#gives a sense of importance and poetry to mundane things like reading alone in my room

[batvillainz]

Very palpable feeling of learning about myself and growing and finding my place in the world

[wolfstarlibrarian]

Hello lovely friends, and welcome to the second installment of the Beyond the Shelves series! This month the library is featuring @aryastark-valarmorghulis​ who’s beautiful prose borders on poetry, and always manages to access those lovely tender feelings we so wish to share with the world. Hope you enjoy this interview here, and make sure to check back later today for the list of her favorite fics!

Name/Creative Type: Arya (she/her) / Author

AO3: aryastark_valarmorghulis  

Tumblr: @aryastark-valarmorghulis

What's your favorite thing about Remus & Sirius? 

Oh, well, this answer will be incredibly sappy.

Let me begin by saying that I am truly disappointed and horrified by JK Rowling and by the harmful, awful views she’s expressed in the last years. I don’t share her ideas and I don’t support her anymore.

Having said that, HP was my childhood and is still incredibly important for me – it helped me, saved me, even, during some very dark and difficult moments, and I believe those books – as flawed as I see them now, as dated as they are – will stay with me until the very end.

Remus and Sirius have been my favorite characters since I read PoA – I was intrigued at once by that tragic yet epic backstory we only get glimpses of and I was very interested in what was left unsaid (the Marauders’ school years, the First War, how their friendship deteriorated, why Remus and Sirius reconnected so quickly). 

Even a naive thirteen-year-old could see there was something worth exploring under the surface, and after a few years I opened a fanfiction on LiveJournal: it was the Shoebox Project. From that moment, I started shipping Punk and Nerd-Wolf and never stopped. Even if I left fandom quite a few times during uni, I kept coming back and I’m still here, because I think those two characters have everything a reader and a storyteller need: there’s friendship, self-discovery, queerness, love, betrayal, war and second chances. What else could I want in a pairing?

What do you think your signature is?

I’m not sure I have one, but what I really love is to let the unsaid things speak more than the actual conversations between characters. I often write from Remus’ Pov and he isn’t a big talker for me – not about his feelings anyway – so I try to convey what he doesn’t dare say, which is actually more important than what he does say.

I think objects like clothes or furniture or even houses can carry a lot of hidden significance, and very mundane actions like brewing tea or putting on a record or touching an elbow can convey more feelings than an actual conversation, so I try my best at describing all these things.

What advice would you give new authors?

Write what you like and not what you think other people will like. That's pretty obvious advice.

I would like to say something even more basic for writers like me, whose first language isn’t English: just try!

I know it can be scary to post a story written in a language that isn’t yours and there is the overwhelming fear that you’ll never be as good as a native speaker, but being bilingual can actually be a resource – you can mix together words in unexpected ways and use surprising metaphors.

I won’t lie because there are days where you don’t even know words in your mother tongue, let alone in English, but there’s no harm in trying and this is something we do for free, for ourselves first, and most of all it’s super fun to play with a new language and bend it to our will – sometimes it’s very frustrating and some sentences will never make sense but it’s nothing that a good, trusted Beta can’t fix.

My advice is that it’s worth trying.

What inspires you?/Where do you get your ideas?

I’m actually not sure; I usually get my ideas when I’m about to go to bed and I’m too sleepy and lazy to jot them down, so I can only hope I remember some vague stuff in the morning.

Most of the time I think of a particular atmosphere (a Welsh cottage in the middle of nowhere during a sweltering summer day, a chilly walk in a misty graveyard etc...) and the story develops around it.

Pick a favorite fic of yours and explain what inspired it.

Midday, Midnight is definitely my favourite fic among the ones I’ve written and, I think, the best one. I wrote it very quickly and it didn’t need much editing, except for the usual grammar stuff. It was absolutely unprecedented, it never happened again and probably never will.

I was inspired by two things.

One is this excellent piece of meta by @shaggydogstail​ regarding the Prank that I absolutely agree with; I was musing over a Post Prank story for a while, mostly because of my disagreement with the trope “The Prank was this huge Greek Tragedy that foreshadows the lack of trust between Remus & Sirius etc”.

The second thing I had in mind was writing something that respects Aristotle’s Classical Unities: a story that lasts for no more than 24 hours, with a single plotline and only one location. The many quotes by Ovid and Sappho underline this classic inspiration. I am acutely aware of how pretentious this sounds, just in case you were wondering.

I knew I wanted to write something about the (lack of) consequences after the Prank, and the idea of a fun summer romance came to me after reading that meta and the interesting discussion that it created.

⭐🌙

Last Month’s interview with @theprongsletthatlived​ can be found here. 

[solacefruit]

For the ask meme, 3) and 17), please? And maybe 25) if you're up to it? Irrelevant but I'm the Tormentil- missing/Harrierpaw ruddles from Ailuronymy – I love your writing too, it's amazing! (I'm very excited for a potential Riverclan full-length story, like MAMS, at some point – even if I have to wait quite a while)

Hello there! Thank you so much for saying so, that’s lovely to hear. Please don’t hold your breath for a Riverclan novel, though! It’s not even on my concept list at this point and there’s a lot of other stories, including full-length ones, I’m going to be attempting first. So it’s not impossible for me to write a Riverclan one--it would be pretty neat to have a novel for each clan--but I can’t promise it’ll ever happen at this stage. Maybe! But also maybe not. It’s a mystery for me too.

Now on to your questions!

Send an ask: get to know the author.

3. What order do you write in? Front of book to back? Chronological? Favourite scenes first? Something else?

For all my Warriors work so far, I’ve written from beginning to end. In part that’s just because of the episodic nature of chapters, but also I’d say that’s my default approach for all my writing. When I get into original fiction--and especially big original fiction, novel-length work--I expect I’ll be taking a much more flexible approach, probably jumping around based on the vibe sometimes, but I like linearity because the first draft is really just getting the building blocks on the page. After that point, then you start really sculpting and being clever with it and moving bits around once you have a sense of the whole.

But for me, I think that first stage is more about getting a clarity of purpose and a rough outline--and that can be done pretty well with front-to-back writing. 

