World of Mailman

Storybook architecture

2012-01-06T11:06:00.000-08:00

A reader emailed me recently. She had remembered my (long ago! dating to 2002) Montclarion column about Storybook architecture in Oakland. This style is near and dear to my heart. The article is not cached online, so I’m going to post it here on the blog, slightly rewritten from its original text.

Storybook is the style of architecture that makes you feel like you suddenly slipped into the Germanic forest of Hansel and Gretel, and are peeping at a quaint cottage in the clearing. The Montclair neighborhood boasts two wonderful public examples, pictured here.

At top is the firehouse on Moraga Road. Its roof is not supposed to be painted white to represent snow, but should rather shine with its original copper finish to represent flames –see them roaring up at either end of the building-- quite appropriate for a firehouse. Note the scalloped roofline, the heart above the entry, the tiny windows in the eaves: all illustrative of that olde worlde charm.

The other structure is the library on Mountain Boulevard. Its roofline was built to look like it was already sagging for centuries, although the library was quite new at the time of this photograph. You can see the clinker brickwork behind the bushes and its general homespun, European appeal.

I must credit the coffeetable book Storybook Style: American's Whimsical Homes of the '20s by local architect Arrol Gellner. It’s filled with gorgeous photos by Douglas Keister of many Bay Area buildings, including private residences in Oakland, Berkeley, Piedmont and Alameda. In an email interview, Gellner told me that he thinks "Storybook Style homes, more than any other, represent the embodiment of the builder's personality, creativity and sense of humor. They're also a snapshot of an optimistic era when anything seemed possible, which no doubt appeals to people in these jaded times."

So what defines Storybook? Gellner calls it a "rambunctious evocation of medieval Europe" and sets the three criteria: an overstated rendition of medieval forms, use of artificial measures to make the building look extremely old, and the third, amorphous quality: "whimsy."

Storybook homes, at their most extreme, have crooked chimneys, lopsided walls, roofs that undulate like the wind making waves on a pond, misaligned shingles, askew shutters, clinker brick: all things to suggest antiquity, as if the very house is settling due to its age. Some homes have drawbridges (like Humphrey Bogart's Hollywood home) or streams with bucolic bridges over them, reminiscent of a pastoral Europe.

Gellner presents an interesting reason for why Storybook architecture arose. Even dating to the 1700s, people were fascinated by the Middle Ages (my dictionary says the Middle Ages ended in 1500, so the fascination began 200 years later). For instance, Marie Antoinette's famous "farm" at Versailles was her interpretation of a medieval countryside hamlet. The 1869 castle Neuschwanstein (which Disney later based his Sleeping Beauty castle on) is in essence fake, because it purports to look far older than it is.

Gellner points out that because Victorian style was so fussy, with its overwrought gingerbread detailings and interior doilies and tassles, people longed for a return to simpler times, like the society of a medieval town where goods were made by hand rather than in a factory. This was the basis of the Arts and Crafts movement, which valued craftsmanship. By the 1920s, people were ready for Storybook architecture, which allowed them to pretend they had stepped back in time. However, it seems to me that storybook architecture is a little fussy on its own, with turrets and eaves and different roof levels. Gellner says Storybook architecture relies on Craftsman ideals (like using natural materials, buildings of a small scale and architecture that appears organic to its setting) that were "recast in a rather more theatrical style."

And why theatrical? A major factor contributing to the rise of Storybook was the indomitable presence of Hollywood. By the 1920s, talking movies had created the first "stars" – people whose homes needed to reflect their unique standing in life. Moreover, there was a ready workforce that was used to creating fantasy sets – or was inspired by them – builders whose dials were already set on creative. Hollywood is indeed, as Gellner says, the "epicenter of Storybook style," although I did see at least 10 Oakland buildings featured in the book, as well as a handful from other Bay Area cities.

Another reason for this style? Men returning from WWI with memories of appealing European villages.

Sometimes entire housing tracts were built in Storybook style. Three are local, and were all based on designs by Oakland-based architect W. W. Dixon. One is Stonehenge in Alameda, another is Normandy Gardens in Oakland, and the third is on Oakland's Ross Street. This street was chosen because its electrical and phone cables had already been undergrounded by the time of the construction, and the street had pleasant light standards, rolled curbs and concrete pavement rather than asphalt. Part of the Ross Street tract, built by R.C. Hillen, was removed during freeway construction in the 1960s.

A few other streets host Storybook enclaves. One is 75th Avenue near MacArthur Boulevard. This stretch is called Holy Row, Gellner says, because at one point many of the homes were lived in by various church leaders. These homes were built in the early 1930s. Another street is the charming, tiny Veteran Way in the Dimond District, with three full-fledged Storybook homes and several "almosts."

Storybook architecture was gone by the late 1930s when Art Deco took over—a style that was also revivalist, looking in part to Egyptian motifs after the 1922 discovery of King Tutankhamen's tomb. Unfortunately, there are few buildings left. Gellner told me "Sometimes we (he and photographer Keister) had to spend days just to find one good one. It was like finding a diamond buried in a sand dune." So Oakland should certainly appreciate its good fortune in having many structures!

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Timberline's True Name

2011-12-16T10:37:00.000-08:00

--This is a reposting; I know there is renewed interest in Woman of Ill Fame and so I'm going to put this blog post up again.

This blog is currently about witchcraft persecutions, ancient and modern, but now and then I will dip into material regarding my first novel Woman of Ill Fame. The novel is about a Gold Rush prostitute in a dangerous, brand-new San Francisco.

A few days ago, someone was in my archives and saw my post about the real-life prostitute whose image is featured on the cover. All I knew was that her name was Timberline, she was a Dodge City prostitute, and her image is in the collections of the Kansas State Historical Society.

Well, the anonymous commenter wrote that her name was Rose Vastine.

That for one thing totally threw me. Although I fashioned my character based on this photograph and named her Nora, for some reason I had “felt” that this real woman’s name was Kate.

Secondly, the commenter wrote that she earned the name Timberline for being 6’2” in height. Another big surprise. In my mind, the nickname had dirty connotations!

Armed with her real name, I consulted Professor Google.

The first link I accessed made me gasp out loud in the café I was working in, and literally grab my forehead. According to Linda Wommack’s Ladies of the Tenderloin, “Timberline climbed up into the hills above Creede and shot herself not once, but six times.”

When you have spent so much time staring at someone’s photograph and constructing an entire novel around them, you develop a strange and intense connection to them. It was almost as upsetting as hearing this news about someone I knew…but not only was Timberline a stranger to me, but she died 150 years ago. Whatever sorrows she endured, they are dust now.

I dedicated the novel to two wonderful women the world lost at an early age, and on the second line dedicated it to “Timberline and the other girls of the line: I hope the world was kind to you.”

And here was evidence that the world had not been kind to her.

The link went on to say that Timberline did not die from that suicide attempt, but strangely enough, another link had her recovering from an “intended overdose.” Is it apocryphal that she tried to kill herself with such vastly different methods and survived both times? Whatever the truth is, she must have been an unhappy young woman.

Several sources have her living in Creede, Colorado, a silver mining camp 420 miles from the Dodge City that her photograph is labeled with. Sure enough, the website for Creede, Colorado mentions Timberline on its “About Creede” page. Bat Masterson too (whose biography the commenter mentions) lived in both cities, so maybe she hitched a ride with him.

If anyone has any more information on her, I’d most definitely love to know it.

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Germanic wood sculpture

2011-12-14T10:25:00.001-08:00

Sculptor Stefanie Rocknak makes the incredible life-sized pieces you see here, inspired by the medieval art of Germany.

I was so taken with these images (seen in my alumni magazine, Colby: we both attended the same college) that I contacted Rocknak to rave. There's so much emotion captured in these faces and in their body language. I feel like I could stare at them for hours to try to figure out what their individual stories are.

There's something about these figures that is timeless and we see they are the same as us today...but deep in the wood is the darkness of their shortened, brutal lives. They lived in a world where superstition reigned, where food was scarce, and where they couldn't even use logs to warm their huts (only nobles could burn logs; peasants were reduced to whatever branches they could scrounge on the ground).

These sculptures visually show what I tried to convey with words in The Witch's Trinity. In fact, had I known of Rocknak's work in 2006, I would have begged and pleaded with my editor to have one of her pieces on the cover --or maybe even this triptych, which to me looks like the priest, Gude and Irmeltrud.

Check out Rocknak's artist statement on her website. I love her eclectic, whimsical look back at what fueled her work (like her brother's wooden robot, or a face she carved with her dad as a child), rather than some high-flung attempt to interpret her philosophy for others.

This image of her is from the Colby magazine article by Pat Sims. I love how the statue in the background is arching around to look at the camera too.

Nice review of Witch's Trinity

2011-10-21T15:48:00.001-07:00

Many thanks to blogger and writer Susan Spann, who just posted a very nice review of The Witch's Trinity on her site, www.susanspann.com.

I met her at the Historical Novels Society conference this year in San Diego. I had a great time sitting with her at dinner and talking shop. One cool thing about her (among many) is that she is required to drink about five cups of coffee a day. I thought it was great to have a medical dictate to freely imbibe! She was a lot of fun, and now she has written a really nice review of my book, on top of buying multiple copies of my book. Many thanks, Susan!

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Suffrage Re-enactment Parade

2011-10-14T14:16:00.001-07:00

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What a fine day we had, and how high were all the spirits! I loved wearing the purple "Votes For Women" sash and feeling like I was marching in the footsteps of my forebears (unfortunately, we were not able to recreate the exact path of the 1908 parade in Oakland, but close enough!)

Today, the 14th of October, is the 100th anniversary of the official tally for women getting the vote in California. HOORAY! (The polling date was the 10th, but back in 1911 it took four days for all the votes to be counted up and down the state--and in fact one of the reasons against woman's suffrage was the idea that it already took so long just to count MALE votes.)

Here's a photograph of me in my parade sash. I'm at far left, gesticulating, pushing a younger voter. I have many, many photos to post, but this will suffice for now. If you're a woman and you're not registered to vote, the ghosts of the past are shaking their fingers at you.

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Suffrage article about Governor Markham

2011-09-28T14:17:00.000-07:00

I wrote this piece for the Oakland Heritage Alliance newsletter. If you'd like to subscribe (it appears three times a year, and always has great articles about Oakland history), visit www.oaklandheritage.org. Membership is affordable, and the subscription comes with it.

Gov. Markham sets back women's movement several decades
By Erika Mailman

Suffrage passed in California in 1911, nine years before it passed nationally. We can pat ourselves on the backs for being the sixth state to permit woman at the polls. Yet if not for the bullheadedness of an early governor, women could have been voting as early as 1893.

The villain? Governor Henry Harrison Markham, a Republican who served 1891-95.

Born in New York in 1840, he was educated at Wheeler Academy in Vermont. After graduation, he and his brothers moved to Wisconsin. There, he worked as a teacher before volunteering for a Wisconsin infantry regiment of the Union Army. He participated in Sherman’s famous march to the sea, including slogging through waist-deep swamp water, and sustained severe injuries at the Battle of Whippy.

After the war he returned to Wisconsin and studied law. In 1876, he married Mary Dana. They responded to a newspaper ad to buy 23 acres in Pasadena, in part to improve Henry’s ill health, and moved there with their young daughter in 1879.

Markham certainly sounds like a good guy: he volunteered for the school board and helped establish the local library. He was the first U.S. representative for California’s sixth congressional district, 1885-87, and won the campaign for governor thanks to his solid grip. “The victory was attributed partly to Henry’s manner of personally greeting thousands of voters who became well acquainted with the ‘Markham Glad-hand.’ It was his signature move—a firm, hearty handshake evoking sincerity,” wrote Lawrence P. Gooley. He took office in 1891.

In response to the state’s economic woes, he pushed for the 1894 Mid-Winter Exposition which indeed brought needed money and attention. Held in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park for six months, the fair’s legacy is the original De Young Museum and the Japanese Tea Gardens.

A lovely anecdote about Markham shows his good heart. Out walking one day, he found a woman and child who had been evicted from their apartment. He secretly slipped a $100 bill into the keyhole and told the boy to go look again for the “key.” He left before his good deed was discovered.

All this makes it hard to conceive that this gentleman looked at the suffrage bill that had passed both the Senate and Assembly and summarily vetoed it.

Harder still to understand how he justified his decision to his wife and four daughters, Marie, Alice, Gertrude, and Hildreth. The family had no sons.

The discussion may actually have been easier than we might think, since it was doubtless conducted by mail, if at all. His fifth daughter Genevieve had died of typhoid fever six months after the family moved to Sacramento. Mary and the remaining daughters returned to Pasadena where they stayed until the end of his gubernatorial term three and a half years later.

It’s hard to enter the 1800s male mindset to determine why Governor Markham didn’t think that his closest circle deserved to vote. His wife had been formally educated at Rockford Seminary in Wisconsin (whose most famous graduate was Jane Addams, winner of the Nobel Prize), and was a tireless volunteer for her Pasadena church and its causes. He had been raised with five brothers and four sisters, so surely the female gender was not a cipher to him.

He loved his daughters. I found an article that talked about an elaborate playhouse he built for them, which is still extant and now sits in a corner of the yard of Pacific Oaks Children’s School in Pasadena.

Yet it’s said he felt suffrage was unconstitutional. Trying to locate more information than that is difficult, and in fact one of my sources indicates that the bill may not have been for blanket suffrage, but rather for “school-suffrage,” so that women might vote at any school election and hold office.

This appears to have been a tactic to chip away at public sentiment; men might be more likely to grant power in an arena viewed as female anyway, and then armed with that success, women could then lobby for more. By 1904, 19 states permitted school-suffrage (in addition to the four states then granting full suffrage: Colorado, Idaho, Utah and Wyoming), while in a few other states women might vote on municipal bonds or questions of public expenditure.

According to the 1904 World Almanac prepared for the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, other persons excluded from voting in California included “Chinese, idiots, insane, embezzlers of public moneys, convicted of infamous crime.” A footnote added, “Or a person unable to read the Constitution in English and to write his name.”

Markham did not run for a second term, and his grand three-story Pasadena mansion was torn down several decades after his 1923 death from stroke. His mansion had stood near today’s tourist mecca for Craftsman enthusiasts, the Greene & Green Gamble house, and homes owned by other titans of industry: Busch (beer), Wrigley (gum), Maxwell (coffee), Spalding (sporting goods) and others.

The issues around suffrage were complex, and not solely attributable to misogyny. As is endlessly the case with politics, financial interests played a huge role. Many feared women would promptly institute social reforms such as limiting hours that children might work, making factories and mills less profitable. They also predicted women would institute prohibition, not a farfetched fear since the Christian Women’s Temperance Movement was a stalwart suffrage crusader.

Indeed, when the issue of suffrage went (unsuccessfully) to a statewide referendum in 1896, the Liquor Dealers League urged its members, “See your neighbor in the same line of business as yourself, and have him be with you in this matter.” Still others felt suffrage would create an administrative nightmare: it already took nearly a week to count the male votes in the state.

Whatever Markham’s reasoning was, he set back the women’s movement in California by 18 years.

One final tidbit: my research yielded the fact that Gov. Markham has his own Facebook page, and six people like him. Hilarious!

Suffrage article by Elaine Elinson

2011-09-27T14:49:00.000-07:00

I just stumbled across a suffrage piece by an old writers group friend, Elaine Elinson. She too is a Heyday author, and her nonfiction book Wherever There's a Fight: How Runaway Slaves, Suffragists, Immigrants, Strikers, and Poets Shaped Civil Liberties in California won a California book award.

She outlines here how Selina Solomons got San Franciscans to work for suffrage. She's a fantastic writer.

Sad discovery of woman possibly thought a witch

2011-09-27T13:41:00.000-07:00

Friend Linda McCabe alerted me to this link, about the discovery of an 800-year-old corpse in Tuscany. Because seven nails were driven through her jaw, it's thought she was a witch, and this was a measure to keep her from rising from her grave. (But that seems spurious, as she was buried in consecrated ground.)

Thirteen nails were also found around her body, as if fastening her clothing to the ground. She was not in a coffin or shroud. Hm, seven and 13: both kind of "evil" numbers.

Another nearby corpse was buried with 17 dice. Seventeen is an unlucky number in Italian, and women were prevented from playing dice in medieval times, so it's thought she too may be a victim of a witchcraft accusation.

Stories like this are always such sad mysteries. Were the nails driven before or after death? What were these women's stories? And how would they feel knowing their images are posted on some worldwide device that everyone can access, and see the horrible truth of their skulls displaying the violence of their treatment?

Here's the link.

Suffrage parade reenactment

2011-09-01T11:23:00.000-07:00

Something is brewing in Oakland that I'm so excited about!

Individuals and groups are coming together to re-enact a suffrage parade that took place in Oakland in 1908-the FIRST suffrage parade in California! Suffrage didn't pass for another three years, in 1911...but women fought hard for decades to get it through.

We want to honor those women who struggled so valiantly to get us the right we take for granted today. Can you imagine if women couldn't vote now?!! Yet only 100 years ago it was the case all across the country with the exception of four states: Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado and Utah.

The parade takes place Sunday, Oct. 2. Gather at the Lakeside Park bandstand, march up Grand Avenue to the pergola, and return through the park. It's free.

If you want to spend money, buy a $10 commemorative sash, or donate to help defray expenses for things like street closure permit and the requisite police officers to monitor the event. Visit this website to learn more and to get your sash/donate.

Here is a photo of the 1908 parade. In the background is the (now gone) Masonic Temple at 12th and Washington. The woman on the right is mother to the woman in the center, which makes my heart swell. I somewhere also came across a photo of a woman pushing her child in the stroller. Women working together across the generations: beautiful.

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Free novel writing workshop this Saturday

2011-08-09T14:03:00.000-07:00

Join local published novelist Erika Mailman for a free 2.5-hour
workshop on Writing Your Novel. Come with a notebook and a few
ideas. Erika will guide you through the process of brainstorming,
outlining and how to keep motivated over the long haul. You’ll
do two guided writing activities and leave with a solid idea
for a novel, the beginnings of an outline, and tips for
staying the course.

The workshop takes place 2-4:30 p.m., Saturday, Aug. 13,
at Booksmart bookstore, 80 E. Second St. in Morgan Hill.
Limited to seven people aged 15-99; please call Booksmart
to pre-register at 778-6467.

