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.

Book cover titled 'Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution' by Adrienne Rich, with introduction by Eula Biss. The background features various shades of blue with a wave-like pattern.
Book cover for 'Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change' by Angela Garbes, featuring a stylized illustration of a woman holding a baby against a pink and black background.
Poster titled "Revolutionary Mothering" with colorful abstract background, black silhouette of a face, and red text banner reading "Love on the Front Lines".
Book cover titled "Modern Friendship" by Anna Goldfarb, with colorful overlapping circles and subtitle "How to Nurture Our Most Valued Connections" along with a note about a 14-day Wholehearted Friendship cleanse.
Book cover titled 'A Woman's Work' by Elinor Cleghorn, featuring an illustration of a woman with a bun holding a cat and a dog in front of a framed painting.
Book cover of 'All About Love' by Bell Hooks with a red background and black text.
Book cover titled 'Normative Motherhood: Regulations, Representations, and Reclamations,' edited by Andrea O'Reilly, featuring line art of a mother holding her child.
Book cover titled 'In (M)other Words' by Andrea O'Reilly, featuring a cream background with a maroon section displaying handwritten text and a quote at the bottom.
Book cover titled "Emergent Strategy" by adrienne maree brown, with a background of birds in flight and a pink strip at the bottom containing the subtitle "Shaping Change, Changing Worlds"
Cover of a book titled "This Bridge Called My Back" with the subtitle "Writings by Radical Women of Color," fourth edition, edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria E. Anzaldúa, featuring an abstract design of a human figure with green leaves and a dark silhouette against a reddish-brown background.

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.

Matri|arch|ives: Winter 2026

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.

Book cover titled 'Undrowned' with dolphins and waves, part of Emergent Strategy Series, about Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals by Alexis Pauline Gumbs.
Book cover titled "CARE WORK: Dreaming Disability Justice" by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, featuring an illustration of a white, leafless, intertwined tree with a person in a brown shawl and hands emerging from behind the tree.

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.

Ready to join us?

Meet the Story Keepers

A woman with curly dark hair sitting cross-legged on a wooden deck surrounded by potted plants and flowers, with a large ceramic vase behind her, in a lush garden.


  • 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.

A smiling woman with dark hair takes a selfie outdoors in a greenhouse or garden with green plants and large windows in the background. She wears an orange and black patterned top and a necklace with an eye-shaped pendant.

  • 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.