I do not have a Halloween Night concert this year, but I am taking part in some really interesting events this month which fit the theme.
OCTOBER 16-19: I will be performing and vending at Summerland Grove’s Festival of Souls in Memphis, TN! This event is my home festival, and I cannot recommend it enough. Specifically a Pagan event, FOS welcomes all comers and boasts a candlelight labyrinth, concerts and fire dance performances, and meaningful rituals and celebrations- the veil is thin at this point in the Wheel of the Year, and FOS seeks to help us honor and celebrate our loved ones on the other side. This year’s festival will be extra meaningful for me. Not only is it a homecoming of sorts, but it will mark 10 years exactly since I lost my father, William Crosby Tucker. It will also give me a chance, at last, to meet the band Tuatha Dea, who are sharing performance time with me at the event- we’ve been chasing each other around the country and across podcasts for months, and now we finally get to meet face to face! This year’s FOS will also be the first time Dryad Tea will be on site, selling her lovely looseleaf wares, some of which are based on my music!
FRIDAY OCTOBER 24, 7pm: Thanks to the beautiful Kelley Naylor Wise, I will join a fine flock of my fellow Arkansan poets as they hold forth at an event called Poets Scrounging, companion poetry jam and open mic to Gallery 360‘s Artists Scrounging art show in Little Rock! Join the Facebook event or check my announcement listing to submit your own work and get in on the madness with me. Deadline for participation is October 22nd. There is no deadline for being in the audience. Kelley says, also, that the event will stream live online!
SUNDAY OCTOBER 26, 2-8PM: Conway, Arkansas, one of my new hometowns, is having its very first Pagan Pride Day festival ever. The event is free and will take place in Simon Park. We had a recent date change from October 25, but rest assured that October 26 is now the correct date for the event. If you want to connect with other local spiritual types, and if you want to hear me sing for free, this is the place to be!
ALL MONTH LONG: 20% of my online sales will go to Turpentine Creek Big Cat Refuge in Northwest Arkansas, as part of the Halloween Studio Tour. 🙂 Lions and Tigers and Bears gotta eat. Doom nom nom a la big kitty takes a lot of money and maintenance. Having visited Turpentine Creek, I can tell you that it’s a great place and an ever growing facility. Download or order my stuff this month, and it helps them out.
OTHER FUN AND APROPOS STUFF:
(trigger warning: death, mortality, decomposition, funerary things)
I have a new Youtube obsession, and her name is Caitlin Doughty. She’s funny, she’s lovely, and she’s a mortician in California.
It’s not the stalker kind of obsession. I just can’t go through my day lately without looking up another fun mortician fact a la her web series, Ask A Mortician. I heard Terry Gross’ interview of Caitlin on NPR’s Fresh Air this past Wednesday, and I was instantly a new fan. Check out her collective’s website, The Order of the Good Death.
Some of you are aware that I have but one tattoo, and it’s a stylized, very simple, line-art Grim Reaper. 🙂 Caitlyn has reminded me this week that my tattoo is more than just the spur-of-the-moment decision made by my much more outwardly goth, eighteen-year-old self. It stands as both reminder and reassurance. Caitlin’s videos and words have taught me a lot this week about how death is viewed and handled in the first world.
I’ve always had an interest in the ways we honor our dead and how we deal with death. Mythological psychopomp figures and god forms, for one thing, continue to captivate me as a songwriter and as a spiritual person. There is so much. I’ve always wondered about so many funeral traditions and things (Samhain and Halloween included, but also sky burial, holy crap), as well as “what happens in a funeral home/during cremation?” and etc. Caitlin manages to answer all sorts of questions about the nitty gritty side (no foolin’) about how we deal with the dead and with thoughts of our own mortality. Watching and listening to her has brought a whole lot of stuff back to the forefront for me, just in time for the tenth anniversary of my father’s death. And Caitlin is very good at including beauty and humor in what she does. In the age of Youtube stardom, she’s a genius at frank discussion about some of the most serious stuff possible, including activism and awareness of how we might improve the funeral industry/how we relate to death in this country, tempered with pop culture references, grace, and a smile.
But for the love of everything, don’t read the comments. 😉 Never read the comments.
Caitlin has a memoir out which is available on Amazon. I will be ordering it to read during my train and plane travels at the end of this month.