Here we go again. End of another year, and — as in 2020 — I’ve been back through my newsletters from the past twelve months and collaged together the things I read, watched or listened to that stuck with me the most. It’s far from definitive, it’s not themed beyond being vaguely chronological, but it nevertheless forms a messy picture of where my head and heart were and went during 2021.

📖 READ

At the start of 2021, I came across Juliet Blackwell’s series of witchcraft mysteries, and became completely and utterly obsessed. They feature Lily, a witch who runs a vintage clothes shop in San Francisco. After years of travelling the globe in an attempt to deny and escape her magickal heritage and abilities, Lily’s finally building a life, community and family, until she gets caught up in one weird and witchy adventure after another. From reading, I can tell that there’s been loads of research and input from real magickal practitioners, because all the spellwork, folklore and other witchy elements have so much satisfying texture to them. The books are so readable, and using the secondhand clothes as a way of learning and telling people’s stories is so satisfying to a lifelong thrifter like me.

Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino is a collection of nine essays exploring everything from reality TV to religion via MDMA, marriage, identity and the internet. I read it in February, and two chapters in particular blew my mind: The I in Internet, about how our constant online performance of our identities impacts our understanding of ourselves; and Always Be Optimizing, about (among other things) the pressure to produce ourselves according to idealised Instagram aesthetics.

“In my earliest performance art works, I offered my body to be touched anywhere, be kissed, put needles through. I sat in silence, blindfolded, for long, long periods. People did different things to me. Now, I can’t help but hear the voices inside asking whether those performances were all just unwitting re-enactments of violence I’ve lived—psychology’s moth to a flame. Even though it never feels true, the voices have kept chorusing the question throughout a decade. Now I’m writing a book on how not to pathologize performance practices and I doubt even that will stop the voices.”
Read in early March but stayed with me much longer: Skin Has Two Sides, a beautiful essay about performance art by Adriana Disman.

Sex, sexuality and sexual identity came up more than ever in my therapeutic work this year. There’s a twofold reason for that, I think, one being that most people have had more space for reflection in the past couple of years than they had before. Thinking about sex and sexual identity from that perspective, rather than in the context of their interactions with others, seems to have led lots of people to do more exploration around and define on their own terms what they want sex and sexual expression to be like for them. Combined with that, the closure of clubs and other community spaces – and all their associated opportunities for hook-ups, play and other sexual or sexually-charged encounters – for such big parts of the past year seems to have led to more reflection around desire, curiosity, pleasure and the proactive quest for them – be it in solo sex, existing relationships or something else entirely. So I really loved this interview with Cain from Slag Wars about sex work, sobriety, creativity, queer community and the intersections between them.

In May, I read Carmen Maria Machado‘s experimental memoir, In The Dream House. I wrote about it here.

Another one from May: Burnout by Emily and Amelia Nagoski, which helped me reframe how I think about rest and connection and permission to take time off. Having grown up in real poverty, overworking to combat my money scarcity issues is a real thing for me. That’s what we call a maladaptive coping strategy, kids. A way of being or coping that we develop to help us get through something difficult but that ends up doing more harm than good. And, y’know, existing under capitalism. That’s a fucker too. So learning more of the chemical and physical effects of burnout, along with how to counter them, has been really helpful. Balance and not overcommitting is for sure an ongoing learning curve, but the Nagoskis’ book gave me a few more tools and ways of thinking about it that I was definitely grateful for.

I followed Burnout with The Bouncebackability Factor by Cait Donovan, a brilliant, practical book that identifies seven reasons you might be burning out (trauma and boundaries are in there, of course, but so are several others you might not have thought about), and then breaks down strategies and resources for addressing each one that even the most frazzled of burnt-out brains should be able to implement, creating some immediate relief before you go onto the more in-depth approaches.

