we’ve made it to season 3 of snort & cackle! in our opening episode, host ash alberg talks about how showing up as a person and caring for mental health intersects directly with showing up as a #bosswitch/small business owner. they also discuss how therapy and magic have helped them to navigate the pandemmie in a more regulated way. fellow #bosswitch babes looking to start their own design biz can check out this quiz to see whether the creative coven online design course is the right fit for them. you can also find the creative coven challenge and work through it at your own pace 24/7 within the creative coven community.

each season we read a new book about witchcraft practices around the world with the #snortandcacklebookclub, with a book review by ash and the occasional guest helping us close out the season. this season's #snortandcacklebookclub read is brujas: the magic and power of witches of color by lorraine monteagut.

take the fibre witch quiz at ashalberg.com/quiz. follow us on instagram @snortandcackle and be sure to subscribe via your favourite podcasting app so you don't miss an episode!

seasons 1-3 of snort & cackle are generously supported by the manitoba arts council. you can support future episodes of snort & cackle by sponsoring a full episode or transcript.

transcript

ash alberg: [Upbeat music plays.] Hello, and welcome to the Snort and Cackle podcast. I'm your host, Ash Alberg. I'm a queer fibre witch and hedgewitch. And each week I interview a fellow boss witch to discuss how everyday magic helps them make their life and the wider world, a better place. 

Expect serious discussions about intersections of privilege and oppression, big C versus small C capitalism, rituals, sustainability, astrology, ancestral work, and a whole lot of snorts and cackles. Each season, we read a new book about witchcraft practices around the world with the #SnortAndCackleBookClub with a book review by me and the occasional guest helping us close out the season. Our book this season is Brujas: The Magic and Power of Witches of Color by Lorraine Monteagut.

Whether you're an aspiring boss witch looking to start your knitwear design business, a plant witch looking to play more with your local naturally dyed color palette or a knit witch wondering just what the hell is a natural yarn and how do you use it in your favorite patterns, we've got the solution for you.

Take the free fiber witch quiz at ashalberg.com/quiz and find out which self-paced online program will help you take your dreams into reality. Visit ashalberg.com/quiz [upbeat music fades out] and then join fellow fiber witches in the Creative Coven Community at ashalberg.com/creative-coven-community for 24/7 access to Ash’s favorite resources, monthly zoom knit nights, and more. [End of intro.]  

Hi, sweet peas. Welcome to season three of Snort and Cackle. I can't believe that we are here already, and I also have no idea where the time went. When I was first getting Snort and Cackle prepared, I was applying for an art grant from the Manitoba Arts Council to support the first three seasons.

That was the timeframe. It was a COVID-specific grant where whatever art you were doing and whatever method you were doing, it was a new way of connecting as a result of COVID impacting your usual operations. And so for me, that meant that the connecting that I do, which I feel like is always ultimately at the root of my work, it's in connecting others and in sharing knowledge and in making knowledge and stories accessible to as many people as possible. And in sharing other people's stories with others.

And that comes from my theater days and comes from my storytelling days and my story gathering days and has continued. And now it takes a different form, of course. There's different stories that you tell through stitches with knitting and other stories that we tell through our use of plants and materials in herbalism and natural dying. 

And I love that about my work. And also, especially through my forays into fibershed advocacy and other passions, connecting others and sharing knowledge and education in a way where as many people are able to access it as easily as possible, that has been something that was really important and pre-COVID took the form of more often than not going to different fibershed producers’ spaces and being able to share time with them in their space and seeing their space and hosting interviews with them where they could share their work and their practice and then sharing that via video interviews. 

And we did some distance interviews, but as we all know with Zoom these days, it's hard enough getting audio to behave itself when you are especially dealing with like rural and remote places and locations, nevermind getting the video to also behave itself. And it's just different. 

So while there was something lovely about From Field to Skin's interviews, being able to take place over the internet for folks that were in different locations across a very large landmass there was still more of a focus on … for me, especially where I travel and learning like onsite for me and being able to share an experience of place and see place through someone else's eyes and through their hands, with the work that they do. That's always been really important. 

And so it was … I became less interested in trying to host virtual interviews and conversations and more interested in figuring out ways of getting out to those spaces, which included looking into grants at that point in time and trying to bunch or batch interviews together so that I could go to one location and meet multiple players within that one location.

And then COVID came and everything came to a grinding halt. And so, this podcast has taken that place. And while some of these conversations, of course, do still happen with folks who work within their fibersheds and work with textiles, obviously there are many others who do other kinds of work and it still comes down to sharing their stories and being able to offer a space for people's experiences to be gathered and shared. 

