I’ve pressed my hands against a wall that used to be a door. I’ve kept the same three childhood books for decades. I’ve set a whole series on the edge of the sea. So why is it, that I keep finding magic at the edges?
A Hallowe’en special to begin with, and season one arrives in February 2027.
About this episode
Years ago, in an old thatched manor house, I kept pressing my hands against a solid wall, certain there should be a door there. Turns out, there had been, once.
In this Hallowe'en special, I follow that feeling through the edges where magic seems to gather: Nos Galan Gaeaf and the Welsh spirit nights, the ballad of Tam Lin, and three books I've kept since I was a teenager. Along the way I visit the Owens women of Practical Magic, the door to Annwn in my own Stormbound, and a school trip to St Davids I've never forgotten. And I wonder whether reading itself is an edge too.
Digging up these memories for the episode has made me want to reread all three of my childhood books, and I'd love some company.
Books mentioned
The Hounds of the Mórrígan by Pat O’Shea (paperback only) [link]
The Changeover by Margaret Mahy [link]
Fire & Hemlock by Dianna Wynne Jones [link]
Practical Magic by Alice Hoffman [link]
Tam Lin, the traditional Scottish ballad
The Witches of Môrlan by me, starting with Stormbound [link]
Some of these are affiliate links, which means I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.
Join the conversation
Is there a threshold in a story, or in your own life, that you've never been able to forget? A door, a shoreline, a night of the year when things felt thinner? Or a book you think sums up this episode better than mine?
And if you’ve read any of these three, please tell me. I'd love to know I'm not the only one. Find me on Instagram or Facebook as toriahowellauthor, or leave a comment below.
I'd genuinely love to hear from you. I'm hoping to share some readers' answers in a future episode.
Season one is coming
The Wild Between returns in February 2027 with a whole season of questions about why the stories we love do what they do to us. Sign up to my newsletter below and I'll let you know the moment it starts.
If you'd like to step through the door to Annwn yourself, Stormbound is where the Witches of Môrlan begin.
Transcript
Hello, and welcome back to The Wild Between: Exploring the Magic in Fiction. I'm Toria, but you can call me Tor, and this is the second half of a little Hallowe'en special before season one begins properly in February.
I want to start with a wall.
The doorway that wasn’t there
A friend of mine lived in an old manor house. The really old kind, with a thatched roof, old enough that it felt like it was standing before anyone in the area was building in brick. I only went there once, with another friend of ours who, like me, is a sensitive, because the family asked the two of us to spend the evening exploring the house to see what we'd find. We found a lot.
At the far end of the house, there was a wall I couldn't leave alone. I kept pressing my hands against it, again and again, because every part of me was certain there should be a doorway there. Despite the wall feeling solid, I couldn't shake the certainty that there was a doorway there, so certain in the belief I thought it might be a hidden or secret door.
Afterwards, the family looked into the history of the house. It turned out the building used to go on a little further than it does now. Part of it had burned down, long before they bought it. And that wall at the end, the one I kept pushing on? It used to have a door in it.
They'd never have known if I hadn't gone looking for it.
I've always felt thresholds like that, even ones that aren't there any more. And I don't think I'm the only one. Because when I look at the stories I love, the magic hardly ever happens in the middle of things. It happens at the edges. In doorways and on shorelines, at midnight and at the turn of the year. In people who are halfway between one life and the next.
So that's today's question. Why does magic happen at the edges?
Edges in time
It seems right to start with tonight, or near enough.
Hallowe'en is an edge. It sits on the hinge between autumn and winter, between the light half of the year and the dark.And, forgive me here, I'm going to butcher some Welsh because, despite living here 20 years now, my Welsh pronunciation is appalling. In Wales we have Calan Gaeaf, the first day of winter, and the night before it is Nos Galan Gaeaf. It was one of three ysbrydnosau, the spirit nights, that Cymru celebrates per year when the boundary between this world and the other one was thought to wear thin. And, although, Hallowe'en and Nos Galan Gaeaf celebrate different things in similar clothing, they're not really the same.
What I find interesting is that the night itself isn't magical because of anything in it. It's magical because of where it falls. It's not quite autumn and it's not quite winter. The old year hasn't quite let go. And in that gap, things that normally stay on one side of the line can cross.
