Thirty years ago, when Practical Magic was released as a novel, and then as a groundbreaking film that became a cult classic, sisterhood was overlooked. There were very few novels and even fewer films that focused on the inner lives of women and the importance of our complicated relationships filled with loyalty, family history, and friendship. Practical Magic 2 is being released at a time when women’s relationships matter more and sisterhood is seen as central to our lives. We have opened our hearts and minds to who we are to each other. A coven can be a gathering of witches, but it can also be a sisterhood we are born into or a sisterhood we choose, the people who are there for us when we need them most.

Sisterhood and magic are at the heart of Practical Magic 2. The film is romantic, and love is everywhere, but at the center of everything there is the deep and abiding solidarity that binds Sally and Gillian Owens together. In the Owens family romantic love was destructive in the past, and has always seen as a curse, while family love has is the magic that can rescue you. In Practical Magic 2 the magical grimoire of enchantments known as the Book of the Raven is found in the library by Jet Owens. Sally and Gillian’s beloved aunt discovers that there is a way to break the family curse, but doing so includes great sacrifice. What wouldn’t we do for the people we love - our sisters, our aunts, our daughters, our dearest friends? Sally and Gillian are willing to make any sacrifice to rescue Sally’s daughter Kylie, just as their aunts, Jet and Franny, have always willing to sacrifice themselves for the nieces they had taken in and raised.

Sally turned away from magic as a child and has never come to terms with the fact that the Owens family is different. Witchery runs in the family, and because of their history they have flaws and talents others don’t. But isn’t every family different? Don’t we all have our own individual histories and experiences? For me, growing up in a family that was unlike that any other in the neighborhood was difficult and like Sally all I wanted to be normal, to have holidays and birthdays and family dinners and be like everyone else. I felt that if I wasn’t careful, if I stayed out under the stars and danced all night, at a solstice celebration or in my own back yard, I would be headed for trouble. Sally is conflicted in much the same way, she avoids her truest self, and yet she’s drawn to love and magic. In many ways Practical Magic 2 is the story of women who are doing their best to find their truest, most authentic selves. I was lucky enough to find out who I really was at the library, opening each book as if it contained a spell, finally accepting myself for who I was when I realized I could find the magic I was looking for by reading and writing. In Practical Magic 2 Sally Owens finally stops running away from her true nature and accepts who she is. She is a person with power, a loyal sister, a mother who is brave enough to save her child, a woman who at last understands that the real magic in our lives are the people we love.

Please share your own story of how sisterhood and magic changed your life.

Scan a newspaper for five minutes and chose an incident to write about. Write from the POV of a character mentioned in the story for five minutes. Then write for five minutes from the POV of an invented character.

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When my husband of forty years left me for a close friend, I wanted my mind cleared of heartbreak. I tried therapy, EMDR, mediation, and yoga but none of it worked. I remembered a film in which a heart-broken Jim Carey has his memory of his ex-beloved erased and all at once I knew that was what I wanted. A clear and spotless mind, devoid of memories of the day my husband said he was leaving, or the day I went to use my credit card only to discover my name had been removed from all of our credit cards and bank accounts. I wanted to forget how our marriage soured, how the dreams we’d had evaporated, how the person I’d fallen in love with had slowly disappeared until nothing was left of him.

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As a child I preferred fairy tales to all other stories. Fairy tales seemed to trust that even as a child I could understand major concepts of good and evil, fear and cowardice, and distinguish the difference between the truth and a lie. Children realize that there are beasts who wish to do good in the world, and adults waiting in the woods who may be dangerous, and paths that should be marked, whether by bread crumbs or tears, so that we can find our way home again. In the world of fairy tales, the amazing is recounted in a matter of fact tone. One ordinary day there is a knock at the door, a rose that refuses die, a spindle that must be avoided at all costs.

It was the melding of the magical and the everyday that was most affecting to me as a reader, for the world I lived in seemed much the same. Anything could happen. People you loved could disappear, through death or divorce; they could turn into heroes or beasts. Such stories are perhaps the original stories, tales told by grandmothers to grandchildren from the beginning of time, an oral tradition later captured in print by authors such as Perrault and the Grimms.

I began to read novels that, like the great traditional fairy tales, incorporated the real and the magical. Every child reader knows that magic equals power and possibility. It is the recourse of the young, the neglected, the orphaned, and the brave. Why are children attracted to magical literature? Magic contains a story within a story, the deepest truth within a thrilling tale. A child can build his or her own understanding through the symbols and language of magic as if connecting with a secret code.

For years magical fiction was looked down upon, set apart from real literature, but happily that is no longer the case. As a proponent of magic from the time I could read, I consider this to be a joyous time for literature. Interestingly, many adult readers are being brought back to the original literature of their youth, at first reading along with their children then choosing children’s and young adult literature for themselves.

In writing my novel for children Nightbird I realized I was writing for my ten year-old self. I was halfway through before I realized that ten year-old I once was is still the person I still carry within. Despite my age and experience, I am not unlike the main character Twig, self-conscious and book-mad, lost in some ways, and found in others. I am still the reader now that I was then, with the same heart and soul, and a longing for a world in which anything can happen, magic or not, on an ordinary day.

