Conversations with Lorry (Dyrt Witch) Stone

Today we’d like to introduce you to Lorry (Dyrt Witch) Stone.

Hi Lorry (Dyrt Witch), so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?

It’s a long story, because most people’s lives are by this point.

I started in the Midwest and became a professional dominatrix at only 17 in Chicago, largely as a means of survival. That life eventually took me to New York, London, Scotland and Ireland. I had grown up working on farms in the Ozarks, incredibly far below the poverty line, and suddenly the world opened. I learned that I could move between worlds that had once seemed completely inaccessible to me.

Eventually that brought me to Los Angeles, and for nearly 20 years I’ve gone back and forth between LA and the Mojave Desert — specifically the Joshua Tree area. I now live off-grid in a trailer in the desert — not in the romantic, fancy version of “off-grid.” It can be hard living. But the skies are so decadent. I traded streetlights for lying under the Milky Way at night, and honestly, that feels like a pretty good trade.

That combination has become incredibly important to my work: the city with its history, Art Deco, glamour and decay, against the enormous skies and expanses of Joshua Tree and the Mojave Desert. Somewhere between those two landscapes, I found the space to make art, read tarot and perform ritual with the people who feel called to sit with me. I call it “Slowing Down to Catch Up With Yourself.”

I don’t pretend to be a guru. I actually resist that idea. But I do think both my artwork and ritual practice are deeply trauma-informed. There is an openness that can happen when someone understands that vulnerability is allowed in the room.

In my visual work, I use herbalism, esoteric symbolism and contemporary symbolism alongside the body, nature and science to amplify the female and queer gaze. I’m currently developing a death-doula-inspired series exploring what we would choose to place on our own altar as we pass through that final threshold.

In my witchcraft practice, I’m interested in bringing Olde Magick into Southern California through workshops rooted in ancestral folklore, mask-making, ritual and seasonal gatherings. On October 31st — Halloween and Samhain — I’m holding the first Joshua Tree Samhain Festival at The Annex in Flamingo Heights, California, in the Joshua Tree area. It will be the first in my Solstices & Sabbats Festival series, bringing ritual, folklore, art, music and community together around the turning of the wheel. The next gathering will be Yule.

I also offer private tarot readings, ritual work and event experiences through Dyrt Witch, both in the Joshua Tree area and beyond.

I’m also creating the Joshua Tree Tarot and Joshua Tree Oracle, projects rooted in the plants, animals, mythology and energetic landscape of the high desert.

One of the greatest things I’ve learned in middle age is that honest art — art rooted in heritage, survival and the things we’ve actually lived through — connects us far more deeply than polish ever could. I think there is a hunger right now for that lack of polish. The grit we earn is part of our beauty and our magick.

Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not, what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?

No. Not remotely.

I was taken away from my family at three and placed into foster care with a Baptist family. I was eventually returned to my mother, whose addiction and abuse shaped much of my childhood.

We moved constantly. I attended more than 15 schools, sometimes changing schools five or six times within a relatively short period. I started working at 12 because we needed money. I worked phones and waitressed while also trying to go to school, and some of the money I earned disappeared into my mother’s addictions.

She attempted suicide repeatedly. I was an extremely sensitive child, and after enough ambulance rides and hospital visits I became strangely numb to something no child should become accustomed to. I remember reaching a point where, when another ambulance came, part of me just wanted to know whether I could stay home and watch The Simpsons. That says something about what repeated trauma can do to a child.

Eventually we ended up back in Milwaukee. When I was 16, my mother decided to move again. I carefully told her I wanted to stay. She seemed almost relieved and left me in the apartment to take over the rent myself. She sent me a small amount of money, and I later understood that keeping the arrangement quiet also allowed the child-support situation to continue.

At 17 I went to a party in Chicago that led to another party at a professional dungeon. I was offered a job. Teachers at my school had actually been trying to help me pursue an art scholarship, but survival won. I left school and became a professional dominatrix.

By 19 I was helping run a dungeon and participating in guest lectures at colleges in Chicago. It wasn’t glamorous. I lived on the South Side in a neighborhood where violence was very present. I learned how to move through situations most people never imagine becoming normal.

There have also been multiple experiences of sexual assault and violence throughout my life, including assaults when I was simply walking alone. I don’t include that for shock value, and I don’t want trauma to become the most interesting thing about me. But leaving it out would also erase part of the reality that shaped my relationship to safety, the body, intuition, vulnerability and ultimately the work I make now.

Dominatrix work also showed me that I could travel. I began going to New York, where I made close friends within that world, and eventually traveled to London with one of them. I stayed. I simply never got back on the plane.

Later I met someone who wanted to move to Los Angeles to become a producer, and I went with him. That relationship eventually ended in divorce, and afterward I slowly began finding myself again.

