Perhaps one of the first mistakes many new Wiccans make is assuming that all Witches are Wiccan or follow Wiccan ideals. Yet Witches have been around a long time and develop many different ways of doing things. Some of those differences might be of interest to more experienced Wiccans who may have wondered if there were other ways that Witchcraft might be done. Some of the differences might prove useful for some people.

Crick is a Witch who follows an Irish and Appalachian Tradition who often posts essays about the Craft of Witches' Voice. He was kind enough to offer some of his time for this interview to clear up some differences between his tradition and Wicca.

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Michael Thomas Ford is the author of more than fifty books of both nonfiction and fiction that often deal with Gay life. Ford began his writing career in 1992 with the publication of 100 Questions & Answers about AIDS: What You Need to Know Now, one of the first books about the AIDS crisis for young adults. He has since published collections of essays, nonfiction books about sex and religion, and novels in a variety of genres. His work has been nominated for eleven Lambda Literary Awards, twice winning for Best Humor Book and twice for Best Romance Novel. He was also nominated for a Horror Writers Association Bram Stoker Award.

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It was his being in Chaos Magic that brought Julian to my attention from my readers, but he does have other aspects as well that I thought might be interesting to bring out and so I asked for an interview.

Christopher: How would you describe yourself right now?

Julian: As a chaos magician, that is as someone who is interested in an eclectic approach to magick, less fascinated by 'religious' ritual than directly transformational practice (though I appreciate that there is no hard and fast discontinuity in these things).

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Christopher: How would you describe yourself?

Phil: I think of myself as a fairly ordinary person, just bobbling along pursuing stuff that interests me.

Christopher: In many of the so called Earth Religions there seems to be this rather romantic and friendly view of nature. Yet the first thing you seemed to see in growing up in Blackpool was that the sea was powerful, not controllable, it was dangerous and could kill you.

I see the same thing here in my desert where life and death or side by side and part of each other rather than separate and different. In fact all life feeds off the death of something else. If we are going to be what we call Nature Religions, don't we need to really get to know nature and not work from our romantic fantasy view of it, sort of a Disneytized view of what nature is?

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The Pagan culture has forgotten something, very dire, and very central to who we are. (And I say this with no degree of arrogance, because I forget it, too) We lie docile in armchairs or on couch cushions, meditating for some time each day and quietly hoping divinity will swoop down and come to us in the midst of our internal peace. Which is all fine and good-

-For a while.

But there is, undeniably and importantly, something else. There's another kind of divine contact, another way to get to the core of who we are. I have often contemplated that perhaps we like to quietly go about our spirituality because it's easier that way. We like to think that if we sit in quiet for a few minutes that we can manipulate energy and reach the divine - it is, after all, much easier than "the old fashioned way".

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Rev. Patrick McCollum is an ordained Wiccan Priest with a long history of working for Pagan religious rights. In 1997, after the settlement of a case involving a Wiccan inmate, the California Attorney General's Office asked Rev. McCollum to serve as a Wiccan chaplain, making him the first government-recognized Wiccan chaplain.

He has served as an unpaid statewide correctional chaplain for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation in all 33 CDCR correctional institutions. He is also a member of the American Correctional Chaplain Association, the Program Chair for the National Correctional Chaplaincy Directors Association, and the Chaplaincy Liaison for the American Academy of Religion. He acts as a chaplain for 2000 Wiccan prisoners. His website is: courtingthelady.com

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Like all people in AREN, I do have another life besides being editor of ACTION. Winter through early Spring is the busy time for my little shop here in New Mexico as this is the tourist season for us, the snowbirds. So this is when I have the least time to work on the newsletter.

So for me the Imbolc and Ostara issues are the most difficult ones to do. The Imbolc issue is the hardest because it also has the shortest dead line of the two.

First there was difficulty in communications, yes Mercury was in retrograde. Though I only asked someone after a couple of frustrating weeks. Just about all the people that I interviewed for this issue are extremely busy people and some had just finished family get togethers, book tours.

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