An Interview With Nicola Maye Goldberg

BY LISA MARIE BASILE

OTHER WOMEN is a novel by Nicola Maye Goldberg.

About the book: After dropping out of college, a young woman wanders through New York both invisible and vulnerable, studying the city’s strong magic and longing for a man she knows will never love her back. She thinks she finds salvation when Charlotte Herzfeld, the young wife of a successful businessman, hires her as a live-in nanny to accompany the family on their trip to Berlin. As the After dropping out of college, a young woman wanders through New York both invisible and vulnerable, studying the city’s strong magic and longing for a man she knows will never love her back. She thinks she finds salvation when Charlotte Herzfeld, the young wife of a successful businessman, hires her as a live-in nanny to accompany the family on their trip to Berlin. As the Herzfelds begin to crack under the weight of their secrets, she finds herself in a more precarious position than ever before. Both thoughtful and restrained, Goldberg’s prose examines the painful obsession that so often accompanies the confusing lust of youth. Herzfelds begin to crack under the weight of their secrets, she finds herself in a more precarious position than ever before. Both thoughtful and restrained, Goldberg’s prose examines the painful obsession that so often accompanies the confusing lust of youth.

You can read an excerpt here. 

In your book, OTHER WOMEN, love how sometimes your writing feels like a diary, a memory, and a peek behind the curtains at once. I love passages like this, where you detail so beautifully, so gently, and so specifically on a situation.

"Obviously we don’t get to choose who we love, I thought. I was lying in an unmade bed that smelled of gin and soap and your girlfriend’s perfume. All things considered, you can do much worse than a wall. 25 We stayed up until dawn. I watched the shadows of your eyelashes move rapidly across your cheeks. We got under the covers and you pulled me close to you, muttering something about goose-bumps. I tried to sleep beside you, but your heart beat so fast it bothered me. You couldn’t believe how small I was, how cold."

What inspired this book, and your style of writing? What inspired this narrator? 

The starting point for the book was the same, I imagine, as for a lot of books - I was really in love with someone who didn't give a shit about me. The bulk of the book is made up of emails I wrote and never sent to that person. A lot of the book was also written in the margins of the notebooks when I should have been taking notes in class, or in the notes app on my phone. 

Do you read while you write, or do you avoid writing so as not to become a sponge? I myself feel like I can't read while writing, or else something happens and bits of something kind of get stuck in my mind and I feel like what comes out isn't clearly me. That's probably why I write so slowly. Tell me about how muse and inspiration intersect with your writing process.

I'm almost always writing - though not necessarily well - so it would be impossible to not read while I'm writing. I read a lot of poetry while I was writing Other Women. I was especially obsessed with Couer de Lion by Ariana Reines. Fiction is my favorite thing to read, but I try to balance it out with nonfiction and poetry as much as I can, because I'm afraid of other writer's voices overpowering my own. I often write while watching television, which is not very disciplined of me, but seems to work. 

Your book is very firmly rooted in the experience of being a young woman. Tell me more about the appeal of writing about that experience, that condition, that perspective. Why do you think these tales, and that voice, is so fucking intoxicating? 

I mean, it's what I know. In the project I'm working on now, I throw my voice a lot more, writing through the perspective of people who are very different from myself. But for my first book, it seemed safer, I guess, to stay close to my own experience and perspective. I don't know what makes it appeal to other people. Personally I've kind of lost my appetite for coming of age novels right now! Personally I'm really into books about older women who have been through a lot and have unusual views on the world. 

If your book was a song or a color, which song, and which color, would it be? Why?

If it were a song it would definitely be "I don't smoke" by Mitski which I listened to a ton while writing. That song is very much in the emotional register I tried to maintain in the book. And a color - maybe a pale pink with blue undertones. Or maybe lilac? Something muted, probably. 

Who should read your book? Who is Other Women for? 

I wrote it primarily for myself, I think. I tried to write a book I wanted to read.  I have no idea who should read it.  I will say that I am a little surprised whenever men tell me they enjoyed the book. 

There's a little conversation in the book about the narrator saying to her lover that she liked soft sweaters; he responds by saying he prefers material sturdy, strong. Something that will last unto death. You write, "It was such a small, odd piece of information you’d given me, but there was a real possibility that it was something only I knew. Even though I knew you most likely forgot that conversation by the time you left my apartment, to me it was a real gift."

These tiny snapshots, fragments—they stay with us, and you manage to capture them so tenderly and honestly throughout your whole book. I love that. Do you think that love is a perpetual struggle in being seen, remembered, being seen as special? Is this more a book of sorrow, or is it more a book of acceptance and growth? 