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I have come to believe that the books that influence us most are the ones we read at the impressionable ages of eight to twelve, the time when readers are most open to imagination and possibilities. It’s the time, too, when our worldview is being formed, not only by experience but also by our readings. Who you become as a reader deeply affects who you become as a person and, for some, as a writer. My first introduction to literary magic was through the work of Edward Eager, which I was lucky enough to find when my life was falling apart in the real world as my parents divorced. I stumbled upon Half Magic stored on a dusty shelf at the Malverne Public Library one summer day when I still had all the time in the world. Was I looking for a way out of the sorrow that surrounded me? Absolutely. But I was looking for more. I was looking for instructions on how to live one’s life, something that was especially unclear to me at the time. Back then, no one recommended books to a child-reader, at least not to me, and finding a book that spoke to you all on your own, turning those first few pages and entering into another world, was pure magic.

Eager, who was a lyricist and dramatist, is a dry, witty, adult sort of writer who fell into children’s books accidentally (isn’t that how all good magic stories begin?) when he discovered E. Nesbit’s work while searching for books to share with his son, Fritz. His droll, self-effacing essay “Daily Magic,” published inThe Horn Book Magazinein October 1958, celebrated both E. Nesbit and Eager’s own delight in finding magic. He wrote for children through his own adult sensibility in the time of real-life Mad Men, cocktails and trains home to Connecticut, but he was an adult who remembered what children loved most. At the same time, he never spoke down to his readers, something I very much appreciated and had previously found only in fairy tales. Eager predicted the flowering of magical realism, suggesting that the core of a good magic book was the dailiness of its magic: “So that after you finish reading…you feel it could happen to you, any day now, round any corner.” It’s the very ordinariness of both setting and characters that makes the magic all the more believable. It’s a lesson learned from fairy tales, wherein an ordinary girl can sleep for a hundred years and a perfectly normal brother and sister discover a witch’s house in the woods and beat her at her own game. The best magic, after all, is always woven into the facts of our everyday lives.

Eager insisted that his own books could not have existed without E. Nesbit’s influence. He thought of himself as a more accessible and lesser author, and referred to himself as “second-rate E. Nesbit.” But for American readers his magical worlds may be more relatable than Nesbit’s magical books, which can seem old-fashioned and stuffy to modern children. Eager’s books maintain a timelessness that allows current child readers to be as enchanted as I was when I discovered his books in the sixties. Because Eager is a lover of puns and jokes, his books are both entertaining and adventurous. But behind the fun there is more: the sense that an adult is telling important facts about issues of family loyalty and love, and of course Eager always includes a lesson concerning the love of reading and books. Behind the adventure there is the wise reminder that, even while growing up, it’s still possible to see the world as a place of enchantment and to not lose what we had as children: the power of imagination.

Eager’s theory of magic is that it can and will thwart you whenever possible. For children, well aware that the adult world often thwarts childhood itself, the contrary rules of magic come as no surprise. At last, someone is telling the truth: the world around us often doesn’t make sense, and we have to do our best to figure it out. Magic is playful and unreliable, and that’s half the fun of it, especially when it’s doled out in halves or discovered in a lake on a summer vacation. The participants have to figure out the rules as they go along, as they would a puzzle or a game with rules that may shift and change. They make mistakes — some amusing, some dangerous — and in many instances they have to tame the magic and take control of it lest it take control of them. Is this not the deepest fear and wish of every child? That he or she will manage to take charge of a world that is chaotic and unfathomable? As every child reader knows, especially those with unhappy childhoods, the first exit out of the dreariness and difficulties of one’s real life is through reading. All books make for a good escape route, although novels are always preferable, and, as one of the characters in Edward Eager’s bookish and wonderful Seven-Day Magic asserts, “the best kind of book…is a magic book.”

Eager’s magic series totaled only seven in number due to his untimely death at the age of fifty-three. Still, seven is the most magical of numbers, just enough books to last through a summer. One of the best summers I remember with my own son was the summer of Edward Eager, a glorious time when we read all of the books in the series aloud, often in a hammock, beside a pond that some people said was enchanted.Half Magic begins the series, with a troublemaking talisman found on the sidewalk that grants only half wishes, including a cat that can half-talk in a hilarious half-language. O, unpredictable magic, wise enough to make certain that the adults in the picture remain unaware of its powers! Children can see what adults cannot, in life and in Eager’s book. The novels that follow —Knight’s Castle,Magic by the Lake,The Time Garden, Magic or Not?, and The Well-Wishers —lead up to the final book, the brilliantSeven-Day Magic, which gets to the heart of Eager’s enchantments. Here, a library book that can be checked out only for seven days creates literary enchantment. When I read it I couldn’t help but think: how does Mr. Edward Eager know this is what happened to me in my library, on my summer vacation, when I first discovered Half Magic on the shelf? And then I understood what the best novels do: they know how you feel before you do.

My own work for children has been influenced by Eager and his creation of what I call suburban magic, and my aptly titled Practical Magic is a book for adults who can still remember what magic was all about. No enchanted woods, no brothers who turn into swans, no vine-covered cottages, but rather small towns where nothing unusual ever happens — until one day, it suddenly does. The suburbs would seem the least likely place in the world to find magic, and yet such places turn out to be rife with enchantment. Here every bit of enchantment matters, and each firefly counts. My own magical books for children occur in small towns and suburbs, often in the summer, often involving the characters who most need magic in their lives: the lonely, the unloved, the secret-keeper, the fearful, the outsider that most of us were at some point in childhood.

