About Us
“it is not about becoming, it is about becoming-with.”
Donna Haraway
Savage Craic is a living partnership between llewyn máire (they/siad), Dr. Lisa Newman (she/they), Irish soil/ seed workers, local and international herbalists, artists, makers, and an eclectic family of plantcestors, microbial mates, and fungikin— fermenting lifeways in the Irish Free State since 2015.
We are an anarcho queer venture that centres health autonomy through collective care and prefigurative skill sharing rooted in land stewardship — our offerings include workshops, events, radical remedies and seasonal ferments.
Funds raised from the sale of ferments, remedies, and events like Mushrooms & Roses goes towards creating opportunities for community care.
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llewyn máire, known in community as lle (yE), is currently the primary facilitator and maker for Savage Craic.
Their lineage with cooking and liberatory community herbalism starts at home with lessons from their mother, Laura Matthiessen, who taught them the importance of building relationships with the more-than-human world, the necessity of land stewardship and ongoing political activism, the need to centre community care, how to build queer resilience as a tool for resistance, and how to cook food for survival and shared nourishment.
This led to decades in community and professional kitchens; from Food Not Bombs to fine dining — where they developed a passion for cultivation, fermentation, and food as medicine.
Learning herbalism is on-going; a life sharing with people and plants, a deep love of books, and engaging in more formal education through Herbalista Free School, Solidarity Apothecary, The Peoples Medicine School, Terra Sylva School of Botanical Medicine, and others.
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Savage Craic is in the process of becoming a not-for-profit social enterprise and is seeking land to steward towards the development of a queer sanctuary that will include a generative residency, creative studio, radical food forest, and community apothecary kitchen.
Fermentation transforms and inspires, making for delicious ways to engage with our food, the land, and each other. These relationships speak to an ancient mutualism that started when we first shared breath with our plantcestors.
This venture is motivated by our love for gathering together and breaking bread, making art, sharing stories, cultivating resilience, and building care networks.
We are each microbial stewards, eco-celebrants, agents of community care, spiraling ever forward in this dance of life, our goal is to do so with ever growing purpose, to create positive relationships, rewild our lifeways and aid in the cultivation of decolonial futures for us all.
When we first arrived in Éire, we were breaking bread with new friends when a comrade from Ennis referred to everything we were sharing as some “savage craic”, which felt like an induction to something very old, a birthing of something new — and a welcome home.
llewyn máire