How to Survive Happy Ever After with Lissa Sloan

I’ve been thinking a lot about what fairy tale characters go through.

When I was little, my favorite tales were about a quest. I loved the adventure and excitement of it all. I think my favorite part was the coziness of going on a long journey (on horseback, please—I loved horses!), getting wet and cold and possibly wounded, and then taking refuge at an inn or friendly castle where my companions and I would be given hot baths and food and new clothes and warm fires and soft beds.

I think it was the safety after the danger that appealed so much, though I only thought about the danger abstractly then. It was only a story, after all. And yet, when I think about it now, fairy tale characters deal with some serious trauma. Cinderella is abused by her family. Hansel and Gretel are purposefully abandoned by theirs, then kidnapped, imprisoned, and nearly eaten. Little Red Riding Hood IS eaten, in some versions at least. There is betrayal and murder, dismemberment and blinding, and that’s just for the protagonists. It’s heavy stuff.

And yet, for the most part, those protagonists keep going, somehow. They sometimes make unwise choices—they use that key they’re warned not to, they stray from the path or make a bad bargain. But in the end, they fight off the witches, make their way through the wood, escape parents who want to kill them, or worse, marry them. And at last, they arrive at a well-deserved Happy Ever After.

That makes for a satisfying story, but when you think about it, how can it be? How can these characters go through what they do and come out unscathed? My guess is only because fairy tale characters are fairly one-dimensional, and the stories are very simple. But if these characters and their stories were fleshed out, surely there would be some long-term consequences from all those grim experiences.

It’s an idea that’s long been working in my subconscious. Not being able to admit to (let alone know how to process or even articulate) some of my own experiences, I began exploring them in the context of fairy tales. For quite a while, I only knew I was writing things I needed to write and that writing provided relief from something I couldn’t name.

When I began writing about a Cinderella whose glass slippers no longer fit her, I knew I was digging into my past experiences of searching for a purpose and a place to belong. But I later realized there was far more going on. I was examining the consequences of trauma. In the case of the narrator of my book, Glass and Feathers, these consequences are things like anxiety, withdrawal, and making choices that harm not only her, but also the person she loves most. Writing a journey of healing for my girl in the glass slippers provided me a map for how I might face these consequences in my own life.

In the last couple of years prior to my own book coming out, I’ve been excited to discover other authors exploring the effects of trauma in their fairy tale writing. While more fairy tale adjacent, Wendy, Darling continues Peter Pan from the point of view of an adult Wendy who has been in denial of the harm done to her by the eternal boy. Weep, Woman, Weep examines the tale of La Llorona through the lens of intergenerational trauma passed from mother to daughter and tells the story of a woman determined to break the cycle. After the Forest asks what internal scars Hansel and Gretel would truly bear after escaping the witch.

It seems to me fairy tales are perfectly suited to explore the consequences of real-world trauma. Because their protagonists aren’t elves, fairies, or shape-shifters. They’re very often ordinary mortals, and not terribly powerful ones at that. Perhaps they are wealthy or even royal, but they are just as likely to be despised youngest children, dispossessed soldiers, or babies traded away for a handful of greens. And yet, when they or their loved ones are in trouble, they possess and wield an instinctual power. The princes in Sleeping Beauty and Snow White awaken (or even resurrect) their princesses with a kiss, Rapunzel cures her love’s blindness with her tears, the Handless Maiden even spontaneously grows her hands back—not because she wants to have hands again, but so she can save her child from drowning. This power comes from their very human emotions like love, grief, and compassion.

It is a very hopeful idea. Because if these characters are able to heal their own and others’ hurts by virtue of their very humanity, perhaps we can too.

 Guest Contributor Bio

Lissa Sloan is the author of Glass and Feathers, a dark continuation of the traditional Cinderella tale. Her fairy tale poems and short stories have appeared in The Fairy Tale Magazine, Niteblade Magazine, Corvid Queen, and anthologies from World Weaver Press. Visit Lissa online at lissasloan.com, or connect on Facebook, Instagram, @lissa_sloan, or Twitter, @LissaSloan.

Glass and Feathers serial cover is by Amanda Bergloff.

The Bruja Professor, a witchy take on literature, the occult & pop culture, is the scholarly sister to Enchantment Learning & Living, an inspirational blog celebrating life’s simple pleasures, everyday mysticism, and delectable recipes that are guaranteed to stir the kitchen witch in you.

If you enjoyed what you just read and believe that stories are magic & true magic is in the everyday…or your next good read, subscribe to my newsletter below for regular doses of enchantment.

Want even more inspiration? Follow me on Instagram and Facebook. Here’s to a magical life!

Designing the Rook and Rose Pattern Deck with Marie Brennan

This is your past, the good and the ill of it, and that which is neither . . .

The Rook and Rose Triology

It seemed like a good idea at the time: since the fantasy series my co-writer Alyc Helms and I were writing (the Rook and Rose trilogy, under the name M.A. Carrick) is set in an invented world, we shouldn’t use the familiar tarot for the divinatory cards that appear in the story. No, this called for an original deck, one that would reflect the culture and history of the setting.

Of course, it wasn’t that simple.

Designing our own deck immediately opened up countless questions: how many suits should the deck have? Should it have suits? Numbered (like the pip cards of a normal playing deck or the Minor Arcana of the tarot), uniquely named (like the cards of the Faerie Oracle or Lenormand deck), or a mix of both kinds? How many cards should there be in total? What concepts would be represented, and what concepts left out? And how are the cards read -- what layouts do the people in this world use? Do the cards have reversed significance as well? What would we call the deck? Because both Alyc and I are anthropologists and folklorists by academic training, we even went beyond the deck itself to ask ourselves questions like what games people might play with the cards and what in-world folklore the various names and images might be referencing.