Thank you for the compliment! I think I know even less about love now than I did when I started the book. There's pretty much nothing about it I can say with any certainty. As to that particular conversation: I thought if I captured certain moments, certain memories, I would be able to drain them of their power, that they would no longer have such a hold on me. It didn't work. 

I love the fact that you published with Witch Craft Magazine. What drew you to that press, specifically? It's such a perfect combination of editor/writer magic. 

Other Women was originally my undergraduate thesis. After I finished writing it I sent it to some agents who basically said it was too short to be published and that I should make it longer, which I really didn't want to do. Witch Craft published one of my short stories around the same time, so I asked Elle if she knew of any small presses that might be interested in my manuscript. I actually don't remember if it was Elle or I who suggested that they publish it. I'm really glad it worked out the way it did. Elle and Catch have been such a joy to work with. I got to have a lot of creative control, which I appreciate. 

Can you tell me what else you're working on right now? 

I'm working on a book about murder, inspired by a ghost story I heard while I was in college. I'm sort of nervous to say too much about it, like that might jinx it or something. Spending so much time thinking about ghosts has apparently made me superstitious. 

---

Nicola Maye Goldberg is the author of Other Women (Sad Spell Press, 2016) and The Doll Factory (Dancing Girl Press, 2017). She is a graduate of the fiction program at Columbia University. She lives in New York City. 

Other Women: An Excerpt by Nicola Maye Goldberg

BY LISA MARIE BASILE

OTHER WOMEN is a novel by Nicola Maye Goldberg. You can read an interview with her here. 

About the book: After dropping out of college, a young woman wanders through New York both invisible and vulnerable, studying the city’s strong magic and longing for a man she knows will never love her back. She thinks she finds salvation when Charlotte Herzfeld, the young wife of a successful businessman, hires her as a live-in nanny to accompany the family on their trip to Berlin. As the After dropping out of college, a young woman wanders through New York both invisible and vulnerable, studying the city’s strong magic and longing for a man she knows will never love her back. She thinks she finds salvation when Charlotte Herzfeld, the young wife of a successful businessman, hires her as a live-in nanny to accompany the family on their trip to Berlin. As the Herzfelds begin to crack under the weight of their secrets, she finds herself in a more precarious position than ever before. Both thoughtful and restrained, Goldberg’s prose examines the painful obsession that so often accompanies the confusing lust of youth. Herzfelds begin to crack under the weight of their secrets, she finds herself in a more precarious position than ever before. Both thoughtful and restrained, Goldberg’s prose examines the painful obsession that so often accompanies the confusing lust of youth.

We stayed up until dawn. I watched the shadows of your eyelashes move rapidly across your cheeks. We got under the covers and you pulled me close to you, muttering something about goose-bumps. I tried to sleep beside you, but your heart beat so fast it bothered me. You couldn’t believe how small I was, how cold.

In the morning you smoked a cigarette, pretending not to look at me.  

I dressed myself and went to run a bath. As I kneeled on the blue tile floor, checking the temperature of the water, I had a strange feeling, as if I was utterly pure, as if I had been scrubbed clean from the inside. There was no word for it: the only one I could think of was cauterized. The second I stepped into the bathtub it was gone.

As I was getting dressed, you said: this has to be a secret, and I nodded.

“No, really,” you said. “It has to be.”

I pinky-promised. It might have seemed silly, but when I was a kid one of my friends told me that if you broke a pinky promise God would hate you. I didn’t believe that any more, strictly speaking, but I did attach great importance to that small vow.

You never once responded to me with blank stares or stunned silence  

or awkward, painful laughter. There seemed to be nothing I could say that would convince you I was too intense, too insane.

When I told you about the earring I left in your apartment, you laughed and said it was a nutty thing to do, definitely, but that you were glad I’d done it. I told you about my childhood obsession with Joan of Arc, of my totally irrational but somehow consuming fear of being burned at the stake, and you told me about a beautiful blue and white church in Mexico dedicated to Saint Lucy, who you said was your personal favorite. You promised, blithely, to take me there.

Once when we were having sex at my apartment, we kept almost falling off the tiny, unmade bed.

“What’s wrong with us?” I laughed, and you said, “I’ve been wondering that for a long time,” as if the same thing might be wrong with both of us. I didn’t think that was true, but it made me happy that you might.

Once you told me I had a perfect mouth and I glowed for days. It was such a specific compliment, and you said it with deliberation, as if you had thought about my mouth for a long time before settling on the word “perfect.” If you had ever told other girls they had perfect mouths - and I wasn’t stupid, I knew you had - mine was still the most perfect. I don’t know where this certainty came from.

