In my years wandering two worlds, the very real one that I inhabit on a daily basis, and the bizarre other world that is the internets, I’ve been fortunate enough to meet a lot of amazing, beautiful, interesting, and all-around brilliant people.
Perhaps this is the biggest blessing of growing an online community, of publishing books that take you on book tours, that introduce your work to people in every corner of this spinning blue planet. Kate Belew THE WORD WITCH (and author of the stunning book of the same name), is one of these, and I’d be hard pressed to say there are many that are More amazing, beautiful, interesting, and all-around brilliant. She’s one of one, and so when I realized I wanted to continue my new Interview Series that kicked off with my lovely wife, she was one of the very first I thought of to join the party.
What’s more, it was her birthday just two days ago, AND serendipity should of course have it, that today also happens to be Imbolc, the pagan/Celtic holiday that celebrates and marks the beginning of Spring, as well as honors the goddess Bridgid. What better day than to post this interview with this unbelievable human.
I HIGHLY encourage you watch me fumble my way through the actual video interview, I am absolutely not a professional interviewer so it’s mostly just us having a beautiful conversation haha, but I’ll do my best to summarize and concisely sum up the questions I asked, and her beautiful answers below. I suggest, push play on the video or the audio, let it serenade you in the background of your Sunday, and reap all the wisdom she’s so generously handing out.
Here we have it, the highly concised first 5 Questions (so please do watch or listen to the real interview for the actual humanity of it all) round 2 of my new Signal Fire Interview Series—The amazing Kate Belew, THE Word Witch:
Q1 — “How and when did you first realize that the act of writing poetry and the practice of witchcraft were linked for you?”
Kate: “I feel like it has been this lifelong knowing and then unknowing and then remembering process. When I was young I was very aware of the strangeness of the apparition of a poem. Wherever this is coming from, I just have to get it down. That always felt very magical to me. Then there was this time where I got a little lost, where they were two separate things.
It took moving to New York and immersing myself in a situation where I was surrounded by a lot of professional witches and magic makers for somebody to be like, what you do with poetry is the same thing. And then I was like, oh yes, of course. I’ve always known this in this bodily, innate, earthy way. A lot of my practice has been about returning to things I loved when I was young and have always known. How do we get back to that?”
Q2 — “What role does intention play in arranging words on a page compared to casting a spell? Are they the same or different?”
Kate: “I feel like intention is what differentiates. You can have word witchery and you can have writing, and there is a natural inherent magic to writing. But to cast a spell or do word witchery on purpose, intention is integral.
A spell starts with that crucible of vision or intent or purpose, and then the thing comes out from there. It’s like what you’re saying about conduit — you’ve got to put the antenna up, turn your ear up or down, and be like: Okay, now I’m listening. Intention sets those gears into motion.
It can be a deep inner knowing. Pam Crosman said on our podcast, ‘I don’t know why it works, but I know that it works.’ I know writing is magic, and the opening to the possibility of magic is so important, but I don’t always know why it works. It just works. The mystery of it itself.”
Q3 — “Is there a specific element of writing that holds the most raw, transformative magical energy for you?”
Kate: “For me personally, it’s story. When I hear a story or work with my own memory as story, that’s always what gives me the hinge for a poem. That’s different than some of the things I do from a more witchcraft perspective, like working seasonally or with invocations or circle casting.
When I sit down to write a poem, I look for the thread of a story. I wrote a poem earlier this year about Chopin’s heart — his sister had to smuggle it out of France back to Poland, which I didn’t know. I learned about it in a Jesse Eisenberg/Kieran Culkin movie. I paused the movie, did some research, and wrote it because it felt so present with me.
Thinking about Hekate and the crossroads, or story, myth, folklore — the things that bind us as humans in this ancient ritualistic way — that’s it for me.”
Q4 — “What poem is your most potent spell? Has a poem you wrote actively changed something in your reality?”
Kate: “It’s called “Go You Kinder Creature” and I wrote it in when I was at Sarah Lawrence getting in my MFA and I was going through a very very very difficult time in my life. It was I was in a really bad I was in a bad situation. I’ll just leave it at that. And I was just grasping at straws in my life and I was just like, you know, I actually don’t know what I’m going to do. And so basically, I had just started grad school. I was in this situation. I decided to adopt a dog. I was living alone in this apartment. I was just like I was working 40 hours a week. I was working teaching in a prison. I was working teaching seventh grade creative writing. It was just like the most. And I remember being up really late at night and I had that phrase stuck in my head, which is why I didn’t want to mess it up. It was just, “Go, you kinder creature. Go, you kinder creature. Go, you kinder creature.” Because I was just like, I’m not going to let this make me hard. Like, I’m going to I’m not going to whatever. And it was it’s this very strange poem. It’s almost like a call in response type of situation, but it’s it’s one of the most witchy spells. And I feel like I wrote it as sort of this calling out for help like to magic, to the witches, to the ancestors. There’s a line in it about the speaker kind of talking to her ancestors who answer as spiders and like sort of this way of like and the spiders are like twist repair, twist repair, twist repair. And I felt like I didn’t write it at all. And I it was a message of somebody being like, “Hey, like and it’s I don’t love a lot of the work that I did while I was in my MFA program. I think it taught me a lot of things about teaching and about workshopping but I just don’t think I was at a place to be creating my best like creative work. But that poem is one that has really stayed with me and when I read it, I still feel like it’s a message from the other side to keep going.”
Q5 — “How does practicing a traditional craft like witchcraft work with the opposite reality of New York City life?”
Kate: “I have found that New York City is the most magical place. People are always very surprised. They’re like, “Oh, we expect you to live in a cabin in the woods.” And as you can see from my backdrop, I have found a cabin in the concrete jungle. But there is so much nature here. Like, I have great faith in the pigeons. I have great faith in the rats. I love my neighborhood dogs. I have my dog Banjo who’s here with us. I see this oak tree every day. I had pumpkins growing in the little like block garden across the street from me just because somebody had thrown their pumpkin there in the fall and the next summer the pumpkins grew. And so I find and you know the amount of people that are drawn to this city that are witches and artists and strange makers and change makers and all of the things. It has this sort of innate feral energy to it that I don’t even I think that the concrete might just emphasize or something. You know, it’s the the dirt is not that far under the surface. And you know, I didn’t really when I moved here from Michigan, I did not think of New York as being on the ocean. Like that was never really something that occurred to me, the rivers didn’t really occur to me and when I moved here people would be like “Well let’s go to the beach” and so I would pile into someone’s car and now I have a car and we would drive out to the Rockaways in the summer and I have seen dolphins out there many times and it’s magical but it’s like I think I think people see a New York and I think that you know in some ways my neighbor neighborhood is as small as my I mean that’s an exaggeration because I grew up in a town of 4,000 people but I still I can walk down the street and see I don’t I don’t leave my house without seeing someone I know and so it it has this sort of community communal, chosen family of people that have moved here sort of energy that I think really lends itself to witchcraft.”
There are so many more wonderful responses to so many more wonderful questions, but the transcript alone (which you can download by clicking under the video) is 78 pages long.
Please, listen to the rest, learn from her, absorb her energy and wisdom, and absolutely positively follow her, subscribe to her, and just pick up all she puts down.
Kate, thank you, for your time, your energy, your intention, and most of all, your friendship. I am so lucky to have people like you in my life, and I don’t know what I’d do without you.
If there are people all of YOU would like to hear an interview series of, please comment and let me know who I should add to the list!
The Word Witch is available in bookstores everywhere, or on Tamed Wild. Pick up a copy today.
Magic in the words,
in the sharing of our souls.
Witches are made here.