Here is the best thing about magic: you never know if it’s real or imagined. But as Eager suggested, “The next best thing to having it actually happen to you is to read about it...” As a child I found solace in books in a way I couldn’t in the real world. I understood, in some deep, immutable way, that even the powerless have power through imagination. That is the gift of magic and of Edward Eager’s books. All you have to do is walk out the door on a July afternoon and turn the corner, and magic will be waiting for you. All you have to do is read.

Originally published in the May/June 2015 special issue of The Horn Book Magazine: Transformations.

When crossing the street, never trust the judgment of drivers. They may not stop for you. They may roll over you, and keep going. In fact, never trust anyone. They're not your family; their blood is not half as thick as water, why would you take their advice? Do they have your best interest at heart? Not one bit, and frankly, neither do most of your own relatives. It's dog-eat-dog, it really is, although what can you expect? Life is hard. Life is a battle. Life is what you make of it. Be prepared with a career. Retail is good-people are always buying. Everything could be burning down around them, and they're buying. You can call this sort of behavior foolish, but it's human nature. It's hope.

Anything served in a fancy restaurant can be equalled in your own kitchen. As a matter of fact, everything can be made out of potatoes-bread, soup, pancakes, cake. Alone on a desert island, all a person really needs is a bag of potatoes and a toaster oven. Forget planes, jets, cars, TV. Without a doubt, a toaster oven is the finest invention of the twentieth century. It broils, it bakes, it toasts, it sits on your counter, small as a mouse. Always read labels. What? You're surprised it's so full of chemicals? You think these companies have your best interests at heart? But a potato. There's nothing evil they can do to it. No additives or red dye or MSG there. A potato is a hundred percent pure. It is what it is. Unlike most things.

Between men and women, love is not only blind, but stupid. Oh, sure, love has a sense of humor, but the punchline is usually sex, money, despair, or kids, and none of these are particularly funny. Here's how you test if love is real. Broil a chicken (with a side dish of potatoes, naturally) and invite him over. Cook badly. Even if you're already a bad cook, make it worse. Trust me, it's easy. Throw in anything you want. Too much salt, too much pepper. Feed him and see what he says. A complaint means he's thinking about himself, and always will. A compliment means he'll never make a living. But a man who says, " Let's go to a restaurant," now he's a real man. Order expensive, and see what he's got to say then. Kiss him good-night. Go ahead, don't be afraid. Are you sick to your stomach and shaky in your knees? That's love all right, so don't fight it, honey, because in such matters, no human being is immune. Not even you.

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I don’t know why I’m here, and why I alone can tell you the truth about what happened, but perhaps our fates are made long before we’re ever born and we’re marked in ways we can’t begin to understand, so that the angel of death knows when to pass over and when to alight on our roofs. Perhaps my mother was right about that. I was fifteen when it happened. I was plain, with dark hair, tall for my age, well behaved, but curious. I wanted to know how things worked. I could keep a secret. I wanted things I couldn’t express, but I see now that I wanted another life, one in which I could be a child, although clearly it was already too late for that.

The week began with lightning, which my mother took to be a bad sign. Where we lived, out so far in the woods, we had to think of fire. 

“We’ll burn down,” my mother said. “I see it in my dreams.”

Our house was made of wooden shingles and there were groves of eucalyptus and redwoods surrounding us. My mother and I got buckets of water from the rain barrel and my two younger brothers, Sam, who was five, and Jackson, who was seven, went up on the roof to wet down the house in case sparks should fall. My sister Rose was little more than a baby in her crib, only two. She had inherited my mother’s beauty, but her good nature was hers alone.  

“Do you think she’s an angel?” my mother would whisper to me.

“Of course not. She’s a little girl,” I told my mother, but secretly, I agreed.

I did not know my father, only the father of my brothers and sisters. He was the reason we were in the woods. My mother feared him greatly, and when she’d gone for groceries one day she’d never gone back. She took us in the car with her, and frankly I drove part of the way. She was a bad driver, and on this day, she was worse because her hands were shaking. I didn’t have a driver’s license, but I’d driven her around plenty of times, when she thought the dark angels were coming for us. On those days we hid in the house and covered the windows with newspapers taped to the glass. We sometimes went to school, and sometimes didn’t, but I’d read enough in a psychology textbook to know my mother wasn’t well. I’d talked to a counselor once at school, but she had seemed so upset, almost beside herself, and she said something about foster care, and I backtracked. I told her my mother wouldn’t let me go out with boys and that I had lied about her. I didn’t even cry until I was standing outside the school.

I had made a promise to myself. I would take my brothers and my baby sister and get out, not to foster care, but to someplace that was ours. I saw what the future could be one day when I took my brothers for a swim. I had the baby with me. I would have never left her with my mother who had started to talk about burning down the house. It wasn’t a house, really, it was a hunter’s shack that someone had abandoned long ago. We had discovered a lake, and we were usually alone, but this time a car had parked, and there was a woman having lunch. She’d brought along a lawn chair and was looking at the birds. My brothers went over, drawn by the scent of food, and I followed them. I put my hand on Sam’s shoulder when we reached the lady. He knew what that meant. Don’t tell anyone anything.

“This is a surprise,” the woman said. She was forty or so, wearing a jacket with brass buttons. She was pretty in a way that made you feel as if you already knew her. “I’m usually here alone.” 

She saw the way my brothers were staring at her lunch. They were like birds of prey.

