The first question could be an easy or hard one: why witches? You’ve written novels about witches several times before, including The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane, which takes place partially during the Salem witch trials. What draws you back to witches again and again?

Part of it has to do with personal context. I started writing Dane while in graduate school for American Studies. I was living in Marblehead, MA, which is unusual in that it has the largest collection of standing eighteenth-century houses in the US. It’s a weird, evocative little town. My husband and I rented an apartment in a house built in 1705. I’m a history person and have been on historic house tours and all that, but I’ve never lived in a house that’s been continuously occupied for that long. One afternoon, when I was working in my office, I suddenly thought: someone who lived in this house was alive when the trials happened.

Dane came out of thinking about how we look at people from history with a kind of pity—oh those poor dumb people, and so on. But the people who conducted the trials weren’t stupid. They were educated men. Generally when I was giving a talk about the book, I ended up not talking about the book much at all and talking about witchcraft instead. It’s a hard thing to learn about when you’re outside of it, and it was a subject of enduring interest for people. That’s how I ended up editing for Penguin.

In your press materials, it mentions that you are the descendent of three accused witches from Salem. I have to ask—did you tell other kids this on the playground and threaten to curse them? Because that’s absolutely what I would have done.

[Laughs] If you read the introductions to other books about Salem, like In the Devil’s Snare by Mary Beth Norton and Entertaining Satan by John Putnam Demos, you learn that when someone does research on witchcraft, they inevitably discover they are the descendent of witches—it’s just a case of math. I found out about the first two as a teenager, from my aunt who was doing some family tree research. One of them had the same last name as me, so that wasn’t too much of a surprise. My reaction, being a teenage in the ’90s, was “Oh yeah, this is awesome!” But it didn’t really change my interest. What really got me interested was just living in this area. If you look at the type of women who were accused of being witches, they were middle-aged, angry, argumentative, out of step with culture.

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A few years ago, when my brother’s girlfriend was pregnant, my mom called to tell me that nearly the entire carton of eggs in the fridge had double yolks inside.

OK?

“It means your brother is going to have twins.” (Obviously.) That idea popped into her head with the first egg, but she kept going. Two yellow yolks plopped out of several eggs. 

People were obligated to eat a lot of eggs that day, and an ultrasound later showed my brother’s girlfriend was pregnant with twins.

Now, my favorite aunt – my mom’s baby sister and a kindergarten teacher as innocent and kind as a kindergarten teacher – is asking me how to reach Stevie Nicks by fan mail. 

“The song ‘Landslide’ has helped me a lot during this. I would like to tell Stevie how her music has helped my soul. Any ideas how? I’ll send her a special envelope so it stands out. I love you! I’m going to make it through this.”

^An actual text from my actual aunt.

A few weeks ago, she awoke panicked from a dream that my uncle, her husband of more than 25 years, had been cheating on her.

Had she called anyone but my mother, they would’ve told her that it was a just a dream. It probably means you’re insecure about work or something. Have you been watching The Laci Peterson Story again?

But she didn’t. She called my mom. And my mom gave her an ominous, “well, keep your eyes open.” 

Later that day, my aunt found an extra float in their pool and Malibu Rum in my whiskey-drinking uncle’s liquor cabinet. He admitted he’d been fucking his secretary for months (cliche, I know) – including the night she dreamt of it.

Mom says she knew he was cheating as soon as she heard her sister say, “hello” on the phone that day.

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Liz Labacz’s previous work for The Toast can be found here.

“Sr. Mary Joan would like to see you in her office.”

I was not a person who got called to the Disciplinarian office. Not to say I had never gotten up to any mischief, but I almost never got caught and had not, to my memory, actually done anything noteworthy recently.

When I arrived, she asked me to sit. Sister and I knew each other pretty well by that point, most of the way through Sophomore year, from her excellent honors English class. She was an imposing force at my school and plenty of my classmates never saw beyond her tough role as Disciplinarian (and later, Principal), but we liked each other. I like to believe, accurately or not, that I may have even been among her favorites. She remains among mine.

I fidgeted in my chair. She paced for a moment and, with an exasperated sigh, finally spit it out.

“Are you in the Trench Coat Mafia?”

The static electricity that had been building up as my nerves rubbed against each other released in a belly laugh. “I wear a peacoat!”

“Humor me. I need you to just say yes or no.”

That morning, I’d met my friends in the cafeteria for breakfast, where three of us happened to be toting witch hats for a Theatre Arts project later in the day. All of us were lit nerds, so it seemed obvious to take hands and skip in circles, cackling “Double Double Toil and Trouble” and squealing with laughter. But apparently we scared a freshman studying quietly in the corner, who had reported the activity as evidence that the Trench Coat Mafia was alive in our little school. Sister Mary Joan judged the claim as preposterous but, being responsible, had asked the accused just to make sure. They really did try to keep us safe, as best they knew how. No, we weren’t part of the Trench Coat Mafia. No, we didn’t want to hurt anyone. But teenagers have their secrets. We were witches.

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The wind is howling on Pendle Hill on Halloween. It lies in Northern England, and has been described to me as a seductive hill with a macabre, dark past. My friend Rachel and I are climbing the hill – it’s only 4pm, but the sun sets in less than hour. We can see the small villages of Sabden, Colne and Roughlee below us, but we’re far above them now and the hill is deserted except for a pair of silhouettes in the far distance at the hill’s peak.

The North of England is untamed. Lancashire is the wild part of the untamed. These are words from Jeanette Winterson’s latest book The Daylight Gate, a novel about the infamous Pendle Witches who inhabited this land 400 years ago. Visitors on the hill have reported feeling invisible hands strangling them or smelling the scent of strong perfume. As another gale rolls across the hill and my shoes slip in the mud, Winterson’s words again echo in my ears.

This was Lancashire. This was Pendle. This was Witch Country.

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