Have you seen the meme asking, “What three objects would you use in a ritual to summon me?” It surfaces from time to time, and I never answered because I could never nail it down to just three things. It tickled my brain, though, and being a witch and writer, I ended up writing a poem in answer.
I thought about submitting this somewhere, but it’s so personal I wanted to keep it under my own wing. As Neil Gaiman says, poems are free.
Summoning Ritual
Music for the occasion:
any Wonder Stuff or Kila
Scarlett's Walk by Tori Amos
or in a pinch
Cheek to Cheek by Fred Astaire.
Don a piece of clothing
you wished you wore more often
because it's too fabulous
or ridiculous
for ordinary days.
Light a candle scented
like secrets, warm treats, old books:
amber, lemongrass, smoke, chocolate.
Draw a circle
in purple nail polish.
Inside draw a star
in silver Sharpie.
Sprinkle liberally
with coffee grounds, toast crumbs,
and a few cat hairs.
In one hand,
hold three treasures you found in the forest.
In the other,
three treasures you found on the beach.
Call out any
of my many names,
except, for B-words,
leave it
at "Beth."
What three things would someone put in a circle to summon you? Maybe more than three things? How would you use objects and ritual actions to imply your essential self?
Hello, magic seekers. Not long ago, I announced that my story, “Medicine or Poison,” had won Fairy Tale Magazine’s flash fiction contest, snagging grand prize. It’s the Hansel and Gretel story told from the witch’s perspective. This is just a quick (ecstatic!) post to say the winning fairy tale issue is out for purchase now. You can read all the wonderful flash fiction fairy tales for only $5.99.
My extra good news is that as the grand prize story, Fairy Tale Magazine published it on their website for free. You can read it here right away!
Sometimes a story needs to find the right audience to be considered grand. The key is to not give up. This is the story of my story that won grand prize in a contest at Fairy Tale Magazine.
Wise Women and Their Medicine
I wrote a flash fiction story for a contest a while back, which asked for tales of wise women, cunning women, or witches. Wisdom of the woods, in other words.
I’d been carrying around this notion in my head of someone who sees food as medicine or poison. An awesome and intense conversation with a new friend who was a nutritionist sparked the idea. She said that anything you put in your body could act as either medicine or poison. One was nourishing, encouraging growth and sustaining life. The other was toxifying, slowing down natural processes, and included many things that a body needed to filter out. Wholesome food versus processed food. Herbal tea versus whiskey. That idea stuck with me, as a binary I’d never thought of before. I decided to save it for the right story.
Cross-Stitch meets Cross-Reference
I took up cross-stitch in the pandemic, as a meditative practice to focus on sewing tiny Xs instead of the real world’s problems. At the time I was stitching a Hansel and Gretel pattern, a candy cottage deep in the woods.
I added a bunch of detail and the surrounding trees to the original pattern.This hangs in my kitchen.
These three things collided in my brain: Hansel and Gretel, Cunning Woman of the Forest, Medicine or Poison. So I wrote a short-short story, retelling the classic tale from the witch’s perspective. Maybe it had all been a mistake. Maybe she had offered medicine, and the wayward children, terrified and starving, had only seen poison.
I had to write it very quickly, in about two days, because I saw the contest notice right before the deadline. This pressure was actually a good thing, because it forced me to hunker down and make the story work instead of ruminating on possibilities.
The right story for the right audience
My story was rejected from that “cunning woman of the forest” anthology. Phooey.
But guess what? I submitted it to a flash fiction contest at Fairy Tale Magazine. And my story, “Medicine or Poison”, WON grand prize!
Proof I didn’t dream it.
I’ve never had a story win Grand Prize before, and as a fairy tale teller, getting chosen by Fairy Tale magazine just makes it that much cooler.
My son suggested I write a series of stories where the traditional witch is not the bad guy we always thought. Like Neil Gaiman’s classic short story, “Tori Amos), and the true evil is smiling behind ruby red lips.
