The Story Behind

Wayward Witch

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I didn't exactly take the traditional route to get here.

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I was born in Houston, Texas, and thankfully, very thankfully, my family moved to

Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where I spent most of my childhood. At seventeen,

I became homeless. From there, I learned how to sleep where I could, stay with who

I could, and keep moving.

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And I did keep moving.

At twenty-six, while playing World of Warcraft, I met an Australian guy online who

asked me to come to Australia.

So naturally, I said, fuck it, one more adventure.

I packed three suitcases and landed in Brisbane.

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Australia was never necessarily supposed to be permanent. There were plans, at one point, to eventually move back to America. Somewhere along the way, those plans disappeared. I still miss home, parts of it anyway, but Australia became home too. More than that, it eventually became the place where I was able to build a life I don't think I could have built anywhere else.

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Before Wayward Witch

 

My first degree is a Bachelor of Fine Art in Animation and Visual Effects. Once upon a time, the dream was Pixar or Industrial Light & Magic.

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Moving countries in the middle of that degree made things considerably more complicated. Australia's industry was incredibly limited compared with the one I'd been preparing to enter, and the career I'd imagined for myself simply never happened. Luckily, I had another skill.

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I could cook.

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I landed a head chef position at a restaurant called Taste of Texas after arriving in Australia. For a displaced Texan, it felt almost ridiculously serendipitous.

I loved the kitchen. I was good at it. I spent close to twenty years as a chef; eventually, my body couldn't do it anymore.

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When Your Body Changes the Rules

 

I have fibromyalgia.

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You'll sometimes hear that fibromyalgia isn't progressive. My lived experience has been considerably less tidy than that. Eventually, working in a kitchen meant crying before work, forcing my body through a shift, and crying again afterwards. The physical demands, stress and pressure became something I simply couldn't keep asking my body to survive.

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So I left.

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I moved into casual retail and went back to university, eventually completing a Master's in Literary Studies and Creative Writing with an emphasis in children's literature. I thought perhaps I'd become a professor. I also had, and still have, approximately forty books living inside my head waiting for me to get my shit together and write them.

Neither of those things happened.

Instead, after university, I entered the corporate world.

That lasted about a year.

The physical stress of the kitchen had given way to a completely different kind of pressure, and eventually my health collapsed under it. When I left that job, I knew something fundamental had changed.

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I couldn't just find another career.

I had to build a life that could bend when my body couldn't.

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$300 and a Fuck-It Mentality

 

Wayward Witch began with roughly $300 and absolutely no grand business plan.

I bought what I could. Made what I could. Sold what I could.

Then I'd have another idea and think, well, let's see what happens.

For quite a while, running Wayward Witch felt like throwing darts at a board in the dark. Some things worked. Some absolutely did not. But after about a year, I realised there was actually something here.

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So I started giving it structure.

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Almost three years later, Wayward Witch has evolved into Wayward Witch’s Teahouse & Emporium.

Not because I've finally figured everything out.

Because I've learned to build this business around the body I actually have rather than the one I keep wishing would come back.

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In the early days I made candles, fragrances and all sorts of wonderfully heavy things. The problem with wonderfully heavy things is that eventually you have to carry the bastards.

Markets became increasingly difficult. After divorce left me without the help I'd previously relied on to set up and pack down, something had to change.

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Herbs are considerably lighter than candles.

And strangely enough, that practical decision brought me closer to the heart of what Wayward Witch was supposed to be all along.

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A Little Folk Magic, a Lot of Research

 

Herbal knowledge runs through my family, through my mother, grandmother and great-grandmother, alongside folk remedies, traditional knowledge and the kind of things that are often passed from one generation to another rather than learned from a textbook.

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But tradition is only the beginning.

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When I consider bringing an herb into one of my blends, I research the absolute hell out of it. Traditional use, folklore, available scientific research, contraindications, how it works alongside other herbs; I want to understand what I'm putting into something before I ever ask someone else to put it into themselves.

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Most blends begin with a problem.

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Sometimes it's mine. Sometimes someone comes to my stall and says, Do you have anything for this?

