Just two prompts away from the end of @studyonderly‘s quarantine reading challenge! This challenge has been a bit of work to keep up with (especially after accidentally falling behind), but it has been so rewarding to revisit seek out new texts. But, I promised I wouldn’t do to much reflection until I finished the challenge, didn’t I? Let’s get into the prompt.
The prompt:
Week 4. Picture Perfect
Share a story that’s really graphic and detailed, just full of imagery.
Have you read a story that seemed to play out like a movie in your head? As if the imagery came to life in your mind?
What story do you think would actually be better as a movie?
For this prompt, I chose to look back at Black Cats and Evil Eyes by Chloe Rhodes. A book of superstitions and their histories, I thought this would be the perfect book for this prompt because of how important symbolism is in witchcraft, and superstitions are largely based in symbols and meaningful imagery.
Of course, I don’t have time to talk about every single superstition in this book, so I did some light bibliomancy and flipped to a random page which led me to “Putting Salt on the Doorstep of a New House to Ward Off Evil.” Rhodes references the Iliad and even superstitious practices used to keep witches away during the 1800s. These descriptions of cultural relationships with salt as a method for purifying for the self or even for the gods really highlight its importance. Even today, we use salt for cleansing and protection.
So, for this I actually wrote a counter-prompt that might be worth journaling to. What symbols represent cleansing or purification to you? What is something that you would benefit from literally or metaphorically “salting”?
Of the eight prompts in @studyonderly‘s quarantine reading challenge, the two for week three were the hardest to plan for because they pushed me in a direction I don’t usually go on this blog. Now, I won’t spoil part two of this week for you, but for this week, I did dive into fiction whereas the majority of these prompts I have managed to move toward reference texts and non-fiction essays.
So, even though the book and specific story from it that I’m sharing in this post probably won’t help you hone your craft, they are great witchy reads that I highly recommend!
The prompt:
Week 3. Magical Realism
Real world, meet the otherworldly!
What story have you read that contains supernatural, magical elements or dreamy surreal fantasy?
Pick a book that you feel would benefit from being rewritten with magical realism in mind! How would you incorporate that?
Is there a story that seemed to just transport you into another world?
Now, before I dive into this one, I feel like it’s my duty as someone with a degree in English (and master’s almost complete) to explain that magical realism and fantasy are not the same thing. Fantasy narratives take place in fantastical worlds where it is our expectation to see magical creatures and supernatural abilities as part of the world mechanic. Magic realism (also called slipstream, fabulism, surrealism, and lots of other things) requires settings and interactions that are believably of our world with the addition of some surreal or “magic” additions here and there that shake things up. As a writer, this is the genre I typically work in. If you’re interested in this kind of literature, I would highly recommend Haruki Murakami, Karen Russell, Kelly Link, and Aimee Bender’s work.
With that out of the way, I want to say I bent the rules a bit by revisiting this collection for this prompt. Of the fifteen stories in this collection, a large portion of them are fantasy, but I chose the final story in the collection, “Why They Watch us Burn” by Elizabeth May which twists reality and witchcraft into a wonderful commentary on blame and punishment.
For this prompt, I chose to do more of a light analysis of the work May has done in the story as far as that commentary, but because it is mildly triggering (there’s nothing graphic, but it is a story about the social mistreatment of sexual assault victims), I’m going to put that below the cut.
In the story, our protagonist has been imprisoned for being “A witch intent on a destroying a good man,” after she reports a man who assaulted her. In this version of reality, there are two potential paths for women accused of this “witchcraft,” be tied to a post in the town square and set on fire or be sent to a lumber camp for penance.
The women are fed enough to keep them alive to chop trees that have been blessed by priests and marked with symbols that are supposed to ward against witchcraft. The wood from the trees they chop, by hand by the way, is used for houses, furniture, and to burn other witches.
The women also have their names taken away from them. One of the first things that the protagonist is told when she is dropped off at the camp is that no one in the camp has a name.
“‘The girls don’t have names here,’ he told me, his eyes as sharp as blades. ‘You don’t use names. You don’t have names. You’re nothing now. Do you understand?’”
Now, I won’t spoil the ending because I would definitely recommend picking up this collection and reading it yourself. But what I want to talk about doesn’t really require knowing how the story ends. Throughout her time in this camp, our protagonist is imagining the spells she would cast if she could because she isn’t a witch. Most of these spells are to ease the pain caused by the camp.
Because of this we are left with this picture of a world we already exist in that has put a lot of the psychological pain faced by victims of sex crimes into the physical space. The victims that are not destroyed (in this case literally burned at the stake) are imprisoned and forced to stay silent and anonymous. They are not only starved for support, they are literally starved. They are accused of having used power against their attackers and in turn have everything stripped away from them. Reliving what happened becomes the repetition of chopping trees, the emotional scars become the blisters from the axes they use.
What May gives us access to is a society that is stripped of the excuse that it’s “hard to tell” what people are going through because they are going through it all on a physical as well as an emotional level. Even the societal manipulation that often pits victims of one crime against victims of others is displayed in the use of the wood from the trees to burn other victims.
Even in silence, these victims’ experiences are screaming loudly into the physical space around them. Fighting a rhetoric that tells them they should be grateful to have survived something they caused and that encourages them to punish themselves while they are punished.
The final line of the story is “We did not go quietly,” and it is the perfect marriage of the silent emotional struggle that takes place and the physicality that May has given it.