I’m thinking of Sleeping Beauty (which needed a rewrite from the outset, frankly). Perhaps Aurora is a diva princess who should be taught a lesson, only the curse wasn’t meant to last a hundred years, and the whole thing is overblown for the jealous witch who made one teensy wicked wish….
You can buy the upcoming “Tales from the Night Queen’s Realm” issue of FTM, due out on September 1st, to read “Medicine or Poison”. I would love to hear what favorite witch’s tale you’d like to hear retold in the comments.
All the best,
Buy The Flight of the Starling, A Fairy Tale by Ella Arrow, out now. You can read the first chapter here.
One of the things I’ve been promising to do once school was back in session is to go on a photography safari. Not to shoot wildlife, just take a drive for an hour or two and stop when I see something that strikes me in the right way. While I probably could have done this with kids in tow, I worried too much they would have gotten bored, making me feel rushed instead of meandering.
The first place I wanted to go had haunted me for a while. On the way out of Stoughton, almost to the freeway, there’s an old one-room schoolhouse perched on a bit of lawn between the road and a golf course. I’d always found it charming and a bit mysterious. What was its history? Was it still in use for anything? Could I park and hop out and peek in its windows without annoying golfers or the owners of their club?
I parked across the highway to be a bit less obvious and used the golf-cart viaduct to cross under the road to the schoolhouse. The paint is peeling more than I expected, as if whoever owns it has forgotten about the little historical building. A few windows are broken. You can see right into the basement through a square hole in the stone porch, as if a hatch or bunch of bricks are missing. The cellar is piled with lumber; the main room houses old furniture and flags.
I tried to capture the melancholy of the broken windows and fallen slats. I tried to catch the charm of the past in the familiar shape of the building. Many photographers find the same bittersweet beauty in shabby vintage vistas these days, so I mimicked the close-ups for texture and the wide shots for structure. After years of passing it on the road out of town, I was not disappointed.
I wish I knew its name.
I wish I could take care of it. It could be an art gallery, a quiet retreat, or a tiny coffeehouse. There’s an ache about such decaying beauties, an unspoken desire to imagine the heyday, and a slippery slope of enjoying the varying grayscale of weathered boards while wishing you could polish life back into their bones.
Do not disturb the spiders.
I live in a house built in 1885. The dining room slopes decidedly toward the windows and none of the doors are straight. I know how to love time-worn buildings and their glorious wrinkles.
I had no destination after the schoolhouse. I drove through a few little towns I knew, and followed some country roads I didn’t. My other find of the day was a few barns on the verge of collapse, on the edge of otherwise healthy-looking farms. A few years ago my son dubbed these “Jenga barns”, as if the loss of one little piece of wood could cause the whole thing to tumble. I didn’t want to creep around someone else’s property, but I got a couple of shots I liked from the side of the road. I love that you can see the sky through the ribs.
There was a Jenga barn on the road to turn in to my last office job. I loved driving by it every day, thinking about not only what it must have been, grand and wide and sturdy and useful, but admiring the way it sloped and shrugged, losing its shape to the weight of time. Someday I’ll head back there and get more than a snapshot on my phone. Some future safari, maybe.
Anyway, I decided to anthropomorphize the nameless schoolhouse in the photos’ one-sentence story. Hope you like it.
School’s Out… forever.
The dilapidated one-room schoolhouse stands despite flaking paint and broken windows, wondering when summer will finally be over.
When will summer end?
As usual, prints and products of the images are up on my Society6 artist shop, and you can get digital versions on my Etsy store for less than five bucks.
I took this photo in Killarney, Ireland, on a trip that was extremely magical for me. I’m happy to announce that any reader who subscribes to my mailing list will get access to a free download of the image above, Fairy Creek, and exclusive access to the flash fiction story that the image inspired.
It’s easy and painless, and I pinky-promise not to spam you. Sign up here.
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You can also buy prints on Society6 or get the full digital image package in several sizes on my Etsy store.
