Layer upon layer, the Chrysanthemum (Chrysanthemum indicum) opens in a spiral of complexity. A flower of contradictions, it carries with it stories of both joy and sorrow, friendship and mourning. Across cultures and centuries, its meaning has shifted—sometimes a beacon of life, sometimes a token of death.
Modern Symbolism Today, in much of the Western world, the chrysanthemum often signals grief. A flower for funerals, remembrance, and the bittersweet weight of love after loss.
Medicine and Healing Yet beyond its symbolism, the chrysanthemum has a long medicinal history. Teas and tinctures made from its petals have been used for colds, fevers, blood pressure, and digestion. But caution is key: this flower can irritate the skin or interact with other herbs and medicines. Like so many plants of myth and medicine, it carries both remedy and risk.
Stories of Folklore Across traditions, the chrysanthemum blooms with layered meanings:
In East Asia, it represents joy, longevity, and friendship.
In Europe, it is bound to death and mourning.
In Greece, it was said to protect against evil spirits.
In myth, it serves as a bridge between life and death.
A Final Thought The chrysanthemum is no simple bloom. It is a spell within petals. Joy hidden in grief, medicine laced with poison, a dim light against shadows, and a bridge across the veil. To sit with this flower is to be reminded that life and death are never far apart, that beauty wears both a crown and a shroud. Say its name, and you call up both endings and beginnings.
Learn more about my upcoming novel, Miranda’s Garden, where this layered and luminous flower makes its appearance.
First things first: I’m not looking for condolences, “I’m sorrys,” or advice about forgiveness. I’ve done all that. If you can’t resist, if unsolicited advice is your currency, know this: I keep boundaries like talismans. Cross them and the door closes.
Boundaries are what led to the estrangement. It didn’t happen all at once, but person by person. And while I thoroughly grieved each loss, I’ve made peace with them all.
My dad: We’ve been estranged since my youngest son was two. He’s now 35. When I tried to talk about my childhood, my dad shut me down: “You can write to me about what your kids are doing or about the house [my then husband and I were building a custom house], fine. But if it’s about any of this other stuff, don’t bother me.” He also told me he had “a new family now.” I took him at his word and wrote one last letter saying the door would always be open if he ever wanted an honest conversation. Thirty-three years later, it’s still open.
My mom: Our falling out was slower, with repeated “come back” attempts, always on her terms, always at my expense. Her well-disguised narcissism unraveled when I could no longer pretend. The final break came in 2017.
My younger brother: Our estrangement fell between the two. Ask him why, and he’ll tell you it’s because I’m crazy. That’s all.
So, why am I sharing this?
First, because I’m often asked when I do public readings: “Is this autobiographical?” (A bad question, in my opinion. I’ll say more about this in a future post.)
If I wanted to write my autobiography or memoir, that’s what I’d be doing. Writing fiction is a choice I’ve made for particular reasons. In short: fiction is a superior form of writing, in my opinion. (More on that, too, in a future post).
Another reason I’m airing my dysfunctional family estrangement is because:
being abandoned by them taught me resilience. It shaped me into a tenacious, self-contained, resourceful human who isn’t afraid of doing life alone. That has been pure gold.
it’s taught me that “Love conquers all” is only an adage. In my experience, shame and fear often outweigh love. (That doesn’t make me jaded. It makes me a realist.)
maybe most importantly, this is the soil where my fiction grows.
These experiences—loss, resilience, the complicated messiness of dysfunctional family dynamics—are the threads I weave into my fiction. Writing is where I transform the raw emotional material of my life into story, where pain becomes meaning, and where characters walk paths I recognize.
So, when people ask me, “Is this autobiographical?” about my work, the answer is always “no.” I don’t write about myself. I don’t need to anymore. Because I have the perspective… The distance needed to make meaning of human dramas and the human condition on a wider scale, to make my stories universal.
I let my characters have their own struggles, I walk beside them the way a parent does a child, and I serve as a guide on their path to meaning making about the human dramas readers identify with, which leads to recognition, validation, and connection.
