The Next Big Thing: Fixed Stars Govern a Life and The Magician's Girl

The Next Big Thing is a blogging meme conceived by She Writes that gives authors an opportunity to discuss their next book, whether it’s being published or not.

Thanks to P.H. Davies for approaching me to be a part of this project. I am honored that he finds my work of interest. You can read about P.H. Davies’ work here.


What is the title of your book?
I have two companion books nearing completion that can be read either separately or together: Fixed Stars Govern a Life: Sylvia Plath’s Qabalah Code, and The Magician’s Girl: History, Mysticism and the Lives that Shaped Sylvia Plath.

What genre does it fall under?
Both are nonfiction. Fixed Stars may be considered Literary Criticism; The Magician’s Girl is Biography.

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie?
That’s already been done. ;-)

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?
Because there are two books, you get two sentences:

Fixed Stars Govern a Life is a study of Plath’s Ariel poems as they correspond to the Tarot and Qabalah, dramatically reinterpreting her work in a way that’s been missed for fifty years.

The Magician’s Girl is a biography that looks not only at Plath’s life, but the people and events happening around her, and how these found their ways into her work.

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?
I’m in the process of figuring all of that out right now. I have some proposals out. A university press is likely to be my best option over mainstream publishers, as many would consider this topic to be “academic.” But who knows, right? Sylvia Plath is still a very hot topic, and even fifty years after her death they’re making movies on her, reprinting and re-collecting her poems, and producing her play, “Three Women.” I’ve even seen Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes dolls on Etsy. I’ve also been exploring ebooks and/or self-publishing options. While I love the dream of seeing my books sitting printed and bound on someone’s personal library or bookstore shelf, I also like the idea of my books in digital format, being searchable for scholars and students. As we know, the publishing industry has gone through great changes this past year. As with what happened to the record industry in the 1990s, more artists are going independent due to the ease of availability and communication of the Internet, and widely-available, quality digital publishing tools.

How long did it take you to write the first draft?
I am into my seventh year of work on both books. The Magician’s Girl originally began as an introduction to Fixed Stars Govern a Life, but it soon took on a life of its own.

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?
There are some very good literary criticisms on Plath out there, but none have taken on my perspective of Qabalah and mysticism. Actually, it’s kind of odd that no one has thought to do this. Especially considering Plath’s interest in Tarot and the occult were not too secret with her writings about using the Ouija board, her picture with the crystal ball, all the talk of astrology and meditation, etc. She worshiped her husband, Ted Hughes, for most of their marriage, and Hughes has been widely written of in his literary-occult pursuits.

Sylvia Plath with Crystal Ball

I do believe that both of my books are breaking new ground, and may even cause some controversy, as they essentially build the case that Sylvia Plath’s poetry has been mostly misunderstood for half a century.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?
While obtaining my Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, I had a semester final project in my Poetry, Form and Theory class. My professor, Dr. Steven Schreiner, suggested that I look more deeply into all the Tarot symbolism I kept noticing and commenting on in Plath’s work. I have been a Tarot card reader for over thirty-three years, you see. The modern Tarot was designed to correspond to the structure of the Qabalah Tree of Life. It might have taken both a Tarot scholar and a Plath scholar to see the connection. There probably aren't too many people like me out there.

That was the beginning of work that would swallow up every waking minute, as well as some sleeping ones, over the next six years of my life. And here I go into the seventh…

What else about this book might pique the reader’s interest?
Well, first, no biography has explored the importance and practice of mysticism in Sylvia Plath’s life, as well as the influence of the personalities of Plath’s family, friends, and professors.

Second, no one has aligned Sylvia Plath’s work with the historical events of the time. In addition to her mystic pursuits, she was a very political person, aware of the issues around her. Yet scholars continue to narrowly view her work as mere autobiography. It’s quite unbelievable to me.

To view Sylvia Plath’s poetry through these new perspectives lends exciting new interpretations of Plath’s older poems, and new levels of understanding toward The Colossus and Ariel books. My work is primarily drawn from already-published materials that have never been viewed as collective whole, and also from unpublished letters and archival documents. The reader will come to understand Plath’s development as a poet as she learned to layer in outside meanings in her work, to understand the Jewish and Holocaust references for which she’s received so much flak, and to realize that Sylvia Plath was a great deal more than her terrible personal drama.

There is a larger take-away from these books as well. Both books, but especially Fixed Stars Govern a Life, tangibly illustrate Qabalah as a kind of “divine road map”; it is a system of how our universe works, and to read even several poem interpretations in a row, one has to marvel that Plath did this forty times in Ariel. To me, this proves that Sylvia Plath was a literary genius like no other, and/or that there is some kind of undeniable higher order. Or both. It’s been the most exciting and important work of my life.