17. If you could give your fledgling author self any advice, what would it be?

Don’t sweat it. That stuff you think is important is completely not important at all. You’re doing all this nitty-gritty obsessive researching and “world-building” pointless, mundane aspects of the world because you: 1. are procrastinating actually writing; 2. have been tricked into thinking that’s what the “good” “serious” fantasy writers do, because that’s what a lot of boring old guys you don’t even like to read do and brag about, and you’re still believing can’t be a good fantasy writer without that, because that’s the popular image of a fantasy writer; & 3. are scared if you’re not perfect and exact in every detail, people are going to tear your writing apart for being “inaccurate” or making a mistake. 

That’s no way to live. You don’t like doing it, really. You’re trying to preempt criticism from people who weren’t ever going to like your writing anyway, and I think you know that. You’re trying to imitate authors you don’t even want to write like, because you think what they write is kind of boring and flat and it’s really straight and you sort of hate it, but you feel you should since it’s what’s “right”.

But you’re not being authentic to yourself, or your vision, or your talent, or what you want to write, and you should be. 

It’s really not your fault you feel this way, but you’re going to be so much happier when you realise this version of a fantasy writer is all total hokum and not your style and instead start writing what you want to, the way you want to. People are really going to like what you’re bringing to the table. It’s going to set you apart and you’re going to love writing fantasy that’s a bit weird and kooky and self-indulgent and fun and queer and all the things those old books just aren’t. 

I can’t stress how liberating it will be to put on heart-shaped pink sunglasses and decide that the most important thing your writing has to be is genuine and fun for you. You never wanted to write realist fiction anyway. Secondary worlds forever. 

25. Copy-paste a few sentences or a short paragraph that you’re particularly proud of.

I thought about it for a bit because something I never do here is share any poetry I write, despite writing a decent amount of it. Partly that’s just not this blog’s audience, but also a lot of it I hope one day to put into publication, if only in a little chapbook. That said, I wrote this a while back on commission for someone’s character who was deathly ill and his lovers left behind, so I don’t mind sharing it now. It’s a tanka set (5-7-5-7-7, a bit like a haiku). 

summer has four hands,  he remembers, and twenty  loving fingertips-- and it doesn't end, ever;  it lasts a lifetime--at least, in his heart--even as his own fingertips grew slow and cold, his hands too weak to return a touch, to reach out and hold on, to find comfort in their  warm skin and promise them that he would be okay: each new winter weighed him down with the too-familiar  tiredness of a body with not quite enough life in it, like a garden under the frost, cold and withdrawn at the edges of the leaves, waiting for a sunrise that isn't coming. The ground, he remembers, was solid as stone under the snow that last winter, a final  cruel laugh from the world, as though giving him to the  earth--as though burying a lover--was not hard enough for them already-- but it was a pain that time alone could heal; so he waited, in the place so near and so far away, until the seasons moved once more and time brought them to his open hands, ten fingertips made of light, never to let go again. when he remembers the living world, he thinks of it better than it  was and forgives it for the brevity and falling snow.

[imaginariumpod]

Bright Star : The visualisation of tenderness

This movie is one that I constantly revisit, the beauty and softness of it is something I want to carry with me. The soft colors, the delicateness of the moments that we see, and yet a story that moves hearts. This is the sort of stories I want to be able to tell and this is why I really wanted to write about this film.

I am just going to preface this article by saying that BRIGHT STAR (2009) directed by Jane Campion is one of my all time favorite movies and that I am going to be extremely biased in this article. Now, that this is out of the way, let’s move on to the article. Bright Star is a movie about the love story between John Keats and Fanny Brawne. But ultimately, it is a story about yearning, poetry and loss, at its core, it’s a story about love. Every shot of this movie encapsulates the tenderness and kindness which drives the story and Jane Campion’s directing. This movie is a highly romanticized version of John Keats’ life that centers Fanny and John’s romantic relationship and not necessarily on Keats’ career as a future legendary poet. The angle she chose to tell this story is a very soft and kind one, that is very empathetic toward both its main characters.

I’m going to start by placing the movie in its cultural context as well as in the cinematic industry that was prevailing in 2009 and still is today. Jane Campion is one of my favorite female directors and one I would qualify as an Auteur. Unfortunately, the cinema industry being as it is, I feel like so few women have the standing in the industry as artists that a lot of men have. Not to turn this into an interlude on the inherent inequality of the cinema world at large, but it’s easy to think of male directors that have a certain aesthetic and a recognizable way of making their movies. I’m thinking of Wes Anderson, Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino, Guillermo Del Toro etc etc. For better or for worse, those cineasts are known for a certain style of works that is attributed to them . Female cineasts who get to be artists for more mainstream are very few in between, Jane Campion is one of them, but I could also name Anna Biller, Agnès Varda and Greta Gerwig. Women work at all scales of the industry and yet it feels their work is not valued enough for varied reasons. The industry doesn’t want to take A Risk (™) on a  female cineast the way they do with male movie makers. The industry still has so much progress to do when it comes to centering stories made by people that aren’t straight cis white men, the films being produced for a mainstream audience are still majorly directed, produced and written by white men. You only have to see the recent award shows where the best directors nominees were all white men, despite women and people of color  presenting amazing work constantly. Representation is important in what you see in the movies, non-white actors and stories featuring marginalized people, but what is also truly important as well, and I feel isn’t talked as much in the broader discourse about this subject, is how it’s important to have diversity behind the camera as well, whether it’s the director, writer, producer, crew, etc. I think we can safely say that progress was indeed made since 2009, but a female filmmaker being celebrated is still so rare to this day that i feel it’s important to remark on.

Jane Campion was still a celebrated filmmaker, despite having taken a hiatus from the film industry, and Bright Star (2009) did very well. The movie received many awards and nominations in such prestigious institutions such as Cannes or the British Independant Film Awards. Campion describes the film as more intimate than the previous ones she had made  and in this regard, she is right. The way the film is shot and directed brings you closer to the characters and the story. The intimacy and the tenderness is almost overwhelming at times, she uses shots that are both very close and very near to give you a close sense of nearness and intimacy and to convey the emotions the characters are feeling, but also Campion uses a lot of very ethereal and shot. Hands brushing, butterflies flying around while one is lying on the grass,  make  this movie a literal visualization of soft romantic yearning.  

