Aaron Oberon, Part 1. Author, DungeonMaster, and Southern Witch

In this episode I talk to Aaron Oberon. Aaron tells us about working with spirit, D&D, and how stories can help make your magic. This ended up being a pretty long interview, so I actually split it up. You can catch the second half next week!

Aaron Oberon on instagram


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Transcript

Welcome back to Your Average Witch, where every tuesday we talk about witch life, witch stories, and sometimes a little witchcraft. This episode of Your Average Witch is brought to you by Dark Star Curiosities. In this episode I talk to Aaron Oberon. Aaron tells us about working with spirit, D&D, and how stories can help make your magic. This ended up being a pretty long interview, so I actually split it up. You can catch the second half next week!

But first, I want to tell you about this week's sponsor, dark star curiosities.

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Now let's get to the stories!

Kim: Hi, Aaron. Welcome to the show.

Aaron:Hi. Thanks for having me.

Kim: Thank you so much for being here, especially since we're having a late start because my computer exploded. Can you please introduce yourself and let everybody know who you are and what you do and where they can find you?

Aaron: Yeah. So, my name is Aaron Oberon. I'm a dirty swamp witch from Southwest Florida, originally Central Florida. Huge difference I know. I am an artist, a witch, occasionally I write some stuff, pretty good author I guess. My pronouns are they/them. I do have a shop for my prints on Etsy, which I know is the scourge of everyone's existence. It's-

Kim: We all have one though.

Aaron: I know. I keep telling myself I'm gonna get a website again but websites, they're just a lot. But you can find my prints on SkullandMoonprints, all one word. If you separate it, it just brings up ugly scarves with skulls on them, which I discovered when people started asking me for my link I was like I actually don't know what the link, the URL is. And then I started just going on the Etsy search bar and yeah, it's just horrible scarves. Not good at all. So yeah, primarily I make art depicting my land or the spirits that I work with. I do a lot of talismanic work making image art or image magic, and when I'm not doing that I'm digging things out of the ground.

Kim: Oh, yay.

Aaron: I'm a simple little dirt goblin.

Kim: Dirt is playing a big part of my life lately.

Aaron: As it should. Everyone should play in the mud.

Kim: Not enough water to have mud, but lots of dirt.

Aaron: Come to Florida we have plenty of water. In fact, it's going to soon overtake the land and reclaim it for the sea.

Kim: Yeah but you got a bunch of mosquitoes.

Aaron: Only in some parts, where they don't have good mosquito control, or if they've, due to capitalism, destroyed the natural landscape which takes care of mosquito populations. But where I'm at, we have lovely bats. We have a lot of sloughs where I live.

Kim: I haven't heard that word in a minute.

Aaron: Yeah, so for the listeners who don't know, a slough is a swamp where the water moves. A swamp on its own, the water is still, stays in place, and a slough moves very, very slowly. It's not like a river. You can't really see it moving, but it very gently flows.

Kim: I didn't know that. That's cool. Yay. Education.

Aaron: You'll learn a lot about swamps, sloughs, marshlands down here. Because... and how some of our swamps are no longer swamps, they're turning into marshlands because of deforestation, which is not a great thing. So anyway, well, that's a yeah, that's a bummer. Welcome to my TED talk. (Kim laughs) I'm going to give you environmental anxiety.

Kim: Awesome. I didn't have enough of that.

Aaron: No, not at all. It's just being a Floridian, it's at the forefront of your mind at all times. It's like, hmmm, if I don't get eaten by alligators, which would be my preferred way to die. If I don't get eaten by alligators, then I'm going to be swallowed up by the sea. Or... a meth head will blow up their apartment. And those are the those are the ways that a Floridian goes out. Those are called Jacksonville funerals technically.

Kim: (laughs) Wow. What does it mean to you when you call yourself a witch?

