I’ve just seen this thread on Twitter, with many lovely kind people replying and offering new bears.
My beautiful boy has lost his favourite thing in the world known simply as Bear. Jack is autistic and this scruffy bear has been his best friend and companion. He is completely devastated and would be so grateful to find him again. Twickenham, Teddington and local area. Pls RT pic.twitter.com/Rv45Cft0s9
— Matt Barnfield (@mattbarnfield1) April 13, 2018
There’s a lovely story in Richard Adams’ folktale anthology The Iron Wolf, called “The Painting of the Birds”. I was reminded of it because today is National Bird Day.
Here’s my retelling of the story.
A story of Old Father Christmas, Joulutonttu, Krampus, and the spreading of the spirit of magic, mystery, and rebellion.
The splash screen image is me doing the voice of Krampus.
Filmed by Bob Houghton, story by Yvonne Aburrow, music by Borrtex (Christmas Eve).
What do Anansi, Raven, Coyote, Pérák, Aradia, the Golem of Prague, Robin Hood, Wild Edric, and Ned Ludd have in common? They are all folk heroes of resistance to tyranny, oppression, slavery, and fascism.
This is part 2 of this story. You probably want to read Part 1: The Gift of Naughtiness, first.
The kids at the fundamentalist bootcamp for LGBT children were slogging through the mud on yet another early morning run. They could see their breath freezing in the wintry air. They were running along the perimeter fence when they saw a glimmer of light through the trees.
Sally, a transgender kid from Oklahoma, nudged her friend Tim in the ribs. “Look – rainbows!” she said.
“Quiet at the back there, Samuel,” called out the youth leader, old-naming Sally.
Tim and Sally slowed to a jog to look at the curious phenomenon of the rainbow glimmers coming down from the sky, twisting and turning on the wind. The glimmers were clearly invisible to the youth leader, who ran on, oblivious.
The other kids started to notice the glimmers too. Gaby, a lesbian from Kentucky, smiled for the first time in weeks. The glimmers flitted about the children’s heads, and finally settled on their tongues. Each child tasted their favourite flavour – sherbet, marshmallow, chocolate, pistachio ice-cream. As they swallowed the delicious magic, they felt a warming, loving feeling inside them. The world was suddenly brighter. The judgmental God they had been told hated them and their kind receded from their minds, and they knew that their way of loving and being was right and good and beautiful.
“A Double Rainbow Halo on June 1, 2014, at 1-57 PM” by BlueHypercane761 – Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Commons.
Now that they had tasted the magic, they could also see the wind-being who brought the magic. The wind-being smiled at them, and ruffled the trees outside the perimeter fence. A shaft of sunlight illuminated a path through the woods.
Later that night, they held a secret meeting in the dormitory.
“We’ve got to escape,” said Tim.
“Too right,” said Gaby. “But how?”
“Weapons of mass distraction,” said Sally.
“I’ve got it,” said Cal, a bisexual boy from Arkansas. “We raid the pharmacy and put drugs in the staff food.”
“There’s enough sedatives in there to knock out a herd of elephants,” said Che (her given name was Charity, but she preferred Che, and had often worn a black beret in honour of the revolutionary leader, before it was confiscated by her right-wing parents).
“What will we do if we actually succeed in escaping?” asked Tim.
“I escaped before,” said Josh, an older kid. “I got caught, but the thing to do is to get onto a long-distance freight train. There’s a railroad track with a junction not that far away. If we can make it to there, we can get onto the freight cars while the train has stopped.”
The next day, the plan went into action just before breakfast, which was when sedatives were normally administered. Sally started overthrowing the tables in the dining room, scattering breakfast trays and cutlery and bowls everywhere. The other kids soon got the idea and joined in. Under cover of this distraction, which had most of the staff trying to calm things down, Che snuck into the pharmacy and stole the sedatives (her father was a pharmacist so she knew the names of the drugs to look for).
The rest of the morning was spent in an emergency prayer and healing session, with the staff laying hands on the kids and trying to exorcise the ‘demons’ that had clearly gotten into them.
The rainbow glimmers of vintage eighteenth century naughtiness were not to be defeated, however. They filled the kids with secret glee, and strengthened their feelings of validation.
The kids were also required to help with chores around the centre, and today Gaby was on kitchen duty. Che slipped her the packets of sedatives just before the duty started at 11:30, and told her what dosage to use.
