So how do I craft? How do I write? It depends on what I am writing. My projects are usually long and considered “book-length,” which usually means, at least in the poetry world, more than forty-eight pages. Lewis Carroll said that he believed in “periods of intense work followed by periods of perfect idleness.” I hate to admit that I also operate in this way. I may work on a project for three months and then do nothing for another three months. I wait for the moment; I wait for the conditions to be right. I have to be allowed to be quiet, to mentally hibernate, to clear the clutter in my mind. The more I interact with other people, the more rusty and encumbered I become. In “Levels of Reality in Literature,” Italo Calvino writes, “The preliminary condition of any work of literature is that the person who is writing has to invent that first character, who is the author of the work.” I find myself spending many months inventing this “I.” It is a bit like witchcraft: staging a certain sacredness before the sacredness can start.
When I do get to that sacred place, I work daily there. I make myself write a page a day. I regret that I cannot really speak about craft, that is, about the particulars of fleshing out a sentence or a line or revising it to meet my needs. It may seem absurd to say that a certain mystical dream cloud covers my writing time. The time lasts for about an hour. It begins immediately upon my waking in the morning, and once that cloud has lifted, I find that I can no longer write. I don’t force myself, but usually the page has been written before the cloud has lifted.
A talisman will bring things to you, such as power or luck or positive energy or whatever it is you want to come to you, while an amulet will guard and protect you from bad spirits, evil, negative forces, or whatever it is you don’t want to come near you.
The writing manuals always remind you to think about the reader, but I find that when I do so, I relinquish sincerity. The spell sours. The lover whom you made love you will come at you with a knife.
Perhaps, in writing, I leave out a simple fact: that the boy whom I wanted to love me was embedded within the group of witches and was older than me—eighteen—and also a proclaimed Satanist who had carved pentacles and upsidedown crosses into his skin. I still do not understand why, at thirteen, I wanted someone who loved the dark to also love me.
In writing, too, there exists the struggle with sincerity and wanting someone to love me. There is a craft in that, I do think: the craft of writing as the craft of getting someone to love me.
I am watching snow blow or else melt into icicles on the various roofs around me. It is twelve degrees. I have no desire to leave my house; I haven’t felt like leaving my house in days. I am the happiest I have been in months. I wish for more snow; I wish for a blizzard; I want the blizzard to last for days.
But let’s say I’m not writing something very long; let’s say that I’m writing a short essay. Then the essay may begin this way: it may begin with a suspicion. I follow that suspicion until it gives me something I might have been searching for. I let it stay that way all day. I get up. I sit down to write again. I see a hole here or there, and I fill it in. I see a connection here or there, and I make the connection or else try to. I rearrange my block paragraphs. I may write from the middle out or pick up from the end again. I let this go on for days sometimes, but rarely more than that, finding that the intensity diminishes after too much sitting.
To prepare for a spell, a witch needs to take a bath in water that has been through some process of purification, which can be done through meditation and sea salt. Depending on the type of spell or ritual to be carried out, certain oils and herbs should be in the bathwater. During the bath, the witch must, in addition to cleansing her body, cleanse her mind. After this, the witch can put on her special robe and chant under the moon that is in a particular phase and throw salt and herbs upon the earth. When I was thirteen, this all sounded like such beautiful fun, but I never had the herbs, and I never was able to cleanse my mind. I made a very bad witch.
When I was in graduate school, there was a boy I thought I was in love with, and this boy told me that I had a dark side he was afraid of and that’s why he could not love me.
There are days, like today, when I feel like a very bad writer. I am still terrible at cleansing my mind.
The craft of writing as getting someone to love me despite how dark I might be.
It’s difficult to accept that it was twenty years ago when I used to think I could, simply through visualization and the right herbs, get the world to change for me. And that is the worst thing, the thing that clutters my mind the
