ADMA 2023-2024

Here’s a sweet witches spell for you!

“Mix up of self and others is achieved more easily in language than in life.” I pluck this little spell from Anne Carson’s Eros the Bittersweet, published in 1986 by the Princeton University Press. I got so excited when I first read it, and candidly wrote it down in my notebook.

In my research, I try to navigate identification in fiction. There’s a certain desire driven draw between reader, writer and text.

Every time I train my eyes to see the three separately, their constellation fizzes around. Reader and writer push at each other. At times, I feel animality from text too. And when I read this line and think, no wonder I am so disoriented, mix up of self & others is achieved more easily in language than in life. When in the depths of text, sometimes I can not tell myself apart from reader, writer, text.

My initial goal was to write a short visual novel, as a way to document my research. What I realise is, I act more as a reader than a writer. I set out to become a writer, but I only ended up reading more. I find myself reading even when I write, putting distance between me and the text. This makes me question, why do I take so many steps to remove myself from my writing. Why do I rather identify with text of others?

I have always had a strange aversion to writing in first person. It feels too up close, not leaving space for the reader to fill in the gaps. Opposite to this, fictional setting with enough space between reality and fantasy feel way more comfortable to identify with. The texts I have been writing throughout the past months swing between these two worlds. In some I try to locate myself and reflect on my developing writing practice, written in first person. In the others I use the tone of a disembodied narrator, written in third person.

This pendular motion of identification is made possible because of how “mix up of self and others is achieved more easily in language.” The fantasy of this mix up, I kin to spells and magic. Hence, the novel I wrote has a magical thread running through it: I wrote the character of Maria into it, a young witchling. Just like my writing practice, so does her magic change from naive to overly confident to selfish to coy.

Maria, alongside other plot points, I am borrowing from writers and texts that influence me. For my literary references, I contrast books that I have inherited from my father’s library to ones I discovered as in online femme, queer spaces. There’s not one specific author or genre to them. Instead its a selection based on my and the communities’ personal taste. I directly borrow from three separate texts: A scene from the horror mystery Umineko When They Cry by the artist group 07th expansion — two lines from the Emily Dickinson poem Long Years apart—can make no — and the setting of Ali Smith's Artful. This act of borrowing is a way to reflect on identifying with fiction. As a complementary tool, I play with the triangular relation between reader, writer and text.

The format of the novel is chosen to reflect this constant shifting. The text is bound in a set of pdfs, ordered in separate folders. The pdfs are linked together by a string of hyperlinks. The reader can follow the story along these, or discover the content in a self-determined order.

My story functions in the context of fiction and magic. There’s this kids song in Hungarian about a snake that keeps coiling because it wants to be a strudel, and a strudel that keeps coiling because it wants to be a snake. (‘Tekeredik a kígyó, rétes akar lenni, tekeredik a rétes, kígyó akar lenni.’)This is a baby spell, you just need to squint your eyes to see the snake in the strudel and the strudel in the snake. They’re easy to mix up. In a similar utterance, you can squint at the triangle of the reader, writer and text. Between your lashes pressed together, you can glimpse them shifting into each other. Still squinting, if you try to read the lines of the novel, they turn from being written by a third to being mine to being yours.