Erika Mailman is the author of two historical novels, Woman
of Ill Fame and The Witch’s Trinity. The Witch’s Trinity
was a San Francisco Chronicle Notable Book, which Khaled
Hosseini called “a gripping, well-told story of faith and
truth.” She has taught writing at the University of Arizona,
College of Alameda and currently teaches through
www.mediabistro.com.

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Historical Novels Society conference

2011-06-27T11:20:00.000-07:00

Recently I attended the Historical Novels Society conference in San Diego, and can't say enough good things about it.

There was an amazing slate of authors, so many great panels that I had a hard time selecting which to attend (typically, four panels per hour), and a great collection of agents and editors who generously shared their insider look at the business.

The high point for me was meeting Heather Lazare, Crown editor, and Michelle Moran, Crown author. Heather's actually my editor (I was very happily assigned to her after Allison McCabe, my editor for The Witch's Trinity, left publishing) and I had never met her. It was fantastic to have that opportunity, and to meet Michelle as well, whose career I heartily admire, over delicious fish tacos.

I was also thrilled to meet Vanitha Sankaran. We share an agent and I was delighted to have been able to blurb her lovely debut WATERMARK. Vanitha did a great job presenting on the Marquee Names panel, and I sat next to her at the booksigning where she signed them hand over fist. Nice work, Vanitha!

I also enjoyed meeting fellow witchcraft authors Mary Sharatt and Suzy Witten, and Sarah Johnson, the guru behind the conference, and Richard Scott, the genie behind the conference, and Gillian Bagwell, who did a great job in a nighttime reading session with Diana Gabaldon and CC Humphreys, and Christopher Cevasco, who I sat next to at dinner, and seeing again fun and wry Christopher Gortner.

I had great conversations with many folks and apologies if I'm not remembering names. I loved talking to the publishing attorney who is very close to finding representation (and thanks for buying multiple copies of my book! hugely appreciative) and the woman who wrote the Goddess tarot. Many other great interactions; sorry if I'm forgetting anyone.

I learned so much that it would be impossible to blog it all, but here are a few highlights that stick in my mind:

Sourcebooks editor Shana Drehs talked about cover art decisions, and said that most options for a single book she's ever seen was 124!
Heather Lazare and Michelle Moran also talked about cover art for MADAME TUSSAUD and the many iterations it took to come up with something everyone could live with (I love that cover and would adore seeing the also-rans)
Someone said it was integral to join Goodreads, and so I have!
Persia Woolley told of a online seminar in how to use Facebook better as an author
Someone spoke of the importance of being able to boil your novel down into a one-sentence pitch, and then a one-paragraph pitch. I do that with my mediabistro students, so it was confirming to hear that.
Shana Drehs talked of the exponential growth of ebooks, with a huge jump just between November 2010 and January 2011
She also said the point of writing is for the reader to feel "I'm awesome" while reading it. That generated a lot of reflection for me. How do we get a reader to feel like they're cool for reading our book?

The conference alternates between England and the U.S., so the next one will be held in London. Although I'd love to visit, it's far more likely my next foray will be the 2013 conference. Hope to see you there!

P.S. Amended later to add some more thoughts:

It was great seeing Cecelia Holland get a standing ovation for her keynote address. She said something in that speech that really got me thinking: "We'll never know more about this particular moment than we do right now."
Enjoyed speaking very briefly with Susanne Dunlap, Bethany Latham, Christy English, Susan Higginbotham, the two fabulous bloggers Heather of Maiden's Court and Allie of Hist Fic Chick and the nice aspiring author from the Crusades era who brought his dad (awww)
And finally, wanted to say that while I was happily reassigned to Heather Lazare, it was with great angst that I "lost" Allison McCabe, an incredible editor who shares my love of all things morbid and dental, and made my book so much better than it was before.

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Visiting Chabot

2011-04-01T09:29:00.001-07:00

A few weeks ago I visited Chabot College to talk about my novel Woman of Ill Fame with an English classroom where--gasp!--the wonderful instructor, Danielle Maze, had assigned it. Who ever woulda thought prostitute Nora Simms’s story would be thought of as a textbook?

The students asked really thoughtful questions and I enjoyed that challenge of being slightly put on the spot for things I didn’t instantly know the answer to.

I think the best question of the night was about craft: “Why did you choose to start the story the way you did? At the beginning you can’t tell right away what’s going on, and who’s involved, and you keep reading to have it unfold.”

That’s a great question. I don’t know what spurs the first moment of a novel. I do know a lot of advice says, “Start writing, and then you’ll probably discard the first 20 pages and begin where the story really starts.”

All I knew was, my novel had to start with Nora arriving in San Francisco, and it made sense that she’d use every last second to make money the best way she knew how. I hadn’t really thought of that beginning sex scene as cryptic, or that one is initially unsure what’s happening. I’d have to look at it again (that book was two babies ago!)…but the underlying question is more global than that: “how do we choose to relay information?”

Some writers might well have chosen to say, “Nora Simms lay on a rice bag, having sex with the galley mate as the ship docked” (which is the scene), but instead I chose a more subtle approach to keying the reader in to what was happening. It’s instinctual, and it’s just how people innately decide to write scenes. I never really think about different options for starting a scene; I just start. My mind knows what it wants to do, right or wrong. I’d be curious to know if other writers consider and abandon different approaches before starting.

Two other interesting things arose out of that classroom visit. One was that someone asked me to sign her book, but it was a library book. We laughed a bit for the idea that I could inscribe it, “Dear library patron…” In the end, I wasn’t enough of a scofflaw to sign the book on the title page, but I did write a little secret message at the back on my author photo page. So if you take Woman of Ill Fame out of the Oakland Public Library, you may happen to get that copy.

Another signing issue arose when someone handed me a book that I had previously signed! He must have bought it off Amazon. I had written, “Dear X, Good luck with your writing career!” so it was probably someone I briefly talked to about their writing aspirations. Unsure what to do, I chose the goofy route, crossed out the woman’s name and instead wrote the current man’s name, and wrote something silly in the margins around my original message.

I’m sure this has to have happened to other authors before since I’ve noticed something: most people open your book to the first page, not the title page, to be signed, making it likely they wouldn’t notice the book was already signed. Which actually makes better sense: it’s typically a page with more room for a message (sometimes completely blank), whereas the title page has many elements to contend with.

Anyway, it was fun to talk about (and think about) Nora Simms again. Thanks Chabot students and especially thanks to instructor Danielle Maze.

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Winter reading recommendations

2011-01-31T12:00:00.000-08:00

Blogger author

2010-10-30T21:44:00.000-07:00

Many thanks to historical author Brandy Purdy for blogging about Witch's Trinity! She's the author of several Tudor novels, including one to be released soon, The Tudor Throne. Here's her very kind post. Thanks, Brandy!

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My peeps!

2010-09-24T20:58:00.000-07:00

A few weekends ago I had the true pleasure of meeting other Parsonses, at the Western Parsons Family Association. The group invited me to come speak about our ancestor in common, Mary Bliss Parsons, who was accused of witchcraft in 1600s Massachusetts.

This group all descends from a Parsons who came west on a wagon train in 1853...and then ultimately from Cornet Joseph Parsons, the first in our line in America (the husband of Mary Bliss Parsons). They are very knowledgeable about their genealogy and came equipped with tomes of family history.

I so much enjoyed meeting this wonderful group of people, who have met up annually for years. They made me feel right at home and seemed genuinely interested in Mary's witchcraft travails. Each year they make quilt squares and Harriet Parsons lovingly sews them into a beautiful quilt. She brought about 10 of the most recent years' and they were incredible works of art.

Here is our group (I'm sitting on the stone wall in a red shirt), and a picture of the sheet cake we all devoured.

I hadn't thought about Mary Bliss Parsons for a while... my book came out in 2007 and since then we've had two children and moved twice and... well, she just hasn't been on my mind. But boning up to do the talk, and then responding to the questions they raised, again filled me with enthusiasm to go to Northampton, Ma. to visit the family home, now a museum, and research more about this intriguing ancestor of mine. Someday!

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Summer Reading Recommendations

2010-08-18T19:50:00.000-07:00

My quarterly goal is to do a recommendations list. I did one in the fall, just a few posts below. Hope you will enjoy these summer books as much as I did.

Daughters of the Witching Hill by Mary Sharatt

This book is written with such lovely empathy that it radiates. Based on the details of the 1612 Pendle (England) witches trial, this novel follows Bess Southerns and her family as they scratch a living out of the hard soil. One source of income is doing “cunning” work: healing and magic. Which of course leads to trouble… imprisonment and the threat of execution.

I so sincerely don’t believe in witchcraft, and am so enraged at how even today (read my archives) people are still being tortured and killed for the accusation of witchcraft, that it’s a tough sell for me to accept a novel in which someone really does have powers. But Sharatt’s light touch allowed me to immerse myself in this world.

An interview with Katherine Howe, another witchcraft author, reveals a key point for me. Sharatt says of one of her real-life characters:

Her last recorded words before she was hanged were a passionate vindication of her grandmother's legacy as a healer.

Clearly, these women did believe in their cunning powers, whether or not they truly existed. Sharatt’s earnest and compassionate telling of their lives won over this initially hesitant reader, and I highly recommend this beautifully-told book.

The Children of Witches, by Sherri Smith.

Published in England and available here in the U.S. as a Kindle edition, this novel looks at the world of witchcraft in a medieval German town. Smith asked me for a blurb for her beautiful novel, and I gladly gave one.

The innkeeper’s son Manfred is somehow “not quite right” but has a lovely singing voice and gathers attention and fame for it. Unfortunately, once the spotlight shines on him, it displays other things, and suddenly a village is turned upside down. The priest gathers children to him and they begin pointing fingers. Soon, they run the village and even their own parents are afraid of them. No one will enter the marketplace during the hours that the children are freely roaming and looking for people to enact their spite upon.

It’s a terrifying look at what happens when the most power is handed to the people least able to wield it. With poetic language, this novel is quiet and haunting.

The Dark Lantern, by Gerri Brightwell

Set in Victorian London, one of my favorite historical fiction armchair destinations, this novel tells the tale of Jane, a maid who does that wonderfully appropriate thing of spying on her employers. We quickly learn all kinds of disquieting things about possible fraudulent heiresses, intruders impersonating the man of the house, and even the fact that our maid hides secrets herself.

I’ve never read such a realistic (and harrowing) description of housework of the era. The cinders from the fireplace, which embed themselves in the rug and endlessly need to be cleaned, became nearly a character themselves.

The lantern of the title has a sliding screen that can hide or reveal the candle inside, which provides a beautiful metaphor for the way the author gives brief, half-seen glimpses of truths before leaving us in the dark again. A compelling read very akin to Sarah Waters’ work.

Witch's Trinity makes summer book list!

2010-06-21T00:30:00.000-07:00

My dear friend and fabulous author Tamim Ansary was asked by the San Francisco Chronicle to pick one book to recommend for summer reading. He was kind enough to pick mine: here's the link.

I was thrilled that the Chronicle book editor John McMurtrie ran Tamim's pick as the top book in the list, and with a huge jpeg of my book cover. Thanks so much!

The Chronicle has been kind to Witch's Trinity: it was named a Notable Book in 2007. And as the sole newspaper in the Bay Area that is still running independently, it deserves kudos for standing strong.

. . . . .

Shirley Jackson Awards

2009-11-18T22:10:00.001-08:00

I'm happy to announce I'm a juror for the Shirley Jackson Awards which honor "outstanding achievement in the literature of psychological suspense, horror, and the dark fantastic."

Which means I'm embroiled in reading some wonderful books and some not-so-wonderful books, and open to recommendations. The book has to be have been published (or slated to be) this year.

The press release is here.

I'm also excited to see that Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle is going to be made into a film.

. . . .

Red Room

2009-11-10T11:44:00.000-08:00

One of my favorite scary books when I was a kid was Scott Corbett's The Red Room Riddle. Fittingly, right now there's a wonderful website to check up on authors. It's Red Room: Where the Writers Are.

Within the site, authors can create blog posts. I wrote one recently about my experience of Halloween. Currently, Red Room is featuring me on their home page, linking directly to that post. Thanks so much, Red Room! This is a great site to learn more about writers and to find out event dates and the like.

Speaking of events, I'll be talking to the Mayflower Society in Pebble Beach, California, this Saturday the 14th. I'm particularly excited because I just read Nathaniel Philbrick's incredible book Mayflower, which shed a lot of light on what conditions were like in 1656 Massachusetts at the time of my ancestor's first witchcraft trial.

I think I'm going to buy multiple copies for my family members this holiday season... learning how the Pilgrims and Indians very nearly were able to cooperate (and did in fact live together fairly well for decades) and then how pressures from Puritans, self-interested individuals and general mistrust led to King Philip's War was nail-biting stuff. And I don't usually say that about nonfiction, especially nonfiction whose outcome I already know.

Philbrick's book basically gives the background for every skirmish of the war. "King Philip" was the mocking name given an Indian with apparently regal bearing... his war against the Europeans ultimately spelled the doom of his people--although it so easily could have gone the other way. Philbrick relates:

In the years before the war, Native Americans had constituted almost thirty percent of the population of New England. By 1680, they made up less than 15 percent.

Another shocking statistic is that in 2002, it was estimated that 10 percent of the American population descends from Mayflower passengers. Those Colonials did their best to propogate, having huge families. My ancestor Mary Bliss Parsons (not a Mayflower passenger, but a very early immigrant) did her part, birthing 14 children, nine of which lived to adulthood. A different world, no?

. . . . .

2009-10-18T22:40:00.000-07:00

I’ve blogged before about the passage in the Malleus Maleficarum (the witch hunting bible written by medieval German friars) in which witches gather up men’s stolen penises and store them in a bird’s nest. But recently another nuance to this story occurred to me. Bird’s nests usually contain eggs, right? Once again, witchcraft circles around the concepts of fertility and growth.

Here’s the actual quote:

Witches…sometimes collect male organs in great numbers, as many as 20 or 30 members together, and put them in a bird’s nest, or shut them up in a box, where they move themselves like living members, and eat oats and corn, as has been seen by many, and is a matter of common report.

A subsequent anecdote talks about a man who was a victim of penis theft. He approached a “known witch” for advice on what to do. She suggested he climb a certain tree and “take which he liked out a nest in which there were several members.” He (can we blame him?) tried to take a big one, and she said he couldn’t take that one since it belonged to the parish priest.

It’d be nice to insert here a platitude about how lucky we are not to live in the Middle Ages…except that “penis theft” is still happening, and people are still being killed for this absurd crime.

Google “penis theft” (or enter the term in the search box above to scan my archives) and blow your mind.

. . . . .

Fall Reading Recommendations

2009-10-11T16:10:00.000-07:00

As part of a literary community, I love the fact that I can recommend books written by people I know. I hope as the weather turns, you will sit by the window with a glass of warm apple cider and read each of these books (why not?).

1. The Widow's Husband by Tamim Ansary. I loved this book. A beautiful, literary look at Afghanistan in the 1800s, with tribal life lovingly rendered. Tamim is also the author of West of Kabul, East of New York, and the recently-released Destiny Disrupted, A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes.

2. Cleopatra's Daughter by Michelle Moran. I have to confess, this is still in my TBR pile...but I love Michelle's writing and so can confidently make the recommendation. Michelle does Egypt (and now Rome) like nobody else!

3. Flow Down Like Silver by Ki Longfellow. Another one I have yet to read but can wholly recommend on the basis of her previous novel The Secret Magdalene.

4. The Gatekeeper by Michelle Gagnon. Not available until next month, this thriller follows Kelly Jones in her third installment of serial killer trackdowns. Michelle is so personable in real life, you'd never guess her mind is so dark.

5. Exult by Joe Quirk. I loved this novel. Joe is amazing at action scenes that literally make your pulse race. His first novel The Ultimate Rush was well-named for that reason. Joe also writes nonfiction about the differences between the genders: Sperm Are From Men, Eggs Are From Women is a witty read.

6. Remedies by Kate Ledger. I went to grad school with Kate, who made me jog with her in Arizona's brutal heat. She's gotten great reviews for her debut novel, and I can't wait to read it.

7. The God Patent by Ransom Stephens. Could there be a better title? Ransom has published through scribd.com...and I also hear there's an audiobook in the works. That's the one I'll be buying; I'm a big car listener.

8. The Sower by Kemble Scott. This book got lots of noise (including NYT noise!) for Scott's alternative publishing method. His first novel, SoMa, was a finalist for the Lambda award.

All right, those oughta keep you busy for a while. And if you haven't read The Witch's Trinity, that would be a perfect fit for this time of year.

Happy reading!

. . . . .

My letter to Google

2009-08-29T21:11:00.001-07:00

Things are heating up around the proposed Google Book Settlement, since the time for authors to object is nearing its deadline.

Authors, we have until Sept. 4 to file an objection to the Google Book Settlement. For specs, see the FAQ under googlebooksettlement.com. This is a landmark, precedent-setting case; please consider expressing disapproval to the court.

For those of you new to the issue (and those who aren't), I'd like to share my letter of objection.

Office of the Clerk,
J. Michael McMahon
U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York
500 Pearl Street
New York, New York 10007

August 21, 2009

Dear Clerk:

I’m writing to object to, and express my horror at, the Google Book Settlement currently on Judge Denny Chin’s desk.

As an author, my creative work is copyrighted. What does a copyright mean when a corporation like Google can get hold of my work, without my permission, for financial benefit?

I find it unconscionable that an interloper who had nothing to do with the writing of my books, nor the publishing of them, will now be able to profit from them.

If I were a dressmaker and Google absconded with my gowns, there would be no question that Google would need to promptly return them and face serious legal consequences. However, due to the digital and therefore distributable nature of books, Google’s theft does not appear that way to all eyes.

I opted in to the settlement because it was the only way to protect my rights to my work; my back was against the wall. I did so under situational duress. My literary agent recommended that I do so. I don’t have the time or resources to hire my own attorney, but I do not feel that the Author’s Guild attorneys represent me… nor do they somehow magically represent the world of “all writers everywhere.” I am not a member of the Guild, and I am deeply upset that the Guild is considering the settlement. I would like Google to go to court and have to defend its position.

Under the terms of the settlement, Google keeps 37 percent of all revenue generated by its sales of works written by hapless authors. That is a despicable figure given that the typical percentage for authors who created the content is only 10 percent under traditional publishing.

