I see this section as being about something arising from the deepest desires of the characters, whether they own these desires or not.

One Halloween night, six friends decide to take a moonlit walk through the woods.

Only five come back.

The sun doesn't disappear. We just can't see it as much as in the height of summer. There is treasure in the void. There is gold in the dark.

A snake isn't worse than a rose if you are looking for a way to kill a character. A jewel isn't better than a tornado if you want to move the action of your story somewhere else.

January, the time of Illusion, and and how to use incident to intensify a current problem for your characters.

An introduction to Ceremony & Story, a podcast about storytelling, narrative structure, and the bone-deep cycles of the universe.

You are going into a state of trance and time just kind of goes and there's this sort of animal channel between the head and the hand and it's wonderful.

How might you figure out a style? You start word by word, page by page, building slowly, incrementally, and intuitively.

You unearth your work like an archaeologist discovers treasures, or a farmer pulls up crops.

In the writing workshop, there is more free association than we admit, and there is more impossibility than the form officially allows.

On Christmas night, a small girl is crowned at a pageant, before stumbling into the snowy darkness, alone, to meet her greatest fan. Set in Rosewood’s forest, the “creeping liquefaction” of the dead produces a fungal harvest that casts a spell on the town. In the endless dark of winter, feral creatures thrive, and psychedelic spores infect the air. The Museum of Atheism, deep below ground, is full of hallucinatory terrors.

The cocoon is not about shame and fear and perfection but it does allow those elements to be held; it contains multitudes. It allows those things to decay and to be renewed. It is miraculous.

No Books Allowed, is a compelling story set in an altered world that explores the flawed reality of our own. her characters are complex and human. Their encounters with tragedy and oppression are written with tenderness and clarity.

Reflections from recent editorial clients.

Recent client publications.

The charge of a banal, homely setting or an idyllic landscape degraded by violence has always held a dark fascination for me. Luminol felt both materially and metaphorically significant as a way to reveal hidden or previous violence even in an ostensibly untroubled location. I wanted to extend this idea out to think about culture (especially US culture), in order to reveal what has been occulted and to illuminate the contemporary United States as a crime scene.

Berg refuses to accept the common view of Stockholm Syndrome as a binary of victim/abuser, and rather portrays Kampusch-as-Bibiana as having agency, even in such constricted circumstances. Berg’s collection offers this small hope, this tiny act of witchcraft in a collection that both reproduces and interrogates patriarchal violence and its necrotizing effect, and the hags/hackers who are revitalizing these dead zones.     

‘You want to pee in a red hood you want to lock yourself inside the house. You want to sleep with the wolf. You want to turn on the oven.’

These everyday objects take on a plastic significance, the ashtray is a repository for waste, and the mingling of the ash with the ‘pink seat’ suggests an uneasy disruption of categories. The used, carcinogenic, ash despoils the homely pink seat.

Rathore’s poem ‘Alison Device (1594-1612), named for a Pendle witch, is a beautiful meditation on mortality and desire. Rathore describes Alison carrying ‘a lamb’s heart/ studded with thorns/ in her left-breast pocket’ and shows her watching ‘her cat harry a neighbour’s rabbit/ tearing it’s stomach first, then/ feasting on the organs inside.’

Hedges, like lawns, are of no use to the witch unless they are overgrown, wild, and generative. She likes to feel overwhelmed, to feel powerless in the presence of unruly vegetation. Hawthorn is a native of this island. To cut its branches is a death sentence, to violate it is to incite supernatural wrath.