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Alice Hoffman, MRPL ’24, is one of the most prolific novelists of the twenty-first century, writing over thirty novels including When We Flew Away, Aquamarine, and Here on Earth, which was selected for Oprah’s Book Club. Now a 2024-25 Religion and Public Life Fellow, Hoffman reflects on what drew her to the Master of Religion and Public Life program and how it has impacted her work.

Hoffman first found out about the program after a friend connected her with American singer-songwriter, producer, and HDS alum Maggie Rogers, MRPL ‘23. Hoffman was especially interested in Maggie Rogers’ experience because she was a fellow artist navigating a divinity school. “I thought, ‘How did it impact her work? And what difference did it make to what she was writing?’” Hoffman continued, “She was very positive about it and how it had affected her work while she was there.”

After writing many books with religious themes and magical elements, Hoffman looked forward to taking classes that would allow her to have a deeper understanding of religion and its place in literature. Hoffman felt drawn to the experience described by Rogers and, in particular, to the opportunity to grow in religious literacy, the first component of the RPL Method which serves as the foundation of inquiry in the MRPL.

Another alum, American journalist and editor Phil Picardi, MRPL ‘23, encouraged Hoffman to meet with Diane L. Moore, the associate dean of Religion and Public Life at the time and the founding director of the program. “Phil Picardi had said to me,” Hoffman recalls, “‘Talk to Dean Diane Moore. If you talk to her, you’re going to want to go.’ So, I did talk to her, and he was right. As soon as I met her, I thought, ‘Yeah, this is what I want to do.’” Hoffman finished, “Now, having spent so much time with her and feeling her dedication to the program and the students, I feel really lucky to have worked with her.”

Once a student, Hoffman found that the framework and curriculum of the MRPL program enriched all her coursework while providing space to pursue her own project path. “What MRPL allows you to do is follow your own heart. You can make it into whatever works for you, your work, and your search,” said Hoffman.

This sense of searching was important to Hoffman’s experience at HDS, having immediately felt a difference in the people she was surrounded by upon arriving. “I felt people were there not to so much get something but to find something, and that was really interesting to me,” Hoffman recalled.

Hoffman mentioned two classes that “really opened up things” for her and greatly influenced the novel she is currently working on: “Theories and Methods” with Professor Annette Reed and “We Are One: An Anthropological Introduction to Contemporary Spiritualities” with Professor Giovanna Parmigiana.

While the lessons she learned and the classes she took were all intriguing and insightful for her work, she reflected that it was ultimately the people who truly made her time at Harvard Divinity School a worthwhile experience. “It’s the singer, not the song,” Hoffman said, a quote she lives by and that best encompassed her experience as a student.

In addition to Diane L. Moore, Hoffman loved the professors she was able to work with. She most appreciated how they valued her unique situatedness, allowing her to tailor assignments to fit her needs and interests as an author. For example, Hoffman described Professor Shaul Magid as a fantastic teacher, saying, “Professor Magid allowed me to do assignments in ways that related to my larger work, like writing poems or fiction in response to class readings. That was great for me.”

Professor Matthew Ichihashi Potts, Plummer Professor of Christian Morals and Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church, was another professor from whom she learned a particular lesson.

“I always have thought that fiction tells the truth, and nonfiction is a lie,” said Hoffman. However, it was Professor Potts and his recent book Forgiveness that helped Hoffman articulate why: “A lot of people who write in an academic way also want the chance to write in a different way and find different kinds of truths. Fiction gets to the heart of things in a way that is pure and emotional.”

Hoffman also felt the impact of her MRPL cohort and their moral imagination. Unlike the many ideologies that she encountered while working for corporate, she found that her peers united under a core value of “doing good and finding and searching.” She stated that “most people do not have time to explore and search while working full-time and balancing a bunch of other things. I was thrilled to be surrounded by so many passionate and reflective individuals from various fields.” Such interdependence with one another and the new insights born of their shared investment in just peacebuilding and the moral imagination to pursue not what is but what is possible have fueled Hoffman’s creative work.

Hoffman’s use of fiction as a typology of peace is best exemplified through her recent novel When We Flew Away, which is written as a prequel to Anne Frank’s Diary, reconstructing the story of Anne Frank’s life from the moment the Nazis invaded the Netherlands until the Frank family was forced into hiding.

“When I was asked by a publisher at Scholastic to write this book, I immediately said yes,” Hoffman said. “I felt like it was a way, even though I was writing fiction—albeit fiction that was extremely well-researched in cooperation with the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam—it was a way to express emotionally what had happened or what might have happened.”

The novel, in many ways, embodies much of what Hoffman gained through the MRPL curriculum and the impact of religious literacy.

“I still can’t believe I did it,” Hoffman said. “In a way, I feel like I stepped out of my life for a year. But everything I learned while a student in the Master of Religion and Public Life program now impacts my life going forward. I’m still friendly and in touch with several people from my time at HDS. And I feel really fortunate that I got to be with people who, at a time when I was searching, were also searching.

Previously shared on the Harvard Divinity School website.

As daughters, we may come to realize that our own mothers may be the biggest mystery in our lives. When we look at our mother — whether we’re children or adults — we see the woman who gave birth to us and raised us in a particular way, defined by our needs. She was the person we argued with, the one we stopped speaking to, sometimes hated, and often turned to for comfort. She, who was overly protective or never there, who was too supportive or too judgmental, was the one we talked to our shrinks about. She ruined us, she was hard to live up to, she never told us we were pretty, she pushed us too hard. Let’s face it, whether she was a lawyer or a factory worker or a nurse, we defined her by a single role: our mother.