And especially with folks whose stories are not collected or are historically not told, which for witches is all of us basically. And some more than others obviously. And traditional methods and ancestral methods, how colonialism and hierarchy and white supremacy has … which really they're all one and the same or different arms of the same beast. They do their best to wipe out those stories. And so this is like a fuck you project to that. 

And here we are at the start of season three and that initial grant was designed to support through not even the end of season three, technically. But I felt confident at that time in committing to the first three seasons. And now as I record this and I'm getting season three ready for you, we have almost the entire season in the queue. And as more people are getting booked for interviews, then we're looking at season four and that's so exciting. 

And there are now other considerations that I have to figure out, including this project that I deeply love also needs to financially support itself. And again, I want this to remain as accessible for as many people as possible, which means not putting it behind a paywall. And so it needs to bring in income through other forms. And figuring out how to do that within … while respecting my values and the podcast’s values and our team's values and the values of our guests and finding that balancing act.

I personally think that my dream goal for this podcast is to [a tiny chime plays in the background.] … I actually really love that “ching” sound, it grounds me these days and is settling my sense of scarcity that has been cropping up lately, which we're about to get into. But … sorry. 

With the goal of Snort and Cackle, what I would love for it to get to a place with is for it to be so supportive that not only am I able to pay myself and my team properly for our labor and for the expenses of putting out what is a very tech-heavy and tech-involved podcast. Thank goodness for grants, because I was able to upgrade my computer during this time as well thanks to a grant.

And that was very necessary because these files were literally killing my old bebe, which when you run an online-based business is a problem. So thank you for grants. Thank you for ways of functioning outside of traditional, only transactional capitalism. And also, what I would love is for the podcast to be at a stage where not only am I paying us, but I'm also able to pay guests because I think that is especially important.

And while I am glad that we are able to serve as a … as an application source for people to share their work and to share their knowledge, they're sharing their time and they are sharing their knowledge and we don't pay bills in exposure. And while of course I hope that listeners are supporting guests through purchases and booking sessions with them and booking them for speaking gigs and things like that, I would also love to at the very least be able to pay guests for their time on the podcast. 

We are not at that point right now, and I will say that very blatantly at this stage. I would love for it to get to that stage.

So that's where I see the longer term focus of this podcast as we go through our seasons. And I'm just really excited to have more chats with more people and to hear more stories and gather more stories and share more stories. That to me is really exciting and also, yeah we're already into season three. How the hell did that happen? 

And as I'm recording this, we're not too far into the start of the Gregorian New Year. We're also, when you listen to this episode, if you listen when it comes out the week of Imbolc, we're still not that far into a new Gregorian new year. And I find the start of the Gregorian calendar, always a point of refresh and I actually do like it as a reference point for me in my goal setting, in the work that I do, in structuring beginnings and ends of … I was chatting with one of my, one of my friends and actually a past guest, Sheila Masterson. We were doing my career spread for the year and we were discussing the Death card and how in projects, there are so many tiny deaths that happen.

And it's not that the whole project comes to an end. It's that we let go of one, one iteration of it, or one idea of what it could be in order to make space for the next version of it. And so I don't necessarily mean that the end of a Gregorian new year means that things fully come to an end and they are now dead and composting, but I do mean that I use it as a way of hitting a reset button of, okay, we've done that.

And we are now going to look at the things that we can look at and feel our feels and plan ahead for what do we feel we did well? What would we like to improve on? What would we like to let go of? And I do that in smaller ways throughout the year but I always enjoy a good Gregorian New Year as a way of doing kind of a larger reset.

And I did that recently. And the energy that I have been feeling since then has been very overwhelming and a lot of spinning, which is different for me, because I feel like last year in particular there wasn't actually as much spinning because I was moving from small crisis to small crisis and there was a sense of needing to slow myself down in order to build some important foundational blocks.

And then as those were happening, also dealing with things in my personal life that were not catastrophic or stopping, but did require way more of my focus and prioritization. And now at the start of this year, I am now looking back at what were my goals before I had to stop to build those foundational blocks? Those goals are still there. 

And so now let's look from this stronger place at enacting those goals now which means building up rather than building … not down, but just building before. And building up is fucking scary and causes me to feel a sense of overwhelm. It is bringing up all sorts of bodily responses and triggers that come from times where I felt less safe, and so those triggers caused me to play smaller often or slower or more measured. 

And sometimes those are really useful and they have served me in the past and I am grateful for them. And also right now, they're not necessarily helpful. [Chuckles.] And processing with my therapist of giving space to them and thanking them for that and figuring out how do we thank those parts of ourselves, and also work on training new habits that are better served for where we are at now, with also the patting on our head for our kid self that there is no guarantee of anything. 