It was a ton of work. And worst of all, we had to know the answers to many of these questions before we started writing the series. Not all of them -- the cards languished under placeholder names for a good long while -- but the fundamental structure and significance of the deck, yes. Because our main protagonist, Ren, uses these cards . . . and what’s more, we didn’t want to go the route I’ve used in one of my own solo series, deciding what a given spread needs to say and reverse-engineering a selection of cards that will convey that message. Instead I took a blank deck, wrote the names on the cards in Sharpie, and any time we needed a layout in the story, I shuffled and dealt and we wrote what we got.

The results were eerily on point.

Sometimes too much so! There’s one scene in the first book, The Mask of Mirrors (whose title comes from the card of secrets and lies), where we had to lean on the existence of certain magical defenses to stop Ren from seeing a piece of information we really needed her not to gain until the second book (The Liar’s Knot, the card of trust and betrayal). But every time a card or a whole spread played perfectly into our plot, we gained more confidence that we’d designed the deck right. It fit with our characters, our world, and had just the right balance of specificity and flexibility, enabling a variety of interpretations. On occasion -- one chapter in The Mask of Mirrors, one in Labyrinth’s Heart (the third and final novel, the card of stillness), and the entire plot of the related novelette “Pearl’s Price” -- we even used the deck to structure the narrative, building our scenes around what the cards evoked.

This is your present, the good and the ill of it, and that which is neither . . .

So what does the deck look like?

The back image of the Oracle deck.

The first decision was one of nomenclature: we named it the pattern deck. That word calls to mind the connection between textiles and fate, and point one seven seconds later, textile imagery had spread all across the culture of the Vraszenians, the people who created the pattern deck. Because of that, we also termed the suits “threads” -- and because Alyc and I are the aforementioned anthropologists, this wound up connecting to Vraszenian religion and beliefs about the multi-part nature of the soul. But the rest of our worldbuilding is another story . . .

We opted for three suits, initially for very pragmatic reasons. Four would call to mind the tarot and the regular playing cards of the West; five felt like too many. But three wound up being perfect, because the series has another magical tradition (developed by a different ethnic group) which is all about numerology and sacred geometry, and thanks to that corner of our worldbuilding, the number three wound up as a recurrent and significant motif in the story. We also decided to name every card individually, rather than numbering them -- partly because it just felt more flavorful for the narrative, but also because making the deck unnumbered would help distinguish it from that foreign, mathematical tradition. (A decision we regretted at times, as we struggled through the long process of naming every single card. Some were easy; some . . . weren’t. One, which fortunately hadn’t been mentioned during The Mask of Mirrors, didn’t get its final name until after we’d finished drafting The Liar’s Knot. Another, which is a special case, dragged out all the way to the revisions on Labyrinth’s Heart.)

The oracles cards: The Mask of Mirrors, The Liar’s Knot, and Labyrinth’s Heart.

The suits -- or rather, the threads -- aren’t arbitrary divisions. Like the suits of the tarot, each one has a theme. The spinning thread, represented by a spindle, is focused on the “inner self,” which is to say matters of the mind and the spirit. The woven thread, represented by a shuttle, addresses the “outer self,” concepts that have to do with relationships and social institutions. And the cut thread, represented by shears, deals with the “physical self,” the body and the material world. In addition to these, there’s a much smaller set of cards (seven instead of twenty) for the Vraszenian clans, though for in-story reasons those have largely fallen out of use by the time of the trilogy.

Although the cards are named instead of numbered, we do have something reminiscent of the court cards: the Faces and the Masks. These again link to the Vraszenian religion, wherein all deities are believed to have two aspects, one benevolent, the other wrathful. Each thread has four pairs of Faces and Masks, and the theme of duality they bring in extends to the interpretation of all the cards in the deck. Placement within a layout, not orientation, determines whether a card should be read as positive or negative . . . and everything, no matter how seemingly good or bad, contains its opposing aspect. Drowning Breath may be the card of fear, but doesn’t fear exist to warn us of danger? The Face of Song may be the card of peace, but isn’t peace sometimes a facade achieved at the cost of ignoring problems?

Layouts are one aspect that evolved quite a bit as we wrote the series. At the outset, our only plan was for a nine-card spread, three rows of three -- a grid whose rows are introduced with the phrases I’ve been using in this post, This is your past/present/future, the good and the ill of it, and that which is neither. But, well, it takes a lot of words to write through the interpretation of that many cards; we weren’t sure our readers would sit still for it over and over again, and besides, sometimes that felt like overkill. So we introduced both a single-card draw for immediate inspiration and a three-card line for guidance on a problem, with the first card representing your current situation, the second the path you should follow, and the third where you may wind up.

That was all in place early in drafting the first book. But seven is another number of significance in the series, for example with the seven Vraszenian clans, and it felt to us like there would be a layout built on that framework. Thus, while working on The Liar’s Knot, we invented the seven-card wheel: one position for each of the clans, offering more in-depth insight on subjects like allies and obstacles, the question you must ask and the wisdom you should remember. And with that in place, well, the number five was sitting right there, conspicuously empty among the one, three, seven, and nine-card options. In Labyrinth’s Heart we reveal that this is used, very rarely, for cursing other people -- not a step to be taken lightly!

This is your future, the good and the ill of it, and that which is neither . . .

Even before we started writing the series, Alyc and I dreamt of making the pattern deck for real. Not my blank cards scribbled on with Sharpie -- precious though they are to me, given the role they played in shaping the series -- but a proper deck, illustrated and printed in a form we could share with the world. We’re delighted beyond words to say that dream recently became reality: thanks to the support of over four hundred backers on Kickstarter, we now have the money to pay three amazing artists, A.C. Esguerra, Avery Liell-Kok, and H. Emiko Ogasawara, to bring our vision to life.

We made the pattern deck for the world of our story, but we hope its particular structure and set of concepts can be of use to other people, whether for divination, personal reflection, card games, or storytelling. On our website there is a simplified widget -- which will have the card art once that’s completed! -- where you can lay a three-card line or a nine-card spread, and if you want to explore the full list of cards with their significances, we’ve made those available as well. And if all of this sounds like something you’d enjoy exploring, you can pre-order the pattern deck on BackerKit right now, along with several add-ons like the full-size guidebook, a cloth bag for the deck, or dice for playing a pattern-related game.