But who was she really, before we came along?

For a girl who is aware she is not being raised by her birth mother, the mystery presents itself early on. Every aspect of an adoptee’s birth mother is a missing piece of a puzzle: the way she looks and speaks, her background, her history. What is missing is her mother’s story. But even for those of us raised by our biological mother, how do we ever know the true story of our mother’s life? What drove her, what were her raw fears and desires? We can never know our mothers as they were as children, beautiful, gawky teenagers or young women with their futures ahead of them. If we could somehow time travel and meet our mothers when they were 8-year-olds who were afraid of thunder storms, or college students in love with the wrong man, or young mothers-to-be awaiting our births, all that we believe that we know would likely replaced by a different vision. Let’s face it: Just as we always hid aspects of our true selves from our mothers (who we slept with, what our dreams were, how we climbed out our windows after curfew to meet our friends, or tried smoking), the same is true in reverse. It is a classic don’t ask, don’t tell situation. Maybe we don’t want to hear about our mother’s fears and dreams any more than she wants to know about the rules we broke. So, how do we ever break through the roles that define us to each other, and see through to the person inside?

For me, the break-through happened as my mother was dying. She asked me to contact her high school boyfriend, someone she had never mentioned before. I realized this boy had been the love of her life, in a life kept secret from me, one she only admitted to when she had nothing to lose. She told me he was the one, her fate and her destiny, but somehow, she’d made a mistake and let him go. For more than fifty years, she’d been secretly harboring her regret and her sorrow. I couldn’t help but wonder what else had she kept from me, and how many other parts of her life she’d kept to herself either to protect me or to maintain her image as my mother. She divided her life into the woman she once was and the mother she came to be. Now as a mother myself, I understand how that happens. The woman you were before you had children is in many ways a stranger, even to yourself. Because there’s such a pivotal shift in one’s focus after having children, the girl you once were slips away.

But she’s still there. I knew that when my mother held my hand and finally confided in me about her true love. I know it now as I sometimes get a glimpse of the girl I used to be, the person my own children have never met, but who, after all these years, is still somewhere inside, and who still has her own story.

When he came to tell me he loved me, I sent him away and that was the end, or so it seemed. I was young and I wanted to go to California. I was heartless, too. I didn’t see the way he looked at me, and so I left. Did I say there were problems, and that he had a vice that became a habit, and that the habit grew worse, and so I was never in contact. We’d had a friend who had died of an overdose, and at the funeral something happened to me. I sat by myself and saw the boy’s family sobbing, and that was when I knew I had to leave. We had grown up in a place where drugs were everywhere, in a time when drug-users were criminals rather than people who needed help. Sooner or later, it catches up with you, even when you think you’re smarter than everyone else, smart enough to live your life carrying that burden on your back. I didn’t know he had been to prison for ten years because I left, I never looked back. Now I know, that was my bad habit. I could never admit when I’d made a mistake.

I went to California, then moved to city near Boston. Twenty years of a different life passed, and then one day I saw him at a flea market. It was a cloudy August evening, and I was on vacation with my family. I was by myself, looking for the old photographs I liked to collect, and suddenly there he was in the middle of a row of stands which sold everything from antiques to tomatoes. He seemed confused. He seemed lost as a matter of fact, as he looked around. It was as if he had been plucked out of his life and deposited here. I thought about approaching him, but what would I say? That my life had not turned out exactly as I’d wished? That I couldn’t sleep at night? I had young children and a husband who was more distant by the day, but it was a family, and it was mine, so I turned and walked away.

I thought about the day when I’d left more often. The truth was, I thought about it all the time. I saw a therapist to discuss my inability to face the tough issues of real life and why my family seemed like people I didn’t know. I never said aloud what I was really thinking. I was living someone else’s life. I often wondered what would have happened if I had gone to speak to him on that August day. I wondered why he’d been here at that particular flea market, three states away from the town where we’d grown up.

I tried to let it go, that was my therapist’s advice. And so it was a year before I searched for him on line. That was when I found his obituary. There was no cause of death, so I knew what had happened. No one ever give the cause of death as an overdose, they never say you went into your bedroom at eight in the evening, as you did every day at around that time and that didn’t leave your room again. I knew what had happened because I contacted his sister and she told me the truth. He had died the previous summer, in August, on a cloudy evening. It was the date when I had seen him, when he looked so lost, when I didn’t go to speak to him, when I walked away for a second time.

I didn’t see him again until ten years later. By then my children were teen-agers and my husband was hardly ever home. I had been diagnosed with breast cancer and I hadn’t yet told anyone. I was in shock, I suppose. Or maybe it was that I didn’t feel close enough to anyone to tell them. I was standing by the window crying when I saw him in my garden. He was sitting in one of the metal chairs beneath the beech tree. It was a beautiful tree, one I loved. I’d insisted we buy the house because of it. But it looked different to me now. It looked like the trees I’d seen on gravestones in the old cemetery nearby. I thought about all I hadn’t known when I was young, and how easy it was to make a mistake that would last a lifetime.

