Tag Archives: publishing

Harry Potter Fans not all that into Magic, Witchcraft

Glancing back at Oberon Zell’s sporadic blog, I see mention of the “Azkatraz” Harry Potter convention in San Francisco last July. (Scroll down to the “Escape from Azkatraz” subhead in Aug. 1, 2009 entry.)

The Zells took a vendor space for their Mythic Images business of New Age, Pagan, and Goddess-oriented images, etc.

But it was not a very successful show, as Oberon notes:

And that gets me to the second important lesson we learned: Harry Potter fans aren’t interested in Wizardry, Witchcraft, Magick, an online school, or anything that isn’t specifically and only about the Harry Potter stories and characters. The only successful vendor was the one selling licensed trademark Harry Potter merchandise—such as Hogwarts House patches and regalia, movie replica wands, Harry Potter games and toys—and pointy hats. I bought a really nice new one,as well as several books from the book vendors. And we sold two copies of the A Wizard’s Bestiary: A Menagerie of Myth, Magic, and Mystery by managing to convince some folks that the magickal beasts featured in the Harry Potter stories could be found in this book. This is true, and I do hope they’ll go on to read about other beasties as well.

I don’t doubt his observations. It’s not that the Harry Potter books “drive children to witchcraft,” it is more that some Pagan Witches hope that Potter-readers will wonder what real witchcraft is. Most, however, probably will not, having enjoyed the stories just as stories.

Just Another Saturday

Wake up, feed the dogs, make coffee. Take Fisher, the newly adopted (last May) Chessie, for a walk. (Shelby, the ninja-collie, goes to visit her Rottweiler friend Bruno on her own.)

Start working on laying out an article for Pomegranate 11.1 in Adobe InDesign.

M. gets up. We eat breakfast. I cut the grass at the rental cabin, which takes about 45 minutes. Drink water and cool down on the porch. (M. takes a a walk into the national forest, sans dogs.) Back to Pomegranate.

The article is about Paganism in Eastern Europe. At one point the writer uses letters that occur only in Polish, like the L-with-a-slash (sounds like “w”). They are not found in Book Antiqua, the journal’s normal font, so can I sneak in a couple of letters from Times, which has everything?

The telephone rings. It’s a fire department call. (I joined the local volunteers last January.) But it’s not the usual telephone-tree person. Something about an accident up the canyon, but the caller is not clear about how we are responding.

I call the sheriff’s office to check. Yes, they know about the accident. Someone is responding. The problem is, because of the location, it could be one of three departments.

“Thanks,” I say. Do I go? What to do? The phone rings again.

It’s T., our asst. chief. He has been asked to back up on a vehicle extrication–“jaws of life” and all that. He’ll meet me at the little country store down on the state highway.

I’m running around, pulling on my turnout pants and boots, grabbing the coat, helmet, and supply pack, throwing them into the Jeep, yelling at Fisher that no, he can’t come.

I drive the mile to the store, re-lace my boots. T. rolls up in the brush/rescue truck. (It’s all we have, plus a tender.) He turns on the overhead lights, and we’re rolling up the canyon, diesel engine laboring.

At the accident scene, the ambulance crew ready to load the victim. There was no extrication–he was riding a motorcycle! He went off a twisty curve and has a broken femur. Irony: he is a medical doctor, an anesthesiologist.

Everyone–rescue-truck crew from the other department, the Forest Service law-enforcement ranger who had been nearby, the sheriff and a couple of deputies–shoots the breeze for a few minutes and then disperses.

T. drops me back at the store. I can’t wait to get home and get out of the heavy gear.

Half an hour after the first call, I decide that sneaking in the Times italic will work well enough. There is a smidgen of Hungarian in the article too, but Book Antiqua can handle it.

A Boy and his Dog

Jason Pitzl-Waters blogs on the PanGaia-newWitch merger, a sign of the times.

I knew the announcement was coming but decided to respect the publisher’s embargo, something that I prided myself on not doing back when I was a reporter in a two-newspaper city (which now feels like saying “back when I rode for the Pony Express.”)

For those of you who read the newest–and last–PanGaia and the article “The Brightest Lights in Our Sky: Today’s Most Influential Pagans,” let me say that I am humbled to be included.

And the “friend” in the photo is Jack. Chesador’s Hardscrabble Jack, to use his full name, which no one ever does. He will, however, answer to “Jack–yes, you, damn it–do you see any other Chessie named Jack?”