One of the most important things to me in this movie,  is how kind the narrative is toward Fanny Brawne. History hasn’t been kind to her, especially when we know that historians in general (ad im talking precisely white male cis straight historians who have been the ones to mainly write our History) have created the narrative that she was a despicable person, that she was a frivolous woman who didn't deserve to be in the vicinity of their favorite poet, simply on account of her being a woman who was more interested in clothes than rhymes and verses. and maybe she was, but on all accounts, John Keats was terribly in love with her, and she was equally in love with him. I  just want to preface this by saying I would die for keats, I adoooore his poems and his writing and I have his complete works on my bedside table at this very moment.. I feel like its a very special kind of misogyny (or a very mundane one, now that I think about it) where the simple feminine presence of Fanny brawne near John Keats somehow tarnished him. The fact that she loved feminine things was a flaw that she needed to overcome for most male historians, they thought her futile and shallow, simply for the fact that she was a woman who was interested in clothes and delicate pretty things.

But more than that, she was also a skilled seamstress, she made her own clothing and was delightfully creative and hardworking, and the way Campion frames the craft of Fanny in the movie shows how valuable she thinks this skill is. Garment making is a really complex craft that requires skill and time and hardwork and to this day still isn’t valued the way it should be. So it should be no surprise that history, mostly written by male white cis historians, remembers Fanny Brawne as a vapid shallow woman who only cares about clothes. We can see that the character of Charles Brown, who will later be introduced as one close friend of Keats, is a bit of a placeholder for this sort of perspective. He constantly tries to thwart Keats and Brawne’s budding romantic relationship because he doesn’t think Keats should bother with such frivolous affairs. The movie is incredibly kind and tender in the way it showcases how craft, any craft, whether it be sewing or writing poetry, is work and a labour of love, and does not diminish the value of either to the advantage of the other.

John Keats is ofc a central part of this story. Ben Whishaw succeeds perfectly in bringing the tragic poet to life. Whishaw is perfect to play a poet who is about to die of consumption, he’s just very tragic that way. His delivery is perfect and he is the perfect casting for John Keats. (If you have the time, this reading of La belle dame sans mercI by Ben Whishaw is so delicate, beautiful and legit brings tears to my eyes )  I’m sure most of you know the story of Keats, but it’s still very tragic to think about : a  poor and unsuccessful poet who died incredibly young and who never got to truly see how impactful his art would be in the future.  Keats is still remembered today, but he never got the chance to enjoy the success his poetry had, years after his death. He never got to marry the woman he wanted to marry because he didn’t have the means to do it. He created beauty from his words and then died alone in Italy at just 25 years old. It never truly hit me before this year, when I did my annual rewatch of the movie, how young Keats truly was, being now 24 years old at the time of writing this article, it truly was a life that has been cut too short.

The directing of Jane Campion is very deliberate, and i think there’s a vision to this movie that is incredibly powerful and obvious. The movie’s pace is very slow, but I think sometimes we need media that just takes the time to slow down and to just enjoy the scene enfolding in front of us. I’m thinking about some scenes where you can only see Keats sitting on a chair outside. He is writing. The wind is moving through the leaves, the birds are singing in the distance, and Keats is writing. A lot of people would say that the scene is useless when it comes to moving the plot forward, and I guess i would agree, strictly speaking, that it doesn’t do much in terms of moving the plot forward, but it does set the atmosphere wonderfully. You can feel the calmness and the ethereal feeling of Keats’ poetry. Campion scatters moments like these throughout the movie, where she takes the time to slow down and get lost in the moment. It’s something that i particularly adore in media, as life constantly feels like it’s getting away from me, it reminds me to slow down and take the time to breathe.

The delicate colors of the cinematography are another aspect that I think really brings such a soft and tender dimension to the movie. The director of photography for this specific movie is Greig Fraser who also did the cinematography for such movies as Rogue One, Vice, as well Batman film starring Robert Pattinson but we aren’t talking about that atm. The colors that have been used throughout the film are very soft and soothing. Soft pinks and soft greens, as well as deep rich hues of blues and browns. There’s a haziness to this movie that very much feels like being thrown into a poem.

This wouldn't be an article written by me if there wasn't any mention of the costume design. The costume design in this movie is being taken care of by Janet Patterson, who had worked previously on other Campion’s movies (Portrait of a Lady, The Piano). The work she does here is marvelous. She manages to create such a beautiful wardrobe for each of the characters. From the colorful dresses of Fanny Brawne to the outfits of the last extra, everything is carefully thought of, and the attention to detail really stands out when you look at the clothing, from the historical research to how well the costumes fit within the realm of the BRIGHT STAR cinematic universe. John Keats’ outfits, in particular, were particularly delightful, he,s always clad in deep blues and clothes that seem worn and comfortable. Something about these darker blues just seem so melancholic compared to the rest of the costumes, especially in contrast with Fanny Brawne’s brighter dresses.

The last thing I will touch upon is the tenderness of the story in itself, despite how sadly it ends. The love story between John Keats and Fanny Brawne unfolds slowly, and then all at once. Despite all of what they go through, the love and the care they give each other is tremendous. And the times they have to be apart, you feel the yearning and longing for the other as if enveloping the scene. Having to wait for another letter, having to acknowledge that they can’t be together is heartbreaking, especially as Keats is desperately trying to do right by Fanny. They want to get married, but Keats is an unsuccessful poet who is in debt, and Fanny is from an upper middle class family and won’t be allowed to marry beneath her rank. I feel like it’s such a mundane story and yet, it feels world shattering to them, especially the last moments they share when Keats becomes ill and he has to leave for Italy to rest and try to get better, but they both know that it’s probably the last time they’ll see each other breaks me. The tenderness in each movement and each conversation they had was tinged by the heavy weight of saying goodbye one last time.

And then. The letter arrives. With the news of Keats’ death. And his fiancée cuts her hair, dons a black dress. And mourns him.

