Girl Gang Craft Podcast Episode #83 “Missing Witches with Risa Dickens”

Phoebe Sherman interview with Risa Dickens

INTRO
Phoebe Sherman

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Welcome to the Girl Gang Craft Podcast where we dive in deep to all things business, wellness, creativity, and activism for artists and entrepreneurs. We talk with impactful female driven companies and founders for an inside look at the entrepreneurial experience where you'll come away with tangible steps to elevate your business. Are you ready? I'm your host, Phoebe Sherman, founder of Girl Gang Craft artist and designer, and marketing obsessed. We're here to learn together how to expand our revenue, implement new organizational techniques, and cultivate best business practices as we work towards creating a life doing what we love. Let's get started.


Hello, hello. Hey creatives Phoebe here. Welcome back to the Girl Gang Craft podcast.
Today we have Risa Dickens one half of missing witches, on the podcast today. Missing Witches is created by Amy, Tarak and Resa Dickens, old friends, creative collaborators, curious crafters, big tacklers, howlers at the moon, grumpy Old Crowned, just a couple of perpetual baby witches living in writing and recording out in the woods on unceded Anishinaabe territory in Quebec, Canada. Missing Witches is an art and activism project. A public research project, Missing Witches mission is to tell stories and gather communities so that we might resist that era of isolation, powerlessness, and scarcity that have been cast by imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy and in doing so, help nurture the re enchantment of the world. Risa and I have a really interesting and important conversation about deep work, about making a schedule and systems in your business that works for you, about giving back to the community, about collaborative projects, about working with a partner, things like how magic and activism are interconnected, what re-enchantment is, and just their hopes and dreams for the world, and how witchcraft can be a tool to not only turn inwards, but also turn outwards and establish better things for the community, create better worlds, create re enchantment.

Before we get into the interview, a couple of things that are going on in our world. Just around the corner, Oakland girl gang craft is happening. That is May 18th at Oakland Scottish Rite. That is right by lake Merrit in Oakland. Come check it out. We have about a hundred of them forward vendors at the event. We have food truck. We have Aurora photos. We have tattoos happening. So it's gonna be a really, really rad time. Feminist cocktails as usual and a DJ and just yeah, good, good shop in good time. So come out, bring a friend. And yeah, there's some public transport options around Lake Merritt from Bart. You know, we always suggest that you don't leave anything in your car when parking in Oakland. Or San Francisco or really anywhere in the Bay area, so come check that out. You can find out more information, call them craft.com/events. RSVP for us please. Put it on your calendar May 18th and then right around the corner June 8th is our Providence show out here on the East Coast. And then we've got some Salem events and we've got a first Sac event. So if you want the full schedule, make sure you're part of our mailing list. That's a really good way to stay in touch. And you can also find out all this information on our website. The Mother's Day Gift guide is also live on our site. That's our girl gang craft.com/giftguide4mom You can also just go to our site and click on it at the top. Navigation. If you want to support small businesses and also get something really cool for your mom or your mom, like figures or yourself, go ahead and check that out and do some shopping. We have about 30 businesses featured there and what else.

You can call, you can just call us up now y’all. We have a phone number and I really should memorize it at this time. But it Is let's see (413) 961-0855. And you can ask us anything there. Ask us things. We've gotten some questions about taxes and submit an LLC. You can ask us about craft fair stuff. You can ask us about, you know, sourcing product or outsourcing work or, you know, how we manage our time. I will personally be answering them mostly on the solo podcast episodes and maybe we'll, you know, pull in some experts for certain questions. That's really a great way to get some of these questions answered and to really start the dialog in a collaborative way. Okay that’s it for for now. I hope to see you in person at some of our events, and let's get into it with the Missing Witches.

Hey creatives, welcome to Girl Gang Craft the podcast. Today we have Risa from The Missing Witches on the podcast today. Hello, Risa. Welcome.

Risa
Hi, Phoebe. Hi, Girl Gang craft.

Phoebe
I'm so excited to have you here. And I was just reading your second book on the train this weekend. And so things are top of mind and I'm ready to dive into magic and resistance with you.

Risa
I am honored also, I feel like it's so fun to be on a train with you. I’m like imagining our coven and our book getting to go on a train ride. That's lovely.

Phoebe
I love trains because, like, I don't have to worry about falling out of the sky.

Risa
Yeah. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. I like seeing the country go past. I like imagining like a future of electrified rail. I like all of that.

Phoebe
Yes. And it's really nice for New York City because I'm in Salem, Massachusetts. So Boston to New York is a relatively easy train ride. And yeah, it's fun looking at the ocean on one side. And there had just been snowfall. I mean, it really is kind of magical.

Risa
Totally. That's the kind of magic I am all about. I feel like that's the kind of magic we all understood when we were kids, you know, like you were making your potions and it was like slushy and sand snowy at the ocean, and you felt the power of the wind, and you were like a kid in touch with all your powers.