By autumn, I was still reading about resisting and challenging productivity culture. Two favourites were Laziness Does Not Exist by Devon Price and How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell. Laziness Does Not Exist especially blew my mind through its framing of laziness as nothing more than a social construct (and as with other social constructs like gender or virginity, its one that’s advantageous to some while being harmful to others). That’s something that’s been on my mind since reading, and has helped me reframe my own thinking (and sometimes self-critical attitude) about ‘laziness’ and rest.
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“Teach yourself — and the space — that you are a collaborative force, and that one of the Great Works you can do together is…to do nothing. Sit there. Love your belongings: dust them off, tend to them, arrange them often. Notice the energy and tend to it. This is a workspace, but it also a joy space. The spell is cast when you let yourself turn a space of generativity and work into a space of safety and softness, long quiet moments, and slow magic.”
Luna Luna magazine – one of my fave places for beautiful poetry, essays and imagery – launched a new series called Slow Alchemy, ‘a column for creatives, magic-makers, and dreamers.’ Here’s the first instalment, with several prompts and suggestions for bringing in more slow magic to your creative practice.

In June, I read a brilliant anthology: Arcane Perfection, from Cutlines Press, which is a collection of essays, poetry, art, rage, love, rituals, spells, and interviews by, for, and about queer, trans, and intersex witches. Beginning life as a coven project that was then expanded to encompass queer, trans and intersex people from around the world, it came out in 2017 but only crossed my radar this summer. Being obsessed with all things esoteric, I’ve read a ton of books exploring this sort of subject material, but never one like this, from such a fiercely and unapologetically queer perspective. From trans deities to protection rituals to sex work as an act of magick, there was a real range of topics, voices and ideas, and I know it’s going to be one I return to over and over.

“You wind back into your mother’s womb, she winds back into hers, like branches retreating into buds on a tree and it all goes back in billions of unbroken lines to the first mitochondrial cell dividing in the pre-Cambrian ocean 3 and a half billion years ago.”
Another one from 2017 but new to me: this amazing two–part interview with Grant Morrison absolutely blew my mind. It explores ritual, performance, illness, making magic by making art, psychedelics, subjective truth and reality and a ton of other topics. Hard recommend.

An entire quarter of a century after the iconic nineties film The Craft came out, here’s a lovely round-up of pagans and magickal practitioners sharing their reflections on what the film meant to them.

“As the sky got darker through the windows, our bodies blurred and our feet became heavy and automatic. The acts were introduced as first time performers. Within minutes they were both naked and dancing and the older dykes I was with cheered, clapped and celebrated. I was petrified but also in awe – I thought ‘Wow, this is what we do here – we celebrate our bodies. We don’t hide ourselves.'”
As drag nights started recommencing, I loved this article about reconnecting with queer pride, joy and community.

“I reminded myself that, if I go too long without making some kind of art, I get self-destructive. Even if what I create is useless, or if art is self-indulgent, destroying myself would be more so. What good am I to the world or anyone in it if I’m destroying myself? I thought of that night in February 2017 when I realized art can change the world—it was a poetry reading that was more like a riot that was more like a party. The room was packed with rowdy poets. We stomped our feet and clapped our hands and beat on drums. We sang hymns of love and rage, and howled at the moon.”
This brilliant article by Jessie Lynn McMains is a much-needed retort to the ‘why-bother blues’ that all artists experience at times: those sneaky voices from culture, or family or somewhere inside us that say it’s self-indulgent and pointless to spend time creating when the world’s going to hell and everything’s hopeless and there’s so many more important things we could be focused on instead.

Novels that stuck with me most this year: Boy Parts by Eliza Clark (gruesome, sexy and unsettling in the best possible way); Shuck by Daniel Allen Cox (art, homelessness and sex work in New York, I read this back-to-back with Boy Parts and could not have anticipated how much they’d complement each other); Cover Your Tracks by Claire Askew (third in the DI Birch series and just as brilliant as the others, I read this in two sittings in my garden and felt truly transported, pun totally intended); Sealed by Naomi Booth (gloriously compelling, evocative and nightmare-inducing); and People Like Her by Ellery Lloyd (a smart and scary thrill-ride through the world of Instagram ‘mumfluencers’ that made me triple-check all my social media privacy settings and I’m not even a parent).
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And I’d be remiss not to mention Test Signal, a collection of the best new Northern writing published by Bloomsbury/Dead Ink this summer. It’s a brilliant anthology, and it’s a real honour to have my short story We’re Made of Electricity featured in it alongside so many authors I really admire. Even Cosmo is a fan.

