Voice and Style
Mutable air: research, reflection, voice
You unearth your work like an archaeologist discovers treasures, or a farmer pulls up crops.
Poison Apples and Writing Myths
Mutable air: circulation of ideas, intrusive thoughts, risk-taking
There is something so compelling abut the poison apple; it is sweeter, juicier, shinier, and a deeper colour than any other fruit. But its seductive appeal means that it is easy to ignore the fatal aspects.
Everyday Witchcraft in Sian S. Rathore’s Wild Heather
Fixed earth: wild animals, practical witchcraft, poetry
Rathore’s poem ‘Alison Device (1594-1612), named for a Pendle witch, is a beautiful meditation on mortality and desire.
Weird England
Fixed earth: ancient Norfolk flint, deep time, sacred herbs, soporific lettuces, and chilly beaches.
The landscape is dry in its lunar whiteness, with heaps of cracked inky flint in the pale wash of sky.
lying on the laundry with wet hair
Fixed earth: surrender, cocooning, deep rest
There are ways to move into a different plane of time - meditation, music, psychedelics, movement, reading, having a crush, eating a whole bowl of cherries very slowly.
peonies and creative containers
Fixed Earth: containers, support, grounding
Some people see the container as a capacious space to experiment in, and some people feel it is a barrier that needs to be broken down.
The Cocoon of Writing
Fixed earth: salt crystals, haunted forests, deep rest
The cocoon is not about shame and fear and perfection but it does allow those elements to be held; it contains multitudes. It allows those things to decay and to be renewed. It is miraculous.
Sensitivity and art
Fixed earth: sensitivity, grounding, sensuality
It was Kali Malone’s core artistic principle, ‘cherish sensitivity’, that helped me to think about sensitivity as one of my most precious resources.
Three Tarot Essays
Cardinal Fire: deity, divination, world-yielding
The bridge between deity and humanity isn’t so special, we call it dying
Distilling the Themes of a Story
Cardinal fire: prismatic storytelling, intensity, wholeness
The film is formally beautiful. Long, slow takes. The drama of light through a circular window. The harrowing beauty of autumn leaves against a whitewashed exterior. Mortality is conjured in the changes of seasons, and the gradations of light.
A Match is Struck: on Writing the Present
Cardinal fire: immediacy, fire, creativity.
Unlike the click of a lighter, a match creates a suspended moment in time. The weight in the hand, the sound of the strike, the little fire glowing, and the curl of extinguished smoke.
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.’