After work, Kayla and I would come back to our apartment, get high and sit on the floor, and listen to songs sung by women with hearts even weaker than our own.

Weak hearts, but at least they made something out of it. I couldn’t sing, couldn’t paint, couldn’t even write poems anymore.

What I did was draw, on old newspapers and flyers, whatever I felt like, pigs and mountains and babies with delicate faces. You enjoyed my drawings. You kept them folded inside your second-favorite notebook. You showed them to your friends, and didn’t understand why I was angry. I thought you were making fun of me.

We never liked the same music. Once, when we were alone, I put on Etta James, and you just shook your head.

“These torch songs, they’re just lullabies for ugly girls,” you said. “They make it seem like not being loved is just as romantic as being loved.”

“It isn’t?”

“Well, what do you think?”

I shrugged. I didn’t feel like I had enough data to say for

sure, then.You pulled me toward you. I noticed that your pants were too big. You looked ridiculous - why not just buy a pair that fit you? Maybe you thought they looked good. Maybe Josephine did.

I was obsessed with the gap between your front teeth. It was not very large and I liked to think I was one of the few people who noticed it. It reminded me of how quickly your smile had turned into a kiss.

We measured our hands against one another. You squeezed mine tight and flipped me over. Around you, it felt terribly natural to be on my back. I was like a dog that was afraid.

---

Nicola Maye Goldberg is the author of Other Women (Sad Spell Press, 2016) and The Doll Factory (Dancing Girl Press, 2017). She is a graduate of the fiction program at Columbia University. She lives in New York City. 

3 Poems by Paul Aster Stone

BY PAUL ASTER STONE

there    a flesh drips
porous wax

eyes falling into   a landscape
of disintegrating  ash  dark  green.

a hand  extends itself  from the looming
of a silent face creased down the middle.

was there something ever  like a sweet
whispering  or
is the meeting between two  ribcages
a closed   affair?

deeply,  shimmering a wild fluorescence
then  is the horizon like  a

dis‒ appearing mouth,  over  and over again?
a moth once entered my bloodstream,  it
lingered  for a moment before   as if hair
had become a screen  evaporating in the thinning air

of atmosphere burning.

   your fingers alwayS
   leave  a gap of reciprocity
   already  missing  again,  a missed 

departure.

the millionfingered rose
blooms like a star  struck
by daggers.     i peel
and pull each    pinprick   out

and feel    colors  explode my skin‒

each   thorn  leaves  my  body
slowly  a jar of honey tipped over
seeping  quietly  like liquified   amber

there is blood  from  forty years ago
also seven,  and three  and two
        years ago  it.

blends with the blue   river
of tears    that a finger  thought to caress
nine

the minefield   explodes back
into itself  and the earth  sinks
sere   and handless

each speck of dust trembles once
in the ripple of  ten thousand folds
learning to   speak  and stumbling
unfolds itself into spine-throat glottis

    ( ( the river zone of her tears ) )
if you trace
your body over this
the echoes haunt  as ripples
of smoke  bleeding into
concentric space  splayed

as a worm.

 

DREAMS

i.

like cast a spell charmed aspiral this
is me in a small snail swollen on the cusp
of transfiguration in a day
barred like rust

ii.

she was wondering what power of suction there had to be, perhaps, to suction the lines out of the peripheral surroundings and only leave behind a hazy cotton-wad?

iii.

(as the dusk roses  glow
in   aftershadow of a worm-hugged tomb
the sprightly   scent of a spirit's  )   never-self  that stair

touches  frog's spine
(as if
    in that dream )    hold hold hold hold hold

---

Paul Aster Stone is a poet, dancer, and drag queen (HAUS OF VALDES).
he travels with stolen goods and writes letters to screens. w/he dreams of re/visioning sight/e.
his first zine is trans/missions. it is a haunted house. it is a safe space for healing// with and beside the phantoms that might, come thru. (to be released fall 2018 & variant editions to come). he's sometimes @pink.privacy (ig). look there for/ a piece of him.

Light Magic for Dark Times: Practices for Magical Living, Resiliency, & Self-Care

BY LISA MARIE BASILE

Hello, Luna Luna readers—it's your long, lost editor-in-chief. This post is looooong overdue, but alas, summer languidness and a lack of time. So, I've got an announcement: I wrote a book, and it's called Light Magic for Dark Times! It is available for preorder now, and it's out in September.

In a way, this book is the official Luna Luna collection of rituals and practices for grief, resiliency, shadow work, sex magic, writing magic, body and identity appreciation, regeneration, love, trauma, creativity, and glamour. I'm so out of my mind excited!