Tim was in the handicraft workshop with the other boys, and was able to steal a small pair of wire cutters from the tool cupboard.
Back in the kitchen, Miriam, a normally quiet girl from Tennessee, pretended to faint. While the cook was distracted by that, Gaby passed out the packets of sedatives to the other girls, and they quickly put them in the celery soup, but not the tomato soup which most of the kids preferred.
At 12 o’clock, seemingly demure and biddable, the girls served the soup to the staff in the dining room. It wasn’t long before the staff were all slipping into slumber, snoring in their chairs. The kids stole more food from the kitchen, and slipped quietly out of the building. They ran towards the perimeter fence where the glimmers of magic had arrived. Tim cut through the perimeter fence with the wire cutters, and they headed for the path through the woods which had been illuminated by the shaft of sunlight the day before.
“So we have escaped, but now what?” asked Jacob, one of the younger kids, who had not been in on the original plan.
Josh explained about his plan to get on a passing freight train, and about the safe-houses in various more liberal cities, which he had been making for when he got caught and sent back to the bootcamp.
It wasn’t long before they got to the railroad track. As they came out of the trees and into the area beside the track which had been cleared to prevent forest fires, the wind brought them more of the rainbow glimmers. The tiny sparks of joy descended on each child who had not yet received one, and they too knew the happiness experienced by the others.
Che began to sing softly, a song from The Rocky Horror Picture Show. “Don’t dream it, be it…” The other kids soon joined in, even the ones who didn’t know the song.
It wasn’t long before they heard the mournful double hoot of a train in the distance. What met their eyes as the train got nearer was totally unexpected, though: it was a circus train. And riding on the roof of the first carriage was a being of light, dancing for joy to see the effects of his plan. It was Joulutonttu, brought by the wind-spirits to see the joyful sight of the children breaking out of the bootcamp.
As Josh had predicted, the train stopped at the junction. Among the circus folk was Cady, an artiste of high calibre. The circus was not the kind of circus with animals, but the kind with acrobats, and jugglers, and fire-eaters, and dancers. They were on their way from New Orleans to New York. Cady knew immediately where the children had escaped from; he recognised their beige uniforms from the time he had spent at the same bootcamp many years before. He had been experiencing feelings of distress for some time as the train drew nearer to the place. He jumped down from the train.
“Have you escaped from David House?” he asked.
The children were a bit hesitant to answer. They feared that they might get sent back, even now, even with Joulutonttu in plain sight on the roof of the train.
“Of course you have,” said Cady. “Get on board the train, quickly, and let’s get the hell out of here!”
The children clambered onto the train, and were welcomed by the circus people, many of whom had experienced similar sad things in their own childhoods. Tia Estella, the acrobat, found them suitable costumes from the circus’ store of spangly tights and sequinned tops. Sally pirouetted in her new outfit, and sighed happily. Soon the children and the circus people were exchanging stories, sharing food, and working out how the children could be incorporated into the circus performance.
Joulutonttu flitted amongst the passengers, spreading magic and laughter.
Featured image credit: CC BY-SA 3.0 – File:Munich – High trapeze act – 6879.jpg [Wikimedia Commons] Uploaded by Jorgeroyan – Created: 1 January 2007 – Jorge Royan / http://www.royan.com.ar
If you want to know more about kids who escape from fundamentalist bootcamps, I recommend the excellent novel Hidden by Tomas Mournian, who has also made documentaries about these awful places.
You might also like to find out about, and donate to, the excellent organisation Truth Wins Out, which campaigns against “gay conversion therapy”. The executive director, Wayne Besen, recently wrote:
Some people, particularly parents, feel conversion therapy is safe and there is no harm if their child gives it a try. In reality, such rejection of self can be psychologically devastating and leave lasting mental scars that must be undone with real therapy. The single worst decision a parent can make is forcing their child into conversion therapy. Still, a demand often fueled by religious fervor inevitably creates a pool of religious ideologues or greedy practitioners who bilk desperate and vulnerable clients with promises of healing or an elusive cure. This is why conversion therapy must be banned for minors in all 50 states. I urge everyone to get behind such noble efforts that protect teenagers and put conversion con artists out of business.
![Old Father Christmas [CC0, Public Domain]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Claus#/media/File:Santaandgoat.gif)
Old Father Christmas [CC0, Public Domain]
Yuletide was approaching, and the elven helpers of the Yulefather, who goes by many names (Old Father Christmas, Captain Christmas, the Lord of Misrule, Joulupukki, St Nicholas, and other names unknown to humankind) were preparing the magic to send out gifts of magic to human children.
