Let's Put 2024 Away, Shall We?
Reflections on the Year, Deviating from the Plan, & Recommendations for Your 2025 Toolkit
Thank You
Hi folks, Coach here!
As 2024 draws to a close, we’re all feeling gratitude for you — our listeners, subscribers, Patreon supporters, and friends. You’ve heard it a gazillion times, but we only make the show because you listen to it (just as we only publish Substacks because you read them!). Your respective interests, expertises, fandoms, and curiosities help drive our podcast and the research Hannah and Marcelle do for the show. We appreciate you keeping things interesting for and with us.
Last year, we released 29 Material Girls episodes, launched Making Worlds and Gender Playground, published 22 Substacks, hit 1000 supporters on Patreon (from all over the world!), and hosted a live event in my hometown that was unforgettable.
All to say, as we look to the New Year, continuing work at Witch, Please Productions is a bright spot we don’t take for granted.
Thank you and Happy New Year! Read on to hear from Marcelle and Hannah. <3
Deviating from the Plan
a message from Marcelle
I'm writing this year end message on my phone while in the mountains with my family. My mom and grandma flew to Alberta to spend the holidays with us. My grandma (as you might remember from a previous newsletter) has cancer, so this visit is special for a whole host of reasons. But bless her it's been a HARROWING visit. My three-year-old has been super sick, which has made spending time together very high-risk considering the impact of my grandma's chemo treatments on her immune system. Until the last couple days we've all been masking when together, eating far apart, keeping the toddler isolated, and just kind of running back and forth.
Fortunately, the toddler recovered from whatever demon possessed him (we think it was hand foot and mouth) and we all seem to have dodged that bullet (🤞). He recovered just in time to drive through the mountains and take Grandma to see some of her great-grandchildren and a niece she's extra close to. Of course that means we've been driving mountain roads at night, which is literally TERRIFYING. We saw a moose (cool!) on the road at night in low visibility conditions (VERY NOT COOL). I white-knuckled it the whole drive, doing about 20km under the speed limit. Since my life flashed before my eyes for about two straight hours, I thought of some highlights to share from the past year.
This calendar year has been a tough one for sure, but making Material Girls has been a constant blessing. I love this team and I love the guests who join us to think through the wild and wacky stuff that makes up the fabric of our lives. I know we recorded it in December 2023, but we started the calendar year with our episode on Wonka featuring the incredible Leena Norms (how fitting that she joined us for Wicked, our last episode of 2024!!!).
really set the tone for our guests this year. We got on like a house on fire!Obviously a massive highlight was going to Disneyland with my two favourite co-hosts, Hannah and Raimi. There was the whole getting-lightly-hate-crimed situation, but HATE CRIMES ASIDE, this was truly a baller way to celebrate my 40th birthday. We made two episodes about Disneyland for Material Girls, but I just couldn't bring myself to write the trip off as a business expense lest I got audited.
When I think about the (no-guest) episodes that Hannah led, it's hard to beat our Jurassic Park episode. No one knows Jurassic Park like Hannah McGregor, and what a treat to celebrate the launch of their book Clever Girl by diving into what makes the movie so special.
I think the (no-guest) episode that I enjoyed researching the most was our episode on Tupperware. Did we single-handedly bring down Tupperware’s pyramid-shaped business with our incisive questions? Impossible to know! 😈
The episode I led on Golden Girls with “tall homosexual” Marshall Watson was the first time I got to extensively collaborate on the script with a guest. It was a hoot to write and a delight to record. I look forward to more such shenanigans in the future!
To be honest, I'm really not sure what I want for 2025! One of the pleasures of making Material Girls has been deviating from the plan (sorry Coach!) when a whim takes me (this is the story behind both the sweet potato fries and Twin Peaks episodes). But come what may, I know we'll continue to make delightful (and at times totally unhinged) content that's as thrilling for us as it is for our beloved listeners.
Thank you all for being part of this community. You're the reason we can do this and we are all so grateful.
Happy 2025 and all the very best with the challenges ahead. We're in it together.
An End of Year List for 2025
a message from Hannah
Huge news: somehow, despite all evidence suggesting that it was going to last forever, 2024 is actually coming to an end. No offense to 2024, it was just a lot, personally and collectively, locally and globally. Looking back, a key theme emerges for me, one that Chani Nicholas articulated beautifully in the latest episode of Vibe Check: if we’re going to take community care seriously, we need to slow down our drive toward individual accomplishment.
Easier said than done, obviously. Especially when you’re working in a systemically underfunded public education system. Especially when academia has broken your ability to set normal professional goals or healthy work-life boundaries. Especially when part of community care might be being one of the only people you know with a pension.
Maybe it’s turning 40; maybe it’s coming through a very scary medical crisis (I hurt my back really badly in April); maybe it’s witnessing an ongoing genocide that has exposed the depths of humanity’s capacity for both goodness and monstrosity; maybe it’s just the number of times I’ve cried over a budget announcement at work. Whatever the cause, it’s been a big “what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life” kinda year for me. And the best answer I’ve been able to come up with is this: slow down, seek joy, and show up for your community with whatever skills and resources you have to offer.
Community care is a practice, as in, you need to practice it. As my friends and I age, as life under end stage capitalism becomes harder and more precarious, as the world veers in the direction of fascism and fire, I’ve been getting plenty of opportunities for practice. Sometimes it’s looked like introducing the principles of trauma-informed pedagogy into my work. Sometimes it’s been buying sheets for a sick friend so she can do less laundry while recovering from surgery. Sometimes it’s about slowing down an entire project to make it more sustainable for everyone involved. Sometimes it’s helping a dear colleague hold a banner condemning Israel’s scholasticide as we cross the stage at convocation.
But another way I practice community care is by turning to stories and texts and thinkers that help deepen my understanding of what it might look like. So in the spirit of an end-of-year list, here are some of my recommendations for reading, listening, and watching that I’ve added into my apocalypse survival tool kit. Note, these aren’t all new in 2024, just things I encountered in 2024 that meant something to me.
Reading
Love after the End: An Anthology of Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer Speculative Fiction, edited by Joshua Whitehead (which I got to talk about with sexy genius Leena Norms)
The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, by Becky Chambers (we haven’t done a Making Worlds episode about Becky Chambers yet but I guarantee we will)
Sluggish, by Jesse Meadows (I’ve become obsessed with this newsletter since we had Jesse on the show)
Watching
Reservation Dogs (you can listen to our episode with Karrmen Crey to hear the origin of my obsession)
Thelma (this movie is so funny and also about the tension between autonomy and collectivity and it made me laugh and cry)
Agatha All Along (is this as obviously about community care as I think it is?)
Dimension 20 (this one we do have a Making Worlds episode about)
Listening
Text Me Back! With Lindy West And Meagan Hatcher-Mays (all I want is a million podcasts hosted by smart women who are trying to live in the world with integrity and silliness)
Vibe Check (actually I also want podcasts hosted by queer Black men talking about pop culture and politics and
reading poems to us at the end of every episode)Worlds Beyond Number (also also I want podcasts that do deep immersive collaborative decolonial fantasy storytelling)
5-4 Pod (and, despite the fact that I’m neither American nor a lawyer, I want to listen to leftie lawyers unpack Supreme Court decisions, what can I say I’m a lifelong learner)
Okay your turn: tell me what movies, tv shows, podcasts, books, newsletters, albums, etc. have inspired you this year!
And now…
An assortment of screenshots from 2024
