HEX FOLK CONTRIBUTORS
Issue 3 ~ Spring & Summer 2008
 J. W. Baylis
Freya Introduces Odin to Seidh
Loki in the Form of a Mare
b.1970 J. W. Baylis is an eccentric and illustrator from Newport Beach. His art reflects a fascination with the quasi-historical writings of late 19th century, as well as the quirky mysticism of the late 20th century that it inspired. Odd imagery and layered meanings compete with a hint of sarcasm, which can leave some viewers wondering if they’re really in on the joke.
 Antonius Block
The Language of Myth
I was born December, 1979. Since my teenage years, I have devoted most of my time to various interests the fields of art, music, and linguistics. I have been interested in the indigenous pre-Christian beliefs of Europe for most of my life and much of my artistic inspiration stems from early traditional cultures.
I work full-time as a graphic designer, but I also keep myself busy with pen and ink and other conventional media outside the office.
I love traditional music and I play a variety of instruments, some of which I’ve built myself.
I am strongly interested in comparative studies, and I believe that many of the difficulties in understanding the Germanic myths (and many others for that matter) can be overcome with the aid of historical linguistics, comparative religion, archaeology, and anthropology.  Jason Hovatter Craban
Cover Artwork ~ Standing in Place
Coming of Age Story ~ Standing in Place
i grew up in rural maryland, spent most of my free time in the woods, drove a pickup truck with a gun rack and was a hard workin’ farm boy all-around redneck. in my late teens i began to seriously consider a career as a wildlife illustrator but as i discovered various alternate psychedelic realities my paintings evolved along with my need to explore the expanding world around me. after a few years as an art student i hit the road tramping around the country on foot and freight. stopping now and then in a friendly town, i worked in several kitchens, a leather shop, and a primitive boat building school. somewhere in there i met the love of my life but we've only just now sort of settled down, more than ten years later. i currently call portland, oregon my home and have most recently spent several years as a custom shoe maker, “laughingcrowe leatherworks,” and am involved in a couple of musical projects, “a minority of one” being the foremost. i'm a father and husband, lover of good home-cooked food and good friends to share it with. i'm fascinated with and strive to remember the way folks lived before this industrial age. well, even before this agricultural age, when we worshiped the wind and felt ourselves to be a part of “the spirit that moves in all things.”
 Jennifer Culver
The Valkyrie Perspective
Education:
MA – English Literature – University of North Texas (GPA 4.0)
BA – English Literature – Texas Woman’s University (summa cum laude)
Other Roles:
Participant – National Endowment of the Humanities Institute: “From Beowulf to Postmodernism: JRR Tolkien”
Presentations:
“The Complete Beowulf” – National Council of Teachers of English 2006
“Evaluating Alternatives: Ælfric’s Presentations of Options for his Flock” – International Congress of Medieval Studies 2007
“Extending the Reach of the Invisible Hand: A Gift Looks for Gain in the Gifting Economy of Middle-earth,” – International Congress of Medieval Studies 2006
“Echoes of Dragon Slaying in Lord of the Rings: Wyrm Imagery in Context” – International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts 2005
“From Iron Bands to a Mind of Metal and Steel: Examining the Consistent Negative Perceptions of Iron” – “From Plato to Potter” Conference – UT Tyler 2005
“Teaching Tolkien: Using Tolkien’s Work as a Bridge to Literature” – International Congress of Medieval Studies 2005
“Threads of Tolkien: Using The Lord of the Rings to Help Students Connect to Literature” – National Council of Teachers of English 2005
 Darrah Danielle
Owl Said
The realm of Imagination has been the wellspring of my life. I spent my childhood on both the east & west coasts of America, inventing worlds filled with talking animals & benevolent spirits that kept me from despair. I loved illustrated tales, such as those of Arthur Rackham, with all my heart.
After receiving a degree in Literature from the University of Pennsylvania, I moved to the West for good, living for years among the misty mountains & myths of Oregon.
I came to the craft of collage & assemblage naturally, or rather, it came to me. My visual narratives are filled with signs & symbols that come from mystery. They speak of where I’ve been & dreams I wish to inhabit.
