Prompt 222. Contagion Magic

& a prompt on portals of imagination by Holly Huitt

Hi friend,

Just recently a beloved pal gave me a framed antique drawing of a woman with a small white dog. Below the drawing is the word “unfinished,” and below that, a love poem, the words too faded to read. When I opened it, it brought me to tears. It felt so perfect for me and the story of this year.

Many times I’ve been the recipient of a perfect gift like this, most often from my mother, but also from friends. It’s the kind of gift-giving I aspire to, so different from the usual—running from store to store the day before someone’s birthday, hoping against hope of finding the exact object that says, “I love you and I’m grateful you’re in my life and here’s the proof!”

But this kind of thoughtful gift-giving is not the kind of thing you can rush, and I want to shift from the panicked, last-minute purchasing craze, to moving through the world with my loved ones in mind, noticing that spark of seeing something that suits one of them. I’m thinking of it as “slow gifting.”

Recently I ordered some shelving, and I’m setting up a gift-wrapping station in my office closet. I’m planning to dedicate one shelf as a repository for gifts—not things with great monetary value, but little evocative objects like the sweet antique painting, or notebooks that I hand-painted the cover of, or seashells from Fire Island.

Maybe I’ll keep on hand a few tubes of bright red lipstick, inspired by a friend who gifted me one right before my second bone marrow transplant. Along with it was a note explaining how, when she was recovering from surgery, a friend had given her a tube of red lipstick. She said she found it so delightful, so different from the kinds of gifts she had been receiving. She was sending it to me as a reminder to seek out beauty and little luxuries, and to dream of all the dinner parties I’d be back at soon enough.

Such a simple gift, and on its own, maybe even strange. But accompanied by her note with that story and that sweet intention, it took on a whole different meaning. The story infuses the object with a life of its own, like what anthropologists call “contagion magic,” which is the belief that an object bears traces of those who come in contact with it. To me, it seems like a spell passed through palms—a kind of enchantment.

Here on the first day of Hanukkah, one week out from Christmas—as many of us do our last minute shopping—we might hold this in mind: that the most memorable objects are the ones we bestow our own magic upon. And that brings me to today’s essay and prompt, which meditates on a related theme—though rather than the story behind an object, it’s a world within. From our wondrous Isolation Journals comrade Holly Huitt, it tells a fantastical tale of a length of rope exploding into a whole wide universe.

Sending love,

Suleika

Some Items of Note—

• Today from 1-2 pm is our next meeting of the Hatch, our virtual creative hour for paid subscribers. Carmen and Holly will be hosting, sharing a poem and prompt that considers the beauty and power of darkness. To join, click here!

• Over at the Isolation Journals Chat, you can join us in our weekly ritual: our collective list of small joys. It’s a gorgeous chorus that’s both anchor and a buoy. Tap the button below to add your small joy to this week’s thread.

Italo Calvino’s Octavia, illustrated by Gérard Trignac

Prompt 222. The Jute Rope Universe by Hollynn Huitt

In college, I spent a semester studying abroad in the Netherlands—a surreal privilege I couldn’t have imagined for myself until it happened. There I was, a scholarship kid from a small town in South Carolina, living in a castle ringed by, not one, but two moats, with a Eurail pass burning a hole in my pocket. I was seeking personal and creative transformation: I visited all the great museums, I walked along the Seine, and I definitely learned how much wine is too much wine. But also, and maybe most importantly, I encountered Italo Calvino. 

It was in a travel writing class taught by the poet Denya Cascio; she assigned his Invisible Cities, a work of fiction that imagines the explorer Marco Polo in conversation with the emperor Kublai Khan. In separate, chaptered accounts, Polo describes cities in Khan’s empire so fantastical as to be unbelievable. And yet, his reports of each place—from how they look, smell, and feel, to the people who inhabit them—are so finely wrought that you forget they’re impossible. You’re fully, immersively transported.

One day, midway through studying the text, we walked into the tall-ceilinged, wood-beamed classroom-from-your-dreams to find objects piled on the desks: a length of jute rope snarled into a bristling knot, a plastic bag of crumpled soda cans, a soft scarf, knit in a rainbow gradient, swirled into a peaked pile. Denya asked us to choose one and, in homage to Invisible Cities, forget the object as it exists in our world and imagine an invisible city contained within. I chose the rope. It started slow. The obvious observations (color, texture, size) came easily. After ten minutes, having described every contour, I looked to the front of the room, thinking that she’d probably call time soon. She had the look of someone prepared to wait, so I turned back to the task.

The best way I can describe what happened next is by sharing a story a friend recently told me about her daughter, Arden—that as a toddler, Arden would become so immersed in play that she’d lose all sense of scale and reality. She had a toy fire truck that she loved to roll back and forth, and eventually, in the course of play, she’d flip open the miniature ladder and try to climb it. Other times she’d open a door and attempt to squeeze in.

I, too, got lost. One detail led to another until I stopped describing and started imagining. I wrote my way into this rough city, this place of darkness and filtered light, populated by industrious people with calloused hands who long ago had the idea to cut single strands of jute to weave rope ladders across chasms, so many ladders that the world was a fibrous, living nerve. I pushed so far that, when Denya quietly called time and I looked up, the room spun around me. I had the distinct feeling I’d opened a portal into my imagination shuttered since childhood, and now it was a place I could return to, again and again.

Your prompt for the week:

Choose an object—or a pile of objects—with textural interest. It might be a pineapple, a sponge, an egg carton, a pinecone, a pile of crayons, an overturned colander. Now, imagine a whole world contained within that object—a place full of life and commerce. What does it look like, smell like, and feel like there? How has the environment shaped the citizens? What do they fear? What do they wish for? When you think you’ve gone deep, go deeper. Get lost.

You can find excerpts and an array of visual renderings of Invisible Cities here. And if you’d like, you can post your response to the prompt in the comments section, in our Facebook group, or on Instagram by tagging @theisolationjournals.

Today’s Contributor

Hollynn Huitt is a writer and professor who lives in an old farmhouse in central New York with her family and many animals. She holds a BFA in Writing from the Savannah College of Art and Design and an MFA in Fiction from Bennington College. She has stories published in Stone Canoe, Hobart, PANK, and X-R-A-Y.

For more paid subscriber benefits, see—

• Read Me, See Me, Like Me, an installment of Dear Susu where I answer the question, “How do I share my words with the world?”

• On Conjuring, our Notes from the Hatch where we talked about writing as a powerful act of creation

• Seeking Patterns & Searching for the Why, a meditation by Carmen Radley on paying attention