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.
Ella Arrow artwork is now available on jigsaw puzzles! Society6.com, where I have my artist shop, has started offering 200, 500, or 1000 piece puzzles, so I set up dozens of my designs.
Personally, I love doing puzzles, especially when I’m feeling stressed. It fills that need to feel productive (without actually being important to finish) and requires a certain level of concentration that lets me block out the Big Scary News or whatever is troubling me. I don’t know about you, but I’ve done all the puzzles in my house in the last two years, so it might be time for some new ones.
Different artwork results in different puzzling difficulty. Not so hard: Box of Sparks, Green Mermaid, Fairy Creek
Medium challenge: Sea Treasures, The Question, Air Through His Bones
Quite a challenge: Blue Fairy Stars, Golden Road, Oak Tree Canopy
Woof: Dive In. I mean it’s all purples.
Give art and you support an artist. Art is a unique gift that you can be sure they don’t already have!
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.
I live in Wisconsin, in one of the many small towns that ring Madison by about ten miles. I figure it’s the distance a horse could ride in a day and that’s why all these towns sprung up, like a fairy ring of mushrooms. In my book, The Flight of The Starling, one of the two fairies is named Beloit. Beloit and his sister meet Princess Lily and convince her Prince Alexander is a horrible guy who likes to cut wings off fairies who annoy him, which makes the princess determined to rescue them.
Flag of Beloit
Beloit, Wisconsin, is about an hour away from my house. I drive past it to visit my friends in Chicago. I’ve never spent any time there. I’ve never had any reason to.
So why is an important character in my novel named Beloit?
Simple: Frank Zappa. And my mother.
Beloit on the cover. I picture him in lederhosen.
I grew up in the Midwest, and once on a road trip to Wisconsin, my mom recalled a funny quote when we passed Beloit. It wasn’t till years later that I learned it was something Zappa said in a concert in Wisconsin: “I can never hear the name ‘Beloit’ without thinking of the sound of a marble being dropped into a toilet bowl. Beloit!”
I’m probably butchering the quote, and I could not find an
official reference to it. But my brother and I were in grade school at the time
and we knew comedy gold when we heard it. A family running joke was born. We
could never hear of Beloit without saying this, and sometimes we would just
intone the word – low on the “bell” with a long L, a lilt and emphasis on the
“oi” – and bust out laughing.
I don’t know why my brain picked Beloit as the name for a fairy. Marzipan’s name came first – a light and crunchy confection somewhere between candy and cookie. She’s Beloit’s sister, the other fairy in the fairy tale, and she is distinctly more salty than sweet. But she means well and would never try to hurt anyone with her mischief. Beloit is less practical than Marzipan, more silly, but together they make a perfect pair of pixies, finishing each other’s sentences and schemes.
Marzipan flies circles around your logic.
“Marzipan and Beloit” had a nice ring to it. I was definitely thinking of the marble in the toilet bowl when I named him. To me, Beloit will always be funny. The horse’s name, Milwaukee, was just a continuation of the joke. I don’t know why but I thought the random Wisconsin references got funnier the more I did it.
When I wrote The Flight of The Starling, I lived in Montana. I had no thought of moving closer to Beloit. Now that I am a Wisconsinite, I have to say, I think naming a fairy Beloit is even funnier than it was when I wrote it. I apologize to any Beloitites (Beloiters? Beloitians?) who don’t agree, or who think the splooshing onomatopoeia is an insult. What can I say, I was a child, and it stuck in my head. You’ll have to take it up with Frank Zappa.
What would you name a fairy and why? Leave me a comment.
All the best,
The Flight of The Starling, A Fairy Tale, is available for pre-order on Amazon and IngramSpark now, for release on November 1.
It was the snow that made the apples irresistible. The icy glaze obscured any hint of discoloring poison, and heightened the longing for the last sweets before true winter gripped the forest. Now a sprinkle of magic to make the crabapples grow. There. Three of them in an old woman’s basket. White as her skin, red as her lips indeed. The girl would never suspect a gift so perfect, so like her fable.
Visit my store at society6.com/ellaarrow to find art prints, canvases, and other cool stuff made from my art.
Four petals fluttering on clusters of flowers, each stem its own bouquet, the bees seemed to love the bush behind our new house as much as we did. My grandmother would have named them hydrangeas, but I didn’t know that, so I told my little girl we had a butterfly bush.
Visit my store at society6.com/ellaarrow to find art prints, canvases, and other cool stuff made from my art.
