One of the highlights of my week is the Folklore Thursday hashtag on Twitter. I’ve not had time to look at it for a few weeks though, so it seems I missed the occasion when some völkisch fascists tried to hijack it, much to the horror of the regular participants.
One of them accordingly started a second hashtag, Folklore Against Fascism, and several participants tweeted about their opposition to fascism and commitment to inclusive folklore.
Lots of witchy books this month: I re-read City of Refuge by Starhawk; read Making Witches by Barbara Rieti, and I’m halfway through The Witch’s Athame by Jason Mankey.
Three adventures of very different sorts this month: Yiddish for Pirates, Walking to Mercury, and The Fifth Sacred Thing.
There are currently three amazing exhibitions on at the Art Gallery of Guelph (until 16 December): epistemologies of the moon, 1745, and Critical Mass. It is hard to say which of these exhibitions I was the most excited about, as they all address things I care about.
A video in which I read an excerpt from my book, The Night Journey: Witchcraft as Transformation. I was particularly pleased with this chapter, as I think it’s very poetic and has some powerful imagery in it.
What do Anansi, Raven, Coyote, Pérák, Aradia, the Golem of Prague, Robin Hood, Wild Edric, and Ned Ludd have in common? They are all folk heroes of resistance to tyranny, oppression, slavery, and fascism.
Snowflakes – a bedtime rhyme
(for Yvonne, especially)
by Linda Haggerstone, 2017
Many people are expressing shock and dismay that a fascist government has taken over the USA, and at the rising tide of xenophobia in Broken Brexit Britain. However, if you are at all familiar with the rise of the Third Reich and the operation of oppressive systems such as the British Empire, the signs have been writ large for some time. If you need a crash course in recognising the oppressive atmosphere for what it is, then here’s a crash course. Why have I chosen mostly novels? Because novels try to describe how it feel to be in the situation, and to provoke empathy. And empathy for the persecuted is what we need more of right now.
There’s been a lot of talk about snowflakes recently. When the term was first coined, a “special snowflake” meant someone who claimed that everything was triggering them, even though they did not have post-traumatic stress disorder, were not a rape survivor, nor a survivor of some other significant trauma.
February is LGBT History Month in the UK, and there are events exploring queer history up and down the country. Oxford Brookes University has an excellent programme of events, and the other day I went to the first event of LGBTHM 2017, the launch of an exhibition of Claude Cahun’s photographs, which included a film about Claude Cahun by Lizzie Thynne.