With the settlement, Google keeps 37 percent. Of the remaining 63 percent, writers and publishers must pay 10-20 percent to the Book Rights Registry (again, an entity I don’t know and don’t want to profit from my work) and then equally split the remains. Doing the math, whether the Registry keeps 10 or 20 percent, the author and publisher percentage is significantly less than Google’s (28 percent or 25 percent, respectively). That is grossly unfair.

Authors sweat and pray and write for years to create a book. Publishers do a fair amount of work as well. They put up money to create a tangible book (or e-book), maintain a stable of editors and marketing staff, and undertake the arcane and unwieldy world of book distribution. These two entities deserve revenue from their books. But what will Google do to receive 37%? It will scan a book—which any halfwit with a scanner can do.

The publishing industry is already on the wane. This Google settlement may sound its death knell. Independent bookstores are closing like the livery stables of yore, and losing business to yet another online competitor may close down the entire literary operation, with thousands of publishing house employees, bookstore employees, and authors left stranded. If we thought Amazon was tough on the business, this new venture will shoot it in the knees.

The saving grace for publishers may be e-books… a new way of reading that may rescue the industry. Yet the Google Book Settlement will undercut this possibly vital new scheme.

Publishers publish books knowing the undertaking is risky. The book may not flourish and its publication will have been an error. But that is the beauty of literature: we do not know which books will please, and we read and write and hope for the best. Already it is famously difficult for writers to get published…if publishers must watch their wallet even more closely, and take less risks on new writers, there will be a trickle-down effect on the entire world of literature.

And what about libraries—those bastions of civic benevolence? If one can access a book at 2 a.m. on one’s computer, who will bother to wait until morning to get in the car and go to the library? The whole library system may founder.

This settlement provides a landmark precedent for whether literary works will be protected by law. If Google is permitted to scan and sell others’ content, the “barn door is open,” as they say, and scads of other companies will leap to do the same thing.

Please protect writers, publishers and bookstores by unequivocally shutting down this unfair, abhorrent settlement—make Google go to court and explain itself.

Sincerely,

Erika Mailman

cc via email:

Boni & Zack LLCbookclaims@bonizack.com

Debevoise & Plimpton LLPbookclaims@debevoise.com

Durie Tangri Lemley Roberts & Kent LLPbookclaims@durietangri.com

. . . . .

Witchcraft in India

2009-07-29T21:35:00.000-07:00

I had a discussion with book blogger Gautami Tripathy of India about her country's modern-day persecution of witches. She was kind enough to agree to write a guest post for me. She cautioned me, "I tweaked it a bit leaving out specific places. Remember, ours is a volatile country."

Please leave comments here and I can get them to her, or you can visit her at Everything Distills into Reading.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Witch Trials in India
By Gautami Tripathy

I have read a lot of books on the Salem witch trials. And I have been horrified by it, as I ought to be. Most of us think of it as something which is in the past, and simply move on after deploring the past with platitudes.

Is it in the past? And gone? Not so. Here I will highlight that aspect. Witch trials are still happening in today's India. Scary, isn't it?

What is the reason that it still persists? Superstition? Religion? Those do not even scratch the surface. It is more on the lines of property rights. Brand a woman as a witch, throw her out of the village and grab her property. It happens with those women who have no family support and no one to speak for them other than themselves. Sometimes it is also done to settle scores against women who have spurned sexual advances from powerful men. Those women too aren't spared who question the societal norms or go against them. How can a man's ego, any man's ego, stand that?

Mostly childless and helpless widows face the brunt because the husband's family don't want to share their property with her and want her gone from their fold. The villager elders instead of supporting the woman even instigate the woman to be thrown out or sometimes killed. When mobs come out, what does a woman do? The law either turns a blind eye or turns up after the deed is done. With virtually no witnesses, the culprits go scot-free.

Sometimes religious beliefs allow a woman to be tortured. Hinduism too has stories about witches and if something happens to someone, the woman is blamed and all come out against her. In recent years, as many as 700 women have been hunted down as witches.

Most of the witch trials end up in killing. NGOs have come up, spreading awareness, providing for helpless females, but it still isn't enough. As long the feudal spirit persists, superstition rules the roost, and spreading awareness will not help.

Frankly, the government is apathetic too, which is a shame. Maybe it thinks brushing it under the carpet will make it go away.

. . . . .

Waterstone's

2009-07-11T00:13:00.001-07:00

My lovely English editor at Hodder & Stoughton sent me a mobile phone image of Witch's Trinity being featured front-of-store at Waterstone's. It's part of a buy one, get one free promotion for the next week or so. You can see it in the second row, third from left. I absolutely love this yellowish, snowbound landscape cover design.

Waterstone's has been really good to the book; thank you!

Waterstone's has a special place in my heart. When I took my junior year abroad in Ireland oh so many years ago, I won second place in a poetry contest sponsored by University College Cork, and the prize was a Waterstone's gift certificate. I still have and love the book I got with it, a volume of Patrick Kavanagh's poems. It still has the W sticker on it! I loved the dark wood of the shelving units and spent a lot of time wandering the Cork store.

. . . . .

Bellarmines

2009-06-06T12:11:00.000-07:00

The Times Online reported recently the discovery of “witch bottles” which one buries outside the front door to discourage witches from following you inside and wreaking havoc.

Scientists examined the contents of one such flagon, found outside Greenwich several years ago and dating to the 17th century: inside was urine with traces of nicotine, well-manicured nail clippings from a man, a lock of hair, some belly button lint, nails, pins and a heart-shaped leather emblem. There were 200 such witch bottles found.

The article states:

Most witch bottles are heavy stoneware wine flagons from the Rhineland known as bellarmines after the French cardinal whose face was traditionally embossed on the neck. When the import of bellarmines ceased glass bottles were used, although fewer have survived.

As one of the commenters at Times Online correctly pointed out, this is witchcraft to ward off witchcraft.

The link to the article is here.

. . . . .

Gambia 'witches' forced to drink foul potion

2009-05-29T21:18:00.000-07:00

This, from the May 20 New York Times: "Witch Hunts and Foul Potions Heighten Fear of Leader in Gambia."

Under the bizarre rule of dictator Jammeh, squadrons arrested Gambians (mostly elderly, witnesses reported) suspected of witchcraft, took them away on buses, and fed them a strange liquid. The article reads,

"To the accompaniment of drums, and directed by men in red tunics bedecked with mirrors and cowrie shells, dozens, perhaps hundreds, of Gambians were taken from their villages and driven by bus to secret locations. There they were forced to drink a foul-smelling concoction that made them hallucinate, gave them severe stomach pains, induced some to try digging a hole in a tiled floor, made others try climbing up a wall and in some cases killed them, according to the villagers themselves and Amnesty International."

The drink made some unconscious, and one man interviewed for the article shakes his head uncontrollably from side to side and has done so since the torture. Amnesty International says that six people have died from the unidentified drink.

This story ran on page A6 of the New York Times...the news about witchcraft persecutions is getting more attention lately, as it should. This is a shameful human rights issue that needs to be addressed.

. . . . .

Abuse of child witches on the rise

2009-05-18T11:28:00.001-07:00

From today's CNN wire, the article "Abuse of Child 'Witches' on the Rise, Aid Groups Say" addresses the horrible plight of children stigmatized by the name witch. It follows in particular the story of 14-year-old Christian Eshiett of Nigeria, whose "rambunctious" ways led him to be repeatedly beaten, and to run away from home as a 12 year old, spending the next two years on the streets.

The article states:

“Children accused of witchcraft are often incarcerated in churches for weeks on end and beaten, starved and tortured in order to extract a confession,” said Gary Foxcroft, program director of Stepping Stones Nigeria, a nonprofit that helps alleged witch children in the region.... The states of Akwa Ibom and Cross River have about 15,000 children branded as witches, and most of them end up abandoned and abused on the streets, he said.

Link here to Stepping Stones Nigeria, should you wish to donate.

Interestingly, Foxcroft feels the belief in witchcraft should be permitted to remain. I strongly disagree. As long as anyone believes another person wields supernatural powers, especially demonically-endowed powers, there is danger.

This is a very sticky issue for Africa and other parts of the world: Westerners don't wish to insist that such beliefs are superstititious or primitive. Medieval Europe found a way to extricate itself from such egregious beliefs (without the interference of colonializing forces). I honestly think the key is for economic conditions to improve. Crime rises when people are desperate--and accusing someone of witchcraft is a crime.

I don't support the belief in witchcraft. However, perhaps Foxcroft feels his best bet is to improve the system from within, allowing the belief to remain while removing children from its target:

“It is not the belief in witchcraft that we are concerned about,” Foxcroft said. “We acknowledge people’s right to hold this belief on the condition that this does not lead to child abuse.”

What do you think? I welcome comments--is the belief in witchcraft harmful in itself, or a benign belief system?

The image accompanied the article on CNN, with the caption "Children branded as witches protest on February 26, 2009, in the southern Nigerian city of Eket."

. . . . .

2009-05-07T21:37:00.000-07:00

This originally appeared as a guest post for Historical Tapestry.

I love historical fiction, because I love the opportunity to learn about women's lives of thepast, whether glorious or painful. It helps me hold a mirror up to my own life, and see that I am lucky to live when and where I can vote, where I can speak my mind, where I can take penicillin and not die from a minor infection, where I can undergo labor that is still risky, but knowing my chances of coming out of it alive, with a healthy child, are pretty strong.

History seems to give the lion’s share of textbook coverage to men and battles, but I like to know what women of the day were doing. Sometimes it takes some digging, but the research is always compelling and allows me to feel kinship for these women who made the best of the world they were given.

In the most recent instance, I buried my nose in books about medieval witchcraft. I studied a world where society measured women’s value by how many children they produced, and how many of those they managed to raise to a “safe” age. I learned that having a male relative (father, son, husband) was key to protecting oneself—many widows or unmarried women found themselves accused.

I learned that the cards were stacked against women accused in medieval Europe (New England was far more reasonable—more on that later). Getting one’s case dismissed is hard when you are not allowed to have an advocate (lawyer) speak for you, or even to know who is accusing you. Those were two procedural suggestions from the Malleus Maleficarum, the witch hunting Bible written in the late 1480s. This pseudo-legalistic book by two friars provided a guide to help magistrates figure out how to properly try a witch. A bestseller of its day, it winged its way across the countryside, allowing baffled lawmen to confidently hold inquisitions.

The reason magistrates withheld the accusers’ names? So that the witch could not summon the Devil or other witches to visit retribution on the accusers’ heads.

And why not permit her to be represented? Because anyone who supports heresy is a heretic in turn.

Fertility plays a huge role in witchcraft accusations—and as women are childbearers, they were more frequently accused, although certainly men also faced trial in significant numbers. In a world without supermarkets, staying alive requires that you have a successful harvest and properly store the food, effectively raise and keep animals, and have your own children to help do all this work…all of which hinges on fertility.

Small wonder, then, that so many of the accusations relate to cows and chickens dying—there’s milk and egg production squandered and lying in the dirt. Other accusations involved controlling the weather (and hence crop growth)… this medieval woodcut shows witches calling down the rain with the magic stew in their cauldron.

And of course, many, many accusations related to miscarriages, stillbirths, newborn deaths and outright infertility. These are issues we still struggle with today… imagine that grief compounded by an angry belief that someone else did that to you.

In 1656, a woman was pregnant at the same time as my ancestor, Mary Bliss Parsons. While Mary’s baby thrived, the other woman’s died soon after birth...and she called Mary a witch for it.

This was just one of many crimes her Massachusetts neighbors felt she was responsible for. The others also fell in line with the fertility concerns of centuries: that she made a cow, pig and sow die, caused a neighbor boy to trip in the woods while tracking down his family’s errant cow, and made spun yarn diminish in volume. (She also faced oddball accusations like being able to go into water and not get wet.)

Mary spoke for herself in court, so effectively that she won. And here’s where New England was fairly reasonable: nearly 30 percent of witchcraft cases ended in acquittal. As a new country, not so deeply entrenched in the centuries of witch hunting that Europe endured, the colonies behaved far gentler to their witches. Even when executed, witches knew kindness—the preferred method was hanging, a presumably quicker death than burning at the stake.

Mary again faced the witchcraft accusation 18 years later; apparently, the court’s ruling was unconvincing. She was—mindblowingly—acquitted again, and died of old age in her eighties.

Mostly these sojourns into the past make me so, so grateful that I live when and where I do. Although to be honest, I’d give my eyeteeth (who needs them, really—and in fact what are they?) for a chance to visit the 1800s just for a day.

Preferably not a day when someone with tuberculosis sneezes on me, or a day when I’m giving birth to a breech baby…or a day when a migraine hits…or I have food poisoning and it’s 30 below zero and I have to keep running to the outdoor privy… or I really hate the candidate running for office and wish that I could cast a vote, and my husband tells me it isn’t proper for women to vote… or a day when… actually, maybe I’ll stay here in 2008.

* * * * *
The image comes from a 1489 book on witchcraft, De Lamiis, reproduced in Kors & Edwards: Witchcraft in Europe 1100-1700.

How do witches fly?

2009-05-04T22:52:00.000-07:00

This was originally a guest post I wrote for fellow historical fiction writer C.W. Gortner's blog Historical Boys. Gortner's wonderful novel The Last Queen is being released in paperback tomorrow!

How do witches fly?

One of the prevailing characteristics of witches throughout time immemorial has been their ability to fly. Before broomsticks came into the picture, medieval imagery depicted witches flying on tree branches, as in this woodcut from De Lamiis, a pre-1500s tract written by German professor Ulrich Molitor to confirm the existence of witchcraft.

But how might a witch elevate herself? What provides the power that thickens the air and permits her to ride it?

We turn to the Malleus Maleficarum for the answer. The Malleus Maleficarum translates to “The Witch’s Hammer”—not the hammer a witch uses, but one that is used on her. This book, written in the 1480s, provides information on how to identify, question and punish witches, in essence a witch hunting Bible. Two German friars wrote it, based on their experiences roaming the countryside ridding it of witches. No less a personage than Pope Innocent VIII issued a papal bull complimenting these men on their hard work and providing an endorsement for them.

The book became a bestseller of its day, going through multiple editions over hundreds of years… and today, you can purchase a 1970s edition that is still in print. The Malleus purports to be legalistic and reasonable, even while it contradicts itself and provides flabbergastingly ridiculous examples of witchcraft. My edition provides nearly 300 pages of wince-worthy material… we would be laughing uproariously if hundreds of thousands hadn’t died because of its convictions.

So, the answer on how to fly. This comes from Part II, Question I, Chapter 3 (you can see that the very format of the book lends officiousness and dignity):

Now the following is their method of being transported. They take the unguent which, as we have said, they make at the devil’s instruction from the limbs of children, particularly of those whom they have killed before baptism, and anoint with it a chair or a broomstick; whereupon they are immediately carried up into the air, either by day or by night, and either visibly or, if they wish, invisibly; for the devil can conceal a body by the interposition of some other substance, as was shown in the First Part of the treatise where we spoke of the glamours and illusions caused by the devil. And although the devil for the most part performs this by means of this unguent, to the end that children should be deprived of the grace of baptism and of salvation, yet he often seems to affect the same transvection without its use. For at times he transports the witches on animals, which are not true animals but devils in that form; and sometimes even without any exterior help they are visibly carried solely by the operation of the devil’s power.

So there you have it: you must murder children before they can be baptized (saved), and create a potion from their limbs. Or with the devil’s help, you can dispense with the unguent and ride a devil in animal form, or just fly away solely.

The Malleus follows this information with a real-life example, to fortify its truth. The friars write of the town of Waldshut on the Rhine. Here lived a woman everyone hated so much that they didn’t invite her to a wedding that all the rest of the townsfolk attended. Indignant of the slight, she raised a hailstorm to ruin the festivities and prevent the guests from dancing.

Witches “usually” raise hailstorms by pouring water into a trench—since she had no water, she instead urinated into a little hole she dug and stirred it with her finger. A devil stood nearby, and when she was finished, he raised up the liquid and transformed it into the hailstones that fell on the celebrants.

[Quick tangent: how sad that she had no water. Was this indicative of the fact that she was a beggar and scorned for her inability to get food and drink for herself, to the extent that the town excluded her from the wedding celebration?]

As the woman re-entered the town, everyone who had been marveling at the hailstorm saw her and thought, “Aha!” Later, shepherds who had been tending their flocks and saw her urinate into the trench shared what they witnessed, and the witch was arrested.

She confessed to spoiling the wedding because she had not been invited. And they burned her at the stake.

What a frightening land and time to be a person that no one likes. Burned at the stake for the whims of weather, paired with guilt over not providing feast food for the one woman in town who was probably the most hungry.

As I wrote this guest post, I found myself wondering whether Waldshut really existed. Thanks to Wikipedia, I see that it is today amalgamated into the city of Waldshut-Tiengen.

And in the town, yes, still stands the Hexenturm ("Witches' Tower"), a round tower of the medieval fortified walls where witches once were jailed.

Photo credit is from Kors & Edwards: Witchcraft in Europe 1100-1700.

How to interrogate a witch

2009-04-28T22:03:00.000-07:00

Apologies if this is content you've seen before... I originally wrote this as a guest post for Lee Lofland's wonderful blog The Graveyard Shift, and provided a link to it. Now that a respectable amount of time has passed, I'd like to post it on my blog as well.

The Graveyard Shift is an incredible resource for crime writers. Many thanks to Lee for letting me guest blog. My name’s Erika Mailman and I’m warping the concept of the blog a tad… I’m not displaying the latest crime-fighting gadgets or talking about police procedures. Instead, I’ll discuss the “cops” of the medieval Dominican monastery, the tonsured friars who hunted witches.

Instead of the Macavity-nominated Police Procedure & Investigation, the book that guided friars in their interrogation of witches was the Malleus Maleficarum. Written in the late 1400s by two German inquisitors, this book addresses every question that a witch hunter might ask.
An exceedingly popular book, the Malleus underwent multiple printings. Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press 30 years earlier made possible its widespread dissemination. It’s still in print after 500 years (I got my copy on Amazon), and a more chillingly misogynistic book can’t be found.

In pseudo-reasonable legalistic writing, the friars set about instructing readers how to identify witches, what to do with them once they’re in custody, how to interrogate them, when and how to use torture, and how to determine if the “extreme penalty” (death) is warranted.
In this post, I’ll be highlighting some of the information found in the book.

