Are You Sure?

This interview is on a website of a writer who is concerned with disability issues. He has a Writer's Roundtable, which is usually a short interview with a writer he's talked to on the internet. He did a fairly lengthy interview with me because of the intersection between writing and disability that I address in some of my work. It's posted here, with an in-depth discussion of how disability impacts my life as a writer, some talk about my article in the Disability and Religious Diversity anthology, and geilt and poetry. If you're interested, please do drop by and give it a look.

From Leon and Allen:

Dear Fellow Travelers,

MEETING ON THE FUTURE OF TRAVELERS

Monday June 11, 2012, 7 pm at TRAVELERS – 501 East Pine St.

News has been trickling in that our shop on Capitol Hill has been leased out from under us. Posts are appearing on Gamma Ray Games’ Facebook page, and on the Capitol Hill Blog, that they will be opening in our current space in mid-August. Naturally, I have heard nothing of this from our Landlord yet, but I have little doubt it is true. It looks as if this is the last month for TRAVELERS at 501 East Pine. The question is:

WHAT DO WE DO NEXT?

We are calling a meeting, on Monday at 7pm, of the TRAVELERS “family” (you know who you are), all those who love us and want to help TRAVELERS get through the current crisis and go forward. We need volunteers, especially if you can work at least one four-hour shift, one day a week, over the next month. We need to make some money. There are lots of things to do: production, cleaning, kitchen and counter service. We’ll also need help getting everything out of the space, moving it somewhere, cleaning up.

If we only have one month, let’s make it a great month! I’d love to see all the friends, fans and devotees we’ve accumulated over the years stop by. I hope our past employees will come by too, to reminisce about some of the great things that have gone on within these walls. And spend some money while you’re here! We have lots of bills to pay, and we still have lots of amazing things. We may schedule some last event or two, as well, before we bid adieu, so stay tuned… this isn’t over yet.

THANK YOU!

When I think of all the great things we have done in out 14½ years here, I know we have lots to be proud of. TRAVELERS has been a wonderful place, full of wonderful things. But most important it has been filled with wonderful people. It seemed for years that all roads led to TRAVELERS. We’ve had visits by great spiritual leaders, amazing concerts and performances, brilliant lectures, workshops, art exhibits, and even fashion shows. My mind boggles at all the awesome people it has been our honor and our great pleasure to host. And we have had the opportunity to show our own art, to do public rituals, to cook for you. We never made much money, but in all other ways it has been a huge success. Thank you for being a part of all this and for your support over the years.

Om Namah Shivaya!

Allen and Leon

TRAVELERS TEA CO. – 501 E. PINE STREET – (206) 329-6260 (at least for now)

TRAVELERS THALI HOUSE – 2524 BEACON AVE. S. – (206) 329-1465

This evening I did an IRC chat with the Sisterhood of Avalon folks. It was so much better this time, being able to actually have the tech work properly. There were, at the time when the most people were in, about 20 people there, and some really excellent questions were asked, with good discussion had. I hope that someone has a transcript - if they do I'll see about sharing it, though I can't promise I'll be able to, given this was a SoA chat. I had a really lovely time and it was a great group of women in attendance. Many thanks to vyviane for organizing this, particularly at such short notice.

I got email from joyful_storm about the pilgrimage and sent her the more detailed itinerary and some of the info I've been collecting about the places, book recommendations, and whatnot that I've been sharing with the pilgrimage list, and she decided she's going to be coming with us. Time has suddenly opened up in her schedule so that she can do this and I'm so very excited to be able to travel with her! It'll be great to have someone from home along with me for that part of the trip. I'm delighted to have a couple of my very favorite people (her and ogam) coming along!

Once I got all that stuff settled, I finally write a draft of the opening ritual at the older Brigid's well, involving water, fire, and our meditations with ogam and the three cauldrons. I've sent the draft off to vyviane and Jhenah for their approval or edits. We shall see what they have to say.

If I'm sufficiently together tomorrow, I'm going to see about taking Garuda for his oil change, and getting a haircut. I hate how it's all down in my eyes now. It's very very annoying. And Garuda needs the oil change before I head for California.

Today was the podcast adventure. It was kind of "obnoxious talk radio" done Pagan, but the conversation in the chatroom was okay. Some of my friends showed up and asked good questions and made some good comments. The hosts were nice to me, but were very RAR WE DO NOT AGREE WITH PEOPLE about things. That said, they actually tended more to agree with what I said than not, so their generalizations about What CRs Do apparently didn't much apply to me, despite that I'm a CR. It was interesting, at least. Some of what I said was repeated on the air, as they'd said would probably happen, though I think some of it was a bit lost in translation, if you will.