[artmusicjoy]

i just want to scream into an abyss

but i also want hang out with friends

but everyone is an ocean away (even though I’m meeting new people but haven’t reached out to them because I don’t know how to nor do I know how available they are but i feel better talking with them, is that because they’re cool people or because they’re people at all? also i’ve kept in touch with pretty much everyone from home anyway so why the fuck do i feel so alone?)

i just want a hug (i like hugs, ok?!?!)

i just want to talk (i don’t even know what about. something deep but simple and trashy but not pointless even though realistically everything is pointless)

i just want something (probably dinner, but I feel sick from eating so much earlier, or am i actually hungry again and just can’t differentiate the feelings because i’m fortunate enough to not wonder where / when my next meal is, except now that I’m feeding myself I can’t get off my lazy ass to take care of myself. or am I just joking about dinner because i can’t describe this want i actually feel?)

i want to do something 

(God going back through this makes that part feel like shitty poetry^^^)

and now i’m going through to bold the original stream of consciousness so anyone reading can see how editing thoughts works, because I can’t even trust my gut on my emotions in real time. or did I just say i can’t trust myself because of a jaded character i was watching a few minutes ago? i can’t even trust my own commentary on my commentary. I’m a mess.

i want to scream and cry and laugh and run and dance and write and read and study and cook and break things and punch a wall without alerting my flatmates and actually feel like I’m close with them without coming across as weird for not getting to know them better the past month and just feel normal

but there is not such thing as truly normal so why do I care so much about being it?

would friends even help me in the long term or just distract me in the moment until we go our separate ways for the night or day or week or lifetime. as much as i love my friends and know they’ll want to help, I don’t want to weigh them down with my wellbeing. Especially since everyone has their own shit to deal with that’s arguably worse than mine. Yet if they said that to me, I’d reply “someone with a broken ankle won’t (or at least shouldn’t) tell someone with a sprained ankle that their pain isn’t real or valid.” 

my is my default feeling so numb and so painful at the same time

why can’t I cry about this? like i physically have felt the need to cry in the back of my mind for the past like three weeks and have only gotten a few tears out

i need to get more done

even if more is crying

why am i bothering to fix any mistakes I type as though I’m going to post this

should I post this or would my friends worry too much? should I let my vent into the infinite abyss of the internet and maybe someone will relate and feel better by seeing it

or am i just typing so I can look through my thoughts like a diary while not talking to myself (like a crazy person in the movies) 

is it even that normal that I can like feel the need to cry build in my life? do i really feel better when cry or is it just the relief of being empty (i just fixed two more spelling mistakes)

I keep telling myself in class that I’m motivated enough to work on the next project (or reading for my classes) and I even started an idea for one, but I’ll probably scrap it because it was so spur of the moment

and I’m behind on the dictionary project partially because I don’t give a shit, partially because I feel like I’m behind in the class when I’m really not, and partially because I feel like putting it off knowing I’l get it done eventually because I always do

I can boast never using an extension even though it means I’ve stayed up till 3 AM to write two paragraphs, only to stop at 3:30 to take a shower that I was putting off until I finished my work, as though disregarding my body’s health is the way to keep my mind from staying idle

and that was a year ago

now I just feel bad about feeling bad and not doing the things I know will help me

I fucking wrote my 300 level English final paper while my mom was packing up my dorm room so I could go home for winter break and have everything to be abroad. She was so worried seeing me work in the moment, so down to the wire. But so proud that I was able to buckle down and do it. Whereas I felt like shit for not doing it sooner. It was a topic I CHOSE and I LIKED IT. WHY THE FUCK DID I PUT IT OFF>!!>??!? I don’t even remember, probably because of my other, less exciting but way bigger project weighing down my spirit

if I just change my scenery then I’ll probably feel better

go to the common room to be on my computer instead of the same for walls of my room that I’ve decided were better because they’re private and nobody can judge me in here, but they also can’t get to know me and I can’t get anything (or much, I’m somehow doing some of the readings) done. You know, like a few other people do and then I’ll feel weird for only starting to do it now. idk

if I could just find another passion to keep me going, a new show or book

god i need to get the courage to go enjoy the library here. I feel so out of place there. nothing’s worse than feeling like a waste of space and a stupid piece of shit in a university library full of people like me who are probably procrastinating or struggling to finish work or even trying to figure out the English language because they’re from the freaking Netherlands and India and everywhere else

while im just the american in England who is struggling over something I probably wouldn’t feel if my life were just a bit worse. as though switching my life with some starving child in the arctic circle would make me feel better because i’d be too close to death to feel like shit and they could enjoy all the benefits I feel like i’m abusing by wasting away on my computer typing into a void rather than actually working to resolve my own issues

because maybe this post will somehow help me resolve things by putting them all out for others to see. or so i can reference it later. idfk

like “hi friends, I’m feeling like shit. Also I’m loving my time abroad, I had chocolate pancakes for dinner last week and I somehow feel like I have the right to complain about doing nothing and feeling bad about doing nothing.”

like knowing you’re a piece of shit doesn’t make you better than anyone because everyone should be trying to work towards a better self and more complete sense of self but i don’t even know where I’m going with this sentence, let alone my fucking life

maybe I should get a boring office job because then I’ll know what to expect and how to get my mundane task done instead of trying to build up the will to be my own boss as a writer and still never feel motivated to put my LONG list of ideas out into the world beyond my desktop

I seriously have over 70 pages of bulleted ideas, half of them are barely formed but i can’t bring myself to get rid of them because they might be worth something to someone one day

i wonder how future historians will deal with old laptops and the documents that were never shared there or the posts that feel so personal but so private as anyone can find them but only some will know the face behind my screen

do I want to share these thoughts with everyone? just close friends? or nobody, not even myself?

fuck it

To my friends: don’t feel obligated to read all this or reply. But you can if you want. Wow this sounds so manipulative, like reverse psychology bullshit. I’m sorry. 

I’m second guessing posting all this. But after all the effort I put in, I think it’s important to have and remember or whatever.

here it goes

EDIT: two minutes later and I feel like an attention whore and feel bad and need to point it out before people (strangers mostly, but still) make that judgment of me themselves. And now feeling like more of an attention seeking piece of shit for pointing it out. why is my brain so broken

would I ever really talk like this face to face? will people see me differently after this? i... whatever

[barberwitch]

hey barber, could I have some advice? i'm a male witch, too, and i had an interest in witchcraft for the longest time, but it never really seemed to work with me. no spells, sigils, charms or anything ever seemed to work, no matter how much faith or effort i put into them. i want to be able to believe in and live magick, but it seems like i'm just ... not. every day i want to pull my old spellbooks back out, but i quickly loose any motivation and begin to doubt myself again. what do i do ?

To start off, I’m sorry that it’s been pulling you down like that, it can be really tough to want something so much and not have it work out the way you planned. Just know you aren’t alone, everyone who has an interest in witchcraft goes through it at some point in their life.

So my first piece of advice builds off that: lose your expectations. Don’t go into it thinking you’re going to be super powerful, or you’re going to be having lunch with spirits, or talking weaponry with Hephaestus and Odin. Just be open to whatever comes your way. This builds off that phrase I always end up using “Mundane before Magic.” What this means is that magic isn’t a replacement, it’s the added thing, the extra. You do everything you can to achieve your goals through the regular tried and true route: hardwork and planning. Magic comes in to stack the deck in your favor. 