Today was his thirteenth birthday, and M. and I toasted him with champagne at dinner.

In about two weeks, I will be at the Florida Pagan Gathering, where I am scheduled to give a couple of talks, which prospect is fairly terrifying. Must write, must write.

Call for Contributions: Women in Magic

This call for contributions to an edited collection comes from editor Brandy Williams’ blog.

Megalithica Books, an imprint of Immanion Press (Stafford, U.K./Portland, OR, U.S.A) is seeking submissions for an anthology on women working in the magical communities, particularly in communities where women have not been extensively published or in which women face stereotyping and misunderstanding within and without the community. These communities include (but are not limited to) groups and individuals working in the Golden Dawn, Thelemic, Aurum Solis, Alchemy, Chaos, and Experimental Fields.

Women have been involved in traditional and ritual magic since the late Victorian era. However women are often viewed as tangential to these communities or as soror mysticae, assistants to the magician. Today women are actively involved in ceremonial magical groups and lodges, alchemy, chaos magic, and Experimental Magic, overcoming stereotypes and creating new visions of magic within the communities.

Go here for the whole thing.

Thorn and Pagan Magazine Publishing

I like magazines. I have worked for three, owned one (still going), and sold freelance articles to a bunch of others. I taught university classes in magazine-writing and production.

So when Vol. 1, No. 1 of Thorn, subtitled Paganism in the Silicon Age, hit my mailbox, I was eager to read it.

Having made various cynical comments in the past about “Wicca as fashion statement,” I was a little amused to see two fashion layouts in the magazine. One, “Creation Myth: Intelligent Designs from the Descendants of the Sun Gods,” showcased Peruvian textiles. The models looked like models, and I am not sure where the photos came from. (Ex-editor that I am, I always look closely at credits, trying to determine what was in-house content and what was not.)

More fashion. The magazine’s centerspread, “Phos: Primal Wear in the Forest,” shows two designer/models looking sullen and “alternative” in their own designs. No word on where to buy them–or if you can–whereas the Peruvian clothes were at Saks.

Don’t get me wrong. I like Thorn. It’s a generational thing—in the publishing sense.

Having worked much of last summer on Green Egg Omelette: An Anthology of Art and Articles from the Legendary Pagan Journal, I had plenty of time to reflect on its content. Green Egg was — and is — about visions of Pagan spirituality and culture, much of it speculative.

Thorn, however, takes Pagan culture for granted. As far as I can tell, that is a Good Thing. Not that such culture is a finished product, no way. And it is still minuscule in the overall picture. But it exists.

The magazine has good writers, a wide range of articles, and most of all, the opportunity to help define what Pagan culture is. Blogs like this one are fast but fragmented. Books can take a long-range thoughtful look at what has happened and what might happen. Magazines, meanwhile, have enough lead time to get thoughtful articles but come out frequently enough to be more or less current.

From a media point of view, I think there should be a place for Thorn—and for its competitors, such as PanGaia, newWitch, and, yes, Green Egg.

I like the fact that you can subscribe with PayPal, but being conservative about these things, I would include a blow-in or bind-in card for people who want to use other payment methods.

Since Thorn is published quarterly, it is alternating print issues with online issues–the February 2009 issue is now available, with a report from PantheaConm, an interview with paranormal-romance author Sherrilyn Kenyon, and a thoughtful piece on the threat from racial-supremacists to the Pagan movement.

I have mixed feelings about this approach. Magazine-guru Samir Husni, a journalism professor who studies the industry, pans the whole e-zine concept: “So it is beyond me to understand why people, very creative people, spend so much time to create what they call “e-zines” that do nothing but imitate ink on paper.”

He wants the Web to do what it does well—short prose, sound, video—and print to do what it does well.

Green Egg has switched to sending subscribers a PDF file of the print magazine—you print it yourself. Switch email addresses, though, and you’re in trouble.

I want there to be a place for print magazines with good artwork and articles that you can curl up with, so I subscribed to Thorn and wish it well.

A publisher friend of mine says that Sunset magazine helped define “Southern California” for a generation. We need the Pagan magazines to do the same for Pagan culture generally.

Review: Good Witches Fly Smoothly

There are a lot of books about religious Wicca out there. There are a lot of books about practical magic, spells, etc. There are very few books about what happens next, but Good Witches Fly Smoothly: Surviving Witchcraft is one of them.

