In conversation With Molly Aitken

Molly Aitken was born in Scotland in 1991 but raised in Ireland. One of her short stories was included in the Irish Imbas 2017 Short Story Collection and she was shortlisted for Writing Magazine’s fairy tale retelling prize 2016. Her magical debut novel, The Island Child, is steeped in Irish folklore and centres on motherhood, womanhood and identity. In a review for The Telegraph, Ella Cory-Wright described Aitken’s prose as ‘exquisite’ and said ‘Aitken is an exciting new voice in Irish literature.’ 

Image © Christy Ku

Elizabeth Kim What inspired you to write The Island Child?

Molly Aitken For me fiction inspires fiction. Many years ago I read two fictions in the same week that synchronously came together as the idea for The Island Child. One was a scene in The Odyssey where Odysseus is shipwrecked in a storm and washes up on a tiny island where he’s found by a princess. The scene was so vivid to me I even dreamt about it. A few days later I read Riders To The Sea by the Irish playwright John Millington Synge about a family of women on one of the Aran Islands waiting to hear news of whether the last surviving son and brother had drowned. The two began to meld and I wondered how that story of a stranger washing up on an island would work if the island was Irish and the setting was a little more contemporary. However, I didn’t put pen to paper for years. Something about the story didn’t feel right for me to write...until I realised it wasn’t about the strange man but the woman who lived on the island and wanted to escape it. And that’s how Oona was born. 

EK Why did you decide to set this on an imaginary island off the coast of Ireland, not somewhere we can find on a map?

MA The island, Inis, in The Island Child is based on many islands around Ireland that I was familiar with from childhood, especially Cape Clear and the Aran Islands. As a child and teenager holidaying on the islands, I felt like anything was possible there. My belief in the fairies was heightened perhaps because islands are so isolated, you are so close to nature, so at its mercy. I wanted Inis to have that magical aura that childhood brings, an essence of the otherworldly, so it felt important that it wasn’t a real place. The island throughout the story is rooted in memory, and Oona, the narrator, bends the place to fit her memories and emotions. It is in many ways a place outside of time for Oona so it felt important that although it’s based on real islands and the way those islanders lived, Inis is its own place. That also allowed me to make up my own myths and stories about it.

EK In your novel, we see fairy folklore and pre-Christian ideas blended with Christianity. What research did you do? 

MA There was no specific research I did initially into the peculiar Irish phenomenon of blending Christianity with folk belief. Although I think in many Catholic cultures the dregs of pre-Christian ideas still live alongside present practices. Italy springs to mind. I grew up in this environment so I never really thought to question it. My parents weren’t religious, but I went to Christian schools (it’s hard to avoid them in Ireland) and also heard the stories of the little folk from adults all around me. For a long time I believed they were all related. The gods in Greek myths populated heaven alongside the Catholic God while the land was inhabited by the little people. There’s a wonderful belief held by some people in Ireland which I included in The Island Child that the fairies are actually fallen angels, not quite bad enough for Hell but who still cause a deal of mischief on earth. I love this explanation because it perfectly marries Christianity to folklore and that’s the power of stories. When early readers of The Island Child mentioned how odd this blend of folk Christianity was I began to research it. Most of what we know about it has been passed down orally and only in the last fifty years or so have the stories been collected into books. 

EK And having grown up in the Republic of Ireland, in your experience, does this resemble the way Christianity is practised in rural Ireland today?

MA Growing up in Ireland I heard stories about the fairies from people who went to church every Sunday. As a child I visited a holy well dedicated to St Bridget where there was a tree covered in flapping rags and odd trinkets. In pre-Christian times, these wells were for a goddess or nature spirit. People are perfectly aware of this flips. The more rural in Ireland you get, the more stories and personal sightings of the little folk or even the odd banshee. At pubs in rural Ireland I heard many a ghost story and personal folk tale. I believe that being so close to nature encourages these sightings. I never heard anything about the little people in Dublin. 

EK Your story veers away from the more romantic notions of little folk and revisits the terror associated with encountering them in classic fairytales. You don’t shy away from describing the more hostile aspects of living so close to nature — the things that terrified people in ancient times — the scene where the whale is cut up comes to mind. Can a magical world view and re-enchantment ever come without the terror of coming face-to-face with Pan in the wilderness?