In the fall of last year, I was approached by a publishing house, Quarto Books (the leading global publisher of illustrated nonfiction!)—whose editor had been reading Luna Luna (and one of my posts about grief rituals). They asked me if I'd be interested in writing a longer book of what they'd seen—so we went back and forth on some ideas. As a poet and essayist, this felt like a beautiful challenge, but I'd be lying if I said it wasn't difficult. I had been practicing magic for so long—and in a really intimate, quiet, chaotic, eclectic and solitary way (more on that here), so I wanted to make sure that my work was accessible and inclusive to be understood and used by anyone, including people who also had their own set ways of practicing. Magic is something we all have within us, and I believe removing barriers to that personal power is so important—especially in times when we feel we've lost our autonomy or sense of joy. 

As a former foster care youth, a trauma survivor, and someone with a chronic illness, feelings of out-of-control-ness have been no stranger to me. Those feelings can impact your self-esteem and your creativity, your resiliency, your hope, your desire, and the way you engage with the world around you. I wanted to share some of my personal practices and rituals that helped me through all of that. And I brought my experiences as a poet, empath, community builder, and writer to the book, too (so, yes it's even got a poetry section).

It was important to me that the book be a collection of practices that could both honor and manage our shadow selves and our light. They're one in the same, I think; they just move along on a spectrum, sometimes hand in hand, sometimes separately. 

Oh, and the foreword is written by Kristen J. Sollee, the amazing, inimitable, wonderful author of Witches, Sluts, Feminists: Conjuring The Sex Positive. 

Would you like to preorder the book?! You can do just that anywhere you can get books (Amazon, your local indie book store, B&N, and more). It can be preordered in the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand and Canada here. It can even be preordered at Target and Walmart (wild, right?).

Oh, and here are some photos from the writing & editing process:

Having a mini flip out, witches! The black font on the cover and the crystal-like design on the back will be foiled (so, *shiny*). The inside covers will be pearlescent. Excuse me as I do a hundred cartwheels down the street. Also, preorder link is in the bio BUT message me if you want links to alternate ordering methods or if you’re in Canada, NZ, Aus, or the UK! 🖤

A post shared by Lisa Marie Basile (@lisamariebasile) on Jun 12, 2018 at 10:37am PDT

I am soooo excited to share one of the GORGEOUS images from the intro to Light Magic for Dark Times 💛The talented @adagracee captured me (wearing my actual crown from @sthedwigatelier) so beautifully. I cannot wait for you to see the rest of the book. I’m so in love with the small touches of color, like magic, that sweep in and out of the book. They’re quiet but deliberate. They’re intentional. I’m so excited. You can preorder the book by visiting the link in my bio! 💛

A post shared by Lisa Marie Basile (@lisamariebasile) on May 10, 2018 at 12:09pm PDT

🖤 I’m really fascinated by how we use ritual in our everyday lives—and how it intersects with wellness and healing and creativity. So I started a new blog, lightmagicdarktimes.com—please check out my new column #RitualTalk, which is an interview series that encounters ritual from varied points of view. To kick things off I spoke with some of the most magical people I know: @mythsofcreation + @tristamarieedwards + @lezacantoral + @darleystewart. Visit: lightmagicdarktimes.com 🖤

A post shared by Lisa Marie Basile (@lisamariebasile) on May 7, 2018 at 10:53am PDT

💎I got a beautiful surprise from my publisher in the mail today! My book, laid out, with all of its glorious art—illustrations by @adagracee—ready to mark up. I canNOT wait to share more info and the preorder link with you all. My heart is bursting with joy.💎 . . Writing this book was a very intense and very emotional experience (and time in my life), but it was fun and pulsing and changing. I wrote it for all of us dreamers and creators and darklings and light seekers..so that we can find a path through heaviness and murk and emerge more resilient. I feel so grateful. 💎

A post shared by Lisa Marie Basile (@lisamariebasile) on Apr 18, 2018 at 3:20pm PDT

Just 10,000 more words (and then the editing phase) and I’ll have completed Light Magic for Dark Times. I’m so excited to show you all this book! For now, we’re working on illustrations (I’ll share soon!) and my publishing company and I are sending ivory & taupe organza sachets of dried rose and lavender with little spell scrolls to a sales conference. I can’t believe this is my life.🖤 The most beautiful thing about writing this book as a secular person is the opportunity to explore the very real magic in everyday things—in care and kindness, rituals of routine, in creativity, in self-love, in looking into the abyss. 🌸 #LightMagicforDarkTimes #poet #witch #picoftheday #nyc #magic #book #flowercrown

A post shared by Lisa Marie Basile (@lisamariebasile) on Jan 10, 2018 at 7:51am PST