Does it always work? No. Not even for me, or other witches who’ve been doing this even longer. But that doesn’t matter as much, because you know that you did everything you could to achieve that goal. That’s what’s important. If it did work, that’s where it gets tricky, because was it the stuff you did, or the magic? They become so intertwined it’s hard to separate, and that’s what living like a witch is like for me. Whether things come to pass because of hard work, or magical means isn’t the point, because they ended up working out for me.

What draws so many people to their craft is power. Not necessarily to rule the world, or to learn to levitate, but the sincere need to reclaim their own power by connecting to something outside themselves. It is an outlet for emotions that can’t be expressed for one reason or another, it is a tool to add to and give form to the subconcious wants and desires, it is a lense to look at the world through and make sense of it in a way that give a better grasp on who we are.

This leads me to my next piece of advice: Start small, and start with what you like.This may be just a me thing, but I’ve got an inquisitive brain, and I joke that my hobby is collecting hobbies. Start reading things that interest you, not necessarily because you’re seeking to do whatever the book entails, but because you like it. It doesn’t have to be a quiz, no notations and bibliography are going to be asked of you, just read what you like. Look at artwork, read quotes, poetry, science, whatever! It seeps in when you aren’t thinking about it. It also helps you figure out what you actually believe in and what resonates, and what maybe isn’t for you.

When I look at my craft, it’s simple. If I like it, I do it. My day to day stuff is just, what I do. It’s normal for me and makes me feel better about myself and my place in the world. I come home, I light a candle, maybe some incense if the air is stale. I read fiction, fantasy, books about witches and folklore. I make things: jewelry, wood work, ointments, oils, whatever I feel inspired to make, then I make it. I’ll draw a tarot card or a few and see what they mean. I think about my day.

What I’m getting at is that witchraft is simple if you take the pressures off. Sure you see stuff that might make you jealous, or inspired, or think “I could never do that” on tumblr. We all want a cauldron big enough to fit a small town, and enough crystals to choke a whale, but that’s not realistic for everyone. That’s not why I share stuff. I share it because for me, this stuff is simple because it’s what I enjoy, and my views of witchcraft are pretty laid back. Do what makes you happy, and don’t worry about others. There’s no rush, or timeline. No benchmarkers that say by this time you should be able to *insert blank*. Witchcraft is about yourself, not about what others think, or even where you think you should be. We all learn at different rates, and tbh, you probably know more about certain things than I do! We all have our strengths, the trick is figuring out that that weakest part of ourselves, is viewed as our greatest asset by others.

I hope this helps, truly, and if you ever want to ask me questions, or just chat about a shitty boss, or an awesome dinner you made, hit me up. We’re all brothers right? You got this!

🦇 Cheers, Barberwitch

[how2to18]

IN THE EARLY 1980s, when I was a sophomore at Yale, I lived in a narrow clapboard house off-campus, somewhere east of Wooster Square. It wasn’t the happiest time in my life, but I had a small study with a big metal desk; my roommates were seniors, with one foot out the door; and there was a speakeasy around the corner where you could get a six-pack of beer on Sundays when everything else was closed.

We lived on the top floor; a couple in their 30s lived downstairs: the woman, who was Vietnamese, spoke little English and always looked frightened; her husband, who was white, was a Vietnam vet who would periodically get drunk and beat her. I’m not sure I would have had the courage to do so had I been living there alone, but my roommates often called the cops, who would come and intervene. My neighbors weren’t the first people I knew for whom the war in Vietnam hadn’t ended — I had friends in Pennsylvania whose older brothers had come back, completely changed. My stepfather, a mild-mannered neurosurgeon who had been a doctor in a busy MASH unit, would occasionally belt back a couple of drinks and fly into an inexplicable rage. I was curious about these people, wondered about the experiences that haunted them. But the war, and the protests surrounding it, seemed remote, something I would never comprehend in the way that we can’t really comprehend things we don’t live through, experiences whose most intimate details we will never know.

In Alice Mattison’s new novel, Conscience, we meet two characters for whom the war has not ended either. The novel, which is set in present-day New Haven (where Mattison lives and often sets her stories), is Mattison’s 14th book, her seventh novel in a long, distinguished career as a writer and a teacher. In an author’s note, she explains that the book grew out of her curiosity about an idealistic young woman she met in the ’60s who later “turned violent.” Among other things, the novel poses some interesting questions: How long does the past linger? What’s the value of rehashing it? How can we honor, forgive, or live with people who have done difficult things?

Mattison tells several stories in Conscience, and watching them grow and intersect is one of the greatest pleasures of the book. The first story begins in the mid-1960s, in Brooklyn, with three young women who become involved in the antiwar protests: Helen Weinstein, a serious girl who drops out of Barnard after she is radicalized; Valerie (Val) Benevento, a popular girl who will eventually write a successful book about Helen’s life; and Olive Grossman, Helen’s best friend, an editor who now lives in New Haven with her husband, Griff, the hard-working principal of a school for troubled kids, a gentle man who is marked, like Olive, by a violent incident that happened in the ’60s. Helen is the most compelling character in the novel, and it is Olive’s need to make sense of Helen’s life that moves the story forward.

Several other plot lines unfold over the course of the novel: Olive and Griff face an impasse in their marriage; the complex arcs of several female friendships are explored; and Olive finds the courage to tell the truth about her relationship with Helen, getting past what Virginia Woolf famously called the “angel in the house,” that dreadful expectation that women should be sweet and charming, avoiding conflict at all cost. Finally, there is the more contemporary story of a slightly younger woman named Jean, who runs a homeless shelter in New Haven. Her friendship with Olive dominates the second half of the book.