Contrary to popular folklore, it is not the actual Christmas presents that are delivered by the old man with the sleigh, but more intangible gifts: the ability to see magic and mystery in the world; the ability to play, to laugh, to sing, and to be merry.
A sparkling, tangled, constantly shifting and changing cloud of magical energy was forming around Korvatunturi, the magic hill in Finland where Old Father Christmas lives. Occasionally it would get out of control, and the sky over much of the Northern hemisphere would be filled with great sweeping curtains of green and purple light. It is said that Korvatunturi is shaped like an ear, so that Old Father Christmas can hear the wishes of children.
The elves were getting ready to carry the magic to all parts of the Earth when they heard a terrible rumour. The children of North America were being beset with a hideous interloper, designed to crush the curiosity and magic out of children: the Elf on the Shelf. This simpering red impostor would move around the house, keeping an eye on the children’s behaviour, and reporting their behaviour back to “Santa Claus” – a red-clad impostor representing the spirit of consumerism and capitalism, who seeks to supplant Old Father Christmas in human hearts.
When this news reached the ears of Old Father Christmas, he was furious. “That red-clad impostor!” he roared. “That stalker, that peeping Tom! Not content with tormenting children with his voyeuristic tendencies, now he sends his minions out to do it! That is the final dollop of reindeer poop! It’s war.”
The elves all cheered wildly. At last they would see off those horrible impostors, the Elfs on the Shelf. For of course, a real elf doesn’t have a simpering expression and a little red suit. A real elf is a lithe wisp of energy, and can manifest in many different forms, so the elves were deeply offended at these interlopers, and worried that human children would stop believing in elves and faeries as a consequence of these caricatures.
Joulutonttu was the youngest elf – the one all the others regarded as a bit flighty and irresponsible. He decided to do something special to prove himself to the others. He would liberate human children from those little red monsters once and for all.
He went into the restricted section of Old Father Christmas’s library of magical tomes. He clearly needed something special. He worked his way through several tomes, getting quite dusty and cobwebby in the process. The stack of discarded volumes grew bigger: the section of the Kalevala dealing with the forging of the Sampo was stacked regretfully on the discard pile along with several long-lost grimoires that human magicians would dearly love to get their hands on.
At last he gave up on the library, and wandered off in search of Krampus – who, contrary to popular belief, rewards children for having an independent spirit and not being blindly obedient. He wandered all around the underground caverns of Korvatunturi, where the elves were hard at work massaging the dollops of magic and mystery into manageable packages which could be sent along the ancient trackways through the forests. Finally he found Krampus in the observatory on the peak of Korvatunturi.
“I don’t like it,” muttered Krampus to himself. “Those children are getting forgetful of the old magic. Not enough freedom to wander about and find things out for themselves, I reckon.”
Joulutonttu waited patiently while Krampus finished his observations.
“Ah, hello there, small elf,” said Krampus, looking over the spectacles on the end of his nose.
“Hello, Krampus,” said Joulutonntu. “I was looking for a way to save the human children from those horrible Elfs on the Shelf. I was thinking you might have an idea.”
“There are indeed some disturbing currents in the magic,” said Krampus. “The humans are too cruel, too greedy, too focussed on things. Most of them don’t care about the old ways any more. Those Elfs on the Shelf are a manifestation of their overwhelming desire to control everything.”
“But surely the children still have a tiny spark of magic?” asked Joulutonttu.
“Some of them do,” said Krampus. “But I believe I might have just the thing. Come with me.” He got up from behind the vast array of brass telescopes, finely calibrated sensors equipped with red feathers for measuring kindness and justice levels (many indicated critically low levels of either), and stomped off towards the door. Joulutonttu half-ran, half-flitted along behind him.
They walked down many winding stairs, through ornately carved doors, down into the deep caverns below Korvatunturi. They went through three doors bound with wrought-iron sigils (something of a trial for Joulutonttu, as elves hate iron), which had signs written in Runic, Old Gothic, and Finnish reading “High energy magic area – enter at your own risk”.
Finally, behind the last door, Joulutonttu beheld a vast cauldron full of shimmering, twisting energy, constantly changing colour from purple to green to blue. “What is it?” he asked.
