Life Keeps Moving

It is high time I get back to this blog, but I find myself at a bit of a loss as to what to write about. The last month and a half has been a blur of Fiddler ending, Thanksgiving travels to Denver, and my daughter’s persistent illnesses and trouble sleeping, which has overshadowed everything. I suppose I’ll share some highlights and key takeaways.

Fiddler was amazing and so stressful and we really put together an incredible show. I feel proud of it and sad that it was so quickly over. I learned that doing a show for only one weekend maybe isn’t my favorite, because it didn’t give me enough time to process or integrate the experience before it was abruptly over. Even so, it was a great experience overall.

I finished out my semester on Tuesday and was quite stressed about a 10 page paper that I was supposed to turn in for my Roots of American Magic class and had barely started. Then I had a flash of remembering my teacher tell me that I could submit something more creative if I wanted to. At the time I didn’t have an idea for anything, so I didn’t think about it seriously, but I realized when I was struggling with my paper that I could turn it into another creative nonfiction lyric essay similar to the ones I’ve written before. So, Monday morning River was able to go to daycare and I just spent several hours writing the essay. I don’t think it’s the best thing I’ve ever written but I am happy with it considering the circumstances. I’ll share my favorite section from it at the end of this post.

One of the best things to come from my MFA class this semester was that I got to work on an outline for my novel using the 3 act story mapping structure that I wrote about a few months ago. I had a phone call with my teacher to talk about it, and now I have a brand new revision to do to the novel based off of the outline, which I think will tighten the structure and increase the stakes of the book, hopefully making it more cohesive and drawing the reader in.

It was really helpful to get feedback from my teacher and classmates about my novel, and I’m excited for next semester because I have another writing class and also a mentorship class. For mentorship, I will get to work with an artist/writer one-on-one, so I plan to ask to work with a YA/MG author and have them read my book and give me feedback. Over the winter break I will work on this most current revision so that it will be ready to send to my mentor. I’m really excited to get back to working on the book. I’ve had doubts at times about staying in school, mostly because of the money and because at times I feel like it pulls me away from working on my own projects, but I’m really noticing how helpful it is to be in a space with other creators and to get feedback on my work, so I’m not just working alone. Plus my classmates are so inspiring, I learn just from sharing space with them.

Here’s the excerpt from my essay that I wrote for Roots of American Magic, which was about figuring out what magic means in my own life.

“Magic is the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with will,” (Aleister Crowley).

“You’re a witch,” one of my best friends has said with such conviction that I believed her, but when the question was asked “What is magic? What is a witch?” I had no answer to give, only a blank swirl of emptiness in my head, until one of my classmates uttered the words, “When you make a wish you cast a spell,” and I realized that I’ve been casting spells my whole life, visioning my future, cutting out images from magazines, pasting them to cardboard backgrounds, placing them on my walls and leaning into the intention of changing my life.

If magic is matching intention with will then isn’t art magic? Creating something that transforms? The painting on my wall that I salted with tears of grief and transformed into a tree, is magic. I have never put so much intention and will into the transformation of anything as I have with my voice, and as I stood on that stage this fall singing about losing home and finding love, about the difficult choices that we must make every day, as my voice echoed and reverberated over the many faces looking at mine, that was magic.

Or last year, when I wrote poems about the suffering I witnessed every day, about the grief and love and hope wrapped up in my career, and then bound those poems in a spell of a book, blessed it with a charm and created an art piece in memory of the girl who died - that was magic too.

So, if magic is making a wish, if magic is transforming pain through art, if magic is poetry;

Then I guess I am a witch, after all.