Fixed fire: the gurlesque, luminol margaritas, glow-in-the-dark rosaries

shrines, quinceañera parties, holy communions, and seances of this book are all stained luminescent blue.

Fixed fire: incandescence, blue flame, eerie glow

As anyone who watches crime television might already know, luminol is a substance that emits an eerie glow when it comes in contact with human blood.

Mutable earth: wild foxes, psychedelic spores, deadly forests

On Christmas night, a small girl is crowned at a pageant, before stumbling into the snowy darkness, alone, to meet her greatest fan

I really like reading a book where character’s got an obsession, almost, and you start to learn a bit about that obsession when you read a book like that.

Hard- boiled fiction is also really afflicted with this twisted, and very American, casual bigotry. And it makes me so mad because there are so many great lines and so much extensive writing that Chandler did, and these movies just have so much beautiful writing in them but just have these big problems.

Welcome to season one of Ceremony, a podcast about storytelling, seasonality, rituals, and dreaming new worlds into being.

Cardinal air: new ideas, pleasure, play, obsession

Scheele’s Green: the story of arsenic-laced wallpaper and the most gorgeous colour ever to exist.

Mutable fire: flickering light, limit experience, neural reactions

Like the experience of being on a psychedelic trip, whether you perceive bliss or horror is down to your state of mind.

Mutable earth: big mood, the mundane sublime, weird landscapes

Weird landscapes tell us so much about making the hidden aspects of life visible, and, about our interconnectedness with the natural world.

Mutable water: the unconscious, hallucinations, psychic plane

Rachel Pollock writes that “in divinatory readings the moon indicates an excitement of the unconscious.”

Fixed fire: sun, bright colours, festivities

The bare tree still looks pretty.

The reindeer glow.

Cardinal air: signals in the dark, secrets coming to light

A creative block is so often about being in the liminal space where something new is waiting to emerge.

Cardinal air: prayer, holy visions, visitations

In Catholicism there is endless creativity in the naming of patron saints. Some of the more obscure ones include St. Julian the patron saint of murderers, and St. Lidwina, the patron saint of ice skaters.

Cardinal earth: initiation, deep future, building

When you have been inhabiting a world so deeply, it can feel like a loss to turn it into something that other people can perceive. In some ways, the more fully-realised your imaginative space, the more difficult to let go of your vision.

Mutable water: liminality, precarity, recklessness

Emma Cline’s novel The Guest is a thriller where nothing much happens. The tension and dread are evoked from the seemingly impossible drama of trying to live from moment to moment.

Mutable earth: locked room mysteries, the sacred and the earthly

I don’t know about you but I love stories set in haunted houses because they offer a closed set, a liminal zone for transformation to occur, and mysteries to be explored but not necessarily resolved. And because they remind me of dreaming.

Fixed earth: sensual pleasures, bodily responses, love

As well as honouring blood that has been spilled, I want to write about blood circulating in warm bodies, flushed cheeks, and beating hearts.

Fixed air: systems, ancient wisdom, collective practices

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.

Fixed water: working through, deep release, breaking open

You can work with this ritual to come back to creative centre whenever you are feeling blocked.

Mutable earth: mycelial networks, field notes, fungal categories

In The Museum of Atheism, each chapter begins with a description of the fungus that has taken over the town of Rosewood, where the action happens. These descriptions act as field notes about real and imagined fungal forms