May you see the Face and not the Mask!

Guest Contributor Bio

Marie Brennan is a former anthropologist and folklorist who shamelessly leans on her academic fields for inspiration. She recently misapplied her professors’ hard work to The Game of 100 Candles and the short novel Driftwood. She is the author of the Hugo Award-nominated Victorian adventure series The Memoirs of Lady Trent along with several other series, over eighty short stories, several poems, and the New Worlds series of worldbuilding guides; as half of M.A. Carrick, she has written the epic Rook and Rose trilogy, beginning with The Mask of Mirrors. For more information and social media, visit linktr.ee/swan_tower.

The Bruja Professor, a witchy take on literature, the occult & pop culture, is the scholarly sister to Enchantment Learning & Living, an inspirational blog celebrating life’s simple pleasures, everyday mysticism, and delectable recipes that are guaranteed to stir the kitchen witch in you.

If you enjoyed what you just read and believe that stories are magic & true magic is in the everyday…or your next good read, subscribe to my newsletter below for regular doses of enchantment.

Want even more inspiration? Follow me on Instagram and Facebook. Here’s to a magical life!

Re-Enchant Your Life with the Tarot

This post originally appeared on The Carterhuagh School of Folklore & the Fantastic’s blog. And can I just say I’m swooning at the magical cuteness of the graphic they made and let me steal away?

Last week, Sara and Brittany asked those of us taking the Everyday Magic Challenge an important question: What fairy tale are you?

Being a tarot-inclined bruja, my eyes went directly to the divination deck sitting on my writing desk before they even finished asking the question. The tarot, you see, is its own folktale. It’s a timeless story and an ever-evolving one that starts with the Fool and follows him as he journeys into the great wide world, much like Joseph Campbell’s traditional hero’s journey… only waaaaayyyyy cooler.

Here’s the fun part about the Fool’s journey: It plays with the staid template of the hero’s journey. The tarot, at its heart, has a lot of trickster energy in it and resists anything too literal, always pushing you to think creatively, poetically, magically rather than in stifling narrative boxes.

For one thing, the Fool is not about completing A Journey but A Series of Journeys. We are always beginning and ending phases of our lives, leaving something behind to embrace something new. We don’t just stop when the chapter ends.

And we don’t always have to leave home to go on an adventure!

That was a comforting thought for me during the pandemic when we literally couldn’t leave our homes during lockdown. My journey had to be an internal one and, thank the powers that be, an online one—where would I be without my internet friends? Or the tarot, for that matter?

I am grateful to have many quiet, soul-nourishing conversations with the deck each morning as I enjoy my first cup of coffee and bask in the early-dawn hush of a day full of possibility. And I always love it when my familiars join me. They are two black cats that represent the duality of the tarot: Smoke (aloof and mysterious) and Juniper (playful and mischievous). Together, we explore the next chapter in our story, at home in both the sage advice and puckish riddles the cards reveal to us. The beauty of this ritual is in knowing that as soon as I finish one journey, either out in the world or in my inner dreamscape, there is always another calling to me to bring me a deeper understanding of myself and the world around me.

Here is the other delightful secret of the Fool’s Journey: We are always in a state of unknowing AND a state of familiarity. We take comfort in the magical items that protect and heal us, like beloved amulets or soothing pots of tea. We feel a thrill of excitement in the unexpected enchantments that come our way—an invitation, a chance meeting, the first apples of fall. And yes, sometimes we feel fear when we take a wrong turn and find ourselves in a dark, haunted wood. But the cards are there to talk with you. To help you find your way back into the light and sometimes make your home in the darkness, as much wisdom can be found there.

Then we wind our way home, either to our literal sanctuary or sense of self or both, content to have completed an important journey… and the cycle begins again.

We are not stagnant beings. We do not stop growing. Each new milestone, each new curve in the path, in fact, only reveals how little we know. Now that might sound like a terrible fate—being in a constant state of unknowing—but I assure you, it’s delightful. Consider the wild woods of folklore or the enchanted treasure troves of myth. Half the fun of them is in the fundamental understanding that we will never know the whole of them. Think of all the mysteries hidden in the heart of the woods! Imagine all the treasures buried at the bottom of the sea! We will never know the whole of life’s wonders and so we are always able to be delighted and awe-inspired by what we find. And when the world feels too big, as it can sometimes, we have the safety of our sanctuaries—our constant state of familiarity—to retreat to before beginning our next adventure.

Folklore is something that makes peace with mystery, the great numinous unknown.

So, too, does the tarot. The more we let go of finite narratives like the hero’s journey, the more expansive we become. The more we can see our personal myth as an ever-evolving unfolding story that deepens in meaning and resonance over time, the more we can begin to see ourselves as dynamic, expansive beings with a multitude of stories within us. In the same way, the meaning of the cards can change over time as we develop our relationship with the deck and become more attuned to our personal journeys.

We are all made up of stories and the Fool represents, in many ways, the stories we tell about ourselves. The major arcana begins with the Fool leaving on a grand adventure and ends with the World. The message is clear: By the end of any good journey, we are at home in the world, at one with ourselves and our place this wild and wonderful universe.

Isn’t that what a good story does for us? It reminds us that we are connected to worlds outside ourselves and within. This is why I’ve begun to think of myself as a story witch. Between conversations with the tarot and conversations with beloved folklorists and fellow writers, Sara and Brittany, I’ve come to find story magic can help us re-enchant our lives and reimagine the stories we tell about ourselves.

For example, I was once a burned-out educator and people-pleaser. Now? I’m taking my power back and becoming the main character of my own life again, thanks to the incredible community that is The Carterhaugh School of Folklore and the Fantastic.