Aaron: I was gonna, I was gonna say something quippy and funny, but I always get very, very mysterious about this. I do actually take this kind of seriously. I think calling yourself a witch is bringing on a mantle to yourself. I think you are, whether you define witch as someone who's doing healing work, and I say that a little condescendingly because I just know too many of those people, whatever you define being a witch as. The spirits see witch as something very specific, in my personal experience, in my personal opinion. Your mileage may vary. Alright, that's all my disclaimers, now you're just going to get my bullshit. So, being a witch is claiming the other. It is the queering of the self, it's queering of the soul. When you are a witch, you are someone who is diametrically opposed to whatever over-culture you exist within, whatever that structure is, you are antithetical to it. To be a witch, to claim that, is to announce to the spirits, "I am the destruction of whatever the architects design. I am-"

Kim: I love destruction!

Aaron: Yeah, I think that is the cornerstone of what makes something witchcraft as opposed to being a magician, or a folk healer, or if we want to use like an old word that is only ever said in like the backwoods where my family is originally from, like the white witches. Even that, like all of those are a very particular thing. And the thing that makes being a witch different is there is a uncontrolled nature to it, there is a dangerous nature to it, there is an inherent... two-handedness to it. There's a venom, it's not just pretty. And there's a lot of magic that's not just pretty. Most of the magicians I know are total assholes, so that just goes to show you. But, I mean, inherently calling yourself a witch calls up something, without being too much of an edgelord, that is on the destructive side. I'm not even gonna say dark, because dark is... that word has lost all meaning, much like witch itself, calling yourself a witch nowadays practically means nothing to us, right? Because it can mean anything to the spirits. They pick up some things when you throw that down. But I do think it has this inherent destructive quality, particularly as it applies to culture and dominant religion.

Kim: That's fun. I like that. Do you have any family history with witchcraft or any, when you think back to being a kid, your family may not have said, Oh, we're a bunch of witches, but they were doing like smoke cleansing every year or something?

Aaron: So not that. Nothing so overt. It actually was not until very recently that I found out that my family has an actually very extensive history of folk magic that they 110% kept hidden, and I sure as hell didn't know about growing up, and I'm very mad about it.

Kim: Why do our parents do that?

Aaron: Parents, grandparents, everyone. It's just crazy. Everyone. And it wasn't until I was doing research for, I guess I'll plug myself, I already got paid for it so I'm not going to make any money off it, but it's a good-ass book. Llewellyn's Complete Book of North American Folk Magic, I was approached to write about Florida. And so, in preparing for that, you know, I'm sure we'll get into this later on, but I am an anxious, anxious person. Anyone who's listening, and I wear it on my sleeve because I think it's important for us to discuss anxiety and mental health and be very much forthcoming with that. And so as an anxious person that also comes into me being a very anxious witch, and when I am writing or putting anything out in the world, I like to make sure all my bases are covered. So I did a lot of extensive interviews with family members. My mom has changed a lot in the last 15 years or so, so talking about this kind of stuff doesn't scare her like it used to. So I got things out of her that I have never heard of, that I never knew existed, that she would have never told me 15 years ago, or even 20 years ago, because she was so petrified of me being a Satanist. Because that's the worst thing you could possibly be. So I found out that our family actually has a... So my family roots go back to the Appalachian Mountains on one side, and primarily North and South Carolina, and then on the other side, primarily Tennessee. So those are the two regions, and Arkansas. So my, I'm trying to like picture my family tree in my head. I had a, these are women that I never met. A great-grandmother who, they didn't have any words for it. She just took off was the language that my great-aunt would use. She took off illnesses from babies. It was very specific illnesses. And I'm kind of like talking around it because there is that power in secrecy, right? But this woman very specifically took things off, and as I'm hearing my aunt talk about this stuff, I was just like, why the hell have I never heard this before? And I would just ask some questions just to keep leading her on and get more information out of her, and apparently this was an initiatory practice that would pass from male to female, from female to male. Supposedly it died off with my great-great-aunt, but they lost touch with that side of the family, so they don't know if it got passed down to someone else, but it had already been, according to my great-aunt, it had already been broken because it was passed from a woman to another woman, and according to the tradition, she can't pass it on anymore. So there's all these taboos and laws and I'm like, this is all the same shit that I have been researching and trying to reclaim for 10 years now, and you're telling me we have this in our family this whole time. Because the things that I grew up with were like my mom praying over sweet tea that my family would be as cool as the sweet tea itself, you know. Or be sweet, sweeter to each other because our family would just fight all the fucking time. Or my grandmother telling me to put the Bible under my pillow to stave off nightmares. That was the kind of magic that i grew up with. Very very small things. Probably the most overt thing that ever happened was my uncle giving me a catfish crucifix, which is a very particular kind of... It's a sail catfish, which is a saltwater catfish, and it's face plate... bone... thing? The interior of it looks like Christ on the cross, and when you shake it, the bones rattle on the inside. So it sounds, according to a series of postcards back from the 1970s, it sounds like the dice of the Romans who were gambling about who would die first of the three that were being crucified, Jesus or the two thieves. So yeah.

