Leodrune: our story thus far, + what's to come
Leodrune is in its fifth year of life as of this winter. We have been pleased to see our published works receive a lot of new attention in the past twelve months; we warmly welcome those new readers. Some of you remember the first 9 publications, while others will not have heard of them. As we prepare to put the last of that original library to rest, it felt like a good time to share the story of this whole project: what led up to it, what became of it, and where it’s taking us.
We release this free essay with the intent to raise funds for a drastic upgrade in publishing quality for our current & upcoming books. Keep reading to learn more.
I will shortly be listing original book illustrations up for sale on our Instagram, and we just opened a donations page for folks looking for a simple way to support us. You may also consider a paid membership to this newsletter.
I (Sylvia) was born on land traditionally stewarded by the Clackamas and Stl’pulmsh peoples, now citified and called Portland. I began my path into ritual practice in adolescence after a near-death experience coincided with my menarche. I dabbled with small rituals with various friends, to greater and lesser success, before a hiatus in late teenhood.
Tristan was born just a day’s walk south of my birthplace. Traditionally stewarded by the above tribes, as well as the Grand Ronde, Siletz, Cayuse, Umatilla and Walla Walla, Oregon City is the oldest town west of the Rocky Mountains to be incorporated, though only 180 years ago. There, he lived his whole childhood in one house, at the top of a wooded hillside, among deer, coyotes, and feral cats. His upbringing was highly religious: he attended rural evangelical church-schools for much of his childhood, resulting in a deep exposure to biblical mythology. After leaving the church in adolescence, his primary pursuit was playing black metal music.
I learned to make booklets at a young age, often being my preferred creative medium. In college, I met a designer, Violet Reed, who properly introduced me to the skills & materials needed to publish booklets. Together we released a small collection of spells the summer of 2017, during the brutal forest fires on the Columbia River Gorge. I met Tristan several weeks later.
I was just beginning to delve into writing music, and Tristan was also working on an album. Through a mutual friend, we met online. I needed male vocals for my songs, and he needed female vocals for his. We collaborated on our respective projects, and became close friends in the process. Less than two months later, we admitted we had fallen in love. Tristan moved out of his only childhood home in with me, where we have now lived for six years: a little room in a repurposed elder care facility, among many others who live in its 9 strange bedrooms.
From a magical perspective, the path toward publishing was certainly made open to us. Before I even thought to fully pursue this endeavor, when I was in pre-medical school and the first zine of spells was released, a curator for Portland’s renowned Powell’s Books happened to visit a studio where a copy of the zine was left, took notice, and ordered it wholesale. I was completely shocked and thrilled— it was galvanizing. I slowly admitted to myself that I was turning away from the medical profession I’d gone to school for, and I dropped out in favor of food service, which offered me mental freedom to focus on my creative interests.
When the first Leodrune books were released, Tristan and I were both baristas at coffee shops on either end of our neighborhood. I worked slow shifts researching and writing on my computer or illustrating pages on a clipboard, sometimes even packing & shipping orders while stationed by the espresso machine. When we weren’t working, we were sitting at a local teahouse, candles under our pots, reading and ideating together. The first several Leodrune books were made from within the walls of these communal spaces. Our friends were wonderfully helpful in the early days, coming with us to the Independent Publishing Resource Center— a local specialized studio space— to fold and assemble. A warm thanks to Keely, Simon, Heather, and others who have supported us.
Each early book captured a particular moment in our young adulthood: Cottagecraft happened over two weeks of oophorectomy recovery, which I spent sitting in Tristan’s café, medicated, drowsily writing. The Cider Moon exploded in popularity overnight while young Tristan and I were at Disneyland, of all places. I illustrated The Mistletoe Moon in a single sitting, on the floor of a friend’s house, for the duration of all 3 extended Lord of the Rings films. The Seedling Sun was the final book to be released before the pandemic began.
That spring, we both unknowingly worked our last shifts as baristas. Both of our cafés closed permanently shortly after. What was quarantining then is now, four years later, just working from home.
Suddenly, we were able to dedicate all our time toward our creative pursuits: ritual, illustration, writing, music. Tristan read and read and read, accumulating a basis of knowledge from which our unique ritual practice would eventually sprout. I took a year to create a sort of ‘witchcraft curriculum’ for absolute beginners, which was really a way for me to teach myself those basics, and to improve my writing. I did not adequately prepare for the amount of work that creating a curriculum over the course of one year would be. Though I ensured that the work was quality for the kind people who signed up, it did help me understand that I no longer wanted to write from an instructional perspective, but from an experiential one.
