Letter From The Forests of Arduinna: June

I’ve decided to begin posting a monthly list of links and updates for you folks, as I often forget to include these at the end of essays as I previously had been doing.

Also, in the last three weeks my subscriber list has exploded, and I noticed I don’t actually know more than half of you, which I then suspect means you probably don’t much about me. So these monthly updates will maybe be a way of making sure the enforced distance of internet writing diminishes a little.

So first off, hi! And thanks for following my writing. I’ve been quite humbled by the many of you who are reading my works and especially by the many of you who are also kicking in money to help me continue this. Thanks for that, deeply.

These substack dispatches are called From The Forests of Arduinna because I live in the foothills of the Ardennes, the ancient hilly forest that once stretched continuously from what is now the city of Metz, throughout all of Luxembourg and most of Belgium, and to Trier and Saarbrücken in Germany. That forest, incidentally, was once part of an even larger one, which stretched from the western edges of France to the eastern edges of Austria, and possibly farther.

Arduinna is the name of the local goddess for this forest. She was depicted as a huntress on hill top shrines and associated with boars (thus the boar on the logo).

As you maybe know, I was born in the United States (in Appalachia) and lived in that country all but the last six years of my life. I then moved to Rennes, France, but now live in the Ardennes. It’s both a magical and somewhat tragic story how this all happened (including needing to flee an abusive marriage in Rennes), but my life is now extremely beautiful, full of love and joy and a sense of purpose I’d not known was possible.

I’m a writer, and I’m also an editor and the director of publishing for a small anti-capitalist pagan press called Gods&Radicals. It is a not-for-profit, and the organization which manages it is called Ritona. Ritona is the name of another local goddess here, a goddess of river crossings. Her name has the same root as my name (Rit/Rhyd) and in old Celtic meant ‘ford.’

I’ve published several of my own books through Gods&Radicals Press, but my primary work there is publishing the works of others. As of 1 September we will have published 28 titles, with five more scheduled for release by the end of the year. I’ve been the lead editor on most of these works, which is quite a lot of work but something I deeply enjoy.

In addition to that, I do my own writing. This is what I truly love, and I recently got some incredible news regarding this. I can’t tell you much more yet, but I will be a writing a book for a really cool leftist publisher who liked my writing. That book is scheduled for release late next year, and I’ll of course keep you updated when the publisher announces the book.

And as you may have noticed, I call myself a druid. What this means precisely is that I practice a kind of relational spirituality to the land around me, informed both by experience and by the scant historical evidence we have of what ancient druids actually did. While I’ve studied with official neo-druidic organizations, I make no claim that what I’m doing is what “true” druidry is or was. But I also find no other word accurately describes the sort of work I do and the relationship I have to the land here, and that’s enough for me.

The rest of my life is filled with gardening, gym training, biking, hiking, and doing delightfully domestic things like cooking. I once did many “activist” things, like union organising and protesting and all those other actions that I have discovered mostly just drained my desire to actually live and create. When you’re busy trying to tear things down, you have no time to build or create anything and you find yourself no longer even really wanting to, regardless of how much you tell yourself you’re doing this all to build a better world.

Current public things I am working on include a course on paganism called Being Pagan. The first iteration of this course starts on Monday (enrollment filled up 8 weeks before it started), but I am instructing a second iteration in October. Likely due to the aforementioned manuscript contract, I won’t be able to offer it again until the book is completed, so if you’d like to be part of it, enrolling in this second iteration is your best chance for that.

The course itself will also be a book of the same name, which should be released by the end of the year (the course text I’m using is derived from excerpts of that manuscript). This is the second book I will be publishing based off a course I have developed. The first, All That Is Sacred Is Profaned, is a straightforward guide to Marxism from a pagan and animist perspective. The book is our third-best selling book, and the course was very popular. Because I will likely not have time again to instruct it, I will soon be creating a free version of the course, including the video lectures I used for teaching.

Besides that book, I have published four other books, all through Gods&Radicals Press. The first three (Your Face is a Forest, A Kindness of Ravens, Witches in a Crumbling Empire) are collections of essays, travel journals, and poems I’d written. The fourth is The Provisioner, an erotic fantasy novel which I’m deeply proud of (it will have a sequel).

I write a monthly in-depth essay (usually 6000 to 8000 words) for Another World, the supporters’ journal of Gods&Radicals Press. These can be read either by becoming a supporting member, joining my Patreon, or waiting a couple of months for them to be reposted on the primary online journal, A Beautiful Resistance.

And finally, I’ll add that I’ve been creating occasional druid video journals. These I post first to Patreon supporters and soon to supporters of this substack. They are then all eventually made public. I’ve been a bit behind on new journals, partially because of my writing schedule, partially because the really frustrating smartphone that I record them with has become even more frustrating.

That’s all for this letter. Subsequent ones will be more like updates and will include links to interesting writing of others as well.

Thanks deeply for all your enthusiastic support of my recent writing, whether that’s been paid subscriptions, gifts, or just the free signups to From The Forests of Arduinna. One thing that I especially appreciate is if you could tell others about this, as I am using social media platforms less and less (and will completely cut out Facebook from my life by 1 August). So, sharing my essays with others is really, really helpful.

Be well!

—Rhyd Wildermuth