The old ballads knew this. In Tam Lin, a young woman called Janet has one night to win back the man she loves from the Fairy Queen, and that night is Hallowe'en. She waits at a crossroads, pulls him from his horse as the fairy procession passes, and holds on while he changes shape in her arms. A crossroads, at the turn of the year, with a man caught halfway between two worlds. It's edges all the way down.
Diana Wynne Jones built a whole novel on that ballad, Fire and Hemlock, and I'll come back to it in a moment.
So time has edges. But I don't think time is the only thing that does.
Three books I've kept
There are three books I read when I was about the same age as their heroes, and I've kept all three. I haven't read any of them in years, so bear with me. This is what's stayed with me, which may not be quite what's on the page. Having dug them out for this episode, I'm definitely going to reread them.
The first is Pat O'Shea's The Hounds of the Morrigan. Pidge and his little sister Brigit live in an ordinary Ireland, and what I remember most is that there was a particular place they went through to cross into the other one. In my memory it was something completely ordinary, like walking between two trees, or under a sign. When I flicked back through the book for this episode to make sure I was telling you true things, I think it may actually be walking under the capstone of a standing stone.
I find it really interesting that my memory changed it. A standing stone is somewhere you have to go. Two trees could be at the end of my road. Somewhere along the way, I think I quietly turned the door into something everyday, so it could be open to me too. And that's the heart of that book for me: a whole, wide magical world living right alongside ours, open to anyone who finds the right door. It was probably the first time I was introduced to the Otherworld, running alongside our own, hidden from view. It's how the Welsh Otherworld operates too, and feels like something I've always believed.
The second is Diana Wynne Jones's Fire and Hemlock, and it's the weird things I remember most. I'm fairly sure there's a giant in a supermarket and something to do with a car chase, but I have no details. But what really stayed with me is that the man Polly loved has been taken out of her memory. She's nineteen and about to leave home when she realises she has two sets of memories of growing up, and only one of them has him in it.
So the edge in that book isn't a place. It's inside her. She has to stand between two versions of her own past, work out which one is true, and then go back for him. That's Tam Lin again: holding on to someone while the world tries to take them away.
The third is Margaret Mahy's The Changeover. Laura has to become a witch to save her little brother's life. But the changeover isn't a spell someone casts on her. It's a journey, something that happens internally her and that she experiences as if it were an external journey. It's almost a quest. And what I've never forgotten is that it costs her. Laura pays a price for her family, and she never tells them.
Putting them side by side, I can see they share a shape. In each one, someone finds a door, goes through it, and comes back changed, having paid something for it. It's a quest every time. And honestly, what tween (or middle-aged author) doesn't love a quest?
But I think the quest is part of the answer to today's question. You can't set out on a quest from the comfortable middle of your life. You have to leave, and leaving means crossing a line. The edge is where every quest begins. Most people my age are happy to stay home, in the warmth, with the telly and the central heating. I've always been a strange one though, I can't think of anything more exciting than setting off for an adventure, even at my age!
Maybe that's also why so many of these heroes are young. Pidge, Polly and Laura are already standing at an edge, halfway between childhood and whatever comes next, so they don't have far to go to reach the door. And maybe that's why these books meant so much to me at that age. I was standing at the same edge they were. Now, I'm standing at a different edge: middle age. Still an edge, still a time of transition, still with a cost (don't get me started on perimenopause!) but still with that sense of something different on the horizon. I'm officially entering my crone era.
Edges of belonging
There's one more kind of edge I want to mention, and that's the social kind.
In Alice Hoffman's Practical Magic books, the Owens women live on the edge of acceptance. Their town needs them and is wary of them in equal measure. People come to the back door after dark for a remedy or a love charm, then cross the street the next morning so they don't have to say hello. The Owens women are part of the place, and never quite inside it.
In the last episode I wondered whether witch stories were ever really about women and power. That's here too, but what I notice this time is the geography of it. The Owens house sits on the edge of things, and so do they. And that position is what lets them see the town more clearly than the town sees itself.
I think that's what links all of these together. An edge is a place where you can see both sides. If you're right in the middle of something, a season, a life, a community, it's almost impossible to see it clearly, because it's all around you. Stand on the edge and suddenly it has a shape. And you can see what's on the other side as well.
