There are books we love that seem to haunt us long after we’ve closed the covers. For me, those books have always lived in the strange and beautiful space I now call lyrical magical fiction, stories that blend the ordinary and the mystical in quiet, poetic ways.
Not fantasy.
Not sci-fi.
Not vampires or alternate planets.
Just this world but shimmering slightly.
A teacup that knows your secrets.
A tree that blooms when someone is healed, no matter the season.
A ghost that doesn’t apologize for showing up at breakfast.
I’ve loved stories like that my entire life. What I didn’t realize until very recently is, I also enjoy writing them. At 66, I’m finally giving myself permission to write the way I see the world. To trust that my own strange blend of poetry, intuition, spirituality, and myth has a place.
Lyrical magical fiction has offered me a creative home I didn’t even know I was longing for. I came to it sideways. When I began writing about my adoption, something unusual happened.
I imagined what my deceased biological mother might say to me, if she could. And her voice came through, clear, poignant, full of mystery. I didn’t know I was walking through the veil into the realm of the mystical. I only knew that the conversation felt true. And healing. And necessary.
That’s the thing about this kind of storytelling, it doesn’t ask you to explain the unexplainable. It just asks you to believe it for the span of a sentence. A page. A life. It lets me braid together all the parts of myself, my lifelong love of poetry, spiritual practices and devotional paths and the houses I’ve lived in, 52, and the ones that still live in me.
It affirms my experience as an adoptee, a seeker, a writer, an intuitive, and a woman who sees no boundary between the sacred and the everyday.
The teacup is an altar.
The garden is a prayer.
The page is a portal.
I’ve often said, I see the world through a witch’s eyes.
And honestly? I’m still stunned it took me this long to figure out my voice. I remember wanting to write fiction in undergrad but didn’t. It surfaced again in my MFA program at Goddard, whispering at the edges. But I told myself I needed to use my platform for more “important” things, to address oppression, grief, all the endless woes of the world.
The truth is those themes can be woven into the fabric of my work if I choose. And I don’t have to suffer to write something meaningful. I still remind myself, it’s okay if I enjoy the writing process.
I’ve healed so much by writing about adoption, by facing it head-on. I no longer feel the need to circle it endlessly. That doesn’t mean it won’t show up in my fiction. It might.
But it will arrive in different forms, under different names.
I’m still deeply engaged in the world. I’ll always be that way. But I also trust now that wonder is as vital as witness.Beauty is not an escape it’s a kind of activism. Maybe I had to live enough years to understand how grief walks beside wonder. How the sacred hides in ordinary dust. How our stories aren’t always linear.
They spiral.
They haunt.
They heal.
But there’s more I need to say.
Last night, I woke from a dream that brought everything into focus.
I understood, in that soft, in-between place, why I write this way.
Why I string words together like spells.
Why mood and setting matter so much—because they are incantations.
A way of shaping how I see and feel and breathe.
I write like this because I’m trying to understand the world.
How to keep seeing beauty, even when everything feels broken.
How to hold grief and magic in the same palm.
How to live honestly in a world full of sorrow and still look for the shimmer.
Writing, for me, is both resistance and reverence.
A way to say, yes, this world is unraveling and yet,
There is still wonder.
There is still mystery.
There is still a ghost at the breakfast table, and a tree that blooms when someone forgives.
That’s what lyrical magical fiction offers me,
Not escape.
But a way to live with everything.
To bear witness and bless.
It challenges me.
It stretches me.
But more than anything, it heals me.
Are you drawn to stories like this too?
Have you ever written something you thought was “just a story,”
only to discover it held a spell, a prayer, or a sacred truth?
I’ll be sharing more about this journey in the coming weeks, craft notes, prompts, book recommendations, and lessons I’m learning as I write my novel.
But for now, I just want to say:
If you see the world a little differently,
If you talk to ghosts or believe that houses can feel,
You’re not alone.
You’re not wrong.
You might just be a writer of lyrical magical fiction.
Or maybe, like me, you always were.
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