BECOMING DANGEROUS: A book about ritual and resistance

Over 900 backers, over 90% funded!
over 6 years ago – Mon, Oct 02, 2017 at 01:19:55 AM

What a great day. We're so close now! 

I think this calls for another Ritual Short, this one by my friend Jared Axelrod (yes, that's her real name, it just happens to sound like a superheroine's!). 

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Ritual of the Blade

Like all the best rituals, shaving feels like one is accomplishing something, is slightly painful, and must be repeated to have any lasting effect. Shaving is done in private, in rooms where lavender-scented clouds of hot steam obscure what I’m doing. Only the gods can see me scrape away the stubborn roots of my former identity in hopes of crafting a new one. A blank space is necessary for any act of creation. I can’t paint a new life until my skin is clean of the old.

As a trans woman, I am intimately involved in the process of hair removal. It is an ordeal that is simultaneously humiliating and elating, a privilege and a curse. I hit puberty early, and saw my body hair as a roadblock to a more feminine life. So it is with not a small amount of joy—giggles are sometimes knocked loose, even now—that I watch those dark bits of my masculinity cut loose from their moorings wash down the drain. It almost takes the sting out of waking up and seeing my hairy tits first thing in the morning. Almost.

In any case, I try to avoid the mirror early in the morning.

There is an old saw trans-exclusionary radical feminists like to trot out: that there’s more to being a woman than grooming. More to being a woman than shaving your legs, putting on make-up, wearing high heels. Though it is so often wielded with vitriol, I understand this tired phrase for the prayer that it is. I, too, pray that there is more to my womanhood than a pair of shaved legs, hairless cleavage and shoulders smooth enough for an owl to perch on. I pray that not shaving my legs will be seen as a radical act of defying the patriarchy, as opposed to a sign that I am not trying hard enough. Or, worse, that I am revealing my “true” nature, which no amount of powder and lace could hide.

Because that’s the monster, isn’t it? That’s the boogeyman, shared by TERFs and trans women alike, that my bladed ritual is trying to ward off. The hairy man in a dress. A potent image my razor can keep at bay, but only just.

Not too long ago, in response to Trump’s proposed ban on trans soldiers in the military, some liberal friends began sharing an image of Jamie Farr from the TV show M.A.S.H. as a well-meant but ultimately harmful form of protest. Farr’s character Klinger dressed as a woman not because he was trans, but as a con to get kicked out of the Army. To pick this character as a symbol shows the image my well-meaning but ultimately harmful liberal friends have of trans people, whether they realize it or not. Klinger is hirsute but sexless, tottering on heels he has no business in, constantly lying about his nature, fooling no one. My well-meaning but ultimately harmful liberal friends had no idea that this is the image than haunts trans women at the edge of their mirrors. That this is the very nightmare that brings me to place a sharpened blade against my skin every day.

I’ve reconciled that this is how the world, even my well-meaning but ultimately harmful liberal friends, will see me. My ritual is not for them. My daily prayer of razors and soap, the canticle carved across my calf, is a ward against the monster in the mirror. It’s to protect myself from my own fears and anxiety.

As with every good horror story, the call is coming from inside the house.

There will come a time when this ritual is no longer needed. The combined effects of hormone replacement therapy and growing self-acceptance lead many trans women to find that their prayers are answered. That their womanhood is more than their dresses and makeup, and some slide into a soft butch identity as comfortable as an old flannel. I enjoy my glam rituals, but I do look forward to the day when I don’t need them as protection against what I fear will be my own reflection. Though, I understand this is part of womanhood, too.

Until then, I have my blade and my willingness to sacrifice the stubborn remains of my old identity. I have the embrace of the warm water, the caress of a razor’s edge, a reverse-cocoon made of stripping things away. A ward to keep the monster at bay, for one more day.

 Jared Axelrod is an author, an illustrator, and a world changer. Throughout her eventful life she has also been a circus performer, a puppeteer, a graphic designer, a sculptor, a costume designer, a podcaster and quite a few other things that she’s lost track of but will no doubt remember when the situation calls for it.

She is not domestic, she is a luxury, and in that sense, necessary.

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See you next time with more Ritual Shorts, more info about stretch goals, more info about what our authors are writing about, more good news.

I'm heading out to New York for New York Comic Con next week, but I'll still be around to answer your questions if you have any!

Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!

❤ Katie

End of Week 1 and 77% funded!
over 6 years ago – Thu, Sep 28, 2017 at 11:10:38 PM

Hello everyone!

I am happy to report this project is 77% funded - we're so close to reaching our goal! 

