November 2024: CONJURE
Writing prompts and reflections to support you all month long
Welcome back to #AcWriMoments, a yearlong experiment in purposeful scholarship creation. On the first day of each month in 2024, we offer you a guidepost with a unique theme and simple prompts for living out the theme as a scholar and a human. Return to the guidepost all month long, anytime you need support for cultivating SACRED (strategic, artisanal, creative, reflective, embodied, delicious) moments of communion with yourself and your work. May these offerings encourage you in your pursuit of whatever goals and visions you deem worthy of your attention—the most precious resource you have.
Theme for November 2024: CONJURE
With a flash of your magic wand — aka, your pen or pencil — a word appears on the page. Then a whole sentence, a paragraph, a book! Words work magic by making the invisible manifest, materializing unseen ideas. Through words, you can remake your world: if not always your outer environment, then surely the unmapped lands within.
Words can CONJURE a feeling, an image, a memory. A concept, a narrative, a description of reality. A novel framework. An explanation. Words can sketch a tiny fragment or construct an entire parallel (or possible) universe.
This month, we invite you to CONJURE! Use your words to make something happen or appear. 🌱 Elicit an effect. 💥 Call something new into existence. 📣 Summon a dream into the waking world. 💭 Produce a result. 📈 Exercise your agency. 💪 Express your desire. ❤️🔥 Impose your vision upon the world in some small way! 🎨
You can’t control the outcomes or reactions to your efforts, but you can choose to create space and moments to leave your mark.
Here are some Reflection Questions and an Experiment to get you started!
REFLECTION QUESTIONS
Choose a daily prompt. Back in November 2023, we launched this #AcWriMoments experiment by delivering a series of 30 prompts, one per day, created by a range of contributors. Now we’ve gathered those prompts onto this evergreen #AcwWriMoments page so they’re easy to revisit anytime. Select a prompt that resonates with you today and dive in!
Revisit a monthly theme. Throughout 2024, we’ve been sharing one #AcWriMoments post on the first of each month with a theme to guide your work that month. Choose one of the previous #AcWriMoments themes to revisit. If there’s one that you missed this year and have been meaning to try out, now is a perfect time! How can this theme guide your conjurings in the days to come?
Meditate on the Ace of Wands tarot card, which was our inspiration for this month’s theme of CONJURE. The card pictures a hand reaching down from the clouds, offering a magic wand that symbolizes the gift of creative inspiration. What auspicious new beginning might this moment hold for you? What do you feel moved to say or do? How are you expressing your unique creative self? What place or activity can you seek out to help you access your creative power?
EXPERIMENT
Choose an inspiring image to guide your next conjuration. In magic, a sigil is a powerful image, usually a pictorial symbol, that guides the process of manifestation. Choose an image that evokes how you want to feel in your work or what you want to create. It could be ancient or modern, abstract or culturally specific, printed from online or copied by your own hand. Place the image somewhere you’ll see it often. Meditate on it regularly. Notice how the image guides, nourishes, and course-corrects your process over time. (In our final #AcWriMoments post next month, we’ll share about a new resource that can help you integrate the magical images of tarot into your scholarly process throughout 2025: TAROT FOR SCHOLARS. Stay tuned for details!)
As you live the theme of CONJURE this month, what materializes before your very eyes? What do you learn about your own capacity to shape your world?
Thank you for joining us for #AcWriMoments! We’d love to hear from you. Please drop us a comment to let us know what you’re learning, trying, and discovering this month.
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Hello Helen, I want to thank you for the Ace of Wands tarot card you posted. It helped me with the final concluding comments I was getting stuck on, before finishing off and submitting my PhD thesis. I kept visualising the wand conducting inspiration down to me from high above. Thank you!