Ø Not believing in witchcraft constitutes heresy. The authors knew that in some communities, witch hunters would face opposition from those who argued that witchcraft didn’t exist. Their solution: disbelief in witchcraft became heretical itself. While people might stick their neck out to protect a wrongly-accused neighbor, their willingness would abate if doing so put them under suspicion.

Ø Women are more likely than men to be witches. The title Malleus Maleficarum, which means “The Witch’s Hammer” (i.e., the book is a weapon to hurt witches with), gives the word “witch” a feminine gender. Although medieval witch woodcuts often depict men and women in equal number, and data shows that in the 1300s both were equally targeted, the Malleus clearly finds women more culpable.

There are two reasons for this. They are “feebler both in mind and body” and therefore unable to resist the Devil’s allure as easily as men. But the second, more overwhelming reason, is that women are unspeakably carnal. The authors in Freudian slippage delighted in describing the various lustful abominations women indulge in. [Remember, friars undertook vows of abstinence.] They wrote, “To conclude. All witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which is in women insatiable.”

Ø Women steal penises. One of the strangest things women were accused of doing was stealing penises. They either pilfered the member outright, or rendered it smaller. The Malleus devotes incredible amounts of ink to this problem; no less than three full sections deal with the issue. The book earnestly reports that witches “sometimes collect male organs in great numbers, as many as 20 or 30 members together, and put them in a bird’s nest, or shut them up in a box, where they move themselves like living members, and eat oats and corn, as has been seen by many.”

The image of corn-eating phalluses would bring a smile to your face if the consequences weren’t so severe. And so terribly, terribly current. Believe it or not, a penis theft epidemic rages in certain African countries today. As recently as April 2007, Congolese men tried to lynch witches who had stolen their members. In 2001, a mob beset five people in Benin for the crime. Reminiscent of being burned at the stake, the vigilantes doused four of them with gasoline and set them on fire; the arguably lucky fifth was hacked to death.

Ø They don’t recommend attorneys for these kinds of cases. Although witches desperately wanted someone to speak on their behalf—especially since so many of them lived powerlessly on the fringes of society—they would have to fight to convince someone to do so. Why? Because any advocate of theirs would be defending heresy… and therefore also a heretic. The Malleus states, “Such cases must be conducted in the simplest and most summary manner, without the arguments and contentions of advocates.”

Ø It’s best that the witch not know who her accusers are. For fear that the witch would demonically retaliate, the Judge suppressed the names of the witnesses. The Malleus does admit that personal feuds may lead to an accusation, and in that case the accused should be released. That sensibleness is tempered, however, by stating that “It is very seldom that anyone bears witness without enmity, because witches are always hated by everybody.”

Ø The judge and inquisitors must be careful to protect themselves. Lest the witch target them, the officers of the church and court took protective measures. They did not let the witch touch them, and to prevent the evil eye, she would be led into their presence backwards. They wore a necklace called Agnus Dei (“Lamb of God”) that contained consecrated salt embedded in wax. The witch would be shaved (everywhere) to locate any powerful amulets she might’ve hidden on her body.

Ø How to obtain confession. First, the witch’s friends were brought to her, instructed to tell her that she would be spared her life if she confessed. If that did not work, the Judge would “order the officers to bind her with cords, and apply to her some engine of torture; and then let them obey at once but not joyfully, rather appearing to be disturbed by their duty.” If she still resisted, “let her be often and frequently exposed to torture.”

Ø What to do after she confesses. Lifetime imprisonment was the proper sentencing for normal heretics. But witches were more than simple heretics; they were Apostates (people who forsake religion). As such, they had to suffer the extreme penalty, even if they were penitent and immediately confessed. Thus, the only value to confession was to avoid torture before execution.

Ø So… what about that promise to spare her life if she confessed? This forms the most egregious part of the Malleus Maleficarum. The book suggests that the Judge may pass the buck: “The Judge may safely promise the accused her life, but in such a way that he should afterward disclaim the duty of passing sentence on her, deputing another Judge in his place.”

* * * * *

And now we bring you your weekly gross-out

2009-04-24T13:23:00.000-07:00

Please don't read this if you are eating! Switch screens and come back when you're done. I'll even give you a few "carriage returns" so your eyes don't happen to fall on anything gross.

la la la

For today's excerpt from the Malleus Maleficarum, the witch hunting Bible penned by two medieval German friars, the blog will turn a bit scatological.

Amusingly enough, this quote comes from the section entitled, "Whether Witches Can Sway the Minds of Men to Love or Hatred":

We know of an old woman who, according to the common account of the brothers in that monastery even up to this day, in this manner not only bewitched three successive Abbots, but even killed them, and in the same way drove the fourth out of his mind. For she herself publicly confessed it, and does not fear to say: I did so and I do so, and they are not able to keep from loving me because they have eaten so much of my dung - measuring off a certain length on her arm. I confess, moreover, that since we had no case to prosecute her or bring her to trial, she survives to this day.

In the immortal words of E.L.O., she's "got a strange magic."

. . . . .

Contest winners

2009-04-21T22:55:00.000-07:00

I’ve pulled two winners for the two separate editions of The Witch’s Trinity and am announcing them here. I plan to do another giveaway over the summer and hope to blog on a more regular basis, so I hope you will bookmark this page and check back here now and then.

The winners are:

U.S. hardcover: Wanda

U.K. paperback: Nightdweller20

I have asked them to respond by Thursday midnight EST with their addresses; if I don’t hear from them, I will pull other winners from those who entered.

I used a somewhat unconventional method to select the winners. I had heard other bloggers talk of “auto randomizers” that they used for their contests, so I imagined it would be an easy websearch to find one. Well, I failed on that end, and noticing the luck of having 51 entries, I thought, “That’s almost a card deck!”

I eliminated the Seven of Clubs, since long ago some rabid Hearts-playing friends and I decided that was the most worthless card. I organized the suits by how I like them (which probably does not match their ranking in poker): Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds and Spades.

If you’re still following my [questionable] logic, the first 13 names on my list corresponded to the Ace through King of Hearts. The second deck was Clubs, skipping from six to eight to avoid the hapless seven. And so on.

So, to get the actual cards to pull, to correspond to the numbered list of entrants? I pulled up Solitaire on my computer and looked at the hand it dealt me. Believe it or not, the Seven of Clubs was the first card on the left! So I skipped him and went to the next two, the Eight of Diamonds and the Queen of Spades.

If you are double-checking me, there may be irregularities because I missed two people’s comments when they initially posted, and so tacked them onto the end of my list when I did my double-check just before the [skillfully-done] drawing. I used my own numbered list which I added names to as they posted.

It’s a good thing I don’t run a corporation and I’m not in charge of anything important.

Anyway, I enjoyed this process and I thank everyone who took the time to enter to win. Those who didn’t, I suggest asking your library to purchase a copy and/or putting it on your gift wishlist. Or just wait for the next giveaway!

Many thanks! And Happy Earth Day....

. . . . .

Get yourself ready for May

2009-04-17T22:05:00.000-07:00

A few days left for the giveaway of Witch’s Trinity! Scroll down a few posts to learn how to put your name in the (pointed) hat.

In the meantime, find yourself a willow tree and quickly. You have only a week or so to protect your livestock against a year’s worth of witchcraft.

According to the witch hunting Bible The Malleus Maleficarum,

On the first of May before sunrise the women of the village go out and gather from the woods leaves and branches from willow trees, and weave them into a wreath which they hang over the stable door, affirming that all the cattle will then remain unhurt and safe from witchcraft for a whole year.

This was a “common practice” in Swabia, a region in Germany.

You’re welcome!

. . . . .

2009-04-08T12:58:00.000-07:00

If you’re looking for The Witch’s Trinity giveaway, keep reading; it’s the post under this one.

It’s been a long time since I posted an excerpt from the Malleus Maleficarum; it’s time. I’m going to write about an anecdote the friar authors relate, about a woodcutter in Strasburg.

While he was cutting wood one day, a large cat attacked him. While he drove it off, another appeared, larger and more fierce. He fought off those two, then a third showed up. He crossed himself, and in a great panic beat them away by hitting one on the head, one on the back, and one on its legs.

He returned to his work. An hour later, two men came and took him to the magistrate. He was under arrest!

The judge kept his distance from the man and refused to listen to him—the man was tossed into “the deepest dungeon of a certain tower, where those who were under sentence of death were placed.” He stayed there three days, begging his jailers to help him get an audience with the judge.

Finally the judge relented, and he got his hearing. He threw himself before the magistrates and pleaded to know what his crime was. The judge said:

You most wicked of men, how can you not acknowledge your crime? At such a time on such a day, you beat three respected matrons of this town, so that they lie in their beds unable to rise or to move.

The man protested his innocence, said he was cutting wood all that day, and in fact the men who arrested him could attest that that was what he was doing! Upon further reflection, the man remembered the cats. “I remember that I struck some creatures at that time, but they were not women,” he said.

The woodcutter told of the three large cats that attacked him. Horrified, the magistrates let him go.

The anecdote ends there, but the Malleus goes on to examine it. Did devils arrange the attacking cats without the presence of the witches, or were the witches actually there in the shape of the cats?

The friars believe the second:

For when the devils attacked the workman in the shapes of cats, they could suddenly, by local motion through the air, transfer the women to their houses with the blows which they received as cats from the workman; and no one doubts that this was because of a mutual pact formerly made between them.

As with all the anecdotes, I try to reason out a reasonable explanation, but sometimes the stories are simply too farfetched to do so. With this one, I came up with a few ideas:

A. The man really did attack these women in a fugue state. Returning to his work, possibly one cat snarled at him, and he confused that brief cat skirmish into the maelstrom of beating. He did say that during the cats’ attack he was “more panic-stricken than he had ever been,” which may explain his increased adrenaline after the real attacks on the women.

B. Rabid cats? But that doesn’t explain the damaged matrons who sent the magistrates after him.

C. Pure, total, crazy fantasy on the part of the witch hunters. The Malleus says it is “charitable and honorable” to withhold the name of the town in Strasburg where this happened. Makes it kind of hard to double-check facts when the scene of the crime is unknown!

For those interested in reading more, this is from Part II, Qn. I, Ch. 9 of the Malleus Maleficarum.

Image is from www.bottesfordhistory.org.uk and is a woodcut from The Wonderful Discovery of the Witchcrafts of Margaret and Phillipa Flower, about women executed at Lincolne, England in 1618.

. . . . .

Giveaway!

2009-04-02T13:38:00.000-07:00

Update: The contest is now closed. Please bookmark and check back later: we will do another giveaway over the summer.

In tandem with Literate Housewife's posting of an interview she and I did, I'd like to offer two copies of The Witch’s Trinity as a giveaway.

One is a hardcover U.S. version, a first edition (left).

The other is the U.K. mass market paperback version (right).

All you need to do to be considered is to post a comment here. The deadline is midnight, April 21, 2009, so that the next day—Earth Day—I can post the two winners. Somewhat befitting since what the earth does and doesn’t do in medieval Germany is the crux of my novel.

I will use an auto-randomizer to pick a hardcover and paperback winner. I will mail anywhere; all nations welcome.

Please also check Literate Housewife on Monday for the interview.

P.S. Please either leave your email address in the comment or make sure to check back here on April 22 so I have a way to let you know if you won!

. . . .

Timberline's true name

2009-03-31T21:39:00.000-07:00

This blog is currently about witchcraft persecutions, ancient and modern, but now and then I will dip into material regarding my first novel Woman of Ill Fame. The novel is about a Gold Rush prostitute in a dangerous, brand-new San Francisco.

A few days ago, someone was in my archives and saw my post about the real-life prostitute whose image is featured on the cover. All I knew was that her name was Timberline, she was a Dodge City prostitute, and her image is in the collections of the Kansas State Historical Society.

Well, the anonymous commenter wrote that her name was Rose Vastine.

That for one thing totally threw me. Although I fashioned my character based on this photograph and named her Nora, for some reason I had “felt” that this real woman’s name was Kate.

Secondly, the commenter wrote that she earned the name Timberline for being 6’2” in height. Another big surprise. In my mind, the nickname had dirty connotations!

Armed with her real name, I consulted Professor Google.

The first link I accessed made me gasp out loud in the café I was working in, and literally grab my forehead. According to Linda Wommack’s Ladies of the Tenderloin, “Timberline climbed up into the hills above Creede and shot herself not once, but six times.”

When you have spent so much time staring at someone’s photograph and constructing an entire novel around them, you develop a strange and intense connection to them. It was almost as upsetting as hearing this news about someone I knew…but not only was Timberline a stranger to me, but she died 150 years ago. Whatever sorrows she endured, they are dust now.

I dedicated the novel to two wonderful women the world lost at an early age, and on the second line dedicated it to “Timberline and the other girls of the line: I hope the world was kind to you.”

And here was evidence that the world had not been kind to her.

The link went on to say that Timberline did not die from that suicide attempt, but strangely enough, another link had her recovering from an “intended overdose.” Is it apocryphal that she tried to kill herself with such vastly different methods and survived both times? Whatever the truth is, she must have been an unhappy young woman.

Several sources have her living in Creede, Colorado, a silver mining camp 420 miles from the Dodge City that her photograph is labeled with. Sure enough, the website for Creede, Colorado mentions Timberline on its “About Creede” page. Bat Masterson too (whose biography the commenter mentions) lived in both cities, so maybe she hitched a ride with him.

If anyone has any more information on her, I’d most definitely love to know it.

. . . . .

The Pope in Angola

2009-03-26T17:03:00.000-07:00

Probably this is old news to many, but I wanted to belatedly link to the BBC’s article “Pope Warns Angola of Witchcraft.”

In it, the Pope is quoted as saying,

“In today's Angola, Catholics should offer the message of Christ to the many who live in the fear of spirits, of evil powers by whom they feel threatened, disoriented, even reaching the point of condemning street children and even the most elderly because - they say - they are sorcerers."

It’s interesting to me that as witchcraft beliefs have spread through southern and central Africa “over the last few years,” as the article says, the phenomenon is echoed by an exponential increase in western novels about witchcraft in medieval Europe and colonial America. Something is drawing western novelists to explore the lives of people living in such abysmal conditions that they seek a scapegoat (a witch), at the same time that people across the world are still LIVING that reality.

In the last paragraph, the article notes the Pope’s shameful refusal to support condom use in combating HIV/AIDS, which is such a tragic epidemic and, I might note, a trigger for witchcraft persecutions. Just as medieval people blamed the plague on Jews poisoning the wells, some Africans blame the spread of AIDS on “witches.” The case of the young girl burned to death in Papua New Guinea a few months ago may have been a result of such an accusation.

Here is the BBC article in full.

. . . . .

Witch killing country

2009-03-15T11:20:00.000-07:00

"I am driving deep into witch killing country," writes Johann Hari in an extraordinary Independent (U.K.) article.

Hari reports on Kenya and Tanzania's overt "witch" murders, with old women paying the price for living too long. I was especially struck with the story of women blamed for the death of a young child from diarrhea--that was one of the more serious accusations leveled against my ancestor in 1656, that she had killed her neighbor's newborn, while really flux (the old term for diarrhea) was the cause.

1656 was 353 years ago... is it not outrageous that these same tragic issues are still happening, with parents bewildered by the brutality of their child's unfortunate death, and casting their eyes about them for someone, anyone to blame?

"Witch killings are a daily event in Sukumaland," writes Hari. This is an agricultural area of Tanzania. A daily event.

Hari tackles one of the more touchy aspects of discussing modern witchcraft persecutions: the fact that it renders the western world patronizing and meddling and oblivious to the aboriginal culture:

Africa consists of hundreds of fissiparous cultures and no culture anywhere is homogeneous and unchanging. The culture of Massachusetts was to burn witches not so long ago – until some people there began to stand up and oppose the practice. In the same way, there are huge divisions within African societies.

To read the entire article, which is quite in-depth with much anecdotal evidence (and tackles genital mutilation as well as witchcraft), please visit here.

To help support those fighting against witchcraft, visit HelpAge.org, which is teaming with Comic Relief to help elder women in Sukumaland. The article also mentions Maparece, an organization working against female genital mutilation, but I couldn't find an online presence for it to create a clickable link.

. . . . . .

Welcome, English readers!

2009-03-05T08:48:00.000-08:00

Today the Witch's Trinity launches in England in its mass market paperback format. It's the same novel as the hardcover, but in the back there are now a few extras:

1. Five medieval woodcuts of witches and demons
2. A Q&A with me (also to be found on my website)
3. Book group discussion questions (ditto)
4. A brief list for further reading on witchcraft.

Since I believe strongly in authors helping each other, I will also post that list here:

The Last Witchfinder by James Morrow
Entertaining Satan (nonfiction) by John Putnam Demos
The Heretic's Daughter by Kathleen Kent
The Witch of Cologne by Tobsha Learner
Witch Craze (nonfiction) by Lyndal Roper

Meghan of Medieval Bookworm posted the first review of the new paperback here at her blog. Thanks, Meghan!

Today is also World Book Day in the U.K. and Ireland. Started by Unesco, over 100 countries participate, but most do it on April 23. [Why? Because the tradition started in Spain, and that is the date of Cervantes' death. It's also connected to St. George's Day of the same date, a celebration that since medieval times has entailed a man giving his love a rose, and her ---or him! As I type this, the Supreme Court is deliberating on Prop. 8---returning the favor with a book.]

In Ireland and U.K., children are given a special token that they can use to buy one of six specially-published books at a bookstore. What a neat idea... get kids into bookstores, and armed with a special coin to buy a book!

Sadly, I don't think this is a holiday that the U.S. participates in. I have never heard word one about it before, and I am a regular library and bookstore visitor. Maybe I'll write a letter to President Obama about it. After all, we share the same Random House imprint... he'll have to listen to me! ;)

. . . . . .

Behind the Pointy Hat

2009-02-28T16:09:00.000-08:00

Cue the music for "Behind the Music"... this is an expose of the "dark" side of witchcraft.

A good friend, LeAnn Lewis, agreed to write about her experiences working at the Salem Witch Museum. LeAnn and I were in the same writers group in San Francisco for years; I had no idea until recently that she had this “witchcraft” background. Upon learning it, I of course begged her to do a guest post for me. She now lives in Paris and very kindly agreed.