“This, my friend, is pure vintage eighteenth-century naughtiness,” said Krampus. “The finest distilled essence of the childhood naughtiness of revolutionaries, the Luddites, William Blake, the Romantic poets, the Lunar Men, the early feminists – their moments of rebellion, their high-spirited games, their visions, and their flights of fancy.”
“Are we going to release this into the wild?” asked Joulutonttu excitedly.
“That’s exactly what we will do,” said Krampus. “Humans need a wake-up call – they are sleepwalking into an apocalypse on a tide of consumerism. This ought to stir things up a bit.”
“How do we release it?” asked Joulutonttu. “And how do we know it will get to the right children?”
“Ah, that’s the clever part,” said Krampus. “Each of these wisps of naughtiness will waft around on the winds until they find the human heart that will make a warm and welcoming nest for them – and then they will make that heart glow with merry wildness.”
“Let’s get to work!” said Joulutonttu.
So they carefully carried the cauldron up to the topmost peak of Korvatunturi. They summoned the spirits of the four winds, Dáinn, Dvalinn, Duneyrr and Durathrór.
“But it’s not Yule yet,” protested Dvalinn. “Why have you summoned us?” So Krampus and Joulutonttu explained what they wanted.
The four winds sniffed the contents of the cauldron appreciatively. “Ah, haven’t smelt naughtiness like that in many a long year,” said Durathrór. “It takes me right back to the Luddite rebellion, that. Heady days.”
“Oh yes,” agreed Duneyrr. “This is no ordinary naughtiness – this is the true spirit of freedom and creativity. Almost Promethean, that is.”
“Oh yes, Prometheus. They don’t make ‘em like that any more,” said Dáinn.
The winds agreed to carry the glimmers of naughtiness to everywhere they were needed, and soon the sky was full of many-coloured glittering threads, like sparks being carried aloft from a bonfire.
If you see a tiny wisp of light, perhaps out of the corner of your eye, it might be one of those very special glimmers – and maybe it’s just for you. So open your heart and hope that it makes its nest there.
Update: Part 2 of this story, The Taste of Magic, is now published.
What if Planned Parenthood is defunded and shut down– where should women and men go for the other 97% of funded services PP currently provides?
What if we notice a dropped stitch? What if we don’t?
What if Persephone eats that pomegranate on purpose?
What if we’re all more genderfluid than we admit?
What if sexuality isn’t a wound?
What if the nuclear family is not the only available model? What if it isn’t the best?
What if Black lives matter?
What if a question mark is a fish hook?
What if abortion is allowed to be an ambivalent and uneasy act, safe and legal?
What if women live into their sexualities as a source of power with, not power over?
What if men do that too?
What if you could say how unhappy you are?
What if a woman’s voice is the tree falling in the forest?
What if women’s voices weave another forest?
Epistemology of Mother, A Cloud of Permeable or #PinkOut
Wendy Vardaman and Sarah Sadie
Few topics have stirred as much passionate response
now there is a plank in the platform of the Republican party denying any place
in the short time I’ve belonged to this listserv as the one that exploded over the seemingly innocuous color pink, and
for abortion even in cases of rape or incest. This feels like the final thundering chord (although I know
although I didn’t join the discussion, I, too, feel strongly about the subject. Reading the posts on the color
it’s not—there is so much more they could try to do, try to take from us) of their grand crescendo,
and its associations—Cinderella, Barbies, stickers,
building for a year now. A year when
I was surprised by the emotional and political
terms such as “birth control”
connotations it carries
“sluts” “vaginal ultrasounds” “vaginas” have been bandied about
for so many of us and disturbed by the way
we debate the difference between “legitimate” and “forcible” as applied to
pink got tossed back and forth as if it were some uniform monolith
the act of rape.
when a moment’s reflection serves to demonstrate this obvious fact: pink is not one color.
What other qualifiers shall we hear?