It makes me SO delighted to offer up a little magic of my own in their latest Enchant course.

I’ll be contributing a special series titled, “Conversing with the Tarot to Conjure Main Character Magic.” This Enchant tarot series is designed to help those suffering from burnout and stress to recapture their main character energy by consulting the deck. The cards are the embodiment of story magic and, by conversing with them—exploring the stories and iconography that overlap with folklore—we can learn how to reclaim our own story and find enchantment—and empowerment—in our daily lives.

Come join us on a journey into the expansive world of stories!

Note: The link I provided for the course has a special code so that a portion of the price you pay will support me and my work as a professor, writer, and bruja.

The Bruja Professor, a witchy take on literature, the occult & pop culture, is the scholarly sister to Enchantment Learning & Living, an inspirational blog celebrating life’s simple pleasures, everyday mysticism, and delectable recipes that are guaranteed to stir the kitchen witch in you.

If you enjoyed what you just read and believe that stories are magic & true magic is in the everyday…or your next good read, subscribe to my newsletter below for regular doses of enchantment.

Want even more inspiration? Follow me on Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter. Here’s to a magical life!

Putting Down the Burnout Crown with The Carterhaugh School of Folklore & the Fantastic

Confession: I absolutely adore the wonderful word witches behind The Carterhaugh School of Folklore & the Fantastic, Sara and Brittany! In fact, they really helped me find my way back to everyday magic during the dark days of the early pandemic. Even now, they nourish such a loving community of like-minded folklorists, storytellers, and book lovers all looking to reclaim our right to everyday enchantments and a life beyond burnout.

All of which is to say that I was beyond excited when they asked me to contribute some tarot magic for their new course Enchant, which you can read more about below…

What do you feel when you hear the word “burnout?”

Maybe it’s a sense of instant recognition or heaviness in your chest or limbs. Maybe it’s more like emotional exhaustion or a feeling of flatness. Maybe it’s just a big, gray BLAH or like sinking into the Neverending Story’s Swamp of Sadness.

For us, it’s kind of a resigned recognition, an “oh, hello again, YOU.” Burnout is an old nemesis of ours, one that keeps popping new heads like a hydra.

Over the years, we’ve come to recognize burnout as the antithesis of enchantment. Burnout eats up all the space and energy that enchantment needs to take root. It robs you of the spark that ignites enchantment. 

What do we mean by enchantment?

We think it’s a little different for everyone. For us, it means dwelling in a space of possibility, security, and creativity. It’s where art and connection thrive. And we tend to get there through folklore, especially fairy tales. 

We’re kind of the queens of burnout. And we have spent years trying to relinquish our crowns. 

But then we’d start another irresistible project or we’d get an exciting invitation or we figured if we Jenga-ed our calendars just a little bit harder…

… aaaand the crowns would boomerang back onto our heads, giving us migraines as they landed. As they always, always do.

And let us tell you, it is hard to feel enchanted when you have a migraine. 

So many of the people that we talk to these days have their own versions of these stories. Especially women and non-binary folks, but really just about everyone. 

There is so much to do. There is so much that people are passionate, sparkly, about, and yet the muck of the burnout swamp pulls them down, because they feel like they have an impossible amount of stuff that must be accomplished and that it all has to happen before they can take a moment for themselves.

So many of us have had our boundaries systematically eroded and have been taught over and over that their needs must come last. 

As for what we want? 

Honestly, for a while, we forgot that was even a question you could ask. 

When was the last time someone asked you what you needed? What you wanted? What would light you up, help you step from burnout gray back into sparkle, into something like enchantment?

If you’re anything like us, these can be weirdly difficult questions to answer.

Or maybe you already have an idea, but you haven’t started moving towards it yet.

Our new course, Enchant, came out of these questions. It came out of the quest to give up our burnout crowns for good (we’re still working on it but we’re putting them down for longer and longer and living for that feeling.) We’re learning and we’re unlearning. We’re breaking ourselves apart and putting ourselves back together again with the idea that we deserve magic - that feeling of replenishment and potential. 

Maria is, quite honestly, one of our role models for this, and it’s one of the reasons why we invited her to be a part of Enchant. She’ll be sharing her wisdom and strategies with you there, too! We’ll also have a bonus lecture with the amazing Terri Windling, a big workbook, and so much more. 

This is a course where the magic exists in art, in the everyday, in the ordinary, in connection, and in you. It’s not all going to be easy, but the best spells never are. We hope you join us.  

A note from the Bruja Professor: Learn more about this fabulous course here.

Guest Contributor Bios

Dr. Sara Cleto and Dr. Brittany Warman are award-winning folklorists, teachers, and writers with a combined 26 years in higher education and over a hundred publications. Together, they founded The Carterhaugh School of Folklore and the Fantastic, teaching creative souls how to re-enchant their lives through folklore and fairy tales. In 2019, Carterhaugh won the Dorothy Howard Award from the American Folklore Society.

When they aren’t teaching at Carterhaugh, they are scholars, writers and best friends who have published peer-reviewed articles, appeared on podcasts, sold stories and poems, written book introductions and encyclopedia entries, and written for magazines and blogs. (They’ve also been known to crush “Total Eclipse of the Heart” at karaoke.) They are regular writers for Enchanted Living Magazine, and their weekly blog has reached more than 150,000 people. Sara and Brittany also deliver sold-out lectures at venues like the Smithsonian, the Profs & Pints series, the Maryland Renaissance Festival, the Contemporary American Theater Festival, and FaerieCon.

The Bruja Professor, a witchy take on literature, the occult & pop culture, is the scholarly sister to Enchantment Learning & Living, an inspirational blog celebrating life’s simple pleasures, everyday mysticism, and delectable recipes that are guaranteed to stir the kitchen witch in you.

If you enjoyed what you just read and believe that stories are magic & true magic is in the everyday…or your next good read, subscribe to my newsletter below for regular doses of enchantment.