Over some months, a tiny studio came into being in our room. Our first purchase was a cheap, shoddy paper cutter which we use to this day. Our publishing materials have, until recently, been stored under our bed. For quite a while, our working desk was the floor of our bedroom.
In 2021, a series of long-form ritual workings initiated radical changes for us. As we read through so many books about witchcraft and its related web of traditions, we found ourselves dissatisfied by the homogeneity of the terminology used in occult discourse, and oriented our intentions toward finding fresh language. We were having experiences that went far past the scope of our materials thus far, and we felt such urgency to share them that we almost ditched Leodrune and started an entirely new publishing house.
Rather than scrapping everything, however, we decided to allow our then-current body of work to molt— to evolve into new, but related, material. For the next two years, we feverishly wrote and released the little books which currently stock our shop, and have slowly archived the original set of zines.
For the last five years, Tristan and I have been hand-making every book— assembling, bone folding, stapling and cutting to size. This process is dear to our hearts, but it is labor-intensive, and we are running up against how many books we can produce using this method. We also want the option to release books with longer page counts, which requires a new type of binding.
By way of this upcoming book sale, through which we are discontinuing our final original materials, we are trying to raise funds to transition our library from staple-bound to perfect-bound. Perfect binding will allow us to distribute our books more widely, even internationally; having the books professionally made will give us more time to write and illustrate. The books will also slightly increase in size, and the risk of cutting errors, which are common for us, will greatly decrease.
We do not intend to raise the prices on our materials drastically, if at all, in response to this upgrade. The funds we raise from this sale will be put towards ordering in large enough quantities to ensure the materials stay accessible and affordable.
Our fundraising book sale will begin on February 9th, 2024 on our Etsy shop, and last until the full Moon on February 24th. An Instagram countdown and a reminder email will be available.
Keep reading to learn a bit about Leodrune as it continues to mature and grow.
O U R E T H O S
Throughout the field of witchcraft & folk magic studies, there are many great minds working to carefully reconstruct lost traditions, to revitalize currently fallow ones, and to preserve what existing lineages of practice remain. As Tristan and I are not inheritors of such responsibilities, we feel it is pertinent to begin forging new spiritual frameworks for ourselves and for those that come after us.
Leodrune materials are an outgrowth, a fruiting body, born from a privately maintained faith practice shared between Tristan and I. Like many public-facing ritualists, we keep much of our practice hidden, and carefully reveal our findings to others through our publications.
— BOOK AS RITUAL ARTIFACT
Books are extensions of the human body-mind, and their form mirrors our species’ uniquities. Most books are, like us, bilaterally symmetrical; their bodies are tailored to the size and shape of our hands, and only our hands can give rise to them. Like our own skins which we have tattooed for millennia, the book’s pages are inked with shapes that only our eyes can make sense of.
And yet, books are spirits all their own, just like children: though born from us, they are entities distinct from us, here to do their own work.
We develop Leodrune materials from within ritual space, as a result of ritual working. We identify transmissible intents or insights, found in the inner or outer world, and work to translate their essence into book-form. Throughout these workings we collaborate with the physical and spiritual ecologies around us, and other familiar spirits, to bring forward the material in its truest form.
— FOLK SCIENCE, FOLK MAGIC
Folk science is a term used to describe ways of knowing that do not rely on the scientific method: it is an approach to understanding our environment through our bodies, without the use of abstracting technologies to enhance our observations. As an approach to learning, folk science leads to all other traditional human practices, from medicine to religion and mysticism. It is how people have always learned the ways of their local World, and the way we have found meaning and understanding from within those complex webs of relation.
As civilized systems & technologies fail, we will see that folk apprehensions of the world are absolutely vital: they are the basis of all our current & future knowledge. We aim to encourage a phenomenological, embodied approach to ritual practice that acts on ecological knowledge obtained with the help of folk science.
— EARTH MOLTS & WE MOLT
We seek to serve the many-headed, vastly intelligent entity we are born from and a part of. As ritualists and writers, we offer our skills to Earth and her spirits, and honor our own animal intuitions, in the form of devotional art & craft.
We witness the volatilities and strangenesses that a changing climate provokes in the Land. The world is becoming something new, and as ecologically inclined and ritually engaged people, we need to allow our practices and stories to molt alongside it. As we witness the true beginning of the Anthropocene, this new geological epoch, we feel compelled to create materials that will help others adapt, ritually and relationally, to the Earth’s changing surface and atmosphere.
Thank you so much for reading through this essay, and I hope you’ll stay with us as we make the changes we need to make. Again, the presale will take place between Feb 9 and Feb 24 — you will be notified via email if you subscribe to our newsletter.
I will soon be listing original book illustrations up for sale on our Instagram, and we just opened a donations page for folks looking for a simple way to support us.