Other than that there is guarantee of pain, which also corresponds with a guarantee of joy. And there is a guarantee of death and change. And so with those facts, we don't have guarantees of anything else beyond that.

And by letting go of the need for a guarantee of safety in every single moment or a need of guarantee of, okay, we found our happy place and this happy place will never go away. If we hold onto that, then we actually end up creating this sense of dread and of stagnation and of inertia because we're scared.

And so instead of being able to enjoy or experience … even if it actually is not at all enjoyable, even if it fucking sucks, if we come out the other side of it, we have survived. And it may be a new version of us that has survived. Maybe we've left an old version behind, but we have survived and we have now got whatever else is in front of us. 

And we have the ability to make choices, and not everybody has the same ability to make the same kinds of choices, but we do all have choices in some capacity. And so making use of those choices rather than getting stuck in frozen mode, because that doesn't serve us.

And so figuring out how do I give myself compassion and grace for the moments where this scared child version of myself rears its head and throws a tantrum and also giving space for my adult self to show up in a regulated way and to acknowledge those feelings and also make better choices. 

And so how the hell does this all relate to being a boss witch? Well, very directly. I am doing my best to operate from a sense of the Empress this year. I've decided that this is the year of the Lovers. I also want to make it the year of the Empress for me personally, and really ground into that more tangible, visceral feeling of being present and being very grounded in the immediate experience around me and in all of the sense. And by that, the senses, and just feeling fully. 

And that includes doing that in my business and also running my business in a way where it is giving me the space to do that in the rest of my life as well. When you're running a micro-business and it's you, or mostly you, and especially for creative businesses, our works are extensions of ourselves and they're very tactical. 

And also not at all what anybody who is going to a traditional business school is going to tell you was a good idea for how to run a business. And I fucking love that because it gives us the ability to start and continue from a place of values. I have always operated my business from a place of values.

Sometimes that has straight up fucked me over. I think I've talked in the past on the podcast about how there have been times in my business where I wanted to make my work as accessible to everyone as possible. And as a result of that actually made it less accessible because I was burning myself out and didn't have the capacity to make decisions that would truly make my work available to those who actually cannot access it.

And also couldn't help myself. And that, that ended up screwing me over and screwing my wider community over and had I allowed it to continue, I probably wouldn't be running my business now. And so that work that I get to do every day, by showing up for my business, I wouldn't be able to do. And all of the initiatives that I do and all of the activism that I do through my business, I wouldn't be able to do. 

And that's such a fucking shame. And I see it happen over and over again where well-meaning values-based small businesses start and then implode as a result of trying to do as much as possible for the wider world without first making sure that they themselves could continue on a day-to-day basis.

And that is one of the side effects of supremacy is not giving us the tools and keeping us under resourced and then keeping us fighting for scraps. And it takes a lot to get out of that loop. It takes a lot to stay out of that loop. It is a lot of ongoing work and sometimes we do a better job of it and other times we succumb to it and both of those are super fucking valid. 

And I'm not pretending that I know the answer for everything. I'm sure that some of you who are listening are like, “I am not into business at all, period. I think there's other ways of functioning in the world” and I love that idea. I also would love to know how you are making your day to day needs being met and also how you are making your safety net being met, because if the way that is being met is that you are getting money and it's just that somebody else is giving you the money through the means of a paycheck then you haven't actually opted out. [Laughs.]

And if you are able to opt out, that takes a whole whack of another kind of privilege, assuming you're living within the same societal structures. And I think there's no, there's no perfect way of doing any of this, right? Like we're all having to make different compromises based on our own abilities and capabilities and access and all of that.

If you are able to do that, cool. We can't all. And this is the way that I've chosen to function my life. I also really have a terrible time listening to other people just because they are above me in some sort of hierarchy. If they have actual experience and expertise in an area, I am happy to listen to people and learn from them, but if you're going to tell me to do something inefficient and then when I ask you why, you just say, “Because,” that's not good enough and it's never been good enough for me. And this is why I worked for myself. 

I also, I love being able to run my business from a position of being able to keep my values front and center. And so from the get-go, I've always run my business with the fact that I am a queer non-binary person as a central point of my business and working in what is an extension of the fashion industry, it's very directly related. And I get to enact my queer politics on a day-to-day basis just by picking my clothing and making my own clothing and having my face and the faces of humans I love on my feeds and taking up space. It's a big old fuck you to a lot of things. 

And also I am a queer, non-binary, femme who passes as cis. And I have a lot more privilege in showing up the way that I do in my queer body than other queer folks are able to, and so part of my work is fighting for more queer bodies being able to show up the way that they want to and celebrating that beauty and making space for that beauty and carving space out for us to be able to do that. 

