Confession: I absolutely adore the wonderful word witches behind The Carterhaugh School of Folklore & the Fantastic, Sara and Brittany! In fact, they really helped me find my way back to everyday magic during the dark days of the early pandemic. Even now, they nourish such a loving community of like-minded folklorists, storytellers, and book lovers all looking to reclaim our right to everyday enchantments and a life beyond burnout.

All of which is to say that I was beyond excited when they asked me to contribute some tarot magic for their new course Enchant, which you can read more about below…

What do you feel when you hear the word “burnout?”

Maybe it’s a sense of instant recognition or heaviness in your chest or limbs. Maybe it’s more like emotional exhaustion or a feeling of flatness. Maybe it’s just a big, gray BLAH or like sinking into the Neverending Story’s Swamp of Sadness.

For us, it’s kind of a resigned recognition, an “oh, hello again, YOU.” Burnout is an old nemesis of ours, one that keeps popping new heads like a hydra.

Over the years, we’ve come to recognize burnout as the antithesis of enchantment. Burnout eats up all the space and energy that enchantment needs to take root. It robs you of the spark that ignites enchantment. 

What do we mean by enchantment?

We think it’s a little different for everyone. For us, it means dwelling in a space of possibility, security, and creativity. It’s where art and connection thrive. And we tend to get there through folklore, especially fairy tales. 

We’re kind of the queens of burnout. And we have spent years trying to relinquish our crowns. 

But then we’d start another irresistible project or we’d get an exciting invitation or we figured if we Jenga-ed our calendars just a little bit harder…

… aaaand the crowns would boomerang back onto our heads, giving us migraines as they landed. As they always, always do.

And let us tell you, it is hard to feel enchanted when you have a migraine. 

So many of the people that we talk to these days have their own versions of these stories. Especially women and non-binary folks, but really just about everyone. 

There is so much to do. There is so much that people are passionate, sparkly, about, and yet the muck of the burnout swamp pulls them down, because they feel like they have an impossible amount of stuff that must be accomplished and that it all has to happen before they can take a moment for themselves.

So many of us have had our boundaries systematically eroded and have been taught over and over that their needs must come last. 

As for what we want? 

Honestly, for a while, we forgot that was even a question you could ask. 

When was the last time someone asked you what you needed? What you wanted? What would light you up, help you step from burnout gray back into sparkle, into something like enchantment?

If you’re anything like us, these can be weirdly difficult questions to answer.

Or maybe you already have an idea, but you haven’t started moving towards it yet.

Our new course, Enchant, came out of these questions. It came out of the quest to give up our burnout crowns for good (we’re still working on it but we’re putting them down for longer and longer and living for that feeling.) We’re learning and we’re unlearning. We’re breaking ourselves apart and putting ourselves back together again with the idea that we deserve magic - that feeling of replenishment and potential. 

Maria is, quite honestly, one of our role models for this, and it’s one of the reasons why we invited her to be a part of Enchant. She’ll be sharing her wisdom and strategies with you there, too! We’ll also have a bonus lecture with the amazing Terri Windling, a big workbook, and so much more. 

This is a course where the magic exists in art, in the everyday, in the ordinary, in connection, and in you. It’s not all going to be easy, but the best spells never are. We hope you join us.  

A note from the Bruja Professor: Learn more about this fabulous course here.

Guest Contributor Bios

Dr. Sara Cleto and Dr. Brittany Warman are award-winning folklorists, teachers, and writers with a combined 26 years in higher education and over a hundred publications. Together, they founded The Carterhaugh School of Folklore and the Fantastic, teaching creative souls how to re-enchant their lives through folklore and fairy tales. In 2019, Carterhaugh won the Dorothy Howard Award from the American Folklore Society.

When they aren’t teaching at Carterhaugh, they are scholars, writers and best friends who have published peer-reviewed articles, appeared on podcasts, sold stories and poems, written book introductions and encyclopedia entries, and written for magazines and blogs. (They’ve also been known to crush “Total Eclipse of the Heart” at karaoke.) They are regular writers for Enchanted Living Magazine, and their weekly blog has reached more than 150,000 people. Sara and Brittany also deliver sold-out lectures at venues like the Smithsonian, the Profs & Pints series, the Maryland Renaissance Festival, the Contemporary American Theater Festival, and FaerieCon.

The Bruja Professor, a witchy take on literature, the occult & pop culture, is the scholarly sister to Enchantment Learning & Living, an inspirational blog celebrating life’s simple pleasures, everyday mysticism, and delectable recipes that are guaranteed to stir the kitchen witch in you.

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