Electric Light
Mutable fire: emergencies, cinematic glimmers, glowworms
The dark spools forward and I grip the branch. I lunge into the deep mud and my holy communion dress is ratted at the hem.
Electricity in the Writing Workshop
Mutable fire: mass psychic currents, desires, teaching and learning
In the writing workshop, there is more free association than we admit, and there is more impossibility than the form officially allows.
Rain-Sown Wheat
Fixed water: unfinished business, deep emotions, divination
We record this by leaving the work unfinished and unresolved. The absence is a space for grief.
Writing as Devotion
Fixed water: shadow, will, integrity
Writing is an act of devotion, the same as any other magical practice.
The work of writing is as integral to their lives as any other form of ritual, ceremony, or prayer, and their devotion produces magical results in their writing.
Ceremony Podcast Season One, Episode Five with B.K. Harbeke
One Halloween night, six friends decide to take a moonlit walk through the woods.
Only five come back.
A Ritual for The Underworld of your Writing
Fixed water: petrichor, deep wells, decay
The sun doesn't disappear. We just can't see it as much as in the height of summer. There is treasure in the void. There is gold in the dark.
Frequencies
Cardinal air: signals in the dark, secrets coming to light
A creative block is so often about being in the liminal space where something new is waiting to emerge.
Hellbender: the Shock of Knowledge
Cardinal air: lightning knowledge, shock of awareness, excitement, fear.
The restless prickle of adolescent longing led Izzy beyond the invisible boundaries of the forest, and into a drinking game that had bloody consequences.
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.