Phoebe
Yes. Wait. Let's talk about that. How did you come into identifying as a witch?

Risa
Yeah, that's a funny one, because it's hard to pinpoint. You know, I feel like so much of the roles that are available to us or were, I guess, when we were little girls or like the fairy. The princess. Yeah. Or like a fucking hag, you know, and I just, as Amy often says, like, we just never really identified with the princess. It was kind of a role that I tried out a bit, but I think so many of us felt like somehow different somehow, other to that very constrained feminine identity, that there had to be something more, something that understood, you know, sorrow and rage and darkness and also something that understood power and something that understood like that connection you felt when you saw, I don't know, waves or crows or ravens or when you got to fly outside under the stars for the first time. Yeah. So I think there was part of me that always says when I read stories, I always felt like the witch, you know, and then growing older and starting to practice was sort of part of an art practice. I was part of a political practice. It was part of just like fucking around with a group of women, you know, late 20s, early 30s when we were like, really there was a sense of not enough ness, like there was there was a group of us in abusive relationships, or we had lost a friend. We didn't really feel connected to a religion to mourn her in a way that felt appropriate. You know. So there is really like loss and leaving relationships that were sort of seminal in like, for me, I walked out of a ten year relationship when I was 30 and went to Amy's house and could not talk, so just sang loudly until and louder and louder and louder until my voice cracked and I felt my power come back. And really then Amy and I started to practice together and it was fun. It was celebratory, you know, we had met as artists, as musicians. And so that opened this space for us to kind of play with things. I feel like your audience of creatives and crafters understands that. That sense of like, we can make things. We have the power to change our worlds, change our fortunes by making things, exerting our will upon things. And it was really that. And then we had a friend who was working at the Salvation Army in the bookstore, and she told us that the Salvation Army burns any books that come in that are related to witchcraft. And she started smuggling them out and smuggling them to us. She was like, I'm not really witchy, but I feel like these deserve a home and they should go to you. And so that was how we got this—

Phoebe
Does this still happen? Do we know about it?

Risa
I Don't know, but this is not that long ago. Yeah. And so that was how we got these piles of first books, and we started inventing our own rituals and, and crafting together and really, the power of it was being with a circle of women, queer people, often late at night in the community garden and just feeling like we could invent our own rituals. We read books and then, you know, threw them over our shoulders. And were like, the goddess forgives. We're going to use the flowers that are in the garden and a bunch of glitter. And we're going to say out loud what we really, really, truly want. We're going to take off our masks of polite behavior and say what we really want. And it was life changing for all of us.

Phoebe
You're such a storyteller. And even just in everything, you have to say it just like just because.

Risa
You know, you don't even know.

Phoebe
It paints such a beautiful picture. And I mean, there's so much power in words. And I've been thinking a lot about these, like, intersections of, like, witchcraft, magic, like yoga, even like yoga, sort of how I came into witchcraft in my, like, adult life. And then the political and all these things are so interchanged. And there's a couple things you said, one of the things you said was like, take off our masks of politeness, right? As a woman or femme folk or anyone, we have these sort of, you know, these constructs of gender that we're supposed to fit into, right? We're supposed to be small. We're supposed to not take up space as we're supposed to. You know, people might be nice to be, you know, this, like faux mother energy, this giving. Right? And I just think it's so interesting, right how creativity can disrupt this, how magic can disrupt this, these like, modes of resistance and I mean, even this like community making, right? All of these things are ways that we can come back to ourselves and come back to each other in a really potent way. So I love that you just brought that in immediately too this, the take off, the mask and like come back to who you are with community.

Risa
Yes, I have something that is so dear to my heart and I think too, like I look at how that was life changing for, you know, women and queer people in my immediate circle. But I'm seeing it too, in the sort of straight cis men, like just, you know, be able to put down this weight of dominance, put down this damaging constraint of, you know, bearing that provider role constantly, like the limitation of roles that are available to men and saying, like, you're welcome here, whatever you want to call this space. I call it a coven. You call it whatever looks like you are out of it. You are welcome to try out new modes here and together that is how we will foster sort of the re enchantment of the world. Right.

Phoebe
I want to come back to this re enchantment. But first, I would love to hear a little bit about how you came to this project of Missing Witches with Amy.

