In lieu of the usual #TarotTuesday Irreverent Tarot I give you a slapped-together live recording of my talk at PCA this past weekend, ‘Open Your Heart of Wild Honey’: Occult Medievalism in Leonora Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet. I very lightly edited the audio so it’s still full of ahhs and umms and stumbles of various kinds. You can’t hear that people do actually chuckle a couple times. But as I no longer have to care about publish or perish (well, we all have to worry about the latter) why not share it with the few people who might be interested?
The launch of the new Divination, Witchcraft and the Occult area went well with some terrific presentations including:
Subverting Patriarchy: Ecological Feminist Resistance in Witches, Saints, and Voodoo Queens – Christine Battista
Conjuring Black Aliveness: Depictions of Black Female Aliveness in Afia Atokora’s Conjure Women – Gwendolyn (Dolyn) Moore
Once Upon a Timeline: A Faery History from Dangerous to Delightful and Back Again – Sapphire Hamblin
“Queens of Ghost-Land” 134 Years Later: Un-Masking An Appalachian Witchcraft Accuser, Aíne Norris
“What Field is Your PhD in, Exactly?”: Tarot, the Grail, and Esoteric Pedagogy, Shannon McRae
Next year Atlanta! Put on your witchy thinking caps; I’m already trying to persuade folks to come, and I am planning to propose a roundtable to discuss Amy Hale’s Communist witches and cyborg magic: the emergence of queer, feminist, esoteric futurism if I can twist enough arms. Feel free to propose any topic under our broad umbrella. If in doubt, email me through the contact form. the CFP will open this fall.
Many thanks to my roommate Mis Wendy: we had fun! Thanks to Carol Bernard for kindness including taking pix of me yammering. Thanks to all the PCA folks, including Nicole for patience and Antares for inviting, even if we were too low battery to take you up on it. John Lent received an award to honour his many contributions to the conference as well as to the fields of both comics and Asian Popular Culture. It was great to celebrate with him and meet his son and daughter in law. And New Orleans is always a feast of fun. Yum!