Without further ado, here are her hilarious ruminations on one of the best jobs ever!

The Official (Slacker) Witch of Salem
By LeAnn Lewis

I have had many jobs in my life before obtaining the current one that I have had now for five years, that of teacher. On average I was able to hold a job for three months. That is approximately what it took before someone was forced to let me go, without being legally responsible for firing me. I am really good at job interviews; I always know just the right tone to hit, what to wear and I myself get caught up in my own enthusiastic falsehoods. People were so sorry when they hired me. And I felt sorry for them as well, and convinced that I could change…If I could only make a job out of job interviews---I really do think I have crafted it to an art.

In my late teens and early twenties, I was a bartender, waitress, bike messenger (with no bike), headhunter, diet counselor, personal trainer, human resources consultant, psychic hotline operator, ice cream sundae smoosher (you know, at one of those places that custom mixed in the Snickers bars), secretary, and witch. Yes, I did say that, witch.

Not only was I a witch but also again I only lasted the three months of witch-in-training before they hired someone else at the Salem Witch Museum. Apparently I was not nice enough.

I was a Slacker Witch specifically. I think the people who hired me should have known that I would not work out. Firstly because I did not even apply for the job; I got it through the back door, by being Replacement Witch when my friend Spring Break SubWitch was too hung over to show up for work. It was sort of an “acting” job: tour guiding. So one could also say I was also an “actress,” but you need to make the air-quote sign with your fingers.

To understand this job fully one must understand the epoch. It was the ‘80’s: neon colored T-shirts, bangles, Big Bangs. So Big that they were ready to pierce the sky. Big Bangs that I still wore as a Witch. The job was designed to supplement my alcohol budget, Lisa Lisa and the Cult Jam cassettes, and spray needs for my Big Bangs.

At the time we were both in college and very excited about our illicitly-obtained I.D.’s. Going out every night was essential. Spring Break SubWitch “was,” according to her lost/stolen I.D., a 40-year-old woman with prematurely grey hair named “Carol.”

I “was” a blonde with blue eyes that did not fit my brown hair and hazel ones, and my I.D. read “Shayna.” We secretly thought Shayna was a stripper, because she kind of had a louche look about her. "Carol" was jealous because my photo was sexier. "I look like a.... like a mom," she would complain, as if this was the worst fate imaginable for anyone. "I wanna be Shayna!" I, however, was jealous of hers because Carol seemed normal, whereas Shayna seemed the type of woman destined to drive intentionallyfast into all life's bad turns. Who knew what would become of a woman like that?

We would often forget to call each other our new names in front of overweight bouncers and we would make dramatic eye rolls to express our fear that we would be discovered as 19 and kicked out of Trackside, the bar everyone went to. But nobody cared; I.D. was a formality to get in the door.

However, that summer in Salem was also my first summer as an Adult: I had just had to file taxes for the first time, pay for my own health insurance and portion an amount of my paycheck to pay for Rent (!), Food (!) and a mimosa-colored towel set, my first adult home purchase at Kmart (being the burgeoning alcoholic that I was, the big joke was that I could only describe colors by comparing them to cocktails, a trait I still share with “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” hosts, apparently). Being a Witch therefore was also part of the plan to Be. An. Adult, and thus pay my own way.

I would work the morning as a Witch and the evenings as another version of a witch: a constantly stressed out waitress at the Hawthorne Inn.

Soooooo my first day. I showed up as Replacement Witch in jeans and my wrinkled Absolut Vodka T-shirt that some publicity company had given me the night before and explained that I was subbing for my friend because she was “sick.”

I told my new potential bosses that “Carol” and I had both been in the same production of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest;” had they not seen me? I was, I assured them, as my new “bosses” nodded confusedly, a big star in Salem at the dinky community theater. Did they not see me? (This was true. I had been in the production, but “star” was stretching the point). Finally they made out amongst my confused babble that “Carol” was not coming, and since the door was opening soon, I had the job!

Yes they had seen me, they assured me, and they thought that I was a good enough “actress” to do the job. Just for the day. They asked me if I had my script. I did. I dug it out of my jeans. It was written on a cocktail napkin before “Carol” passed out the night before. I had memorized it on the bus.

Sort of.

The gist of the meaning of the lines.

My job was to act on a stage with one other “actress” and nine paper mache dummies with voice-boxes (because there was only a budget for two live people). We would re-enact a trial scene from the Salem Witch Hysteria for busloads of tourists and then give them tours. I was Ann Putnam. The other actress was Goody…Something. My job was to say my line and time it correctly to be responded to by either Goody Something or the paper mache dummies’ voice boxes. Could I do that? For $9 an hour?

“Cool.” I said. “No prob”.

I couldn’t wait to tell my friends that I was a real actress. It was the most money per hour that I had ever made.

They gave me my uniform. A ankle-length dress, petticoat, and bonnet with attached fake curls coming out of its sides like Nellie from Little House on the Prairie (that looked mysteriously like my I.D....) My bangs made the top of the bonnet look Teepee-ish. Then they ushered me into the barn theater where my “debut” would take place.

A typhoon of searing heat blasted me, and this was how I discovered that the stage was not air conditioned in the 100-degree Salem heat wave that occurs every summer in Massachusetts. I slumped into the green room and met Goody Something, a 56-year-old early retiree who had had a health scare recently, which, upon her being cured, saw her quitting her high-paid financial job in Boston to move to the North Shore and take classes at Lori Cabot, “The Official Witch of Salem’s,” Crow Haven Corner (which is now franchised to someone). She was busy reading some book on chakras and gave me a perfunctory nod as we passed though. I was told by my new employers that I would also be conducting a tour through the “dungeon” below the barn after the show and then coming back to repeat the performance. 10 times. Where would Goody be?

“Oh, she just does the show. We like the younger girls to give the tours. She will just wait in the green room”.

I already did not like this job, ageism that did not favor me. Why did she get to read about chakras while I was slavin?

“Anything else?”

“Yeah. Uh. How many tours?” I asked.

There was tour every 40 minutes and the show lasted 15 minutes. I would have five minutes to recoup and slug down a Crystal Light. I would be there for a six-hour shift.

“Ready?"

“Uh, yeah.”

When the curtains came up I was confronted with my first audience: an entire tour bus of Floridians with large lapels of sunflowers on which were marked the names of Marge, Leon, Geraldine...there was even a Carol that looked like “Carol” but no Shayna. They all smiled sweetly. I started my speech, looking down nervously at my crumpled Trackside napkin. A little old man tottered to the front and heaved a video camera that was the same size of his body in my face and stage whispered in an echo, “Excuse me, dear, could you please speak up? The video is a present for my granddaughter’s birthday. She likes witches.”

“While what-for with, my good man,” I improvised gratefully but I was slightly disturbed with my ability to suddenly channel a former life Renaissance Faire Wench so easily.

I stumbled through my lines, instantly forgetting what I had memorized on the bus, replacing old English with “the gist” and interrupted various voice boxes.

“So he be-eth…er, I see-eth, um, the point is that he is, is-th, uh, a witch, a um witch-eth?”

However, I still, 25 years later, remember the first lines that I was able to actually memorize: “My name is Ann Putnam. I be a single woman of Salem Village who has been aggrievedly abused by Goody Something who, while the good lord left me lie sleeping, did visit me and performed with my person ungodly acts!”

At this point, Goody Something would interrupt me to say “No, NO!” Then the voice box of the Judge would continue “Now, fine people of Salem…”

Then, after several minutes of this dialogue, I was to throw myself on the floor, convulse as if I was having an epileptic seizure, while accusing her of bewitching me so as to avoid being persecuted myself. Then the curtains closed.

Goody would leisurely pull out her chakra research or open up a bento box complete with matching plastic Hello Kitty chopsticks and begin to pose bits of sushi delicately in her mouth while I tripped down a creaky stairway in my skirt and bonnet to try to usher arthritic oldsters through a very cost-efficient dungeon in a record amount of time. Usually I had to push them on to get them out in time for the music, which, once it was starting, was a sign for me to get on stage and for Goody to wipe the wasabi off her bonnet ribbon. The curtains would fly open, the voice boxes would start to accuse and then I would commence “My name is Ann Putnam. I be a.…”

Somehow the job continued. Spring Break SubWitch was on a bender, so I substituted the next day. And the next. I tried at different points to get Goody to do her fair share by hiding her bento box or spilling my Dunkin Donuts iced coffee on differing chakras, but she held firm. She was not willing to do the tours.

On humid days sometimes the voice boxes would get stuck and drone out the same lines and I would have to have my epilepsy a bit closer to the paper mache judge, to “accidentally” kick him to stop it. The moisture also did damage to their forms and often the limbs of the mannequins would fall off in the middle of my “soliloquy.” This wasn’t too hard to handle: I would just accuse Goody Something of bewitching them too.

I have a low attention span. Once I master something, I need to be challenged. After a day I mastered my “script,” I started improvising. Goody reprimanded me. I told her that she was hindering my creative growth and that this was Strasburg method acting. Or was it Stanislavski? Or Spanikopita acting? Something like that. Even Brando knew it.

She told on me and I got written up. I invited my boyfriend and his friends to come see my “professional acting” and they threw spitballs at Goody in revenge and oooohed and guffawed (as only 21-year-olds can do) when the voice boxes, or I, repeated the words “ungodly acts” which I had not noticed, until then, was so prevalent in the script or so salacious sounding…. Goody complained, and I was warned that my friends could not come and see me “on set.”

Then there was also the problem with my other job at the Hawthorne Inn. Despite the lack of a bonnet, I was still recognizable as the witchly tour guide. One night while waitressing, I approached a table and the youngest started screaming and hitting the banquette.

“What is it, honey?”

“No, I don’t want her giving me food! She is a witch!”

I had to explain to my boss what that meant. He was annoyed; now he understood why I was not flexible to work lunches. My temper started getting shorter in the heat. I was getting madder at Goody Something. I was spitting out my lines to the audience and screaming into their video viewfinders, “I BE A SINGLE WOMAN IN SALEM!”

This turned out to be true when my boyfriend dumped me for a blonde that looked like my wig. She was uncomplicated and did not have to work two jobs. She had time for him.

“Besides, you keep saying your lines in your sleep. And then you have your convulsion sometimes too. It’s freakin me out. Have you thought of just taking out a student loan?” he mumbled.

The fall leaves began to blow across Salem Center Park. Laurie Cabot, the “Official Witch of Salem,” switched her summer pointed hat for a sturdier winter one, and a black long shawl. Goody Something started to bring soup instead of sushi. It was the dreaded time of year; the re-start of school and homework, the end of my first summer with Shayna’s I.D., the horrible possibility of running into the blonde and the boy who had broken my heart and the end of the sun. My costume was not causing me to sweat anymore; in fact, there was no heat in the barn and it was freezing. One day I slunk into my costume feeling sicker than usual, despite not having drunk the night before. I could not understand why. Then, I remembered.

It was the three-month review.

“You have done a very nice job and we really appreciated all your help this summer, but we think we are going to start with another girl. You know, I think you have really gone above and beyond our expectations; you have actually merged with your character,” my boss said, smiling only with her mouth.

Then she showed me a few customer complaints. I was rude, curt, too mean on stage, and brusque during the tour.

“You really did find a witch, didn’t you,” said one.

I hung my bonnet up and walked past Goody Something slurping her soup, as haughtily as only a 19-year-old can. She was there. I was movin’ on to better things, I told myself. I wouldn’t end up like her, defeated, desperately clinging to illusion, fleeing my day job. I was a Real Actress. My life would hold better things for me…and it did, but getting older myself now I realize that she too was doing her own thing…. courageously.

One never knows where life’s turns take you, to New York, to San Francisco, to other countries, even, all the way from the North Shore. And looking back now, there are worse places to come from, and worse ways of spending a teenage summer, than being the Official (Slacker) Witch of Salem, Massachusetts.

. . . . . .

Gratitude

2009-02-12T16:00:00.000-08:00

Throughout The Witch's Trinity, the main character Gude remains conscious of extending gratitude to the things in her life that sustain her: the water in the river, the buds under the snow, the meat on her plate.

Today I came across a news story I wanted to post... about a 40 year old woman who tracked down the firefighter who saved her life as a newborn. Evangeline Anderson told Boston Globe reporter Maria Cramer:

I didn't want him to leave the earth, or I to leave the earth, without saying thank you.

They were reunited yesterday for the first time, 40 years after firefighter William Carroll crawled on his stomach through an apartment black with smoke, to find baby Evangeline in her crib unconscious with soot dusting her face.

It's an emotional read, and I invite you to read it here.

And then for one moment, think of something you are intensely grateful for. Blessings are falling out of our fingers, and we need to number them.

. . . . .

Witchvox essay

2009-02-11T13:00:00.000-08:00

I'm happy to say that the witchcraft website Witchvox has published an essay I wrote for them. You can read it here.

. . . . . .

A very stirring morning

2009-01-20T13:44:00.000-08:00

It’s been an incredible, moving day. I’m ebullient, lifted, feeling—very sincerely---hopeful. I believe President Obama’s earnestness, and I believe he has the power to make many (or hopefully all) of the things he talked of become a reality.

His inaugural speech was moving in part because, as one commentator said, it referred to values, not just a series of policy promises. It was a mission statement of sorts. Obama’s mindset is not just red, white and blue: it is about the peoples of the world, and how our country affects how the world operates.

He spoke directly to poor nations, telling them we felt a responsibility to help them establish healthy farms and clean, running water—and then he spoke to other wealthy nations and reminded them that we have a duty to help those poorer nations. That was the part of his speech that affected me the most: it made me see that we elected someone who can’t freely enjoy this country’s prosperity knowing that others around the world have nothing to eat, and are drinking from contaminated water, or none at all.

My book club for the first time eschewed our policy to read only fiction, and we are reading Dreams from My Father, President Obama’s first book. I am only 40 percent of the way through it, but I am awed by his writing power, not only in his turns of phrase, but also his sense of history.

In his 1995 introduction, he writes,

“[This book] is autobiographical, although whenever someone’s asked me over the course of these last three years just what the book is about, I’ve usually avoided such a description. An autobiography promises feats worthy of record, conversations with famous people, a central role in important events. There is none of that here.”

Reading that through the film of 14 years of hindsight, it’s poignant. Not only has President Obama had discussions with famous people, he is famous. He will play a central role in important events and perform feats worthy of record. He is one of only 44 people in the history of the world who have led this brash country founded on beautiful, simple democratic values.

His sense of history is strong, as his book explores his own familial story against the backdrop of the larger march of time. His world sense is keen: he spent formative years witnessing devastating poverty in Indonesia, and he has seen racial attitudes from Hawaii to Manhattan, including his own white grandmother being afraid of an aggressive, panhandling black man.

He represents the “patchwork” he referred to in his speech. He is named “Barack” after his African father, but the name itself is Moslem and means “blessed” in Arabic. His family roots are as “apple pie” as small towns in Kansas, and as worldly as Kenya. He has spent many years examining himself, his family’s story and the larger story of the world, and his conclusions are solid, compassionate and so desperately needed at this hour.

. . . . .

A few things to share

2009-01-15T17:45:00.000-08:00

I have a few updates to share.

First, my last-ever reading for The Witch's Trinity will be in a few weeks. 7:30 p.m., Tuesday, Jan. 27 at Booksmith, 1644 Haight St. in San Francisco, 415-863-8688.

Secondly, Booksmith is such a wonderful and enterprising bookstore that they hired local filmmakers to do a video of me and four of the other authors reading there this month. The filmmakers describe it as a "video love letter" to San Francisco. You can go to Booksmith's website and it is featured there on the home page. It's also playing on YouTube.

Thirdly, the fabulous Marshal Zeringue invited me to do a guest blog over at his My Book The Movie site. The idea of the site is that he invites authors to fantasize about who might play their characters if their novel was made into a film. It's really fun to read through his archives.

He also runs The Page 69 Test, another creative blog where he asks authors to open their book to page 69 and comment on whether that page is representative of the whole, and why/why not. He invited me to post at Page 69 back in 2007 when Witch's Trinity came out in hardcover (and that hyperlink brings you to my post). Thanks so much, Marshal.

. . . . .

More thoughts on the woman burned in Papua New Guinea

2009-01-09T20:24:00.000-08:00

Tonight I made pasta, and as I put a single campanelle on a spoon to blow on it and then taste it to see if it was done, it jounced off the spoon and fell flatly against my bottom lip. It was only there for a second before it fell off, but the stickiness of the pasta meant it did stay there for a beat. And it burned. I immediately thought of that poor young woman--just a second of burning on my lip was agonizing. And she felt it everywhere, until she died.

Another thought. I told a friend about this news story, and he got caught up in the detail that she had been placed atop a pile of tires to be burned. He said, "A culture advanced enough to have tires, and yet they're still burning people alive for witchcraft?"

He also pointed out that Papua New Guinea was one of the last places to give up cannibalism (just 50 years ago, as a quick Google search reveals).

The entire news story on the woman burned to death for witchcraft, as reported by CNN, can be read here.

. . . .

Young woman burned alive

2009-01-08T15:18:00.000-08:00

My heart sinks every time a new witchcraft item makes its way into the news. I wish I never had anything to blog about. Today’s horrifying news headline from CNN is “Woman Suspected of Witchcraft Burned Alive.”

The lead sentence is:

A woman in rural Papua New Guinea was bound and gagged, tied to a log and set ablaze on a pile of tires this week, possibly because villagers suspected her of being a witch, police said Thursday.

Just as in medieval times, victims provide scapegoats for others’ misfortune. The article, by Saeed Ahmed, describes how Papua New Guinea’s high AIDS rates give rise to witchcraft accusations, as people believe witches spread HIV and AIDS.

Police don’t know who the woman was and are asking people to come forward. “Somebody lost their mother or daughter or sister Tuesday morning,” a policeman is quoted as saying. Her remains indicated she was probably in her late teens or early 20s.

She was not the only victim of recent times, Ahmed's piece relates:

The country's Post-Courier newspaper reported Thursday that more than 50 people were killed in two Highlands provinces last year for allegedly practicing sorcery.
In a well-publicized case last year, a pregnant woman gave birth to a baby girl while struggling to free herself from a tree. Villagers had dragged the woman from her house and hung her from the tree, accusing her of sorcery after her neighbor suddenly died.
She and the baby survived, according to media reports.

