otherWisdom Circle

Exploring Initiatory Territories through Conversation, writing, and Collage with Tom Hirons & Niels Devisscher

In the middle world we now inhabit, surrounded by the monstrous in politics, ecology, and the psyche, how do we face these forces within and around us, without turning away?
And perhaps most importantly: can we still find something sacred within these monsters?

In this hands-on workshop by poet and storyteller Tom Hirons, and communications designer and collage artist Niels Devisscher, you will be guided into Supernatural and Monstrous territories using two different but complementary media.

Phantoms, spirits, apparitions, poltergeists, wisps of white vapor, floating sheets with eye holes cut out. Spooky as they may be in popular fiction, there’s certainly more to ghosts than blockbuster films. Whether interpreted metaphorically, felt bodily, or dismissed as mythical while hurrying past a creepy graveyard, ghosts are well understood as ancestors, legacies, and former or lingering presences on the land. They can be meaningful ways of relating to and understanding the past. Who are our ancestors’ ghosts? Who are the ghosts who inhabit the land on which we live?

The vilification of witches and witchcraft was a crucial, and very intentional, part of the process of capitalist enclosure. It is one of many examples of genocide against women, pronatalism, demonization of traditional knowledges, disruption of non-male solidarities, and the beginnings of the invisibilization of women's labor. Despite these attacks, people persecuted by patriarchy and sacrificed to capital practiced resistance and solidarity that still persist strongly today. So too do the spaces for holding unconventional and traditional wisdoms of those villified as witches. In this discussion, we will explore what it means to be a witch, why they have been made so feared, and how we might reconnect with witchcraft. Acclaimed feminist historian and author Max Dashu will join us to lead this discussion.