My pinks are mostly dark, vivid, intense, like the other hues that fill the house of a recovering depressive
At last now we have it out: all abortion, any abortion, is never to be condoned, never to be pardoned,
avoiding medication. Color like exercise gives me a lift, so I have it everywhere and in unlikely combinations
never to be considered and never to be allowed. All of this has me walking in a cloud of permeable
that would probably overwhelm many people. Pink in multiple manifestations happens to be a favorite,
sadness, like a mist. It plunges me back to a time a few years ago
although I don’t like the pale variety by itself, any more than large doses of other pastels. I do feel nostalgic
when these questions were live for me on a very personal level. One summer evening, blue sky endless,
looking at 1960s’ hot pink—my mother wouldn’t paint my bedroom that color decades ago,
my husband and I were out for a neighborhood walk. It was
attempting to satisfy me with a bright pink velvet pillow for my orange bedspread. Years later I painted
the sort of weather, the sort of evening, that draws people out of their homes and out into their yards
my dining room an intense sockeye-salmon swirled with orange, a nod to the years my husband and I lived
and the streets and sidewalks. I don’t remember what we were talking about, but
in Seattle, and saved my favorite deep pink for the kitchen,
for a number of days I had been wrestling with
patterning walls and cabinets with combinations of
difficult questions. Finally, I turned to him in the middle of the
fuchsia, yellow, lavender and deep red-violet. Dabbling in textiles I’ve paired pink with navy and turquoise, and
sidewalk, stopped for a moment, and said “I have come to a decision. If I ever were to get
lavender, blue, and red in hand-woven table-runners. I’ve sewn curtains, pillow covers, and clothes that include its different shades and echo those
pregnant again, I would abort the baby.” And then I broke down crying, there on the street.
in my great-grandmothers’ quilts hanging on the living room walls.
This piece was written in collaboration with my colleague and friend, Wendy Vardaman. I am so grateful for her ideas, her example and her friendship.
My daughter wrote me a poem for Mother’s Day:
Mom, I love you the blackest!
I love you the color of a mystery cave.
I love you the color of a blackbird singing its territory.
A summer midnight.
A bat’s wings.
And an evening talk with no meaning.
(Yes, I’m proud.)
“You really describe black so people can feel how bright and beautiful it is,” I told her.
“I know,” she said with rapture in her voice. “Isn’t black wonderful?” And it’s true. She has always loved black. When she was two she took her black crayola marker and (re) colored our living room couch (usually sage green) black. She was very proud.
The next day after school she came back and said to me, “No one understands about black.”
“You can help them understand,” I told her. “By writing poems and stories. By making art. You can share your thoughts about how warm and comforting, how strong and glorious black is.”
One of the tropes I am most tired of is the binary opposition of “light/good/white” versus “dark/bad/black.” This is everywhere in our language and culture, and especially deeply entrenched when we talk about religion, soul, spirit, knowledge and wisdom.
Darkness nurtures the seed, the babe. The dark nests us all when we sleep. Dark allows us space to mourn, and also space to grow, to change, to cast off an old skin and try on a new. Night is the nurturing mother of us all.
Light without dark is the intolerable bright glare of torture and interrogation. We need our shadows. We need the dark. We need black.
And those of us who are makers, writers, story tellers, artists, songwriters and creatives of all stripes, we have a responsibility to help our culture(s) rethink this binary. We need to find a way to embrace black, and the trope of darkness. We need to remember—and to say, repeatedly—that light (and white) is not always good and beneficent.
This is not about race.
This is about race.
I just got back a week ago from AWP (Association of Writers and Writing Programs)’s annual conference. (You can check out the action at Twitter. Search on #AWP15) The Minneapolis hotel didn’t run out of alcohol (that has happened in the past) but they did have a run on the tabouleh in the first 24 hours. Well, with approximately 15,000 writers in town, you’re going to run out of something.
Maybe there’s something about being (lost) among that sea of writers that has me thinking about the Hero’s Journey. I could have used a clever animal sidekick or a pair of magic scissors or something. Or maybe it’s just another way for me to think about shaping this story I’m always trying to write. Or this life I’m trying to live. Living the life, writing the book…same project, as far as I can tell. 
Joseph Campbell picked up where Jung left off and got us all thinking of the Hero’s Quest or Journey as an archetypal form we could overlay onto our own lives. He outlined the steps of the Journey. I’ve seen it stated slightly differently in different places, but here is one model:
Wikipedia tells me Campbell borrowed Joyce’s term “monomyth” for this. And like monotheism, the “monomyth” has a pronoun problem. Campbell wasn’t so great on the wimminfolk, as you can tell from the above steps. The Hero for him was always a boy or man. True love is represented by “the Goddess,” and tempation likewise takes the figure of a woman. Towards the end of his career (I read this anecdote from The Sound of a Silver Horn, by Kathleen Noble—a great book on women and the Hero’s Journey for anyone interested), a young woman asked him in class, “What about women?” Campbell answered, “Women are the Mother, the Goddess, the Beloved…what more do you want?” “I want to go on an adventure,” she said. “I’m glad I’m retiring,” was his reply.