As a thank you gift, here's another Ritual Short, this one by my friend Jacs Fishburne, one of the most talented and incredibly strong people I've ever known.

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I walk in circles seven times, red string in my hand. You walk seven times around the tomb of Rachel. Seven times through the guards and danger. Seven times around myself. 

Trace seven lines along your back and have you guess the meaning. I don’t know what I’m drawing but I know what I’m feeling and I hope it gets through between the fits and starts of my shaking hands. 

I scream fire and lighting and watch cities settle in the curves of my hips. I hold storms. I hold undiscovered worlds between my breasts and centuries of secrets between my toes. Juliet’s true passion (seething) and Joan’s last smoke-filled breath. 

I run from things that can no longer hurt me and wallow in grief for the words unspoken. I gather those tears and snot bubbles, you know, the products of ugly crying, and open my eyes. I grip my red string and circle, binding the past in place so it can no longer follow. I trace markings on my skin with my nails, secret texts only I can read, and watch the tail winds make way to blue skies. 

I take pictures of myself, endless streams of lines and hair and emotions pouring out, too much for the sensor to hold, never enough to truly contain me. I’m afraid if I stop I’ll lose myself so I alleviate my fears through societal vanities and dismantle ingrained beliefs one pixel at a time. I count the scars and freckles, trace constellations down my arms. I scan my legs for the hairs that evade your razor no matter not, the ones you only find when they are old enough to collect social security and demand to be called Brenda or Jim and respected for their experience. Most of their friends are dead. They’re still here and that’s gotta be something. 

I try to be better. To love more and forgive old regrets. I tell people when they’re dressed fantastic or if they just seem to somehow glow. I over apologize and then overthink about over apologizing and realize that cycle will never end and it’s always better to just buy something delicious and walk your thoughts away. I whisper secrets into cupped hands when I go hiking. I release them back into the wild and think of the complications of loving a wild thing. 

I walk in circles seven times, red string dropped from my hand. I make up my own vows as I walk, promises to myself that are gentle and kind. I run fingers through hair and form laugh lines on my face. Sometimes I stumble and sometimes the paths are true. I open my eyes and search for clues on the edges of my periphery, secrets of the universe I’m not ready to grasp. I count my steps and slow my breathing. 

I harness my powers and pick the red string back up. Seven times around my wrist. Seven times around my heart. 

 Jacs Fishburne is an asexual photographer working with the nude body. She culls experiences and lessons to form an image and believes in every possibility. She frequently travels between the US, Canada, and Europe. She's currently based in Columbus, OH. 

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See you next time with more Ritual Shorts and hopefully the news we've been fully funded! I can't wait to talk about stretch goals with you!

Thank you!

❤ Katie

Hey, you probably want to know what the authors of Becoming Dangerous are writing about, right?
over 6 years ago – Thu, Sep 28, 2017 at 11:10:04 PM

Kickstarters for books are kinda weird, right? You don't get to flip through the book, reading a page here a page there, seeing if it's something you'd like. You just get the gist of the content and have to decide, do you back it? Or not? 

WELL, I'M GLAD YOU DID.

But also, let's take a wee virtual flip through the book, shall we?

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'Being queer and mixed-race is a lot of things. It is heartbreak and privilege and otherness and grief. I am a ghost weaving through the margins of race, gender and sexuality. A monstrosity of contradiction and complexity. I embody both the colonized and the colonizer, the oppressed and the oppressor. Growing up, I thought the holiday dinner table or the schoolyard playground was the most uncomfortable of arenas to confront my identity, but these spaces never came close to the moment I cast my first spell. Candlework and crystal healing caused me to question the most integral parts of my ancestry and my relationship to it. Engaging in witchcraft allows me to exorcise the spaces of myself that others label “exotic” and rid myself from the toxicity of that ideal. Witchcraft calls on my flesh and bone, my skin and blood and rips at the seams of my vulnerability around otherness. “Exorcising the Exotic” is an excavation of my journey through seeking witchcraft as shelter from my identity and instead finding space to mend and heal myself within it. It is an ode to the identity-ghosts and culture-shells who have become a compilation of other people’s projections. It is for the invisibilized and the confused. It is a redefining of authenticity and ancestry and a call for re-embodying what it means to be mixed.' - Jaliessa Sipress is a black/mixed-race queer Astrologer and witch. She specializes in life-path Astrology and seeks to make it a liberatory tool for navigation and healing. You can learn more about her practice, read her work or book her for a private reading at obsidianmoonastrology.com.

