Laura Joyce Laura Joyce

peonies and creative containers

Fixed Earth: containers, support, grounding

Some people see the container as a capacious space to experiment in, and some people feel it is a barrier that needs to be broken down.

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Laura Joyce Laura Joyce

Three Tarot Essays

Cardinal Fire: deity, divination, world-yielding

The bridge between deity and humanity isn’t so special, we call it dying

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Laura Joyce Laura Joyce

Distilling the Themes of a Story

Cardinal fire: prismatic storytelling, intensity, wholeness

The film is formally beautiful. Long, slow takes. The drama of light through a circular window. The harrowing beauty of autumn leaves against a whitewashed exterior. Mortality is conjured in the changes of seasons, and the gradations of light.

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Laura Joyce Laura Joyce

A Match is Struck: on Writing the Present

Cardinal fire: immediacy, fire, creativity.

Unlike the click of a lighter, a match creates a suspended moment in time. The weight in the hand, the sound of the strike, the little fire glowing, and the curl of extinguished smoke.

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Laura Joyce Laura Joyce

artmaking in fiction

Mutable water: imagination, intuition, dreams, desires.

I’m thinking about art about artmaking. My own process is in disarray at the moment, and I am finding solace and guidance in the work of other artists grappling with these questions.

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Laura Joyce Laura Joyce

Oceanic Feelings

Cardinal water: oceanic feelings, water, psychoanalysis, intimacy.

I was an adult when I learned to swim, and I think that is why water is troubling and desirable to me, and why it appears in so many of my dreams and visions.

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Laura Joyce Laura Joyce

Hellbender: the Shock of Knowledge

Cardinal air: lightning knowledge, shock of awareness, excitement, fear.

The restless prickle of adolescent longing led Izzy beyond the invisible boundaries of the forest, and into a drinking game that had bloody consequences.

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Laura Joyce Laura Joyce

A Ritual for The Underworld of your Writing

Fixed water: petrichor, deep wells, decay

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.

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Laura Joyce Laura Joyce

Seven of Cups: Unknown Pleasures

Mutable water: illusions, hopes + fears, unknown pleasures

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.

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Laura Joyce Laura Joyce

Voice and Style

Mutable air: research, reflection, voice

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

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Laura Joyce Laura Joyce

Electricity in the Writing Workshop

Mutable fire: mass psychic currents, desires, teaching and learning

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

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Laura Joyce Laura Joyce

The Cocoon of Writing

Fixed earth: salt crystals, haunted forests, deep rest

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.

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Laura Joyce Laura Joyce

Tiny Acts of Witchcraft in Aase Berg’s Hackers

Fixed air: hacking, repurposing systems, linguistic play

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.

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Laura Joyce Laura Joyce

The Beautiful Apocalypse in Skin Horse by Olivia Cronk

Fixed air: revelation, visions, futures

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.

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Laura Joyce Laura Joyce

Haga, Haxan, Hag, Hawthorn

Cardinal earth: rapaciousness, growth, deep roots

Hedges, like lawns, are of no use to the witch unless they are overgrown, wild, and generative.

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Laura Joyce Laura Joyce

The Art of Deer Stalking

Fixed fire: blades forged in fire, revenge, steadfastness

For the proper adherence to ritual we had shaved our hair ultra-close, and smeared on a square of silver zinc.

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