Two of the three hosts are Heathens, and they do regard the CR community as kin of a sort, which isn't too uncommon. I have pretty good relationships with the Heathens in my life. We've got a lot in common as reconstructionists, after all. I'm not sure where the hosts were getting the idea that the worship of some of the major "pan-Celtic" deities (Lug, etc) was somehow a Wiccan influence. They were talking about how this sort of thing was all the druids and wasn't what the tribes did at all, which I can't really agree with. They were all "we are so tribal" and not really explaining what that meant. Not really my thing. I don't necessarily identify as a druid most of the time unless I'm fulfilling that function in my community, but the CR community interacts with a much more diverse selection of deities than they seem to think it does.

One of the women had apparently written a CR book that got slammed by some of the CR community online, and she was rather sore about it. There was a fair bit of snarking about that. I hadn't read it and she didn't mention the title that I recall, so I seriously doubt I'd read it, but I know that a lot of the self-published stuff out there isn't very good quality, sad to say.

As a result of this, however, vyviane suggested that I do a chat session with women from the Sisterhood of Avalon so that they'll have a better idea of my take on Brigid and what I'm like. Perhaps this would bring in a few more folks for the pilgrimage, which would be lovely. As of yesterday, we have seven of twelve potential openings spoken for. That means there are only five places left, so if you're interested, please do get in touch with her so that you can get in on it. It's going to be a really fantastic thing and I'm looking forward to it so immensely.

Tomorrow I'll be heading up to Vancouver to help out mael_bridge for a few days, after her surgery on the 15th. I'll be heading out in late morning and will be returning Thursday afternoon. I'd like to avoid rush hour on both ends if possible, so I'll most likely be leaving by about 11am and departing Vancouver by 1pm on Thursday so as to be home by about 4, if all goes well and the border doesn't suck like a bilge pump. I still have to pack tonight, and figure out what I'll be taking for writing and for keeping myself entertained while she snoozes. I'll be having dinner with Bruce and Heather, though we haven't got the details worked out yet. I'll call them when I get up there, after I've dropped stuff and checked in with mael_bridge and seen that she's doing okay.

Chances are I'll be able to update regularly. She has internet access, and I know there are cafes with wireless nearby as well. I may be a little slow in responding to emails, though. I'll try to remember to post a quick note before I head out the door.

I got an inquiry over on my FB page today from Chuck Hudson at Raven Radio about doing a podcast conversation about Asatru and CR, their similarities and differences. They've done some interviews with Troth folks before. I wanted to ask if anyone (I'm looking particularly at you, nancyblue) knew about these folks and whether I should consider doing the talk with them. I'm always a little skittish about doing stuff that involves phones (or, in this case, Skype) where I can't be in the same room with the person or people I'm talking to. I do have some fairly problematic phone-phobia issues, which is why email and text messaging tend to be my go-to communication methods of choice.

If they're not connected with anyone unsavory, I might be willing to do the talk with them, provided I can cope with the phobia issues. I'm just at the thinking about it stage at the moment.

Beyond that, I've done some more writing on my fic today and signed up to do a short one for a holiday gift exchange in one of my fandom communities. The keyword here is "short," as the current one I'm working on is going to be fairly lengthy. I'm still poking at it in another window right now, and it's at about 23,000 words. Yeah, I tend to be windy, I do. It's for the good cause of cleaning out my brain so that serious nonfiction writing can be done later.

lupabitch pinged me earlier today too and asked if I might consider doing a guest blog post for the Pagan Newswire Collective project No Unsacred Place. I'm giving that one some thought, as it wouldn't have to be a long piece, and I might be able to pop some photos into it as well. I can worry about that later, though.

I may be going to see the new Muppet movie on Thursday with gra_is_stor, depending on how I'm feeling. Right at the moment, I'm rather headachy. I crawled out to the grocery store to get dog food today, but that and writing have been about it for activity. I still need to do laundry; I'm hoping I'll be up to it tomorrow. Along with throwing together a proposal for the Esoteric Book Conference.

Damn, I'm busy. I hadn't expected that.

Shut up, hips.