Conscience is told in alternating first-person voices. The shifting perspective works well, as a chorus of “I”s (there are three of them — Olive, Jean, and, to a lesser extent, Griff) helps build a collective sense of the collateral damage of the war and the noisy overlap of friends, family, and lovers that make up a community. At a certain point, the voices seem to blend and merge, becoming almost one, a tactile illustration of some of Mattison’s larger themes: family, friendship, community. The alternating voices also give the reader an intimate view of Olive and Griff’s marriage. Personal space is an important concern in the novel (especially for its female characters), and there are interesting issues related to the architecture of Olive and Griff’s house. Originally a duplex (Griff lived upstairs and Olive downstairs during a time of marital separation), the two units are now connected, but to some extent, the separation remains. Olive, who has a home office she never uses (strange since she is always craving solitude), spreads her work over the kitchen table, which annoys and pains Griff, who retreats upstairs or leaves the house. They often eat alone. As each character recounts their version of this conflict, the reader, like a couples’ therapist, pieces together their troubles, sees the misperceptions and the self-deceptions, and feels the loss of what might have been. In another example of Mattison’s clever use of shifting perspectives, Val’s book, which we learn about as Jean reads it, offers a different perspective on Olive’s and Griff’s versions of Helen’s story.

Most of the plot elements fit together neatly, something we have come to expect from Mattison, who is very good with form. But characters, like Olive and Griff’s oldest daughter, are sometimes brought in to serve the plot, never to return. And some of Mattison’s plot twists feel improbable, especially the ones that are centered around Zach, a young pediatrician who was once involved with Olive and Griff’s daughter and is now involved with Jean. The New Haven story doesn’t have the same intensity as the Brooklyn one, and the friendship between Olive and Jean is not as convincing as the one between Olive and Helen.

But Conscience is a curious book. Every time I wanted to object, Mattison pulled me back in, some of which, I think, is connected to the book’s pacing, which is wonderfully slow and lush. Fiction tends to move at a fast clip these days — it’s full of fragments and ellipses, abrupt shifts that reflect our accelerated, decentered lives. But Mattison refuses to give up the rich, mundane details of domestic life — people talking, cooking, washing the dishes. It’s where her stories live.

Many of Mattison’s characters are well drawn: from important figures like Jean and Zach to minor characters like Eli, an older activist who sleeps with everyone (“[p]utting his hands on both our shoulders, he drew us into his apartment”), and some of the people at the shelter where Jean works. The youthful portraits of Olive and Helen are full of poignant details: from the windy walks they take in Brooklyn to get away from their families to Helen’s growing indifference to money, food, and hygiene. Mattison’s honesty about the less-than-noble motivations that sometimes drive the actions of her characters — to please a friend, to have sex, to get away from their parents — is refreshing. She doesn’t idealize; there are no heroes in this book — on the contrary. Mostly, we see the toll the war takes, the way each character struggles with the dictates of his or her conscience as the government continues to send young men off to war, continues to bomb and kill in Vietnam. As Olive says, “Being preoccupied by the war was something like having such a bad cold that you didn’t care what happened in your life.”

Several of the characters turn to violence. Some of them are destroyed by this and some of them repudiate it, but all of them feel guilty about what they did and didn’t do. Trying to make sense of the choices Helen made, Olive asks some questions that haunt the book: “What should she have done — what should I have done — to end the war? What should we have done instead? To say ‘nothing’ would condemn us to complicity.” Mattison never condemns the characters who opt for violence, but in the present-day story, where characters like Jean and Griff work tirelessly to help troubled kids and the homeless, she offers us a compelling alternative. The most interesting character in this regard is Griff, the agnostic son in a long line of New Haven clergymen, whose youthful act of violence changed his life. Unfortunately, we don’t understand as much about his choice as we do about Helen’s although we see the ways in which his life is circumscribed by it. Every decision he makes involves a painstaking consideration of the potential harm it may do to others, which causes some problems with Olive, but Griff’s condemnation of violence allows for no exceptions: “What’s wrong […] is wrong. What is destructive […] [d]estroys.”

From her earliest work, a 1979 poetry collection called Animals, Mattison has been invested in telling women’s stories, giving women space on the page. The female characters in Conscience are part of a long line of women — working women, sexual women, family women, thinking women — whose lives Mattison has lovingly captured and explored. Her portrayal of the men whose lives intersect with the lives of her female characters is usually nuanced and complex; they are sweet, distant, sexy, needy, human. But in Conscience, this isn’t always the case, which has to do, I think, with the character of Olive and the outsized role she plays in the book.

As a young woman, Olive is a little neurotic, the kind of girl who worries about being “liked” by other girls, a “secondary character,” as she once calls herself. Her political activism takes a back seat to Helen’s; her desire for approval eventually leads her to be used and burned by Val. As an adult, Olive is lonely; she feels abandoned by Helen, exhausted by the hard work of carving out a space for her career within the confines of marriage. Mostly, though, she’s angry at Griff, whom she blames for many of her problems, in ways that are sometimes tedious, even absurd. Griff can be a tough character, inexpressive and inflexible, but Mattison never succeeded in convincing me that Olive’s problems are his fault, and he comes off as a passive foil, a stand-in for the traditional inequity of male-female relationships. At a certain point, Olive’s critique of Griff is so egregious that I thought the book was going to be about how she recognizes and addresses this, but Mattison’s sympathies remain firmly with Olive. At the end of the book, when Olive agrees to a kitchen renovation that will create a space where she and Griff can coexist, it’s meant to signal love and acceptance, but it really feels like she’s throwing him some crumbs.

You could argue that Griff gets second billing because he’s a male character in a book about female empowerment, but Griff is also black, one of several black characters in the novel, none of whom have much of a voice, and this disparity becomes increasingly apparent as the novel unfolds. Over the course of her career, Mattison’s work has often been set in the world of social justice, including the Civil Rights movement, but her tendency — the old left’s tendency — to divide the world along the lines of race, gender, and ethnicity (black, Jewish, male, female) doesn’t serve the part of her story that takes place in New Haven in the 21st century.

Underlying the problems between Olive and Griff is the pressing question of how men and women (especially women) can live together with autonomy. Mattison, who places a great deal of value on family and community, can’t quite wrap her mind around it, but the novel hints at an intriguing solution. For years, I was married to an architect who had a theory — a convincing one — that many people’s problems are actually architectural problems, problems that can be resolved with architectural solutions, and I followed the architectural trail in the book eagerly. The repurposed duplex, Olive’s unsuccessful quest for a secluded work space, the third floor of Jean’s shelter that controversially offers “private space” — space to read or think or nap — to homeless people in New Haven. In Conscience, Olive and Griff are trapped in a marriage — and in a house — that doesn’t suit them. Could it be that some couples can’t coexist, at least in the traditional ways that couples have always coexisted in the Western world (another issue the ’60s tried, with limited success, to address)? Besides, Olive is a writer, and most writers, male or female, need solitary conditions to work in, conditions that often clash with family life. Mattison is hesitant to liberate Olive and Griff from a traditional marital structure, one that has created a terrible choice for them — a stifling marriage or an unhappy solitude. But what if that dichotomy were false? What if there was another solution, one that occurs, at one point, to Olive, almost as a joke: bring back the duplex!

