If superstition worked, I would be rich and famous. I am not rich or famous, but I am still superstitious.
When I wrote my first novel – it took five years to get it published, it was rejected by some of the best minds in publishing – a best-selling author I met at bookstore reading gave me some advice.
“If you are not superstitious, get superstitious,” he said, the writer’s life is so uncertain and unpredictable you need all the help you can get. Try voodoo.”
I am superstitious. When we were struggling to sell Bedlam Farm 1.0 friends told me with absolute certainty that I needed to plant St. Joseph’s statues in the garden and bury some in the lawn. Feng Shui devotees told me how to rearrange the house to draw buyers, and various spiritualists urged me to talk to the farm and tell it to let go of me. Some psychics gave us a pouch to hang in the windows, it would, they said, attract nice and wealthy people.
They said the farm was angry with me, I had to make things right.
We were fairly desperate at the time, so I will tell you in all candor that I had a number of meaningful conversations with my farm, I stood out in the barn and earnestly asked the farm to let go of me, and open itself up to someone new. Nobody else seemed to hear the conversation.
it took four years to sell the place and Frieda dug up most of the St. Joseph’s statues and ate them. Still, what if…?” No sane writer would forego any chance to write a great book, and I do believe in spirits and angels, I couldn’t really tell you why.
Groucho Marx wrote that if a black cat crosses your path, it means the cat is going somewhere. Christopher Hitchens said that superstition was one of the most viral forms of stupidity. He would not have liked my office.
I have my beautiful muse on my right, and a growing corner of talismans and figures to the left – a very old madonna statute, a garden sswan with flowers, a turtle sculpture from Ed Gulley, one of Maria’s intuition dolls to the right, my “head” statue with yellow flowers, even two beautiful pink crystals on the desk, I got them 30 years ago to enhance my creativity. There are candles as well.
The little corner of my office grows over time, it has taken on a character and dimension all of its own.
There is enough superstition in the room to launch the next Hemingway or Faulkner, but the fates are not feeling it so far, and I have no evidence to give you that any of these things work in any way, except that I believe in them all. They comfort me, inspire me and keep me company on the sometimes lonely writing trek.
I think Hitchens was too hard on superstition, those of us who take the leap into the unknown, and live without certainty or weekly paychecks sometimes need to be as creative about their hopes and dreams as they are about their work. I feel the same way about superstition that many people feel about God: I’m not sure if it works or is real or not, but on the off chance that it does, I want to be prepared. It can’t hurt, and I have come to love my eclectic companions, they seem very real to me, and they seem very nice to me.
It depends, I guess, on what you want.
In a funny way, these figures and rocks and statutes are part of my family now. And if I don’t ever get precisely where I want to go, look how far I have gotten? That is something of a miracle.