Book People

Celebrating the Gregorian, courting wild queens, flowering dusk, letting the wildness get in your bones, drawing down the moon, and marrying spirits

Comrades—

Happy holidays, and, to quote a delightful message from McAlla Ann at Saturnvox, “Happy New Year to you if you celebrate the Gregorian!” We wish you health, wealth, joy, peace, and all good things¹ as the days lengthen.

As our New Year’s bonus, we want to introduce you to some of our favorite book people from this year. Think of it as an animist take on a best-of list. We’ve cribbed the term ‘book people’ from Gordon White’s Ani.Mystic, taking up his argument that a book is not an object – it is “relationally composed of its authors, readings, encountered beings, contextual encounters, and other books.” A book is a mycelial network of ideas that co-create our world. A book is a person. A book is an encounter:

You know exactly where you were—sitting on a bus, waiting for a lover in a park—when you first read those lines, when you first encountered that life-changing idea. The experience is wedded to Place.

That’s something we want to honor in talking about our favorite books from the year, and in introducing them to you. These introductions are not in any particular order. We hope that they enliven your coming year, the way they did our last.

Jessie & Brian.

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Brian’s Top 5 Books of 2022

(A short side note: I did, as always, try to pick some books that J and I had not read together. However, I want to say that one of the great privileges of a magical partnership is that so many of these books are the start of conversations between us. They have value in themselves, but the shared journeys through their ideas are pearls of rarest price.)

Courting the Wild Queen by Sean O'Donoghue

Walking a long loop at the Austin airport, between the armadillo gift shop and the people jockeying for position over the lone working charge station, I was listening to Jessie read me a poem about how the wolf is the god of the deer. I was in Austin for a Rune Soup get together that J couldn't make, and missing her, and we had both been reading Courting the Wild Queen. She was ahead of me (always :) ) and had finished. And now, hearing her read, I was transported into the forest that grows around us whenever we talk.That is what Courting the Wild Queen is to me: it is longing for and finding your beloved, an enchantment calling me home from this world to a truer one, and a loving promise of a future that we make come true.

Drawing Down the Moon by Margot Adler

I lived and breathed this book over the last three weeks before Yule. I felt like I was getting to know a secret world that was right in front of me for years: J recommended it to me as part of my getting up to speed on Wicca and Paganism, where I am sorely unstudied. It was about 3 hours in that I realized this was the same Margot Adler who I knew from NPR growing up, and had never understood was a witch. In some ways, that is a metaphor for my whole blinded approach to witchcraft. This book is important not only for its history of the modern American witch movement, but also for the fact that it centers so many voices of that movement: Starhawk, Zsuzsanna Budapest, and Adler herself, just for a few. It brings you into a living practice and is also a book about how a movement grows—and what it means to be part of a tradition that believes in change.

The Ancient Celts and Druids: A Very Short Introduction by Barry Cunliffe

In the early part of the year, I fell into a frequently repeated spiral of needing to know more about the Celts and Druids: it used to hit only every 2 years or so, and now feels like it's grabbing me every 3 months. And honestly, this will always be the best take on the subject. But if you're looking to be able to really bother your friends at dinner parties with things like "It looks like Celtic languages may have been a maritime trading invention," I highly recommend listening to both of these excellent books while driving. You are guaranteed dreams of white robed figures charting the movements of stars.

Ani.Mystic by Gordon White

Ani.Mystic, for me, was time travel. Being a part of Rune Soup meant that these ideas were something I'd heard Gordon talk about often and sat with, making them a part of my life. So this book wasn't just something I was reading on trips to see my folks, or dog eared and living inside my backpack like the good travel companion it was: it was a talisman of years of conversations. It was a stargate or rather, a time portal. It took me back to the prayers and magic done around a computer in my old apartment, knowing that our words and wishes could make a difference to a small town in Tasmania threatened by fire. Because of course we can: that's the enchanted world that has always been there. It’s the world that is there: those that have eyes, let them see.

The Swill by Michael Gutierrez

I've known versions of The Swill for years. Mike Gutierrez is more than just one of my favorite novelists: he's a writing partner, a grad school comrade, and a deep and true friend. But I've read the Swill on computer screens, looking for edits: the process feels like trying to help your friend find the best wedding dress. Reading The Swill over a long weekend felt like getting to go to the wedding. But more than just seeing something beautiful come to life, I was struck again by the humanity of it. It's a story that holds heroism up to a good hard look, and finds not just that it's wanting, but a new way of seeing that story. It's a good yarn and it sticks to your ribs.

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Jessie’s Top 5 Books of 2022

Flowering Dusk by Ella Young

This is the memoir of Ella Young, the purple-robed druid of Berkeley—poet, storyteller, gunrunner, godmother of the Dunites, friend and collaborator of Maud Gunn, W.B. Yeats, AE, Kenneth Morris, and many others. She was extensively collecting and recording traditional Irish stories at the exact same time as W.Y. Evans-Wentz (yet is notably and unfairly less recognized for it).