Kim: That's so good!

Aaron: Yeah, there's this extensive, yeah, there's this really extensive Florida folklore that ties directly in with tourism. Because that catfish crucifix is popularized through postcards to get people, I write about this in the article, so I won't go too much into it, because if you want the real deal, you really should check out the book. But there is a series of postcards that talk about the mystical qualities of various iconic Florida things, like the passion flower having 12 petals to symbolize the 12 apostles, sand dollars having five-

Kim: Doves inside?

Aaron: Say again?

Kim: Don't they have doves inside?

Aaron: The sand dollars?

Kim: Yeah.

Aaron: I don't know about that one. But they have the five spokes for the five wounds of Christ. Dogwood flower is the same five petals for the five wounds of Christ. and then the catfish crucifix, which I mean it really does look, I'm staring at mine right now. It does eerily look a lot like a man on a cross when your brain is seeking patterns and creates those for you, so there were little bits in my childhood of folk magic. Never witchcraft, witchcraft was bad. It's not a good thing. You don't want to do witchcraft. I, that made me so much more interested in it, all of the materials. I've told this story on pretty much every podcast I've ever been on, the thing that fully and firmly got me into witchcraft was a book in my Southern Baptist library about the dangers of Wicca. And I read this book about how evil and the trickery of Wicca and how it claims to be a nature religion and it's really getting you into the diabolism of the devil. And I was like, this sounds great, guys. You got me. Hook, line, and sinker. I mean, it really did. So that was, you know, that and my little pocket psalm is what really got me into it. But there was actually this like family history of like very, like the kind of stuff you would read in an academic study about Appalachia. Like that was stuff that was in my family and they were just like, oh, we're going to stop talking about that. And that's not even getting into the other side of my family where prophetic dreams come from. So, yeah. And that was something that I had always known about, but I had known about it with me. I did not realize that my mother and her great aunt, the woman who gives me all of this information, it comes from that entire line. Almost every woman in that family has had prophetic dreams. And they can trace it back specifically to one person who was born with a caul over their face. And I haven't told this story much because this is only something I've learned in the last year, two years. This man was born with a caul over his face, and the way that my great aunt puts it is, well, when he was born, they were supposed to pull it down and close his eyes. But they didn't. They lifted it up and they opened his eyes. And then she pauses for a second. She goes, do you know what I mean when I say that his eyes got opened? And I said, yes, ma'am, I sure do. And then she just continued talking on the story. So ever since him, he, the way that she put it, he had true knowing, and true dreaming and no-one, supposedly no one else has been born with that true knowing but my great-aunt, my mother, and another female family member and myself all have this true dreaming. So yeah, there was this family shit and they all kept it hidden for years, because they were worried about being weird, basically.

Kim: The devil. 

Aaron: Yeah, my mom occasionally would tell me to trust my dreams. She would cite Joseph in the Technicolor Dreamcoat. I'm saying that because I'm a theater kid, but Joseph and the Coat of Many Colors or whatever. She would cite that story as why dreams are okay. That's not a bad thing, but the more entrenched I got in the concept of the witch, the more even that was like, oh, maybe that's a door to the devil, and maybe we shouldn't tell Aaron about dreaming, dreams are a good thing, you know. So that's, yeah that's, and that's why I got so excited because I'm like oh yeah I don't think I've actually taught told this story because it is such fresh information. It's only been over the last year or two that I've actually known this shit, because my parent, my family is bizarre and they don't like to talk about anything.

Kim: Mine either. At least it's, I don't know, it's health, health crap with my family. Super great. 