Sacred space starts with enjoying your air. You can craft your own candle scents candles with essential oils for only a few dollars in supplies, and cast a little air magic as unique as you are.
In the Wiccan tradition, the element of Air is all things breezy: the wind, the sky, smoke, birds, butterflies, feathers, bubbles, bells or chimes. Air is associated with the cardinal direction East, and so with the sun and the break of day. Air is linked with the mind, thoughts, creativity, and inspiration. Invoking the element of Air will help you puzzle out a tough problem, find that zap of inspiration, get the lift and drive to start a project, and focus your mind.
Lately I have been invoking Air in my home using scents. Essential oils have risen in popularity of late, in part because of companies like Goop, raising both their profile and accessibility. (Negative flak for essential oils has risen proportionally, but mostly I put that down to rants against popular things.)
Plenty of people have raved about the purported powers of essential oils, but I’m only going to deal with how they smell.
Disclaimer: Nothing on this blog constitutes dispensing medical advice, even my personal stories about remedies I’ve used. Please don’t get your medical advice from blogs.
One way to perfume a space is with scented candles, but dang, those things are expensive. I admit to falling for fancy names and dreamy scents at BB&B on occasion, but only with their ubiquitous coupons lining my wallet. Without the option in the past year to even give them the sniff test, I set out to create my own scented candles. My recipe is cheap and simple:
Unscented pillar candles from the Dollar Store
Jars big enough for the candles
Essential oils and perfume oils
Once I’d thought of it, this method was incredibly easy.
Put candle into jar and burn until the melted wax reaches the edge.
Blow out the candle.
Put several drops of oil into the melted candle wax. Stir it around with a match or toothpick.
Relight the candle, right away or later once the wax solidified.
I didn’t burn it to the edge, so it doesn’t look as nice as it could.
But it sure smells nice.
And like magic, I had my own custom-scented candle for 1/20th the price of the brand-name ones. I can control how much scent there is, and if I can modify it by adding oil as the candle burns down.
Mason jars work, or if you’ve saved old jar candles, you can clean them out with a table knife and then a microwave to get out the old wax. Be sure you remove anything metal, like the wick stub, before microwaving.
Only use oils, not eau de parfum, which is water-based and will pop if burned. Likewise don’t drop oil on a candle flame or it could flare and be dangerous.
One thing I love about this is blending my own combinations of oils. I didn’t have to rely on artificial ingredients or unidentifiable scents. I could make my bathroom smell clean, my dining room warm, my library cozy, while knowing exactly where those scents came from in nature.
Kitchen: Cinnamon, Sweet Orange, Peppermint
Dining Room: Cinnamon, Clove, Sweet Orange
Bathroom: Lavender, Peppermint, Eucalyptus
Meditation: Amber, Cedar Wood
Focus: Rosemary, Tea Tree, Peppermint
Air magic invites experimentation and play. Imagine the air in your house as an element for you to dress, just like you do the walls and the floors. What do you want visitors to feel when they enter your space? What do you want to feel? Can you find a combination that helps you focus on work in your home office, or relax in your bedroom at the end of the day? Experiment with different mixes and craft your own candle scents with essential oils in combinations specific to your affinities.
My essential oil collection is fairly basic, with the occasional blend picked up in craft markets and spiritual shops. What do you think I should add? What other ways do you invoke the element of Air in your home? Leave me a comment.
This week I’ve opened my store on Etsy! For a long time, I debated whether the effort to open one would be worth it, since I have other venues where my art and book are sold, but it answered two important needs I’d been pondering for a while. Plus like most things, it wasn’t as complicated to execute as I’d imagined.
Signed Books
I can easily offer signed copies of The Flight of The Starling paperback on Etsy. If you want an autographed copy of the book, personalized for you or your favorite fairy tale reader (or simply signed), you can now order one from directly me. To prove it, here’s a photo that includes my book, my hand, and my library wallpaper.
I ordered a bunch of paperback copies in March 2020, anticipating a book sale at the local writer’s conference, and then 2020 was all PLOT TWIST! So since I have them on a shelf, and people have asked how to get signed copies before, this feels inevitable.