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'Here are some of the rituals I engage in, the rules that I live by, the things that I insist upon to make myself less of a monster: Speak softly. No--more softly than that. Don't raise your voice. Be perfect. Don't strand your prepositions. Be better than perfect. Weaponize rationality, logic, rhetoric. Make your emotions useful or rid yourself of them--fury can be used; despair cannot. With all of these rules, I look around me and see women--typically white--claiming monstrosity, declaring their fearfulness and wishing that men would see them as harpies, sirens, banshees, world destroyers. Still: though I am a woman, I am also black. My monstrosity has been insisted upon me externally, used as justification for killing me. My rituals exist to prove my humanity, to evidence that I am not dangerous, to demand that they see me. What does it mean that I perform them every day--despite knowing that none of them work?' - J. A. Micheline, or JAM, is a writer, critic, and editor newly-based in Chicago. She writes cultural criticism, prose, comics, and the occasional angry tweet before bedtime. Her still-in-progress novel, Super Charismatic Nucleus, was shortlisted for Cambridge University's Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize in 2016 and her critical work has been featured in The Guardian, VICE.com, The A.V. Club, and elsewhere.

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'One of my visualizations for getting around the city as a crazy sick cripple witch is to imagine myself, my crooked body and odd appearance, as a black cat crossing somebody’s path: good luck to some, bad luck to others. I’ll be writing about my city-magic rituals as a cripple-witch (whether wandering or housebound), using my cane as a sacred safety object, and re-developing my imagination with borderline personality disorder and complex-trauma. My city-magic process involves casting spells on/with concrete, talking to squirrels and raccoons, crying in public as a form of resistance, taking painkillers to go outside, eating dumpster-trash for survival, and learning about my blood / poor / witch / mad / disabled / etc. lineages. I’ll be asking questions about how disabled and mad folks experience witchcraft, cities, and nature, and discussing cripple-witch aesthetics as protection spells. These ideas will be a continuation of my essay, "How Magic Helps Me Cope with Pain and Trauma," as well as a message to and from my thirteen year old self, a witch who did not know they would survive.' - Maranda Elizabeth is a capital-C Crazy writer, zinester, witch, identical twin, high school dropout, cane-user, recovering alcoholic, cripple-goth, and white non-binary amethyst-femme. They write about recovery with BPD, complex-trauma, and fibromyalgia; writing, creativity, & friendship; politicizing recovery; magic & witchcraft & Tarot; self-care, support, & $upport; and surviving poverty. They’ve been writing zines for fifteen years. They published an anthology, Telegram: A Collection of 27 Issues in 2012, and in 2013, and a novel, Ragdoll House in 2013. Their next novel, We Are the Weirdos, will be published in Summer 2017. Maranda also offers Tarot readings for misfits & outcasts, and publishes a fortnightly-ish column on LittleRedTarot.com called See the Cripple Dance. Read more of their work at marandaelizabeth.com, schoolformaps.etsy.com, and @MarandaDearest on Twitter.

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'My garden is my altar. Blood and bone meal and shit and decay – I clear out the dead, the dying, the withered, to make room for new life – cutting and cleaning and slicing, all sap and seeds, digging a graveyard steaming with rot and heat to feed the roots of something stronger. I nurture what I please. I cut down what does not earn my favor. I control sun and shade, wind and water. Poisons and pansies, elements and herbs – my hands are the scales of life and death, my feet planted in black soil and red clay.' - Marguerite Bennett is a GLAAD-nominated, New York Times-bestselling comic book writer based in Los Angeles. Her superheroic credits include DC Comics’ BATWOMAN and DC BOMBSHELLS, as well as stints on BATGIRL and LOIS LANE, and Marvel’s A-FORCE, YEARS OF FUTURE PAST, and ANGELA: QUEEN OF HEL. Elsewhere, her credits include JOSIE AND THE PUSSYCATS and RED SONJA. Her creator-owned titles, ANIMOSITY and INSEXTS, can be found through Aftershock Comics. Her prose has appeared in THE SECRET LOVES OF GEEK GIRLS. Her work is full of queer characters, heroines, villainesses, talking animals, bloody revenge sagas, female monsters, murder, and kissing.

This is all sounding really good. Let's just flip to one more.

