Liminality in Emma Cline’s The Guest
Mutable water: liminality, precarity, recklessness
Emma Cline’s novel The Guest is a thriller where nothing much happens. The tension and dread are evoked from the seemingly impossible drama of trying to live from moment to moment.
Ritual Support System for Writers
Fixed air: systems, ancient wisdom, collective practices
This can become the container for all of your rituals, devotions, and divinations, and a space to process what your subtle body is experiencing when you generate, edit, and share creative work.
Tiny Acts of Witchcraft in Aase Berg’s Hackers
Fixed air: hacking, repurposing systems, linguistic play
Berg’s collection offers this small hope, this tiny act of witchcraft in a collection that both reproduces and interrogates patriarchal violence and its necrotizing effect.
The Beautiful Apocalypse in Skin Horse by Olivia Cronk
Fixed air: revelation, visions, futures
These everyday objects take on a plastic significance, the ashtray is a repository for waste, and the mingling of the ash with the ‘pink seat’ suggests an uneasy disruption of categories.
Mystery: a closed mouth and an open heart
Cardinal earth: initiation, deep future, building
When you have been inhabiting a world so deeply, it can feel like a loss to turn it into something that other people can perceive. In some ways, the more fully-realised your imaginative space, the more difficult to let go of your vision.
Haga, Haxan, Hag, Hawthorn
Cardinal earth: rapaciousness, growth, deep roots
Hedges, like lawns, are of no use to the witch unless they are overgrown, wild, and generative.
Reproduction in Sara Tuss Efrik’s Persona Peep Show
Mutable fire: film screens, spectrality, excess
‘You want to pee in a red hood you want to lock yourself inside the house. You want to sleep with the wolf. You want to turn on the oven.’
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.