preface from my manuscript, Workings: New Wives' Tales for a New Millennium

This collection of writings is an invitation/invocation of those memories which frequently are labeled as dreams or nightmares; you know, the memories you clearly never created from any actual moment in your past.   This is a bit of the old timey, a visitation of spirits, little birds, signs, and improbable luck that we have a tendency to disregard as something that actually belongs to us.

I could say that I am the sole author of the things which follow, but that would be the arrogance of the living.   Instead, I am the one Chosen to Re-member and gifted to Re-lay that which has been submerged for sometime now in the reservoir of our collective hurting soul.   Just little flashes of what all else could be down there, I hope the tales, recipes and spells trigger rushes of "oh! I heard of something like that," or "hmm. That's not what Auntie so-and-so used to do" and then y'all go on and get the parts you know out there for us all to continue the story; strengthen the verse and scansion.

Each item that follows was a response to a need of a friend.   One of my gifts is helping people to remember things so they can continue to move in an expansive fashion.   Sometimes, I remember their great grandma forgot to tell their own mother something.   Then I must write. Writing it down is the working.   These I call NewFound Folktales.   Other times I dance.   Actually, to be honest, I dance while I write and frequently smell something bubbling in some unseen pot.   All workings.   I fancy myself a kitchen witch and have been known to cook myself into a stupor, but it was never really clear that my folk telling and dancing were also types of cooking for me.   See, I can re-create just about any dish I eat once, able to reconstruct the recipe (ok y'all know I'm lyin' now, but really I'm pretty good with divining ingredients).   Same thing with African dance and Afro hyphenated dances. Then I realized that some things that I just called "cooking" were in fact "spelling," and some movements that I just called dancing were in fact writings that were stories which are, after all, just long-winded spells so now I am clear that I'm a Conjurer, plain and simple.   In more organized settings you could call me a priestess, but since Spirit seems intent, at least for now, on keeping my head all to itself, the hierarchy of such systems are not pillars upon which I sit, though I am marked to walk through those gates, any time now.  

Instead, you may find me at the foot of a huge tree on the dry side of a swamp, tree full of Spanish moss at the edge of a pool, which could be mistaken for a lake, gazing in amazement at the reflection of my unborn children as they swim on the Under, waiting for a chance to get to the Upside.   I'm in white, surrounded by many of my ancestors, some I knew as people, others just decided they needed to introduce themselves so that I could get the story straight.   And we are all eating, but mostly sitting and listening to the vibration of good company and years of blood memories.  

From time to time, one of them leans over and whispers something in my ear. I, in bad form of course, repeat out loud what they said and all the others hear, then we all debate the efficacy of the suggestion.   Once I'm clear on the order of things, proper placement and any urgency required, and why in the hell I would ever do something like that in the first place, then I get into motion: get the required items, "find" the proper incantation, and work it.   Next, I write it down.   So here is a plate from that dinner we been having for the last 20 years or so.

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