Risa
Yeah, sure. So we were making music, making magic, making art, you know, surviving. We lived across the Jon Tallow market from each other in Montreal. It's like the largest open air market in North America. So we would walk through this. I think of your all of your, you know, craft fairs and artisans, like, you know that spirit in that kind of a space of like people bringing their best goods. Anyway, I feel like that was part of our origin story, although we don't talk about it that much. And then really, it was a podcast idea and it was like a weird art project podcast idea. Like I had the idea for the name Missing Witches. We had already been researching and kind of just calling each other and telling each other we were looking for stories. We were looking for stories of women and queer people. We were looking to, you know, try to discover an intersectional history of witchcraft. When you first start to look for a history of witchcraft, what you get as a history of Wicca, and that is often a history of white men, some cool dudes, you know. But it wasn't what we were looking for. We really wanted to know like trying to find a women's history is a challenge, but the more you look, the more you find them and you start to find these women that feel like they could have been your radical anarchist aunt, you know? Yeah. And so that was the origin of the project was we were going to do a six episode season where we wrote these sort of strange meditations, history pieces about people we were missing. We really we were longing for that. And we wanted to know a history of people who had explored magic, real people. We don't write about fictional characters, and we don't write about gods or goddesses. That's important work, but it's not what we do. We're looking for real people in history who either practiced a form of a traditional religion that was aculted or marginalized, or they were at the origin of the invention of Wicca, or they were looking for, you know, the goddess. They were looking for powers of fem in magic. And yeah, we were really kind of committed to just telling each other those stories in a way that we thought the other would really enjoy. And just Amy, as a musician, had a recording studio in her house so she could make these soundscapes for them. And then she added the idea of finding contemporary practitioners to interview. And so that really became the balance of the podcast. And then we launched it just sort of like this was a side hustle, a hobby, you know, a creative act between us. And it found an audience that we weren't really expecting. And then from there we found our community. You know, we wrote these essays and interviewed people, and it evolved into a book that we are we you know, Amy said we had to trick each other into writing a book or we never would have done it. But we evolved our stories into the first book, Missing Witches: Reclaiming True Histories of Feminist Magic. And then the second book, A New Moon Magic: 13 Anti-Capitalist Tools for Resistance and Reenchantment, and our coven and our membership community that has just been, like, wildly more exciting and interesting and supportive than anything I could have imagined. So yeah, it has that feeling of, yeah, a magic of a spell. Like it has that feeling of something that we absolutely didn't plan, but by like, really loving it and making sure we only do it in ways that feel deeply like good and caring for each other in it, it's growing. So yeah, that's the story, I guess.

Phoebe
What is the most surprising part of this project for you?

Risa
Oh man, a couple of things come to mind. One, I did think that we would run out of stories to tell, and the opposite has been true. You know, there are so much of what we go looking for is stories that exceed the archives. Right. So you are looking for queer people, people of the global majority, who had different ideas about how the universe works, about what might be possible in this world, but because those things have been so aggressively marginalized, obfuscated, I did think we would sort of run out of witch stories to tell. And the opposite has been true. Whenever we find one, we find six more. Our lists for future episodes will take us the rest of our lives to do. And so that's been like really exciting. It's like you're pulling on these roots and finding more and more and more flowers and things you didn't expect. That was really unexpected. And then really, the community like, you know, at first you thought it was surprising that there were listeners, but there are listeners who felt like us that they were cut off from each other and experiencing a sense of isolation and desperation that, you know, late stage capitalism and, you know, environmental collapse that can leave us feeling really desperate and really detached from our power and really detached from the like, fertile, joyful nature of being on this planet, like the planet has so much, and we could live in so much bounty together, but we're sort of cast in these delusions of scarcity. So to find each other and other people that wanted to support each other in that and to make a community around that was not something I expected at all. I had worked in community building, but it was so like corporate in a way that, like you always knew community had this revolutionary power. But I was doing it as a job for other people, and I did not expect to use those skills in my creative project. So then to start to build a community and see how deeply wise they were, and I just want to spend time with them and learn from them and follow their guidance and our own inspiration on what the community becomes. But a community of like 300 witches around the world who meet multiple times a month, and it's growing all the time. Was it not what I expected when I thought we would do? This little six episode weird podcast season.

Phoebe
Since this is a business podcast, I would love to hear a little bit about your business structure and how this became this a side hustle, and maybe if you guys are still doing other projects as well to pay for your life or whatever you feel comfy and called to share, I'd love to hear about it.

Risa
Yes, I love talking about all this stuff. Thank you for asking, and thanks to other people who are willing to talk openly about it. Because when you do start a business, I mean, first of all, we didn't know we were starting a business. So we did a weird art project for a couple of years and then registered it as a business only two years ago.

Phoebe
We love that.

Risa
I feel like your listeners get really.

Phoebe
I can relate personally as well.

Risa
Right? Yeah. So then we registered it as a business, I think just two years ago. And basically the business aspect, like we stumbled into it, we had like, you know, 1 or 2 advertisers on the podcast purely because they were like soulmate advertisers. The work they did was so aligned and, you know, but I mean, that didn't even cover any of our expenses. But it was a joy. But it was a lot of work. And ultimately we realized we are not in the ads game. You know, that's not something we're interested in managing and pursuing. It seems like it takes a whole other person to run a good ad business, and it wasn't for us. Also, when you do an anti-capitalist podcast, it's sort of weird to like, cut in a 32nd mattress ad or whatever it didn't feel right. But a member of our community, Angela, urged us to begin a Patreon. And so we were sort of like, well, if people want to, like, pitch in, I guess we could. Started a Patreon and found that really fulfilling and exciting. And we couldn't believe that people wanted to support the project. And we struggled with what the sort of rewards or membership levels would be, you know, that all of that is like kind of hard to tune and figure out so that you aren't giving more than you can manage. You know, I think that's a thing when you start a membership business, if anybody is thinking about that, it's like you feel like you just want to give so much to these people who have come with this great generosity to join your project, but you can really burn yourself out. So trying to find that mix was was tricky for a while. And then last year, just last year, we still have a Patreon, but we kind of shifted our home base off Patreon. So we invested and we updated our website, so we had been on. It's interesting if I do the actual like platforms and stuff for your audience, you can cut this out if it's boring.

