Ceremony Podcast Season One, Episode four with Matilde Pratesi
You are going into a state of trance and time just kind of goes and there's this sort of animal channel between the head and the hand and it's wonderful.
What are Deviant Strategies?
Cardinal air: new ideas, pleasure, play, obsession
Scheele’s Green: the story of arsenic-laced wallpaper and the most gorgeous colour ever to exist.
Haunting
Mutable earth: locked room mysteries, the sacred and the earthly
I don’t know about you but I love stories set in haunted houses because they offer a closed set, a liminal zone for transformation to occur, and mysteries to be explored but not necessarily resolved. And because they remind me of dreaming.
Luminol Theory
Fixed fire: incandescence, blue flame, eerie glow
As anyone who watches crime television might already know, luminol is a substance that emits an eerie glow when it comes in contact with human blood.
The Luminol Reels
Fixed fire: the gurlesque, luminol margaritas, glow-in-the-dark rosaries
shrines, quinceañera parties, holy communions, and seances of this book are all stained luminescent blue.
Ceremony Podcast Season One, Episode three with Mimi Zacharia
I really like reading a book where character’s got an obsession, almost, and you start to learn a bit about that obsession when you read a book like that.
process diaries – Light
Fixed fire: sun, bright colours, festivities
The bare tree still looks pretty.
The reindeer glow.
Ceremony Podcast Season One, Episode two with stephanie edd
Hard- boiled fiction is also really afflicted with this twisted, and very American, casual bigotry. And it makes me so mad because there are so many great lines and so much extensive writing that Chandler did, and these movies just have so much beautiful writing in them but just have these big problems.
Introduction to Season one: Ceremony and Practice
Welcome to season one of Ceremony, a podcast about storytelling, seasonality, rituals, and dreaming new worlds into being.
The Moon: Excitement of the Unconscious
Mutable water: the unconscious, hallucinations, psychic plane
Rachel Pollock writes that “in divinatory readings the moon indicates an excitement of the unconscious.”
A Spell for Writer’s Block
Fixed water: working through, deep release, breaking open
You can work with this ritual to come back to creative centre whenever you are feeling blocked.
Year Ahead Spreads
Fixed air: future visioning, collective energies
What happens if you think about your projects not in terms of word counts, but in seasons? Could you be guided by a full seasonal cycle, from solstice to solstice, or Samhain to Samhain? Or could you work with your solar return?
Temperance: Genre Alchemy
Fixed fire: alchemy, energy, creative flows
Have you been feeling like you could use a change in your writing routine? Perhaps you would like to find a regular weekly slot to work? Or even something more drastic like a complete change in direction?
Two of Wands: Writing Sabbaticals
Fixed air: portals, balance, opposition
How do you build rest into your writing practice? When do you let the field lay fallow, and when do you let it grow wild?
The Devil: What is Story?
Cardinal earth: ambition, architecture, boundaries
When we read a story, temptation only works when we agree to it. Like the two figures here, we must submit to story.
Five of Pentacles
Cardinal earth: cathedral, winter, resources, the unknown
The Five of Pentacles appears to be about stuckness, and scarcity, but it can teach us a lot about the luminous mysteries.
Ace of Pentacles
Fixed earth: receptivity, plenty, earthly pleasures
If we keep frenetically trying to force our way through the world, we will lose sight of the luscious opportunities being handed down from the clouds.