People would come into my loft and respond to the way I had built the environment around me, which unexpectedly led me into art department work, production design and some special effects. I eventually worked on television, including Food Network productions.

But this was pre-MeToo, and the sexual harassment was aggressive. I was actually told not to speak up because crew members could lose their jobs. There was a point when I went back to professional domination because, bizarrely, I experienced less sexual harassment there than I did working in mainstream entertainment.

Throughout all of this, the Mojave Desert — especially Joshua Tree — became the place I returned to. I’ve been coming out here for roughly 20 years to ground myself.

Looking back, I think I spent a tremendous amount of my life pouring energy into environments that could never hold it properly. Now I finally have time to meet myself again.

Painting, ritual and community are where that energy goes.

Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?

I’m a portrait surrealist. My work brings together trauma, female empowerment, sexual identity, nature, witchcraft, eroticism, esoteric symbolism and science. I’m interested in what happens when all of those things are allowed to exist on the same canvas rather than being separated into neat categories.

I’m also the creator, author and illustrator of the Joshua Tree Tarot and Joshua Tree Oracle, with the first deck currently in development. Both projects are rooted directly in the high desert — its animals, plants, folklore, danger, beauty and strange resilience.

As Dyrt Witch, I offer tarot readings, private ritual work, workshops and immersive event experiences. I work both one-on-one and with groups, and I’m especially interested in creating experiences that feel intimate, personal and grounded rather than overly performative.

People often tell me that a reading with me feels different because I’m not interested in performing mystical authority over them. I’m much more like an intuitive, trauma-informed eccentric auntie.

I also don’t believe in abruptly cutting someone off because their allotted hour has ended while they’re in the middle of something profound. There still have to be boundaries, obviously, but holding space for someone means understanding that human beings don’t always unfold according to a stopwatch.

My rituals draw from roughly 20 years of living with and studying the Mojave Desert and Joshua Tree, herbalism, symbolism, folk practice and my own heritage. Many of them focus on self-empowerment, protection, recovering energy after narcissistic or abusive relationships, invoking the feminine and reconnecting someone with their own body.

Some rituals are incredibly tactile and simple: honey, milk, herbs, washing or bathing the feet, oils, smoke, earth, water. I’m interested in ritual being something you experience physically rather than something you merely perform for aesthetics.

I also do animal death-doula work. Our animals are family — our familiars in the oldest sense of the word. When an animal is approaching death, I can create anointing oils and personalized rituals to help the humans who love them accompany them through that threshold with intention and tenderness.

I also create and sell original artwork and take on selected commissions, so there are several different ways people enter my world — through a painting, a tarot reading, a private ritual, a workshop or one of the larger events I create.

What connects all of these practices is probably the same thing that connects my paintings: I’m interested in thresholds. The body and spirit. Beauty and decay. Trauma and transformation. Life and death. The sacred and the dirty. I don’t think those things are opposites.

Where do you see things going in the next 5–10 years?

Community over industry.

There is obviously a resurgence of interest in witchcraft and the esoteric. You can see it everywhere now — fashion, entertainment, corporate marketing. Some of it is deeply considered and some of it is simply aesthetic.

But if the aesthetic opens a door and somebody eventually walks through that door toward their ancestry, folklore, the natural world or their own spiritual practice, I don’t necessarily think that’s a bad thing.

If anything brings people out of concrete and back into relationship with nature, I’m interested.

Over the next five to ten years, I want to keep growing the workshops, rituals and gatherings I’m creating in Joshua Tree and Southern California, including the Solstices & Sabbats Festivals beginning this Samhain and continuing with Yule. I want them to become recurring places for people to gather around the old seasonal markers — but in a way that belongs to the strange, beautiful landscape and community we actually live in now.

Both the Joshua Tree Tarot and Joshua Tree Oracle will be out in the material world, and I want them to become objects that people actually live with — not just decks they buy and put on a shelf.

So much folk knowledge disappeared through persecution, displacement, assimilation and generations being taught to be ashamed of old practices. I’m interested in participating in the continuation rather than pretending I invented any of it.

I want my work to contribute something meaningful to the witchcraft and artistic communities that have held me.

I also see the artwork and Dyrt Witch becoming increasingly international. I want to create immersive online experiences in multiple languages and continue connecting people across places and cultures.

Ultimately, though, I don’t want growth for the sake of becoming a bigger “brand.”

I want the work to get deeper — and I want more people to be able to find it.

Pricing:

• Tarot Reading 150
• Joshua Tree Tarot Deck 40
• Joshua Tree Oracle Deck 40
• Art starts at 2k
• Rituals 200

Contact Info:

• Website: Dyrt witch.com
• Instagram: @Dyrt_Witch @lorrystoneart
• Facebook: Lorry Stone

Image Credits
Image with black hood : @JuliaShoots
All other Images by me

Also please pick whatever image you like for a main image, as well as pick and choose in the writing