The Writing Magic Walk

Transcript of Helen Sword’s podcast episode The Writing Magic Walk

Hi, I'm Helen Sword from HelenSword.com, and this is Swordswings, my podcast series for writers in motion. Whether you're out walking, driving, on a train or a bus, or just pottering around in your kitchen, this recording will help you move yourself and your writing to someplace new. For today's podcast episode, we're talking about magic.

What exactly is magic, and why do we need it in our writing? How can we integrate magic into our creative process? Margie Thomas, founder of ScholarShape, joined me in 2021 for a conversation exploring the role of magical practices, such as tarot and astrology, in scholarly writing. These practices can help us develop more creative and intuitive ways of writing and guide us through the messy process of bringing new ideas into the world.

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Helen: Margy, Welcome!

Margy: Wonderful to be with you all.

Helen: Wonderful. Well, I've been starting most of these special events by asking my guests. It's to begin with what I call an intellectual autobiography, though you don't have to keep it intellectual if you don't want to, but it's sort of how you got to where you are in the writing space.

Margy: Sure, sure. So I guess the maybe conventional academic way to tell the story would be that I went to grad school, earned a PhD in literature, I studied genre. My fascination is how texts are put together and how the structures of texts and the shared features across families of texts contribute to their meaning.

You know, how do authors use genre in creating texts, how do readers use genre in interpreting texts, how do genres evolve over time? For this context, it feels relevant to say that … My, I would say that my entire life, I've been a deeply spiritual person, even though there've been years at a time when I haven't engaged with it.

You know, I was the kind of child who loved to talk to God. I didn't know who God was or where God was, but that was always a part of my reality. And so then what's happened over the last few years in developing Scholarshape is I've come to realize that was really the missing ingredient to all of the intellectual support I was giving people.

It's like, wait, we can talk all about, metaphorically speaking, the math behind how you engineer work of scholarship but it's really the spirit of the scholar infusing that work that makes it really powerful and fascinating. So, yes, it's been a fascinating journey over the past two years of bringing together my spiritual self and my intellectual self and that's really where the scholar magic material comes in and emerged from.

Helen: It's so interesting. You have, well, the intellectual side of me ticking over, but, as you know, I've done work on the behavioral, artisanal, social, and emotional aspects of writing. That was my writing BASE for my last book. Now I'm working on the writing space. So we're adding to that social and emotional, we're adding the physical, the aesthetic, the creative.

And so I find myself thinking a lot about mind and body and, I guess, heart—as in connections to other people. I realized that where I haven't gone yet, and maybe outside my comfort zone a bit, is what you're calling the spiritual, you know, or this more sort of existential connection, which is yet another way of thinking about it.

Expanding our intellectual constructs that are so powerful, particularly for those of us working in academic modes. So I'm gonna, I'm going to be learning a lot from this here. And yeah, can you talk about that a little bit more?

Margy: Well, the whole idea is… I'm a big believer in generative structure, as you know. It’s obvious from everything we've said so far. I believe that being in a space that is just the right shape and size with just the right thing to focus on can unlock your creative power. And I'm someone who hates having structure imposed on me but when I find myself in just the right structure, I am so inspired.

Actually, okay, I think a concrete inspiration for Scholar Shape the Incubator is actually my son's preschool classroom. Because I remember the feeling I would always get when I would drop him off, this little two year old, he's eight now, but I just felt immediate peace and attention and focus. The classrooms are beautifully arranged in an orderly way that's not like oppressively orderly. Anyway, I just remember getting this idea: what if there were a Montessori preschool for grown-ups, scholars?

Helen: Yeah, and of course, we talked about this in our conversation about structure, how both of us, I think, are obsessed with structure as a means of creating a space for creativity, flow, what you're calling now magic…So the structure is not there to impede or to put people in boxes. It's more like a scaffolding that allows people to build something really up their own.

Yeah, and it's full of riches, I can say. But now it seems Scholarshape is changing because you're explicitly bringing magic into it. So can you define what you mean by magic?

Margy: So, okay. A lot of us, when we hear the word magic, we tend to think of something fictional or imaginary, like it's something that you see in children's movies or fairy tales, or you see someone perform an imitation of it on a stage in card tricks or whatever.