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'"Nazar na lage" is something I grew up hearing. It's a wish, a warning, a protection - "ward away the evil eye". I rolled my eyes for years at the small rituals and habits women in my family have practiced forever. "This is stupid," I told my mum, when she had me and my brothers dip our fingers into olive oil and touch a bag of pennies. "What is this actually going to do?" I wish I could tell my obnoxious teenage self to chill out, because adult me understands what it actually does. There's power, and also hope, in these rituals, in believing that you can keep away the evil eye, that you can keep your family safe. No, I don't believe in the evil eye, but I do the same thing. I make my world smaller in times of crisis, I control what I can with self care rituals that make me feel powerful and bring me comfort. My mum walks through the house with incense every morning, while I paint my nails everyday and slap on a bold lip. She never sews after dark, and I get my eyebrows threaded every two weeks. It doesn't matter if the power is tangible. Having belief in these rituals is like strapping on armour, piece by piece, before wading back out into the world.' - Sim Bajwa (@simuella) is an admin assistant/writer based in the West Midlands. She graduated from Edinburgh Napier with an MA in Creative Writing in 2016, and her work has been featured in Helios Quarterly, the Dangerous Women Project, and 404 Ink's Nasty Women. She's currently working on her first fantasy novel and her favourite things are nail polish, cats, and tea.

I can't be certain, but this sounds like one flippin amazing book.  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

We can look through the rest of the book later and see what the other 15 writers are writing about. :D

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So this campaign has been going pretty amazing, right? It has! And I'm so impressed. It's 85% funded with over 830 backers. And it's just steadily moving up. 

Now, today happens to be my birthday. As a birthday present to me, can you tell a friend who would really love this book about the Kickstarter? Someone who needs to have a bit more power in their life. Someone who needs to be a bit more dangerous. And then you should go buy a book by a marginalised author published by an independent publisher. As it was just National Poetry Day here in the UK, may I suggest Total Mood Killer by Becoming Dangerous contributor merritt k, published by TigerBee Press? Or Bear published by Bloodaxe Books and written by Chrissy Williams, who is in my mind the greatest poet in the UK? Both good options. 

That's all for today. 

❤Katie West

End of Day 2!
over 6 years ago – Tue, Sep 26, 2017 at 02:23:21 PM

Hello everyone!

Welcome to the end of day 2 of the BECOMING DANGEROUS Kickstarter. It was another very good day, we're now 55% funded, which is excellent. 

I'm heading off to Thought Bubble, Leed's Comic Art Festival tomorrow and I am not packed or ready to go in any way. But if you see me there, you can probably buy a copy of SPLIT, the first book from my publishing company. It's a book with true stories about the end of marriage and what happens next. You may have noticed I like to publish books about niche things. :)

I have to go try to get some sleep because it will be an early morning, but thanks everyone for being here. Next time I'll be back with more Ritual Shorts and some information about STRETCH GOALS! I want these Stretch Goals so bad, team! Help me make it happen!

❤Katie West

p.s. My friend Simon Berman has a Kickstarter running right now for a series of Alchemy symbol enamel pins - since you all love enamel pins, it may be of interest to you!

First day and 35% funded! I'm AMAZED!
over 6 years ago – Fri, Sep 22, 2017 at 11:39:57 AM

Hello!

When I launched this Kickstarter this morning I was really nervous. I didn't update the Dashboard or the Kickstarter page for about an hour afterwards, worried about what I would find when I did. 

But here we are at the end of the first day and the book is 35% funded with 330 backers. AMAZING. I hope that by the end of tomorrow, that number is doubled and we can be well on our way to those badass stretch goals. (Seriously, I just spoke to an author today who I REALLY want to be part of this project and she wants to be too - can we make it happen?!)

I'm so grateful to everyone who has blogged, reblogged, tweeted, Instagrammed and Facebooked about this project. This success is all because of you and your efforts. So thank you so much. I can't tell you how much I appreciate it. 

As all of you backed on the first day, I thought I'd go ahead and give you a thank you gift. 

Throughout this campaign, I'll be posting short short essays by a bunch of amazing writers about how they use ritual in their lives. The very first one is by Cara Ellison, one of the contributors to Becoming Dangerous. It's about becoming a god.

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I have to be god for a living. And to be god you have to be powerful. When I get up I have to make myself powerful.  

I'm a writer and game designer for a living and I want the things I design to touch people. Bertolt Brecht said 'Art is not a mirror held up to reality but a hammer with which to shape it,' and I want the people who experience my work to feel an aching soul, or lousy with desire, or the friction in the pit of the stomach at some difficult choice they might make that will impact the people around them. I want them to feel powerful, but not at the expense of others. I want them to feel like they are taking care of their characters and the other characters they might meet. I want them to long for a life that imitates the ones I design so that they leave the house and try to make it real. I want to make something so uplifting a person might shut their front door and proceed to be extra kind to the people they encounter. I want them to understand that there is someone out there who feels the same way they do about life, about safe places, about the gentle feeling of belonging. I want them to feel seen. It's hard to design for those experiences. But I do it every day, under a cover of non-disclosure agreements and a thick feeling of endurance of the years-long development processes. The difficult part is sustaining yourself creatively into the stride of a marathon: getting it out of yourself. Sometimes it gets stuck.  