Phoebe
I love it. I love hearing about tools and apps and stuff.

Risa
I tell you about our stack. We’re tech witches too. Yeah. So we migrated off WordPress on to ghost IO, which is a WordPress fork that was created by former WordPress employees. They made a nonprofit version that is completely dedicated to sustainable journalism. So WordPress can do anything. All Ghost does is basically manage a subscription at membership business, for writers or for publications. And so all of those tools were in one place for us with great SEO. And it's beautiful and nice looking. And we've found their team really wonderful and also sort of more ethically aligned for us ultimately, than some other options. So we set up our home base there and then we're still on Patreon, but we moved our actual community hub to a platform called Circle, and that's like an investment. But we have found the tools they are really allowed us to have a feeling of like our own social media, like felt like a private place that almost feels like a Facebook slash Reddit slash zoom thing where we can have our own courses, we can have our own circle meetings, we can share and write there. And so that was a huge kind of shift in our business. And those 2 or 3 sort of sets of technical changes have really made it a business. So now it's much more streamlined. People find us, they subscribe to the newsletter, they join the community if that feels right for them. You know, they read the contributor covenant. If it does feel like it's a place that would be like home to them, then they join. And so now we are completely community supported and profitable, and we sort of can see a future for the project that feels right and aligned for us, where we don't have to sell ads, we can dedicate a month every year to reparations and donate all of our income from that month, and still feel like we're growing enough that Amy and I can be supported and continuing this work.

Phoebe
And were you doing other work? I assume you were doing other work when you started this project?

Risa
Yeah, in the beginning. So I had worked in, like I said, like community building in tech. I was actually at Yelp. I was a community director for them for like ten years. And I started this project right before I went on mat leave. We were writing our first episodes when I was very, very, very pregnant. And so yeah, that's kind of like a pirating of systems, right? In Canada, we have a really ethical and reasonable maternity leave, parental leave. And so I had that year supported yay, social democracy. Everybody gets everybody gets them. Yeah. And so we kind of pirated that system. Took advantage of that year and made a couple seasons of the podcast. And then, you know, this was before we were a business. So I would kind of work on it in my spare time. And then after or during Covid, I got laid off and it was like a kick in to doing my project full time that I wouldn't have taken otherwise. Truly. Like I was looking at other tech marketing jobs and felt like I was dying every fucking time I looked at them because it was not what I wanted to do anymore. But if I wanted to continue making that salary, that's where I had to go. And I just did not know what to do. And I asked to have the path open for me. And then I got laid off, which was great because you get laid off, you know, you can get more government resources. And so that kind of gave us, again, another like year of time that we could invest in the project. And that has sort of brought us to this moment where we are making enough from the project that we don't do anything else right now, it's tight, but we also limited our costs pretty intensely before that, both of us lived really simply. And the project is enough right now, and we can see the way it's growing that we can continue to invest in it full time for right now.

Phoebe
And are you comfy sharing Amy's story at all? A little bit about?

Risa
I wonder what she would say for herself. But Amy has always been like a contract worker artist and so she continues to do some of that work. She's a musician and a visual artist, and so she was doing a lot of that. She was also doing full time care for her father up until, just like I want to say, three years ago or two years ago. And so that's a full time job. If you are in elder care, that's a more than full time job, incredibly mentally demanding. And so that, I mean, she was home and doing pretty intense work, but was able to write and work on the podcast while she was doing that. And so sort of the time when we were both sort of free from those work that we loved, but that was like very much a huge, huge portion of our days. We were both sort of like pushed away from that world of her, from elder care and myself, from my full time corporate job at around the same time. And we've both just sort of leaned into making this our job since then. Not too use leaned in, I mean, okay, Sheryl Sandberg.

Phoebe
What did those like, first moments feel like for you when you got laid off and you’d realized this was a full time money project?

