I knew some kids who really believed they were witches; I also knew some kids who really believed they were vampires. The witches were often suicidal, had the scars to prove it, and didn’t appear to have any parents. In biology class, I cut the foot off a frog during a dissection. I let it dry, and when it was dry enough, I pierced it and hung it from a necklace. The witches thought it was a talisman, and they wanted me to give it up. They met me as I was getting off the bus and asked to see it. They went through my necklaces one by one and demanded to know which one was the talisman because, they said, I was not a witch, and I wasn’t allowed to have it.
There is a difference between a talisman and an amulet, and although both can be made through witchcraft, my frog’s leg was neither a talisman nor an amulet. It was just that: a frog’s leg preserved in formaldehyde hanging about my neck. But the witches, who never appeared to go to school and perhaps because of this didn’t know how I might acquire a frog’s leg, apparently thought that I had captured and killed a frog to make a talisman.
I wanted to begin, initially, by telling you about a textbook representative who came by my office one day. He asked what I taught. I said I taught creative writing. He said his company had many books to help me teach creative writing. He opened his catalog and highlighted many handbooks that were written or edited by important writers. These books would help me teach my students the craft of poetry or the craft of writing, and I suddenly realized that, although I had been forced during my undergraduate education to use such handbooks, I have never used or even considered using such a book in my teaching of writing. I politely feigned interest, holding back my horror and shock that such tools, like medieval medical devices, were used and still being used to teach writing.
Once, I performed a spell to get a boy whom I wasn’t in love with to fall in love with me. Unlike most spells in the books, this one only required two ingredients: a pink candle and rose oil. The spell book instructed me to rub the rose oil on the pink candle while envisioning the love this boy and I would share. I was then to burn the candle for three nights, and whenever the candle was burning, I was to keep envisioning this love. I didn’t have the rose oil, but I had roses growing outside in my parents’ garden; I took the petals and soaked them in water, and I used that water instead. I had many differently colored candles acquired from Wicks ‘n’ Sticks, a small candle-shop chain located in a mall, where I would also run into and try to evade the witches who thought I had a talisman I should not have.
Perhaps it was because I used rose water instead of rose oil that I had such a terrible time with this boy. He did fall in love with me, and one night, when I refused him, he tried to stab me with a butcher knife. Like many things, I never told my parents about it. I blamed the craft: my motives were insincere; the spell soured.
The witchcraft I read up on was considered white magic. Black magic was dangerous, or so the books said. I read about the terrible things that might happen to you if you performed black magic, usually spells of revenge or spells that would otherwise harm others. To practice black magic was to make a pact with the darkness in the universe. Some books called this darkness the devil. If you practiced black magic, you had to let the wickedness in.
Coincidence or not? When I was twenty-one, I made a pact with myself: my writing should always be sincere.
Although I was horrified by the idea of using a handbook in my writing classes, I thought back to the exercises I was subjected to as an undergraduate. Many of them involved thinking about past situations and then writing through them. In this way, the exercises resembled therapy: confronting an experience with the goal of moving beyond it to free oneself from buried trauma. The writing handbooks seemed to suggest that one could not be a writer if one had bottled up emotions or had not properly dealt with those emotions. Other exercises I remembered had to do with envisioning or making manifest the unknown, giving shape to the unknown. You had to imagine a hypothetical scene and then write through it in order to discover the plot, the drama, the motivations of characters, and, eventually, unlock the ending. In this way, the exercises resembled witchcraft; in witchcraft, you imagine in order to achieve, and it seemed to me that the writing exercises had the identical goal.
Witches are supposed to make an altar in the home. They are to sanctify the altar and keep it sacred by warding off negative feelings and forces. The goal is to purify.
Today, it’s eight degrees in Chicago. I left my husband with my in-laws in New York City and returned to Chicago before my teaching semester began so that I could write.
This seems puzzling to others. Why subject myself to a harsh Chicago January when I don’t start work again until the end of the month?
In witchcraft, there is something called the threefold law. It means that everything you do has repercussions, and those repercussions will be threefold. So when, with insincerity, I made that boy fall in love with me, I faced, threefold, a very bad repercussion.
I know I’m supposed to be