MA Although not set in ancient times, The Island Child is about people who live in communion and friction with nature. They rely on it completely to survive but it is highly volatile and dangerous. The sea takes lives and so does the rocky land. When people live so closely to nature, it does become more threatening. In this way, the fairies who are tied to the islanders’ understanding of nature also have to be threatening. The first time Oona leaves her house on her own, she’s conflicted with joy at her freedom but also fear about what lurks in the fields and water surrounding her. As a child she has been filled up with these stories of the dangers of the land and sea in order to protect her, but this means the world beyond her mother’s cottage seems dangerous. There are fairies lurking everywhere ready to steal her away. The scene of the whale is a good example. The people of the island have a story about how they live on the back of a whale. She is their mother and protects them. When the whale washes up, it quite literally sustains them, but it’s horrific to Oona and some of the other characters. They struggle to combine the beauty of the myth with their harsh reality. 

EK Myths often centre on men—did you, in your research, find stories centred on female experience?

MA I’ve always been much more interested in myths about women, and women’s experience, than the swords and clatter of male narratives because they feel more familiar to me. I can relate. When that scene in The Odyssey of the hero washing up on an island came to me as a good novel idea, one of the reasons I didn’t want to write it was because the story was too familiar and therefore boring. When I realised I could tell it from the woman’s perspective and in that way reclaim it, the narrative and voice came alive. I think now is a really important time for myths about women. For so long, the ancient western stories that are remembered and honoured are about men but finally the tide is shifting and people, including myself, are becoming much more interested in re-enlivening the voices that have been silenced for so long. Amazing examples are Madeline Miller’s Circe and Natalie Haynes A Thousand Ships not to mention contemporary retellings Kamilla Shamsie’s Homefire.

The novel I’m currently writing, The Butterfly Factory is a loose retelling of the myth of Psyche. This is a very unknown story from antiquity where the woman is very powerful. It’s almost a feminine story of Hercules. When I mention this myth people are either unfamiliar with it or only know Psyche from art where she is hyper sexualised. I hope to change this a little with my writing.

EK Do you think of Oona as a character channelling the witch archetype? Which witchy Irish figures inspired her? 

MA This is such an interesting question. At the beginning of The Island Child when Oona is still young she becomes fascinated by a wild, outsider woman named Aislinn. She’s an unmarried woman who lives alone with her child and grows herbs and strange plants in her garden. She also offers healing to people who ask for it. These aspects of her make the islanders suspicious of her. She is the character who people suspect of being a witch in The Island Child, but that’s not how she sees herself. She sees herself as an independent woman who is self-sufficient and content without a husband. This is what Oona wants for her own life too. The freedom of what this small community views as a witch. 

EK Oona is haunted by the island that shaped her; the lines between her and that setting blur. Can we ever escape where we came from?

MA This is a complicated question without one simple answer. In The Island Child Oona is haunted by her past because she refuses to acknowledge it. Once she left the island Inis for Canada, she never speaks about where she comes from or who she is because of her home. Her past is particularly traumatic. The main message of The Island Child and what I hope readers will take away from it is that stories and telling our stories can be healing. Only once Oona begins to acknowledge her past does she then transform it into something she can examine without fear. I don’t think she will ever escape it but she can become less fearful. She can face it. Speaking the words and telling the story of her past through the novel almost breaks the spell she has allowed her past to cast over her. Words shine light into the dark corners and shows her she can live with them. That’s the power of story.

EK Finally, which other books about the sea and/or Irish mythology would you recommend to readers?

MA While writing The Island Child I read many books including ‘Women and the Sea: A Reading List’ as well as The Country Girls trilogy by Edna O’Brien, The Good People by Hannah Kent and the particularly magical and strange Himself by Jess Kidd. I also recommend the stories of Peig Sayers who was one of the greatest storytellers Ireland has ever had. 

In conversation with Naomi Ishiguro

Naomi Ishiguro is the author of Escape Routes a playfully magical and unsettling collection of short stories out this month. A blend of fairy tale allure deeply rooted in reality, these tales of imagination, traps and ultimately freedom completely captured me while I read them. I was lucky enough to meet up with Naomi at a glitzy coffee shop in London that neither of us were dressed for. Naomi was good enough to let me follow up our conversation with questions about her new and magical collection of stories.

Molly Aitken Naomi, what was the first spark of an idea for Escape Routes and what was the first story you wrote?

