Magpieing: Sparking The Creative Process

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Skip to content annakcompton Reflections February 22, 2019February 21, 2019 5 Minutes

One for sorrow, two for joy, three for a girl, four for a boy…

Last year I worked in a primary school, and noticed children using a literacy technique called Magpie-ing. As European folklore tells us, the magpie is a thief of shiny things. The pupils were being taught to ’steal’ words, phrases or ideas – verbal treasure – that appealed to them as they read, for use in their own writing. I loved that they were being schooled in this strategy, and the name given it. I felt like I’d been magpieing all my life without knowing it.

It’s my first week on the year-long project Creative Histories of Witchcraft 1790-1940. I’ve been recruited to write poems in response to the historical record.It’s part of my brief, I think, to be empathetic – to explain witchcraft from the inside via my imagination. I am to transform the fact and the found into poetry. As I spend my first days immersed in histories of witchcraft and reading a list of 1000+ strange cases, my eye is beady for treasure. The magpieing metaphor has settled in my mind, and while I ultimately want to understand the whole world of the project, the ruthless writerly part of me is simply on the hunt for the shiny word, phrase or image that will trigger a poem.

Writer Nick Laird describes the poet’s sensibility in a similar way, but his formulation is more fish than bird:

Grubbing and intent, he’s a bottom feeder, obsessively going through the refuse of his awareness to check he isn’t chucking anything of value. A glint among the peelings. It could be a sprocket, a washer, a locket, a ring. He rubs some of the tea-leaves off, rinses it in the sink.
Nick Laird, ‘Words of mouth’, The Guardian, 2008

I wonder if the historian does this too? Catches at the sparkly detail. Stores it up for later, for the story. Hilary Mantel describes history as “a few stones, scraps of cloth”(and look what she does with it!).

As a former archivist, I know how remnanty the archives can be. How they cry out for the meaning-making of the history-writer. Carolyn Steedman’s address to the historian is delightful:

Your craft is to conjure a social system from a nutmeg grater.
Dust, Carolyn Steedman, p.18

The folkloric magpie is not just infamous as a thief. All around me, the older women in my life salute magpies to ward off their curse. My own grandmother believed magpies predict the future (one for sorrow, two for joy) as witches were once tasked to. Discussing pre-20th-century supernatural beliefs, historian Graham Robb writes:

Pagan saint-worshippers did not suddenly die out and disappear like fairies. They turned into the population of modern France.
The Discovery of France, Graham Robb, p.134

When I wonder how to connect to a 19th-century woman consulting a toad at the crossroads or a man accusing a neighbour of supernaturally souring his butter, I think of magpies; I think how superstition persists.

A real magpie can recognise itself in the mirror. The supernatural magpie is dual – expressed in its black and white plumage – it brings both good and bad fortune. Such duality runs through the cases of witchcraft I’ve encountered this week: many are complaints about well-meaning spells (to heal, to unwitch) gone bad, or failed, or fake. I’m told that the witch is the person most like your own self: old man accuses old man, neighbour turns on neighbour. Reading these cases, I begin to see that feeling powerless may prompt a turn to magic and blame.

The poet Abigail Parry writes:

I believe there’s wisdom in superstition, provided we don’t over-literalise: we know that we can be cursed, or curse ourselves, and that there are things that can lodge in the heart, doing their sharp work.
Poetry School Blog, interview with Abigail Parry

Some years ago, I made this collage to illustrate a poem I’d written, called Ophelia on the Ward:

The poem was about an unexpected ectopic pregnancy in my early twenties that nearly claimed my life. The collage and poem dramatise a magpieing process: in there is A Level Hamlet; Millais’ Ophelia (and my teenage friend who dismissed Pre-Raphaelite paintings of women with the words “They all look like they’ve got period pain”); images from the Ladybird books I adored as a child; the magpie-superstition of my grandmother.

Skimming through the 1000+ cases of Known Witchcraft, a catalogue of bad fortune, I come across this one:

Pyrénées-Orientales (no more precision). A young girl claims to be possessed, bewitched. But the commissaire de police called in confirms that the only thing she is possessed by is… a pregnancy. Journal des Pyrénées Orientales 30.10.1868.
from Will Pooley’s research, ‘Known Cases of Witchcraft’

“Don’t worry”, I write in the poem that accompanies my collage, “They will slip our trouble out like a stone from a peach”. I understood the science of what had happened to me, but at the same time I did not understand what had happened at all. If I’d had recourse to a spell to make me whole again, I may have used it. Instead, I went to hospital, felt sad (weak, ashamed, blamed etc, etc, and a most-hidden feeling – cursed) and eventually wrote a poem.

In his essay ‘Dreams and Occultism’, Freud says there is “a general tendency of mankind to credulity and a belief in the miraculous”. It’s a sweeping statement, but I like how he then implicates himself:

It may be that I too have a secret inclination towards the miraculous which thus goes half way to meet the creation of occult facts.
‘Dreams and Occultism’, Sigmund Freud, in New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis

If I’m going to get inside the heads of those long-ago believers, I’m going to have to turn to my own secret inclinations, their sharp work.

At the start of this project, I don’t know which trinkets are valuable and which are tat, but I am busy filching. My hoard will be my subject-matter and also my tools – my ways-in to the possibility of the poem. Here is Hilary Mantel:

You cannot give a complete account. A complete thing is an exhausted thing. You’re looking for the one detail that lights up the page.
Hilary Mantel, Reith Lecture 4, ‘Can these bones live?’, 2017

So far, birds have not come up at all in the accounts of witchcraft I’ve looked at. The magpie is a diversion along the way, but I’ve almost superstitiously followed it … And fortunately, I was told in my first meeting: It’s up to you what you do – there are no rules. Nevertheless, I tell myself, from now on: fewer corvids, more witches.

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Published February 22, 2019February 21, 2019

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