Tag: writing

Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Daughter Speaks Out

On By Chas S. Clifton5 Comments

The MZB/Walter Breen scandal was bigger in the science fiction/speculative fantasy world than in the Pagan world, but MZB has influenced Pagans through her Mists of Avalon books and her Pagan associates, as detailed by Sonja Sadvoksky in The Priestess and the Pen.

If you ask someone under 35 about Mists, they do not think it is relevant, or maybe they have heard of it but most likely have never read it. If you ask someone over 35 the same question, especially if they are female, they often come back with with an answer that Mists was a fundamental book in their development as a Pagan and Witch. I kind of straddle this divide, as I am turning 34 this month, and I have a thing for weird books.

The Bradley/Breen scandal was about sexual abuse, and their daughter Moira Greyland experienced it too.(I don’t know the blog where she guest-posts, but the post itself came well-recommended.)

My observation of my father and mother’s actual belief is this: since everyone is naturally gay, it is the straight establishment that makes everyone hung up and therefore limited.  Sex early will make people willing to have sex with everyone, which will bring about the utopia while eliminating homophobia and helping people become “who they really are.” It will also destroy the hated nuclear family with its paternalism, sexism, ageism (yes, for pedophiles, that is a thing) and all other “isms.”  If enough children are sexualized young enough, gayness will suddenly be “normal” and accepted by everyone, and the old fashioned notions about fidelity will vanish.  As sex is integrated as a natural part of every single relationship, the barriers between people will vanish, and the utopia will appear, as “straight culture” goes the way of the dinosaur.  As my mother used to say: “Children are brainwashed into believing they don’t want sex.”

Read the rest if you can handle it. Moira is not exactly waving the rainbow flag.

I would rather not get into the whole “Can you separate the artist from the work?” because, most of the time, I think that you can. That’s the reader’s response. On the other hand, it is also fair for the critic to examine how the writer’s attitude toward X affects how she or he writes about X.

What Does the New AP Stylebook Say?

On By Chas S. Clifton

Last December I reported on an effort spearheaded by Oberon Zell to get Pagan (in the religious sense) capitalized in both the Associated Press Stylebook and the University of Chicago Press’s Manual of Style.

The first is used mainly by journalists (when they remember), the second by writers and editors for university presses and other publishers of serious nonfiction books. Both are periodically updated.

A new AP Stylebook is out and receiving comment. Apparently 200 new religious terms were added. Has anyone seen a copy yet? Even Terry Mattingly at Get Religion says he has not yet seen one, but Emma Green at The Atlantic has and makes some comments, such as this:

“Holy Spirit” and “Holy Ghost” are both capitalized, but the former is the preferred usage, spirits being the more acceptable metaphysical entity. “Satan” is capitalized, but not “the devil.” Also noteworthy: “Voodoo,” the religion, is capitalized, but “voodoo,” roughly meaning “shenanigans,” is not, “especially when ascribing magical solutions to problems, as in voodoo economics.”

Anyone can buy either one of these books, of course, and more writers should. My copy of the AP Stylebook dates from 2004. Time for an update? But I am more of a Chicago guy these days.

The Zells’ Biographer on “Living Your Myth”

On By Chas S. Clifton

John Sulak, who co-wrote Modern Pagans for RE/Search and worked for a decade on The Wizard and the Witch, the new biography of Oberon and Morning Glory Zell, gives interviewer Anne Hill his own take on the Zells, the writing process, the Church of All Worlds, and others in their circle. (Was Gwydion Pendderwen really the Kurt Cobain of Paganism?)

Sulak compares himself to Studs Terkel, but if he had “cut up” his interviews — and spoke in more of a monotone — he might remind me a little of someone else.

A New History of the Craft in America

On By Chas S. Clifton4 Comments

When I wrote Her Hidden Children, I definitely was not trying to tell the history of different groups, except in broad strokes and as that history helped the discussion of the larger questions that interested me, chiefly, “What do we mean by the term ‘nature religion’?”

Thanks to his earlier experiences with reference books on new religious movements, Aidan Kelly, one of the founders of the New Reformed Orthodox Order of the Golden Dawn (a spoofy name that stuck) in the 1960s Northern California, is better able to do it.

He has released the first book of what he hopes to be three, A Tapestry of Witches, Vol. 1, which is available on Amazon.

He writes on his blog,

I was an active participant in many of the events and developments I describe, but I have tried to tone down the autobiographical details by unobstrusive (I hope) use of passive constructions and third person. Still, one reason the book is accurate is that I have first-hand knowledge of the decade from 1967 to 1977. However, I also as much as possible worked in information from letter, emails, and interviews that my friends shared with me. I have not ignored the Big Name Pagans–I couldn’t; many of them did much of the work, many were and are good friends–but I have also tried to give due credit to the many who worked hard without ever receiving public acclaim.

Having drawn on his earlier history of NROOGD’s beginnings, Hippie Commie Beatnik Witches, I look forward to reading the new book very much.

Journalistic Cliches and Their Academic Cousins

On By Chas S. Clifton3 Comments

My least-favorite journalistic cliche is “time will tell.”

Despite the president’s charm offensive, some pundits say that the world will end next Tuesday. Time will tell.

Read the whole list of 150 here.

As a journal editor, I could make my own list, particularly those stupid bits of wordiness that get between the reader and an actual thesis statement, in which the writer actually takes a position on the issue.

Some sample candidates:

I plan to explore the intersection between . . .

