Witchy World Roundup - January 2016

BY JOANNA C. VALENTE

Mistress Harley is a tech dominatrix. It's pretty fascinating:

"When new technology springs up, sexuality adapts to it," she says. "Human sexuality is never static. A new form of technology emerges and we find a way to connect it to sex."

-Jessica Placzek for Broadly

Heart mender tea. Um, yes:

"The bittersweet effect of love is a force we all know well. Breakups can be a harrowing process. The recollections of time together haunt us and fog our thoughts."

-Brittany Ducham for Witch Craft Mag

What everyone should know about the intersex community:

"It is estimated that 1 in 2,000 people is intersex, but it is likely that the figure is actually higher. “Intersex is a natural variation of human biology,” Quinn says. “I think once everyone realizes how non-binary human biology is, it'll be easier for people to accept others on the sex or gender spectrum.'"

-Alaina Leary for Her Campus

Writing against the false narratives of anorexia:

"I have nothing pretty to say about my body when I get too thin. My skin dulls and develops scaly patches; my oversized noggin bobs on my pencil-neck like an idiot balloon. Eating disorder memoirists love to fetishize hipbones, but I am here to tell you that mine made zero aesthetic contributions to my stomach area."

-Katy Waldman for Slate

On modern love for the modern, single woman:

"Why was I putting myself through this again? It was exhausting. Maybe love was overrated. Maybe love was just what people claimed to feel for anyone who’d put up with them. I leaned against the wall and closed my eyes. I could hear the chatter of women, turning on faucets, flushing toilets. I’ll just wait here, I thought, until the mingling is over."

-Susan M. Gelles for NY Times

This guy didn't drink for two years. This is what happened:

"I’ve had friends who’ve stopped hanging out with me because I don’t drink anymore. I’ve had relationships end (or not even start) because of it. I have been sent screenshots of people I know talking smack about me to other people because I choose to not do a thing."

-Andy Boyle for Medium

Black women don't get to be depressed:

"Depression was something that happened to white people on television, not a thing that could take down a Strong Black Woman. It seemed like just another way I was desperately trying to be white."

-Samantha Irby for Cosmo

Bill Cosby was finally charged with sexual assault.

"Mr. Cosby’s apologies to Ms. Constand and her mother and offer of financial assistance was 'further indicative of Cosby’s consciousness of guilt,' according to the complaint."

-NY Times

An interview with Michael Seidlinger on his book "The Strangest," which was inspired by Camus:

"I was particularly interested (and worried) in the narrative arc—a death, a murder, a trial—and whether or not I could accurately replicate it without it being too derivative for readers. I also worried about how much of the book should remain faithful to the classic and how much should be original."

-Heather Partington for The Rumpus

Looking Forward: Luna Luna's Risky Relaunch & Our Plans For 2016

BY LISA MARIE BASILE, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF & CREATIVE DIRECTOR

On October 31, my staff and I relaunched Luna Luna Magazine. Actually, let me clarify: I forced a relaunch. Fed up with WordPress and its forever-glitchy plugins and crashing themes (we're a volunteer staff who operates late-night from our bedrooms, and we don't have a tech support team), I made the switch to Squarespace. I even bought a brand new URL (to hell with SEO! Just kidding, that's a huge pain point).

This overhaul wasn't conventional, at least not for a content-focused publication. But I wanted something beautiful, something that could create the magic reading experience we envisioned, and I wanted something that reflected our aesthetic. I also wanted that something to be easy for our team, since we're mainly updating on the go. Ah, such is the glamorous life of a niche internet magazine. There were plenty of others variables, and I won't pretend I knew everything, but I believe in big fucking risks that positively impact long-term sustainability.

I made a frightening decision to change our editorial focus and voice too. This is to say that I had push-back as well as major support. A lot of tense G-chat debates and in-person conversations. A lot of excellent points made all around. A lot of weighing clicks versus craft. A lot of wondering if Luna Luna Magazine was repetitive, redundant, messy, wonderful, necessary, unique or impactful.

Joanna (our managing editor and the one I've worked most closely with for the better part of a year+) wanted to ensure the magazine's success in practical ways: consistently publishing content, making sure our pageviews were growing. I too wanted that, but I struggled with the things that tended to make things clickable. I refused to let Luna Luna Magazine become yet another Click This Headline magazine. All things said, Joanna's eye for strong and shareable content has meshed beautifully with my stringent (aka relentlessly pushy) creative direction. (My boyfriend called me the 'witchy Anna Wintour', oh god.)

Intermission: No, for real, props to the Luna Luna Magazine team for being absolutely badass. 

Part of the risk of relaunching this October was in cutting a portion of the kind of content we published. We had started as an edgy, darker arts & culture magazine in the summer of 2013, but we slowly became a daily feminist touch-point. The majority of our content focused on women's rights and feminist first-person essays. I loved this, and meeting so many incredible women and writers did things for my life that for which I am endlessly indebted. Our pageviews skyrocketed.

However, I fell and felt deeply out of touch with our content. I wanted to keep writing about women, but reduce any one niche focus in order to do more of everything: art, culture, the original occult vertical, confession, intersectional content and even bad feminism. We don't want to be perfect; we're explorers. 

We were also publishing so much that I couldn't edit (9-5 jobs, am I right?). I couldn't work with my writers closely and I couldn't go through with a fine-tooth comb to find the voices and perspectives we hadn't published already. I felt that there needed to be a way for me to connect with my writers as much as our readers. After all, Luna Luna, as I envisioned it, was always a community for dialogue and opinion from the inside out. It was about creating a space for readers and writers to be friends, supporters and dreamers together. 

