Writing Life

I Swim in Secrets, I Bask in the Truth

by David Groves

There was a time when I was like the rest of you: a stunningly talented writer working day in and day out to supply the intellectual diesel that makes our nation's magazines and newspapers run.

But I strayed. Burned out. Eventually, I traveled a crooked path to where I am today: one foot in the real world, and one foot in the secret world.

You know the real world. It's a world of assignments and deadlines and payment on acceptance—"I swear!" the editor says—and hope that the accounting department isn't running a shell game. Although I once made my full-time living in this world, logging in over 500 articles over a decade, I have ratcheted down to less than half-time.

But it is the secret world that I live in that now intrigues people. Several years ago, I began making a portion of my living performing magic. I go to cocktail parties dressed to the nines and, from group to group, perform miracles. I stand in front of crowds of up to 2,000—conventions, sales meetings, banquets—and cause their jaws to drop in unison.

I swim in secrets, I protect secrets, I lust after the deepest of deep secrets. My fans seek them, too, but what most don't know is that there is an entire secret literature that has remained unavailable to outsiders for centuries. Don't tell Dan Brown; he might rake in another $90 million from writing about it.

There are secrets in the writing world, too, of course. At my first ASJA meeting years ago, I caught a secret uttered by a white-haired doyenne named Isobel and a light bulb went on in my brain. Within a year, I had used that secret to begin publishing on a regular basis in the women's magazines.

Some journalists withhold professional secrets—and for good reason, for it's sometimes like giving away money—but it is those secrets, sometimes freely given, sometimes wrested from their cold, hard clutch, that continue to make my membership in ASJA valuable.

While the two worlds I straddle Jolly Green Giant-like are both rife with secrets, the ways in which they handle them differ in the extreme. Secrets are the foundation upon which all of my magic shows are based. Without secrets, magic would be as mundane as stereo instructions.

But in the main, the secrets of writing are hidden in plain sight: Write the truth. Be direct. Say what you mean. See it. Hear it. Taste it.

In some deep way, then, a writer is successful to the degree that he can tell the truth, while a magician is successful to the degree that he can lie.

Recently, however, I've attempted to forge beyond magic's lies. In 2004, I traveled to Vanuatu in the wilds of the South Pacific, where I performed magic for tribal natives who live without modern conveniences, without television, and without even electricity or paved roads. They believe in real magic and thought I was a true god. I should have settled there with some nubile young thing.

One night, Chief Tom sat me down in the velvet-black night with only a dim candle between us. He talked for hours, filling me in on the magic that he had personally witnessed being performed by shamans—man blong magik, or man who belongs to magic—in the islands.

"A magic man can turn into a dog, squirrel, flying fox," Chief Tom said."If he doesn't like another man, he can wait till the man go fishing, then turn into a shark and eat the man. A magic man can turn into a cat and climb in a window, and if you touch this cat, you will die. I'm telling the truth."

I talked to many other believers in Vanuatu, as well, and heard many astonishing stories. Since then, I have traveled to other farflung destinations and heard equally stunning stories.

I was initially skeptical of these accounts, but gradually, began to give credence to the many firsthand accounts that I heard, especially from American expats who now believe.

I also began to realize that the assumed infallibility of Western logic is shot through with holes, leaving much room for the possibility of real magic to crawl through. These holes have names like urban decay, legalized pollution, SigAlerts, cigarettes, Vioxx, chemical toxins, strip malls, mutually-assured destruction, methamphetamine, heavy-metal rock and George W. Bush.

When I returned to the States, I published my experiences in the New York Daily News and other publications. Ever since, I have continued my search for evidence of real magic, and find more of it in real life than you might think, sometimes in a coincidence, sometimes in a gasp, sometimes in the sound that spectators make when they hear the fabric of their cocksure Western beliefs ripping. It is the sound of the Earth cracking open. Come to the conference and watch my show if you're skeptical.

For a fuller account of my encounter with real magic, go to my Web page at www.david-groves.com and click on the "Magical Vanuatu" button.

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David Groves has been a freelance writer since 1980, having published more than 500 articles in publications on four continents since then. He has been a professional magician since 1990. You may see his magic during the ASJA conference's cocktail party on Saturday, April 12, at 5:30 pm. Contact him at pesky.journalist@gmail.com or visit www.david-groves.com