Downloadable Digital Images
My Society6 storefront is an awesome tool for printing art on anything you can imagine (coffee mugs, notebooks, and tote bags are my favorite), but currently they have no option for simply buying a digital image. Etsy to the rescue!
As someone who has done a lot of layouts, desktop publishing, and just plain switching up my computer wallpaper, I love digital art. You can print it and put it in a frame, tack it to your office wall, make it into a birthday card, or set it as a pretty background on any of your screens. It’s quick and easy and if you lose it or scratch it, you can download another copy, forever. It’s also a lot cheaper than buying physical art – the online equivalent of buying a print at the art fair.
A new store deserved a new artwork, right? Cue the trumpets.
Sea Spiral – Digital Art on Etsy
This close-up photo shows the perfect pink spiral at the tip of the fierce-toothed chicoreus ramosus shell. Delicate and dreamy, sharp and unique, this image invites contemplation on nature and its beautiful contradictions.
One digital art purchase includes 5 files, sized to fit various standard frames. If you buy it and somehow it doesn’t fit your needs, just contact me and I will adjust and send a brand-new file, free of charge.
Now that I’ve got the store open and figured out the finicky process of resizing to make the files, I’ll start adding more artwork in the near future. Have any advice or suggestions for running an Etsy journey? Leave me a comment.
When in doubt, go to the library. – Hermione Granger
I haven’t been writing as much as I intended on this blog dedicated to finding magic and wonder when life is hard. I keep having ideas and then rejecting them as not inspired enough. Feels like everything on the internet must be Pinterest-worthy these days. I realized I’ve been thinking about it wrong. It’s not that I need the answer, to offer tasty tidbits that will teach readers how to live a magical life. I mean, sometimes, if I’m lucky and lightning strikes, yes. But I don’t want this blog to turn too sweet, too optimistic, poisonous positivity. It’s about the struggle, right?
Yesterday was a struggle. For one reason or another I was cranky. I was feeling mildly unwell, like you do in early March/late winter, when the sky is grey, the snow is grey, and the people are grey from lack of vitamin D and too much worry about the latest flu virus. Yesterday I was Neville who died from ennui.
Gashleycrumb Tinies by Edward Gorey, copyright Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1997
My mental to-do list is always bigger than my time or energy, especially when I’m forced to do something unavoidable, like work or cook. That’s when the to-do list balloons, taking over the margins of my brain beside meeting notes or vegetables. And when work is done, the couch beckons, Gardenscapes or a word game on my phone rots my brain and then before I know it I’ve whittled away my afternoon, and my son is late for karate.
Obviously I’m a terrible mother. No other mother in the history of karate lessons has ever taken her son to a 30-minute class 10 minutes late. The shame. The horror. How will I ever make it up to him?!? This is my inner voice until every little thing my daughter did evoked a snarl while we sat for 20 whole minutes in the viewing chairs at the dojo.
I tried to reset, sitting there taking deep breaths among the chatting parents and the shouting uniformed child army. I wonder why it didn’t work?
I tried to reset at home, making dinner, moving about in tedious tidying, feeding one animal after another. I wonder why it didn’t work??
I’ve been reading my book (shameless plug) to my children at bedtime. This is a one-of-a-kind joy, something I can never do for the first time again. It makes me want to write 10 more children’s books before they grow up, just so I could read them aloud to them. But lately, at pajama time, they’ve been playing together happily, sometimes for the first time all day.
So there was no time for stories before lights out.
I sat on my gray couch in my blue living room feeling sorry that I’d wasted my afternoon instead of writing. I wondered how I could chase the clouds away while staying relaxed enough to wind down toward my own sleep. And that’s when I remembered sometimes it is a struggle. Sometimes you must seek out that spark of joy, not try to will the dark clouds away but run towards the sun.
When in doubt, go to the library.