This time I went to the door. I opened it and stepped outside. I should have felt afraid. I should have doubted my own sanity. Instead, I went to sit in the chair across from him. I wondered if he had never forgiven me, and if had come here to haunt me, but I didn’t feel haunted. I felt comforted instead. I felt that there was someone who cared about me, still, after all this time, whether or not he was here.

I suppose I fell asleep while I was sitting there. I’d been up all night, worried about my doctor’s appointment and I was exhausted. When I woke the tree was filled with sparrows and I cried when I saw them. I knew they were a message to me. That with each one’s song, he was telling me to go on living.

It took a year of treatment, but I recovered. Afterwards, I still went to sit in the garden every day, as I had all the while I was in treatment. It was the same time of day as it had been when I saw him at the flea market, and when I first saw him in the garden. By then, my husband had left me. My children had not turned out as I’d hoped and lived on the west coast. They’d left the way I had, without ever looking back. My hair had grown in and I wore it up, the way he’d liked me to when we were young. I stopped smoking. I planted rose bushes. I left out seeds for the birds and there were more and more all the time until the children in the neighborhood began to call me the Bird Lady. I didn’t mind. They could call me whatever they wished to. I knew who I was.

Time passed faster than I ever imagined it would. Often, when my friends called me, I said I was too busy to go out to dinner. I didn’t want to miss sitting in my garden at eight o’clock, as the dark was drifting down. His sister called, worried about me. I had written her a note to say he visited me each evening and now she was concerned. She said he was gone and I didn’t argue with her. I didn’t say she was wrong, at least not for me.

I was growing old, but he was not. He looked exactly the same as he had when I’d last seen him on the front porch of my mother’s house. My suitcase was behind me in the hallway and I already had my tickets to San Francisco. He said I don’t understand. Why can’t I go with you?

Being haunted is not what you think it is. The air does not become chill, there’s no need to hide under a shawl or behind a locked door, there’s nothing frightening about it. As it turns out, it’s a great comfort when the dead come back to you. When the dark spills down between the branches of the beech tree, at the hour when he vanishes, I know he’ll return again. All I have to do is sit in the garden. All I have to do is wait and I’ll be with him again.

When I was a child, I was convinced that something miraculous was about to happen. I lived a very ordinary and very unhappy life -- my parents had divorced when I was eight, and my father all but disappeared. Times were different then -- I didn't meet anyone else whose parents were divorced until I went to college. My mother worked to make ends meet, the only working mother I knew in our neighborhood. And so I knew early on that families broke apart, just as I knew that when your mother kissed you goodnight and told you to sleep tight she herself might be up till all hours worrying about the sort of problems that plague grown-ups, food and laundry, dollars and sense, love and sorrow.

No matter what grown ups say, children know there are monsters in the world. They may not be in the closet, or under the bed, but they're there all the same. Monster are, were and always will be. But it seemed only fair that there would be magic as well.

In school, I felt alone and the place I felt most comfortable was the school library. I went there as often as possible, and our school librarian, Mrs. Inken -- who she had the perfect name --- and I began to think she was somewhat magical herself -- allowed me to break the rules and take out not three or four books, but as many books as I liked. This was our secret, and it made me feel, in some deep way, that Mrs. Inken and I shared something major: we both loved books. I always learned, early on, that librarians are rebels.

As an early reader I was a huge fan of magic -- anything by Edward Eager, and later Ray Bradbury -- both of whom I feel are my literary godfathers. I was also fanatical about the Borrowers series and Mary Poppins. I suppose I was looking for magic in the real world because my world was filled with sadness. I still clung to the belief that a miracle would occur and change my mundane, ordinary life. Birthdays came and went, but I wasn't worried. I never wavered in my belief that there was more to life than the one that I knew. Sooner or later, I'd meet up with my destiny.

Summers might have been a problem for me, with school closed and Mrs. Inken gone. Other kids were thrilled school was over, for me I mourned the loss of the school library. As it turned out there was library in the next town, and I began to go there to read every day. The route I took was a green leafy path so overgrown with weeds it was almost possible to forget that I was walking along a chain link fence, and that the rushing sound I heard wasn't a stream or a brook, but the echo of cars on the Southern State Parkway. When I run into the girls I grew up with and ask what they remember about me, since I don't remember much, they always say they remembered me going to the library. But we weren't residents, or members of the library. I just keep going. I was amazed when one of the librarians suggested I take out some books. Like Mrs. Inken, she didn't mind if I took out as many books as I wanted. Without a library card!!! Another wonderful life-saving rebel. For this I will always be grateful to the Malverne Library on Long Island. When I think of heaven I think of the Malverne Library. It opened the door that lead me into the rest of my life, and I am certain that without that library I would never have become a writer. It was there I found Emily Bronte, Emily Dickinson, Jane Austen, all of the authors I still love best. I found shelves of fantasy and science fiction, as much magic as I wanted. And I found Ann Frank, my first hero.

My miracle happened, in Malverne. It wasn't an amulet that I needed, or a lamp that could grant wishes, or a rose that would never die. It was the best sort of miracle, the kind that happens when the heat outside is blistering, or when a storm is brewing and you can hear thunder in the distance. It was there I learned what London was like, was the rain felt like in Paris, what true love was. I had a very small life, but the world opened to me through my readings.

