Illustration © Kaitlynn Copithorne
Since launching Cunning Folk, I am often asked what my magical practice is. I do read Tarot cards and know a thing or two about herbs. A disappointing truth, perhaps, is that for me, most magic lies in the everyday, the mundane, the habitual. Morning walks. Foraging and cooking. Catching eyes with an animal and recognising the flicker behind their eyes. Reading and writing.
It is often said that work kills passion. As a writer, I haven’t (yet) found this to be true. In the earlier days, I was sometimes assigned topics that didn’t immediately interest me. It’s freeing to realise that anything can become interesting, if you find its magic. Like Shirley Jackson, I like to think of writing as “a way to transform everyday life into something rich and strange, something more than it appears to be.” A story that initially seems dry can be embellished, made beautiful; a moment of strangeness, wonder or terror can usually be drawn out of an everyday experience. Food shopping can be transformed into a cinematic epiphany—think about those moments when a character is overcome by wonder, the sudden awareness of being alive, the sadness at life’s impermanence, or the terror of inhabiting a body.
It’s true, though, that the most important work I don’t do to a brief. I do it for myself, often not entirely sure what possessed me, and there’s a good chance it will never be read. Much of it is filed away in draws, or on bookshelves gathering dust. When an urge comes to write something you may never publish, you could say it’s a way of exorcising thoughts that bother you late into the night. Or those that haven’t yet taken form—there’s just a nagging gut feeling that something is wrong. When you write something down you begin to see it for what it is. When you re-read it and edit it, you gain clarity. You confront your ghosts and your demons. And in turn you better understand yourself, as the receptacle of these thoughts. You can write yourself into situations. You can also sometimes write yourself out of them.
In this way, the role of an editor is somewhat comparable to that of a medium. As an editor, you work with a writer who has already done much of the work of translating images from their unconscious mind and making them available to the conscious mind. Yet even when they’ve carved out some semblance of narrative structure, there are usually still pieces in the puzzle that need disentangling, or trimming. An unnecessary metaphor or digression. A point that’s overstated, or understated. Sometimes you write something that never quite seems finished. When you give it to a good editor, they transfigure it into the thing you always had in mind, the thing you could never quite execute on your own, the thing you felt always existed, inexplicably, somewhere out there, beyond our limited expression.
First the writer succeeds in bringing forth those inspired images, strings of words or ideas from the realm WB Yeats described as the Spiritus Mundi—literally ‘world-spirit’. When an editor manages to tame chaos into order, we have something magical that can be understood in the here and now. The hope is that with time and practice, both the writer and editor will become more efficient in their roles. The writer becomes more conscious of pattern and synchronicity. What starts as fragmented, obscure prose, may gain narrative structure.
Reading a good book, it sometimes feels like the author has got you under their spell. They’ve reached you from across space and time, often from beyond the grave. You’re invited into the subjective experience of consciousness—and sometimes, unconsciousness—of another human being. You temporarily believe in their reality. You care about their characters. Whether a story is plucked from the author’s psyche, or something else entirely, through immersion you may temporarily forget yourself. We all say that books are magical. I truly think they are.