Magic Objects: Revealing the Messages in Story and Life

One of the many things I learned from Joanna Rose and Stevan Allred, my writing teachers at Portland's Pinewood Table, was to pay attention to "magic objects."

 

Things will show up in your story. A sewing kit. A flashlight. A bottle of Woolite fabric wash.

 

When you realize these are more than random objects, you can let them have magic powers, as it were. They call up emotions, and become alive with power.

My memoir narrator, a six-year-old kid, senses the presence of her disabled mother when she smells the sweet-starchy scent of Woolite. That bottle comes to stand for so many things: fragility, tenderness, ineptness. Poverty, because they don't own a washing machine. Care, because of the hand-washing. Loss. That bottle was so often empty.

What's gorgeous about magic objects is that they appear 1) in your stories and 2) in your life.

 

Especially when you are going through transitions, note the things that keep showing up - when you walk, when you wash dishes, when you get in your car.

 

First, look for the magic objects. Choose one. Take walks with it, and sit with it, and sing to it, and really listen. Notice what it is saying to  you.

 

You could put it on the dash of your car, on your kitchen counter, at your bedside. 

 

Let magic have its way. 

 

Your story and your life are not complete without it.