I continue to be inspired by the rich & varied tradition of the Fairytale, the art of Alchemy & the Occult, Medieval Bestiaries, the colorful history of Vaudeville & Cabinets of Curiosities…anything that crosses my path and speaks to me in the moment. www.foundfables.com
Currently, I live in Northern California. When I’m not in my studio I spend much of my time in the garden with my feline familiar, Pandora the Wise.  Alice Deane
Living Off the Land ~ A Garden Journal
I was born and raised in Southern California, the daughter of two actors. As I child my first love was drawing and painting, but I also spent many hours backstage in the theatre where my parents worked. I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area for college and remained living in and around San Francisco for the next ten years. I lived in the midst of the entire revolutionary social upheaval of the 1960’s but moved to Portland, Oregon at the end of that decade, feeling the need for a quieter pace to my life. Portland was my home for the next thirty-some years, where I met my husband and raised my daughter. Portland was indeed more to my liking and I began a love affair with the Pacific Northwest that has continued to this day, and I expect will be with me for the rest of my life. I worked for twenty years with an extremely creative and innovative theatre company, both onstage and backstage. The last ten years of my working life I spent working backstage on touring Broadway musicals during their Portland stops. Yearning for another change of pace and attracted to rural life, my husband Teddy and I moved to San Juan Island in Washington State in the year 2001. Here we live on six peaceful acres where I am growing an expanding crop of my own fruits and vegetables. I became a master gardener in 2005 and I am continually learning more about growing and eating pure, unadulterated, unprocessed foods. I am becoming involved in participation and promotion of the local food movement, and this year I plan to start saving my own seeds. I was first introduced to the Heathen lifestyle by my daughter Lucy and it immediately felt like a good fit, incorporating traditional customs and wisdom into my lifestyle. I hope that my writing for Hex Magazine will inspire readers to grow a garden, eat locally, save seeds and otherwise benefit themselves and their families by eating healthy foods and living close to the earth and the treasures and bounty this lifestyle offers.
 Christina Finlayson
I Am
I was born in ’72 in Montana, raised in rural Utah and have written poetry since childhood. At eighteen, I took a twelve-year hiatus from poetry as I explored the wider world to return at age thirty and delve into formalism. It was through internet poetry that I met and married My Sweet Robert (also known as R.N. Taylor, poet, artist, musician). We reside in a beautiful Victorian home in the hills of West Virginia with my two children and our new baby. When I am not working on poetry, I enjoy gardening, baking, classic movies and studying the paranormal, runes and the tarot, folk medicine and nutrition. I enjoy doing my part to preserve traditionalism and strive to do so through my poetry as well as in everyday life.
We have a web site where we showcase some of our work (www.theredsalon.com) and plan to have chapbooks available in the near future. Several of my poems will also be featured in an upcoming book called Sugar & Spice, available through Ethical Society Press.
 Kim Graham
Troll of the Great Northwest
Kim Graham is your run of the mill Renaissance Woman. She is a primarily self taught artist who has applied herself to most major fields of art and fabrication. Painting, calligraphy, watercolor, airbrush, ceramics, mold making, plastics casting, and steel fabrication. She is determined to discover the holy grail of sculpting mediums; a non toxic, ultra strong, outdoor material that does not require molds. It must be inexpensive to make, reasonably light weight and capable of doing very large sculptures. After seven years of tests, she is very close to finding it. The troll was one of the tests. www.kimgrahamstudios.com
 WANTED: Gerhard Hallstatt
Coming of Age Story ~ Gandul
Austrian artist and outlaw, founder of the Austrian industrial folklore project Allerseelen, former publisher of the magazines Aorta and Ahnstern. Loves to travel. Claims to speak several languages. Loves poetry. Claims to be poet but never published a book. Loves music. Claims to be musician but does not know one single note and plays no instrument at all. Loves mountains. Looks like a rucksack bomber. Always carries with him a rucksack containing maps, books and other items. Maps: These may be maps of cities like Copenhagen, Edinburgh, Lissabon, Moscow or mountain maps from remote areas in Austria, Bulgaria, Greece, Italy, Spain. Books: These may be books by writers like Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Hermann Hesse, Ernst Juenger, Alexander Lernet-Holenia, Friedrich Nietzsche, Alexander Pushkin, William Shakespeare. Other items: biscuits, water, wine. Claims to stand with his poetry and music in a strange tradition with various occultists, symbolists and visionaries of his homeland Austria. Distinguishing marks are absinthe-green eyes, scars, a hidden tattoo. Take care and control: All his dreams come true.