There is much more in the full article; click here.

. . . . . .

Witchcraft ritual

2009-01-04T11:14:00.000-08:00

January is the month of inaugurations. This year I am thrilled beyond belief that we have an incoming president who can do so much positive work for our country. And he’s a writer, no less!

In other inaugural news, I’m proud to present my first-ever guest blog post.

Bill Baldwin is a fellow writer, and I met him recently at the Book Group Expo in San Jose. He graciously accepted my offer to write about modern-day witchcraft here. In October, he organized a Samhain ritual—Samhain is the pagan precursor to Halloween—and here he writes about that experience.

Thanks, Bill, for sharing this information. I welcome any comments that I can pass along to him.

So what do modern Wiccan Witches do? Do they have anything to do with the witches we read about from hundreds of years ago? “Yes and No; How would we know?”

I don’t know so much about medieval witches, but I know quite a bit about modern Witches. I’m a legally recognized priest of the Covenant of the Goddess, a witches’ organization. And I often organize community rituals in the San Jose area.

The Samhain (Halloween) ritual I recently presented was intended for a medium-sized group (25-30). South Bay Circles has been offering the eight Wiccan sabbats to the San Jose Pagan community for over twenty years. Its rituals include the basic Wiccan elements of casting a circle and invoking the directions and the Goddess. But I also wanted the ritual to hold personal meaning for me and the participants.

My basic concept was Shamanic – the willing offering up of the shaman to symbolic death and dismemberment in order to achieve wisdom for the sake of the Community.

But I didn’t want the ritual to be too scary. How could I make people laugh at Death? Of course Halloween-time is also the time of the Mexican Day of the Dead.

In the spirit of play I decided to include children’s songs and games: “London Bridge” (to represent Death by Engineering Disaster), “Ring-A-Round-The-Rosie” (to represent Death by Disease), and “Rock-Paper-Scissors” (to represent Death by Violent Competition).

I also decided to perform the entire first part of the ritual counter-clockwise, the reverse direction from usual, to represent dissolution.

I began by honoring witches killed in the witch persecutions. Then, invoking the Three-Form Goddess, I remembered friends and lovers who had died.

Then the children’s games, one by one, left all participants on the ground – “dead” – waiting for rebirth – as I read passages from T. S. Eliot’s “Ash Wednesday” and performed a brief drumming meditation on death, dismemberment, and disintegration.

Then I invited people to awake in the Land of Hades and Persephone. We shared a meal with the Dead -- in contrast to classical myths where you are *forbidden* to eat in the Underworld. By eating with the Dead we accept their deaths, our own deaths, and our connection to those who have gone before us.

Then reconstitution and resurrection, to the song “Them Bones”, based on the Biblical vision of Ezekiel. And a Spiral Dance, leading into the circle counterclockwise, then bending back on itself to return from the circle clockwise.

From here on, everything continued in the clockwise (sunwise) direction of growth. We had offered ourselves for death, met Death, communed with the Dead, been reformed, and returned to Life. What we have learned in this encounter is meant to help us live a better life.

And we have remembered our loved ones who have died, acknowledged that we too shall die, and resolved to live in service to the Community.

. . . .

A documentary to watch out for

2008-12-20T22:42:00.001-08:00

Released Sept. 15, imdb lists a documentary titled "Children of Congo: from War to Witches." Knowing what we know about young children abandoned by their parents for the crime of witchcraft, as well as the tortures in the name of exorcism, this will be a tough one to watch... but important to do so.

The plot summary reads:

Over five million people have died during the past decade as a result of the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Few people are aware of the unimaginable scale of human suffering, death, and destruction that has occurred in this vast country deep in the heart of Africa. In the aftermath of this brutal war, children have endured the brunt of the suffering. This 67 minute film documents the plight of thousands of street children living in Kinshasa and confirms the wide-spread accusations of child witchcraft, torture and child prostitution. The film also examines the efforts to reintegrate demobilized child soldiers, displaced refugees, and orphaned children following the eruption of the massive Nyiragongo volcano, near the city of Goma in Eastern Congo. These heroic efforts are finally bringing some measure of hope and stability to the lives of the Congolese people.

The link for this film is here. I'm going to see if I can find it on Netflix.

. . . .

Writing workshops

2008-12-20T20:56:00.000-08:00

My friend, and a wonderful writer, Jordan Rosenfeld is offering fiction workshops along with Writer's Digest Magazine editor Maria Schneider. They begin in January. For details, click over here to Jordan's blog.

I should probably mention that I too will be beginning an online Advanced Novel Writing class through Mediabistro in January. The online chats will be Wednesday evenings starting Jan. 21. For more info, click here.

. . . . .

I've been tagged

2008-12-10T14:47:00.000-08:00

My friend, a wonderful writer named Jordan Rosenfeld, tagged me for a meme. Here goes:

RULE ONE, I have to grab one of the books closest to me, go to page 56, type the fifth line and the next two to five lines that follow.

Well, the closest book to me is a little pile of my own novel The Witch's Trinity. I won't be so self-promotional as to include lines from that. So next, I turn my eyes to the left of my computer, where one of three bookcases in our house stands.

Balanced precariously on the top of the bookcase (where books aren't supposed to be) is Dreamers of the Day by Mary Doria Russell. On the top shelf, the closest book is Marie Antoinette by Antonia Fraser. The second shelf, Strong Measures by Dacey & Jauss. Third shelf, The Malleus Maleficarum by our wicked German friars. Fourth shelf, Hayden's Ferry Review, Spring/Summer 1996 issue. Fifth shelf, The Great Pharaoh Ramses II and His Time, a museum catalog from the Montreal exhibit my father took me and my mom to in 1985 (thanks again, Dad!)

So, in the Ramses book, p. 56 is a description of a rake-comb, none too interesting. The Malleus quote, predictably about impotence, is too fractured by picking it up on line 5. I have to laugh, because p. 56 is literally BLANK in the Marie Antoinette book! So, how about a selection from Russell's book:

I felt like a film star with my cloche hat and dark glasses, dressed perfectly for the late-afternoon warmth in a linen dress that stopped at my knees. I fancied that the Egyptian women envied me. Poor things, I thought, sweltering in their robes and veils!

RULE TWO, I have to pick five people who love books. My five picks are (in no particular order):

Joe Quirk
Tamim Ansary
Christopher Gortner
Michelle Moran
Holly Payne

. . . . .

Butterfly effect

2008-11-30T15:23:00.001-08:00

I had the honor of meeting another one of Mary Bliss Parsons’s descendants at my reading at Books Inc. in Palo Alto. We are related through Mary’s son Joseph, but after that the ancestors differ: I am the descendant of Joseph’s son Josiah, while she descends from his son John.

I noted that Joseph was only nine years old at the time of his mother’s first witchcraft trial. In a sense, that gives me a genealogical sigh of relief: even if she had been executed, he was of a “safe” age and would have still gone on to sire his line.

However, we will never know if her presence saved him at some later point: did she nurse him out of a fever as a teenager? Did an errand she asked him to perform mean that he was not in the “wrong place, wrong time” during an Indian raid? (One of her other sons, Ebenezer, died in a surprise Indian attack at Northfield, Massachusetts in 1675.)

He must have been one terrified nine-year-old, knowing his mother could be put to death in front of the whole town… and him.

. . . .

Please help make the holidays easier for down on their luck families

2008-11-28T22:54:00.000-08:00

Dynamic fundraising meter for your Red Kettle campaign.

An update on medieval glass

2008-11-25T10:35:00.000-08:00

My friend Carolyn saw my post about the stained glass windows still “moving” and sent me this link to a NYT article that says that is probably a myth:

It is well known that panes of stained glass in old European churches are thicker at the bottom because glass is a slow-moving liquid that flows downward over centuries.

Well known, but wrong. Medieval stained glass makers were simply unable to make perfectly flat panes, and the windows were just as unevenly thick when new.

Yet most people don’t understand why glass should be a liquid and so, well, solid-seeming. Even physics people are involved in this discussion, with Harvard physics professor David Weitz reported as saying, “It just can get so controversial and so many loud arguments, and I don’t want to get involved with that myself.”

One of the controversies involves why molecules in some part of glass move faster than in other parts—but to the eye, the glass appears the same in both regions.

If anyone can find the article I’m thinking of (circa 2001-02) that talked about conserving Europe’s stained glass, with the lead soldering suffering from the glass seemingly moving, please send a link. Thanks for this one, Carolyn! Lots of food for thought.

. . . .

Stained glass

2008-11-20T17:16:00.000-08:00

At the book signing after my panel at Book Group Expo, a reader asked what made me include the stained glass window. [Don’t worry… no plot spoiler. I’ll talk about it very generally.]

A number of years ago, I came across a newspaper article* discussing conservation of stained glass in European cathedrals. Apparently, the molten glass continues to move, infinitesimally slowly--somewhat like a glacier-- so that hundreds of years down the line, the soldering needs to be conserved. Soldering is the lead outline between the different colors of glass.

I found that idea very compelling, that the seemingly-static images of saints were slowly creeping from their bounds.

I also liked the idea that a medieval glass smith, while unable to know the future of his chemical handiwork, might intuitively guess that the glass still moved.

For my novel, having the subjects depicted in stained glass meant that they could still progress, and this worked for the notion of remembrance and legacy that I was looking for.

*I tried to google this particular article but was unable to locate it.

. . . .

The missed salon

2008-11-14T21:41:00.000-08:00

Somehow I missed the fact that Kate Harding at salon.com blogged about my Chicago Tribune op-ed on witchcraft, also discussing Starhawk's piece in the Washington Post. Here's a link to the Salon piece.

I appreciated Kate's piece--and I enjoyed looking through the various comments to her post. Unfortunately, I'm so late to the game that no more comments are permitted. That's a shame because I'd like to clear up one bit of misinformation left by a commenter.

Very quickly, my op-ed talks about my ancestor Mary Bliss Parsons, who was accused of witchcraft, and how I view the playful Halloween decorations a little differently now, thinking of her own potential execution (she was acquitted). The commenter incorrectly stated that Mary was not immune to accusations herself, that she in fact accused her own husband of witchcraft.

There were, believe it or not, two different Mary Parsonses of Springfield, Massachusetts, both accused of witchcraft within a few years of each other. That's why I am always careful to state that my ancestor is Mary BLISS Parsons--the other is Mary Lewis Parsons.

The two Mary Parsonses knew of each other... in fact, as Mary Lewis Parsons caused the minister's children to suffer fits in church, somehow Mary Bliss Parsons also spasmed although she was an adult, and not connected to the minister. This is, in fact, one of the first things that began to cause suspicion against my ancestor.

Mary Lewis Parsons was found guilty and condemned to be hanged--but her execution was delayed due to her sickness and it's believed she died in prison. Her husband was also found guilty, but he was released after his wife's confession and acquitted in 1652.

It was a few years later, in 1656, that Mary Bliss Parsons first went to court for a slander trial against the neighbor who most stridently called her a witch. She won! (Actually, her husband won; he filed the suit on her behalf). But 18 years later, she found herself a defendant, when that strident neighbor's daughter died--supposedly as a result of her witchery. Once again, she prevailed and was acquitted.

Later, I'll post more about Mary Lewis Parsons. Her story is absolutely horrifying, for many reasons. She did accuse another woman of witchcraft, and indeed her own husband. But she is not the one I wrote about and that I am related to. This is all very confusing, and I will freely admit that when I first began learning about my ancestor, I too was momentarily misled by the two women's similar names.

. . . . .

Misery heaped upon tragedy

2008-11-09T19:24:00.000-08:00

The AP wire reported this summer that doctors in Spain were preparing to offer low-cost in-vitro treatments to women in certain African countries (not necessarily Zimbabwe, as I mistakenly wrote in my last post). The procedure, which costs thousands in the U.S., will be offered for a mere $200.

Why? Because infertile women run the risk of being accused of witchcraft.

As if the heartache of infertility isn’t enough, these women fear for their lives—because as I’ve been blogging about for a while now, being called a witch can get you killed in Africa (lynched, set on fire with gasoline, lynched: these are just a few that spring to mind from news reports in the last few years.)

The article reports that one in three women in Africa suffers from infertility. These high rates are due to “complications from unsafe deliveries, abortions or infections.”

"The cost of being infertile in Africa is much greater than in the West," said Oluwole Akande, an emeritus professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria. Akande acknowledged the price of the procedure would still be available only to Africa's upper and middle classes.

He said that in many parts of Africa women who are unable to have children become social outcasts, are labelled as witches, and in extreme cases, are even driven to suicide.

Anyone who has ever endured infertility knows how it bewilders you, makes you feel your body is betraying you, and puts that germ of fear in your heart that you will never have a child. To add the jimmies on the crap sundae, so to speak, and realize your neighbors think you wield dark magic … well, that just would make me go into a room and close the door. For a long time.

The full story can be found here.

. . . . .

Pardoning witches

2008-11-03T13:24:00.000-08:00

My editor at Random House forwarded me this CNN news item about a campaign in England to pardon its executed witches between the 16th and 18th centuries.

This is great news, and I hope Queen Elizabeth II will indeed extend the pardon.

A London costume supplier called Angels launched the campaign, which in some ways raises my eyebrows: was this a bid for publicity around Halloween by a large store that presumably does most or all of its business this time of year? Fortunately, Angels enlisted a witchcraft historian named John Callow to help them compile evidence, lending some scholarship to their cause.

The article states that 400 souls, men and women, were executed in England, while an exponentially larger 4,000 were killed in Scotland.

Angels put up a website to garner signatures for their petition—when you click through to the story, there’s a link to that site as well.

The piece mentions Salem’s witchcraft trials (all were eventually pardoned), but not the other 150-odd cases in the U.S. It’s so strange—people tend to believe that the Salem trials represent America’s only foray into witchcraft persecution.

Sadly enough, the Angels spokesman Benjamin Webb said the pardon isn’t a given:

Webb said while few people today may believe those men and women deserved execution, their stories still generate suspicion and stigma. That extends to modern-day criticism of children dressing as witches at Halloween with the idea that it's evil or connected to the devil, he said.

Welcome to November

2008-11-01T10:17:00.000-07:00

Wow, October was really flurried, and I hope November will slow down somewhat. I'm trying to get up momentum to post about low-cost, in-vitro fertilizations being offered to women in Zimbabwe, since infertile women run the risk of being called a witch. Yes... that's today. Not five hundred years ago.

In the meantime, I guest blogged yesterday at the Historical Tapesty blog as part of their "Why I Love" series. I wrote about loving historical fiction, how I'm grateful I live when I do, and how fertility issues lay at the heart of many witchcraft accusations--including for my ancestor, Mary Bliss Parsons. Please check it out.

I'll be doing three book events for The Witch's Trinity this month: Nov. 19 at Books Inc. in Palo Alto (7 p.m.); Nov. 21 at Book Passage, Ferry Building, San Francisco (6:30); and Nov. 22 at good friend Kathleen's bookstore A Great Good Place for Books in Oakland (7 p.m.).

Finally, here's the link for yesterday's op-ed in the Chicago Tribune about witches vis a vis Halloween.

. . . . .

More guest blogging

2008-10-30T20:01:00.000-07:00

I'm happy to send people over to Shana's Literarily blog today, where I've posted about my ancestor Mary Bliss Parsons, who was accused of witchcraft in the mid 1650s in Springfield and Northampton, Massachusetts. I discuss how mundane squabbles over little things could easily lead to a witchcraft accusation, and often did. For instance, my ancestor scolded her neighbor about his whipping an ox too hard--and soon she was fighting for her life.

I'm also giving away a copy of my novel The Witch's Trinity through the Literarily blog--all you need to do is comment on her blog to enter.

I'm excited to announce that the Chicago Tribune and the San Jose Mercury News will be running slightly different op-eds of mine tomorrow, Halloween Day, about witchcraft. And in the city of my alma mater, Colby College, the Waterville Sentinel and the Kennebec Journal will run my op-ed too.

And please come back after visiting Literarily and/or the newspapers' online sites: I've posted a lot of information on witchcraft (both medieval and modern-day) and you can read older posts on that topic. I'm working on a witch--a real witch, a neopagan--to write about his experiences planning a local Samhain celebration. Samhain is the pagan holiday that gave rise to today's Halloween. Check back later for that.

Finally, if you'd like to visit my website, it's www.erikamailman.com. Thank you for stopping by.

What allows witches to fly?

2008-10-29T19:08:00.000-07:00

I'd like to send readers over to C.W. Gortner's blog today---he invited me to guest blog on the topic of witchcraft, and I chose to write about what permits witches to fly.

Gortner is the author of the The Last Queen, a highly-regarded historical novel about Juana La Loca. I bought a copy this weekend at Book Group Expo, where he and I met. He's a charmer and completely friendly--and it's fabulous to meet another historical fiction writer. We also learned through chatting that we had some other writer friends in common.

Thanks so much, C.W.!

Witchcraft ancestry

2008-10-23T21:59:00.000-07:00

It's been amazing to hear from readers who also share a link with an ancestor accused of witchcraft. Author John Putnam Demos tracked 139 cases of witchcraft in 17th century New England (excepting the Salem trials). Given the large families colonial settlers seemed to have, it makes sense that there are many descendants of accused witches today.

The earliest case was Jane Hawkins of Boston, accused in 1638; the last was an unnamed female in the 1680s, possibly in Salem. Demos tracked the 1600s only--the last witch trial in the U.S. took place in 1706, when Grace Sherwood underwent the dunking trial at what is today Virginia Beach.

Her thumbs were tied to her big toes, arching her back, and then she was tossed into the river. She floated...which meant she was guilty. But instead of being executed, Sherwood was imprisoned for eight years and then released. She was actually given a posthumous gubernatorial pardon two years ago!

Demos's book with a chart of all the trials is Entertaining Satan. He has a new one out this year that I am putting on my wish list.

. . . .

Free copies of Witchs Trinity

2008-10-19T10:41:00.000-07:00

Would you like to win a free copy of my novel? Please visit Literate Housewife... she and I are giving away two more copies.

. . . .

Graveyard Shift

2008-10-08T13:37:00.000-07:00

Please go over to Lee Lofland's blog Graveyard Shift to see my guest blog on how to interrogate a witch. Lee was really kind to permit me to post, and the comment trail has some interesting back-and-forth on witchcraft versus wicca. Tonight, visit www.talkradio1150.com at 5 p.m. Pacific Time (or 8 p.m. EST) for my radio interview with Ken Hudnall. He will be taking callers (and I think you can email questions, too, from that site), which I would fervently appreciate.

