The Glamour

"Ginger is ferocity and stubbornness. Ginger is aggressive and sharp. Ginger is the friend who drags you out of bed and makes you get up and face the morning. Ginger loosens your cramp against the difficult. Ginger stokes up the fires of digestion so you can assimilate what you can't stand the thought of having swallowed. Ginger clears fog from the brain. With its flowers like sex and its roots like firm hands with a grasp of the essential, there is no better friend. Cultivate ginger!" - Remedios: Stories of Earth and Iron from the Puertorriquenas, Aurora Levins Morales

Raven. On this island he too was known by more than one name for he wore his lineage as the son of his silver-haired Raven father and Pale the border witch. There was still a generation of old timers who remember his birth, and were regulars at The Safety Pin Cafe. Skeena, the name he was called when he walked human was a magician, a shaman to some, and beloved as dramatist and co-founder of Banana Skin and Ginger the international acclaimed Salish theater company. Skeena and his partner Shine Molina wove the glamour of tradition in and between the complicated stages of the interstitial. It was not the glamour that was often mistaken for beauty we're talking here. Banana Skin and Ginger was a product, an agreement between the stars, the mystery and the grounded souls of many lifetimes. They dealt in enchantment.

The man trying on the name Herbert of Claybanks has known Skeena the boy and the Raven-blooded all his life. The boy's life. Among the first of his teachers, Herbert was the town's favorite mender and welder of all things broken. When Skeena was curious to learn sleight of hand with shiny copper pennies and warm freshly-laid eggs it was the mender and welder who taught the boy about metal's magical property and respect for all forms of birthing.  The original barn and workshop where metal work and dragging fenders found new life was now a bakery and pin ball arcade but the history of both the building and beings still trickled with magic. It was the verb trickled that had the former mender and welder seeking out the cracks. Aging gracefully was not coming easily. The Raven changeling had come to return a favor.

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At this point a curious reader or a reader who has forgotten the mo'okuauhau, the genealogy, of the medicine stories might like to step off the path ... catch the floating past for a spell. Or, perhaps you, dear reader, just need to know there are tentacles -- many other stories -- that reach into the deep water surrounding Banana Skin and Ginger. 

Joy Weed Journal will introduce you to Skeena, the Raven child's beginnings.
Mend meddle muddle magic introduces you to the Santiago brothers Alex (aka Herbert of Claybanks) and Angelo

Shine's Song will introduce you to Shine Molina and her familia. 

Pale in Purple will both weave and unravel the Raven child's and Shine's stories.

Spider Season does more of that weave and unravel activity.

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To keep on with Banana Skin and Ginger go here.