When I say magic, I'm referring to something real that literally exists. I'm just going to say it. I'm not going to apologize. You signed up to come to a thing called scholar magic. [laughs] So…and so I'm referring to an ancient practice, an ancient form of knowing an ancient way of understanding and engaging with the universe that's taken on many, many different forms across cultures, across millennia.

It's gone through periods of being repressed or forgotten or denigrated and periods of resurgence. And so it's this vast, you know, diverse, impossible to summarize way of being. It's older than science. It's older than religion, and I believe it will outlast them all. But as sort of a concrete way of pinpointing a way of thinking and talking about magic in 2021, particularly in the context of what we're talking about, which is the loop and expressing knowledge on the page.

I like to think of magic in terms of four simple principles. And you can remember them because it's a four, a three, a two, and a one. Okay, so in a magical life, in a magical worldview, we cultivate awareness of and alignment with four key concepts about the universe.

The first is what we call the four classical elements. Okay. So in modern science, we have lots of ways of describing what the universe is made up of, you know, we have the periodic table, we have the atomic model and all these different things, and those are all valid and relevant. And I'm not dismissing them, but in the ancient world, we had this way of understanding the universe in terms of earth, fire, water, and air, which still holds some explanatory power for explaining the nature of the materials that we work with.

You know, we have liquids, solids, and gases—like differences in temperature and differences in energetic qualities of different things. And I mean, of course this makes sense at kind of a physical level in our environment, but also kind of metaphorically, we use language associated with these four elements in describing the qualities of things.

Helen: Right. “Being grounded.”

Margy: Exactly. Or “on fire for a cause”. Or a sort of “airy argument” or something.
And so we can unpack any of these. We can unpack any of that in whatever level of detail you want. Any of you who practice tarot or astrology will be familiar with these four elements because they're the basis of many astrological systems, as well as the tarot deck, which is a common form of divination done with a deck of cards.

Helen: I'll just pop in and say I worked at one point with a speech coach who used those to talk about the voice. And so she talked about needing to be grounded. She talked about the water element as being some kind of deep emotional thing happening sort of in the gut. She talked about fire as being the sort of charisma, the eye contact using your hands, that sort of thing.

And then of course the air is this column that you need to be able to bring in, bring out. The breath is so important as part of that. And so she told me, for example, she said, “You've got plenty of fire as a speaker.” I know how to make eye contact. You know, some people are very shy about that. And that's the first thing they need to learn.

I was fine on the fire, but learning to ground myself, to speak more deeply for a start, but also speak more slowly and with more authority, which felt very unnatural to my fiery self. And, yeah, it was really interesting and useful. So just, An example of that.

Margy: Yes, that's a perfect example because we see these four elements comprise our bodies too. So yeah, that's a perfect illustration of that. And now I'd be curious to look at your natal chart and see how much fire is in your chart. So, anyone who's into astrology…. Oh man, I just don't want to go down a rabbit hole! I'll resist.
Different people, you know, we all know that people have different personalities, different temperaments, different tendencies, different behavior patterns, and for people who find explanatory power in astrology, we can often see there's a reflection of that. I have everything but earth in my chart and you see that in the way that my ideas are all over the place and heart and all that. So anyway, there's a lot of directions we could go with exploring the four classical elements. If you're curious to explore that more. Tarot and astrology—go down either of those rabbit holes for all eternity and you'll discover lots there.

So our principle of three. We just talked about the elements that comprise the universe. You know, we talked about them in a static way. Things are made up of these elements, but we also have processes of transformation. The universe is continually unfolding creation. Whatever your view is of how the universe got here, whether there was a moment of creation, I think we can all agree that there is some sense in which creation is constantly unfolding, the universe is constantly recreating itself. So principle 3 is the three phases of transformation that define these cycles of continual unfolding. They are beginning, middle, and end. And this is how we, as humans, create stories.

What makes a story is that it has a beginning, middle, and end. Another way to think about the three phases in terms of magic is intention, manifestation, and revision. So we see this three-part cycle of transformation. In magic, like I just said, we see it in stories. And we also see it in the lunar cycle. I just took the Scholarshapers through a month-long lunar writing cycle, where we went from the intention to the manifestation to the revision as the moon waxed and waned. We see it in the growth and decay of plants. We see it all over. And once you're looking for it, you notice it more and more.

And it's really cool because the more we notice, the more we pay attention to, the more we can naturally align with the elements and the cycles of unfolding in the universe.

