On this Easter Sunday, the day Christ is supposed to have risen from the dead, I receive a text from my cousin who says one of her best childhood Easter memories is hunting for morel mushrooms in my uncle’s woods. Her mother (my aunt) was particularly good at finding the highly valued fungi, so today when my cousin walked the woods behind her house, she found three morels. She says this must surely be a sign from whatever world waits beyond this one, a greeting and an expression of love from my aunt who died about eight or nine years ago. Just now, in what could seem a coincidence, I check the sports news, and the first headline I see is, “Christopher Morel’s Running Grab.” Could it be that a baseball player’s outstanding catch is yet another sign from my aunt’s spirit?

This all makes me think about magic. No matter whether we believe in the resurrection or in communication between the living and the dead, we can’t deny that sometimes the randomness of the world finds a pattern—the miracle of the risen Christ, the symbolism found in a morel mushroom, a name on a screen. Things connect.

What would happen if we took a piece of fiction or nonfiction (or a poem even) that was giving us trouble and decided to add a touch of magic—something out of the ordinary, something just a bit eerie? What would that do to push the piece to a higher level, arousing our curiosity so we can’t help but finish the draft or revise an already completed draft so it resonates? Maybe it’s something found, or something extraordinary, or something so coincidental we must find a way to make it believable. “Magic lies in challenging what seems impossible,” said former United States Senator, Carol Moseley Braun. Isn’t that what we do each time we sit down to write—try to shape the world of our making into something convincing and irrefutable? When the work is going poorly, maybe all we need is a bit of magic to revive what might for a time seem lost to us. We shouldn’t let the limits of our imaginations prohibit us. As Dorothy Parker once said, “Creativity is a wild mind and a disciplined eye.” Sometimes we need to let our wild minds get even wilder. What’s the craziest thing that could happen in the worlds we’re creating on the page? Let it happen. Follow it. No matter how skeptical we might be, don’t we all, somewhere deep down, want to believe that anything is possible, especially the eternal connection to those we’ve loved?