Risa
Terror. Ego death and terror, I mean you don't get straight to like liberation, right? Like, first you're dragged all the way through and like, you're like the caterpillar who isn't, like, in a protective cozy cocoon and then comes out with its wings like its entire self dissolves into a pile of goop. I felt like that. I felt like my entire self dissolved into a pile of terror goop. And there's a lot of, I mean, trying to be strong and have perspective and advocate for yourself when you know you've dedicated ten years of your life to an organization and then you get like just you realize that it was always even though it seemed different and it was doing different things, it was always the same as every other corporate machine, and it didn't really value you in the end. Like that's devastating. And then to have to be like, actually, I'm not signing that document and actually I'm entitled to a lot more than you're offering me and actually, like, as much as I just want to run away and hide under the moss and return my body to the soil and be a full time witch, I need to stand up for myself in this system a little bit more first. So I had to go through some of that and yeah, advocate for yourself. If you are laid off, talk to an employment lawyer. I probably could have done more, but I did some. So yeah, that was a big part of it. And then also, the witches are comfortable with the yes-and I guess, I also did feel like hugely relieved and I just had to rest for a while. I didn't really realize how my nervous system was exhausted, and also how I had to like, let my nervous system like, reroute a little bit. I had moved to the woods just prior to Covid, but I was still really working in this kind of corporate, super intense, crazy long work days, workweeks, juggling so many projects, and I had to let my system kind of root into the lake and the trees, as cheesy as that sounds. I mean, that's really true for me. I had to, like, find new language that wasn't marketing speak. You know, I had to like, read beautiful things and eat healthy food and play with my kid and let myself write poetry and let myself research magical women and like, look at their art and think about what they were trying to tell me about the world. Like, I really I had to, like, be reborn from my ego death in a way, and I had to guide that in along with my like, real desire. So my real pleasure was like, outside of what I could pay for when I had that job. You know.

BREAK
Phoebe
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Phoebe
After this resetting or maybe during this resetting, was there any sort of scarcity mindset going on about, you know, having to support yourself still through this project?

Risa
Yeah, of course. That's just terrifying, right? And then you go into that loop where you're just like, I just have to do more. I have to do more. I have to do more. If I add one more thing, it'll work. If I add one more thing, it'll probably work. Then I could pay for my house and my mortgage and everything would be okay. Which sort of works til you burn out. Yeah, definitely. And it's funny, you know, all that language about abundance and manifesting can feel so something ick like, it doesn't really feel totally aligned for me a lot of the time. I'm sure you guys have discussed that and thought about it a lot, but there is a way in which and I talk about this is like there is still there is a way in which, like, I had to make space and like allow myself quiet and not always be in the mode of producer, manager, creator, marketer, hustler. Like I had to be in the mode of just like, I guess abundance. You know, like I guess just feeling what was there in the earth or in the air and just feeling thankful to it and being opening up a little space in my brain and in my cells and in my bones for new things to come in. And that is very much like ongoing work, you know, like having faith, having hope, like leaning towards it, being gentle with myself because I was making myself sick. I mean, scarcity, the terror of economic inequality. I mean, it eats away at our insides. It eats away at our stomach linings. It compacts the top of our skull, down on to our bones and gives us tension, headaches and migraines. It makes us really sick, and it is a great privilege to not constantly be in that mode, you know, to have just enough that you can open a space for more to come in. But it's sort of a chicken and the egg thing. Like, the more I'm able to meditate you know lie quietly in the dark and nourish myself or, you know, spend time with my community and really listen to them play with my kid and really listen to the strange insight she has. Then the more unexpected opportunities come and the more the business grows in its own gentle, weird way that isn't me kind of trying to force it into the boxes of things that I already know, because it wants to be something other than what I already know.

Phoebe
Yeah, I've been thinking a lot about this, like reprograming of what a business is. Also, like how to run an anti capitalist business on capital, like how to exist in this like portfolio of other businesses and like pay your bills and pay your team and you know, have whatever programing you have and while also like taking care of yourself and I mean, I think for me personally, that's my whole life lesson. Like, how do I take care of myself and how do I I'm a Virgo and I'm highly productive and I'm really like relearning how to manage my day to day, my emotions, my body, my spirituality, all of this, and still pay the bills and also still be aligned with like my ethos and be aligned with other businesses who are aligned with my ethos and you know, etc. etc. and that's a full learning process. And every day it's different too. So I don't know, I'm wondering if you have any strategies in your day to day to just like get back to what's important for you and like stay in alignment with, you know, the things that you believe in while also running a business.