🌕🌓🌑 FRIENDS. I've been sitting on a biggggg announcement for some time now: I will be publishing a nonfiction book next fall with Fair Winds Press/Quarto Knows, who is the leading global illustrated non-fiction book publisher (they've got 48 imprints, and they sell books across 50 countries and in 39 languages!). In other words: frightening! But I do think my life has led up to this point. 🌙 The book centers on DIY practices, mostly inspired by witchcraft, to get us through dark & hard times. It’s called Light Magick for Dark Times, and it's for everyone--from people specifically interested in or beginners practicing witchcraft, to people who just want to ritualize their intentions and expressions during dark, trying or hard moments. 🌓 I have had the darkest year of my life so far this year (god, haven't we all?), so when this opportunity fell into my lap (because the editor is, amazingly, a fan of @lunalunamag and reached out) it felt kismet to take it. I put a lot of thought into whether I should or not, but ultimately I decided yes. Because light wins and because I hope to be able to make tangible my compassion and love. A few of you here, my close friends, have inspired and pushed me to take this project on. 🌖 Combining my background in writing about trauma and healing and self-care, the nerdy amount of research I’ve done, and my love of ritual and witchcraft, this is *the* best book I could think to offer the world at this point in time. I'm super crazy grateful and extremely honored. 🌙 #lightmagicdarktimes

A post shared by Lisa Marie Basile (@lisamariebasile) on Nov 22, 2017 at 9:42am PST

Via @lisamariebasile: When I was writing Light Magic for Dark Times, it was important to me to make space for the reader's intuition and natural inclinations. You know what feels right for your body, your lifestyle, your beliefs. For example, spending tons of money on tools and doing elaborate rituals for self-care doesn't exactly feel right to me, so sometimes I go with my gut: wearing a color might bring me energy one day, inscribing a symbol into my palm may give me strength, and listening to "that FEELING" I'm feeling — above ALL else — might mean the difference between regret and joy. We all have magic inside of us, truly. So trust your intuition, always, and know that magic is different and personal to us all.

A post shared by Ravishly (@ravishly) on Jun 29, 2018 at 11:53am PDT

Via @lisamariebasile: As a poet and writer, I have always felt that language—the sound of a word, the shape of a letter, the idea conveyed, the musicality of the phrase spoken—is a sort of incantation. When we write, we conjure. We declare. We promise. From my book, I wanted to share a small idea—that writing is magic. If you're ever feeling down or powerless or exhausted, take a moment to write out a small incantation or declaration, to or for yourself. Use your language specifically, and write it in the present. Your power is tangible. I hope you'll check out my book, Light Magic for Dark Times for more on "Word Magic!"—@lisamariebasile 🌬🔮✨

A post shared by Ravishly (@ravishly) on Jun 29, 2018 at 6:12pm PDT

The Luna Luna Grimoire is now available for preorder! . . LIGHT MAGIC FOR DARK TIMES by editor in chief @lisamariebasile is a fully illustrated hard cover (illustrations done by the wonderful @adagracee!), full of rituals and practices, for anyone interested in modern and intentional personal power & magic. 🖤 The foreword was written by the inimitable @kristenkorvette (author of ‘Witches, Sluts, Feminists: Conjuring the Sex Positive’ & editor of @slutist ). 🖤 . . It is definitely inspired by Luna Luna’s exploration of light and dark and her longtime experience with poetry, trauma recovery, chronic illness, death, foster care, and, of course....regeneration and creativity and autonomy and healing. There may even be an Anaïs Nin-inspired ritual—who knows? ;-)🖤 . . While the title might suggest a sort of ra-ra-positivity, the book is truly about finding a way through darkness while also honoring it and immersing yourself in it. It is accessible, the tools mentioned within are inexpensive and the rituals are flexible & autonomous to YOU—meaning everything in the book can be adapted. 🖤 . . @kristenkorvette writes, “Light Magic For Dark Times is a book I wish I had by my bedside and in my heart during my most challenging moments. It holds space for healing and exploring and awakening the parts of ourselves that we or the outside world might label dark, and offers rejuvenating rites of lightness and illumination. Basile’s spellcraft radiates love and sex-positivity, but it is certainly not hex-negative. She elevates shadow work and emphasizes the importance of delving into the dark and facing pain head on to heal. There is no trauma too deep or desire too superficial for the spells, incantations, and rituals contained in this grimoire." 🖤 . . It’s available in the US, the UK, New Zealand, Australia and Canada—and the link to pre-order is in our bio.

A post shared by Luna Luna Magazine (@lunalunamag) on May 2, 2018 at 9:35am PDT