Naomi Ishiguro ‘The Flat Roof’ was the first story I wrote. I came up with an early draft years ago while living in a tower block in London which had – you guessed it – a flat roof. It wasn’t until quite a long time after that I started thinking of writing a whole collection. I moved to Bath in my early 20s to work at an indie bookshop (Mr B’s Emporium, definitely worth a pilgrimage for those who haven’t been), and having spent my whole life up to that point in London the city’s closeness to the natural world felt utterly magical to me, as did having things on my doorstep that seemed straight out of a fairytale, like the Two Tunnels Greenway, for instance: two disused railway tunnels, running through beautiful hillside, which have been transformed into a cycle and running path, and also into a kind of immersive musical art installation. In finding myself so suddenly in such a different environment to the one I was familiar with, I felt quite like one of the characters in my stories – launched out of the London grind into a place filled with sparks of everyday magic. It was really that whole experience that inspired me to start writing the collection.

MA Some of the stories, like ‘Wizards’ and ‘Shearing Season’, are seen through the eyes of a child. Do you feel children have a different, more magical perspective on the world? 

NI Obviously kids have a completely different perspective on the world. I’m not sure if it’s necessarily more magical though… I just think childhood is such an interesting time to write about, in that it’s when a person’s sense of self is most likely to be in flux, and at its most fragile in some ways, at its most resilient in others, and generally at its most open to the possibility of change. 

I also love the way that because kids are (obviously) constantly encountering things for the first time, they’re actively expecting to see new things in the world every day. Really, if the Escape Routes stories do anything, I’d like them to remind readers of how it felt to have that sense of openness, and also remind people of that resilience in the face of change that does so often come with childhood. I’d love if the stories could take people back to a time in which they were used to being surprised and transformed by the process of encountering new things in the world.

MA Throughout the collection, there was a sense of cities being a trap and the countryside offering freedom, particularly in ‘Heart Problems’ and ‘Accelerate!’. Why do you think this is such a powerful image and message?

NI I can only hope it’s a powerful message. It’s certainly something very close to my heart, as someone who grew up in London, and who was only passingly aware of things like the cycle of the seasons, or of how many different animal, insect, bird and plant species there still are out there in spite of the ecological crisis. Leaving London in my twenties and having a bit of a crash course in the natural world honestly felt like freeing myself from a particularly poisonous worldview. It was as if a new part of my mind had been unlocked, and my whole perspective on the world – and on the way humans exist within it – altered to become something which I hope is much more real, healthier, and better-informed. I do absolutely think that that’s a very real kind of freedom that the countryside can offer – the freedom to see things more clearly, maybe. Hopefully this perspective-shift is something readers will be able to relate to. I do also think it’s just generally so important for us all to keep questioning the priorities and values that are so enshrined in all these extreme urban models of living, and to ask whether those ways of life is can actually bring us any real freedom or happiness at all.

MA Although the natural world offers freedom, it is also volatile and unknown. Could you elaborate on the double standard of freedom in the collection? 

NI There’s a version of the idea of freedom which involves being untethered, and without obligations, commitments or familiarity. More often than not, this kind of ‘freedom’ also necessarily involves being without a support network, and without any of those ties which keep many of us grounded in society and generally looked-after. While writing these stories I was thinking a lot about John Krakauer’s Into the Wild, and the hugely sad story it tells of what happened to Christopher McCandless. It seemed to me like such a horrible irony – that someone could sever all ties and literally walk out of his comfort zones in an effort to find a kind of ‘pure’ freedom, only to end up in a new unforeseen trap. 

In a lot of my stories, the characters’ efforts to free themselves from all earthly ties end in a kind of dissolving of self – in a sublimation of their individual lives and personal identities into the natural world. That’s kind of how I interpret that Into the Wild narrative, too, in that the logical conclusion of that kind of search for freedom seems to be a kind of collapsing of one’s sense of self into something impersonal: something much bigger than any human individual, that can transcend all ties, traumas and emotional obligations. That kind of dissolution of self is, of course, just a hair’s breadth away from death – which could be a type of freedom in itself, but only the most tragic kind. So yes, there’s definitely a double-standard to the way I write about freedom in the collection in that regard. 

But this all makes the stories sound a lot more introspective and miserable than they really are, honestly. Please don’t let my rambling put you off reading!

MA The symbol of birds appears in many of the stories. What attracted you to this image in particular?

