Defending the

World Tree:

A Journal of Animist Awakening

Our bi-annual solstice release, Defending the World Tree aims to connect and inspire our readers to the importance of our relationships to land, and to hold the lingering question that whispers in the shadows of our collective forgetting: what is our relationship to place?

With our first issue, we invited writers to reflect on another question, one that might help form the foundations for our collective remembering: where is our church? We bring forth this inaugural provocation to not exceed our harms beyond the simplicity of this metaphorical paper-cut. For we must all reckon with what has been done in the name of religion, and seek through action not only to refuse our part in such forgettings, derangements and excesses, but to reweave for ourselves lineages of vital place-based spirituality left to us by our ancestors. We invite you, reader, to be unrelenting in your striving for animate integrity and resistance to the malaise of addictive dualities riddling our dominant culture. As you continue to engage with this artifact, know the blood and sap spilled for its becoming and do not shy away from sensing your responsibility for where we go from here.

Writers for this issue include:
Returning, Arnold Schroder, ClayAir, Amanda Lyn, Johnny DeLacy
Kelly, Dare/Darius Carrasquillo, Ocean.

As a special gift for online pre-orders between now and December 14th, we are including a small cut of a yew branch that was planted here in the South Salish Sea. The yew, viewed in many traditions across our world as a tree of life and death, felt appropriate to include in this winter edition. The leaves have fallen, the living world drifts into hibernal stillness, and we begin our deep dreaming with the slow awakening world. Take this special charm to a beloved root being in you life, share a prayer, and hang it upon its branch

Shipping begins the week of December 15th.
5.5w x8.5h inches.
112 pages.
First edition of 400 hand numbered copies.

https://severedbranchespress.bigcartel.com/

With writing from:

Returning

Synthesizing currents of black metal, dark ambient, butoh dance, and experimental theater, Returning is a nexus of extreme art in reverence of the living earth and its cycles. https://returning.earth/

ClayAir

A Coast Salish Sea Bioregion and surrounding-watershed based artist and animist practicing with the transformative interactions of shadow and light through Metal, Paper, Eco-Poetics and Butoh dance. She/they are a diasporic ceremonialist and ritual, community theater participant, arts/movement facilitator — the weavings of Dreaming, dying, ferality, biodiversity, embodiment arts, menstruation, natural cycles, plant medicine and decolonization. IG: @hallowed_gramma

E: anclar@protonmail.ch

Kelly

Kelly is a curious kid, a seeker, a photographer, an activist, whose work has taken him from the treetops of Amazonian forests, into vast open-pit coal mines in the Rheinland, through protests and actions in European cities, to the desert frontlines and besieged mountain ranges of Kurdistan, and, most recently, to the threatened Baltic forests. The unifying thread is a search for meaning amidst the crumbling of this civilisation, seeking out stories of those resisting the capitalist worldeater, and finding hope wherever people are fighting on the side of life and freedom.

Amanda Lyn

Amanda Lyn is an herbalist, therapist, and performance artist based in Brooklyn, NY. Their work weaves together themes of death, decay, bodily autonomy, and grief as an exercise of decomposition.

Ocean

Ocean is a disabled poet and novelist. He writes winding hypnogogic chronicles, ordeal fairy tales, pararealist poetry, ballads, gratuitous sci-fi, resuscitatory animist myth, postcards to no one, erasure incantations, and abstract erotic literature. The poet must drown in ink, an anthracite baptism, to make himself reborn—or he is lost. www.mirrorflower.org & @mirrorflower_ocean Mastodon Artwork credit: Lauren Ruiz, www.laurenruizart.com/ & @laurenruiz_art

Arnold Schroder

Lives in Portland, OR, where he writes, podcasts, and organizes. His most common place of ceremony is the cottonwood forests, wetlands, and beaches of the Willamette River in Sellwood. www.againsttheinternet.com/

Dare/Darius Carrasquillo

Diasporican. Tired decolonial daoist animist. Developer of the Story, State, Action model. Disability & indigenous justice thinker. Artist. Ingobernable. Courses and content on Patreon. https://substack.com/@thenightgarden & https://open.substack.com/pub/thenightgarden

Johnny DeLacy

Johnny DeLacy is an ecologist of the liminal landscape, working in realms of sonics, atmosphere, and ritual. His art is a spiritual praxis of corporeal presence, vehemently opposed to the technological mediation of the modern age.

"Within this journal we practice to evoke no lies or evasions, but to slice through any repression of the senses like a paper-cut and spill blood as naturally as sap drips earthbound."