20. Interview with Kelly

Hey listeners, welcome to the second (and final) installment of our interview mini-sodes! In this episode, Kelly fields questions from Jessie about a plethora of extremely important topics including superpowers, fur babies, astrology, and books (#obvi).

Like Jessie did for the last episode, I (Kelly) am updating the show notes with information I forgot to share in the interview. Feast your ears!

• My dogs are named after two Battlestar Galactica characters: Starbuck (callsign for Kara Thrace) and Helo (callsign for Karl Agathon). The Portlandia episode about BSG describes how all-consuming the show can be.
• A friend sent me this wonderful video from the show Crazy Ex-Girlfriend about normalizing antidepressant and anxiety medication. The song even mentions rescue dogs needing meds! Related: “Dogs Get Anxiety, Too” (from The Atlantic)
• Besides my fav bands from my emo-adjacent formative years (e.g., Fall Out Boy, Panic! at the Disco, etc.), I’ve been listening to a ton of queer pop music: Janelle Monáe, Hayley Kiyoko, Troye Sivan, Christine and the Queens, Halsey, and so many more. (Related: “2018 Is the Year of the Queer Woman Pop Star” and “A New Age of Queer Pop Is Here…And Artists Want to Talk”)
• My tarot teachers and mentors include:
  • Lindsay Mack. Her podcast “Tarot for the Wild Soul” and online tarot course of the same title have been such fonts of knowledge in my tarot journey.
  • Tess Giberson. They are so incredible.
  • “Strange Magic” podcast by Sarah Faith Gottesdiener and Amanda Yates Garcia
  • Little Red Tarot blog is no longer active, but I highly recommend checking out the archived posts! The person behind LRT, Beth Maiden, is also wonderful. She runs an amazing witchy shop too!
  • My go-to tarot decks at the moment are Christy C. Road’s Next World Tarot and The Wild Unknown by Kim Krans. (No kick back from using these links – I just love the work these artists do and provide for the collective)
• Overcommitting is something I’m currently un-learning for a plethora of reasons—among them, my role as an academic. Academia is a space which not-so-tacitly promotes overcommitment and burnout. I recently stumbled upon this article about ADHD and overcommitting, which has given me some perspective.
• Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom by bell hooks. If you’re involved in education in any way, please do the collective a favor and read this book. Then incorporate hooks’ ideas into your educator praxis. This is something I try to work on all the time in my teaching.
• Teen slash high school Kelly went through a phase reading the “canon”. Don’t worry, I’ve seen the light, and now I spend most of my reading time learning from black women writers, queer writers, and indigenous writers. “How does the literary canon reinforce the logic of the incel?”, an article from The Guardian, pretty much sums up less-than-sunny feelings about the “canon”.

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Transcript to come Spring 2021

As always, we’d love to be in discussion with you, magical folx. Post or tweet about the show using #criticallyreading. Let us know what you think of the episode, anything we missed, or anything else you want us to know by dropping a line in the comments or reaching out to us on twitter or Instagram (@thelibrarycoven), or via email (thelibraycoven@gmail.com). You can also check out the show notes on our website, thelibrarycoven.com.

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The podcast theme song is “Unermerry Academy of Magics” by Augustin C from the album “Fantasy Music”, which you can download on FreeMusicArchive.com.

JK, it’s magic is recorded and produced on stolen indigenous land: Arapahoe, Cheyenne, and Ute (Kelly) and Chickasha, Kaskaskia, Kickapoo, Mascoutin, Miami, Mesquaki, Odawa, Ojibwe, Peankashaw, Peoria, Potawatomi, Sauk, and Wea (Jessie)

You can support Indigenous communities by donating to Mitakuye Foundation, Native Women’s Wilderness, or the Navajo Water Project. These suggested places came from @lilnativeboy