Matri|arch|ives

A decolonial, cyclical, and seasonal deep dive into reading and relation. This is not your mama's book club.

We enter into books as portals. We will read slowly, moving with the rhythms of the earth, savoring, pausing, and listening.

We gather in the in-between spaces where borders blur, new worlds are born, and memory and imagination entwine.

Here, we do not consume texts; we live with them. We allow them to speak through our bodies, our lineages, our relationships, and the turning of the seasons of la tierra and of our lives.

Matri|arch|ives is a living archive. Each season, we step into books that open portals into worlds beyond the colonial imagination. Our circle does not chase novelty or speed. We choose texts that speak to what must be remembered, reimagined, and embodied.

Our intellectual currents include:

  • Decolonial Feminism → Reading with an eye toward dismantling colonial logics that separate us from land, body, and one another.

  • Afrofuturism → Listening to Black futurist visions that stretch time and reality. Reading them as necessary survival maps, portals into how freedom can be dreamt into being.

  • Matricentric Feminism → Centering the labor, wisdom, and struggle of mothers and mothering people and refusing the invisibility imposed by patriarchal and capitalist systems.

  • Motherhood Under Patriarchy → Witnessing both the violences and the possibilities of mothering in colonial-capitalist culture, and reading toward repair, tenderness, and resistance.

  • Community & Kinship → Asking how friendship, family, and chosen kin become practices of survival and joy.

  • Spiritual Activism → Holding the inseparability of the sacred and the political. Integrating the unseen into our justice work.

  • Healing → Not as a privatized self-care industry, but as collective, ancestral, intergenerational tending.

Each book becomes a thread in the web we are weaving: an archive of matriarchal, decolonial futures.

Register for the Autumn Cohort

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Register for the Autumn Cohort 🍂

Matri|arch|ives: Autumn 2025

Reading as ceremony. Reading as archive. Reading as resistance.

Autumn is the season of harvest and descent. A time of gathering what sustains, and sinking into the depths. For our first gathering of Matri|arch|ives, we walk with two texts that embody this turning:

Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice — Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

Care as survival. Care as collective harvest. This book teaches us to unlearn the capitalist lie of independence, and instead gather around practices of interdependence woven by queer, disabled, and BIPOC communities.

Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals — Alexis Pauline Gumbs

Listening below the surface. A descent into breath, adaptation, and Black feminist ways of knowing. This book invites us to sink into the dark waters of imagination and emerge remade.

How We Move Together

  • Choose your book — Care Work or Undrowned (or both)

  • Opening circle on the equinox — a threshold into autumn’s work.

  • Monthly online check-ins — some co-facilitated with art-therapy practices that invite us beyond words.

  • Closing circle on the solstice — where we bring what we have integrated.

  • In-between — prompts and dialogue carried in our private Telegram space, tending the slow rhythm of the season.

Registration closes September 20, 2025.
The circles open at the Autumn Equinox.

Our Rhythm

  • One book per season → held over three months, read with slowness and savoring.

  • Opening + Closing Gatherings → around the equinoxes and solstices, held online.

  • Monthly Check-ins → simple Zoom circles to share what the text has stirred. Some will be co-facilitated with an art-therapy lens to invite creative, embodied reflection.

  • In-Between → prompts and dialogue in our private Telegram group + channel.

  • Cohort-Based → Each season is its own container, a three-month commitment, a new “volume” in our living archive.

Sustaining the Circle

Each season is offered on a sliding scale. Pricing is per pathway, per season. All tiers receive the same access.

  • $33 — for those in need of community care.

  • $66 — sustains the labor of holding this circle.

  • $99 — subsidizes others and strengthens the archive.

Books are not included. We ask participants to source them ethically from local bookshops, libraries, or Bookshop.org, never Amazon.

My favorite local (to Denver) indie Black- and Woman-owned bookstore is The Shop at MATTER