Calling all Witches!
Exploring online communities with Claire Zulkey of Evil Witches
I talk a lot of shit about social media, and for good reason! Social media can rob us of our time, our freedom, our individuality, and our senses of self. But it can also provide folks with resources and communities they might not otherwise be able to access. Personally, I appreciate various social media accounts and newsletters for their ability to open entertainment or information windows. I also appreciate the cozy feeling of knowing that followers of this Instagram account or that newsletter are privy to a certain level of shorthand, are the types of people who get it. Whether that “it” is my enthusiasm for porcelain cows found in English river mud, my love of corona beans, my interest in divesting from diet culture, or my lack of patience for platitudinous, reductive views of motherhood as something that should be cherished and savored at all costs, even when you’d honestly rather not.
Claire Zulkey helms (for lack of a better word) one such internet community via her Substack,
, which I’ve been reading for what feels like forever. Evil Witches is for “people who happen to be mothers” which right off the bat reveals that it’s an internet community for individuals whose entire identities have not been subsumed by the mere fact of having children.This is a publication for people who don’t need to hear that it’s all worth it, or that the years are short, that this is the most important job of all. It’s for people who are tired of saying “I love my kid but…” and know it’s always inferred. It’s for people who wish that it was the norm to add “.... are you OK?” after parenthood begins, and not just “congratulations!”
Evil Witches is, in short, the newsletter that would have fucking saved my life had it existed (or had I know about it) when I was a brand new mom feeling completely at sea and completely broken by my inability (or lack of interest) to “savor every moment” of the postpartum newborn experience. And Claire is exactly the type of writer I needed to read when I was drowning in Facebook posts declaring that X couldn’t remember life before baby Y, whereas as a new mom with a cracked tailbone bleeding into my super-sized menstrual pad and unable to choke down a single piece toast due to depression and exhaustion, I could only remember (and grieve) my life without kids.
Claire’s background is in both writing and comedy, and Evil Witches is a platform for her (very funny) writing, but also a space deliberately created to serve a community of moms. On the Evil Witches “About” page, Claire claims that she doesn’t know what she’s doing and that she’s “making it up as [she] goes along,” but I very much think she does know what she’s doing if what she’s doing is holding space for the irreverence, the absurdity, and inherent capacity for connection that motherhood evokes.
The Evil Witches newsletter legitimately feels like a (fun! funny! useful! validating! weird!) judgement-free zone for all things motherhood, parenting, and identity, and as anyone who’s been a parent in the age of the internet knows, this means that Evil Witches is not only a unicorn, but a unicorn with sparkly fur and like, rainbow wings.
I’m so jazzed to talk to Claire about community, being Very Online, and more.
Sara: Tell me about Evil Witches.
Claire: So Evil Witches originally began as a private Facebook group I started that was just friends of mine from different social circles (elementary school, high school, college, work, The Internet) who were moms I didn’t have to explain myself to if I wanted to talk shit about my family or family life. They had a certain sense of humor and irreverence about parenthood and there was no need to silo different conversations about work, fashion, relationships, and childrearing highs and lows or find “lessons” or find gratitude or see the bright side. Eventually the wisdom and fun and pathos of these conversations moved a few people to suggest I take this whole vibe to a wider audience.
Sara: And why did you choose a newsletter (as opposed to a podcast or a good ol’ fashioned blog or even an Instagram account)? I’m always interested in how internet communities are impacted by the medium in which they’re contained.
Claire: I decided to go with the newsletter format after a lot of consideration because I am not a moderator at heart. On the one hand, nothing makes me happier than to connect women I know over a shared interest or location or career path but I would like my involvement to more or less end around there. I have seen internet communities endure stress, fracture and implode and that can be high stress and I’m not the kind of person who can’t take that personally.
Sara: SAME. Did you have a clear vision of what kind of community you wanted Evil Witches to be?
Claire: I didn’t have many thoughts about what I hoped would come of Evil Witches but I have always wanted it to be a place that is fun and compassionate and irreverent and sarcastic. But I’m also just one person so I need to be realistic in terms of size and scope and what I can take on in terms of admin and emotional workload. I would rather have fewer followers and let them get along in a friendly way that I don’t need to watch closely. I need non-social-media time and I don’t want to be logging in frantically to check in on hot threads. I’ve been there! That is hard on me in terms of anxiety and just taking care of business at home. The nice thing is that it’s built on a premise that we all come to parenting differently but as long as you can look at it and critique it and laugh at it through a certain perspective, you’re a witch. And it’s just much more interesting and fun when we can learn from each other.
I think I made the motherhood-centric community I wanted, basically. Earlier on in my parenting life I was as susceptible to mom-shaming as everyone else and knew it was super easy to find/stumble into any sort of discussion that implied my choices were selfish, etc even though I knew deep down they really weren’t. Basically so much of motherhood writing or the communities online focused only on the parenting when most of the moms I am friends with carry so much more with them at any time than only focusing on being a good parent. I wanted more nuanced and interesting conversations beyond “Are you a bad mom if…” or “Is it selfish to…” We all have very bad days/weeks/experiences as parents and need reassurance and resources for sure, but also I think a lot of us don’t worry very much whether there’s something wrong with parenting and containing other completely separate and whole passions and priorities.
Sara: Can you talk about how you engage with other “mom content” online or otherwise?
Claire: So I actually don’t follow that much motherhood content myself in my reading list or on social media. Distilling it down to just one thing often comes out too intense and annoying in completely forgetting the human behind the parent.
Sara: YES.
Claire: My husband was asking me the other night about whether I want to take witches BIG and I don’t? I really like working on different things all at once, keeping my skills as a journalist and freelancer honed, and I really think I need dedicated time per day that is specifically NOT about family/mom shit.