How to get through the 'stuck'? Sometimes if I get the design right, the words come. Sometimes if I get the words right, the design comes. The only obstacle between my fingers and the writing flow is mood. Sometimes writers call the lack of idea flow 'writer's block', a controversial term that many working writers deny exists. For me, it's just a matter of a mood problem.  

Some artists will make mood boards, and my friend Tim Schafer does free writing in the morning when he gets up. But I have to make playlists. I have to understand what my characters would listen to. I have to be in a scene with them. I have to understand the pacing of the way they talk: that requires audio for me.  

When I make a playlist they all can be very different from each other, but what they do have in common is that they are very atmospheric and a great deal of them have either no or very simplistic lyrics (too many words and they leak through your fingers into your text). If I know that I am at a part of the story where I want everyone to feel calm and relaxed, I look out old Morcheeba songs and the cheesy sound of the now unremarkable film Garden State. Do you remember the song Lebanese Blonde by Thievery Corporation? It sounds like the lobby of a MILF yoga complex or the background song from a BBC holiday programme. But it slows my heartbeat right down and I can remember cycling past the heady aniseed smell of summer lotuses by Tsurumaru Castle, near where I used to live in Japan. I write a slow-paced beat document that maps out how I feel for the characters: how they move and I slow their actions right down. It's how they might feel if they were in a MILF yoga complex. Or cycling slowly past one of the most beautiful castle moats I've ever seen.  

If your characters are in a William Gibson novel or they're going to the airport, it's Orbital's 'Halcyon And On And On.' Trust me on this.  

If your characters are going to punch someone soon it's Kanye's 'Monster' skipped to the Nicki Minaj verse. (Or if your character is a teen, Drake's 'Worst Behaviour.')  

If my characters want to sleep with each other I vacillate wildly between Prince and 'River' by Bishop Briggs, and sometimes still I want to prolong, prolong, prolong the moment... I want to make my characters agonise and wonder and lose their breath and maybe even feel like they might drop dead from desire. Believe it or not, one of the greatest playlists for this is Vangelis' Bladerunner soundtrack. Beloved of teenage boys and everyone who's a teenage boy in an older body, it's not the most original of choices for 'atmosphere', but when people cringe at clichés what they forget is that in order for something to become a cliché it has to be unbelievably powerful: that's what you need in a song. You need something that can drill through everything and push you through a concrete wall. You need it to pick you up and kick you into a mood. You need it to scrunch you up like paper until that paper becomes a diamond in the middle of a fist. Vangelis has a real talent for this: he can pick you up where you are and then drop you into an abyss you feel you might not get back from. That's what you're looking for, sometimes. The audio equivalent of a black fucking hole.  

So, when you get into 'Blush Response' - 'do you like our owl?' on the Bladerunner soundtrack, you can feel your muscles tense up, the tips of your fingers start to tingle. You can hear the vastness of the world around you, and you drift into that feeling - humans are amazing machines. They are amazing. They are incredible. What does it feel like to look at another human and be able to feel what they are feeling? How might it intoxicate you to touch someone who was really, truly in love with you? What gestures might indicate to someone else that you understand them and that they are safe with you? Have you ever fucked someone looking directly into their eyes and felt like you knew exactly how they felt?  

That's where it can put you, if you just get there. If you just get in that mood. If you just allow yourself to be in a dark room with all the sounds of the best audio storytellers. You can make an incantation with your own dopamine, if you just concentrate for the length of the track. If you get it right, you can be god.

Cara Ellison is a Scottish author and videogame designer, though she started out making radio at BBC Radio 4 and fell into the land of videogames by accident. She's critiqued most aspects of games in word form anywhere you'd expect to find them, from PC Gamer to The Guardian and back again. A comfortable solo world adventurer, she wrote a book called Embed With Games about travelling the world asking questions about why people make games, and what they are for. Permanently uncomfortable in one type of writing or design, she makes TV shows, comics, videogames and essays, and has difficulty sitting still, frankly. (Ed. note: Cara's website is amazing and I HIGHLY recommend you check it out if you're a fan of 90s vaporwave and cybertwee videogames)

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Thanks again. Continue to share this Kickstarter with uh...everyone you know. We're not there yet! Talk again soon! 

❤Katie West