Spoila Magazine

Serious treatments of the interactions between the arts and the occult / magic / spirituality are cropping up everywhere - once again, I'm ahead of the curve :). The second magazine of note is Jessa Crispin (of Bookslut)'s Spoila Magazine. I've just purchased the PDF copy for $5, that is, about £3.50, which seems eminently affordable. I've ordered Issue 2: The Black Magic Issue (wooooohhh!) which I haven't read yet (glass of wine, bath, Kindle, LATER) but it looks great. Contents include an interview with poet Jeannine Hall Gailey, who I haven't heard of, but whose work deals with fairy tale and mythology. A shame we're not still running New Fairy Tales otherwise we could have nagged her to submit.

I don't know for sure, but I sense that the material in Spoila will be about magic as subject rather than spiritual practice - which isn't a bad thing, just a less unusual thing. There is, after all, a proliferation of artistic work about witches/fairies/wizards/magic/magick/gnomes/elves/mermaids etc etc. I'm glad there is, obviously (not least because I'm hoping my teen novel about witches will be successful with a publisher) - it's good for people to explore the hidden and mysterious, even just in fictive forms, even if they never progress past fantasy - I'm just more interested in artistic work that investigates spiritual practices.

However, I think Spoila is good because it has an intelligent editorial policy. The more intelligent attention magic and the occult gets, the better; it's as interesting at the level of literary and cultural criticism as it is for the spiritual wayfarer or mystic.