Aaron: Mine is everything. We're just emotionally constipated. We use comedy to overcome all things. 

Kim: Exactly. And alcohol. 

Aaron: I am like one of the only sober people in my family so I'm yeah I get that. 

Kim: We're working our way. I've been for years but the rest of the family is moving towards it, too. Yay.

Aaron: I got one of my aunts to drop down to one margarita a night. And so that was that was a big celebration. Very proud.

Kim: Do you do any consistent or regular rituals or practices that you'll share with us?

Aaron: Yeah, so the most consistent part of my practice is absolutely working with my house spirits, giving offerings. It's the stuff that's not very sexy, right? It's not the the conjuration of the queen of the Fairest Sibylia. It's not the call to the King Oberon, you know what I mean? Like it's the the daily upkeep. It's doing your evil eye removals. It's cleansing. It's feeding your spirits. That is probably, that is the most regular and consistent thing. Even my husband... my husband who lives in the same house as me. What a weird way to put that. (both laugh) You know, that unusual circumstance for which your husband lives in the same home as you. My husband, who is not a practitioner, is what I think I was trying to say in some version will... (Kim laughs) I have you wheezing and this makes me feel like I am the funniest person on earth and I... that is so good for my ego. (Kim continues laughing) So even my husband will give offerings to the ancestors, like some novenas and yeah it's those are the most consistent things. They're the things that are the daily upkeep. It's the doing your laundry of magical work. It is not sexy, but it is very important and you need to make sure that everyone is fed and happy and doing their jobs.

Kim: As I was trying to figure out what was wrong with the computer, I walked out into the living room and I smelled burning plastic and the candle that we light, I thought it had gone out, but guess what? It had not. And the flames were like eight inches off the thing because... I don't know what happened. Luckily, it was in a candle tin and I had the lid and just dropped it on there, but almost burned my house down today. I don't know what's happening with this day.

Aaron: Somebody's not happy.

Kim: It's wild. But yeah, I do the candle thing.

Aaron: Yeah,, I do. I have a pretty... the same thing I do every day. A shot of gin. Not every day, every week. A shot of gin. One very skinny, like beeswax tapered candle. One incense cone. And some money. And a big bowl of water.

Kim: Why a bowl?

Aaron: So I use the bowl, it's one part offering, one part cleansing, so a lot of my household practices are derived from Celtic reconstructionism, particularly Gaelic reconstructionism. So I'll say some prayers from the Carmina Gadelica, which is a collection of prayers and folk songs primarily from Scotland. I think entirely from Scotland. It was Alexander Carmichael collected... Ugh, now I'm like second-guessing myself, but I'm pretty sure they're almost entirely from Scotland. And I'm saying these prayers over the bowl of water, and then I will I have a palmetto whisk which is, palmetto is a kind of palm-like, technically a grass that it looks like a tree, you know one of those fun biology things. And they grow rampant down here. It is a very important plant. It used to be used for shelter for roof thatching, the boots which are like these woody protrusions from the center of the trunk, can be used to make shoes, so the boots can make boots. And I use the palmetto fans, the big branching out leaves, I use those as talismans, as fans, as cordage. I will, while they're still pliable, I will soak them and then slice them incredibly thin. Normally I have something visual but this is an auditory medium anyway so who needs visuals? But I slice them very thin and then bind them together as a whisk. They used to be made into mosquito whisks, so you would kind of, if there were mosquitoes around you would just slap yourself with this thing, and I use it to beat off the evil eye. Well not to beat off the evil eye, you know. You want to get rid of it, not make it happy. So I will say the prayers, yeah I'll say the prayers over the bowl of water, dip the whisk in, and then knock everything out.

Kim: Neat! I could do that with yucca.

Aaron: Yeah absolutely. The the fibers are very similar.

Kim: How would you say witchcraft has changed your life?

