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 Winter Cohort

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Register for the Winter Cohort ❄️

Matri|arch|ives: Winter 2025

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

How We Move Together

  • Choose your book — TBA

  • Opening circle on the solstice — a threshold into winter’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 December 13, 2025.
The circles open at the Winter Solstice.

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.

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

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

  • Root Tier — $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

Ready to join us?

Meet the Story Keepers


  • Desirae Callaway, MA, LMT writes, mothers, and studies at the intersections of decolonial feminism and spiritual activism. Her scholarship centers motherhood as both wound and possibility under patriarchy, and her practice insists that healing must be collective, seasonal, and matriarchal. Through Matri|arch|ives, she gathers readers into a living archive of care, kinship, and matriarchal futures.

  • Téresa is a mixed Indigenous queer, activist, facilitator, and scholar who holds a BS in Sociology and Latin American Studies with a minor in Fine Arts and MA in Women, Gender, Spirituality, and Social Justice.

    Through her 5 years working as an advocate/case manager for survivors of intimate partner violence and/or sexual violence, she has facilitated support groups, healing art activities, and believes that art and creativity are integral to healing from a trauma-informed and heart-centered practice.

    Téresa completed an Embodied Social Justice certificate which linked her passion of helping others heal from past trauma through reconnecting with their bodies, reclaiming their divinity, and elevating their self-worth through creative and art-based practices.

    She also believes in decolonizing her own mindbodyspirit by spending time with her plants, bodies of water, and ritual work with her ofrenda to connect with her ancestors and spiritual mothers who have passed.