March Is for Doin It
March Is for Doin It
Naughty rabbits, sexy spring, and the Ides of March! Plus events, new Pick Your Potions Ostara recipe deck, News from the Library of Booktails, and elixirs inspired by KNOCKED DOWN and ANIMAL BODIES!
Welcome back to The Cauldron! (Crackle, spit, hissssss!)
Today marks the Ides of March which, despite its reputation for drama, merely indicated to the ancient Romans that a new moon was upon them, or even a new year. They celebrated by binging, getting raunchy, and making sacrifices. Sounds like my kind of March madness.
Incidentally, as a non-sportsball person, I was greatly disappointed to find the origins of modern “March Madness” have nothing at all to do with maenads. However, it’s still kinda pagan. According to dictionary.com:
[…] it’s worth nothing that people have used March madness to refer to “a form of madness or uncharacteristic behaviour said to affect people in March” (according to the OED) since the 1900s. The expression may have come from the erratic, tempestuous weather of the season; alternatively it may have something to do with hares, a larger relative of the common rabbit.
Rabbits and tempestuous weather? Sounds pretty woo-woo to me! But what’s up with the lagomorph connection? howstuffworks.com reports:
As winter comes to an end and spring approaches, the male rabbit begins his search for willing females to mate with after the long winter dry spell. When he finds a female who's willing to do the deed, they engage in a bizarre courting ritual, which can take many forms. Some rabbits show their interest by running and racing, others leap or hop and some even take to boxing or fighting…
Well, there you have it. It’s all about sex! Because of their fertility, rabbits are major symbolic figures in paganism, hence the bunny rabbits hopping about at Easter, a holiday with roots in pagan practice.
Let’s Talk about Sex!—I Mean, Ostara…
The word “Ostara” comes from the Anglo-Saxon goddess name “Eostre.” If you watched/read AMERICAN GODS, (which is on the list to get booktailed someday!) Ostara is probably familiar to you, but there is scant evidence for Ostara as an actual goddess. You can find her in the writings of the revered 8th century monk Venerable Bede, (future band name claimed!) also known as St Bede, a respected historian of his age who reported that pagan Anglo-Saxons in medieval Northumbria held festivals in Ostara's honor during the month of Eostremonath (sounds like a new brand of menstrual cups). However, some have speculated that he was inventing, or at least embellishing a bit.
Regardless of whether or not Ostara was ever specifically worshipped as a goddess, celebrations continue today as Easter, which was the original name for the spring Equinox. The rebirth/renewal cycle has come to represent Jesus’ resurrection from literal death, but many pagan deities experienced cyclical journeys from the underworld to the plane of the living long before Christ, such as the Greek Persephone and Dumuzi/Tammuz, a shepherd and Sumerian goddess Inanna’s human consort, sent to take her place in the Great Below (long story. Read my next novel!) As such, many Germanic Easter customs honoring fertility still dominate today, like painting eggs and all those randy rabbits.
Like many spring celebrations, Ostara is about fertility, rebirth, and renewal. This time of year marked the beginning of the agricultural cycle, when planting begins. So, on March 20th, sow the seeds you’d like to harvest.
New Pick Your Potions Ostara Recipes!
No pagan sabbat celebration would be complete without a special edition deck of cocktail recipes cards! Feast your eyes on:
Butterflies
A citrusy-rose periwinkle delight that’s light as air.
Swan’s Wing
Delicately floral and soft as moon-lit feathers.
The Hare’s Egg
Irresistibly chocolatey, with notes of bittersweet orange and a smoky finish.
Goddess of Dawn
Sweet, creamy, and surprising as a new beginning.
You can find them in the Pick Your Potions shop!
Please note 10% of all Ostara sales will be donated to Doctors Without Borders to support the people of Ukraine.
The Yule and Imbolc sabbat decks are available too! Collect the set.
WOO! Events!
VIRGINIA FESTIVAL OF THE BOOK - TRANSFORMATIVE DESIRE PANEL
Saturday, March 19. 4 pm EST.