Aaron: Well it's kind of taken it over. The idea of my life sans witchcraft is I mean nearly impossible. I started practicing when I was 13 years old. I'm shmurdy years old now so over half my life has been about learning how to talk with spirits, how to shape the world around me. I genuinely... It has shaped everything from what I studied in college, and what hobbies I pick up. If I didn't have witchcraft, I would have never started doing lino, because I would have never met a dear friend of mine, Via Hedera. Who also does lino art. And seeing her do this I was like, that looks so cool! I love that woodcut style! And then I started doing it and now that's all I fucking post about! People are probably tired of it. Well some people follow me for that, the old people are like, why don't you write anymore? I'm sorry, I have too much fun making pretty pictures. So without witchcraft I wouldn't have art. I absolutely can't imagine my life without art. I would be miserable without it. I think the only positive that would come out of that would be I have a lot of extra room. A lot more free space. I have a lot of shit. I guess I should be more respectful. I have a lot of things. No, it's shit. I have so much stuff. Every surface in my office is covered, if not in shrines or temporary altars, then in materia. And even the desk that I'm recording at right now, I have faux leather used for bookbinding, I have a psalter that I hand bound, I have books, I have cypress knees, I have... I mean just everything in the world.

Kim: I love cypress knees!

Aaron: Yeah I have a lamp that's made out of a cypress knee and it's the keep it on my desk in this office because it doesn't have a lampshade, so it looks ugly at anywhere else. I could get a lampshade, I just don't feel like it, it sounds like a lot of work. So how has it changed my life... I mean it's so integrated into its hard, it's it's been a part of everything.

Kim: Okay, tangent question.

Aaron: Yeah.

Kim: Do you have a specific place in... I'm assuming you do, just because it seems like it's easier. Is your witch space the same place where you do your making of things?

Aaron: Yep, pretty much. Well, it should be. All of my... so the office, it's not an office, it's my witching room. It is primarily witchcraft materials, and then I have one corner dedicated to art, but I so often would take my art and my creating supplies and I would take it out to the living room so that I could watch TV and be with my family and my animals while I was making things, that I bought a rolling cart. Like an art teacher elementary school rolling cart, so I could put everything on it and roll it out of the office so that when, because there are days where I'll be in the office and I'll have music blaring, just jamming out to a little Celia, a little Lekele 47, a little Dolly Parton. She's an eclectic girl. She likes all kinds of things. And I'll be doing it, and I'll be just in the office really going to town, but many times I really like to be with my family when I'm making. And I do a lot of things. Like I recently picked up drop spindle, so making thread and yarn out of raw fiber. That's super easy to do in the living room while watching TV. Lino, not so much. Making books, I have to do it in here. It takes so much precision, and I don't want to fuck up, and I still fuck up. Because it can be very costly. If not in material, then in time. So I do, yeah, the, the witching space and the maker space is completely intersected. The cabinets where I keep, um, scrap lino is also where I have a chicken foot, apparently. I don't know why I have a chicken foot down there right now, but that is what I, I opened my cabinets to see what was mixed in there and that was lino and chicken feet. So, um...

Kim: (laughing) Surprise!

Aaron: Yeah, and they're wrapped in thread which makes me think that I was starting something. ADHD and witchcraft, it's a fun mix, guys. It's a very interesting mix. Like, I know why I have chicken feet, but I don't know why I have those chicken feet, and that's always a good question to know. 

Kim: My studio is like that too. It's about half and half of metalworking equipment and jars of weird crap.

Aaron: Yeah, I'm so tempted to get into metalworking. One of my friends got into it and they were like, oh yeah, you can do it on a stove top if you just get a couple of materials. Like, you don't need a whole crucible. And I was like, really? And immediately my husband was like, please, you already have an entire room. (Kim laughs)  So I'm not doing that. No metalworking yet. There's a big ask.

Kim: Yeah, because it's fun. Yeah, although I did burn the shit out of myself earlier today but it's fine.

Aaron: Oh I've done that so many times with, because I also, before I got into lino, I was doing pyrography, wood burning. I like to use the fancier name. I want to sound fancy.

Kim: But it's more fun to say.