The principle of two is duality. The fact that we can make sense of our reality by separating things by identifying things as one thing and not another. And we see this principle reflected in the fact that the simplest computer communication is binary code, right? Any communication can be reduced to zeros and ones, like the founder of, basically.

Yeah. So duality. The concept or the principle of duality is what enables us to make sense. All sense making is built on that. So, you know, we have self and other, we have order and chaos, and we have story and argument.

Anyone who creates knowledge products based on data is probably going to be thinking a lot about storytelling and argumentation because those are the modes of meaning-making that you use to communicate whatever idea it is that you're trying to communicate. Distilling from the data or information that fills your knowledge product.

So that's the four, the three, the two….and then principle one is simply unity. I don't want to speak for everyone, but I think many of us have a yearning for coherence, a yearning for transcendence, a yearning for unification, a yearning for a sense of how things fit together. This is the impulse that drives the writing process for many of us.

Anyone who writes in thesis-based genres is seeking unity because you're looking for one sentence or one paragraph that holds together the entire essay or the entire book or whatever it is that you're writing. So, as far as this big, giant, complicated concept of magic goes, we have a million possible ways to define it.

You're welcome to just take my definition if you want and remember these four concepts:
- The four classical elements
- The three phases of transformation
- The two-sided duality that enables us to make sense and meaning,
- And the one unity, or desire for unity, that draws us toward an attempt at coherence.

Helen: Wonderful. When you were talking about duality, I was thinking, as I'm sure many people were, yin and yang, and the sign where the two are kind of nested in each other, the black and the white, but they have that little dot of its opposite inside it. So when we think dualistically of things being either one thing or the other thing, there's always this drop of otherness in there as well.

Margy: Yeah, yeah.

Helen: Dualistic models get quite interesting. I've realized a lot of my writing, and I suppose my interest in modernist poetry, which was my kind of disciplinary home, is about the in-between spaces, you know, sort of the wetlands of the dualistic model. So that's maybe another way of framing up some of these things.
All right. So we've got magic in the universe. Can you give us that in a sentence?

Margy: Oh, okay. So I think the one-sentence version that I'm zeroing in on is that magic is, in writing or anywhere in life, magic is conscious participation in the unfolding of the universe.

Helen: That's it. I knew you had it.

Margy: And that's why they're, and that's the value that we can find in paying attention to the elements and the cycles and the dualities and the urge for unity. Because the closer attention we pay, it's like we're honing our intuition. Our intuition is our deep, deep knowing underneath and beyond our intellectual, rational minds.

Our rational minds are super powerful and amazing and wonderful and we don't want to override them, but our intuition and our imagination can reach beyond them. And it can help us gather and refine what our intellects are doing and help us imagine the next question to ask. Cultivating magic in our lives strengthens our intuition and our imagination so that they can better enhance and supplement the work of our rational minds, our intellects. That's how I see it.

Helen: Yeah. So, two concrete examples of that that I've seen you using with the Scholarshape community: One is that every month you put out a theme for the month based on a tarot draw that you've done. Is that right? Sort of at the end of the previous year you pulled the 12 cards and then from each of those cards, you kind of pull a theme, don't you?

They're not the cards themselves. I don't know a whole lot about tarot beyond what I've read through your newsletters, but the sense I get is that when you say ‘our theme this week, this month is structure’ or ‘is transformation’ or whatever you're getting that from a tarot card. And that tarot card has a lot of different things going on in it and could be given one of many different themes. And you've sort of chosen one that's relevant to writing. And then you show us a card from your favorite deck, and then you show us cards from other decks, which I find fascinating because it shows the interpretive range that tarot card makers have used. And then you tell us how those themes might be something we could think about in our own writing that month.

So that's the structure of it. Would you mind thinking of a recent one? Since you presumably have these somewhat in your head still. One where you might tell us what the card was, what the theme was, and how you would envisage a writer over the course of a month using that theme to hone intuition in your language.

Margy: Yeah. Okay. So actually lucky for you all, this is the first deck I ever bought. I have it right here. I bought it, like, before I knew anything. I'm just gonna say it, it's embarrassing. Actually, I'm not gonna be embarrassed, everyone starts somewhere! Literally, the idea of tarot popped in my head. This happens to me, I just get these random inspirations, I don't even know where it came from. I' thought ‘I need a tarot deck right now.’ This was probably about four years ago. So I didn't know what to do, I just drove to Barnes Noble, and I bought their basic deck and a book called Tarot for Dummies.

