as play the park they may never come home alive?  

• According to reproductive justice advocate Caroline Reilly, the greatest weapon in the anti-choice movement arsenal is our fear of death. By comparing abortion to murder and framing themselves as “pro-life,” they depict women as evil, immoral individuals rendering them incapable of making “good” choices.

In the days following Trump and Pence’s election, women have had to contend with continuous threats of having their access to reproductive health care stripped, being forced to have funerals for miscarried fetuses, or having a president who stated there should be some form of “punishment” for women who have abortions. This issue has become even more urgent with the possible Supreme Court confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh, who could jeopardize our reproductive rights.  

LMB: For people who are new to the death positive movement or haven't heard of it, but are deeply struggling with grief, fear of death and obsessive thoughts of the necro, what would you say?  

SC: Your relationship with death and your own mortality is like any other relationship – it needs work, reflection, and self-evaluation. Death is so hard, and for as much potential for meaning and beauty as there is to be found in aspects of it, there are equally horrible things to grapple with as well.

My colleague, Caitlin Doughty, host of Ask A Mortician, suggests something that I found to be the most simple and helpful; in lieu of getting overwhelmed by the idea of death, examine what your specific fears are and work towards minimizing that fear through actions.

For example, maybe you’re afraid of pain or you are worried that your wishes, or identity won’t be honored. In this case, you can create something called an Advance Directive, outlining your end of life wishes for things like pain management, quality of life care and legally designating someone you trust to carry out your wishes.

Or, one that’s pretty common is not being able to complete your projects or ambitions. While you’re still working toward your goals, make a plan and get organized. Find people in your life who can help carry out your goals or continue your work if aren’t able to.

For myself, and a lot of other folks in socially marginalized communities it is often dying a bad death – death by violence, or not being able to afford or access care for a treatable or manageable health condition are a couple of examples. This one is particularly hard because bad deaths are often the direct result of things we can’t control. It can help to take action and get involved in movements and initiatives that are working toward changing the underlying reasons that bad deaths occur – volunteer at domestic violence shelters or at hospices for the homeless, financially and physically support organizations like Black Lives Matter, the National Center for Transgender Equality or the Black Mamas Matter Alliance.

For me, the most important reason to face our fears surrounding death is that it influences our behavior and beliefs in ways we are not often aware of. The roots of inequality, racism, and social marginalization are grounded in this fear.

In the early 1970s anthropologist Ernest Becker’s Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Denial of Death came out. It details the theory that all of our actions are motivated by an awareness of our inevitable deaths and out of this work came Terror Management Theory. Very briefly, the theory is that the anxiety surrounding the fact that we will cease to exist is what pushes us to create - we want to live on, or transcend mortality through our work and achievements, or by creating children all things that we believe will carry on our legacy. 

In the past year TMT (Terror Management Theory) has been cited as the reason behind things like the Brexit decision, Trump being elected, and Nazi’s openly rallying in cities across the U.S. The reasoning behind this is that we tend to embrace collective legacies inherent in our culture, or feelings of nationalism because these provide us with a sense of belonging, identity and meaning in our lives. Being a part of something that we feel is important or “bigger than ourselves” makes us feel good and is another way of contributing to our perceived legacy. Recent studies have shown that our fear of death prompts us to double down on those fears and beliefs, and the result is hating or fearing those who are not like us – who don’t look like us or share our same beliefs

LMB: What are some simple steps one can take to become more death positive in their everyday life?

SC: Begin by working on creating rituals for yourself. Each month designate a day to honor your ancestors, collective deaths within your community, or the death of someone close to you. It is important to make space to honor your own grief, as well. This can be any type of loss – relationships to people or places, periods of your life, whatever you need to mourn. 

During this time you could cook a meal to share with the dead, create an altar, play music, read a poem, light a candle, write a letter, draw something, meditate, whatever serves you. What is important is that you create your own rituals and imbue them with things that are meaningful to you. Detach from the idea that you have to acknowledge the dead, or your grief in a certain way, or in a designated location, or on an assigned day of the year. Give yourself permission to reimagine things that will nourish you as an individual, and your community.

There can be comfort for some in collective acts of mourning and healing. Think about creating that space for your family, friends or community. It can be as simple as a potluck dinner with chosen family, to a more defined set of activities within a group - a guided meditation on mortality, followed by writing a letter to someone you’ve lost, and close with a reading and a vigil for folks in your community who died as a result of racism, sexism, capitalism, etc. Finally, carry those threads throughout the rest of the year by recognizing and actively working to dismantle the underlying systems that cause and contribute to these unnecessary deaths. 

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Sarah Chavez is changing the way we think about death. As the executive director of the “Order of the Good Death” and co-founder of feminist site “Death & the Maiden,” Sarah is a leader in the Death Positive movement, using her voice to examine the relationship between ritual, decolonization and death itself. Her multifaceted approach to observing and honoring this process is unparalleled; her work weaves together the relationship between death and food, rituals, culture, and society, which she also shares on her blog “Nourishing Death.” And with her work as a museum curator, Sarah has the uncanny ability to intertwine the ethereal and abstract process of dying into a relatable and tangible experience that can be understood and interacted with. Her latest project, the podcast “Death in the Afternoon” with co-hosts Caitlin Doughty, and Louise Hung, holds this same energy. Sarah will continue sharing her unique, fantastical life with listeners, while of course sharing plenty of anecdotes about death as well.

Sarah grew up around death. As the child of parents in the entertainment industry, she was raised witnessing choreographed Hollywood deaths on soundstages. Sarah’s work has been influenced by this unique upbringing, and she has dedicated her adult life to examining death and dying through an intersectional-feminist and inclusive lens.

As a leader of the Death Positive movement, she uses her work as an activist to advocate for others to reclaim experiences around dying. She does this by sharing history, and her own rituals and ideas for decolonizing death. The goal of this all is to help inspire others to create a healthier relationship with death and mourning, to better serve their own needs as well as those of the community at large. Sarah’s work centers women, both as death professionals and as a part of the Death Positive movement. She uses her platform to help examine the historical and cultural reasons women are at the forefront of death activism, and then she places the narrative back in the hands of the women who are actively doing this work and shifting the future of death.

Sarah’s empowering message weaves into this life, and not just that which lies beyond. She became a historian to preserve the culture and history of the Latinx neighborhood she was raised in, and she became a museum curator for a similar reason; to help share the story of women’s history, as well as other silenced peoples, like the stories of those with Japanese ancestry who were imprisoned in internment camps. Sarah uses her own story to help others see the light as well. She was the subject of a chapter in Caitlin Doughty’s NYT bestselling book, From Here to Eternity, and she has done research and writing and is the editor for The Order, and has worked on popular YouTube series, Ask a Mortician. Sarah continues using her voice to stand up and advocate for those who don’t have the privilege; in this life and beyond.