An Interview with Pagan Pride Day

October 1, 2011 will be the third year in a row that Iowa will host a Pagan Pride Day celebration. Chrissy Dunham, Administrator of Pagan Pride Day, was kind enough to give PNC-Iowa an insight into the event and some information on a Pagan land project where future PPD events might take place.

PNC-Iowa: I believe this is the second year you have been the Administrator.
How did you, Chrissy and the Coven of the Blessed Lady, get involved in running
Pagan Pride Day?

Pagan Pride Day: In 2009 an old friend Linda, ask me to help her out with Pagan Pride. Linda and I have worked on an event before so I said yes. It was a busy year that year as I had 3 family events going on myself that year. A wedding, graduation and a big sweet 16th birthday party. After the Pagan Pride event, Linda decided to go on another adventure and decided to continue it. I have a coven and knew that they would help if needed.

PNC: It must take a lot to put together an event like PPD. Can you tell us a
bit about how it all comes together?

PPD: Well it just depends. if you are a person that is new to organizing an
event then yes it will be hard. However, if you had some experience like I had
you gain a lot of connection with people over the years and it comes together
nicely. I have been organizing events since 2000. I like Pagan Pride the best as
it has more people attending! The hardest part is fund raisers. Finding new
ideas and getting the people to come.

PNC: What is it about the event that keeps you coming back and working for it?

PPD: What motivates me is the pagan community. Getting them a chance to meet a well-known pagan author and to help each person in the pagan community to get connected with an old friend or find new friends. Connected to pagan shopping vendors, entertainers and other pagan groups in their area. I do it for the pagan community no matter if we have 50 in attendance or 500. I do it for them.  I am only a tool for the Goddess to help bring her children together as one.

PNC: Can you tell us about a great memory you have from PPD? How about a worst memory?

PPD: Well last year in 2010 we got Raven Grimassi to come along with his wife
Stephanie, and being with them for 4 days promoting the pagan pride event at 2
pagan businesses and then the main day of apgan pride was awesome. My coven
follows raven’s path and we already had a connection to him so it was easy to
ask him the hardest part was getting them here. I was pleased that we did. The
community had a great time visiting with Raven and Stephanie and loved the 2
discussions that him and Stephanie did. The worse was the heat it had to be the
hottest day of the year, the temp reached 100 that day of all days. But
otherwise everything went well.

PNC: What is the importance of having something like PPD in Iowa?

PPD: To have Pagan Pride day is to let the general public know who we are and
what we are about. Tolerance. Spirituality. Kindness. Caring. Earthy. Many
people think Iowa is boring we don’t have the controversy like other states but
we do. More so than other states. We are consider to be in the bible belt of the
Midwest so having pagan pride does let people be aware that we are here. Let
them know who we are exactly and that we are not bad folks. We want to enlighten the community on what they need or want to be enlightened with.

PNC: What is in store for 2011?

PPD: This year we have Amber K and Azrael K that will be joining us on October
1st at Union Park in Des Moines from 10 to 6. They are wonderful women and also well known for their books. We will have a belly dance troupe form Cedar Rapids.  Melissa Cox, with her beautiful voice will eb joining us as our musical guest.  We will have shopping vendors, food vendors and of course our readers. This year we will only have about 2 to 3 workshops going on instead having a workshop an hour so this way our attendees can shop more, eat more and visit with our guest.  We are also planning our 2012 PPD with a list of authors to choose from it will be hard to make this choice. But now since the Grimassis been here and gave us a great recommendations we have over 10 authors that will like to come now so I see this PPD going on for a decade at least!

PNC: How can we get involved?

PPD: Getting involved is easy. Just let us know you that you want to help out.
We always need someone to help put on a fund raiser in different parts of Iowa.
We can use people to help advertise. We always need help each year for security, clean up, welcome tables and many more spots.

PNC: On your Facebook page, I noticed that there are references to an
acquisition of land for a Pagan retreat. Can you tell us how that came about?

PPD: Yes the land we are talking about is 26 acres up by Monticello,Iowa
(Northern part of Iowa). We have a couple in the Coven of the Blessed Lady that
has willed it over to us. They want to make it into a place where pagans can go
and be way out in the open. Public parks are great but to have a place that can
be a pagan retreat where no one can see you is awesome. Something like Heartland that they have each year in MO.

PNC: Where is the land located and what is it’s intended use? Monticello,Iowa
(Northern part of Iowa).

PPD: We want it for a pagan retreat to have pagans/wiccans/druids/ all paths of
life to enjoy it. There are two things that we are looking forward to. 1) is to
have Pagan Pride Day there some day. 2) is to have a pagan meet up fest. That is
where we can have about 20 or so authors, musicians, shopping vendors and
readers come for 2 weeks or more and just have a grand ole time. Something like
they have at PSG (Pagan Spirit Gathering). Except we want it bigger. We would
like to build a few buildings for a pagan store for campers and have a few
bathrooms and showers, several places to worship – even to accommodate those
skyclad groups. There is a lot of work to be done as it used to be rented out to
farmers and now it isn’t and we just need help to get it altogether.

PNC: How can we find out more information and get involved?

PPD: There is not much info on this yet. We have advertised it through the IPP
Facebook. A lot seem interested. We need volunteers to help and get the land
ready. Maybe a few weekends and we can get it started. If anyone is interested
please contact us through Iowa Pagan Pride facebook and send us a message
through there.

Thanks to Iowa Pagan Pride for all the hard work put into the Iowa Pagan
community.

Posted by:  Crystal