{"id":6329,"date":"2026-01-05T16:06:34","date_gmt":"2026-01-06T00:06:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.stormtiger.com\/collie\/bestiary\/?p=6329"},"modified":"2026-01-05T19:18:24","modified_gmt":"2026-01-06T03:18:24","slug":"my-year-in-scholarly-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.stormtiger.com\/collie\/bestiary\/2026\/01\/my-year-in-scholarly-review\/","title":{"rendered":"My Year in (mostly) Scholarly Review"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I have so much to be grateful for, this year! I honestly did not know at times if I&#8217;d make it, due to the brain aneurysm&#8230; but here I am, still me and still here. Trust me: I am very <em>very<\/em> happy about that! One of my cousins is a retired doctor, and has known me (both as a dear friend and relative, as well as medically) for all my life. As she put it, this is the second time I lived through something impossible, which can only mean I&#8217;m here for some higher purpose&#8230; so I need to get cracking on it! :-D\u00a0\u00a0That made me laugh &#8212; and try hard to get things going just like she said.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m so glad I can still do all these things, and I want to share them all with you&#8230; and with good fortune, we&#8217;ll all be here next year at the same time to do this again! So with no further ado and in no particular order, here are some of the scholastic things I&#8217;m grateful that I was able to accomplish in the past year.<\/p>\n<h2>I&#8217;m published again &#8212;\u00a0yay!<\/h2>\n<p>Considering how slow print publishing can be, I&#8217;m excited to actually have a published article and book chapter by the end of 2025 &#8212; and several more works to be published in the near future of 2026! Here&#8217;s what got printed in 2025:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>An online journal article: &#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/feminismandreligion.com\/2025\/05\/16\/do-women-really-need-the-goddess-by-collie-collier\/\">Do Women Really Need the Goddess?<\/a>&#8221; in <em>Feminism and Religion<\/em>, 16 May 2025.\u00a0This was kind of an homage to <a href=\"https:\/\/www.goddessariadne.org\/why-women-need-the-goddess-part-1\"> Carol P. Christ&#8217;s famous article<\/a>, as well as a (very quick) review of how well some of my dissertation data followed her article statements.<\/li>\n<li>Sent to the printers: <em><a href=\"https:\/\/demeterpress.org\/books\/revolutionizing-motherlines\/\">Revolutionizing Motherlines<\/a><\/em>, edited by Fiona Joy Green, Victoria Bailey, and Andrea O&#8217;Reilly, Demeter Press, 2025. My chapter is titled &#8220;Matrifocal Families: Motherlines Without Misogyny.&#8221;\u00a0I read Lowinsky\u2019s book <em>The Motherline: Every Woman&#8217;s Journey to Find Her Female Roots<\/em> for one of my fabulous Women&#8217;s Spirituality Master&#8217;s program classes. I found the book very helpful &#8212; but I could also clearly see it was written from her white, middle-class, and heteronormative perspective. The various chapter authors (including myself) of the newly published <em>Revolutionizing Motherlines<\/em> reflect upon and, I feel, update Lowinsky\u2019s conceptualization of the motherline that connects mothers to their female ancestors.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>In 2026 I&#8217;ll have several more articles and book chapters published, and I hope to have my book proposal (based on rewriting my dissertation for a lay audience) accepted by a publishing company too. Here&#8217;s what I have out and accepted to date:<\/p>\n<h2>Book chapters<\/h2>\n<ul>\n<li>&#8220;Becoming Whole: A Feminist Spiritual Quest&#8221; in <em><a href=\"https:\/\/demeterpress.org\/books\/mothers-myth-and-mythos-maternal-narrative-knowing\/\">Mothers, Myth, and Mythos: Maternal Narrative Knowing<\/a><\/em>, edited by Alys Enion and Rachael Williams. From Demeter Press, 2026.<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;&#8216;Making the Other, the Self&#8217;: Matrifocal Families to Enhance People\u2019s Lives and Reduce Systemic Patriarchal Oppressions.&#8221; <em>&#8220;I Am, Only Because We Are&#8221;: The Gifts of Radical Kinship<\/em>, edited by Michelann Parr. From Demeter Press, 2026.<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;Matrifocal Families: Enhancing Lives and Reducing Systemic Patriarchal Oppressions&#8221; in the <em>Routledge Companion to Motherhood<\/em>, 2nd ed., edited by Lynn O\u2019Brien Hallstein, Andrea O\u2019Reilly, and Melinda Vandenbeld Giles. From Routledge, 2026 \u2013 or possibly 2027? Not sure yet.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>If any of these interest you &#8212; especially the Demeter Press titles \u2013 then may I encourage you to please preorder them? You can get 20% off on preorders with Demeter Press with the code MOTHERS \u2013 and enjoy, I hope! I very much prefer supporting small presses, as opposed to the soulless giants like Amazon.<\/p>\n<h2>Online article<\/h2>\n<p>&#8220;Goddess Spirituality and Matrifocal Families: Empowering Women and Reducing Systemic Patriarchal Oppressions.&#8221; S\/HE: An International Journal of Goddess Studies. It should be out in mid to late 2026, if I understand correctly how online, peer-reviewed journal publishing works.