Authors Alex DiFrancesco (Transmutation), Morgan Thomas (Manywhere), and I will discuss the enduring magic of storytelling and our genre-defying fiction that’s populated by characters who grapple with ideas of identity, desire, free will, and transformation. Register here
THIS EVENT IS VIRTUAL
VIRTUAL HAPPY HOUR! PART ONE
Wednesday, March 23. 7 pm EST.
AWP FOMO got you down? Never fear, Pick Your Potions is here! (Just let me have that one.) Join me for a writers’ happy hour with a cocktail/mocktail demo and cocktail trivia!
To make the Magic Ginger Vampire aka Sipping the Blood of Our Enemies/Kyiv Mule, you’ll need:
*Spicy ginger beer
*Sparkling water
*Elderflower syrup
*Lemon juice
*Vodka if you like the hard stuff
*Butterfly pea flower tea for color—optional
THIS EVENT IS VIRTUAL
VIRTUAL HAPPY HOUR PART DEUX—WITH READERS!
Thursday, March 24. 7 pm EST.
Keep the party going and the drinks flowing with these amazing readers:
And me, Lindsay Merbaum!
THIS EVENT IS VIRTUAL
News from the Library
Featuring news and updates on authors and their booktail-ized books!
REWRITE THE STARS by Christina Consolino earned an Honorable Mention in the Indies Today Book Awards!
In REWRITE THE STARS, mom-of-three Sadie Rollins-Lancaster struggles with a crumbling marriage she had hoped to salvage. Though her husband initiated divorce, he's now having a change of heart that's difficult to reconcile, as he struggles to manage the PTSD that has rocked their lives. When a chance encounter with a stranger resurrects emotions in Sadie she never expected to feel again, her world is turned upside down. Will she find the courage to shape her own future? Will her husband resolve his internal struggles and win back his wife?
Vera Kurian’s NEVER SAW ME COMING was listed by The NY Times as one of the best thrillers of 2021!
In NEVER SAW ME COMING, Chloe is a quick-witted, revenge-fueled college student in DC. She’s also a psychopath participating in an on-campus clinical research project on psychopathology. When one of the students in the study is found murdered in the psychology building, a dangerous game of cat and mouse begins, and Chloe goes from hunter to prey. As she races to identify the killer and put her own plan into action, she’ll be forced to decide if she can trust any of her fellow psychopaths, including the really hot guy she vibes with.
And Now, New Booktails!
In KNOCKED DOWN, Aileen Weintraub’s hilarious memoir of love, high-risk pregnancy, and the ultimate Jewish mother, the author takes us through the early years of her marriage, including the shift from Brooklyn to a historic farmhouse upstate, which was passed down to her husband from her late father-in-law. When the pair decides to start a family, our quippy, adventurous, glacier-climbing narrator finds herself sentenced to months of bedrest. Faced with the most boring—yet also supremely high anxiety—of jobs she cannot quit, Weintraub takes her pregnancy one season of produce at a time, while contemplating her relationship with her best friend, her own father of blessed memory. Meanwhile, things don’t quite go as planned with the farm equipment business her husband just took over, and there are frequent visits from sassy neighbors and the Weintraub family matriarch, who arrives with suitcases packed with meat, no matter that her daughter is a vegetarian. “She doesn’t eat anything anyway!”
Weintraub’s pregnancy is scheduled to reach full term in apple season, and so the vodka base of this booktail is infused with green apples, which provide the primary flavor, and a little natural sugar. I chose red vermouth to pair with the apple vodka for the brick-red stoop leading to Weintraub’s childhood home, the same red as the faux-fur coat her father had made for her when he worked in the garment industry. This stoop was the site of many milestones, including learning to hit a baseball with a plastic bat, smoking that first cigarette, and finding out the author's father had died. Last but definitely not least, red vermouth also honors the author’s beloved yet aloof Shar Pei, Satchie Red. Finally, peach bitters offer a subtle complement to the apple, matching Weintraub’s delectable scent her husband Chris cites as the reason for marrying her, even if it’s really just her jojoba conditioner.