My friend @studyonderly created a quarantine reading challenge that not only encourages people to read but also pushes us to think beyond the books and what they have offered us.
She was inspired by a world literature course that she took, and while I read a lot of books in a variety of genres, to keep things on theme for this blog and relevant for you all, I’m going to try to do her challenge with witchy books that I own and have read.
I’m a bit behind, but this is my week one post. Here is the prompt she wrote:
Week 1. Happily Ever After
Pick a story that has a happy ending. What makes this story’s ending happy? Could it have been happier? Alternatively, focus on a story with a sad ending, how could it have been made into a happily ever after?
The first book that comes to mind for this prompt is The Faerie Handbook. A collection of stories, crafts, and mythical histories, this book doesn’t necessarily have an ending, but there is joy laced throughout it. I’d challenge any of you to pick this book up and not find something in this book that makes you smile. When we read this book as a group, my book club @libercoven even did some of the crafts in the book. What makes this a “happy” book is the bright optimism with which it is presented and the enthusiasm for all of the various materials between its covers.
For this book, I decided to create a moodboard. What better way is there to express that kind of magic?
My book club, @libercoven, read Becoming Dangerous back in July, but I’ve been meaning to revisit some of the essays in that anthology for a while. Luckily the first prompt for week two of @studyonderly‘s quarantine reading challenge pushed me to do just that.
Here is that prompt:
Week 2. A Room of One’s Own
Originally this prompt is about gender identity and women’s literature, but I’d like to expand it to include its literal words, along with other identities.
Any story that has to do with gender, or written by someone who identifies not as a cis man. Time to dig into the LGBT+ stories, gender theory, and queer/trans coded characters!
Have you ever read a story about isolation or solitude? Literally or figuratively?
Do you know a story that took place in a small, limited number of settings?
With twenty-one essays in Becoming Dangerous, I didn’t want to revisit all of them for this prompt (besides not wanting this post to go one forever, I already wrote a response essay to “Unfuckable” by Cara Ellison, the first essay in the anthology), so I settled on “Before I was a Woman, I was a Witch” by Avery Edison.
Avery is a trans woman and in her essay, she talks about discovering who she was by way of looking at many of the things she realized she wasn’t (including a witch) and how she held onto piece of those things as she found a way to be confident with her identity both gender and simply as a person with interests and hobbies and a really great sense of humor (she’s a comedian). There is a lot of solitude in this piece even though we find out that what Avery was searching for was, in many ways social support from outside communities and herself.
What I love about this piece is Avery’s honesty, not only the raw way that she approaches introducing us to the teenager who faced bullying, illness, and mental crisis while searching for who she was but also in her spiritual journey. It’s hard to admit that the things you explored weren’t for you or that you used them for appearance rather than spirituality, but she does that and goes on to share the ways that even as an atheist she understands spirituality and still has a personal practice.
For this prompt, I originally created a Spotify playlist, but it overlapped too much and eventually ended up working better for the article I chose to read for the next prompt (stay tuned for my next post to see it!). Instead, I chose to do a collage of sorts with quotes from the essay. (A ‘/’ indicates the end of a quote fragment.)
Before I Was
I knew / you can only turn into “Bravery” /
yet-another millennial told she has limitless potential. /
I was wrong. / Deprogramming my millennial illusions, /
I’ve suffered; / I’ve tried to pretend. / All I needed was time, /
our local new age store, / and our past selves. /
A simple (and reductive) version, / I was never a real
witch, / but I’ve done extraordinary things in my life /
We’re nearing the end! There are only two prompts left in @studyonderly‘s quarantine reading challenge after this one. But, I won’t get too reflective just yet. Instead, let’s dive right into the next prompt which, I have to admit, did stump me for a bit as to how I might twist it to fit my purposes with this blog and what book I might use.
A prompt about love!
Week 3.2 A Modern Romance
What story have you read that’s really intricate and romantic, or abstract and modernistic?
Which writing style do you prefer, romanticism or modernism?
Pick a story stylized in romanticism and try to restyle it into modernism, or vice versa.
This one needed some bending because I’m not actually looking at a romance or a piece of Romantic era literature. Instead, I wanted to look at love magic, something I don’t usually dive into. The first book on my shelf that I knew had a little bit of love in its pages is The Little Big Book of White Spells by Ileana Abrev.
This book is light-hearted, simple, and encouraging, and I recommend it if you’re looking for an easy reference for when you’re just not sure what kind of spell you need or you want a simple base to work off of. For this prompt, I focused on the introduction to her love spells section. If there’s anything you need to know about Abrev’s opinions on love magic, it’s this quote: “Love magic should not be used in any way to manipulate love.”
She later explores what it means morally to manipulate love, and while I have some rhetorical issues with her term “dark love” to describe that kind of magic, I agree with her. I also agree with the way that she introduces us to love. She introduces us to all of the abstractions that love might be depending on who you are. (In this case, she’s talking specifically about romantic love.) I think this is interesting because magic is pretty abstract, too, so it makes sense that love and magic go hand in hand. Everything we do from offerings to cleansings to simply watering a plant could be interpreted as an act of love in some way.
So, for this one I decided to do something a little cheesy and make a word cloud with all of the abstractions she uses to try to get at the heart of love and what it might mean to various people. I only entered each word once, so the sizes of the words are arbitrary, but some pretty key things stand out anyway.
