#9

The Holy Hour: An Anthology on Sex Work, Magic, and the Divine

Big news! Your girl is IN PRINT!

For a while, I’d grown accustomed to seeing my name as a byline. When I was copy-editing and writing for a city magazine, I was naturally required to produce scores of content: quick pieces, often fluffy, always under a deadline.

In my personal writing life, however, the approach is drastically different. I linger. I brood. I hone. I research extensively, include too much information, whittle it down before bulking it back up. It’s exhausting, but blissful. It’s also very, very slow–not to mention part of the reason I haven’t published for a few years.

Imagine my delight when I (after the deadline, mind you) pitched an essay to Working Girls Press for their debut title The Holy Hour: An Anthology of Sex Work, Magic, and the Divine. Working Girls Press is the first press (to my knowledge) not only devoted to publishing, promoting, and supporting the writing and art of sex workers, but RUN BY SEX WORKERS (Molly B. Simmons and Emily Marie Passos Duffy)! For the first time in a few years, I’d have the pressure of a looming deadline to contain my wild imagination.

Kind of like Shabari or formal poetics, constraint can be exactly what allows the fire in our bellies to burn brighter. With the help of Molly, Emily, and my beloved writing group, I did the damn thing.

My contribution is a typical personal essay, braided and lyrical in style, meandering through my mind and anchored by the story of a spiritual sex-worker retreat I attending in Puerto Rico in January 2020. I write about Reiki, phony mentors, speechlessness, persona, and how I consider the natural world to be–for me–the only true conduit to the Divine. The piece is titled “Thin Walls.”

Here is an excerpt:

Surrounded by the dense, glossy green of tropical foliage, the weight of my body sunk into the Earth, warm sand cradling my head. Nearby at the shore, mangroves dipped their thirsty toes into the winter-warm water. I’d come to Vieques, a tiny island off the coast of Puerto Rico, for a retreat of “spiritual sex workers and survivors” led by The Amber Witch of Instagram, whose hands hovered inches above me–mystic, discerning, and close enough to choke. 
It was our final morning, and five of the six participants had our turn for Reiki. The Amber Witch did not insist when Vérité abstained. Wild-haired and bespectacled, “call-me-V” Vérité from Montreal hit our group of six like a lightning bolt when we picked her up at the ferry port, a day late and–I later began to suspect–several dollars short. 
Moments before Reiki, V had swirled a story into millions of grains of sand, digging and dancing her hands through a flexible and forgiving canvas. “It’s sacred geometry: the crossing of paths, the triangles within the never-ending circle,” V heaved, her voice throttling more with each movement. “The earth, the sky, the land,” she went on, the rest of us rapt–“the water, the heavens, the spirit”–and I’d wondered if it was intentional, the way her intonations coincided with the breath of the ocean. 
“And that’s infinity,” she’d arrived, as if the conclusion was singular and obvious. 
My fascination with the Metaphysical has always felt fraught, but at this point in my adult life, I was the witchiest I’d ever been–connecting to the deep-seated power of my sexuality as I refined my escorting business. Even if it isn’t how we advertise to our clients, many sex workers identify as spiritual, and social media offers ample opportunities to connect those with intersecting curiosities and experiences. 
Historically speaking, sex workers are “a notoriously superstitious bunch.” For example, some chose or avoided pseudonyms based on whether others who’d used the name saw success. If a man visited and left before spending any money, “it was considered bad luck,” and in order “to remove the curse from the house, it was the custom for the girl who let him out of the door to spit on his back.” Other girls might have then clandestinely pissed on the front steps of the brothel to bring in good customers.
The Amber Witch ran the kind of Instagram account with instructions to concoct love-spell cocktails with a few drops of fresh menstrual blood, dress money candles with honey and herbs, and optimize the myriad properties of jezebel root and rose quartz. The Amber Witch preached abundance, abundance, abundance, and offered the perspective that people can “attract scarcity.” Applying her messages to my marketing, I did begin to see more patrons I truly enjoyed; with this came what she called “blessings.”
Raised by staunchly secular parents within an assertively religious Midwestern community, I admit to rolling my eyes at this kind of language–blessings–but, if only by the curse of an associative mind, I do detect occasional magic in the inanimate–the potential of a lit candle, or of the single gem chosen from an unknowable earthly quantity. Humbly, that’s what The Unknown has always been to me: accepted as such.
Skepticism cannot escape itself, so I’m still unsure if I feel superior or silly when I lift a friend’s purse from the floor or wonder how my income is affected by the moon phases or the curls of cinnamon in my safe; I’m not confident I understand exactly what people mean by “speaking to god.” Could they mean “speaking through” god? Maybe I’m being too literal, but I’ve never felt truly “spoken to” by anything I’d consider to be a Divine Source. 
Something was speaking, it seemed, to V, whose performance I still couldn’t shake even as I, supine in the sand, received my personal Reiki verdict. “Your heart and crown chakras are clear,” the Amber Witch announced, voice sharp. Her brow arched when she added, “Surprisingly.” She stood to dust the sand off her knees and, with a disapproving shudder, confirmed: “That throat chakra, though.”

…

Madeleine Blair, 2024

If you’d like to finish the essay (please do! please do!), you can order copies of The Holy Hour for you and your literate loved ones here. The book launch party is April 30, 2024 in New York City, and I can’t help but feel like it will be the Hooker’s Ball of the 21st century.

Write With Me!

If you are a SWing writer or writing SWer, I encourage you to follow @swerwrites (and me, if you don’t already, @sensememories!) on Twitter–or whatever it’s called now–for more details and information on how to join the weekly SW-only writing circles. Click here for details!

For clients who are interested in one-on-one writing coaching, proofreading, or editing, please feel free to inquire about my services, including client references, by emailing madeleineblair1919@gmail.com.

As always, if you have enjoyed reading and would like to send a tip (to help me fix my beloved whip), you can do so to Venmo @cookiegoogleman or Cash-App at $madeleineblair – Thank you as always for your consideration!