Maybe I'm an idealist. Maybe I'm lacking a sense of entrepreneurialism. But no. I've worked in rigid corporate content institutions, and I've worked at startups where growth at lightspeed (sacrificing quality) was the dominating factor. I've written for clickbait paychecks and I've written beautiful essays that will probably never be seen again. And time and again, I come back to that which makes me proud, makes me uncomfortable, makes me feel I've collected a menagerie of perfect words. 

Balancing that obsession with beauty and slow growth with the way the internet works is a struggle, I won't lie. After all, we want to be able to sell ad space on our new site. In my day job, I'm all SEO and headlines, but at Luna Luna, I can and will take the time to finesse it. 

Since we relaunched, our bounce rate reduced by over 50% - a beautiful thing. Our older site (lunalunamag.com) had more pageviews of course (three years' worth), but people were leaving. Was it the site design? The content? We don't know. Now people are sticking around. Our return visitor rate shows we're building a beautiful community. And our top-viewed articles show that our readers are still coming for the art and staying for the intimacy. This is an area we'll continuously work on.

We have a long way to go. We have to pay our contributors. We have to build a more diverse editorial staff. We have to develop our regional focus (starting with NYC), and we have to do community work. We want to work with organizations, host readings, host speaking series, and throw networking parties. We want to grow sponsorship relationships and make a difference for people on and off the site. This takes time, money, discipline and vision, and we definitely have two of those things. You guess which. 

Our goal is to fundraise for our writers this year, to say thank you, to sell ad spots, to steadily publish beautiful content that is unique and sometimes imperfect, to balance the light and the dark. We aim to balance the markers of actual real world site growth with a continued focus on selectivity and calculated aesthetic development. Those secrets we will keep, but we hope you'll come along. 

And so, I leave you with some of our most popular content pieces as we ended 2015:

13 Aesthetically Beautiful Literary Journals To Submit To & Read

This Is Why My Love Life Has Always Failed

Seeking Arrangement: On My Brief & Failed Attempt at Becoming a Sugar Baby

Stop Saying "I Have A Boyfriend"

James Deen & The Crisis of Media-Appointed Feminist Heroes

40 Books Published in 2015 That Should Be on Your Shelf

A Catalogue of Scars

A Conversation With Poet Megan Falley About Lana Del Rey

Why I Stopped Shaving All of My Body Hair

What You Should Be Reading: Dead Girls, Privilege, Marquez & Speaking Up About Racism

BY LISA MARIE BASILE

I'm Having A Friendship Affair - The Cut
"Our emotional orbits intersected in a thousand places every day but never exactly aligned. There was a space between us as we moved through life. Sometimes I think it is this space that allows us to stay married. Sometimes I think it is this space that makes me stay hungry for something else."

Sixteen Years In Academia Made Me An Asshole - Salon
"For hour after hour, I sat in front of strangers who made me feel either special, as though the job was mine, or alternatively, like an idiot. They asked me long and intricate questions meant to show off their own brilliance. Lots of peacocks in academia, lots. I applied year after year and never got a single offer."

A Room Of My Own: On Writing, Privilege, And The Assholery Of Artistry - The Establishment
"It is true that art is, to a certain extent, a privilege. I harness my life-long desire to write with the tools and materials gifted to me by paying for the two degrees that hang on my wall, receiving fellowships, private endowments, grants, work study, etc. (Though really, my student loan debt is such that basically the government owns those degrees)."

Our Incorruptible Dead Girls - The Awl
"The little girls pulled from the Seine were never identified, but that was never the point of publicly displaying them: They were a site for introspection, a jumbled mesh of mourning and vain superiority. They were a reminder of the dangers of city life; only in a city could two children be thrown into a river undetected and anonymous."

The Secret History of One Hundred Years of Solitude - Vanity Fair
"García Márquez struggled. He turned to screenwriting. He edited a glossy women’s magazine, La Familia, and another specializing in scandal and crime. He wrote copy for J. Walter Thompson. In the Zona Rosa—Mexico City’s Left Bank—he was known as surly and morose. And then his life changed. A literary agent in Barcelona had taken an interest in his work, and after a week of meetings in New York in 1965 she headed south to meet him."

Still Life With Body Dysmorphia - Femsplain
"I’d spend entire nights awake taking pictures of myself with a digital camera and then pick at every flaw: my nose, too pointy; my forehead, too high; my hair, too dry and frizzy; my face, lacking cheekbones, too pudgy at the jawline. But always, always, I’d come back to my hips and thighs. I hated nothing more than the flesh that curved over my hip bones and padded my thighs. There were days I’d skip class and lie under the covers, too afraid to look down at my body."

If You Hear Something Say Something, Or If You’re Not At The Table You’re On The Menu - Entropy
"Let me be clear: I believe it is my political and ethical responsibility to counter white supremacy explicitly and purposefully, in my creative work and in my teaching and in my cross-language practice and in my everyday conversations and movements through the world—and I don’t actually make much distinction among those realms, in practice or in poetics."

Repetitive Beats Prohibited - Cluster Mag
"But after years of political snafu, the law remained on the books, and while you’re less likely to hear talk of the Cabaret Law around town, the damage has been done. In the same Daily Note article, Andy Beta speculates that it wasn’t until the turn of the end of the 00s “that club culture slowly began to dig its way out from the rubble.” And with the recent spate of DIY venue closings that coincides with the proliferation of megaclubs like the 750-capacity Williamsburg techno temple Verboten, it appears that the city will continue to funnel dance music into large, consolidated spaces—where they can keep an eye on partygoers."