And in the end, it leads to healing.
Hi, I’m Johnnie Mazzocco—Word Witch, Story Alchemist, Sage. I’m here to heal the world through stories, whether the ones I write and tell or the ones I help others write and tell.
Have you worked with a real word witch before? It’s time.
More to come about my family and how it has informed my fiction…
Fictional stories are portals. They draw readers across a threshold into other worlds, where characters lead them through human dramas and deliver far more than escapism.
In many ways, stories are magical incantations. An alchemy of the writer’s words and the reader’s lived experience. Jonathan Gottschall, in The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human, calls this the “weird and witchy power” of story.
The Witchy Power of Story
We are so immersed in stories that we forget how strange it is that mere words can alter our thoughts, emotions, even our bodies. Gottschall’s phrase—“weird and witchy power”—is an apt metaphor for the enchantment and danger of story: it seduces, reshapes, and ensnares.
Writers, in this sense, cast spells. They shift readers’ awareness and lived experience. Not with malice, but with magic. In my view, this spell is often medicinal, a way stories help us heal what life wounds.
The Irresistible Pull
Gottschall notes that “human minds yield helplessly to the suction of story” (p. 3). We can try to resist, but narrative captures our attention whether it arrives as gossip, a novel, or a binge-worthy show. Stories are alternate worlds we slip into, often without conscious choice.
I believe readers sense, maybe even unconsciously, that stories will soothe them, mending their minds, hearts, and souls.
Suspension of Disbelief
English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge coined the term “willing suspension of disbelief,” describing the tacit agreement between reader and writer. But Gottschall reminds us that will hardly enters into it.
Stories override our defenses. A simple phrase like “once upon a time”opens the door, and suddenly we are inside.
Storytelling as Spellcasting
Gottschall likens the storyteller to a sorcerer casting an incantation. If the spell is strong, resistance is nearly impossible; the only escape is to close the book.
This elevates storytelling from craft to conjuring. Writers wield a powerful wand, entering the reader’s mind and imagination, shaping thoughts and even bodily responses.
Readers as Co-Creators
Reading may appear passive, but the brain is anything but idle. Language centers fire, sensorimotor regions light up as we vicariously experience actions, and the default mode network engages to simulate mental states and environments.
The writer provides the framework. The reader’s imagination supplies the color, texture, and emotion. Stories “work” because they are co-creations between teller and audience.
The Subtle Power of the Writer
The writer guides but cannot fully control what the reader imagines. The paradox of story—that witchy magic—is this: enough precision to bind the reader’s mind and imagination, enough openness to let them weave themselves into it.
A Closing Spell
If stories are spells, then writers are modern-day witches (Alan Moore called them shamans). With words, they seize attention and alter consciousness.
Recognizing this power makes us more intentional about the stories we create—and more reverent of their influence. Storytelling may feel “fun” at times, but it is also sacred work: the forging of unseen, ethereal connections between humans who may never meet.
There’s one question that makes me want to roll my eyes so hard they disappear into the back of my skull and give you a great big fat face palm:
“So… is this autobiographical?”
Let me rant for a minute.
First, it’s invasive. You’re not asking about the story, you’re asking about me. You’re trying to sniff out where my scars are, which characters are my family in disguise, and whether I secretly had an affair with the villain. And honestly? That’s none of your damn business.
Second, it’s ignorant. Fiction is not autobiography. If you want autobiography, that’s called memoir. Different shelf. Different project. Different set of artistic responsibilities. If I wanted to do that, that’s what I’d be doing. I’m interested in making meaning of human dramas, not navel gazing (does the world really need yet another Eat, Pray, Love?).
Third, it’s naive. Because even when fiction grows from the compost heap of a writer’s lived experience (and it always does), that doesn’t mean the story on the page is “about me.” It means I’ve alchemized the raw material into art.
Here’s what differentiates fiction from autobiography (and why it matters):
Fiction is transformation.