Aaron: Yeah, pyrography. She's a woman of class. She's not a wood burner, she's a pyrographer. It's like biographies, but for fire. (Kim laughs) But yeah, I've definitely burned myself. And I also, I make miniature sets. So this is like the only thing, this is the only hobby I have that's not directly tied into witchcraft, which is D&D. And I will find any fucking excuse to talk about D&D on a witchcraft podcast, because I think every witch should play a little bit of D&D. Because while it's not directly tied into witchcraft, it is magic and life changing. And I won't get on the soapbox. I just did an interview last week where I did a huge D&D soapbox. But I make sets. I make all of my own miniatures. I make, or not all the miniatures because I don't have a fucking 3D printer, but the sets themselves, I will make dilapidated churches and I will make a haunted forest. Or I did a murder mystery once where I made an entire apartment, like studio apartment, where there were things knocked over, and clues, and very fun stuff. And I do that mostly with foam. So I also have a foam cutter that I have accidentally burned myself on. It doesn't hurt that much. It's a very thin wire. But if you snap the wire, it hurts like shit. So I've been told.

Kim: I love D&D. When Corey Hutcheson was on here, he was telling me about how they use it to work with vets with PTSD to help them work through situations that they were in downrange that they'd never got closure.  So I am super pro D&D just for the science part, but also because it's fucking fun.

Aaron: Yeah. So tabletop has seen a resurgence in a lot of medical journals and psychological studies. So PTSD, anxiety, self-expression... There's a lot of jokes in the D&D community about being a gateway drug to coming out as non-binary, basically. Because you can be anything you want. So it's very easy to be like, oh well I'm just gonna play a, I'm just gonna be a girl character, you know, I'm stretching my acting range. And then that person comes out as trans like two months after they start playing. Or one of my dear friends started playing with us and they were like, my character uses they-them pronouns. And of course in my group, you know, we have my sibling who's bi-gender, me and my husband are both non-binary, So we were like, okay cool, Taraquana is nonbonary. You know, some orc name. And then they came out, the person themselves came out as non-binary, not, you know, more than a few weeks later. So it's this really beautiful space, and- all right, here, fuck it, I'm gonna get on my soapbox.

Kim: Yay!

Aaron: I've used it myself as this medium of transformation and healing. So I'm what we call in the biz as a forever DM, meaning that I am always the game or dungeon master because no one else wants to do it basically. And I would rather play than not play. So I learn all the rules and we use a lot of systems, We don't just use D&D and in our group. We use Kids on Brooms, which is like a not transphobic Harry Potter. So that's awesome. Yeah, Kids on Brooms is actually a really cool system. Check it out if you haven't tried it. I do have kind of a... Like, every once in a while I think, like, ooh, I'm gonna start a new podcast where we're just gonna play Kids on Brooms, but with actual occultists. And I don't know if that would be the coolest thing ever or the most miserable thing ever, because occultists are so fucking miserable.

Kim: Do it, do it, do it!

Aaron:  But no, I probably will one day. We use, and then there's a system called Wander Home. And I really, even if you're not into tabletop, I so encourage everyone to check out Wander Home because it is a non-combative tabletop role-playing that is centered on gender expression, healing, trauma, and using communication as a medium of game and storytelling and collaboration, and it is one of the most collaborative tabletops that I've ever played. It's also a cute fucking setting. Think Redwall meets Studio Ghibli, right? Everyone's little animals wearing like tweed vests and shit. It's very Mr. Toad & Mr. Frog. It's very Wind in the Willows. And instead of livestock they have bugs, so you can be a bumblebee herder which is fucking amazing. Is that not the cutest shit you've ever heard in your life?

Kim: I want it.