🎧LISTEN

​FRIED is a podcast about burnout by Cait Donovan (whose book I mentioned above), with each episode featuring raw, real-life interviews with people who’ve been through burnout and lived to tell the tale. I loved listening to this while walking or cooking at the start of the year, and this episode especially, where Cait talks to Melanie Moberg about co-dependency, boundaries and how they can interact with burnout, was really useful to me.

The podcast that kept me company on several frozen woodland walks during the early dark part of the year was Missing Witches, a research-based, feminist, occult storytelling project. It introduced me to so many amazing artists, healers and other fascinating souls, as well as giving me a much deeper understanding of some of the bigger names within witchcraft and esoterica.

Sex Magic is another of my favourite podcasts, and in early 2021 it returned for a fifth season. Whether or not you ID as a witch, there’s loads to love in this inclusive series of interviews and other episodes about the intersections between sexuality and spirituality. There’s tons of beautiful material about sex and sexuality as a framework for exploring self-love, magic and mental health, and topics as diverse as kink, sex work, stress, pleasure and erotic archetypes.
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This summer, I was featured as a guest on The Bisexual Agenda. In this episode, host Kit and I chatted about concepts like body acceptance, fatphobia, why capitalism makes self-love difficult, and how reclaiming pleasure for our bodies can be a radical act. Something I heard a lot from my clients during 2020/21 was how their relationships with their bodies changed in all sorts of ways over lockdown, so in some ways this episode is a response to that too. I share some resources in the episode, but two books I massively recommend on this topic are Just Eat It by Laura Thomas and Health at Every Size by Lindo Bacon. Also a fan of Fat Activism by Charlotte Cooper and Hunger by Roxane Gay (though check out the content warnings for Hunger beforehand if you’re a survivor of any kind of sexual trauma or violence).

Body acceptance, eating disorder recovery and healing our relationships with food, movement, our bodies and ourselves are massive topics for me, on both a personal and professional basis (if just being a human living in a culture with such messed-up relationships to all these things doesn’t do that to you, being a therapist and someone with a history of disordered eating definitely will). As such, I’m endlessly fascinated, often unsettled and regularly outright upset and grossed-out by the way I see things like food, exercise, health and wellbeing being discussed online. So I was happy to discover Maintenance Phase podcast, which debunks and decodes so many myths on these topics in such in-depth detail, is the sort of thing I love. Always suspected that wellbeing and weight loss trends had more to do with capitalism and other oppressive agendas than improving your health or self-love level? This podcast deep-dives into the social and cultural contexts of these phenomena, challenges the BS and will hopefully leave you feeling more resilient and grounded in your own relationship to food.​

📺 WATCH

SEA BIRDS is a heartfelt and award-winning mini-documentary about the Buckettes, a group of women who’ve been swimming in the ocean together for over a decade. Lasting less than ten minutes, it has some lovely reflections on wild swimming, connection and community as ways of healing grief, trauma and dislocation, along with some brain-meltingly beautiful aerial shots.

The Starr Sisters is a brilliantly warm and uplifting tribute to both survivorship and sisterhood. Two sisters, now in their seventies, live together in a Los Angeles apartment where the fairylights continually twinkle and the candy drawer is always fully stocked. Despite surviving abuse and violence as children, followed by other challenges as they became adults, their motto now is that it’s never too late to have a happy childhood, and their don’t-give-a-fuck way of dressing, speaking and living – along with their clear adoration for themselves and each other – beautifully illuminates the power of prioritising fun and joy (whether or not it’s part of trauma recovery).

BRUJOS has been out for a few years now, but it only crossed my radar this year, so for anyone else who missed it on its initial release: it’s a queer, POC-centred, free-to-watch webseries about four queer Latino grad students with magical powers learning to harness their abilities in the middle of a brujo-hunt. It’s visually gorgeous, queer and punk af, and all-round glorious in content, approach and aesthetic. Taking on topics like class, queerness, gentrification, intimacy and indigenous healing practices, there’s so much to love about this. You can watch the first two series here, or here’s a brilliant interview with creator Ricardo Gamboa.