Thorn the Witch

Sometimes I get frustrated for myself as a practitioner. I get frustrated for all of us. There have been periods in my life where I’ve wondered if I wasn’t just hitting a wall, and maybe just bored with Craft as a whole. Like, after decades, surely it’s no great crime to find oneself bored. I wrote a wholeass book about what to do when those sorts of feelings hit (along with burnout,…

It’s weird wading through all of the conversations surrounding the TikTok ban, the enshittification of Instagram, where folks are migrating to next, and if social media is still even a viable thing as an author who needs to promote books. I was never making money on TikTok, and was never diligent enough in crafting promotional content that I noticed much of an impact on my book sales, so the ban…

Witches Among Us: Understanding Contemporary Witchcraft and Wicca is out in less than a month, but I thought you might enjoy a small preview. This is from a chapter called “Witchcraft in Context,” and it’s my favorite in the book because I basically get to nerd out about stuff that’s almost always completely left out of witch books, but which *I* have always thought is really important. Here,…

I’m gradually moving into marketing mode in preparation for Witches Among Us to be released this October, and as I was updating my website I found myself reconsidering my 2022 appearance on Anthony Padilla’s YouTube show, “I Spent a Day With…” I was just going to drop the link on the appearances and interviews tab, but just for the hell of it I scrolled through some of the most recent comments.…

Summer always feels to me like an incubation period. The thing about living with a school schedule for the majority of your life is that your whole yearly wheel gets screwed up, and stops looking like that of most of the folks around you. The New Year is in mid-August. There are only three seasons: Fall semester, Spring semester, summer. Winter is only the sighed breath after exams, gone by…

Earlier this week, Ella Harrison, Polish Folk Witch, and the Redheaded Witch asked participants in online witchcraft communities to use #occultea and share their thoughts on a series of prompts about participating in these spaces. I’ve spent the last couple of days watching folks on YouTube, Instagram, and elsewhere begin responding, and it’s been really gratifying for me. I both love and hate…

Holy shit, friends, this has been a year. I feel like I haven’t kept up with anything, and it’s all just gotten away from me. When that happens, I have to resort to lists: I started my PhD in August, and am going to school full time, working as a TA, and continuing to work my full time WFH publishing job. I’m also still working on writing project, managing a Patreon community, and trying to just…

What Good is Gardnerian Wicca?

When I was in my first year of graduate school, I took a class in atheism. An unusual offering in American religious studies programs, I was interested in the treatment of atheism as a (non)religious category. Most of my friends at the time were atheists (as is common amongst academics who study religion) and I grew up in starkly secular spaces. It seemed worthwhile to visit the subject formally,…

Ritual Nudity for the Insecure

“I would have approached you sooner, but I was a little freaked out about the skyclad thing,” Erin says to me self-consciously. “I’ve got some body issues.” Erin was just invited to circle with Foxfire’s outer court, after hanging out with us in open Pagan spaces for about the last year. I figured she would ask me about my coven eventually—her personality just fits—but some seekers have to spend…

Keeping Magical Records, Despite Yourself

My pile of old witch books, spanning Teen Witch to Gardnerian third. I was taught to keep a journal beginning in the first grade. Every morning, Mrs. West handed out fresh sheets of lined newsprint and we were instructed to write about the day before, how we were feeling, a dream we had, or about something we were looking forward to that week. We were also encouraged to draw pictures to…

Other People’s Witchcraft

Do you ever think about how little we actually know about each other? Like, how telling you I’m a witch doesn’t actually give you much information at all about what I’m actually up to? And how even words like “Wiccan” and “Gardnerian” don’t actually tell you very much, because lots of people use them differently?

I think about that all the time. When someone tells me they’re a witch, I have to…

Next Level Witchcraft (or whatever it’s called)

The second book is complete and in the hands of the good folks at Llewellyn! The tentative release is September 2021, and I hope to see the first round of feedback in a few weeks. I confess to being a little nervous about this one. Will they like it?

People always ask me how I go about researching my books, and it’s kind of an awkward question because, well…I don’t. There’s zero research…

My Five Favorite Recent Witch Books

I’ve made a lot of blog posts and videos in the past about favorite books: advanced books, beginner books, books for people interested in taking things in a new direction, classics I think everyone should read, and books that I’ve got in my personal to-be-read pile. But I was recently asked to share my thoughts on which recent releases were important, or would have an impact for people exploring…

Creativity, Competition, and Community

One of my thesis advisors in graduate school told me, as I was working up my proposal and trying to figure out exactly what I was going to focus on, that building a new argument is a lot harder than tearing down someone else’s. In other words, don’t use this opportunity to only dismantle something. Say something new.

That struck me hard and has stuck with me into other parts of my life. I’ve…

If Everything Changes, What Good is Tradition?

My friend and initiate, Corvus, is in the process of starting a coven, and the other night we got to chatting about what it will mean for her to go forward, both as part of a community and as an autonomous high priestess. What if she does something that pisses off her upline? What if she gets out into the community and decides she doesn’t fit in? What if she has genuine encounters with the gods…