Want even more inspiration? Follow me on Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter. Here’s to a magical life!

The Quiet Terror of Hallmark Holiday Movies: Folk Horror, Small Towns & Christmas Miracles

During the Before Times, I went to Smith College in what would end up being my last continuing ed travel adventure for some time. Located in a picturesque northeast coast small town of Northampton, this college has long been held as a bastion of liberal intellectualism and safe haven for scholastically-inclined women. I should have been excited, but nothing could explain the slow sense of unease that crawled over me during the long cab ride to that town. Sure, it could have been exhaustion from travel and so, so many delays. But there was no denying the quiet dread I felt as the sun set and the darkness seemed to swallow all sense of direction. I couldn’t help thinking, watching the treeline turn into dark, jagged teeth against the horizon in the fading light, that this was the perfect opening scene for a folk horror movie. 

I was in Stephen King Country, no doubt about it (which to my mind, is any vaguely east-coast small-town dotted landscape). Hey, I’m a desert woman through and through, and too much time on either coast leaves me longing for a landscape I understand and that understands me.

Thankfully, I arrived safely. Everyone was quite nice and the little town was small enough and safe enough for me to walk alone at night in search of dinner. I was grateful considering that I was one of the few people of color in the town (albeit white-passing) so, by horror movie standards, that would make me one of the first to go when things went all Children of the Corn.

As I strolled around the next day, however, I couldn’t shake this sense of unease, despite everyone, and I mean everyone, talking about what a perfect place Northampton was to live in. So inclusive! So harmonious! So happy! Just one look at the Black Lives Matter signs decorating the streets should have told me as much! Still, as I strolled around the neighborhoods on my conference break, it occurred to me that the beautiful little painted houses looked like the perfect setting for a Hallmark movie…or a B-horror movie. And then I found myself, quite literally, on Gothic street! The signs couldn’t have been clearer…something was not quite right.

No, I’m not here to roast Smith College, at least not any more than I do the rest of the Ivory Tower Collective otherwise known as academia. I left Northampton with gratitude for the experience and an even deeper gratitude for a public education and a life in the Land of Enchantment with wide open skies, a landscape I knew intimately, and adobe houses that, while not specter-free, were at least the kind of architecture and history that I knew how to make myself at home in. 

But I also couldn’t shake the overlapping similarities between small-town romance and small-town horror, the shades and echoes of which followed me throughout my stay in Northampton. As someone who loves romance and horror, it was hard not to see the small town setting as a nexus for exploring our fundamental humanity—and, in the case of the gothic, our darkness. Like academia, a college campus is its own kind of small town, and a remote rural setting is a focused place that, for its compactness and isolation, magnifies the light and dark of the human experience. And, like in academia, one person’s “safe space” is another person’s nightmare of gatekeeping, performative allyship, and tone policing. 

Radcliffe’s Quiet Terror…

I returned to these musings one year while binge-watching cheesy holiday movies. As I waded through tales of struggling Christmas tree farmers and city girl grinches, gingerbread artists and CEOs who’ve lost that Christmas magic, and more cookie decorating contests, tree lighting events, and neighborhood caroling than should be considered legal, it occurred to me that these films had an awful lot in common with folk horror. The quiet terror in the Scrooge-like protagonists was palpable as those big city fishes out of water in small, out-of-the-way towns were asked to endure local traditions and participate in timeless rituals until the ultimate culmination of all these ceremonies: The burning of the Wicker Man, I mean, the yule log, I mean, the lighting of the Christmas tree.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m no stranger to the joys of cheesy holiday films filled with Santas masquerading as reindeer ranchers or plucky businesswomen teaching princes how to be down with the people and put up a Christmas tree or whatever. But if folk horror stands out for illuminating the darkest corners of the collective unconscious—and the collective urge to conform to the status quo—then holiday films are conspicuous for their absolute lack of darkness. Childhood traumas, and deaths of beloved family members, from parents to spouses, are quietly swept under the rug, used only as window dressing to make our plucky protagonists relatable, interesting, or otherwise worthy of redemption. Any meaningful discussion of those traumas is forsaken in an effort to get to the snowman-building party on time. No, those traumas are quiet, hidden, and like in folk horror, kept just out of sight (until the end of the horror movie anyway).

When I think of folk horror, I think of Anne Radcliffe’s definition of terror. It’s often quiet, eerie, and seemingly innocuous—until it’s too late. Radcliffean terror is frightening simply because it is the thing we cannot see—it plays at the edges of our sight, fueling our imagination and making us fear the unspoken, the unseen, suppressing the unsettling feeling that something isn’t quite right. And, while some folk horror often descends into actual horror—the in-your-face violence and traumas that you can’t look away from or ever unsee—it all begins with Radcliffe’s quiet, uncanny terror.

Folk horror is also a genre adept at exploring the terror of how white supremacy, oppressive social norms, and heteronormativity, to name a few issues, are quietly reinforced and any expression of otherness stamped out. Of course, folk horror critiques these things, showing them as the evil that they are. In contrast, the quiet terror in Hallmark Christmas movies—excuse me, holiday movies—was, for a long time, the suppression of queer relationships and BIPOC characters with skin dark than a paper bag, not to mention anyone who wasn’t conventionally religious. This was Candace Cameron Bure Land, after all, where everything must remain snow white, candy-cane sweet, and cleaner than a born-again Christian’s heart. And while it’s true that much of that is changing thanks to new network management (more on that later), there was a long time when issues of race, sexuality, and other “taboos” were silenced in order to keep the network a “safe space” for the Bure’s of the world.

Terrifying! 

—but also not unlike the small, insular communities in many a folk horror tale.  Let’s take a closer look…

Is it Christmas Magic…or the Call of Cthulhu?