In Conscience, Alice Mattison gives us an intimate portrait of the struggles and sacrifices of the men and women who protested against the war in Vietnam, some of whom, for better or worse, put their lives on the line. She also reminds us of what it is to have, and act on, a conscience, what it is to make a choice and accept the consequences. As Olive, trying to explain those difficult times to Zach, says, “The sixties weren’t—’ I didn’t know how to put it. ‘We were serious.’” As a new generation of protestors fights to defend our democracy against a different kind of threat, it’s good to remember the long, successful legacy of protests in this country, important to reflect on the risks and rewards of dissent.

It takes a long time to make sense of things, to paint a full picture of an important moment in history, especially one as fraught as the war in Vietnam, but this is the luxury (and, perhaps, the responsibility) of literature. And it should be applauded when it’s done well, as Mattison mostly does here.

¤

Lisa Fetchko has published essays, fiction, reviews, and translations in a variety of publications including Ploughshares, n+1, AGNI, and Bookforum. She teaches at Mount Saint Mary’s and Orange Coast College.

The post The Old Left: “Conscience” by Alice Mattison appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

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[topmixtrends]

IN THE EARLY 1980s, when I was a sophomore at Yale, I lived in a narrow clapboard house off-campus, somewhere east of Wooster Square. It wasn’t the happiest time in my life, but I had a small study with a big metal desk; my roommates were seniors, with one foot out the door; and there was a speakeasy around the corner where you could get a six-pack of beer on Sundays when everything else was closed.

We lived on the top floor; a couple in their 30s lived downstairs: the woman, who was Vietnamese, spoke little English and always looked frightened; her husband, who was white, was a Vietnam vet who would periodically get drunk and beat her. I’m not sure I would have had the courage to do so had I been living there alone, but my roommates often called the cops, who would come and intervene. My neighbors weren’t the first people I knew for whom the war in Vietnam hadn’t ended — I had friends in Pennsylvania whose older brothers had come back, completely changed. My stepfather, a mild-mannered neurosurgeon who had been a doctor in a busy MASH unit, would occasionally belt back a couple of drinks and fly into an inexplicable rage. I was curious about these people, wondered about the experiences that haunted them. But the war, and the protests surrounding it, seemed remote, something I would never comprehend in the way that we can’t really comprehend things we don’t live through, experiences whose most intimate details we will never know.

In Alice Mattison’s new novel, Conscience, we meet two characters for whom the war has not ended either. The novel, which is set in present-day New Haven (where Mattison lives and often sets her stories), is Mattison’s 14th book, her seventh novel in a long, distinguished career as a writer and a teacher. In an author’s note, she explains that the book grew out of her curiosity about an idealistic young woman she met in the ’60s who later “turned violent.” Among other things, the novel poses some interesting questions: How long does the past linger? What’s the value of rehashing it? How can we honor, forgive, or live with people who have done difficult things?

Mattison tells several stories in Conscience, and watching them grow and intersect is one of the greatest pleasures of the book. The first story begins in the mid-1960s, in Brooklyn, with three young women who become involved in the antiwar protests: Helen Weinstein, a serious girl who drops out of Barnard after she is radicalized; Valerie (Val) Benevento, a popular girl who will eventually write a successful book about Helen’s life; and Olive Grossman, Helen’s best friend, an editor who now lives in New Haven with her husband, Griff, the hard-working principal of a school for troubled kids, a gentle man who is marked, like Olive, by a violent incident that happened in the ’60s. Helen is the most compelling character in the novel, and it is Olive’s need to make sense of Helen’s life that moves the story forward.

Several other plot lines unfold over the course of the novel: Olive and Griff face an impasse in their marriage; the complex arcs of several female friendships are explored; and Olive finds the courage to tell the truth about her relationship with Helen, getting past what Virginia Woolf famously called the “angel in the house,” that dreadful expectation that women should be sweet and charming, avoiding conflict at all cost. Finally, there is the more contemporary story of a slightly younger woman named Jean, who runs a homeless shelter in New Haven. Her friendship with Olive dominates the second half of the book.

Conscience is told in alternating first-person voices. The shifting perspective works well, as a chorus of “I”s (there are three of them — Olive, Jean, and, to a lesser extent, Griff) helps build a collective sense of the collateral damage of the war and the noisy overlap of friends, family, and lovers that make up a community. At a certain point, the voices seem to blend and merge, becoming almost one, a tactile illustration of some of Mattison’s larger themes: family, friendship, community. The alternating voices also give the reader an intimate view of Olive and Griff’s marriage. Personal space is an important concern in the novel (especially for its female characters), and there are interesting issues related to the architecture of Olive and Griff’s house. Originally a duplex (Griff lived upstairs and Olive downstairs during a time of marital separation), the two units are now connected, but to some extent, the separation remains. Olive, who has a home office she never uses (strange since she is always craving solitude), spreads her work over the kitchen table, which annoys and pains Griff, who retreats upstairs or leaves the house. They often eat alone. As each character recounts their version of this conflict, the reader, like a couples’ therapist, pieces together their troubles, sees the misperceptions and the self-deceptions, and feels the loss of what might have been. In another example of Mattison’s clever use of shifting perspectives, Val’s book, which we learn about as Jean reads it, offers a different perspective on Olive’s and Griff’s versions of Helen’s story.

Most of the plot elements fit together neatly, something we have come to expect from Mattison, who is very good with form. But characters, like Olive and Griff’s oldest daughter, are sometimes brought in to serve the plot, never to return. And some of Mattison’s plot twists feel improbable, especially the ones that are centered around Zach, a young pediatrician who was once involved with Olive and Griff’s daughter and is now involved with Jean. The New Haven story doesn’t have the same intensity as the Brooklyn one, and the friendship between Olive and Jean is not as convincing as the one between Olive and Helen.

But Conscience is a curious book. Every time I wanted to object, Mattison pulled me back in, some of which, I think, is connected to the book’s pacing, which is wonderfully slow and lush. Fiction tends to move at a fast clip these days — it’s full of fragments and ellipses, abrupt shifts that reflect our accelerated, decentered lives. But Mattison refuses to give up the rich, mundane details of domestic life — people talking, cooking, washing the dishes. It’s where her stories live.