I got up today expecting to do an interview and some laundry. Mark came over and did the interview -- we talked for about 90 minutes about steampunk, community, and gender, among other things. It was a fun conversation. If you're local (Seattle area), are in the steampunk community, and have some interest in gender and community issues, by all means get in touch with him. He's a prof at Seattle U doing a project on this.

Instead of doing laundry today, I got a ping from Jason at Hiraeth Press. I'd emailed him just before I left for California last month and asked if he would be willing to look at a poetry manuscript from me. He said after solstice, so I knew I didn't have any rush on it. Today he said that he's got a press meeting Saturday and if I could have a manuscript or at least a few poems to him by then, he could talk to them about it. So I spent a few hours printing out and shuffling poems and setting them into a draft manuscript form. It's about 100 pages of poems. I haven't decided on a title for the collection yet, but I told him that and said I'd be open to suggestions. I'm thinking about what I might want the title to be as well.

Anyway, he's received the manuscript and I should hear back from him soon.

That's two finished projects in the last three or four days. I'm stunned. I've been wanting to do a poetry book for ages but never quite had the confidence to put it out there. Most of what I've submitted (certainly not all of it by any means) has been accepted in the past, but a collection seemed somewhat more intimidating. I've been told I'm pretty good at this poetry thing, but I don't know how my stuff would go over outside the Pagan community where more people would, I think, understand the animist themes.

Tomorrow, sadly, will not see me getting any laundry done. I have shrinkage and then the schmooze business meeting. I'm tired already, just thinking about it. And my hip has still be bugging me after nearly a week. That bit sucks.

On the other hand POETRY MANUSCRIPT SUBMITTED TO AN ACTUALLY INTERESTED PUBLISHER!!! :insert kermitflail here:

I was interviewed via email a while back for an article on Brigid's flamekeepers in the online newsletter The Temple Bell. The Imbolc issue is out now, and I'm one of several people quoted in the issue. The link is here, and the page is a PDF file. Look for the article Keepers of the Flame. I've added the link to my sidebar under interviews.

I was rather worried about the DoDC+3 today, as he started out the day pretty tired and didn't really want to eat or drink anything. Once I brought his dish to his cage, he did eat about half a bowl (a normal amount) of kibble, so that was good, though I don't think he's had as much to drink as I'd like. He may just have been feeling crappy, but he did turn up his nose at some broth earlier today. Later, though, he drank some but wasn't too keen on plain water. I'm not surprised, given how spoiled he's been getting about his food in recent days, but better that he get something.

Later in the day, though, he showed a little more energy. We went for a somewhat longer walk today than the last couple of days. He's still moving very slowly, but he led me not just up to the usual walk area, but across the parking lot to the smaller area under the cedar trees to check things out. I felt that was a really good sign. I'm still trying to figure out what's okay and what's not enough at this point. He has been sleeping in his crate in the bedroom a lot; I put one of my pillows from the bed in there because he can't actually get up onto it, and he seems to like that a lot. Right now he's up on the couch lazing around. He wanted me to rub his tummy today, which I did (very gently).

Overall, I think he's doing well but I'm slightly concerned about whether or not he's getting enough to drink so I'm going to be trying to encourage a little more liquid intake. Most of this, I'm sure, is just due to the fact that I've never actually had to pay attention to how much he's been drinking before. I put a bowl down for him with a half-gallon jug to keep it full, and when it's empty, I put more water down.

This afternoon I spent some time talking with a woman at the University of Maine as part of a study of women veterans who are members of Veterans for Peace. It was an interesting conversation and she asked about the kinds of activism I've been doing, as well as my time in service and my thoughts about women veterans issues. VFP isn't doing the study themselves, they're not affiliated. The woman who's doing the study is a veteran herself. VFP is, however, interested in women veterans' attitudes and experiences with the organization, apparently in the interests of dealing with issues of recruitment and retention.

I (and apparently an awful lot of other women members) feel that they don't put nearly enough emphasis on women veterans issues. There's almost nothing coming from national about the topic and the local groups that I've seen rarely address this either. If it helps raise some awareness and kickstarts a little action, I'll be very pleased, though.

I gave her the url for the NPR interview I did a couple of years back and will be sending her the warrior rituals our CR group did in the interest of illustrating how some communities deal with these issues. We talked about how different people approach and engage with activism and that that constitutes. There are differences between folks who are willing or able to go out and be arrested at protests and those who are, for various health or other reasons, more able to be activists through writing, public speaking, and financial support of organizations. Both of these approaches are necessary, really.