In this paper I will argue  . . .

This article compares . . .

Get out of the spotlight, academic writer, and say something about something.

Quick Review: The Wizard and the Witch

On By Chas S. Clifton1 Comment

wizard and witchOne of my earliest entries on this blog, clear back in 2003, was a complaint about the lack of biographical and autobiographical writing in American Wicca — and I would extend that to all types of new Paganism generally.

That entry did mention Margot Adler’s Heretic’s Heart (1997), but I did not care for Whispers of the Moon (1996), a biography of Scott Cunningham, because it seemed too obviously tidied-up and sanitized. (Sam Webster says that it is still valuable despite that — I won’t dispute the point.)

Michael Lloyd’s The Bull of Heaven (2012) broke the drought. His thoroughly researched book placed Eddie Buczynski in a cultural context — the New York Pagan and Gay Liberation scenes of the 1970s — and explored a wealth of connections and possibilities without blinking.

Now John C.. Sulak, who co-wrote Modern Pagans (2001) for RE/Search Press, has brought us  The Wizard and the Witch: An Oral History of Oberon Zell & Morning Glory.

It is not just the history of a significant slice of  American Paganism from the 1960s until now, but also the love story of a couple married for forty years.

Yet Morning Glory, priestess of Aphrodite, invented the term “polyamory” (but not the concept)  and they embraced it. Paradoxes abound.

Sulak tells the story of Otter and MG through multiple voices, more like a radio documentary — there is even a voice labeled “Narrator.” I thought that was a little weird at first, but I got used to it.

Sometimes the Zells may seem like Pagan rock stars, but then you see them in screaming fights, or admitting that they made mistakes in who they trusted or dealt with their families of birth or how they raised their kids  (Those children, now grown, are also heard from.) Highs and lows, gains and losses, feasts and famines — it’s all here.

Reading it, you can see how the Church of All Worlds, founded by Tim Zell and his close friend Lance Christie, started out as what we now would call “spiritual but not religious,” and changed as it encountered other overly Pagan groups (such as Feraferia) as well as various Witchcraft groups.

There is much about the publishing chronicle of Green Egg magazine and the founding of the Grey School of Wizardry as well, not to mention the growth of the Pagan festival circuit.

When people wonder, “What was the American Pagan scene like in the 1970s, 1980s, 0r 1990s?” they will do well to read The Wizard and the Witch for one answer. It is a sign of Llewellyn’s editorial maturation that they published it, and I applaud that.

Orthography and the Modern Pagan

On By Chas S. Clifton1 Comment

One thing I did at the recent American Academy of Religion annual meeting was stop by the University of Chicago Press booth and get the name of the managing editor of the press’s Manual of Style, which is the holy book, all 1,028 pages of it, for editors of academic books and journals—plus many publishers of serious nonfiction.

A petition has been sent to her by Oberon Zell of the Church of All Worlds, etc., as well as to the editors of the Associated Press Stylebook, the holy book of American journalists, about the capitalization of the word “Pagan.” Oberon has lined up forty-some writers and academics in support of the petition, which reads in part,

The current journalistic convention of printing lower case for these terms seems to have originated with the Associated Press Stylebook, first published in 1953.  However, a new era of religious pluralism has emerged over the past sixty years. The terms “Pagan” and “Paganism” are now being capitalized in a variety of publications, texts, documents, and references, including religious diversity education resources such as On Common Ground: World Religions in America, The Pluralism Project, Harvard University, and Inmate Religious Beliefs and Practices, Technical Reference Manual, Federal Bureau of Prisons, U.S. Department of Justice.

You can read the full text here.

So far, the University of Chicago Press has acknowledged receiving it and plans to forward it to its Reference Committee.

This is a worthwhile cause, I think, and it is a battle that I have fought since the early 1990s (at least) when I was writing The Encyclopedia of Heresies and Heretics for the reference book publishers ABC-Clio. (A friend working there at the time commissioned it.) I won the battle on Pagan — even for ancient polytheists — but lost on BCE/CE versus BC/AD.

As editor of The Pomegranate, I have continued to insist on capital P’s except in direct quotations. This has put me in gentle conflict sometimes with British and other European contributors who favor “pagan” or at most use “Pagan” for self-conscious contemporary new religions and “pagan” for pre-Christian practices. I think that bouncing back and forth is confusing for the reader’s eye.

So the movement to change the stylebooks is underway, although I expect the process to be a slow one.

 

Vampires and the Big Blue Marble

On By Chas S. Clifton

I shared a cabin with Margot Adler and some other presenters at the Florida Pagan Gathering four years ago. At that point she had read about seventy vampire novels and was still going strong, looking for the answer to the question, “Why do literary vampires fascinate us?”

Now she thinks she knows:

Every age embraces the vampires it needs, writes feminist author Nina Auerbach in her book, Our Vampires, Ourselves. Every age uses vampires to express their fears and concerns, writes Eric Nuzum, in his book, The Dead Travel Fast.

In 1897 when Bram Stoker wrote Dracula, England had the largest ports in the world. There was fear of incoming disease, of foreigners, of immigration. And Stoker created the perfect monster, Eastern European, bringing dirt from a foreign land. You can do this for every period that has had a wave of interest in vampires. In the 80’s, with Aids, vampires were often described in novels as parasites. You became infected by vampirism, like a disease.

Here is the whole text and video of  her recent presentation.  Read it, and the title of this post will make sense.