For the purposes of this essay, I’m going to focus my reading on a handful of movies that I feel best represent the folk horror genre, old and new, and the holiday movie genre typified by Hallmark movies (hey, I’m not above using the network name a clickbait title, but let’s be real, they aren’t the only ones doing these sorts of movies). Both The Wicker Man (1973) and Midsummer (2019) are iconic films to the folk horror genre and speak to what is quietly terrifying about insular communities, not to mention the slow-burn gothic elements that signal things Will Not End Well. 

And, dearest readers, I must be honest and admit that I completely blanked when it comes to naming specific Hallmark holiday movies to compare these two folk horror films, although, in retrospect, I shouldn’t be surprised. All the movies are so similar that it is impossible to tell them apart. But, since I’m on a roll roasting Bure for her bigotry, I’ll use two of her movies that have become Hallmark staples and defined the holiday movie over the last decade, Let it Snow (2013) and Christmas Under Wraps (2014). But, seriously, I could be describing just about any small-town holiday movie as you’ll see with the other films I list.

Now, let’s take a look at what these genres have in common so you can decide if the magic behind these stories is a Christmas miracle or the byproduct of the cult-worshipped Cthulhu, an octopus-like monster whose dreams shape the very fabric of our existence!

Timeless Traditions…

Both The Wicker Man (1973) and Midsommar (2019) center around warm-weather holidays, respectively Beltane and the summer solstice, and, until recently, most holiday movies centered around Christmas. Let it Snow (2013) focuses on a variety of holiday traditions from around the world and Christmas Under Wraps (2014) deals specifically with the joys of the Santa Clause myth.

A Welcoming Community & an Outsider who Becomes Part of the Family…

Both Let it Snow (2013) and Christmas Under Wraps (2014) feature a Big City Bure who doesn’t have time for the frivolity and festivities of Christmas until she is welcomed into the quirky small town of Garland, Alaska (Let it Snow) and learns that it just might be the home base of Santa Clause! In Christmas Under Wraps, Big City Bure learns that not everything needs to be about corporate bottom lines and efficiency. Sometimes, it’s about waffles and ice fishing and cute inn owners. There’s no way she can go back to city life after that!  

Similarly, the young adventurers of Midsommar are welcomed with open arms to the Love and Light commune of the Hårga in backwoods Hälsingland, Sweden. Likewise, the upstanding Sergeant Howie is treated like a special guest when he lands on Summerisle in The Wicker Man. That’s old-school community charm for you!

Singing and Dancing…

Let’s not forget the hearty welcome Police Sergeant Neil Howie receives when he visits the island of Summerisle and gets a boisterous round of song and dance at the local pub and inn. Who doesn’t enjoy uncomfortably suggestive songs with equally repulsive dance moves about the landlord’s daughter with both the landlord and his daughter present and clearly enjoying themselves? This festive song and dance pales in comparison to the maypole dancing of Midsommar where the only thing more extra than the flower adornments is the aggressive twirling. Fun times! As for holiday movies, well, there is always a caroling scene. Always. The Christmas Cottage (2017) is just one of thousands of examples. 

An Annual Festival…

Like caroling, there’s always a party to be had! And, if you’re (un)lucky, you just might be roped into participating. It may be May Day or it may be Christmas—either way, it’ll be a party you’ll never forget!

Precocious Children…

Who can forget that precocious little school children or that audacious little girl, supposedly “missing,” who leads the sergeant on a merry chase in The Wicker Man? Then there are the young girls in Midsommar who aren’t above a little mischief as they spike drinks and plant a little something extra special in the food of their esteemed male guests. See A Princess for Christmas (2011), A Crown for Christmas (2015), Switched for Christmas (2017), and Picture a Perfect Christmas (2019) for kids who are just a little too clever for their own good and not above orchestrating a romantic entanglement for their adult counterpart(s). Thrown in Children of the Corn (1984) and The Bad Seed (1956), and you’ve got a neat set of stories that show just how cute—and quick-witted—little kids can be!

Quirky Courtship Rituals…

Mingle All the Way (2018), The Christmas Cottage (2017), The Engagement Clause (2016), A Bride for Christmas (2012)…seriously, so many wedding/bride/engagement Christmas movies! Clearly, you will cease to be a valuable member of these insular societies if you aren’t marrying and reproducing. But they are nothing compared to the joyful communal copulation in The Wickerman, not to mention the naked dancing around a fire in that movie, or the maypole dancing and “forced seduction” of your soon-to-be-ex boyfriend (to put it VERY euphemistically) by a group of fertile young women in Midsommar. 

Delicious Treats!

See any holiday movie with “gingerbread,” “cookies,” “baking,” “sweet,” or “candy canes” in the title. A Cookie Cutter Christmas (2014), The Sweetest Christmas (2017), Christmas Cupcakes (2017)…you get the idea. Seriously, is it even a holiday movie without a cookie-making scene or a baking contest? Of course, we have the delightful post office/drugstore/candy shop in The Wicker Man where jars of dried foreskin and hard candies sit side by side, or the tasty cakes with a special ingredient (pubic hair) of Midsommar. Yum!

Traditional Values…

Like the heartwarming community in Midsommar, many Hallmark movie small-town communities are known for their cozy conformity, sparkling eugenics, and dazzling white supremacy (see previously mentioned Bure movies). They too, want to welcome you into their loving arms—so long as you have blond hair, blue eyes, and light skin. Dani, in Midsommar, survives because she looks just like everyone else, whereas Sergeant Howie in The Wicker Man doesn’t survive specifically because he isn’t like everyone else (he’s a Christian virgin, not a sex-positive pagan). Hey, it’s important to maintain the old ways!

A Festive Makeover…

Take any holiday movie about royalty and you will most definitely get a glamorous makeover moment where the nanny/reporter/basic bitch will be transformed into a princess with the coaxing of helpful staff, a sparkly dress, and a can-do attitude. A Princess for Christmas and A Crown for Christmas are just two examples. Although the heroines’ transformations in those films from ugly ducklings into princess swans are nothing compared to Dani in Midsommar as she gets a glamorous dress made of flowers with a glorious crown to top it off. Royalty, indeed! Even Sergeant Howie gets his time to play dress up, first as a fool and later as a sacrificial lamb. What joy!