<\/p>\n<h2>Conferences<\/h2>\n<p>I was also thrilled to be able to present at a number of conferences in 2025, and I hope to do more in 2026 &#8212; I&#8217;ve even gotten one confirmation already! I was also delighted to squeeze in a 2025 conference that was just for fun. Here&#8217;s the conferences I attended&#8230; and if you&#8217;re interested in my presentations, you can find them on <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/@laughingcollie\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">my youtube channel<\/a>. Enjoy!<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>For my birthday present, on October 24-26 I got to attend Clockwork Alchemy 2025 &#8212; woot! I followed their theme of <em>Gaslight Fantasy<\/em> in my moderation of two panels: &#8220;Steampunk Poetical Philosophy&#8221; and &#8220;Unleash Your Gaslight Fantasy!&#8221; Not only did I get some marvelous (and patient) friends to be panelists with me, but we also had a wonderful time &#8212; both on the panels, and at the conference itself. Best of all, both I and one of my panelist friends were later individually cornered in the hallways by an audience member, with the request to talk more &#8212; because they&#8217;d found the panel so interesting! That&#8217;s definitely a win in my book. Thanks so much, Clockwork Alchemy folks! Though&#8230; maybe a better hotel next year, please? :)<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;Goddess Spirituality and Matrifocal Families: Empowering Women and Reducing Systemic Patriarchal Oppressions,&#8221; at the\u00a0S\/He Divine Studies Conference with the theme <i>Motherhood, Matriarchy, &amp; Matriverse Re-Deemed in the Cosmic Mother<\/i>, June 12-15. I was a moderator, paper presentation, and technical support for this on-line symposium. In fact, the journal article for 2026 (mentioned above) was based on this presentation, as requested by the symposium sponsors.<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;Inanna and Ebih: Garden of Eden or Arrested Childhood?&#8221; at the Hands of Change-sponsored <i>IshtarFest: Building on Herstory<\/i> on-line symposium on June 6-8. This presentation was a great deal of fun, and allowed me to pleasantly branch out my research a little.<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;&#8216;Everyone Gets Lifted Up&#8217;: How Spiritual Matrifocal Families Can Enhance Lives and Reduce Systemic Patriarchal Oppressions.&#8221; I very much enjoyed this on-line symposium, as I received multiple very nice compliments! This was themed as:<i> Wisdom of the Mothers: Celebrating Matriarchal and Matrilineal Spiritual Traditions<\/i>, and was presented by The Lilith Institute and Yerusha Academy Wisdom School, on April 28-29. I&#8217;m really hoping they want me back in 2026 too, in fact.<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;&#8216;Everyone Gets Lifted Up&#8217;: How Matrifocal Family Precepts Can Enhance and Empower People in Treacherous Times.&#8221; An on-line symposium by the Commons of Modern Pagans and Spiritual Seekers Virtual Conference of Pagan Thought and Practice, with the theme of <i>Perilous Passage: Creating Culture &amp; Connection in Treacherous Times. <\/i>March 29.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>That&#8217;s it for now. I hope you too have many things for which you are grateful, and I hope we all have an excellent, productive, and successful new year. Cheers!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I have so much to be grateful for, this year! I honestly did not know at times if I&#8217;d make it, due to the brain&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34,32,5,7,8,9,1,14,26,38,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6329","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-community-activism","category-education","category-ethics-questions","category-family","category-feminism","category-minorities","category-uncategorized","category-religion","category-spirituality","category-womens-mysteries","category-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stormtiger.com\/collie\/bestiary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6329","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stormtiger.com\/collie\/bestiary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stormtiger.com\/collie\/bestiary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stormtiger.com\/collie\/bestiary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stormtiger.com\/collie\/bestiary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6329"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.stormtiger.com\/collie\/bestiary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6329\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6337,"href":"https:\/\/www.stormtiger.com\/collie\/bestiary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6329\/revisions\/6337"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stormtiger.com\/collie\/bestiary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6329"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stormtiger.com\/collie\/bestiary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6329"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stormtiger.com\/collie\/bestiary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6329"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}