Let it* burn**

A couple of weeks ago I started a conversation with my BFF with “SOOOO my favourite local candle place is releasing a candle that smells like the West Coast1 and goddamn if that doesn’t sound good.”

She: “I love that you have a favourite local candle place, you bougie nerd.”

While I was recovering from being so accurately described, I did the math on whether I could afford the candle (no) and contemplated my dwindling candle collection. Autumn was coming. I would need really wanted more candles2.

Now, autumn is here. I walk through the Red Zone and forage apples and figs. The air has bite, and the trees are glowing, red and gold and burnished brown. Some have already dropped their leaves, and face the wind, bare and unflinching.

New Zealand doesn’t have much cultural allegiance to the cosy woollen pumpkin spice aesthetic popular in more northern climes, although you can bet retailers are doing their best to import it. As I am both bougie and basic, I create my own Aesthetic, with candles, with blankets, with pumpkin chocolate scones.

The thing about bougie candles is that they smell nice3 and look pretty, but for me, mostly, it’s the flame. Fire fascinates me, and always has. I remember lying on the cork floor of our old house, watching my dad build the fire in the wood burner with pinecones and kindling. I remember hauling wood from the pile and setting it on the hearth to dry out, swinging the heavy glass door open, poking down the ashes, and watching the new wood catch with the satisfaction of an important job well done.

When I was sick in winter, and old enough to stay home alone, I would build the fire myself. Over the course of a long, listless day, I would tend it as I tended myself. I was too sick to read, too tired to think, but the fire demanded very little—oxygen, fuel—and gave back warmth and comfort and that lovely flickering glow.

*for some values of it

I was an altar girl for a while. Among my duties (walking in procession with a face of appropriate reverence, kneeling without wobbling, hitting the little gong as the priest raised the Body of Christ to heaven) was lighting and blowing out the candles, in which I took a wholly pagan delight. I had an excellent example to follow: the statue of Jesus was pulling his robes aside to show us the Sacred Heart aflame, burning without consumption.

Fire was one of our first technologies, one of the things that made our ancestors stronger and smarter. Were the first stories told sitting around a fire? Does every campfire ghost story and beach bonfire yarn hearken back to those earliest days?

Fire is important and beautiful and powerful.

And dangerous. I never forget that. I have burnt myself many more times in the kitchen than I ever have with an open flame, but my awareness of the risk is much higher. This summer, while fire roared over the Port Hills and roadside verges in North Canterbury were going up in flames, I went for a walk by the river and saw two separate fires in progress. One of them was already being attended. The other, I called in to emergency services. The operator told me that they’d received several calls. Did I know if it was deliberately set?

Of course it was deliberate. Riverbank foliage does not spontaneously burst into flames and there are limits to my desire to watch stuff burn. I despair at the climate crisis that makes wildfires more frequent and more deadly, but arson makes me furious. Setting those riverbank fires was both vicious and stupid. The gender neutral toilet block at my school was out of action for months after someone started a fire. Gaza’s hospitals and apartment buildings burn under relentless bombardment. There’s no way to romanticise that.

** within reason

In literature, we can make the fire act however we want to. But my favourite writing that employs fire conjures both its destructive power and fascinating pull.

Anne Sexton, in her staggering, stunning work “Angels of the Love Affair”4 writes “Mother of fire, let me stand at your devouring gate/As the sun dies in your arms and you loosen its terrible weight.” Leonard Cohen, in “Everybody Knows”, finishes that bitter ballad of betrayal with “Everybody knows it's coming apart/Take one last look at this Sacred Heart/Before it blows/And everybody knows”.

Fahrenheit 451 opens with “It was a pleasure to burn” and describes the pleasure of burning things with a sensual delight I recognise. But what is burning is books, fluttering in the flames like desperate birds, in a society nearly denuded of literature and independent thought. Later, a woman ready to die in the conflagration of her books says “Play the man, Master Ridley.” She is referencing what the former Bishop of Worcester, Hugh Latimer allegedly told his fellow condemned man as they were led to the stake for the Protestant heresy.

I didn’t need to look these lines up5. They nestled into my head like Jesus’s burning heart within his chest.

When it comes to my own work, I appear to be torn between fascination and terror. As a YA writer, I wrote fires into The Shattering and While We Run, where they were dangerous and destructive. As a romance writer, my fires tend to be more metaphorical.

Fire is so commonly used as a symbol for desire that it’s almost useless as figurative language. But I still write heat and warmth into every sex scene. I want that tactile conjuration, that sideways comparison of wanting to sparks and embers and roaring flame, that awareness of fierce beauty and power.

Cliche? Sure. But sex is hot work. While you’re reading, I want you to hover near the flame.

Book stuff!

• Persephone in Bloom is currently $0.99, if you’ve been waiting for an excuse to buy it (or recommend it to a friend!)
• Penelope Pops the Question appears in another collection of freebies, titled “Love Should Be Fun!”. I signed up for this one because the organiser’s only requirement was that the book should “make your readers giddy and smiley”. I have it on good authority that Penelope has done that!  Myself, I’m particularly looking forward to Thick as a Brick (love that cover) and the sample of Me Before Lou (cute dogs! crimes!).
• Savory & Supernatural, my second Movie Magic novella, is off to copyedits, and I should have a cover to reveal shortly! Pre-order now to be one of the cool kids. I also have some more exciting news about the Movie Magic series, which I will tell you as soon as I may.