Whew, I am thrilled and nervous to be here. Let’s see. What do you need to know about me off the bat? I blog primarily at Tiny Cat Pants, which is rapidly approaching its 5th Anniversary. I also blog under my given name, Betsy Phillips, at Pith in the Wind, which is the Nashville Scene‘s blog, the Nashville Scene being our local alternative newspaper.
It’s funny, when I first started blogging, I felt so certain about things. But being on the internet, even with a small audience, for five years has really humbled me to how much I don’t know. Which I think has lead my writing to be a lot more place-specific, I think, a lot more, “This is what I see, and this is how I understand it.” So, I imagine the same will be true of my writing here. Y’all are probably going to hear a lot more about Nashville and Tennessee in general than you ever cared to.
Still, I think it’ll be useful. A lot happens here because of the fucked up ways we think about race and gender and hierarchies of all sorts.
I’m a heathen, though not a very formal one. I hope we can talk about that, too, why I, the daughter of a Methodist minister, left Christianity and became a polytheist. I know paganism, broadly, is loaded with feminists, and yet, it seems to me, we rarely talk openly about what we pagans believe and why to other feminists. And for good reasons. I know I feel like a damn fool when I talk about it, but it’s important to me and a lot of the reason I left Christianity had to do with being a woman, so maybe we can just try it and see how it goes.
I read tarot cards (though I don’t think that’s actually a “woo-woo” skill, at least not 99.9% of the time), and I think we might talk about that, some, too.
I’d also like to talk about my recent forays into genealogy. I don’t know how common it is among white people, but I had grown up with a pretty strong dose of “Well, that wasn’t us!” I’m sure you know it. We didn’t own slaves. We didn’t hang witches. We didn’t… blah blah blah. We sprang from the Midwestern dirt fully formed and became railroad people and farmers and fought for the Union purely because slavery was wrong! Don’t blame us.
Well, it turns out…
Yeah, it was us.
So, that’s me. My comment policy emerges directly from my religious beliefs. I believe in establishing a feeling of “frith” a term we can stretch to mean the everyone working to establish and maintain the luck, or well-being, of the community. Raucous disagreements and smarty-pants comments and wild tangents for the sake of trying to get at something you didn’t understand before are all welcome. But the good fortune of the community should be first and foremost on everyone’s minds. I don’t make it a habit of deleting comments, but, of course, I’ve never had an audience this big.
So, we’ll see how it goes.