The Book Chooses You

Waaaay back in my Catholic school days, one of my Jesuit teachers once told me, "True faith is not blind. It is built on experience. When you receive the same experience again and again, you develop faith that it will continue to happen. Not always when you want, but maybe when you need."

My faith, built on experience, is that books come to you when you need them. They arrive at that perfect moment when you are finally ready for them, but only just barely. Again and again I've had this experience. Someone lends you a book, or you stumble across it at a used bookstore, or it's just sitting on a shelf somewhere and for whatever reason the cover or title jumps out at you and you pick it up and wham it is just what you needed. A couple off the top of my head:

• Free Play by Stephen Nachmanovich, given to me by a mentor, was foundational in shaping my understanding of the creative process.
• The World According to Garp by John Irving, which I picked up at a used book store on a whim, inspired me to quit acting and become a novelist.

I don't usually know it's going to be one of those impactful books right away. There's usually some initial skepticism, perhaps even resistance, followed by a slowly dawning realization that there is some facet of my life that I had simply not been paying attention to until now.

This time was no different. When one of the leaders of our church's Pagan Potluck group handed me a paperback copy of Dreaming the Dark: Magic, Sex, and Politics by Starhawk, initially I was, er...wary. The author name alone was enough to put me on guard. It struck me as both silly and pretentious (and to some degree it still does).

The writing itself is also...not great. Looking at it with the eye of a professional writer, the prose is clunky. Leaden. If I had a time machine, I'd go back to 1982 and give the manuscript a nice brutal line edit. And yes, that was yet another element that made me wary. A book about spirituality from 1982? How dated would it be? How many outmoded or irrelevant ways of thinking would I have to wade through?

And then of course there was the vocabulary. Witches? Magic? Auras? Pop culture associations came unbidden to my mind, and I genuinely wondered if I could take any of this seriously. Did a topic like this really call out to me?

Ah, but there was still that tickle in the back of my mind. Intuition that there was something there for me. It felt the same as when I picked up Gangs of New York by Herbert Ashbury long before I'd even thought of writing Hope and Red. I'd just somehow known it held something I needed.

So I pushed past the clunky prose and my own prejudices and began to read. And what I found was not what I had expected.

Initially I struggled with words like "magic" and "aura". Channeling one's aura to cast spells??? God it felt so hokey! That was, until I read her actual description of the process and...it was an exercise I learned while studying at Carnegie Mellon's acting conservatory program? Every step—the actions, the breathing techniques, the visualization strategies. It was all the same. Only the vocabulary was different.

Which is to say, the method that Starhawk describes for summoning power, channeling one's aura, and casting a spell, is something I have already been practicing for the last thirty years.

Wait, what?

More confused but also more thrilled, I continued to read. And I found such an astonishing overlap between the practice of witchcraft and the creative practice that I realized if I were to replace every instance of the word "witchcraft" with "art" and every instance of "magic" with "creativity" or "inspiration", both the core concepts and the actual methods described within this book have occupied my mind for the entirety of my adult life.

I really struggled with this revelation. It reminded me of when I came out as trans in my early 40s. I've always been trans, of course. It just took me a long time (and a lot of suffering) to realize that fact. Was this somehow similar? Have I been a witch practicing the Craft for decades and just...not realized it?

The notion very destabilizing, so I decided that I needed a sanity check. Specifically, I needed to talk to people who have known me a long time, and whose views of art and creativity are similar to mine. The first was a long time friend and collaborator. The second was one of my earliest and most impactful mentors.