Holiday Miracles…

Let’s circle back to the Bure stories here. Both Let it Snow and Christmas Under Wraps end with the Big City Bure learning to love the small-town charm and festive holiday spirit—with a side of love! She’s also able to save Santa—and Christmas—in Christmas Under Wraps and figure out how to keep a small inn in the black while also highlighting what’s unique about it in Let it Snow. Take that corporate cookie-cutter holiday!

Wait, that’s a different movie. I think.

Finally, we learn that the sergeant in The Wicker Man was specifically called to this secluded island to help solve the problem of failed crops—he’s their only hope! And Dani, in Midsommar, finally finds the family, love, and acceptance she’s always craved by the end of the movie. She will never be alone again. Heartwarming!

A Lit Ending…

Folk horror and holiday films always end the same way: LIT! It could be with the lighting of the Christmas tree (I’m not even going to bother listing specific holiday movies here—see all the Hallmark holiday movies ever made); the cleansing fires of the Hårga that help you release the negative things in your life, like bad exes; or the wicker man himself, where you get a staring role as kindling!

See? Folk horror and small-town holiday movies aren’t so different after all.

A Walk Down Gothic Street…

In the end, you might be wondering why I’m taking the time to write about small towns, holiday romances, and folk horror. It’s simple: Stories shape us. Stories inform. Stories help us explore and reflect on our life experiences, such as why a visit to a prestigious college would feel strangely triggering. 

There’s a fine line between cozy community and frightening insularity, powerful belief in something bigger than us and violent zealotry, divine miracles and human monstrosities. And, sometimes the most horrific things are candy-coated, all the better to make the social conditioning easier to swallow.

As for Smith College, well, I finally figured out the gothic stain on this idyllic supposed sanctuary. Like so many other (dare I say all?) higher education institutions, it struggles to take its anti-racist agenda seriously and take its other inclusive agendas beyond the performative. Allyship is about active inclusion and meaningful reparations, not pretty words. Academia is much like the small towns I’ve been writing about: Sometimes a safe haven for those in search of like-minded souls, sometimes an incestuous cult that silences outsiders who question the status quo and don’t actively worship Cthulhu.

Yet there is still hope.

In perhaps what some would consider the surprise of the century, Hallmark is being aggressively more inclusive, including more stories with queer and BIPOC characters. It’s a REALLY BIG DEAL, in case you didn’t know this, to see them centering these traditionally marginalized identities in stories of joy, love, hope, and a holiday bake-off. But if you still want that back-woods Midsommar charm, you can find it on GAC Family Channel, where Bure and her friends like the criminal Lori Loughlin, are holding court. Perhaps we can all write a letter to Santa asking him to get Elon Musk to buy the channel. He would be the perfect CEO Scrooge to run GAC into the ground.

What a Christmas miracle that would be!

The Bruja Professor, a witchy take on literature, the occult & pop culture, is the scholarly sister to Enchantment Learning & Living, an inspirational blog celebrating life’s simple pleasures, everyday mysticism, and delectable recipes that are guaranteed to stir the kitchen witch in you.

If you enjoyed what you just read and believe that stories are magic & true magic is in the everyday…or your next good read, subscribe to my newsletter below for regular doses of enchantment.

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Joy as a form of Resistance: Talk Transcript from Folklore and Resistance Roundtable - The Carterhaugh School

Last month, I had the wonderful honor of participating in The Carterhaugh School of Folklore and the Fantastic’s wonderful panel on Folkore and Resistance, along with an incredible lineup of scholars, folklorists, and creators, including Dr. Jean Jorgensen, Dr. Margaret Yocom, Daisy Ahlstone, and Terri Windling. It was a celebration of community, storytelling, and more than a little magic!

To keep the magic of this event going, I’m posting the full transcript of my talk below and the full recording, which is so worth the watch—my fellow panelists had so much joy and wisdom to share. Enjoy!

Joy as a form of Resistance: Conjuring Change by Rewriting Trauma Narratives to be Narratives of Hope

Storytelling has always been one of the most profound acts of magic-making, the most beautiful and healing of spells, the thing I turn to when I need to conjure a new way of being in this complicated, fraught world. As a New Mexican mestiza, a woman of mixed raced heritage, so many stories about people like me are ones of trauma, be it ancestral, generational, or rooted in systemic oppression. And, let’s be real, sometimes we go through things in life that can make us feel closed off, perpetually trying to protect the self from further injury—but that’s no way to live. So when I put pen to paper, I conjure change, a shift away from these trauma narratives towards narratives of joy and hope. And this can be especially important when perpetuating trauma narratives can be a way to reinforce systemic oppression. 

As I explain the spell work of writing in the short prose poem “My Joy is My Resistance,” in my first book Everyday Enchantments, “I let my hands relish the feel of my dreams being coaxed to life between my fingers like the red clay of my beloved desert. I mold the clay and I love the earth and shape it into stories they do not want me to tell: the ones of hope.  The ones of healing. The ones that remind us of the moon's power and our own capacity for abundance and possibility.”

In fact, all of Everyday Enchantments was written because I was trying to figure out what happiness looks like and what FEELS like day-to-day and to do that, I had to reimagine my life as a sort of fairytale, a place where the mystic could be found in the mundane, where synchronicities and archetypal messages were as common as fairy-godmothers and enchanted objects.  In essence, I started focusing on life as a form of lived folklore. Like the fairytales and stories I grew up reading, I was on my own journey of discovery, only instead of saving Middle Earth, traveling to Narnia, or making friends will all the animals of the forest, I was relearned the magic of everyday life. 

So folklore and the imagination became a lifeline for me, a way to imagine happiness and fulfillment in a world that doesn’t want people like me to have it.  One of the ways I conjured this sense of joy in a fraught world was by examining my relationship to pleasure.  It can teach us so much about ourselves. Think about.

