Women and Magic, Part 3

by Jean Roberta

Menna van Praag’s fantasy romances always involve magical places (usually shops) in Cambridge, England. In The Lost Art of Letter-Writing (to be released Feb. 16, 2017), Clara Cohen owns a stationary shop where visitors are drawn in by a desire to write something, which can include letters to dead loved ones. Here is what the visitors see:

"The walls of the little shop are lined with letters, hundreds and hundreds of letters,in every colour of ink and paper and every style of handwriting. Dark oak cabinets,containing writing papers in a thousand different designs: papers lined with silver leaf,imbedded with roses and violets, papers studded with glittering foil stars, or painted with watercolour sunflowers – each unique and furnished with matching envelopes.

Shelves sit above the cabinets, weighed down with a rainbow of notebooks: bound in leather, swathed in silk, embroidered on linen or cotton, some made of paper and flower petals but none the same as any other.

One corner of the little stationery shop is clear of any papers, pens or other writing paraphernalia. Instead there stands a delicate ornate Victorian writing desk made of mahogany and inlaid with mother-of-pearl, containing many drawers – one of them curiously locked and impossible to open – and accompanied by a chair cushioned with
dark green velvet.

It is here that Clara’s particular magic takes place."



Visitors who aren’t sure what to say are invited to sit at the Victorian writing desk and offered a special pen which helps them express themselves. After they’ve finished, they can mail their letters right in the shop, where there is a special slot for letters to the dead.

Clara herself seems to have a special ability to sense who needs to receive a special message, and she recognizes these people when she passes by them or their houses. She sends them the letters they need to receive, with help from her special pen.

The first five chapters of this book, sent out as a teaser to anyone in the MVP newsletter list who asks for them, describe a sad widower who receives an anonymous letter that begins lifting him out of his grief. Clara visits her mother, Sophia, who keeps a clutter-free home and discards everything that seems useless. Sophia casually mentions a lost cookbook that Clara’s grandmother wrote, for which she was given a special pen to sign autographs. This seems like a clue to the mystery of Clara’s magical shop, inherited from her grandfather. Clara knows that she is descended from Jewish refugees from the Netherlands who immigrated to England in the 1930s, but she doesn’t know enough, and wants to find out.

Readers who want to learn about the connection between the magical shop and Clara’s roots need to read the entire book. (I probably won’t be able to resist.) Clara will undoubtedly learn something that will improve her own life and probably bring her a love-interest. As cheesy as stories about love-magic usually are, I can’t disagree with the claim that communication in letters sets up a bond between the sender and the receiver, and that a good letter is worth treasuring forever.

My own version of the enticing lost cookbook by Clara’s grandmother is a dilapidated hardcover book about teaching poetry to secondary-school students, titled The Hollow Reed, published in 1935, and written by a spinster English teacher named Mary Rinn. She was the teacher in George Washington High School, NYC, who inspired my mother to continue her education. Miss Rinn was also mentioned as an important mentor by Dr. Harry Dillow, who also grew up in New York, but eventually found his way to the Canadian university where I currently teach, and where I started out as his grad-student teaching assistant. What are the chances?

Sifting through my parents’ books and papers after their deaths in 2009 was like digging for ancient treasure. I hadn’t known that Miss Rinn wrote a book until I found it in the pile. I also found other items that I hadn’t known my parents had, as well as books I had given them, which have now come home to my library. The magic of words only seems to grow stronger over time.
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For Mother Velvet, Wherever She Is

by Jean Roberta

The womb is the most mysterious part of a woman’s body, IMO.

(I’m not sure what is the most mysterious part of a man’s body. I never had a brother or a son, so all my experience of male anatomy is associated with sex. Even though I’m not – ahem – completely ignorant of how things work, it all still seems foreign to me. If uncanny events in the lives of men have a physical basis, men need to tell those stories themselves. But I digress.)

At age eleven, I had a dream about seeing a dead body, covered with blood, with a note in its back. The note said "Thursday 19." Two years later, on Thursday, November 19, I had my first period.

However, the prophetic dream seemed less ghostly than something that happened later. I was sitting in the back of the family car, age sixteen, on a long family trip. My two younger sisters were staying out of my hair, temporarily.