That's how I got started, Tarot for Dummies. But, so just really briefly, Tarot is a deck of 78 cards—I could go on and on about the structure of it and the symbolism, it's so fascinating, but the basic idea is that the 78 cards somehow represent all aspects of human experience, all the laws of nature, all the workings of the universe and human life, all in these 78 images.

And each card has a name and a place within the larger system. So theoretically, anyone could apply tarot anywhere in life. So there's nothing like amazing and revolutionary about the fact that I would apply it to writing, but it's been a fascinating intellectual exercise to have the monthly card and then train my mind to try to laser focus, to translate what this card means for a writer or a scholar in this moment in very, very practical terms. And what are some actual writing prompts I can give people based on this? Ooh All right. I'll share a challenging example. This was a really hard one to do. So for last April, I don't know if you remember Helen, our card was the five of coins, which is a really difficult card. It's very depressing. These people staggering through the snow in rags without enough. It's a card of poverty and lack and loss.

Helen: And I'm just like April 2020!

Margy: Oh yeah. April 2020 was the five of cups, which is like a figure spilling cups looking really sad. So it's a little scary how accurate it is…I find it to be scary accurate. But anyway, so for April 2021, I thought ‘okay, every card has a million different webs of meaning.’ And I knew I didn't want to just instantly go to the negative meaning and tell everyone ‘Well, just trudge through the month. It's going to be depressing.’ So, I really sat with it, really sat with it. And I studied some other interpretations. The coins, the pentacles, they're associated with the element of earth, which is physicality and materiality. A pentagram, you know, the star, one of its major representations is the human form. So essentially the direction I went with it is the kind of ritual magic angle. Like how within a magic circle we can center ourselves, regardless of what's happening around us, we are always at the center of a circle.

Helen: Right, so your theme was center. I do remember that one.

Margy: The theme was center, yeah, and so then I went all off on like the imagery of the circle, and I managed to rescue that difficult card, and no one would have ever even known (hopefully!) that it was a super difficult card.

Helen: I love the way you talk about this and I love reading what you write because you're such a beautiful writer. I'm thinking that actually, I see a book in your future, Margy! Where it's every one of those cards and you've just gone through and done what you do every month in Scholarshape. I think a lot of us, if we're not familiar with these systems and this kind of magical universe, we think, ‘oh, this is, this is fortune telling, it's putting us in a box, it's telling us this is who we are, where we are’, you know? And that's probably something that many of us, especially those with Western individualism, resist. But you're showing how actually it's a doorway into a whole bunch of possible interpretations that immediately get your creative thinking going.

And so you have to, in fact, be quite inventive to figure out how this very concrete card, but with these abstract symbols embedded in it, is going to connect over to the work of writing. And it seems like how you interpret any one of those cards is probably going to depend on where you're thinking is that month or that year as well.

So you could conceivably have done something completely different with that five of coins, couldn't you? Or another person might have taken it and done something completely different in connection with their own writing. So, what I love is the way that you use these tools to open up possibilities, not to shut them down, which is probably a resistance that some people would have to magical systems.

So let's talk about astrology because tarot… I think because I'm quite a visual thinker, I can see ‘Oh, it's this gorgeous card, cool symbolic stuff's happening here!’ You know, I can get into that. I can see the appeal of it and I probably need Tarot for Dummies to talk through it, but I can see the appeal. I could see myself in another universe (where I have a whole lot more free time) getting quite obsessed with that. But astrology, that one, I feel much more of a resistance. Well, my husband's a historian of science, right? I know about the processions and the fact that, you know, what used to be Gemini in being, if you were born in June, actually Gemini is some completely different month of the year now, because it shifts every year.

My rational scientific brain comes in and says, ‘there is no way that my fate, my personality, any of this stuff is in any way mandated, influenced, or affected by the movement of the stars and the planets.’ I just have trouble buying that. And yet, when you talked us through the lunation cycle over this last month, I felt that same generative kind of magic happening where you were just unpacking these really rich symbols in ways that helped us think about our writing on that particular day without necessarily having to have any core belief in the system.