I often write about characters who are changed by books, as I was. My mother was the only mother I knew who had a library of books and who put up some shaky modern bookshelves in our living room and it was there I found Shirley Jackson -- whose fiction and nonfiction I loved and JD Salinger who I felt was writing directly to me. I felt my mind open with every page I turned --

Clearly when a child walks begins to read she has freedom, maybe for the first time in her life. In a library you can make your own choices. No one can tell you what to read or what to believe. Best of all, no one can tell you what you can and cannot imagine.

In my neighborhood, many of my friends did not make it out. They were waylaid by crime and by drugs. Beautiful smart girls were lost, boys who were artists or musicians went to jail. It was a tough neighborhood and some people couldn't see outside of the boundaries of our town. But I could look over the wall. It was as if I pied up all of those books I had read and climbed to the top to peer over that wall, and into the world beyond ours. I think now I would not have survived my childhood, and that I certainly would not have survived my adolescence, had I not become a reader. Books were the true miracle in my life. Nothing is as intimate, as healing, or as private as a book.

Often the people who succeed in spite of the difficulties they face have one thing in common. They read. They are the people who can escape into a book, who know there are other worlds to be found. They are the one who carry books with them to movie theaters and street corners, who lock themselves in the bathroom or sit out on the porch under a yellow light bulb when everyone in the house is too noisy, they're the one who open a new chapter when the world outside their window is too horrible or disappointing or simply moving too fast. They have hope and faith in the future because they know that once upon a time there was a boy or a girl, a woman or a man, who managed to survive. Somewhere among the pages and the print, on the shelves of a library, in Malverne or Hempstead or some other town, there was someone who found solace or justice or truth, or maybe just a change to tell her own story.

1. Create a scene using only dialogue for five minutes. Rewrite the scene for five minutes with no dialogue.

2. Think of a character from a book you like -- a minor character is best. Write for five minutes from the point of view of that character. The character can be in a prequel, sequel or in the novel already written.

3. Spend five minutes creating a character. First write down the facts of the character's life. Then give your list to a friend who’s also a writer and have them write a scene for five minutes using this character that you’ve created.

4. Write for five minutes from the point of view of an inanimate object.

5. Write a fairy tale for five minutes. You can use themes or characters from established fairy tales but tell it from a different point of view.

6. For five minutes write a story in a series of three postcards.

7. Write a ghost story. From the POV of the haunted for five minutes. Then write for five minutes from the POV of the ghost.

8. Six Minutes, Six Words - Write a story using these words: Wedding, Brother, Circus, Dog, Hospital, Florida.

In 1973, at the age of twenty-one, I left New York and went out to California to seek my fortune, having been accepted to the Stanford University Graduate Program. I had never seen a palm tree, or been farther west than Chicago, or heard of Stanford. I was a working-class girl who never expected to go to college, let alone become a writer. I was, however, a fanatical reader, and, in many ways, reading saved my life. My mother - educated, bohemian, divorced - was a great reader and her love of books was contagious. I can’t remember visiting another house during my childhood and adolescence in which there were books, other than Reader’s Digest Condensed Books - a little more like soup than literature. The bookshelves in the back of our tiny living room changed the route I might have taken: Instead of dropping out of high school, I finished early. After a series of jobs, one of which, at a book factory, lasted less than half a day, I registered at a local college. When I graduated, my brother, then living in San Francisco, suggested I come to California. That in itself was a dream.

It was my great good fortune to be given the Mirrelles Fellowship by Albert J. Guerard, arguably the greatest writing teacher in the country. Having taught at Harvard for twenty years, then at Stanford for another twenty, Guerard was a novelist, critic, and essayist who favored experimental work and had brought the Voice Project to Stanford, headed by the novelist John Hawkes. In Guerard’s theory of fiction, it was the writer’s voice - more than any other aspect of his or her work - that was the most important and defined style and substance. For Guerard, this “voice” was like a fingerprint: a unique, one of a kind, the core element that each fiction writer needed to find and nurture.

The early seventies were still the sixties at Stanford. We weren’t thinking so much about being published - there were no book tours, no media blitzes yet in existence. We were yearning to create something brand-new, a voice that sounded like no one else’s, a work of fiction that took chances, and in doing so, took the reader’s breath away. The counterculture was everywhere and the world of publishing, like the rest of the establishment, didn’t define what we did or how we approached our work. Now I realize how lucky we were, to be able to write for writing’s sake. Later the business of publishing and all that went along with it entered the picture, but there was a purity at the graduate program at Stanford, a sort of innocence I’m not certain would exist today. We were there to write. And to be in California, of course, with all that implied. People still went to Big Sur to get high and wander through the hills searching for waterfalls and monarch butterflies. Patty Hearst was abducted and the SLA died on live television. There were still stories of Kesey and the Pranksters’ exploits up in La Honda, where we went down the twisting roads. A horde of Western realists settled in Palo Alto, including Raymond Carver, at whose house we sometimes gathered despite the drinking and the fights. Students left the program because they feared earthquakes or fell in love with poets addicted to heroin. It was a long way from the working-class suburb where I grew up, not far from the city line.

In California, I reimagined the New York I had known, which to me had always seemed mythic and beautiful and doomed. I had grown up in a place and time of huge and stupid drug use, long before the threat of AIDS. Self-improvement, self-awareness, didn’t exist. In my neighborhood, anyone running was either on the track team or had the police chasing after him. We were city people trapped in the grid of the cut-rate paper-doll houses built for our fathers, returning World War II GIs. It was a combustible world, bordered on one side by outdated rules and regulations and on the other by the sudden freedoms of the sixties.