And that's been because of the way that I've run my business and because of the way that I have made a point of keeping my circles of humans, I am unapologetic about that. I am unwavering in it, and I also am able to get into spaces that other folks are not able to as easily because of the way that I look, i.e. femme and passing as cis. I infiltrate and then fuck up from the inside. Turn on its head. 

But when I came out more openly as a witch, that's been interesting because that seems to have caused more people discomfort. And I don't actually know if that's true. It could be that the folks who are uncomfortable with me being queer just knew enough to not try to bring that up as an issue in front of me, because they knew that it was going to be a non-starter.

A family friend who I really admire told me very recently that I have an aggressive energy and she said it as a full compliment and I took it as a full compliment. But it's true. I very much embodied my Aries energy, especially when I am in work mode. And I can be kind after the first like initial interaction with people, but I do make a point of keeping those Aries horns on as my like, hello, welcome to me, sense. 

And interestingly, I think the witch stuff brings up not necessarily more discomfort, but perhaps people feel more comfortable stating their discomfort about the witch stuff. And so that's been an interesting little navigational point and I also have found myself trying to quiet or make less explicit my witchness at different times, whereas I've never done that with my queerness.

I, in my day-to-day life, I absolutely know when to be trusting my intuition and to tone my queerness down because it makes me physically unsafe in those moments, but I will never do that with my business. If you don't like it, you can fuck off, simple as that. But interestingly with the witchness, I find even with this podcast, when I think about inviting certain people on as guests or approaching certain people to be guests or approaching sponsors that there's almost like a need to make not the magic portion less explicit, but specifically the witch identity to be not quite as explicit. 

And I'm not quite sure at this point in time whether that's because I am trying to make people more comfortable who are not comfortable with the idea of witchcraft or if I am trying to find a more neutral language that leaves space for all of the experiences that are deeply spiritual and ancestral and magic that don't use “witch” as its terminology. I'm not quite sure what, like what the drive is or whether it's perhaps a combo of those two but it is an interesting thing when I also, meanwhile, have really centered my business and my branding around being a witch. 

Like I very explicitly say that I help fellow fiber witches to connect, create and get confident. And I work with fiber witches. I classify my offerings into either boss witch, plant witch, or knit witch, or some combo thereof. 

My online community is called the Creative Coven. I run the Creative Coven challenge. I run the Creative Coven online design course. There's explicitly witchy things. Willow is the furry familiar. My studio is referred to as Tiny Coven studios. Like I have very explicitly … if we don't even, we're not even talking about the individual projects that I run and how my designs are always centered these days around magic.

But it's this like funny thing of very explicitly embracing my witchcraft and also trying to figure out what is the language that is going to make this as accessible to as many as possible. Perhaps maybe that's also part of it, is that I know that for a lot of folks embracing their own witchiness is something that is not that comfortable or feels perhaps too foreign to consider. And … or too difficult. And like they don't know how to tune into it and so therefore they feel like they can't be a fiber witch if they're not even sure if they identify as a witch. To which I say, absolutely you can be a fiber witch and not need to identify as a witch otherwise.

But yeah, trying to help folks on that journey of creating everyday magic through their making practices and in the case of my boss witch kids and by kids, people of all ages, everyday magic through their businesses. There is something that feels still a little … not unsure. Perhaps it is unsure.

And I think in that uncertainty, there is a lot of living and a lot of authenticity. And so I try to lean into that and try to lean into that uncertainty, because I think it's also a good experience for me to practice and to show up as being a more alive creature than if I just were to settle into something that felt comfortable and familiar day in and day out.

Yeah, showing up as a boss witch is something that is very much tied into how I show up as a human and in doing the ongoing messy work of figuring out how to be a better human and how to be a good ancestor while I am still alive in this particular form is completely tied into my work.

So much so that I've actually recently added a new bookshelf. I have these virtual bookshelves in the Creative Coven community. And I've basically just, all of the things that people ask me all the time, “Ash, do you have resources on this thing? Or do you have recommendations for that thing?” I took all of the most common areas, which in particular are like natural dying and fibershed work and witchcraft and herbalism, and I've created these virtual bookshelves where I share my favorite resources.

And I've recently added a new bookshelf called “How to Be a Person,” which is a nod to one of my favorite poems by the same name by Shane Koyczan, who is my favorite poet. And it's basically the things that I have been finding that are helping me to dive into the messiness of how to be a person in all of the ways that we are the most alive.