So can we turn to astrology and hear about maybe first of all, what was your awakening equivalent with that? Where are you personally with astrology? But then how do you see astrology as a path into writing?

Margy: So I came to astrology through tarot, which I think is the path for a lot of people because some decks especially incorporate a lot of astrological symbols.

There's a real affinity between the two systems. People tend to specialize in one or the other, but they're related enough that if you're going to get deep into one, you'll probably learn a little bit about the other. But I started off exactly like you, Helen, just like, ‘what? I love far-fetched things, but even that sounds too far-fetched for me!’

So initially, what got me curious to learn about it was, to me, it is just a really powerful example of the human power of meaning-making. The fact that for thousands of years, humans would study these distant celestial bodies and project all of these meanings onto them. They are like really deep, rich, complicated meanings. The further you get into it, the more you think ‘you could fill libraries upon libraries upon libraries!’

But here's one just really simple concrete example of how I think astrology can be practically useful, even if you put no stock whatsoever. So I guess that the general concept underlying it, if you do see an explanatory power in astrology, is the concept of as above so below. You know, if the universe is microcosmic, if the moon can move the ocean tides, and our bodies are 70% water, you know, it's not actually that far-fetched to think that, in theory, they could have some effect on our bodies. But who knows.

Helen: I don’t have too much trouble with the idea that the moon has an effect on the tides, but it's a little harder…

Margy: Yeah, but you don't even have to go there at all with your thinking on astrology to treat the celestial movements as cosmic writing prompts. So one example is, you know, when Mercury appears to move backward in the sky, we say ‘Mercury is retrograde’ and it happens several times a year. It always happens in a particular constellation. And so what astrologers say is when Mercury goes retrograde, that's when you review that area of your life. You go over that area of your life with a fine toothcomb. Check for mistakes, double-cross all your T's, and dot your eyes; that's just good human practice.

Helen: So I think of those little astrology columns in the newspaper, right? And you read them, and you think these are all so generic that could sort of apply to anyone, or you could almost always read yours and find some way that you can make it connect. And then you go, ‘Oh, look, it connected!’ But then you go over and you read one for a completely different sign of the Zodiac. And actually, that one seems relevant, too. And so the cynical part of me goes, ‘Oh, well, these are people who are trained in writing things so generically that everything will apply to everyone.’ But I think what I hear you saying is that being able to think in those more almost universal symbolic ways just gives us access to a wider range of writing prompts.

And maybe it doesn't matter if we're choosing and pulling or how we do it. The point is that the, I guess you could almost say the wisdom of the ages is giving us a lot of possible symbols and a lot of ways of seeing the world that maybe we're not very open to. Particularly in scholarly and professional writing, they've been sort of shut down to this. Would that be sort of right?

Margy: Yeah, yeah, I think so.

Helen: But I'm thinking now, you know, a ‘30 days of tarot’ would be a great one as well, because you would have that opportunity just for a daily prompt that's going to take you somewhere outside of your comfort zone. And maybe get you thinking in a generative way that will help your more traditional formal writing, even if it's just five or 10 minutes of free writing. So we can have that conversation later.

Margy: Oh, yeah! The major arcana would be perfect for that because there are 22 major arcana, and most months have 22 weekdays in them.

Helen: So, yeah, there we go! And that'll help you with the material for that book that I want.

Margy: Yes. Yes. Yes. I love that! I love that you said that because it's been my secret dream bubbling up. I'm just going to say it to the world so it can come true. I've been thinking for years, like, what is my first book? What is my first book? And then over the last couple of months, I'm like ‘I think it's a tarot guide.’ For scholars. Tarot for scholars.

Helen: Tarot for scholars. I love it! Or even just for writers. Yeah.

Margy: Yeah. Yeah. Tarot for writers.

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That's the end of today's podcast episode. I hope that both your body and your mind have moved to someplace new since we started. And perhaps you may feel inspired to try using tarot cards or another of Margie's prompts for bringing more magic into your writing.

Don't forget to visit Margie's Scholarshape website at Scholarshape.com. Click on the Resources tab to enroll in her free Scholar Magic course. You can watch the full version of my conversation with Margie Thomas in the Videos section of the WriteSpace Library. That's my online membership community at HelenSword.com, where members can also find my full series of Swordswing podcasts and transcripts.

Thanks for listening, and I look forward to walking with you again soon.