In a world that always feeds the negative, which our own fears can magnify, we have to remember that pleasure is a valuable healing tool. It’s something we have to actively nourish and celebrate, like 12 dancing princesses sneaking off each night to dance in a magical kingdom (although I’m simplifying that tale quite a bit). It’s also something we can feel disconnected from when we go on autopilot in a effort to cope with the world around us or our own inner turmoils. Healing our relationship to pleasure can help us process difficult emotions and get real about what we want in life: abundance, meaningful relationships…you name it.

You see this play out in my gothic fairytales, too, like Weep, Woman, Weep, based on the Legend of La Llorona.  For those of you who don’t know, La Llorona, or the Weeping Woman is an urban legend that terrifies most Hispanic communities…she is the spirit of a woman who drowned her children in a fit of rage and now sends all eternity roaming the Rio Grande trying to get them back…she just might take you.  I have my own spin on this tale in Weep, Woman, Weep, where La Llorona only drowns girls so that they come back and live lives as sorrowful as her own.  La Llorona wants to perpetuate the trauma she had to live through in her own life.

The protagonist, Mercy begins her story by telling us, “I am built for tears. It’s in my blood. The women in my life don’t know how to have a life without sorrows.” In the story, she survives an encounter with the Weeping Woman. Mercy survives but doesn’t come back quite right—her tears now have the power to hurt or, she later finds, to heal. She starts in a dark place. She’s dealing with generational trauma, ancestral hauntings, and history of colonization and enforced cultural assimilation written in her blood. 

But she chooses to define herself outside of those things. Through her focus on pleasure, the things that make her happy, the things that define and shape her outside of these traumas, she comes into her own—and, eventually, finds a love so strong that not even La Llorona can break it.  

Mercy’s pleasures are small, like trashy novels and pretty rocks, really really good turnips and old records. And they’re big pleasures, too, like building a thriving farm from the ground up and nurturing her magical ability with plants. They’re unexpected, like the sweet lemon balm soap made for her by a man who is half-Angel, half-wildcrafter. And sometimes, her pleasures allow her to process her pain as she reconciles herself to the fact that La Llorona has irrevocably changed her life but that she still has a life to live. Through these experiences of pleasure, she learns that she is not just some weed but a seed.  By the end of the tale, she is no longer a victim of La Llorona or the often whispered about reviled figure in her small town of Sueno, NM, but Miracle Mercy, the woman who can change fates, the woman who has turned her grief into joy. 

This transformation sneaks up on her. She’s been working toward it every day, but she’s never quite able to see the big picture until after she’s developed some magical relationships. There’s a moment, near the end of her story, where she sees this wonderful abundant life she’s created for herself—Mercy’s been so focused on the small little pleasures and the small acts of moving forward from her family’s history of trauma, that she hasn’t quite seen all she’s accomplished, the big picture, until now. 

As Mercy says near the end of the story, reflecting on what it’s taken for her to find her joy:

“[La Llorona] was the Weeping Woman, sure. But I was the woman who made rainwater out of tears. I would use them to water my crops through this drought. When people bought my fat turnips and sharp radishes and long, thick carrots, they would taste of freshly turned earth and freshly turned futures, hope, and the bittersweet taste of things past, and the salty tang of possibility. This I would do to remind others that we are the seeds we plant, not the histories forced upon us. This I would do to wash away the sorrow from my soul.

Was I scared? You bet.

But nothing makes a woman brave except living.”

So here we have at the end of this gothic fairytale, another transformation.  A girl turned weeping woman turned miracle worker through the simple act of turning away from feeding and perpetuating trauma and learning, one small step at a time, what it means to embody joy and abundance.  

In fact, the joy of folklore is that it can be a form of resistance, of changing the kind of stories we tell about ourselves and our communities.  It helps us choose magic and possibility over stifling conventions that would regulate our bodies and our minds.

So in closing, I want to leave you with a meditation or ritual to help you when things get difficult, to remind you that you are the author of your own story and nobody can talk that from you.  Or, as Mercy puts it, “that we are the seeds we plant, not the histories forced upon us.”

This exercise is fairly simple, but it helps me a lot when I get too in my head and need to ground myself. Think about something that brings you joy, specifically a simple pleasure.  It can be anything. For Mercy—okay, and me!—it’s listening to old records and reading trashy novels.

Now visualize that simple pleasure as sacred.  It’s not just something you do for fun.  It’s not a bonus.  It’s a necessity.  Resist the temptation to trivialize it!  There is no room for guilty pleasures here. You can either visualize this or write down details about it, depending on what works best for you.  As you do, imagine the story it tells about you.  How does it soothe? Heal? Transform?  What emotions emerge as you meditate on this pleasure? They don’t always have to be pleasurable, either. Sometimes enjoyment can give us a safe space or relax enough to process difficult emotions.  

Lastly, imagine yourself as your favorite fairytale character—I’m personally very fond of thinking of myself as a hobbit—or who you would be as a folklore protagonist.  Imagine it down to the last detail, including how your sacred simple pleasure fits into your quest. What magic does it offer you?  What wisdom or insights to help you conquer your foes or inner dragons?  How does it help you transform your tears into rainwater?  

In closing, always remember to reword Mercy a bit, “nothing makes a person brave, except living.”

And, to add to that, miracles don’t happen unless you show up, every day, ready to work magic.  

The Bruja Professor, a witchy take on literature, the occult & pop culture, is the scholarly sister to Enchantment Learning & Living, an inspirational blog celebrating life’s simple pleasures, everyday mysticism, and delectable recipes that are guaranteed to stir the kitchen witch in you.

If you enjoyed what you just read and believe that stories are magic & true magic is in the everyday…or your next good read, subscribe to my newsletter below for regular doses of enchantment.

Want even more inspiration? Follow me on Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter. Here’s to a magical life!