And occasionally the answer is:

No. But I can make one.

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I'll find the herb that makes sense as the foundation and build outward from there.

Everything is made by me, in ridiculously small batches. That means I can change things. I can customise. I can work around someone's needs instead of expecting every human body to conveniently behave the same way.

Because they don't.

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Why Buy My Shit?

 

I don't do pretentious tea.

 

There. I said it.

Wayward Witch is approachable, forgiving and occasionally inappropriate. I don't believe herbalism needs to be locked behind an aesthetic, a vocabulary or a price tag that makes people feel like they aren't knowledgeable, wealthy or witchy enough to participate.

Yes, I can grab your attention with a tea called Go the Fuck to Sleep.

But the joke isn't the product.

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What's inside the bag matters to me far more than how expensive I can make the packaging look.

I'm a one-person business. I don't have a giant design department, manufacturing facility or enormous marketing budget. I could spend a fortune making every package look spectacular and pass that cost straight on to you.

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I'd rather put the money into what's inside it.

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I'd rather keep my products accessible enough that when someone genuinely needs something, there's a reasonable chance they can afford it.

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I don't want to gatekeep this knowledge.

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And underneath all the swearing, stupid names and chaos, that's probably the simplest explanation for why Wayward Witch exists:

I genuinely want to help people.

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Every bag is blended by my hands. Every market stall is set up around what my body can manage that day. Every purchase supports a disabled woman, her daughter and the independent life this tiny business has helped us build.

It's imperfect.

So am I.

That's rather the point.

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We're All a Little Wayward

 

I was terrified the first time I started entering witchy markets.

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Imposter syndrome is a bastard.

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I didn't think my work was good enough. I didn't think my little business belonged beside all these established makers and beautiful stalls.

Then I got there and realised something.

They're little businesses too.

They're weirdos making things they love in kitchens, sheds, spare bedrooms and workshops. They're exhausted people unloading cars at ungodly hours of the morning. They're artists, makers, witches, herbalists and wonderfully strange humans trying to turn something they care about into a living.

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I found my people.

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The witchy market community, vendors and customers alike, has fundamentally shaped Wayward Witch. It's where I can push boundaries, make people laugh, have fascinating conversations and create things that probably wouldn't survive five minutes at some more conventional markets.

And that's okay.

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If you can't laugh at yourself, or lovingly laugh at your friend while handing them a bag of tea that very accurately describes their current predicament, I may not be the vendor for you.

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Regional Victoria in particular has become home to me. There is a genuineness here that I adore, and it's where I feel most comfortable being entirely myself.

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I came to Australia with three suitcases because some guy I met playing World of Warcraft said I should.

I didn't know I was coming home.

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What's Next?

 

The dream is a physical Wayward Witch’s Teahouse & Emporium.

Not a pristine, pretentious tea room where everyone whispers over tiny sandwiches.

I want an enchanted little world.

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I want to bring my years as a chef back into what I do. I want cauldron cakes and apple pies and forgotten recipes that taste like somebody's grandmother made them; except perhaps your slightly questionable witchy aunt's version.

I want walls of books.

I want classes, workshops and places to share the knowledge I've gathered rather than hoarding it.

I want someone to be able to walk through the door, sit down and tell me what they need, while I build a tea profile and blend something for them on the spot.

I'd love to bring back my invocation fragrances.

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I'd also quite like to finally write some of those forty fucking books.

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Wayward Witch will keep changing because my life keeps changing. My disability means I have to be conscious of what I take on, how much I make and what I ask of myself.

Sometimes that means things take longer.

Sometimes I have to change direction completely.

Sometimes I will disappoint you.

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That's part of living with a body that doesn't always honour the plans I've made for it.

But Wayward Witch was never built on perfection.

It was built on adaptation.

On surviving.

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On finding another direction when the road you thought you were taking disappears underneath you.

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We're all a little wayward.

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Sometimes we just need the slightest bit of direction to find where we're supposed to go.

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Embrace the Chaos,

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Brook

        Guidry

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