I had paper and pencils in various colours. To write or to draw? I decided to write a poem. Focusing on my stream of consciousness, I saw a bolt of black velvet cloth, slowly unwinding on its own. I was an avid seamstress, and I would have loved to have a theatre-curtain’s-worth of velvet to make into a spectacular dress, or maybe a trendy pantsuit. Somehow, though, I knew that this velvet wasn’t meant to be cut. I had a strange feeling in my guts which I later identified (years later) as contractions of the womb. I wrote a poem I called “Mother Velvet,” writing down whatever came into my head.

About a year later, I decided that I was too old and mature to write nonsense poems that didn’t really mean anything, so I tore the poem up and threw it away. It disappeared into
the ether.

I was more adult (or so I thought) when I used the family Ouija board with my younger sisters. We all asked questions about our futures. We had moved to Canada from the U.S., and I still wasn’t sure where I would spend the rest of my life. I asked the Ouija if I would marry. It said yes. I asked where my husband would come from, and it spelled out “velvet.” This answer reminded me of my stupid poem (surely a sign of latent insanity), and I decided that the ouija was refusing to answer my question.

At age 22, on a year-long stay in England, I met a Nigerian, Pepple Ikiriko, who told me that his mother, Velvet Charlesba Amachree Ikiriko, had been known in the Niger Delta for her beauty while she was alive, but she had been gone so long that he couldn’t remember her face. He told me she died while giving birth to a baby who would have been his younger brother, had he lived. As far as I could figure out, Mother Velvet was about thirty when she left this earth. Pepple said her parents grieved so much that they passed away soon after her. (Apparently Velvet was a young widow with one son when Pepple’s father, Karibi Ikiriko, brought her into his polygamous family.)

In due course, I sponsored Pepple into Canada as my fiance, we married, and I had a daughter I named Elizabeth. (Her dad named her Opukioba, after an ancestor of his.) Somehow the name “Velvet” didn’t seem appropriate, but Pepple gave this name to his next daughter, born to his next wife. Read on.

I was a single mother, living in a co-op for low-income single parents with my four-year-old daughter Liz (or Lizzie-bean, as my family sometimes called her). I had made her sleep in her own bed in her own room, instead of with me in the double-bed-sized sofa-bed in the front room because I was restless.

It was December, just a few days after Lizzie’s fourth birthday.

To be precise, I was having PMS, or the pre-menstrual heebie-jeebies. I couldn’t rest, I couldn’t sleep.

I knew that Pepple and his next wife were expecting a baby at any time, but I didn’t really care. I wondered how that marriage could work, but it wasn’t my problem. I was better off where I was than married to Pepple, who had turned out to be a jealous drunk.

Gahh. It felt as if a huge fist were wringing out my guts, over and over. I now knew that I was feeling contractions, not to be confused with any sexier feeling. The womb is not the vagina (or pussy, honey-pot, whatever.) It was not under my conscious control.

Since I couldn’t sleep anyway, I got up and brought a thick towel to my bed so as not to leave bloodstains on my sheets. Somehow I knew that my period was coming at any moment, and when it did, my womb would calm down. So I sat and watched between my legs.

The blood came with a gush, and I was relieved. For some reason, I looked at the little clock on my side-table. It said 1:00 a.m.

The next morning, I called Pepple to see if there was any news re the baby-to-be. He told me that his wife Maureen gave birth to a baby girl at 1:00 that morning, and they named her Velvet.

Several years later, I bought a hard-rubber holiday ornament in the form of a Kwanzaa angel in a long dress (with little hoop earrings in her ears) holding a candle-holder with seven candles in it. I think of her as Mother Velvet, and I hang her on my Christmas tree every year.

By now, Pepple is only a memory (since December 30, 2006, when his heart literally gave out), but his descendants are alive and well. My daughter Liz has a husband and two children, and her half-sister Velvet has one daughter that I know of. I hope their grandmother Velvet is around them in some form, and that they give her joy.

My womb has slowed down considerably. No blood, no more babies. I assume it won’t be giving me any more messages from the Beyond, but I can never be sure.

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