The Wild Hunt (https://wildhunt.org/author/lauren)
Lauren is a fourth-generation breadwinner descended from mail charlatans, and thus has grown up to become a very educated liar. She is a writer, zine maker, and visual artist, and has written for The Toast, Strange Horizons, The Racket, Belt Magazine, Catapult, and Autostraddle. Her work focuses on the intersection of class, queerness, and the occult. She's the author of the poetry collection "We Are Now the Thing in the Woods" (Bottlecap Press, 2023), "Dark Way Down" (Animal Heart Press, 2025), and "Spells for Success" (Simon Element, 2025). She has a newsletter, "Do You Want to Do Some Witchcraft?" You can join her newsletter here: https://buttondown.com/laureneparker
“Since Pantheacon’s demise in 2020, the West Coast has been feeling the loss of a Pagan conference,” writes Lauren Parker from the 2026 Spirit Northwest conference. “In the era of Discords and government control of internet spaces, in-person congregation remains the most important.”
In 2020, Lauren Parker was driving through the desert listening to David Bowie’s 1976 album “Station to Station,” starring one of Bowie’s most haunting characters, the Thin White Duke. “I didn’t even know if I liked the album,” she writes. “I just couldn’t shake it.”
“The 50’s, for all their historical patina, were an age of post-war innovation: the mixer, the slow cooker, the top load dishwasher,” writes Lauren Parker in her review of this favorite of Witch cinema. “And for more than just these appliances: the invention of the nuclear family and its purity.”
Hint asks if I’m into men or women, but does not offer “both” or “neither.” You are getting your AI generated slop on the gender binary, thank you very much.
“Like a lot of folk love divination, I don’t know where this came from,” writes Lauren Parker. “It’s nonsense, it’s silly, it’s probably not even accurate. And also every time I’m handed a straw I dutifully tie a knot to see if someone somewhere is thinking of me fondly.”