I looked through my library, where I’d recently fluffed my books, rearranging them, and grabbed a tall heavy tome on Michelangelo. I’d inherited this book and didn’t know it well. I was disappointed to see such an abundance of text, academic for sure (though I didn’t read it) and far too many sketches to my non-art-student eyes.
But then there he was, floating on a parchment-colored page: a man’s face in profile. Sketched in red pencil, the lines of his stroke are clearly visible. His face was so clear, so detailed, so specific. I would know this person if I passed him on the street. A weight lifted from my shoulders. A lightness entered me.
Copyright Art Grafiche Ricordi S.p.A. Milan, 1964
Sometimes when I look on great works, I feel I’ve wasted my life. Like Alexander Hamilton, I used to write like I’m running out of time, but job and kids and house and friends and TV and Facebook, and, you know, life, take all my creative energy, and I let them.
But this wasn’t that feeling. What I felt was pure awe.
This was no masterpiece looking down on me from a chapel ceiling, distant and untouchable in its perfection. It was just a sketch. A human brain conceived it, a human hand had drawn it. I could easily imagine Michelangelo scratching this at his kitchen table, planning a masterpiece. (Did he even have a kitchen table? Guess I should try reading that book.) Even in that incomplete sketch, he had captured the essence of the real human in the drawing.
Artists can turn ink into blood, so their creations pulse with life.
My toes curled over the pier and gripped the underside of the platform. The wind rippled along my dorsal fin. This was it. If I retrieved the Pearl of Onakai from the Cave of Tears, I would be queen. Assuming I survived the Gauntlet of Terrors first. My knees wobbled. My fingers gripped my mother’s knife. My second stomach churned, but my brain whispered, “Dive in.”
Visit my store at society6.com/ellaarrow to find art prints, canvases, and other cool stuff made from my art.
When I finally published my first book, I wondered when was the moment it became a real book, and I became a real fiction author.
I got my proof copies of my book, The Flight of The Starling, A Fairy Tale, in the mail yesterday. I don’t know why I ordered 5 of them, the max Amazon allowed, when I can get author copies for the same price in a few days. I was excited, I guess, to hold it in my hands, and I’m more likely to walk into bookstores with a real product to pitch than an ephemeral web link.
I keep picking the book up. Stroking the cover. Flipping it
over to confirm the presence of my photo on the back. Feeling its weight.
Opening to a random page and reading till something makes me laugh. There are
so many little jokes in it that I have forgotten.
I want to sleep with it under my pillow. I want to wear it
inside my shirt over my heart.
Every time I got through a new gate, over a new hurdle, in
this publishing journey, I would say to myself, “It’s starting to look like a
real book.” The cover. The pre-sale listing. The author web page. “It’s almost
like a real book.”
So today as I hold the book, I think, “Is it a real book
yet? When is the moment it becomes a real book? When I get the final print?
When I see it on a shelf in a store? When a stranger buys and reads it? Is
there one moment?”
I am Pinocchio. I am the Velveteen Rabbit. I am waiting to
be loved enough to become real.
It feels oddly similar to how I felt before giving birth. I remember being 5 or 6 months pregnant with my first child when I got my first gift of baby clothes. I held up the onesie, sized for a 7-pound newborn human. Tiny for clothes, but huge it seemed to me, with the baby still part of my body. I also had certain, specific expectations of how I would feel when giving birth, and was disappointed when the experience delivered something else. Something more complicated than those glossy narratives of new motherhood.
So I’m trying not to manage my expectations too much. I want
to feel however I feel about publishing my first book without telling myself a
story of how I should be feeling at this or that milestone. I don’t want to
create a story of what my experience will be, because I know now that can set
up its own kind of disappointment. I’ve loved this book a long time and it is
so scary to think of people possibly hating it. Not getting it. Thinking it
doesn’t work or isn’t worth the effort. If there is a point where it becomes a
“real” book, does that armor me against the opinions of people who don’t think
it should be?
I don’t know. I think it was a real book long ago. I’ve just
been waiting to finally put it into newborn clothes.