Sara: How do you differentiate between the type of community you’ve created with the Witches and the sorts of communities that can be forged on Instagram or Twitter, for example? I guess for me, newsletter communities feel more manageable because you kind of know you’re interacting with mostly like-minded people. People who opted in. Like, you're less likely to stumble across some tweet or Instagram post that haunts you for days.
Claire: Right. But I also feel extra shitty when somebody is like, oh, you know, this rubbed the wrong way, or this had the wrong tone, or you might not realize this but. And then I’m like, Fuck. And I’ve been on both sides of this. I've gotten internet hate from strangers who wished death upon me and injury to my children. But when the criticism is kind of accurate or is given with love, it’s almost more devastating.
I did this story about kids who grew up with siblings far apart in age. Most of the stories were like, I wasn’t really close with my brother because he’s 10 years older than me or whatever.
And some folks wrote in and were like, Oh, this is depressing, because I've been trying to get pregnant and it's been really hard and now I feel pretty discouraged about the potential age gap. And then of course, I feel terrible, because their point of view is completely valid. And I feel really bad about making someone else feel bad. I’m just not good at compartmentalizing and quickly moving on. You’d think I’d have a thicker skin by this point, but I don’t.
Sara: I feel like you just hit on a real pitfall of online communities. Say you have a group of five IRL friends, you're gonna go into a conversation with those five friends knowing all of their individual life circumstances, knowing, for example, if one of those friends is trying to get pregnant and will have a big age gap between her kids. You would modify how you approached the age gap conversation accordingly. And there’s just no way of knowing all of the variables within a large internet community.
Claire: Yeah, and also, even the most rational person has a shitty day. Or a PMS day. And they're like, I'm gonna really latch onto this particular argument. Or if it’s a bad weather day and they can’t get outside to walk it off, you know? It can be really hard to navigate. I haven’t had to do a great deal of comment moderation, but I’m also incredibly conflict averse, especially after kids. When my kids fight, for example, I don’t get involved. I just let them figure it out. So maybe I’m even overly avoid conflict averse – I don’t know. I wish I could figure it out and not feel like the hostess who’s only as happy as her least happy guest.
Sara: Yeah. And this is where both internet communities and social media open the doors to potential feelings that you simply might not want to feel.
Claire: I want to be an enlightened adult. I want to be the type of person who can healthily not get sucked into these types of downward internal spirals. But it’s hard. As a longtime writer and freelancer, I don’t have an escape plan, you know? I don’t have any idea how you make a living without depending on online conversation to some extent. I remember once, back in the blogging days of 1940, Paris Hilton’s sex tape came out, and my husband made an awful parody video, and Gawker posted it, and I remember watching it rise in popularity on Gawker and just feeling a sort of sense of dread.
Sara: I do wonder if the value of internet communities is proportionate to one’s individual and specific needs at the time. Like, back when I was a new mom with only two IRL mom friends, the Witches would have been an absolute godsend to me. But now, as like, a jaded, hardened mother of a decade, that need is not quite as strong because my maternal identity is pretty well cemented, I have a strong community of parent friends, and I’m quite confident in my witchiness. So I guess I wonder if we should be asking ourselves, like, Do I really need this in the way that I used to? Or is it sucking up a lot of brain space and time and emotional energy?
Claire: I totally agree. I also think so much of early childhood is entrenched in a certain amount of downtime. Like, you’re sitting at the playground, you’re watching the baby monitor, whatever the fuck. You can’t work with the same degree of focus as you could before kids or as you can with older kids.
There’s also so much social comparison with younger kids. Like, are you doing cord blood? Are you doing Montessori? How are you sleep training? Whereas with older kids, you can really let your individual kid guide your parenting because as kids get older they become more and more themselves, right?
Sara: Speaking of those strange broken windows of time you experience in new parenthood, I used to spend a lot of that time consuming stereotypical perfect mommy momfluencer content as entertainment. Like, it was fun for me to look at the pretty moms in their pretty houses. And now, I just don’t derive much entertainment from that type of scrolling. I think I needed to look at aspirational maternal imagery back then because (for whatever complicated reasons) I needed to believe that motherhood itself could be aspirational. Now, of course, I want to tell my younger mom self that actually, no, motherhood does not need to be aspirational, but at the time, that’s where I was at. And I think it’s interesting to chart these changing needs and to ask ourselves how our internet communities or scrolling habits meet those needs (or don’t).
Claire: I think that’s interesting, because I really never read mom blogs for fun. I did some hate reading, like I briefly flirted with GOMI, but quickly realized like, this is a bad vibe. I’m out. So in some ways, I think I dodged a bullet by avoiding the aspirational stuff. It might be because I was Very Online before visuals became king, and I just knew in a very deep way how easy it was to fake things online. You know? I mean, just the other day I posted a picture of my living room on Instagram in which it looks lovely and tidy because I cropped out two piles of boxes and suitcase. It’s so easy to sell bullshit.
Sara: Can you say anything more about the benefits and pitfalls of online communities?
Claire: I’ve been trying really hard to identify value in my life that doesn’t depend on generating income, and recently the Evil Witches Giving Circle raised almost 5k to flip seats in Michigan, which I think is pretty cool. I also heard from some Witches in Seattle who met up in person after I put up a call in the newsletter for people who wanted to meet other local Witches. These are the types of things that sort of transcend the limits of online community.
And I guess I’ve been online long enough to know that things always shift and change. And we all need other sources of happiness and meaning that don’t necessitate being online. I mean, what if there’s an outage or Substack abruptly shutters or whatever. We all need other forms of fulfillment outside of of our online communities, even if those communities have been really meaningful and productive for us.
Thank you Claire!
What about you? What are some of your favorite online communities? Mothering or otherwise?
I love Evil Witches! Thanks for interviewing Claire.