Migration is Life: A Round-up for April 🐦‍⬛

In this missive:

• News: Renowned true crime writer Carol Ann Lee has a witchy round-up on Bookshop.org and Ashes & Stones is in the mix.
• Musing On: Migration is Life: why I switched my blog hosting platform from Substack to Ghost
• Reading: The Bass Rock by Evie Wyld
• Listening To the entries in this year's Sami Grand Prix
• Planning: A Beltane Outlier Hour for paid subscribers
• Other News: The UK Supreme Court’s anti-trans ruling this week

News: A&S on Bookshop.org

Renowned true crime author Carol Ann Lee has a round up of witchy. nonfiction on Bookshop.org. Her new book, Something Wicked: The Lives, Crimes and Deaths of the Pendle Witches, is just out. Of Ashes & Stones she writes: 

This is a remarkable book alive with the beauty and terror of Scotland centuries earlier – as if the author reached out a hand and took the reader with her on that journey...The delicate balance between Allyson Shaw’s inner life and personal reasons for making the journey set against the stories of those whose lives were lost is beautifully rendered, while the writing throughout is sublime.

See the whole list & more about Something Wicked here: https://uk.bookshop.org/lists/carol-ann-lee-something-wicked-this-way-comes

Musing on: Migration is Life

I've found a new home for this blog on Ghost. Previously, I had used Substack to host my weekly updates. Substack has become a place of unmoderated of hate-speech. While my little corner of the site felt safe and remote from this, a number of racist, far-right accounts have followers in the tens of thousands and are monetised and growing. Substack defends its position on ‘free speech’ by claiming hate-speech newsletters are ‘fringe accounts, and as long as they refrain from inciting violence, they are welcome on the platform. I used to believe in free speech, that thinking would win out over hateful deceits. Whatever world I thought I lived in where this was true no longer exists. Maybe it never was true.

Substack has also helped thousands of poets, journalists and other writers to crowd fund their work—writers like myself who would not be paid fairly for their work under the current realities of publishing. I have some hope that this can happen elsewhere on the web, at places like Ghost, who have better moderation.

More about this debate:

• The original truth bomb published in the Atlantic is here.
• A summary of ‘both sides’ in Forbes
• And a nuanced, detailed argument on Mashable.

Reading: The Bass Rock, Evie Wyld

This book has been hanging around my TBR list for years, and I finally took the plunge. In this astutely observed novel about multigenerational trauma, the lives different women circle around the landscape of the Law and the Bass Rock in North Berwick. The storytelling is masterful: secrets of the middle class people central to the narrative are revealed rhythmically, even as their stories play out in a separate chronology.  The character of the witch is not who you think it will be—and she is magnificent. I wanted a better ending for her. 

I am interested in the way trauma carried from our ancestors impacts not only our lives but the landscape itself. This facet of psychogeography is usually reserved for folk horror or hauntology.

"...the ghost everyone sees, is it in fact a hundred different ghosts? ...they are on the golf course and on the beach and their heads bob out of the sea, and when we walk we are walking right through them. The birds on the Bass Rock, they fill it, they are replaced by more, their numbers do not diminish with time, they nest on the bones of the dead."

The Bass Rock has hauntology, folk horror tropes and more. Trigger warnings abound, here: rape, sexual assault, stalking, femicide, and child abuse. A lot happens off the page but the much of it does not.

My library copy of The Bass Rock had a millennial pink cover and graphic plums—labelling it a ‘summer read’ marketed to youthful women readers, many of whom will be survivors of sexual assault. (1 in 3 women worldwide have experienced sexual assault in their lives.)

I don’t believe in trigger warnings, but what happens to us when we read cinematic violence on the page, presented as gritty verite? The result for me is a complex emotional and somatic stew—triggered—is only shorthand. I often feel a queasy resentment, a bewilderment—what is the point of this–which grows into a disorientated trauma response.

Reenacting the lived violence of others on the page is not a tribute, not a memorial, nor a witness to ‘grim reality’. Dismantling toxic masculinity and surviving it are two different things. This is more than I can unpack in this post. 

Listening To The entries in this year's Sami Grand Prix

The Sami Grand Prix is a showcase of Sami yoik, or sacred song, featuring singers from all of Sápmi. My personal favourite is Elin & the Woods entry Mailbmi Jorra.

Planning: A Beltane Outlier Hour

Just a few days after Witches Night, we'll have our own wee meeting. This one is for paid subscribers. If you aren't already, why not become a paid subscriber and join us? There will be seasonal writing prompts, camaraderie and discussion.

(If you'd like to upgrade to paid, click the ACCOUNT button in the above right. toggle either monthly or yearly payments [yearly saves you 💷!] and choose your upgrade.)

We'll meet on Saturday, the 3rd of May at 7pm GMT.
Please RSVP to contact.allysonshaw@gmail.com
Find out what 7pm GMT is in your time zone here.

Other News: A blow to human rights in the UK courts

Last week, the UK supreme court ruled that gender is determined by biology. The news is full of photos of women celebrating this as a 'victory.' (In the common terminology, they are T.E.R.Fs, but this implies they are radical feminists--they aren't.) Gender essentialists posing as feminists are working in tandem with the very people attacking women's rights using reactionary religious doctrine. Trans women are women, and all women are now subject to yet another form of biological surveillance. It remains to be seen how and when this ruling will be enforced. Fellow Scottish queers, if you are affected by this or are struggling with its impact in any way, there is help: https://www.lgbthealth.org.uk/services-support/lgbt-helpline-scotland/

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