V. THE HIEROPHANT
Advance copies of my book have arrived. Last week, I had a little (eight-minute) box-opening party on my new Twitch channel. (The video is on YouTube now.) The book is a beautiful object, with a cover and interior designed by the powerful sorcerer Jakob Vala. The finished copies you’ll have in April will be hardcover books, even more beautiful than these, but the cover design and interior will remain the same.
When I first saw the cover, I immediately thought of my favorite childhood books, the Dorrie series by Patricia Coombs.
I mentioned these books in White Magic. I strongly identified with Dorrie, and, in fact, I may have collapsed my concept of the character into my developing sense of self.
I, too, had a mother and a mixed-up room. My mother did not have a secret room at the top of a tower—“It was the room where the Big Witch mixed her magic. It was the room where the Big Witch made strange things happen”—but she was bigger than me, and magic in a different way, and I was a little witch always looking for wonders.
The books are mostly about the trouble Dorrie gets into when left alone with access to the tools of magic. The Big Witch returns and fixes the topsy-turvy results of Dorrie’s spells. Dorrie learns.
As a forest child in the time before internet, I was invested in the idea that books could actually be magic objects. White Magic is my attempt to replicate that feeling for little witches who have grown up. I want it to feel like more than a book—not quite a grimoire or any of the spell books on the Big Witch’s shelves, but a book that makes the magic itself.
The book’s first chapter-essay was published by Guernica last year. And, of course, I’ve had the manuscript in various stages of “finished” as a Word document for a while. But there is something different about having it in print: it becomes a frightening, powerful, and even more alive thing, because even though the text becomes fixed in time when it is printed and bound, it finally feels real.
I feel myself stretching across the threshold between physical “reality” and virtual “unreality.” The threshold is disappearing, or everything is becoming the threshold, as the near totality of my physical world lies within the walls of the old house where I make strange things happen up here at the top of the stairs in my magic room.
You can find me here.