5: ‘Darkness is Healthy and Holy’ - Pam Grossman

What happens when we recognise creativity as a form of magic?

Writer, curator, and cultural critic Pam Grossman joins Joanna Ebenstein for a conversation about witchcraft, creativity, death, and the unseen forces that shape our lives.

Best known for her books Magic Maker and Waking the Witch, Grossman reflects on her lifelong relationship with magic — from childhood fascinations with mythology and divination to publicly embracing witchcraft as both a spiritual and creative practice. Together, she and Joanna explore how modern witchcraft honours darkness, shadow, and mortality without equating them with evil, and why rituals of remembrance and ancestral connection remain vital in contemporary life.

The conversation moves through pagan traditions, tarot, artistic process, justice magic, and the cultural stigma surrounding witches. Grossman speaks candidly about anxiety, creative doubt, and the pressure to “make meaning,” while Joanna reflects on how death awareness can sharpen our sense of purpose and deepen our relationship to creativity.

At the centre of the episode is a shared idea: that making art is itself a magical act: a collaboration between intention, imagination, and something larger than the self. Whether understood as spirit, ancestry, the unconscious, or creative intuition, both Joanna and Pam ask what becomes possible when we stop treating creativity as pure productivity, and begin approaching it as devotion, ritual, and transformation.

📢Listeners! You are invited to share your own offerings: voice notes on death, dying, ritual and the beauty of finitude. Include your first name and location if you want them shared- you might be featured in an upcoming episode. Send your offering via WhatsApp to +44 2921 690468

💀 Memento Morbid is produced by Overcoat Media in partnership with Morbid Anatomy.

Host: Joanna Ebenstein
Series Producer: Jess Gunasekara
Studio Engineer: Fernando Velazco Vargas
Additional Production and Sound Design: Katie Hill
Production Coordinator: Janice Jardine 
Executive Producer: Steven Rajam
Artwork: Lauren Seeley

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