Freya, by Igor Alexis Osorio Solis
Let’s diversify the Journey.
What if the Hero is not an outcast? What if she is enmeshed in her community at the start of the story? What launches her out of her comfort zone and onto the Path? Is there an archetypal moment of rejection, and would this come from within or from without? Or is she just bored? Is that enough? What if she has children? What if she has an older relative she’s taking care of? What if she is the head of the PTO?
And what happens to her at the end? A wise man may be a king. A wise woman is almost always a witch. Mind you, I’m down with that. A woman (anyone) who listens to a wilder song and has truly gained wisdom from that will not be welcome back into a community structured by patriarchy. This is why the witch lives at the edge of town, or deep in the woods. This is an essential difference which does not have to be gender specific.
Stretching our imaginations to re-vision the Hero’s Journey is helpful to writers as we think about plots…but larger than that, if the Journey is an archetype we all may follow in how we think about and understand our lives, there needs to be a diversity of possible paths. Not everyone wants to be king. Not everyone wants to end up married and happily ever after.
If we follow Jungian thought, archetypally, a “king” has been understood to represent someone who is healthily centered, who has embraced their own shadow and is able to rule themselves wisely. Maybe a “witch” is someone who purposefully and deliberately uncenters. Who pushes into the margins, the boundaries, who camps on the edge. Who insists there is still, ever, much of the self she doesn’t yet know.
What would it be to be both?
All my thinking is aswim. What stories can we tell? 
I suppose, if I want to be orderly about this, I should outline the reasons I took an extended leave first.
But I don’t want to be orderly…
I’m sure I don’t remember them all…
Maybe I wasn’t even there at the time…
So I’m skipping ahead to what brought me back to this space. We’ll fill in the backstory another time.
One…
A nice thing happened this week—Junoesq, an online magazine from Singapore, published this interview with me, along with
a handful of
new poems (one of which, “Small But Real,” was inspired by conversation with Niki Whiting of Witch’s Ashram). The compliment was welcome. This year I’ve wondered deeply about the worth of my own voice—others speak so much more immediately and profoundly to current events and crises.
But…Junoesq’s editor, Grace Chia, reached out to me for the interview after I sent her a few poems out of the blue. They struck an immediate chord with her, as another writer trying to balance motherhood, profession, the nature of a literary calling, and public vs. private persona. Halfway around the world, and yet…same old, same old story. Sigh.
Two…
And then, checking out the 1988 book Sacred Dimensions of Women’s Experience, edited by Elizabeth Dodson Gray, I’m struck by how many things have not changed. Women (and men) still struggle to place value on domesticity. We still struggle to love our bodies as they age, thicken, change. We still struggle to insist that our lives have worth, as individuals, as women, no matter our work, our size, our appearance, our voice, or the money we make (or do not make).
So—yes, there are many radical and beloved and ferocious warriors whose voices I treasure above my own. And that doesn’t absolve me from writing my truth. Both. And.
Three…
Then, too, I’m writing a novel. Trying to. Daring myself. This is a new adventure and it has me thinking about different kinds of writing, what they are useful for, how they work. Poetry vs. prose. Fiction vs. nonfiction. Where are the fissures and faultlines between “fact” and “truth.” As I work along on my fictional endeavor, it brings me back to this blog. Blogging is even another form of writing, after all, which I have only begun to explore. Writing in here offers its own strengths, its own opportunities.
Four…
Did I mention I’m working on a novel? At least partly because of one book: The Priestess and the Pen. “Give me blood and magic,” author Sonja Sadovsky writes in the opening pages. I have to agree. In this space, I don’t have to pretend the blood isn’t real. I don’t have to apologize for the term “magic.” No animals will be harmed in the writing of this column, I promise—although I make a special exception for mosquitoes. (Bonus: Jason Mankey interviews Sadovsky at Raise the Horns!)
Five…
A fox showed up in our backyard the other day. I want to find a place once again among people who know 1) the fox doesn’t care about my work and 2) the fox is telling me to get cracking.
So here I am, returned. As Sadovsky writes:
Ultimately, the woman with the sword is the woman with the pen; the one who wields it creates her reality.
I took the time I needed. And I remembered that for me, the answer is almost always both/and. Yes.
The question is courage.