Risa
Yeah, I relate to that. I know everybody doesn't speak astrology as a language, but I do relate to that Virgo. I have the Virgo moon and I really relate to that like I can see all the systems, I can see all the opportunities. I'm going to work really hard. I'm going to gosh do my darndest. You know? For me, working with a partner is a really big gift, is sort of is like a mirror, right? Like I can get really hustley. And then I meet my friend on zoom, like, or whatever it is, my beloved friend, and she cares about how my body is, and she cares about how my brain is, and she cares about how my kid is, and I care about her as a human being. You know, like she's sick, then nothing matters. We always said, like our podcast, our rules, like it doesn't matter. An episode doesn't come out this week. We tell our community the truth, tell the truth, tell the truth, tell the truth. It's the most powerful spell you can cast. Tell the truth, you know. Tell the truth to each other. I just don't have it this week. Or I have this other idea. Maybe it's weird, but that has really been a guiding thing. Like, one thing I think is so powerful for me to think about is like, what I know is this tiny spark. Like, it's this tiny path moving its way through a network of ideas and people that is so much vaster than my brain can comprehend that other people are living these painful and joyful lives and experiences. There's other people there, you know, like, I have to come back to them. So being in community and hearing their stories, we did a circle for the eclipse, New Moon in Aries. We all came together and the prompt was to talk about our warrior selves. I didn't expect and I should have, but I didn't expect that this would bring out so many stories of domestic violence, of surviving domestic violence. You know, I felt so ignorant in that moment and so naive. It didn't occur to me how much of that we are all carrying and those moments, those movements and moments they like, bring my belly back into connection with real people. And it's like the point of anything like the point of anything I want to do is to break isolation and to connect to us and to make us feel like we have a power to change our lives and to survive. And even if it's just for the next generation, like, even if it's just to break the cycle so that I'm not violent to my kid or whatever it is like, even if it's just so that, you know, you have a friend and you can ask for help. I don't know, it's sort of a long winded answer, but that is the truth of it. Like, I come out of that hustle brain by remembering how painful it is to be alive. I think.

Phoebe
So let's sort of I mean, it's all connected, but I want to talk about your wording of re enchantment and how that is connected to magic and ritual and community and, you know, political resistance and political progress. Can you talk about what re-enchantment means to you all?

Risa
Yeah. So there's sort of a philosophical history of discussing this idea of disenchantment, enchantment, re enchantment, Charles Taylor and many other people have written about it. But for me, it was particularly in reading Silvia Federici the Re Enchantment of the World and her way of framing both the history of witchcraft in the context of the theft of the commons, the taking of common land, the taking of common culture, the corporatization and sort of making those things into capital, and how that was sort of a breaking, a way of breaking us from each other. The way she tells that history through a lens of looking at the witch hunts and the ways that women, in particular elderly people, there's a class aspect, for sure. So like low income elderly women who were sort of free in some ways, they didn't have the parenting relationships in the same way, and they really could resist, and they really could speak up and say, this is wrong. Like we are entitled to life, that the history of the witch trials, especially in Europe, but also throughout the world as part of the progress of colonization, that the witch trials were really used as a way to control those women and demonize those women who were resisting. And so she writes about that. And then she also writes that, like in the margins, another world is possible, that everywhere that where, you know, the way, you know, bell hooks, frames it the white supremacist, imperialist, capitalist patriarchy, that sort of combination of forces that everywhere that those forces is pushing down on us. There is also, like in cracks in the pavement, another world being born that people are finding each other, connecting with the land, sharing their rituals, sharing their stories, sharing circles of mutual aid, supporting their small businesses, nurturing each other with craft. You know, like all of that. That is the reenactment of the world. And also like going to our stories, going to our folktales, looking for where we have hidden opportunities for magic. We've hidden stories of resistance and stories of our familiars, stories of like ways we might reconnect again with trees and animals and the plants and the ecosystems that we are a part of. The larger global Earth biome that we are all in like that is all reenchantment too. And it's really it's not different from science, right? Like we're science loving witches and tech loving witches. We're really interested in what is really happening with our ecosystems and how becoming closer with plants and animals and learning their messages, becoming closer with people and closer with stories and closer with ritual that those things can like, give us opportunities to make our lives not just like endurable, but glorious. You know, like Dorian Valiant, who is this super fascinating figure at the origins of Wicca. She wrote that like witchcraft is a fertility cult. But it's not just about babies and, you know, grain and bulls and stuff. There's a way in which fertility is deeply about every person getting to express what they want to bring forth in the world. That's the reenchantment that I am, you know, acting for, conjuring, believing in.

Phoebe
Yeah, thank you. I'm thinking about the book, the second book, and I'm just wondering if, like, you had a favorite chapter or a favorite. Yeah. If you had a favorite chapter that you wrote.

Risa
I love our book so much. I find it hard to read, you know, because it's like, wow, that's a lot of words that, you know, I sort of disassociated and channeled. It’s funny to read, and there's so much intimate stuff in there. You know, we really we combine memoir with history and ritual and stuff. So it is very much like meeting myself in another time in my life on the page. But working in collaboration is such a joy. And so my favorite chapters of the chapters we wrote together, we wrote the introduction and the conclusion together we read each other's chapters, and we offer each other a lot of notes and edits and support. But basically in the book, we write it like we write the podcast episodes where Amy has her voice, she writes her episode, I write mine. But in the introduction and conclusion we write together, you know, in a Google doc, we just write, take turns, and we're just in there building on ideas, adding quotes, refining the language. And those are the times where we get closest to saying what I think. We think collectively, they have our sort of manifesto in them. They have our politics, right? Right in them, especially the conclusion, you know, we really lay out what we believe that our version of witchcraft is a landback movement and our version of witchcraft is a reparations movement. You know, it's anti-racist, it's radically inclusive. Like, that's what we are calling witchcraft. This intersection of art and spirituality and activism. That's what feels like witchcraft to us. And so it's in those chapters that we got closest to telling the truth about what that looks like and feels like for us.