And that's not always pretty. Sometimes it's really fucking messy. I made a point of adding in EMDR therapy onto that list, in fact. But I think it's necessary. I know it's necessary. And I want for my boss witches, whether they study with me or not, to know that it is okay and in fact will serve you more, I believe, to embrace the humanness that is at the central part of your business, because you are your business.

And to make that a central point, because it is exponentially easier to build a business that references and recognizes you as being a human and not a machine, and also building an audience that sees you as a human and not a machine. I am forever grateful for having an audience that doesn't necessarily give that much about a flash sale but does give a shit when Willow needs to go to the vet and will make purchases accordingly.

I think that's a really fucking cool thing, and I'm always grateful for that. And I would love for my Creative Coven students in particular, to be able to build businesses that are similarly able to respond to their own priorities, including when life needs to become a priority over business. And the two are intertwined, but we also are talking about them as separate entities.

And so on that note, I am always open to new Creative Coven students. It is an evergreen program. You are able to work at it through your own timeline. You pay for it either with a payment plan or all at once. Either way, there's no monthly ongoing fees and you then have access to your material that you can get to as often or as not often as you want and return to as often, or as not often, as you want.

And that being said, right now I am offering through … this episode is coming out on the 2nd. So through the 6th of January, we've got a few days left in this experience. If you sign up now, I'm giving you two options. You can either show up for it and pay the payment plan or full and get a one-on-one session with me.

And that is a, it's a VIP day. You get two hours with me via Zoom to talk about whatever the hell you need to talk about, which is a $250 value. So if you pay for it with … at its regular price, again, either payment plan or in full, you will automatically get that. If you prefer to have the $250 off of the course, you can instead sign up with the code, “HOWTOBEAPERSON.”

And we'll make sure that is linked in the show notes and in the transcript so that you can just easily copy and paste, but that's going to be in all caps, “HOWTOBEAPERSON,” and that will get you $250 off. It does mean that you're not going to get the VIP day. You can always purchase that separately, but if you would rather just have access to the material and get that discount on the course cost, you can do that instead.

And then at the end of this month, we are going to be having a live Creative Coven challenge, which everybody is able to access via the Creative Coven community. So join us in the Creative Coven community from February 21st to 25th. We are going to be working together through the Creative Coven challenge for knitting. Also crochet. You can do it if you're a weaver as well. 

It's basically a creative, a creative challenge to get those sparks going again, and to get your knitting mojo back, and to get some ideas out from your brain onto your stitches. But the exercise can absolutely be applied to different crafts as well. Honestly, if you're a writer, you could use the same the same prompts and use it to start a new book if you wanted to, or a new novella or a new poem.

But we're going to be running through that live February 21st through 25th, we're going to have three Zoom classes live, experiences through that on the 21st, 23rd and 25th to help us to guide and to gather together. We always have our monthly Zoom knit night so this is in addition to that in the community. And for my Creative Coven students, the Creative Coven challenge also lives within the Creative Coven material.

And with the design students, you will also be able to join us for those Zoom classes. If you want to also join us in the community, you are more than welcome to. But Creative Coven design students will also be able to join us for that Creative Coven challenge at the end of February. 

So you can decide, do you want your VIP day to happen before, or do you potentially want to go through the challenge, go through the material, have access to the material in your course, then go through the Creative Coven challenge and then after that have a VIP day with me where you are then figuring out, what do you want to do next? The VIP days are to help you work on whatever you want to work on.

So those are the offers and I'm really excited for all of them. I love connecting with people and I love helping them to go further on their journey and to help them get inspired and stay inspired with the work that they are doing and to problem solve. That's, I love that about teaching and to learn from each other. I think that's just, it's the most exciting bit. It's the connection. 

I hope that you join us if you want to, again, those links will be in show notes and the transcript, and otherwise if you have any questions, you can always reach out to us. You can find us on Instagram. Email is honestly the best way of getting in touch. So you can email us at hello.sunflowerknit@gmail.com. 

And I hope that this episode has been useful for you. I'm really excited about the season. We've got some really incredible conversations with some really amazing witches this season. And I can't wait to share them with you. And I can't wait to hear what you all think.

And I'm excited for our book this season as well. So thank you again so much for listening, and don't forget that there are two other episodes in your feed today to get us kicked off with season three of Snort and Cackle, and we'll chat with you soon.

[Upbeat music plays.] You can find full episode recordings and transcripts at snortandcackle.com. Just click on podcast in the main menu. Follow Snort and Cackle on Instagram @snortandcackle and join our seasonal book club with @SnortandCackleBookClub. Don't forget to subscribe and review the podcast by your favorite podcasting platform.

Editing provided by Noah Gilroy, recording and mixing by Ash Alberg, music by Yesable.