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.

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.

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.’

You can use this space to create, adapt, and record your own writing rituals. This can become the container for all of your rituals, devotions, and divinations, and a space to process what your subtle body is experiencing when you generate, edit, and share creative work.

You can work with this ritual to come back to creative centre whenever you are feeling blocked. All you need is a cosy spot and a notebook, audio recorder, or document, and the ritual will help you to create your own spell to carry with you.

Casting a spell is a combination of ritual and will. The ritual supports the magic, and that is why it is necessary to use specific herbs, objects, incantations, tools, and so on. But without the concentrated force of will, the spell will be hollow and ineffective.

A sigil is a powerful symbolic representation of your magical will. Traditionally, a sigil might be a pictorial symbol, a runic image, or a shape. A sigil can be anything that clearly signals your intention to your unconscious that you are performing a powerful, magical act.

Intuition and divination are key to practical magic. The individual magician’s intuition will dictate the results of their magic, even if they follow precisely the same rituals as someone else.

Witchy writers know that this is true for their writing, too. They are open to channelling cosmic messaging, and they never look to others’ external results to dictate their own work.

Writing is an act of devotion, the same as any other magical practice.

The work of writing is as integral to their lives as any other form of ritual, ceremony, or prayer, and their devotion produces magical results in their writing.