Phoebe
What is that day to day look like working together?

Risa
Well, we don’t. I mean, we sort of do, but we're we're very much a virtual business. So even though we're both in the woods in the mountains north of Montreal, we're still about an hour away from each other in our little cabins. So we have Monday meetings. We also have Monday meetings that the coven, especially people at the weavers level, who are all people who are really actively working on really intense projects. So those Monday meetings might include a bunch of other witches, and we sort of bounce off each other, and then we write. We meet again on Wednesdays. We record an episode of the podcast that's called The RX. It's like you're Missing Witch prescription. Really we're like telling how we're surviving another week in late stage capital. Songs in particular that have been magic for us this week. Wednesdays we do that. When we're in season, so we do a spring season and a fall season of the podcast. We have episodes that come out that are scripted storytelling meditations in the spring. It's kinship episodes in the fall. They're histories of real witches. So during those times, those times are really intense. We're writing and researching and recording and editing and producing. We do everything ourselves. There is no one else on the Missing Witches team right now, so we do all our social media, all our partnerships, all our events, all our new moon and full moon circles, all our episodes. So, yeah, I mean, I work from home, I'm in my little witch room, I take my kid to school, and then I work through my to do list for the day. I try to balance out the creative time, the writing time where I shut off the internet, shut off access to things, and just write. But before you're in that stage, there's a lot of research to pull the pieces together. You might need. And then other times later in the day when I can use a bit less an intense part of my brain to answer emails, work on. Yeah, the businessy business parts.

Phoebe
Do you find that you have certain roles in the business that you've taken on, and if so, how did you sort of come to that?

Risa
Yes and no. There are things that are definitely just sort of our strengths. Like I came from more of a tech background. So a lot of that stuff, even if I didn't know how to do it, I could kind of be in charge of figuring out how to do it. And Amy is a really gifted natural community builder. So even though she hadn't worked in that field, she's probably better at it than I am in a lot of ways. So she ended up really taking the lead on a lot of our social media and a lot of our sort of community building aspects. We collaborate on most pieces and we're really respectful of each other's genius genie inspiration. So a lot of the time, you know, we're just we're partners. So she has an idea, she runs with it. I have an idea. I run with it. If we have a doubt. We do a lot of what we used to call sanity check. Now, we sort of realized there's sort of maybe mental health stigmatism to using that language that's not totally fair. So we talk more about like an integrity check or because, you know, we're both a little bit mad and proud of that. But we look for, you know, we send each other writing if we have ideas, we'll sort of call each other up. If it's something we're not sure about and then work through it together, and then we just sort of piece out do you want to do this while I manage that? I mean we're friends first, like really beloved friends. And we were artist collaborator friends, so there's a little bit less of having to apologize for a wild idea. But when you start in that context, you know, I find it harder to, not so much anymore. But I used to find it harder to really collaborate as an artist and take myself seriously as an artist with people who I hadn't met in that context. Even though I produced Amy and I both produced interdisciplinary live shows in Montreal every month for like a decade before we met each other, we were both event producers doing these very weird art shows and in a small city and never overlapped. And those were like growing up times of learning how to, like, tell a tech at a venue. What I wanted while he was telling me what things needed to be or, you know, really gaining your voice. But because we both had that experience and we came to each other with a lot of respect as people who were willing to go on stage and potentially embarrass ourselves or sing our songs, tell our truth. It makes collaboration easier.

Phoebe
What are some rituals that you're loving lately or maybe not loving? What are some rituals that you're doing that are maybe challenging also?

Risa
Yeah. That's interesting. I experience most of the most fulfilling rituals that I do alone. That's still really it's like something that I was thinking about, you know, like my practice is very solitary and like, I need my family to leave the house, which doesn't always happen really. So that part is hard. Like, I really I need to be alone in my space for the feeling to come. That is really magical. I find it difficult. I find I can now, like, enter into a kind of magical ritual, space or embodiment with our coven in circle in New Moon and Full Moon circle. But it is still hard. I'm not someone who led a Wiccan coven or something like that. You know what? I don't like the feeling of it feeling performative. I really like to practice on my own. So there's sort of a long way of saying that. But recently we did a circle where Amy dj’d like a really kick ass set of music for an hour, and while she did, we all cleaned our altars and then made them new again. And that was rad. That was my favorite sort of ritual space I've been in in a long time, because it combines the solitary with the communal in a way I don't know. You don't have to take an altar that seriously. If an altar isn't something you've engaged with before, you can just look around your house and realize you probably have altars everywhere. Like if you are making your home a place that's beautiful and expresses who you are and who you feel connected to, then you are probably making altars everywhere. I have an ancestor altar because I'm super ancestry and you know, if you speak astrology as a language, it might be my cancer sun. But I really do love to have pictures and items that symbolize not just the people in my family who I have felt deeply connected to, who passed. But you know, I've done genealogical research and I have things that symbolize people that I have found further back to symbolize their resistance and their resilience and things that they experienced. And I have animals and stones and plants that sort of signify my ancestry in deep time. And so working on that and then having that in my office space and turning to it when I feel lost or scared or really thankful, is incredibly joyful and empowering and magical. And yeah, I think if you want to engage with a ritual, that's a place to start, even if it's just, you know, a member of our coven has a little portable candle holder with a little ceramic plate, and on there they put sometimes stones or flowers. It's tiny. It's a tiny little altar. I know another person who has a locket, and they'll put, like, a single flower or a single hair, and it's like carrying something that grounds you and roots you, that you can hold on to having something that you think of as an altar. And it can completely be like an altar to science. You don't need to engage with a deity. You don't have to believe in a religion. You don't have to believe in source or you know, whatever those terms are that get used. You can still find a way to like, yeah, turn from the ego brain that always thinks it has to be control or towards that lunar mind or, you know, microbial gut mind or whatever it is you think of that. Outside of that, that ego mind that always thinks it has to be in control. I think it alters a really good way to do that.