. . . . .

Okay to bring a witch to court in Zimbabwe

2008-10-07T23:07:00.000-07:00

This is news already two years old, but I just ran across it while researching the issue.

In July 2006, the BBC reported that Zimbabwe lifted its more than a century old ban on witchcraft.

Back in 1899, Zimbabwe—then Southern Rhodesia—passed the Witchcraft Suppression Act, which despite its foreboding name was actually a positive thing. It made it illegal to accuse someone of witchcraft. Those early colonial settlers remembered the disastrous witch persecutions in Europe and wanted to avoid a similar situation.

But two years ago, the government amended the Act, positing that the supernatural—and witchcraft—exists. Now Zimbabweans can prosecute someone for witchcraft, so long as it’s the bad kind, meant to harm someone. Positive witchcraft, to protect property, for instance, is fine.

The Worldwide Religious News also reported the story, with a very different angle, that the Amendment furthered Zimbabwean culture. It included this quote:

"By rejecting the existence of witchcraft, whites managed to destroy one of the tenets of African traditional beliefs as a way of disenfranchising the blacks of their religious bedrock," said one analyst.

On the plus side, the Amendment does criminalize witch hunting, with a fine or jail time as punishment.

. . . . .

Upcoming events

2008-10-03T14:16:00.001-07:00

Things are getting exciting... the paperback of Witch's Trinity launches next Tuesday, the 7th. Seven has been a lucky number for me (along with four, my favorite number), so that's auspicious. The book has a brand-new cover, the dramatic red and black silhouette of a forest that you see over to the right. From the 7th to the 20th, it will be on the New Paperbacks table at all Barnes and Noble stores... and hopefully most independents will have stocked it as well. Halloween isn't really a gift-giving holiday (other than individually-wrapped candy), but this might be a good present for someone interested in history, women's stories, and witches. See more about the book at my website.

Tomorrow, the 4th, I'll be appearing at Litquake, San Francisco's madhouse of a literary festival. I say madhouse because they pack approximately 50,000 events into one week. It's a ride. I'll be at the SF Main Library from noon to 1 p.m. as part of an afternoon's worth of readings. At 5 p.m. we all adjourn to Books Inc. in Opera Plaza for a wine and cheese reception and book signing.

Next Wednesday the 8th, two pretty exciting things are happening. I'll be guest blogging at Lee Lofland's blog The Graveyard Shift. Lee's an amazing writer, nominated for a Macavity award. Since his blog focuses on cops and robbers, my guest blog will address medieval inquisitors as the "cops" of their day--what methods they use, how they extract confessions, etc.

Then that night, I'll be interviewed on Ken Hudnall's radio show out of El Paso. He focuses on the paranormal. You can listen to it live-streaming here at 5-6 p.m. PST on Wed., Nov. 8.

As mentioned in the last post, I'll be guest blogging at Literate Housewife's site on Oct. 23. And then on Halloween day, she will post our upcoming interview.

The final news for October is that I'll be at Book Group Expo in San Jose on the 25th. From 1:45 to 3:00 I'll be on a panel called Which Witch is Which with Brunonia Barry, author of The Lace Reader, and Kathleen Kent, author of The Heretic's Daughter. This is the third year of the expo, and I've been every year, once as a reader and twice as an author. I love it. Instead of a series of writers reading excerpts, the focus is on discussion--so during each panel, the majority of time is spent fielding audience questions. Tickets are still available, and the expo continues on Sunday the 26th as well.

. . . .

Literate Housewife

2008-10-01T23:28:00.000-07:00

I'm thrilled beyond belief that Literate Housewife has chosen Witch's Trinity for the inaugural installation of her Spotlight month.

She's a great blogger, nominated for many blog awards. She reads like a maniac (11 books in September!) and posts thoughtful, incisive reviews.

Each Thursday throughout the month, she'll be posting new material relating to witchcraft. She and I will do an interview together and we talked about my doing a guest blog. Under her auspices, I'll be giving away three free copies of The Witch's Trinity--the new paperback version that will be released Oct. 7. That black and red cover you see over to the right is the book jacket, which I'm really happy about.

This Saturday the 4th, I'll be reading at San Francisco's riproaring Litquake Festival (so many readings, so little time! Or maybe that just refers to the infamous Pub Crawl night that is an annual tradition). I'll be at the San Francisco Main Library at Civic Center, at the Koret Auditorium, between noon and 1 p.m. I'll be reading with several other authors, and the readings continue all afternoon, culminating in a reception at Books Inc. in Opera Plaza at 5 p.m. Hope to see you there.

. . . .

The witchcraft just keeps coming...

2008-09-26T22:00:00.001-07:00

I've been amazed in recent weeks that the witchcraft news keeps evidencing itself.

A few weeks ago, there was the riot at a soccer game in Congo. It began with taunts that one of the players was a witch, and then fisticuffs got involved, and then the police fired warning shots in the air which totally terrified everyone. The crowd stampeded towards the exits, leaving 15 trampled... to death. Many of them were youths. This is so sad and ridiculous.

Then, of course, there's the YouTube video of Sarah Palin being blessed against witchcraft.

I shake my head in disbelief.

. . . .

The Malleus is scientific

2008-09-11T11:37:00.001-07:00

The Malleus Maleficarum, written in the 1480s, very carefully outlines how to locate witches, question them, and punish them. The authors, two friars, structured the book like a legal argument, with questions posed, considered and then answered. This structure makes the book feel reasonable and logical. That's one of the most chilling things about it.

Here is a scientific analysis of how dreams work. It's under Question VII of Part I: "Whether Witches can Sway the Minds of Men to Love or Hatred." Among other methods, witches work to sway opinion while the person sleeps:

The apparitions that come in dreams to sleepers proceed from the ideas retained in the repository of their mind, through a natural local motion caused by the flow of blood to the first and inmost seat of their faculties of perception; and we speak of an intrinsic local motion in the head and the cells of the brain.

And this can also happen through a similar local motion created by devils. Also such things happen not only to the sleeping, but even to those who are awake.

See, we are influenced by the scientific-sounding description of blood through the cells... and then the friars slide in the reference to devils. It is hard to argue with such authoritative-sounding facts. And unhappily, few medieval folks did.

. . .

Be careful who you burn

2008-09-04T23:21:00.000-07:00

The Malleus Maleficarum notes that those who bring the witches to the stake may put themselves in fatal danger:

And lastly, in the same diocese, in the territory of the Black Forest, a witch was being lifted by a gaoler on to the pile of wood prepared for her burning, and she said: ”I will pay you”; and blew into his face. And he was at once afflicted with a horrible leprosy all over his body, and did not survive many days.

In my novel The Witch's Trinity, the officials at the witchcraft trials take pains to protect themselves, both by the use of salt (which the Malleus says can protect them) and by covering the eyes of the accused so she cannot give them the evil eye. Here's a Malleus quote about salt:

They [inquisitors] must not allow themselves to be touched physically by the witch, especially any contact of their bare arms or hands, but they must always carry about them some salt consecrated on Palm Sunday and some Blessed Herbs.

I think if I was minutes away from burning, I would also pretend to hex my executioners... after all, what do you have to lose at that point? And much to gain... the reverse placebo effect, where whatever ills they endured would be accounted back to the angry spell. (Although how often does leprosy just hit you?)

. . . . .

Incubus

2008-08-27T21:11:00.000-07:00

Incubus is not only a great band, but also a word dating to the 1100s, referring to a demon that comes in the night and has sex with a woman as she sleeps. (A succubus is the accompanying demon for men… interestingly, that word dates to 1350, so men didn’t get their nightly visits for another couple centuries.)

For today’s selection from the Malleus Maleficarum, the famous witch hunting bible from 1400s Germany, we will look at a passage about incubi (plural of incubus). This section deals with whether incubi are visible to bystanders, or if they do their nocturnal pleasuring invisibly:

But with regard to any bystanders, the witches themselves have often been seen lying on their backs in the fields or the woods, naked up to the very navel, and it has been apparent from the disposition of those limbs and members which pertain to the venereal act and orgasm, as also from the agitation of their legs and thighs, that, all invisibly to the bystanders, they have been copulating with Incubus devils; yet sometimes, howbeit this is rare, at the end of the act a very black vapour, of about the stature of a man, rises up into the air from the witch.

But true to the contradictory, irrational nature of the Malleus, a paragraph later the authors state that incubi are sometimes visible:

It is certain also that the following has happened. Husbands have actually seen Incubus devils swiving their wives, although they have thought that they were not devils but men. And when they have taken up a weapon and tried to run them through, the devil has suddenly disappeared, making himself invisible. And then their wives have thrown their arms around them, although they have sometimes been hurt, and railed at their husbands, mocking them, and asking them if they had eyes, or whether they were possessed of devils.

In my novel The Witch’s Trinity, I did not include accusations of incubus visitations. However, there is one moment where my character Güde reflects that the cat sitting on her chest is similar to an incubus.

. . . .

Hallelujah

2008-07-07T13:24:00.001-07:00

As a former community college English instructor, I've spent a lot of time thinking about the sad state of American literacy. Why don't (many) people enjoy reading?

Reading helps you develop compassion, as you learn to experience life through other people's eyes. It helps you become a better writer, as you unknowingly pick up vocabulary, style and grammar. It opens up new options for how you might live your own life, as you see how others live.

Laurie Halse Anderson has a wonderful essay that is now several years old (an address she gave to high school English teachers) but I just came across it and it rang true for me. It moved me, actually.

It's called, Loving the Young Adult Reader Even When You Want to Strangle Him (or Her). I hope you enjoy it. Click here.

Art makes writing possible

2008-05-22T15:57:00.000-07:00

My best friend is artist Kirsten Stolle. She has been making a living as an artist for at least a decade now. She has had solo shows and group shows in major metropolitan areas, and her art is in the collection of the Crocker Art Museum and the San Jose Art Museum. Most recently, her solo show at Dolby-Chadwick Gallery in San Francisco included an exhibition catalog. See images here.

She let me purchase some master proofs recently at a friend price, and I just adore them. Someday I hope to finish a non-historical novel and talk the publisher into using her work for the book jacket. I actually showed some darker abstract images to Random House for possibility with Hexe, as the Witch's Trinity was initially called.

The more things change, the more they stay the same

2008-05-02T22:02:00.000-07:00

Jon Stewart the other night spoke of the Congolese Penis Theft Panic, where men fear witches either steal or shrink their members.

My own heart shrank when I heard this. This is directly out of the middle ages, literally. In the Malleus Maleficarum, the 1500s witchhunting manual that figures in my novel The Witch’s Trinity, there are many passages about witches shrinking penises or making them outright disappear. It is puzzling and sad that parts of the world still labor under superstitions of the Dark Ages.

A quick glance at the Malleus table of contents reveals that Part One addresses the question “whether witches may work some Prestidigitatory Illusion so that the Male Organ appears to be entirely removed and separate from the Body.” In Part Two, that sticky issue rears its head again (oh the terrible puns): “How, as it were, [witches] Deprive Man of his Virile Member.”

Luckily, there was hope offered for those miserable emasculated peasants, as Chapter Four of Part Two offers “Remedies prescribed for those who by Prestidigitatory Art has lost their Virile Members or have seemingly been Transformed into the Shapes of Beasts.”

Curiosity compels me to learn about these remedies. I have a copy of the Malleus, which is alive and unwell in reprints.

Well, pshaw, the member is still there, only “hidden by a glamour.” So how might these suffering men make the invisible visible again? The authors of the Malleus suggest that “They should as far as possible come to an amicable agreement with the witch herself.”

Riiiiiiiight. ‘Cause she’s gonna want to help with that right before she steps up to the stake to be burned.

You may notice that the section title also includes how to get out of being transformed into a beast. This section explores the anecdote of a sailor ashore in Cyprus who ate the eggs sold him by a local. An hour later, he went back to his ship, but his fellow sailors ran him off with a stick, crying, “Look what this ass is doing! Curse the beast, you are not coming on board.” The eggs had rendered him into a donkey.

He went back to the witch’s house, since his ship had sailed, and served her for three years as a beast of burden—with a few coffee breaks in which she and her fellow witches acknowledged him as a man and talked with him.

In the fourth year of his servitude, he and the witch passed by a church ringing its bell at the moment the Host was elevated. He knelt outside it, which piety was remarked by some merchants. The witch tried to beat him to get him to move, which only exposed her witchcraft. She was questioned and tortured, confessed. She agreed to transform him back to a man in return for her release. He sailed home, but she…well, the Malleus puts it in this succinct, chilling language: “Being again arrested, she paid the debt which her crimes merited.”

The New York Times recently wrote about children being accused of witchcraft in Angola, the Congo Republic and Congo, where this penis theft panic is happening. My blog post about it is here.

Write Free

2008-04-28T19:25:00.000-07:00

My friend Jordan Rosenfeld recently interviewed me for her monthly e-newsletter Write Free. This is a newsletter supporting the book she co-authored of the same title.

I picked up a copy and it’s a great way to start thinking about how to turn negatives to positives. There are exercises inside to start changing the way you think and write.

The website is http://www.writefree.us/. You can subscribe to her e-newsletter, which is FREE and has good content to help you on your writing path.

Jordan’s also written a book called Make a Scene, which I’m eager to read next.

On the shelf

2008-04-10T10:13:00.001-07:00

This jpeg sent to me by someone very, very cool. She saw Witch's Trinity at Book Passage in San Francisco's Ferry Building.

Stoker results

2008-03-31T20:00:00.001-07:00

The Bram Stoker Awards were given out Saturday night in Salt Lake City. I couldn't attend, but the ceremony live streamed, so I sat in front of my computer (along with 75 other people--the website kept a tally!) to watch.

I was pleased Jonathan Mayberry won in his category, since we have corresponded a bit and he is a very nice guy. Gary Braunbeck gave an absolutely extraordinary acceptance speech in his category, about a loss he experienced which had me blinking back tears and counting my blessings.

And since I couldn't win in my category, I was very happy that the person who did is also a Colby graduate! Congratulations, Sarah Langan!

The next day, I attended the "Have you read it yet" bookclub in Oakland, which has met for an astonishing 18 years! These ladies know how to have fun. Unlike my book club, which merely tries to (sometimes) cook meals to match the book we read, they actually dress up. Since they had read Woman of Ill Fame, they all showed up in garters and lingerie with curled hair and ribbons and boas...they certainly dispelled any momentary gloominess over the Stoker!

Not only that, but they had created cardboard replicas of the signs the prostitutes hang over their beds so their fellas know who to request next time, replete with flowers and cirlicue handwriting. I've got my Erika sign, so if I ever fall on hard times...

We drank champagne, ate a fabulous brunch, and they actually read aloud passages from the book that they liked... I pretty much wanted to lie on the floor in a delirium of shamefaced happiness.

Thank you, Dale Marie and all you wonderful "lasses with asses."

Forgery associated with the Malleus Maleficarum?

2008-03-19T16:59:00.000-07:00

A reader contacted me about the Malleus Maleficarum, the witch hunter’s Bible mentioned in my novel The Witch’s Trinity. She wanted to be sure I knew that the pope’s endorsement of the Malleus Maleficarum was a forgery—but research shows something a little different.

Printed at the beginning of the Malleus is a papal bull from Innocent VIII, a reference letter of sorts for the authors, Kramer and Sprenger. The bull, known as the Summis Desiderantes Affectibus, says that the two inquisitors, “our dear sons,” were empowered to witch hunt and preach the word of God to the faithful. The bull dates to 1484. It is not a forgery, but its placement at the beginning of the book may be somewhat misleading, as if the pope endorsed the book and not simply the witch hunting activities of its authors.

There is difficulty dating the first edition of the Malleus, but certainly the bull predates it by a few years.

There is, however, a forgery (at least most scholars think it is a forgery)—a letter of endorsement for the Malleus Maleficarum purportedly written by the faculty of the University of Cologne. This too was inserted in some editions of the Malleus, but not in my Dover reprint of the Montague Summers’ 1928 translation so I didn’t know about it.

However, a little quick googling yields the information that at least one scholar is opening the case back up and asserting that the letter is not a forgery. This scholar recently translated the Malleus –actually there were two new translations in 2006 and 2007. Read this article for more information.

The Montague Summers translation is very strange because he believed in witches and in witch hunting. Rather than writing an introduction that reflected dolefully on how women and men of the past were persecuted, he calls the Malleus “one of the most important, wisest and weightiest books of the world.” More on this later.

Van, what ARE you talking about?

2008-03-03T20:40:00.000-08:00

On the way home from Sacramento from the Authors on the Move event, I was listening to the radio and an old Van Morrison song came on. I vaguely knew the chorus, “Oh, the water, oh, the water” but because I was trying fiercely to stay awake, I listened to the lyrics for the first time.

And immediately I was confused. What was that song about? Something stung him to his soul… something in the water stung him. Was it a jellyfish? He does talk of a jellyroll, but is that what they call jellyfish in Ireland?

I listened and puzzled and finally had to google when I got home.

Actually, he was STONED to his soul.

That makes sense.

This has nothing to do with the Witch's Trinity.

. . . .

Authors on the Move

2008-03-03T00:32:00.000-08:00

The event I participated in this weekend in Sacramento was amazing! Incredible orchestration on the part of the organizers, who drew together 300+ guests and around 30 writers for a dinner and auction.

We writers would sit at an eight-top for 20 minutes and talk about our books with the guests, then move on to another table. That sounds nervewracking...but the kindness of the people I sat with made it actually very pleasant. Plus, what a great cause: the Sacramento Public Library's literacy programs and other library projects.

The writers pre-ate together before the guests arrived, and that was really nice too. I got to meet some great people and talk shop. I haven't met any writers in my new community, so it was so relieving to get a chance to hang with other writers.

Thanks, Kathy Les and other organizers!

It gets naughty

2008-02-24T10:59:00.000-08:00

My editor suggested I subscribe to Google Alerts, a free service that emails you anytime your specified search term shows up on any website. So whenever someone writes about "Witch's Trinity" or the misspelled "Witches' Trinity," I get a link to it.

Let us pause for a moment and reflect how scary that really is. Privacy is a thing of the past.

And paranoia and egotism are a thing of the now!

