Trauma Magic (Book)

This is a hard copy, sent in the mail. For the digital version click here.

Trauma Magic is a love letter to our bodies and minds. It is a hero’s journey disguised as a collection of essays. It begins with the enchanted landscape of Southern Ontario, the wild dancing of fairies teaching us boundaries and ecological ethics. It traces the call of magic through the queer desires of the Holy Virgin Mary, the movements of animals in the forest at night, and the practice of witchcraft in everyday life. Trauma Magic carries the generative tension of expansive desire and unbearable pain, taking the reader on a downward journey to the underworld of addiction and psychiatric incarceration, only to return to the surface in an explosive reclaiming of agency and power.

“Clementine Morrigan’s work joins a chorus of other disabled writers who are calling us to consider what non-normative bodies and minds have to celebrate – Morrigan asks us in “Trauma as Possibility” to pick apart violence and its effects: to value the traumatized experience while we continue to resist and oppose the violence which originates it.” – Tara McGowan-Ross, author of Scorpion Season and Girth.

“Trauma Magic is a crip & queer text enfolding compassion, justice, and vulnerability. While recognizing the violent and painful effects of trauma Morrigan simultaneously shares the beyond of trauma. The reader finds possibility when trauma is conceptualized as “a natural and ingenious response to circumstances which terrify and overwhelm.” Tactics of dissociation, hypervigilance and avoidance are re-perceived through an imaginative feminist lens and at a distance from normative conceptions. Not symptoms – resistance.” – Nancy Davis Halifax, author of Hook.

Cover art by Dev Murphy.