"The choice of poetry and quality of music here are impeccable."
www.lunar-hypnosis.com
"Allerseelen represent a standard of excellence that is almost unheard of in the world today. The music of Gerhard Hallstatt is, by intent and effect, a spiritual experience. If you have ever doubted the ability of art to destroy and re-create those who will let themselves be touched by it, immerse yourself obsessively in his work, and see who you are when you come out the other side." www.starvox.net/crypt/novcd.htm
www.myspace.com/allerseelen
www.geocities.com/ahnstern
Aorta c/o Petak, Postfach 778, 1011 Wien, Austria  Juleigh Howard-Hobson
The Ancient Folk of the Isles
Recipes
Juleigh Howard-Hobson is the editor of the Asatru Folk Assembly's Runestone Journal (www.runestone.org). She's edited and contributed to the 2004 Arets Boker award winning Norwegian-press literary collection Undertow. Her writing has appeared everywhere from Aesthetica Magazine (York, UK) to Going Down Swinging (Melbourne, Australia). Named a 'notable short story' writer in the 2006 Million Writer's Award, she is currently one of the few formalist poets to have work nominated for the Best of The Net Award 2007. Her chapbook Sommer and Other Poems is available from Ravenshalla Press (ravenshalla@yahoo.com). She is a former associate of The RuneGild, and a proud member of both the AFA and the Odinic Rite. She is married to the award-winning artist blacksmith Dave Hobson, with whom she homeschools three children. Their threshold is maintained according to the wisdom of the Northern Folkways they follow, as are all aspects of their lives.
 Blake T. Honeytwin
Coming of Age ~ Agriculture and the Rite of Passage
Blake T. Honeytwin is a father of 3 children and a performing artist with Thee Hop-Frog Kollectiv. He lives in Los Angeles, CA. His ancestry is Irish, Scottish, and German, and follows a similar spiritual path as his pagan ancestors.
 Tryggvi Thorleif Larum
Oden's Dream
Tryggvi Larum was born in 1956 in Hafnarfjordur, Iceland to a Norwegian-American father and Icelandic mother and at three years of age he immigrated to California. Soon after entering the California school system he began to display an exceptional talent for art, primarily in drawing prompting his instructors in the final faze of his education to encourage him to pursue a career as an art teacher.
In 1975 following in his father’s footsteps he served as an American soldier in Northern Italy and then in the 1980's he returned to Iceland to retrace his ancestry while serving aboard Icelandic fishing trawlers.
He returned to California where he currently resides with his wife and daughter. He worked in multiple professions while continuing to occasionally practice his drawing until 1998 when he discovered and began to explore wood sculpture as a means to find a new artistic voice to relate the spirit of his talent, culture, ancestral reverence and life experience. Although still an emerging artist his chosen art style draws from his 20 year personal study of the fragmentary history, art and archeology of Northern European Bronze and Iron Ages.
His work began to draw public and media attention from the start of the completion of his first sculpture. Over the years his reinterpretation of these art styles and their mythology and evolving imaginative mix of traditional and sometimes contemporary styles has lead to numerous awards including the public installation of his work in art centers in the U.S., Canada and Iceland. His most recent acknowledgment came in the form of a 2007 nomination of a cultural folk art fellowship to the N.E.A. from Northern California’s Morris Graves Museum of Art and full sponsorship from the Alliance for California Traditional Arts for his 2007 exhibit of his work at the Nordic Heritage Museum of Seattle. See more work: www.nordicart.net
 Kati Meden / FleckchenErde
Holle Auf Erden
I was born 1974 in Braunschweig / Germany and – thanks to my parents – grew up in a nice small village near the forest. After school and some years of trying to find my way I moved to Berlin and studied graphic design. Today I work as a designer – together with my boy friend and two cats in our
own design office.