Aaron: I will host a WanderHome game any time but when I was going through very recently an incredibly difficult time in my life, I won't get into the details of that, but what I will get into the details of is I had I was so exhausted on a daily basis emotionally physically and spiritually that I wasn't tending to my spirits. That I was not tending to myself, that I wasn't tending- I wasn't making art. I was not writing. I Barely even spoke to the people that I loved. My birthday happened at the exact middle of all of this and I had already taken my birthday off. I always take my birth- well, my birthday is around a major holiday, so I always have it off no matter what. And I had asked a couple friends to play tabletop, and I put all of those months of trauma, stress, depression, depression and funneled it into a single game. And it was the most cathartic, healing, powerful... I made my players cry, I made myself cry. We were screaming. We rented a cabin out in the woods so that we could be as loud as we wanted to be. Which I feel like could be a sex joke, but it really isn't, I promise. And basically, I created a game wherein the way to win the game was to realize that I, as both DM and villain, was not going to allow them to leave the game. So they would finish the quest or they would, you know, find the bad guy and face the bad guy and I would restart the game from the beginning. And so that whenever they got to the end of the game I restarted it. And to win the game they had to get up and leave. They physically, not the characters, the players had to physically, and I stayed in character the entire time, one of them stood up and I started yelling at them as this grandmother monster that I had created, Grandmother Raven. And I started telling them, no, you have to sit down. That's not how the story goes, That's not how the story goes! And one by one, my players would get up and they would leave the table. And in character, I am mad. And one of my players was like, I wasn't sure if you were mad or if it was the character, but everyone else was very confident because we've been playing for years. And it wasn't until well after this, because when they got up and they rounded the corner and they were all out of sight, I very loudly proclaimed, you have broken the cycle and that's where we're gonna end our session. Because that's how I end every session, "and that's how we're gonna end our session." So I tell them they have broken the cycle. And it was this beautiful thing and it wasn't until probably a month ago that I realized that I created this game and shaped it. And there was a lot of magic involved in ways that are very difficult to talk, to describe, and other than that, stories themselves are acts of magic. When you craft a story, when you tell a story, you are reshaping the world. That is magic in and of itself. And I don't mean that in like a floofy, like literary way. Like I mean that in a very literal way. The act of storytelling is the act of creation, it is the act of magic. So when you're doing this in a collaborative setting, you are making magic as a whole. And it was making this game where the way to win is to get up and leave a toxic situation that I realized, oh, (laughs mockingly) I need to get up and leave a toxic situation. And it was through the medium of this game, of this collaborative storytelling art that I was able to leave something that was incredibly damaging to myself. And also got me into therapy, which everyone should check out.

Kim: Yay!

Aaron: That is my big, that's a very long tangent about how gaming and art and storytelling can intersect with magic and be... I don't like blending the worlds of psychology and magic. Actually, it's a huge pet peeve of mine. And I won't even consider this the blending of psychology and magic, but it is something that concurrently do exist. The magic of creating this world and this environment that necessitates the breaking of cycles, only to realize that in my own life, I needed to break cycles, is something that was both a very magical act and a very significant psychological act.

Kim: I wonder if my patrons realize. They put together a little D&D, they get together every Monday and they just game.

Aaron: That's hot.

Kim: I love it. I should do it, but it's so hard for me to commit to things.

Aaron: Yeah, and D&D is... It's not a commitment, you know, because my gaming group is very, we've been together for... (laughs) we've been together for five years. um, we're a couple. It actually kind of feels that way. You get very close to your gaming party because you experience things, again, the power of storytelling, the memories that you forge as your characters and with your fellow players are just as real and visceral as your memories in your living life. Because memory is a approximation of actual occurrence. Right, when we look at what a memory is, your memories aren't even actually the memories of the inciting incident. When you think of, I'll use this as an example. If I think of going to North Carolina, when I think of the memory of like, oh, the first time that I threw a snowball at my husband, I'm not actually remembering the first time I threw a snowball at my husband. I'm remembering the last time I remembered that memory. And so it becomes a Xerox of a Xerox over time. So your memories are continuously changing. This is why, (laughs) oh, your face.

Kim: I hate that!

Aaron: (laughs) I'm so sorry! But this is why eyewitness testimony is actually not as reliable as we think of it because our memories are malleable. They're easy to change. Today I thought I lost my wallet because I was 100% sure that I had my wallet. No, I put my wallet in my pocket. I felt the weight of it in my pocket. No, I didn't! I had it sitting on the kitchen counter. It did not go in my pocket, never not once, but I had that significant memory and that's because our memories are not actually of the inciting incident, they are the last time that we remembered it. So, have fun having an existential crisis everyone!

Kim: (laughs) No! Why? Now I don't know what's real anymore!

Aaron: Oh, watch The Matrix and then have that thought the entire- or watch Everything Everywhere All at Once and have that thought the entire-

Kim: I can't, I need to. I'm, yes, I want to. I haven't yet. I don't go see movies.

