Today on the podcast we are joined by Gerard Way. Gerard is the singer of the band My Chemical Romance and also has released some great music on his own. He has spent the last few years writing comics, including the very popular Umbrella Academy comics which have also recently been adapted into a great show on Netflix. In our conversation, we talk about creating worlds and inhabiting characters, the beauty and the difficulty of creative collaboration, the complexity of trying to incorporate time-travel into a story, and we also get into Gerard’s spirituality, and I want to give a brief heads up for some of you regarding that.

Gerard is going to talk a bit about magick and witchcraft. While I’m no expert on either, I do know enough to know that these words in this context probably don’t mean what most of you probably think they do. Some of you might not bat an eye hearing them but a lot of you probably came up inside of a worldview where someone who was interested in these things was considered very evil, and Gerard is very far from that. If I can try to briefly provide a new framework for you it would be this. Generally, modern practices of magic and witchcraft, while being diverse in form, incorporate various insights and ritual elements from animistic pagan and folk religion, as well as incorporating some psychological intuitions from different fields and traditions. Practitioners often tend to be very concerned with the earth and our connection with it. While this is not my spiritual tradition or practice, I recognize that we all have things to learn from each other. I especially think the ideas in these traditions about finding our place within the natural world is a helpful corrective to the western traditions’ tendency to want to dominate over nature rather than see ourselves as a part of an interconnected web of being. I had no idea we’d be talking about any of this going into the conversation, but in the spirit of this podcast, I’m so glad I got to hear from another unique perspective on the good, the true, and the beautiful.

Gerard Way Website

My Chemical Romance Website

Umbrella Academy on Netflix

Carry the Fire Podcast Website

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Produced by Andy Lara at www.andylikeswords.com