The writer takes life—their own, other people’s, the collective human mess—and distills it, reshapes it, stretches it until it becomes something larger than a single lived experience. Memoir looks inward; fiction radiates outward.
Fiction is universal.
In memoir, the writer is the protagonist. In fiction, characters are vessels—archetypes, shadows, mirrors—crafted to invite the reader into the meaning-making.
Fiction is freedom.
In memoir, the author owes allegiance to what “really happened.” In fiction, truth lives in the emotional resonance, not the factual accuracy. Fiction allows for invention, exaggeration, metaphor. It gives us worlds we’ve never seen, time machines, and whole families who never existed but feel achingly real.
So when you ask me if my work is autobiography, you’re not appreciating the craft. You’re reducing it. You’re tugging the focus away from the architecture of the story, the themes, the imagery, the impact, and you’re sticking your nose into my personal life.
And honestly? That’s lazy reading.
If you want to read a writer’s work deeply, ask better questions:
What themes haunt this book?
How does this character’s struggle illuminate my own?
What did this story stir up in me, and why?
What questions does it leave me holding?
That’s the conversation worth having.
This is the soil where my fiction grows: experiences transformed into meaning, pain transmuted into art, threads woven into something bigger than myself.
So no. My fiction isn’t autobiography. My fiction is fiction. And if that disappoints you? Maybe you’re more interested in gossip than literature.
My fiction doesn’t reveal me. It exposes you—if you dare to pay attention.
And… as I say in that post, while all fiction writers draws from their own lives, they use those experiences as seeds for stories that do far more than a simple, navel gaze-y re-telling of their own. Yawn. Boring.
One of my goals is to help enlighten those who don’t have a clue about the difference. And so, for all you gossip mongers who think you have a right to pry into the personal lives of others…
Here’s another tantalizing real-life story seed from my life—the one that planted my short story, Just Like in the Movies.
The story centers on six-year-old Josie Jones, who learned everything she knows about love from old movies. Her favorite? Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
Where did that idea come from?
My own life.
I was eleven the day my dad left.
I came home from school and found my grandma at the kitchen table. She lived next door and was always around. But that day, something was different. I could tell she was sad. When I asked her why, she told me. “Your dad… he left.”
And here’s how he did it.
He left a note. A really, really short one. I think it said something like: “I can’t be here anymore.” Period.
I remember running to my parents’ bedroom, opening his side of the closet, and seeing a row of empty hangers. That image branded itself into my mind.
Josie’s story sprouted from that image.
But that wasn’t the only piece.
Several months before he left, my dad took me shopping. We stopped at a diner for lunch, and our waitress turned out to be the woman he was having an affair with. The woman he left us for.
My dad must’ve had some really big balls. Or really tiny ones. Depends on how you want to frame it, I guess.
In Josie’s story, I borrowed more directly from my own life than I usually do. But I layered in more. Like Josie learning everything she knows about love through old movies.
That piece was pure invention—something that made the story larger than my own memories, and also took me back to my days of teaching argumentation and rhetoric (the impact of pop songs, movies, and romance novels on young girls’ beliefs about romantic love was a hot topic in those classes).
In fact, I had never seen Breakfast at Tiffany’s, so I had to watch it to to get the details right. Doing that—thinking about my own experience, and all the young women in my classes and the essays they wrote on the subject—let me explore the bittersweet way we inherit ideas of love and family that rarely match the messy truth of life.
There’s more to Josie’s story, but I’ll save that for later. (I’ll be posting it soon for paid subscribers.)
Here’s how my real-life story played out: within a year and a half, my parents divorced, my dad married the waitress, and then left her when she was eight months pregnant so he could remarry my mom. We packed up our lives in Illinois and moved to Colorado. (I guess they thought you could run away from the messes you make. Of course, they were wrong.)
And yes, there’s another twist involving that baby—my half-sister. But that story deserves its own telling.
So, here’s my question for you:
What’s one image from your own past, seared into memory, that could serve as the beginning of a fictional story?
I’d love to know…
Opens the notebook wide, leaving space for your words to land.