Aaron: Oh, I didn't go to theaters. I streamed it, girl. I that movie made me cry in the best way possible. And I I cry a lot. I'm such a baby.

Kim: ME too. I cry on this show all the time.

Aaron: Really?

Kim: I'm expecting... I almost did when you were talking about the cabin.

Aaron: Oh, yeah. At the cabin, we cried. We cried hard.

Kim: Yeah. I almost did when you were like, and everybody got up and it's going to make me cry. I have to stop talking about it.

Aaron: Yeah.

Kim: Okay, back to the interview. (both laugh)

Aaron: Okay are we playing, wait are we? So this is session zero, right? We're going to play a game of D&D next.

Kim: Yeah, that would be awesome!

Aaron: I've got the Wander Home book...

Kim: I'm interested. I wrote it down.

Aaron: Oh my god, it's so good. It's so good. And there's no conflict. Of course, it's supposed to be a no conflict system. And what do I do immediately? I combine it with German fairy tales and horror. (Kim laughs) And... oh yeah.

Kim:  I love German fairy tales. 

Aaron: Absolutely. Just to give a taste, un poquito. Just a little taste. One of,  I had all the players pick fairy tales and also I improv 95% of everything that we do in D&D. Because I have a background in acting and improv so I don't, it helps me when I prepare too much. I realized that my players are gonna fuck me over, so I just throw, I'm gonna have to throw it out the window anyway. So I just, I know the world and I know what the world wants to respond to, and I just go into it blind. It works for me, it doesn't work for everyone, but with Wander Home, part of the world-building was, hey, pick a fairy tale. Because what that does for me as a creator, you're picking a fairy tale. That shit is an archetype in my brain and in your brain and everyone in the Western world, if I say Rapunzel, you know, tower, long hair, climbing up a tower. You know, it's just easy. It's a framework that works. So everyone picked a fairy tale, and one of my siblings picked Rapunzel as their fairy tale. So I immediately was like, How do I make this as horrifying as possible? So the hair goes, not just like, oh, that's a really long hair. No, it looks inorganic almost, and it is, it's not coming out of a window, it has broken through the tower, and it covers the forest, and they make investigation checks and find that hidden amongst strands of hair are actually bodies of people who have suffocated in it. And as my players go to climb it, I turn the music off, because we have music playing. I cut the music and I say, there is so much hair that sound is enveloped by it. And as you grab part of the thread, and because I didn't want to say hair, as you grab it and pull yourself up, you lose sight of your companions, you no longer can hear them, you can only smell the fires in front of you as you get consumed by it. And so I turned Rapunzel into a horror story. Ew. It got so much worse. I think one day I'm gonna write it into a short novel, like a little novella, so I'm not gonna say everything, but I immediately took these fairy tales and was like, cool, how do I scar you for life? Wholesome. 

Kim: Dude. (both laugh) 

Kim: Holy shit how can I even go on now?

Aaron: Memories are real, we're living in a simulation, Rapunzel is a hair monster that one, that has no life and will only consume you, much like a sun dew. How's your day going?

Kim: Wow. (laughs) Okay but what's the biggest motivator in your practice?

Aaron: (bursts into laughter) No, I love it. Yes, please. Yes, let's continue.

Kim: It's not often that somebody's more tangential than me, I'll tell you. (laughing)

Aaron: Oh, no, I knew. You said you were tangential and I laughed. I laughed because I was like...

Kim: Okay this is exciting. (fades out)

Sadly I have to cut it off for this week. Catch the rest of the interview next Tuesday, September 12, where Aaron talks about story as part of practice, making your work more accessible as a creator, and tells a great story about getting lost in the woods. 

Thanks for listening to this episode of Your Average Witch. You can find us all around the internet on Instagram @youraveragewitchpodcast, Facebook at Facebook.com/groups/hivehouse, at youraveragewitch.com, and at your favorite podcast service. if you'd like to recommend someone for the podcast, like to be on it yourself, or if you'd like to advertise on the podcast, send an email to youraveragewitchpodcastat gmail.com. Thanks for listening and I'll see you next Tuesday