Unfoldings #15

Observations, reflections, ongoing projects, witterings

Delinquent Elementals - here at last!

It’s taken six years, but Delinquent Elementals - edited by myself and Rodney Orpheus, is now available. It is our selection of content - news stories, interviews, comment pieces, and humor - from Pagan News, the zine we created and published between 1988-92.

If there's one thing I'd like to be remembered for, it is Pagan News. Looking back, I can only marvel at what Rodney and I did, producing a zine every three weeks for over two years. We had a zero budget and an Atari ST that had a mighty 1MB of RAM on it. We learnt typesetting, design, marketing, and promotion on the fly.

One of my lasting memories though, is from 1991. By that time, the production of Pagan News had become somewhat convoluted. Rodney was off being a rock star in Germany. I'd lost access to the laser printer we'd used earlier, and now the zine was being output in Nottingham by a small company that could do laser-printing from Atari STs) and printed on A3 recycled paper in a village outside Sheffield. This meant that Pagan News was now a (more or less) bi-monthly production. I'd gone to the printers to pick up 800 or so copies of the latest issue. It was a cold day, and there was snow on the ground. There'd been some problems with public transport getting there. What I didn't realize was that there was more snow on the way. I ended up struggling through ankle-deep snow for five miles, burdened by a large box full of zines, until I found a busier road with buses that were running, and gratefully made my way back to Sheffield railway station, and, eventually, to Leeds. I think it was at that point, lugging that heavy box through the drifting snow, that I realized how central to my life the “doing” of Pagan News had become.

Delinquent Elementals is available from Strange Attractor as an unlimited paperback with flaps & a special hardback edition of 300, featuring a bookplate signed by the editors.

Our first launch event for the book will be held at Treadwells Bookshop on the evening of Wednesday 26 March. Unfortunately, Rodney Orpheus can’t make this date, but we hope to have another event in April.

If you can’t make the Treadwells Event, I’ll also be speaking about Delinquent Elementals and the UK’s Satanic Panic at the London Fortean Society’s Art / Magic / Lore: Wild Talents at Conway Hall on 26 April. If you’re not absolutely sick of me banging on, on May 20 I’ll be doing a zoom lecture for The Last Tuesday Society entitled The UK Satanic Panic 1988-1992: How Britain was engulfed by fears of a Satanic Conspiracy.

Acts of Magical Resistance Review

My little book, Acts of Magical Resistance, recently received a lovely review from Steve Dee at The Blog of Baphomet:
” a real grimoire for a magical engagement with our lives, our struggles and our joys. Highly recommended.”

Querying the Left-Hand Path Interviews

I’ve recently done a couple of interviews on my latest self-published book, Querying the Left-Hand Path. Here I am chatting on the Liminal Currents podcast, and again, on Darragh Field’s Spiritbox channel.

Querying the Left-Hand Path is available from Amazon in ebook and print formats. Signed copies are available from Treadwells Bookshop in London.

This year, I will be making some of my self-published books available as ebooks from Smashwords. More news about that soon!