Phoebe
What sort of advice do you want to leave our listeners where maybe something in related to, you know, building a witchy business or maybe something or maybe the opposite, like finding space for, you know, witchcraft or both, I don't know, whatever calls you.

Risa
I'll say one thing that comes to mind is early on, we said that in May we would donate all of our income from our membership. So Patreon at the time, and as that grew to the native women's shelter here in Montreal, we had both been to events and walks and demonstrations organized by the Native Women's Shelter in Montreal for years and years, and that felt like it anchored our work. And then we baked it in. So every month that's what happens. We do a series of special episodes dedicated to speaking with indigenous people on the idea of indigenous futurism. What it looks like we do a fundraiser that all of these powerful people in our community donate prizes to, and our community donates and gets to win prizes, and we donate our entire revenue that month and having it baked in. So it is something I would recommend for any business is like bake it in, make it something you do every year or every month or whatever, so that when you fall into the pit of what the fuck is this all for? What am I doing? How does it contribute? What is it worth? There is something to hold on to. At least I do this one thing. It's baked in and reparations can be so joyful, right? It can be this joyful community building peace. It doesn't have to be as complex as what ours has turned into. But don't underestimate the psychological power of doing that, and of not putting it off of saying like, there is this thing that's important to me. And in this way I always support that thing. I am always as my work grows, I am always also resourcing this question that is still this lack. There's still not enough ness that still sort of screams in the universe. I am at least doing this one thing for that. And every time I grow, what I give to that grows. It's like magic for real.

Phoebe
Oh, and you were hosting a fundraiser. Yeah, we want to talk about that.

Risa
Yeah. So the reparations fundraiser is coming up. By the time you share this with your gang, we will be in the full throws of it. So thank you for letting us come during this time and talk about this fundraiser. Our reparations fundraiser is underway. So if you go to MissingWitches.com, you'll see it featured everywhere. MissingWitches.com/reparations. We have thousands of dollars in prizes donated this year from Amanda Gates Garcia. Jynx Monsoon from the Moon Studio Sarah Gottessdiener I mean there arefull classes, year long workshops, works in ritual, works in poetry. You can get readings. So all of that stuff has been donated. And then we invite you to make a donation to your favorite indigenous support org, because let's face it, so much of what we call the new age, or even handcraft or witchcraft has been extracted from indigenous communities. The land we live on has been taken from indigenous people. So for us, just sort of lovingly, joyfully returning money to those orgs is core. So don't send your money to us, send it to the org of your choice or to the Native Women's Shelter. We end up donating thousands of dollars to the Montreal Native Women's Shelter every May from all over the world, and that's really fun and magical to imagine them being on the receiving end of that and not quite knowing why, although they have a suspicion now it's a bunch of witches, so donate to them, and then you send your receipt to us. And for every $10 you donate, you get one raffle ticket, basically. And then we pull names out of hats, and then we will put you in touch with the magical people who have offered the prize at the end of the month. And everyone who donates gets a discount code to Haus Witch in Salem, our buddies there so everybody can go get magical treasures. And yeah. We're really lucky to get to be involved at this point in this fundraiser. So thank you so much to anybody listening who wants to get involved in any way and be a part of this wave. It really is a joy.

Phoebe
And we'll be sure to put all those links on our social posts and on the podcast and on our website as well.

Risa
Thank you so much

Phoebe
Thank you so much. Thank you for being here and for sharing your story. And the other witches stories as well.

Risa
Yeah, it's such a treat. Phoebe, thank you so much for all the work you do to bring creatives and craft together in such an empowering way. There is so much resistance work going on through your community in such a joyful way. It's really, really a treat to get to be here and to be connected with you all.

OUTRO

Phoebe
Thank you so much for listening to the Girl Gang Craft Podcast. Head to Girlgangcraft.com/podcast for shownotes and more. See you next time.