This booktail is presented against a pink background that matches the book’s cover. The glass stands front and center amidst a scattering of rainbow Nerds, a nod to the sugar Weintraub is barred from enjoying during her pregnancy. The cocktail is garnished with a (somewhat vaginal, let’s be honest) half peach and a skewer of annoyingly cutesy baby things, including a pacifier, diaper pin, rattle, and a baby bottle.
KNOCKED DOWN
Ingredients
2 Granny Smith apples
2 oz apple-infused vodka
0.5 oz red vermouth
4 drops Fee Brothers peach bitters
Instructions
First, prepare the apple vodka. Wash, core, and slice two Granny Smith apples into eight pieces. Add them to a large jar or other lidded container, along with 2 cups of vodka. Seal and set in a cool, dark place. Allow the vodka to marinate from 5 days to up to 2 weeks, shaking the container once daily. The vodka will turn a brown-gold color, similar to apple juice. Once the desired level of infusion is achieved, strain into a clean bottle or jar and discard the fruit.
To prepare the cocktail, add the vodka, vermouth, and bitters to a shaker with a large cube or chunk of ice. Agitate vigorously, until the shaker turns frosty, then strain into a martini glass. Garnish with a slice of peach or apple, if desired.
The essays in Suzanne Roberts’ brilliant collection ANIMAL BODIES: ON DEATH, DESIRE, AND OTHER DIFFICULTIES encapsulate the horror and tender beauty of grief in all its iterations—lost loved ones, lost worlds, avalanches, toucans with clipped wings and terrified baby sloths. Tragedy is juxtaposed against life’s pleasures, like food and drink, husbands and lovers, and the surreal beauty of this world, ultimately finding the two are inextricably linked: “But the stories tangle together, folded into my brain like small squares of letters. They run together like ink on the page.”
ANIMAL BODIES is haunting and full of poetry that will, to paraphrase Dickinson, take off the top of your head.
The base of this booktail is dark rum for caipirinhas on a skiing trip with the nieces and nephews, plus a Brazilian nanny: “[...] there’s nothing quite like being alone with your thoughts, skiing through lodgepole pines in the muffled silence of snowfall and that certain slant of morning light, maybe even humming ‘I Got You’ as you give yourself fully to gravity.” Coffee liqueur is for “strong coffee served in delicate china cups on white saucers” in Mexico and Spain, where our narrator states she fell in love with the world. Finally, orange blossom bitters honor the late Ilyse Kusnetz: “And you tell us you planted an orange tree. You say the flowers will bring the bees; you hope they will bring the bees. We all say we hope so too.”
This booktail is served in a glass partially lined with dark chocolate for the rice cake, banana, and chocolate dessert served on the Mekong, and for the bittersweetness of love and loss. To complement the book’s stark cover, it’s presented atop a slice of birch among the grass and paper leaves, a pink flower at its foot, for the lush yet deliberate jungle of language thriving in this collection.
ANIMAL BODIES
Ingredients
¼ cup meltable dark chocolate
1.5 oz dark rum
1 oz coffee liqueur
A few dashes Bitter Truth orange blossom bitters
Instructions
First, coat the inside of the glass with melted dark chocolate. (To melt the chocolate, microwave it in a small bowl for 45 seconds, then stir. Continue microwaving in 15 second intervals, stirring in between, until the chocolate is melted smooth.) To coat the glass, first set down a cutting board or wax paper to keep things from getting messy. Then, tilt the glass and slowly pour chocolate down one side, coating that portion of the rim as well. Angle the glass to the side to widen the streak, then tilt downward to coat a portion of the bottom. Tip the glass upside down to allow excess chocolate to drip off. Use a paper towel to wipe off any excess or smudges on the outside of the glass. Set in the fridge to harden.
Once the chocolate is set, combine the rum, coffee liqueur, and bitters in a shaker, along with a large cube or chunk of ice. Shake vigorously until the ice begins to break up. Strain into the chocolate coated glass and serve.
Cheers!
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