I wanted to read this after reading her stories on the Gobain Saur last year. When I couldn't find a copy, because it's out of print, Brian got it for me from his local university library. Turns out it was a signed edition, from her lecture tour of the East Coast in the 1920s. I mostly spent time with this book on Brian's couch on the coldest evenings of January, listening to Alice Coltrane while snow fell.

Read it for an account of a woman who saw a beautiful, animate world equally as a refugee in America’s redwood groves, deserts, and sounds as in the heaths, hills, and rocky shores of her native country. Read it for the beauty and poetry of her writing alone. This is the writing of a woman who heard faerie music all her life. Read it, and read it aloud—it is not a book for silence.

Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer

I am an idiot for not reading this book sooner. I had a copy gifted to me several years ago by my sister-in-law, even, and hadn't gotten to it because of some vague anarchic attitude that because it was popular it was likely overhyped. Well, I finally got to it this year because it was one of the recommended texts for Siv Watkins's Microanimism course. I read this book everywhere, but I made a special point of reading it outside, even in February in New England. We spent time together in the sheltered gazebo down by the frozen river, and when I started maple sugaring the trees on my property—inspired by the book, before I even finished it—I read it by the maple fire. 

I was so unbelievably wrong about it being overhyped, by the way. This changed my life; it brought me into deeper relations with the plant people forever. It made me a better listener—how many books do that?

Secret Teachings of Plants by Stephen Buhner

In August, I went to harvest seaweed in Maine for a week, but loved it so much I stayed on for nearly a month. I spent a lot of time with book people that month, as there was no internet and very little cell service. My seaweed mentor had an extensive library which included Stephen Buhner's complete works. I grabbed this particular book because the title sounded familiar. I’d heard of Buhner but not read him. I read a few pages at a time by clip-on booklight in my tent, listening to the barn owls and coyotes, before falling asleep. I read in longer spurts, usually on the beach, during the daily two-hour mid-day break waiting for the tide to rise enough to pull the boats in and unload the day's haul.

This book is about plants, but it’s also, largely, about the heart, and about listening, and about letting the wildness get in your bones and in your soul so that you can never really be tamed ever again. In other words, it was the perfect companion to my time in Maine. It will always be entangled with that time, for me.

Spirit Marriage by Megan Rose

I read this as an e-book on Scribd, mostly in one continual frantic sitting over a two-day period when I should have been doing other things. Literally, I blew off work meetings and social plans to read it. I will be buying a physical copy for future re-readings. 

I found it by the kind of pure chance that can only ever be spirit business. Brian and I had been having conversations over the summer, largely inspired by Courting the Wild Queen and Sean Donoghue’s other work, about sovereignty and spirit marriage. It was incredible to find a book a so many longform interviews exploring exactly the kinds of questions we had through diverse spirit marriage practices in Scottish Faery seeing, Shakta Tantra, West African shrinekeeping, Haitian Vodun, New Orleans Voodoo, American neopaganism, and more. 

The book was adapted from a doctoral thesis and is thoroughly researched and rigorously organized. At the same time, it was written by a magical practitioner who has a spirit marriage of her own, who talks very openly about the ritual work and spirit work that were part of the book’s creation. It seems like such a low bar to clear, for an academic book about spirits to be written by someone who actually believes in spirits, yet here we are.

As I said previously, I recommended it to anyone who works with spirits, regardless of whether or not you marry them.

Wheel of Small Gods by Brian Wilkins

It’s cheating, a bit, to include this book as my best of the year since I have been in relationship with this book—and the spirits it shares—for at least three years, as part of helping Brian bring it forth. But seeing it in its final form, holding it, opening its spine, reading it on the page, and finding the perfect spot for it on my shelves—all of that only happened this year. And so much of these poems is about the strange, circling, ebbing, malleable, and profoundly alive nature of time and spirits of time, anyways.

Photo courtesy of Watkins Books.

I believe all poetry should be read aloud, but especially Brian’s poetry, which relies so much on sound for its evocations:

As horsehair catches catgut strings

aluminum rings with silt-rock scrape.

Echoes, tuning with marsh wrens, escape

the shore into the quiet flow of lake

skimming below the jon boat’s skin

like waltzing heels float over sprung floor. 

Wind feels its way over chest waders, blunted,

just as oxy shunted all to dull distance. 

Touch we ever this existence? Full

disclosure, I so much hope it so.

The most deeply fulfilling part about this book coming out this year was the stories of real healing that emerged from the people who used it to connect with these healing spirits. This was never ‘just’ poetry, whatever that means. I knew that from the first time I read it, and each time I circle back again.

1. And by good things we mean: the perfect pair of jeans, 10 acres and a water source, sweet boyfriend energy, and positive fairy encounters, should you want them.