In a candlelit Woodstock living room, as photos of beloved dead relatives look on, magnetic author and teacher Perdita Finn unabashedly announces something that once would have condemned her to being burned at the stake.
“I’ve been working with the dead for thirty years,” she says, her riotous laugh ricocheting off the ceiling, animating the shadows. “I’m more scared of the living than the dead. Put me in a haunted house, but not in a boardroom with reasonable men!”
As an elderly dog and cat roam the floorboards, dodging the attentions of a sprightly young Havanese named Baba Ghanoush – Finn’s “grandchild” – Finn shares the evolution of her new goosebump-inducing memoir-cum-manual, Take Back the Magic: Conversations with the Unseen World (Hachette).
“There’s a lot of talk these days about ancestral healing, and ancestral trauma,” Finn says. “And there seemed to me fundamental things about the other side that people don’t understand. I wanted to put all these pieces together, and make it simpler.”
To celebrate both the book, and All Souls’ Day, aka the Day of the Dead, Finn and the Golden Notebook are offering a reading and book-signing event at St. Gregory’s Episcopal Church in Woodstock, on Thursday, November 2nd at 7 pm. (Finn also deftly narrates the audiobook, available on Audible.)
Finn’s decades-long connection to the other side began in a childhood haunted not by ghosts, but by charismatic, narcissistic parents. Despite the blinding intensity of her homelife, young Finn acknowledged phantom presences, like many children, but was intentionally distracted by her bitter, atheist father, a caddish physician. Decades later, after nursing him through his final days in this realm, Finn discovered he’d disinherited her, inexplicably bequeathing her only a palm-sized black rock encircled with steel rods. This strange, aggressive volley from beyond the grave opens Take Back the Magic, which then unfolds on a nonlinear timeline, akin to dreams.
Finn initially considered the wreckage of her birth family irreparable, but an unexpected apprenticeship under local psychic Suzan Saxman changed everything. When the women’s paths crossed, Finn and her husband/collaborator, author Clark Strand, were busy raising two children (and several animals) in Woodstock, and carving out careers as teachers and writers. Through the elfin Saxman, Finn learned her relationship with her deceased father was not over. Piercing the veil, she re-connected with him. Healing followed, as the incorporeal Finn aided his daughter during some dire life struggles. Meanwhile, Finn’s friendship with Saxman bore fruit in their 2015 collaboration The Reluctant Psychic: A Memoir (Random House). Of Saxman, who lives very modestly, Finn asserts, “In another age, we’d have her in a little temple, and we’d be bringing her presents.”
As the 21st century world has descended ever more into trouble, Finn’s confidence in her own precognitive dreams, intuitions, and premonitions – unabated since childhood – has increased. Because talk of such things can elicit fear and ridicule, she initially shared her experiences only with confidantes, particularly her husband, with whom she wrote the much-admired The Way of the Rose: The Radical Path of the Divine Feminine Hidden in the Rosary (Random House, 2019).
Today, Finn no longer keeps quiet about her experiences with the unseen. Take Back the Magic, her Substack of the same name, and her increasingly popular workshops amount to a wholehearted “coming out,” a means not only to tell her story in luminous prose, but to illuminate for others a path to connection and a more fulfilled life, and thus bring healing to a world on fire.
“We all have psychic perceptions, communications, and messages from the other side,” Finn says. “But we’re pretty good at putting blinders on, so we can be modern human beings in a modern world, miserable, and cut off from wisdom, from healing, from love. People feel lonely and anxious, like they don’t belong anywhere. They feel they have no meaning or purpose. And the very thing that would heal them is the thing they’re conditioned to be most frightened of.” That is, the unseen world – the ghosts of other people, and of themselves.
A thread of forgiveness runs through Take Back the Magic. The heart of the book is a series of warm letters from Finn to her dead father, missives breathtaking in their grace and magnanimity. Finn seamlessly interweaves these communiques with captivating memoir combined with tips to help readers petition the dead for everything from a parking space, to relief from chronic illness, to just company. The result is a unique reading experience, a fireside chat with a friend who’s been through hell, yet has returned from her travels hopeful, useful, and filled with light.
Perdita Finn’s delving into the beyond has brought her into the realm of “deep time,” resulting in a broader understanding of the cyclical nature of life, human and otherwise. Integral to Take Back the Magic is a steadfast belief in the transmigration of souls, of an eternal return, previous and/or parallel lives coexisting with the one we are all experiencing now. Aspects of these previous lives are revealed in dreams, feelings of familiarity with a stranger, déjà vu. Take Back the Magic helps readers tap into these phenomena, and provides instructions on how to use them to expand and deepen their current lives.
“When you work with the dead,” Finn says, “you begin to touch what I call ‘the long story of our souls.’ That’s different than just reincarnation. Most of what lies behind our lives is a mystery to us. I ask people: how many days do you remember of 1st or 2nd grade? A moment of bliss, a moment of drama, of horror… The same is true of our past lives. Odd little bits and pieces. Our past lives are like the maple leaves falling off the tree that turn into the soil that grows the tree, and grows our lives, who we are now. We don’t remember them all, but we have them.
“Nothing is ever lost. No one is ever lost. We’re all returning to each other again and again. That is very consoling. I ask people: what prayer is big enough to carry you from one lifetime to another? What do you want so badly, so deeply, you dedicate lifetimes to it?”
If and when you, dear reader, seek answers to those questions, and you need guidance going forward (or back), look no further than Perdita Finn’s Take Back the Magic: Conversations with the Unseen World.
Join the family! 
