Happy Autumn!
The seasons have been flying by. I returned from Puerto Rico this spring, spent the summer in Austin and now I am unexpectedly on the East Coast. As I've been transitioning in PR, TX, and the DC/MD/VA area, so has Queering Herbalism 2. What started out as one volume and 200 pages has now become 5 volumes with a total of 505 pages. As I've struggled with health and housing and food insecurity, I've managed to keep writing and compiling slowly, but surely. Back in December my computer died, which set me back some months as I wasn't in the financial position to buy a new one. I kept at it, though and a very generous transwoman donated an old laptop to me. The ancestors have definitely been at my side saying "Keep walking."
So, as the months have gone by, I've found each section/volume getting richer and richer. Namely, the Ceremony and Ritual chapter and the Women* Healers, Healing and Resistance chapter. I was able to take a step back and really think about the perspectives being represented (or not represented) and really "go in". In the Ceremony and Ritual chapter went in on many aspects of different ceremonies and the histories and cosmologies informing them, plants' rightful place in these ceremonies and had a little discourse on gender/sexuality and ceremony.
In the Women* healers, healing, and resistance section/volume I was able to spend more time with the questions of...who is a woman healer? what is a healer? And what stories are not being told when we speak of women* healers? This allowed me to add more articles about transwomen and their place as healers in our history and though I was not able to find what I wished I could have on gender non-conforming femme and feminine healers, I was able to write about how this perspective is largely absent in the current literature and literature of the past. You know, our history is oral and this colonized way of legitimizing written history is an issue anyway. But ,where does that leave those of us searching for our predecessors, lineages and legacies?
Well, we are definitely in a new and exciting time where we have to sit down together in living rooms and at kitchen tables and compare notes over meals about who we were and who we are becoming. The next Queering Herbalism is an encyclopedia of 5 volumes that is a window from the past into the present and future. I can't wait to share the completed versions with you. Though I'm working double shifts tirelessly at my day/night job, I am even more committed to getting this completed. Please support by pre-ordering your copies which will be in e-version for now. Also, if you have any printing hookups, please let me know. This will make the reading more accessible to those who are not able to access ebooks or read ebooks online. I'm thinking of doing some audio for some of the sections but that is a few months out, at the least.
Thank you to all who have supported Queering Herbalism 2 and to those who have pre-ordered and waited patiently for the book to come out. I know these volumes are worth the wait. You will receive a special thanks consisting of the full encyclopedia.
Healing and Justice,
AGQ