A door in Môrlan
Which brings me, inevitably, to my own books, because that's where all these childhood stories show up, and it's been interesting to see how I've taken the things I've read and turned them into something of my own.
Welsh mythology is full of edges. Annwn, the Otherworld, isn't somewhere far away. In the old stories it's right alongside this one, and you stumble into it at the edges: hunting in a valley, sitting on a mound, crossing a river at the wrong moment. Like Pwyll meeting the lord of Annwn while out hunting, which didn't go so well for him in the beginning. Or Pidge and Brigit, crossing into an Ireland where the old gods are still very much awake.
When I was writing Stormbound, the first Môrlan book, there's a scene where the Circle needs to speak to someone who's been dead for forty years. I'm not going to say who, or what he tells them, because that would spoil rather a lot. But I called the chapter "Opening the Door", and that's exactly what it is.
Sara can reach the recently dead fairly easily. Forty years is too deep, though, so Non has to open a door to Annwn through Tân, her hound, and hold it while Sara goes looking. The kitchen goes cold and frost creeps across the inside of the windows. Somewhere far off, there's the sound of a gate swinging wide.
Looking back, I can see I've written edges all through that one scene. Sara's magic carries what I called "the cold of a morgue, of the space between the living and the dead". The door is only open briefly. The whole coven has to physically hold on to Sara so she doesn't drift through it. And Sam, who's new to all of this and still working out where he fits, spends the whole scene standing by the kitchen door, close to the threshold.
I didn't plan that last part as a metaphor. I just knew it was where he'd stand. But I think that's the point. When you're writing magic, you put it where it feels true, and edges are where it feels the most honest. It's no accident that Môrlan is on the coast, either. A shoreline is the most obvious edge there is: the line where land meets sea, with the two of them forever battling for supremacy. You can't ignore the power of nature there. Pembrokeshire made an impression on me in a way most seaside trips never did. I remember a school trip to St Davids when I was somewhere between 12 and 14. I think it was my first time away from home with school, and I've never forgotten it. The landscape felt powerful in a way beaches in England never did, despite the blisters paddling in the water in jelly shoes gave me.
Where I've landed
So, why does magic happen at the edges?
Here's where I've got to. An edge is the one place where nothing is fixed yet. The year hasn't turned. The girl hasn't become a witch. The door is open, but only for a moment. In the middle of things, the world is settled. It tells you what it is, and all that weight can. make it hard to change. At the edges, it's still deciding. And anything still deciding might turn out to be more than you thought.
I think that's also why I felt that doorway in my friend's house. Maybe it was nothing more than the house's proportions telling my body something my head hadn't noticed. Or maybe some places remember their old shapes. I honestly don't mind which. What I love is that, for a moment, the wall wasn't only a wall.
And there's one more edge I've been circling this whole episode, which is reading itself.
When you're inside a good book, you're not fully in your own life and you're not fully in the story either. You're somewhere in between, with a foot on each side. That's the space this podcast is named after. The Wild Between is the space between a story and the person reading it, and I think it's an edge like any other. Which might be why so much magic happens there.
That's the end of this little Hallowe'en special. Thank you so much for spending some of the spooky season with me.
The Wild Between will be back in February 2027 with season one, which will be a whole run of questions about why the stories we love do what they do to us. Some episodes will be just me, and in some I'm hoping to be joined by other readers. If you'd like to be there when it starts, follow or subscribe wherever you're listening, and you'll get the first episode as soon as it's out.
Before you go, here's something to think about. Is there a threshold in a story, or in your own life, that you've never quite been able to forget? A door, a shoreline, a night of the year when things felt thinner? I'd genuinely love to hear. Or, if there's a book you think sums up this episode better, please share it with us. Hit me up on Instagram or Facebook, I'm on both as toriahowellauthor. And if you've read The Hounds of the Morrigan, The Changeover or Fire and Hemlock, please tell me. I'd love to know I'm not the only one. I've put links to them all on my website, in the show notes for this episode, if you haven't read them and fancy picking any of them up.
So wherever you are tonight, I hope you find a corner where the magic shows through. Until February, keep being curious about the stories you love, and about what happens in the space between the story and you.
