Witchy review repository Green Man Review has been kind to me since the very earliest days of my touring life. This month, they’re featuring me as their Summer Queen, doing all sorts of posts on behalf of my work! I’m super flattered and grateful. Their first post is a roundup of all the great reviews they’ve done of my stuff over the years, as well as some new and very kind words. Check it out here.
Their second post is an essay they asked me to write back in 2013, now published at last, of my own thoughts on the magic of summertime. I went deep into my roots to get this one out. Here’s an excerpt:
I grew up in the Mississippi River Delta in southeast Arkansas, where the state lines blur near the tops of Louisiana and Mississippi, and life still moves at a very calm pace for most folks. I spent half my summers as a child outside playing softball, swimming, or riding my bicycle through my small hometown. I spent the other half indoors, hiding in the freezing embrace of central air conditioning, as far away as four walls could get me from ravenous mosquitoes and the thick air of Southern Summer Humidity.
Where I come from, Summer is not a nice girl. She is not gentle. She is fierce. She is not there to entertain you. Rather, she’ll eat you alive.
She turns the air to soup and the water to paradise, but you can’t enjoy the latter for long at the wrong time of day, lest the insects carry you off. She scorches the fields, drains the rivers, and chars the skin. She is the divine feminine in her Destroyer aspect, unapologetic and terrible.
But you can bet your ass I was glad to see her when school let out for the year. Every time.
And to tell the truth, she could be generous to those of us who learned how to work with her, to celebrate as one until our buckets of sweat ceased to matter, to appreciate the play of her brutally colorful sunsets through the dry dust of a field at harvest.
Read the full essay here. I hope you enjoy it!
Coming soon: an interview about what my perfect summer feast would look like, and more!