Anyway, this morning I got an alert about a blogger who thought my book was a little too risque. Here's what she wrote:

So as of yesterday I finished a book called the Witches Trinity. Not one I would recommend to anyone. It gets naughty and I am embarrassed to say that I read it.

I had to laugh and say, if you think that's naughty, don't read my first book!

. . .

The Pterodactyl Interview

2008-02-23T20:11:00.000-08:00

I’ve been nominated for a Bram Stoker award by the Horror Writers Association, and here is a quick 10-minute podcast interview about it with Rick Kleffel. It’s not the smartest I’ve ever sounded—among other things, I’ve somehow picked up an annoying overuse of the word “certainly”—but I love this interview because my 10-month-old stars in it! In the background you will hear her pterodactyl shrieks.

Rick's a great interviewer and, as we talk about in the interview, he's the one who suggested I look into the Stoker awards. I owe him big-time!

Here's the link to the podcast.

. . .

Murder, a la Francais

2008-02-23T20:04:00.000-08:00

I’ve had the pleasure of meeting writer Cara Black several times. Her mystery series is set in Paris—not the moony Paris of the Eiffel Tower, but the gritty working-class city of hidden WWII Nazis, immigrants without papers and 1970s terrorists—and that’s just the first three books!

Her main character Aimee Leduc is clever, sexy and vulnerable, and I’ve loved the unfolding story, as the series progresses, of what happened to her parents. Cara’s latest is out, Murder in the Rue de Paradis, and here are a few of the events you can catch her at, to get a signed copy and hear her read.

February 28th @ 7:00 pm
*** Launch Party for Murder in the Rue de Paradis! ***with Pari Taichert
M Is for Mystery
86 East Third Avenue
San Mateo, CA 94401
Contact: Ed Kaufmann
Phone: (650) 401-8077
Email: ed@mformystery.com

March 4th @ 7:00 pm at Book Passage, 51 Tamal Vista Blvd. in Corte Madera

March 5th @ 12:30 pm at Stacey’s Bookstore, 581 Market St. in San Francisco

More events are listed at www.carablack.com.

. . .

I'm stoked about the Stoker!

2008-02-18T19:56:00.000-08:00

I am so happy to announce that The Witch’s Trinity has been nominated for a Bram Stoker Award in the category “Superior Achievement in a Novel.” The awards are given by the Horror Writers Association—their definition of horror includes psychological as well as supernatural. There is fierce competition just to land on the ballot, so I’m honored and amazed.

The trophy is a sculpture of a haunted house. The front door opens to show a plaque with the winner’s name. What could be more cool?

My international class

2008-02-10T22:41:00.000-08:00

The other day I posted about my upcoming Mediabistro class which, as it is online, is accessible to people around the world. The course starts Thursday, February 21, with online chats each Thursday thereafter.

As my novel has been released in England and Australia (and other countries) by the publisher Hodder & Stoughton, I thought it might be useful for potential students in those countries to know when that chat happens.

So I did some googling of Greenwich Mean Time. I actually prefer to use GNT (Greenwich Nice Time), but alas the world is as it is. Here's the results:

If you are in London, the Thursday chat actually happens on FRIDAYS... at 2 a.m. Perhaps not that manageable for most folks...either you're safely in bed, or you're out clubbing and a class on writing is not the most attractive thing to do on a Friday night.

If you are in Melbourne, the chat also happens on Fridays, but at 1 p.m. You could make it a late lunch break if you are working!

If you're American, the class is at 9 p.m. EST.

For me, it's 6 p.m. PST.

The world is very large, it turns out.

Write for Me

2008-02-07T21:46:00.000-08:00

I like to teach novel writing, and through a great organization called Mediabistro, I'm able to do it from the comfort of my own home.

That is to say, I teach online. My next class starts in a few weeks (Feb. 21) and it'd be great to have you. Since the course is online, you can live anywhere in the world. Two semesters ago, I had a student from Sweden--for her, the class was at 3 a.m. or something!

The format is:

1. I post a lecture every week that students read at their leisure
2. Students post assignments several times during the 12 week course--either portions of a novel-in-progress or introspection on some aspect of their own writing--on an electronic bulletin board only visible to those in the class
3. Other students comment on those posts, as do I.
4. Finally, once a week for one hour, we gather "live" in a chat room to discuss the posts, the lectures and whatever else comes up.

The course is designed for students to complete a novel draft in 12 weeks. That sounds very ambitious, but many have done it. I coach students and cheer them on, but also provide feedback to improve their writing. One aspect of the course I really like is when we talk about the publication business--how to draft query letters to get an agent's attention, how to format the manuscript properly, and the ins and outs of the tough business of getting your book published.

If this sounds interesting to you, please check out the official course site at mediabistro.

Witches and cows

2008-01-25T16:09:00.000-08:00

In the Malleus Maleficarum, there seems to be a lot of discussion of witchcraft vis a vis cows. Probably not surprising, given how important cows were to daily life in the middle ages: milk to drink and render into cheese, meat at slaughtertime, heat for those who kept them indoors with them.

Here's a passage about how cows inform on witches:

For sometimes when a cow has been injured in this way, and they wish to discover who has bewitched it, they drive it out into the fields with a man's trousers, or some unclean thing, upon its head or back. And this they do chiefly on Feast Days and Holy Days, and possibly with some sort of invocation of the devil; and they beat the cow with a stick and drive it away. Then the cow runs straight to the house of the witch, and beats vehemently upon the door with its horns, lowing loudly all the while; and the devil causes the cow to go on doing this until it is pacified by some other witchcraft.

A frightening image, the cow battering the door with its horns. And god save you if it was your door the cow chose.

Did the Malleus Maleficarum really exist?

2008-01-10T21:04:00.000-08:00

Emphatically and unfortunately, yes.

You can buy a copy of the Malleus Maleficarum today on Amazon. At my website, www.erikamailman.com, in the right hand column there is a running display of some particularly egregious quotes from the book (each time you refresh, a new one appears).

The authors, Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger, wrote it to guide courts in their prosecution of witches. The book reads like a pseudo (and psycho) legal text, including questions to be put to these witches, and how to proceed based on what they report.

Freud would have a field day with the recurring sections on how women can make the male genitals either shrink or completely disappear.

The book is threaded through with anecdotes that break your heart. I’ll be writing about some of those, so please check back later (but not too soon. Blogging with a newborn is a tenuous undertaking!)

The second painting of "Mary Bliss Parsons"

2008-01-08T19:13:00.000-08:00

This doesn't depict Mary Bliss Parsons; see discussion in previous post.

I had saved the image on my hard drive so I'm able to post it, although I can't refind where a google image search led to information on the artist, sitter and provenance. The yellow garment is the tip-off, somehow an extraordinary choice for a painting of this time period.

UPDATE THANKS TO MY MOTHER:

My mom was able to locate the painting; it's in the collection of the Worcester Art Museum. It's a painting of Mrs. Elizabeth Clarke Freake and her daughter Mary. View the info on provenance here (you will then click on the painting on the upper left--for some reason, the specific page isn't clickable). Thank you, Mom!

. . . . .

Mary Bliss Parsons, is that you?

2007-12-29T21:59:00.000-08:00

Yipes!

I was looking through my archives and realized I never corrected a major error. In this post, I attached an image that I identified as a painting of my ancestor Mary Bliss Parsons. It’s not! (and one of the commenters references another painting of her with a child, which also cannot be the case.) The image was posted at the UMass website with no caption. Because the site is about MBP and because (I must say it) the woman looks VERY MUCH like members of my family, I made the hopefully-understandable assumption that it depicts her.

I got in touch with the UMass webmistress to request permission to possibly use the image in The Witch’s Trinity, which has an extensive afterword about Mary Bliss Parsons. She informed me that there are no images of MBP. The UMass people had simply noticed the website was devoid of images and cast about to find some. The painting is of the same era, illustrating “Colonial America,” so they used it. They ran out of time and funding to properly caption the image.

(But I hasten to say the website is in all other regards completely amazing. Where else would I have been able to see—handwriting and all—the testimony in Mary Bliss Parsons’ witchcraft cases, without traveling all the way to Massachusetts? It also has a very in-depth analysis of my ancestor’s circumstances versus her accuser’s.)

The funny thing is, the woman in the image is basically a dead-ringer for my mom dressed as a Colonial woman. I’m blown away that this doesn’t depict our ancestor! (By the same token, it initially amazed me that after eleven generations, faces could still be so similar).

Interesting crinkle #1:

There was a second painting on the website (the one I think the commenter on my original post was referring to). I have to give my mother credit for questioning it. She said that she had seen it somewhere before (no, not in our attic!). With a strong interest in Colonial painting/furniture/antiques, she recalled that this portrait was unusual for that era in its use of yellow for the woman’s garment. I googled while she pulled out her books. And I was able to locate the painting, which identified the sitter as the wife of someone—not a Parsons. I just now tried to again locate the image; why didn’t I bookmark it? Can’t find it now.

Interesting crinkle #2:

I just went back to the Umass website and am unable to locate either painting. Looks like they took them down. And added some new content: nice work, guys!

Calling Down the Rain

2007-12-27T17:50:00.000-08:00

This image from De Lamiis shows witches bringing down the rain. It looks like they are feeding the cauldron with a snake and a rooster.

Witches were feared for their ability to affect natural phenomena. For people whose lives were staked upon whether crops would fail or succeed, the elements were a fearsome unknown. A cold snap could kill the harvest, or too much or too little rain. If power to affect these elements was in the hands of malevolent neighbors, who were assisted by the devil, well, they were to be hated. And executed.

In The Witch's Trinity, townspeople whose village has been famine-struck look about themselves wildly to find who has kept the fields barren. And thus the witch hunt begins.

***
Image is from Witchcraft in Europe 1100-1700 by Alan C. Kors and Peter Edwards

Names

2007-12-27T17:43:00.001-08:00

Going through some old paperwork tonight, I found a draft copy of my first novel with a completely different title on it—a name I had forgotten. You see, various attempts to position it as more of a mystery or less of a mystery had me and a former agent trying on different names. I don’t believe it ever went to an editor under the title “The Blood-Soaked Bonnet” (the title page I just unearthed), but it was submitted under “The China Silk Murders.” The book at that point had plot points surrounding a scrap of silk found clenched in one of the murdered women’s hands. My original title for the novel had been “Ill Fame,” and it was published earlier this year under the much-better expansion, “Woman of Ill Fame.”

Similarly, The Witch’s Trinity was named Hexe (the German word for witch). I loved this title and thought it could really lend itself to some gorgeous cover art. I was ultimately won over by arguments against this title (hard to pronounce! confusing!) and am pleased with what went to press. I’ve seen online reviews poke fun at it and say it is not a serious-enough title, but I like the fact that it makes more sense once you’ve read the book.

And let’s not even talk about my unpublished young adult novel that has had five titles…

Hodder & Stoughton

2007-12-13T10:08:00.000-08:00

Today The Witch's Trinity launches in England from the publisher Hodder & Stoughton--perfect timing, being the 13th of the month!

Welcome to any of you coming to this blog from across the big pond. My intent here is to continue to post witchcraft-related content for those who are interested in learning more. It's tough, though, during the holiday season, which for us stateside began in November with Thanksgiving.

During readings, people often ask me how the witch craze finally drew to a close. After all, why stop after four hundred years of persecution? That's got a lot of momentum.

There are many, interconnected and complex reasons for the witch craze coming to an end. One, that I'll quickly explore here, is the fact that they simply ran out of women. Literally, in a few cases: there were two German towns that were left with one woman each.

Can you imagine being that one woman?

In a more general sense, though, the villages and cities ran out of women who were stereotypically able to fulfill the role of witch. These would be women outside of society somehow: whether poverty-stricken, displaying mental health issues, or perhaps just outside the bounds of what was "normal" for a woman at this time--marrying and producing offspring. These women were easy to capture, interrogate and execute.

But when all those women are gone and the roving accusatorial eye then rested on women who were not the typical witchlike woman... women important to their society, who were married, linked with upright men of the community... well, then it became a little more unsettling. Instead of a self-righteous certainty that your village has executed a witch, you begin to be a little worried that she was actually innocent.

In Salem, Massachusetts, the witch hunts came to a fairly abrupt halt when the governor's own wife was accused.

There were of course many other facets to the closure of witchcraft (which actually is not a solidly-closed door--please see my previous post about the agonizing tragedy of young children in Africa facing accusations of witchcraft today) and I will touch on those in later posts.

Thanks for checking in!

Nausea

2007-11-14T20:48:00.000-08:00

Two friends sent me a link to this New York Times story ("In Africa, Accusation of Witchcraft Leads to Abuse") on children accused of witchcraft. I read it with a growing sense of nausea.

In my novel The Witch’s Trinity, a family member has possibly accused her mother-in-law of witchcraft because there is not enough food, and she wants one less mouth around the table. And that’s exactly what is happening today in Angola, Congo and the Congo Republic. Except instead of happening to grownups, it’s happening to children.

The article reports:

Officials attribute the surge in persecutions of children to war — 27 years in Angola, ending in 2002, and near constant strife in Congo. The conflicts orphaned many children, while leaving other families intact but too destitute to feed themselves.

“The witches situation started when fathers became unable to care for the children,” said Ana Silva, who is in charge of child protection for the children’s institute. “So they started seeking any justification to expel them from the family.”

This picture is of a six-year-old boy Afonso Garcia, pushed out of his family home because of accusations of witchcraft. He now lives in a shelter with other boys who were accused. Children are being beaten, abandoned and even killed for being witches.

Although my novel describes a horrifying situation, I appreciated the buffer of its being long ago and far away (and fictional, although it certainly could be any woman’s story from medieval Germany). This New York Times story just makes my heart ache… it is happening now.

Talk of the Bay with Rick Kleffel

2007-10-24T16:55:00.000-07:00

I'm excited to report that an interview with Rick Kleffel will broadcast on Halloween, Oct. 31, between 10 am and 11 am on KUSP's Talk of the Bay program. This is 88.9 fm or for those not in earshot, it streams at kusp.org/live. I'll be talking about The Witch's Trinity with Rick.

Read it and eat

2007-10-22T16:34:00.000-07:00

Instead of "read it and weep," Towne Center Books has come up with a monthly event called Read it and Eat. It's a luncheon where the author answers questions, reads a passage or two... a low-key, fun thing to do.

For my book, this is quite ironic, since the characters in The Witch's Trinity are starving... but I'll be participating Nov. 30.

Towne Center Books is an absolutely lovely indie bookstore in Pleasanton, California, at 555 Main Street. Please call 925-846-8826 for more information and to register. Hope to see you there.

Death of the Stablehand

2007-10-22T16:21:00.000-07:00

First of all, two bloggers were generous enough to post interviews with me: please see Michelle Moran's History Buff and Kelly Hewitt's Loaded Questions.

And here's an image titled Death of the Stablehand by Hans Baldung Grien. Although it appears more modern than the Compendium Maleficarum images I've been posting lately, this is actually older, from the early 1500s. As you can see, the witch in the upper right, wielding what looks like an upside-down broom, has either killed or stupefied the poor stablehand, as the horse looks on bewildered.

Trampling the Cross

2007-10-21T15:48:00.000-07:00

Much of witchcraft is a reversal of Christanity. For instance, witches say the Catholic Mass backwards, and it becomes the Black Mass. They accept the Eucharist but underneath their tongue instead of on top--and then spit it out into the privy. In The Witch's Trinity, they pray with their hands pressed together and facing downwards rather than towards heaven. I'm actually not sure if I made up that detail or if I saw it somewhere in my research.

Old witchcraft woodcuts illustrate these reversals. Here is a new witch trampling upon the cross rather than venerating it. And please note--the witch is a male! The image comes from the Compendium Maleficarum, a book that explained everything about witches (borrowing some information from the earlier Malleus Maleficarum, another witch hunting Bible). This woodcut is from a 1610 edition, reproduced in Brian Levack's The Witch Hunt in Early Modern Europe. The Compendium Maleficarum was written by a Milanese monk named Francesco Maria Guazzo.

Is the pebble trial real or invented?

2007-10-21T15:41:00.000-07:00

People ask me whether The Witch's Trinity is based on a particular case of witchcraft I found in my research. It's not--it's an amalgam of all the different things I read, as well as some invention.

The pebble trial is a good example of this. In The Witch's Trinity, a character must endure a test of her innocence. A kettle of water is boiled, and three pebbles are thrown into the steaming, rupturing water. The character is asked to retrieve the pebbles--if she can get them, and if she remains unburned, she is innocent.

In my reading, I learned about the pebble trial. It did exist. But I altered it slightly to suit my story--rather than one pebble, the character must collect three, a reference to the Holy Trinity. Like many of the witchcraft tests, this one is impossible to pass successfully.

If you have read The Witch's Trinity (or even if you haven't!) and would like to ask me any questions, please feel free to do so either by writing a comment on any post--the comments automatically go to my in-box, so I always see them--or by sending me an email to (my first name) (the AT symbol) (erikamailman.com). I would love to hear from you.

Witch's Trinity on the radio

2007-10-14T17:40:00.000-07:00

I will be on KPFA this Monday the 15th from 3-3:30 p.m. as part of Denny Smithson's Word for Word program, 94.1 FM, discussing The Witch’s Trinity. I don't know if KPFA has live streaming, but the website KPFA.org does indeed post the recordings after the fact

Precursor to the broom

2007-10-10T22:54:00.000-07:00

In this image from De Lamiis et Phitonicis Mulieribus--a very old tome on witchcraft--shapeshifted witches ride the air on a stick, a more ancient concept than that of women riding brooms.

De Lamiis was written by German Ulrich Molitor in 1493. He was a law professor, and his book went into several editions, illustrated by woodcuts that were updated so it is possible to find different versions of the same image. I'll post two of those next time for comparison purposes.

Here's what Wikipedia has to say about Molitor:

Ulrich Molitor (15th century) was a Professor of Law at the University of Konstanz, Germany.

He wrote one of the first books on witchcraft, De Lamiis et Pythonicis Mulieribus (The Witches and Diviner Women), published in 1489.

Although Molitor supported the death sentence for heretics and practitioners of witchcraft, from a moderate point of view for his time he considered that the Sabbaths were an illusion caused by the Devil and not a reality.

This image located in Alan C. Kors and Peter Edwards: Witchcraft in Europe 1100-1700.