Since 2003 I am a student at the FoxFire School of Integrative Medicine &
Experiential Shamanism which really helps me a lot to reconnect to earth
and spirit (just to name two). Another important part of my life is to celebrate the wheel of the year (reclaiming tradition) with a group of wonder- and power-ful women.
In Autumn 2007 I started to come out with my own projects which are inspired by my shamanic path and experience. You can see some first expressions of that on my website: www.fleckchenerde.net and on my myspace profile: www.myspace.com/fleckchenerde.  Diana L. Paxson
Sex, Status, and Seidh ~ Homosexuality and Germanic Religion
DIANA L. PAXSON is a consecrated priestess and an Elder (and former First Officer) of the Covenant of the Goddess. She is an Elder and former Steerswoman of the Troth, an international heathen organization whose journal, IDUNNA, she edits, and leader of Hrafnar Garth. Since 1990 she has pioneered the recreation of Oracle work, which she has taught in workshops all over North America and in Europe. Paxson is the author of numerous mythic short stories and novels featuring the Old Religion, including RAVENS OF AVALON and THE GOLDEN HILLS OF WESTRIA. Her most recent non-fiction books are TAKING UP THE RUNES and ESSENTIAL ASATRU. A book on trance work, TRANCE-PORTATION, will be published in September. She also writes a regular Goddess column for SAGEWOMAN magazine. For more information on her work, see www.hrafnar.org
 Jj Starwalker
Everything She Touches Changes ~ Learning the Art of Hex
Jj Starwalker was born into a remarkably magical mid-western family that appeared most conventional to the average eye, as they blended their talents smoothly with their mundane occupations as farmers, housewives, nurses, teachers. Even as a young woman, Jj walked her own path, immersing herself in scientific disciplines yet still studying hex work and regularly relying on telepathy for communication (before cell phones.) Her life path has been at times rocky and convoluted, which strengthened her capabilities. She is woman who doesn't let adversity stop her, with a take charge attitude when needed, and a supportive team spirit when this is called for. Jj has a knack for cutting through the distractions and getting to the heart of a situation, assessing any problems and addressing concerns with an inborn sense of balance that mixes magic and the mundane to find a solution that manifests on multiple levels.
Her friends know her as “stubborn and determined, in a good way;” her stick-to-itiveness doesn't stop until the idea finds expression in the tangible world. She is most comfortable being the Crone in the cottage just out of sight. The friend she asked to help with this bio added “Your hexes just plain work. I know the one you created for us for land working has carried a charge that is practically visible and certainly has brought visible results.”
When not creating hex signs, Starwalker works as a graphic designer and plots her move from North Carolina back to the northlands that she loves. She is a solitary crone, unless you count her 5 birds, 4 cats, 2 dogs, and a fish. See her work at: www.dutchhexsigns.com
 Squiffy Q. Veisalgia
Hair of the Hund
Coming of Age
Known for draining the dregs out of her dad's beer cans at an early age, Squiffy was created for a life of liquid appreciation. Sequelae led her to seek remedies, which she would like to share with you, her kin (hic). Her knees are now too arthritic to jig on tables on pub tables as she once did,
but her liver is still holding out.
 BK Ward
Her Path to Divinity
I currently reside in Seattle with my daughter Kali. My time is spent drawing, painting, creating sounds in a band (www.myspace.com/blacknoisecannon), experiencing nature and traveling as often as possible. I've been doing visual art since I can remember, influenced by the Surrealists and the discovery of Entheogens at a young age. More recently finding an affiliation with the ongoing and ever burgeoning Fantastic/Visionary art movement, through this I have been making
connections and expanding my horizons.
As for any absolute meaning in my work I think the power of visual art is that it's open to the individual's interpretation. Question what you see, consider what you don't, draw your own conclusions. See more work: www.bryankentward.com
[TOP] |