Mistake 27: Using a mind key that can be misinterpreted. (Otherwise known as the Law of Unintended Consequences or “be careful what you ask for.” Here’s my version.)

Whether it is called witchcraft or sorcery, the material taught by Gavin and Yvonne Frost through their School of Wicca has always been highly practical. Gavin did start out as an engineer, after all.

Mistake 35: Helping nonentities with no credentials to inflate their egos.

Good Witches Fly Smoothly distills several decades’ worth of magical tales from their own experience and those of their students.

“In each case,” they write, “the outcome was unexpected. In each case, authors’ analysis reveals what went wrong and why.”

Mistake 78: The mistake Flo made was believing everything Chester, as a [spirit] guide, told her without keeping her mind in gear.

If you have ever suffered through some vague airy ritual for “healing the planet” or “world peace,” you will appreciate this book. It is practical to its fingertips.

Mistake 88: The intent of the ritual became polluted because they felt they had to have the orgasm to achieve the goal. No orgasm, no car was the assumption.

I have sprinkled four of the authors’ summaries through this brief review. There are 99 of them in the book. Get it and read them all.

The Pentagram in 1964

I have more reviews coming, but for now, here is a PDF download of the first issue of The Pentagram, August 1964, price two shillings.

As far as I know, it was the first attempt to create a publication for the various branches of British Witchcraft, then only about fifteen years old, and it lasted but a short time.

Consider the paucity of the reading list on page 3.

A New 3-Volume Work in Pagan Studies

Barbara Jane Davy, author of Introduction to Pagan Studies (The Pagan Studies Series) has a new edited collection out of source documents for Pagan studies.

Paganism (Critical Concepts in Religious Studies) lists on Amazon at an “institutional” price, like the other edited collection that I recently mentioned.

From the publisher’s site:

This new three-volume collection from Routledge’s Critical Concepts in Religious Studies series brings together the best foundational and cutting-edge scholarship in one ‘mini library’.

Volume I addresses the emergence of Paganism as a religion. It collects scholarly analyses of the historical evolution of Paganism, and is organized under topics including debates of historical accuracy, influences on the development of Paganism, and the process of routinization in the religion. The second volume addresses the importance of environmentalism in contemporary Paganism, including work on how Pagans think about the natural world, environmental ethics, and related political activism. The final volume addresses the importance of gender issues and feminism in contemporary Paganism, and collects the best research on topics including immanence, embodiment, self-image, and sexuality.

Paganism is fully indexed and has a comprehensive introduction, newly written by the editor, which places the collected material in its historical and intellectual context. It is an essential work of reference and is destined to be valued by scholars and students as a vital one-stop research and pedagogic resource.

Gallimaufry and an Omelette

¶ Twitter, It’s the CB radio of the 2000’s. That’s funny if you remember the CB radio craze of the 1970s.

Green Egg Omelette: An Anthology of Art and Articles from the Legendary Pagan Journal is shipping now — my contributor copy just arrived. Oberon Zell’s layout suggests the original pages, blending different decades into a coherent whole — with lots of Arnold Bocklin type, on the principle that everything old is new again. (Is it coincidence that Böcklin himself loved Pagan themes in his art?)

Anyway, go buy one and dive in.

¶ I share James French’s skepticism about Pagan-Christian dialog but some people obviously think it is worthwhile.

¶ Caroline Tully reprints some cogent thoughts on the role of the priestess–from 108 years ago. “What do we find in the modern development of religion to replace the feminine idea, and consequently the Priestess?”

Book Posts in the Works

I am spread a little thin these days, and the below-zero (F.) weather the last few days threw some complications my way too.

Two book reviews are in the works. Here are the previews:

• Stewart Farrar: Writer On A Broomstick, The Biography of Stewart Farrar by Elizabeth Guerra. Workmanlike biography of one of the key Wiccan figures of the late 20th century.

• Living With Honour: A Pagan Ethics by Emma Restall Orr, noted British Druid. I am part-way through it and thus far under-whelmed, but I will complete it and write a proper review.

• Meanwhile, if you are a university library (or rich), consider the Handbook of Contemporary Paganism, edited by Jim Lewis and Murph Pizza. Yes, that’s the price. If you thought that American reference books were expensive, consider the Dutch!