Welcome to Roon Soup, a podcast about magic, culture and the paranormal, coming to you from

from... My name is Gordon and I shall be your host. Enjoy. Today on Rundsupe we speak to Ethnobotanist, educator, witch and author Becky Baya.

Becky is based in Appalachia and it is the exploration of this biore region that finds expression in her herbalism, art, magic, agriculture and teaching.

Becky, thank you very much for your time.

No problem, thanks for having me.

All right, well, I'm quite looking forward to this given your bio, but Becky, were you a weird kid?

Um, yeah, definitely.

That's not even, I don't know why I hesitated to send it that.

Such as, so describe your weirdness,

your childhood weirdness to us.

Well, I guess when I was little I was definitely obsessed with fantasy and magic and I was a D&D kid and I was a Renfer nerd and I was a

group on a small farm in Central New Jersey, but we moved around a lot and we had animals and things that was really fun, but I didn't really know how to talk to other kids. I was kind of, I don't know, I would just be like, hey did you guys know that you can zap people with your magic with your energy?

And then I'd freak them out and they all call me witch at school and make fun of me and it was definitely a pretty weird but and I'd sing to myself on the bus. I got made fun of for doing that a lot like quietly to myself as if no one could hear me.

Just whatever was on the radio or were you making up your own songs?

I think I was listening to my walkman because I'm 30 and I had a walkman and listening to my CDs.

Yeah, the CD walkman. God, they were annoying to kill.

Like, CDs are such a large object, really, I know they were so like bulky after the tape

player and they'd skip you know you knock at once and it's skipping you know come on

all right so tell me about some of the, you mentioned you were a fantasy reader, what were some of the seminal texts from childhood?

Oh my goodness, my favorite, I think my favorite were Timura-Pierces books.

A Wild Magic and I love the Juniper series, Wise Child, they were wonderful about, I think they were actually about like ancient Cornwall.

And the Abhorsen series by Garthnix loved all those books and of course Harry Potter you

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