The idea of urban/suburban magic was brewing under my skin. I had always been a major reader, but a schizoid one, divided by the literature I sneaked from my mother’s bookcases - where I found The Catcher in the Rye one innocent day and had my mind, along with every expectation of what a novel should and could be, blown away - and the books my father had left behind when he took off. A box of science fiction and fantasy awaited me in the basement, where my brother raised rats and mice for sale to pet stores. I became enchanted by authors like Ray Bradbury and Theodore Sturgeon. Added to that were the fairy tales and folktales told by my Russian grandmother, and the books about magic I had read as a child. My approach to fiction had been created by a mixture of the stories I loved: a new sort of fairy tale, gritty, mythic in scope and domestic and urban in setting. It was a world defined by pop songs, literature, true-love romances, and a certain gangster New York ethic.

In the literature I had read, girls, if they were anything at all, served as the chroniclers of the boys’ adventures and little more. Even at Stanford, our text, The Single Voice, contained the voices of only two women: Flannery O’Connor and Grace Paley. Reading Grace Paley’s stories as I was seriously thinking of becoming a writer myself was fortune indeed. Paley’s fictional attitude, her singular voice, her insistence that women’s lives were worth writing about and that domestic life and personal relationships were not only political but at the very center of what made the world work (or not work), were all pivotal to my fiction. Paley’s work allowed me to believe that I, too, could write with the boys. Property Of, begun so soon after the war in Vietnam, and in the midst of the feminist movement, reflects the turmoil of being young in a dangerous time, when political thought and personal psychology are shifting, when the very ground you stand upon seems unreliable.

The publication of Property Of was something of a fairy tale itself. Professor Guerard sent a copy of a story that included the main characters of the novel-to-be to his ex-student and friend Mark Mirsky, who published the pice in Fiction, City College’s literary magazine. After the publication, the preeminent editor Ted Solotaroff contacted me for a story, which to my surprise he accepted for publication in his legendary magazine, American Review. He then wrote again: Did I have a novel? I thought it over for about five minutes. Maybe four. Then I wrote back and said that I did. I began writing it that day.

I had read enough fairy tales to know that such a monumental, life-changing chance is offered only once; at least that’s how it went in the stories. If I didn’t accept the challenge, it might never come around again. Six months later, I had a manuscript. (I was also still a student, and working both in the blouse department of Bullocks Department Store in Palo Alto and as the secretary of the Stanford Sex Clinic.) Writing Property Of in the fevered heat of hurry and passion taught me how to write a novel. Perhaps it was more good fortune that I didn’t have time to think or obsess. I had told Solotaroff a date when the novel would be done, and so it would be. When people ask how i’ve managed to write so many novels since, I can only say that I have never written as fast or as furiously as I did while working on Property Of - and everything since as seemed comparatively leisurely.

Solotaroff worked with me for several months, refining the manuscript, and although he didn’t take the book, he did send me to an agent, Elaine Markson, who was my agent for more than thirty years. Elaine submitted the book to Farrar, Straus and Giroux, a publishing house I had never heard of, just as I had never heard of Stanford, but it was the house everyone assured me was best. They were right.

My grandmother went with me for my first meeting and waited on a park bench in Union Square - filled with junkies back then - while I went up to meet with Aaron Asher. Asher was a great editor and I was a nervous wreck. Just being in the FSG offices - all those files! all those books! - was enough to set my head spinning. I was a girl with black eyeliner. He was Philip Roth’s editor. Luckily for me, Asher took the time to teach me quite a lot about how to write a novel.

The book itself, set on a shadowy, mythic Avenue, centers around a street gang named the Orphans and is told by a nameless narrator who is an outsider but rapidly becomes an insider when she falls in love with the charismatic, doomed leader, McKay. It’s a novel about war (gang war), about a woman’s place in that violent world, about erotic longing, but, most of all, it is about the quest for personal identity. In many ways, Property Of follows the path of a formal quest, but the heroes and villains are mutable. The heroes are flawed and the villains may not be who they first appear to be. The prose is a rhythm of urban music, with a rock backdrop, a punk edge, and a nod to the girl groups of the sixties, most especially the rebellious Shangri-Las with their mythic songs of heartbreak and sorrow. It’s a pop culture view of knights and their ladies, set in a world of drugs and betrayal.

The narrator speaks directly to the reader. Her obsession is both love and revolution. What cruelty is accomplished in the name of love? How does one move from being mere “property” to being free? Here again is a woman’s chronicle of male exploits, but it is also a chronicle of the fury that accompanies being a second-class citizen in the world. Property Of is in its nature a feminist exploration of a woman’s place both in the broader world and in the world of black leather and petty crime. All along our narrator is certain she is not like the women around her - the Property of the Orphans. She is somehow different, perhaps better, because she is more psychologically aware. Yet by the end of the novel, she is faced with the realization that if she stays in the world of the Orphans, she will become a part of it - no different, no better - and fated to join in the dance of doom.

Ultimately, Property Of is about a narrator who is telling us a story. Once upon a time, in a dark place, beautiful boys ruined their lives and girls went to sleep for a hundred years only to wake up as widows. Imagine streets slicked with ice, and snow that falls for weeks. Imagine love twisted. Imagine betrayal and loss. A long time ago, or maybe just yesterday, there were men who fought for their honor and women who believed in them, and this is the way their story began.