We also talked a little about activism I've been part of outside of VFP and veterans/DADT issues, including Pagan community organizing, queer community stuff, interfaith work, and AIDS/HIV work. It was a pretty good conversation and, though it was stressful in that I had to talk about things in my past that are very painful to the point where I was quite literally shaking as I typed (we did the interview through IRC), I felt good about having done it. I think that people speaking out about their experiences is important, even if all it does is illustrate that others are not alone.

She also mentioned that she and another woman vet were going to be doing some kind of writing project (presumably an anthology) and was very interested in having me write something for it, but that call for papers will be some months away.

A while back I was sent an interview email for the Patheos website. It took a while for me to answer, given that I was busy with other projects at the time, but now the interview has been posted. I talk about CR, filidecht and geilt, and the Warriors and Kin blog, among other topics.

Here's the link.

For the past couple of days I've been working on responding to interview questions from the Druidic Dawn website's magazine, Aontacht. They asked me a bunch of questions, some of which seem standard for the other interviews I've seen, which are taken from the community forums on the website. I've been invited a number of times to join Druidic Dawn, but it's really not my thing.

I tend to only visit online forums rarely, spending most of my time here on LJ or dealing with folks in email. Having to regularly visit a dozen sites takes more time and energy than I'm usually willing to invest. Generally, if something important comes up, somebody on my flist will mention it or link to it, like stuff about Steve Akins and his regrettable forgeries.

That said, I'm more than happy to do interviews with people when they ask. This one turned out to be about six pages of responses to the questions. I referred folks to the CR FAQ and gave a list of some of the books I think are important and influential for folks interested in pursuing filidecht.

I'm glad to have this out of the way, though. Tomorrow I'm likely to be helping anthea7 and mintofthewater move into a new place, and Saturday is alfrecht's pack-out day to storage. I may be a wisp of no substance by Sunday, when we're supposed to be at the Shinto shrine in the morning. There's also some rumor of snow in the forecast for Saturday, which I desperately hope doesn't show up. That would make a mess of a lot of necessary happenings.

Right now, the front room is stacked with boxes for books and packing other items. It's a bit of a slalom course to get around. On the up side, I have chicken soup going in the crock pot, with chickpeas, and I'll be adding the remaining meat from one of the game hens tomorrow when I get up. It'll be a lovely fortifying meal for after all that exposure to the cold.

More happy news is that today I got hold of mp3s for the Abney Park cd that I bought but couldn't rip to iTunes. Now it's happily on my iPod for my frequent listening pleasure.

I have no idea what the weather will be like tomorrow (aside from cold) but it's 22f right now and likely to get down into the teens later tonight. I'm not looking forward to being out in it at all, but the duties of friendship are many. I'll get through it somehow ;)

mythworker over on the Wild Hunt Blog noted that there's now a PDF up of the PanGaia article about influential Pagans that he wrote and where he mentions me in the reconstructionists section. Thanks Jason!

Went up to visit man_of_snows on Thursday with alfrecht. We had tea at an English style tea shop in Bellingham. The scones were very yummy and light like feathers. Mine tend to be rather more substantial, which I also like, but I do wonder how they get theirs so fluffy. We did a Jory Puja praising his poetic talents to celebrate his graduation Magna Cum Laude from Western, which involved singing a silly bhajan, fiery arti, and flinging carnation petals. (Yes, I helped pick up the petals after I flung them.) A bookshop was visited and "Ecotherapy" was purchased. Dinner was had at a local Vietnamese place.

Yesterday I took yiaya down to the airport for her niece's graduation. I'll be picking her up on Wednesday night when she gets back into town. Garuda's got an appointment Monday for an oil change prior to my road trip.

For the California folks -- I need to start getting my itinerary together. Here's what I'm looking at so far:

Leave Everett Wednesday the 24th, night in Eureka
Thursday arrive at the campsite for the camp out weekend
Sunday night the 28th, Sebastopol with Gus (got to email him separately)
After that, time with lwood and dpaxson for a few days, assuming they'll have me.
At some point during this interlude, ritual with blindwebster and visiting with jcalanthe
When we're all done being jolly together, head down to LA to see tagh333 and company for a day or two
At the end of the road, Lowell Ford down in Torrence
Head home. Back by July 7th or 8th.

So, folkses, put in your claims for my time!