Many of Mattison’s characters are well drawn: from important figures like Jean and Zach to minor characters like Eli, an older activist who sleeps with everyone (“[p]utting his hands on both our shoulders, he drew us into his apartment”), and some of the people at the shelter where Jean works. The youthful portraits of Olive and Helen are full of poignant details: from the windy walks they take in Brooklyn to get away from their families to Helen’s growing indifference to money, food, and hygiene. Mattison’s honesty about the less-than-noble motivations that sometimes drive the actions of her characters — to please a friend, to have sex, to get away from their parents — is refreshing. She doesn’t idealize; there are no heroes in this book — on the contrary. Mostly, we see the toll the war takes, the way each character struggles with the dictates of his or her conscience as the government continues to send young men off to war, continues to bomb and kill in Vietnam. As Olive says, “Being preoccupied by the war was something like having such a bad cold that you didn’t care what happened in your life.”

Several of the characters turn to violence. Some of them are destroyed by this and some of them repudiate it, but all of them feel guilty about what they did and didn’t do. Trying to make sense of the choices Helen made, Olive asks some questions that haunt the book: “What should she have done — what should I have done — to end the war? What should we have done instead? To say ‘nothing’ would condemn us to complicity.” Mattison never condemns the characters who opt for violence, but in the present-day story, where characters like Jean and Griff work tirelessly to help troubled kids and the homeless, she offers us a compelling alternative. The most interesting character in this regard is Griff, the agnostic son in a long line of New Haven clergymen, whose youthful act of violence changed his life. Unfortunately, we don’t understand as much about his choice as we do about Helen’s although we see the ways in which his life is circumscribed by it. Every decision he makes involves a painstaking consideration of the potential harm it may do to others, which causes some problems with Olive, but Griff’s condemnation of violence allows for no exceptions: “What’s wrong […] is wrong. What is destructive […] [d]estroys.”

From her earliest work, a 1979 poetry collection called Animals, Mattison has been invested in telling women’s stories, giving women space on the page. The female characters in Conscience are part of a long line of women — working women, sexual women, family women, thinking women — whose lives Mattison has lovingly captured and explored. Her portrayal of the men whose lives intersect with the lives of her female characters is usually nuanced and complex; they are sweet, distant, sexy, needy, human. But in Conscience, this isn’t always the case, which has to do, I think, with the character of Olive and the outsized role she plays in the book.

As a young woman, Olive is a little neurotic, the kind of girl who worries about being “liked” by other girls, a “secondary character,” as she once calls herself. Her political activism takes a back seat to Helen’s; her desire for approval eventually leads her to be used and burned by Val. As an adult, Olive is lonely; she feels abandoned by Helen, exhausted by the hard work of carving out a space for her career within the confines of marriage. Mostly, though, she’s angry at Griff, whom she blames for many of her problems, in ways that are sometimes tedious, even absurd. Griff can be a tough character, inexpressive and inflexible, but Mattison never succeeded in convincing me that Olive’s problems are his fault, and he comes off as a passive foil, a stand-in for the traditional inequity of male-female relationships. At a certain point, Olive’s critique of Griff is so egregious that I thought the book was going to be about how she recognizes and addresses this, but Mattison’s sympathies remain firmly with Olive. At the end of the book, when Olive agrees to a kitchen renovation that will create a space where she and Griff can coexist, it’s meant to signal love and acceptance, but it really feels like she’s throwing him some crumbs.

You could argue that Griff gets second billing because he’s a male character in a book about female empowerment, but Griff is also black, one of several black characters in the novel, none of whom have much of a voice, and this disparity becomes increasingly apparent as the novel unfolds. Over the course of her career, Mattison’s work has often been set in the world of social justice, including the Civil Rights movement, but her tendency — the old left’s tendency — to divide the world along the lines of race, gender, and ethnicity (black, Jewish, male, female) doesn’t serve the part of her story that takes place in New Haven in the 21st century.

Underlying the problems between Olive and Griff is the pressing question of how men and women (especially women) can live together with autonomy. Mattison, who places a great deal of value on family and community, can’t quite wrap her mind around it, but the novel hints at an intriguing solution. For years, I was married to an architect who had a theory — a convincing one — that many people’s problems are actually architectural problems, problems that can be resolved with architectural solutions, and I followed the architectural trail in the book eagerly. The repurposed duplex, Olive’s unsuccessful quest for a secluded work space, the third floor of Jean’s shelter that controversially offers “private space” — space to read or think or nap — to homeless people in New Haven. In Conscience, Olive and Griff are trapped in a marriage — and in a house — that doesn’t suit them. Could it be that some couples can’t coexist, at least in the traditional ways that couples have always coexisted in the Western world (another issue the ’60s tried, with limited success, to address)? Besides, Olive is a writer, and most writers, male or female, need solitary conditions to work in, conditions that often clash with family life. Mattison is hesitant to liberate Olive and Griff from a traditional marital structure, one that has created a terrible choice for them — a stifling marriage or an unhappy solitude. But what if that dichotomy were false? What if there was another solution, one that occurs, at one point, to Olive, almost as a joke: bring back the duplex!

In Conscience, Alice Mattison gives us an intimate portrait of the struggles and sacrifices of the men and women who protested against the war in Vietnam, some of whom, for better or worse, put their lives on the line. She also reminds us of what it is to have, and act on, a conscience, what it is to make a choice and accept the consequences. As Olive, trying to explain those difficult times to Zach, says, “The sixties weren’t—’ I didn’t know how to put it. ‘We were serious.’” As a new generation of protestors fights to defend our democracy against a different kind of threat, it’s good to remember the long, successful legacy of protests in this country, important to reflect on the risks and rewards of dissent.

It takes a long time to make sense of things, to paint a full picture of an important moment in history, especially one as fraught as the war in Vietnam, but this is the luxury (and, perhaps, the responsibility) of literature. And it should be applauded when it’s done well, as Mattison mostly does here.

¤

Lisa Fetchko has published essays, fiction, reviews, and translations in a variety of publications including Ploughshares, n+1, AGNI, and Bookforum. She teaches at Mount Saint Mary’s and Orange Coast College.

The post The Old Left: “Conscience” by Alice Mattison appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

from Los Angeles Review of Books https://ift.tt/2Ng168h