NI Obviously birds are just generally very useful universal symbols for freedom and flight. More specifically though the preponderance of birds in this collection is probably down to the fact that ‘The Flat Roof’ was the first of these stories I wrote, and I literally wrote it surrounded by birds, sitting on the flat roof of the block of flats where I lived. I was particularly drawn to the idea that while the birds and I were momentarily sharing the same physical space, the birds would obviously have such a different view of the city from my human perspective. I love the idea that while birds can travel huge distances and see the world on a similar scale to humans, they move through the world without any human sense of ownership or trespass, or of borders, states, or immigration rules. 

I also love Old English poetry – the really old stuff from before the Norman Conquest – and birds often show up in those poems as images of a soul freed from the earthly shackles of material existence – something which obviously relates to that Into the Wild idea of freedom again, and that ascetic negating of self. I often use birds as an externalisation of a character’s yearning for that kind of release. I like how framing that yearning in the context of earthly yet distant things, like birds, can make it seem all at once almost tangible, and yet still impossibly unattainable.

I also love the image of a murmuration of starlings as an analogue for a short story collection, in that a murmuration involves a number of individual, separate parts working together to form an almost ghostly image of a wider, greater whole. 

MA Most of the stories are firmly rooted in the real world with just a hint of magic. This combining offers characters a moment of transformation. What do you think this type of fiction can offer readers in today’s often confusing world?

NI Probably not a massive amount! I mean, we certainly need a lot more than a set of short stories to help navigate the world right now… But yes, if anyone reads the stories and is reminded of a time in their lives when they believed change was possible, and believed in the possibility of transformative miracles both personal and political, then I’ll be delighted. For me, magic in books works best when it puts us back in touch with a sense of wonder. Wonder in general is so underrated. It sounds impossibly cheesy but I really do believe it expands our capacity for empathy, and helps us dream of better worlds. 

MA The collection is woven together by three linked fairy tales about a rotten kingdom. What about this story did you feel tied all the others together?

NI I just liked the idea of weaving all the stories together into a fairy tale framework, as hopefully the effect is to cast all the other more real-world stories as fairy tales or fables too. I also liked the idea of those three more overt fairy tales acting as a kind of Gothic mirror to the other more ‘normal’ stories, with the images of birds in the ‘normal’ stories reincarnating as rats in the mad gothic ones. 

Those three fairytales also have the overall narrative shape of a ‘coming of age’/ ‘assuming responsibility for a bewildering and broken world’, and I wanted that thread running through the whole book, as all the stories are really in some way about young people figuring these things out in various ways. 

MA I hear you’re working on a novel. Can you tell us anything about it?

NI Yes! It’s coming out with Tinder Press in the late spring of 2021, and I’m very excited about it indeed. I don’t want to say too much, but it’s much more social realist than Escape Routes, and it’s basically about two friends from very different worlds who meet by chance on a common as young teenagers. The novel then follows them into adulthood, and looks at the difficulty of maintaining friendships across the vast social divides that exist in Britain today.

MA And finally, you used to be a bibliotherapist at Mr B’s Emporium. Can you offer our readers any uplifting and magical recommendations? 

NI What a wonderful question! It’s more sci-fi than magical, but I loved The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers – it’s like space anthropology, and it’s really so nice to see someone speculating about what it might be like to actually live alongside alien species as opposed to just writing about going to war with them. Generally, it’s a lovely, warm, emotionally-intelligent novel that will restore your faith in humanity via outer-space adventures.

Tenth of December by George Saunders is also always a fantastically wacky collection to come back to whenever you’re in need of a boost – especially the title story. It’s a great story to read in these turbulent political times, and a reminder that even when everything seems personally bleak, humans are still wonderfully capable of being better, and of dragging themselves out of the apathy of personal despair to come to the rescue of those who need them. For anyone who hasn’t read George Saunders yet, he mixes bizarre, surreal and often almost magical-realist elements of storytelling with characters who feel very human indeed, and who I promise you’ll fall for instantly. His books can find the hopeless optimist in anyone.

I’d also recommend ‘October Tale’ – a short story by Neil Gaiman, from his collection Trigger Warning. It’s a lovely subtle fairy tale about a genie and a woman who illustrates children’s books. It’s a perfect bedtime story for adults, and one that I’m sure will send anyone to sleep feeling utterly warm and fuzzy at the sheer wondrous magic of perfect storytelling. 

In conversation with Kiran Millwood Hargrave

Kiran Millwood Hargrave is the author of The Mercies, an award-winning poet, playwright and writer of bestselling children’s fiction. In her first book for adults Millwood Hargrave, takes a horrifying real-life witch trial as her inspiration. The Mercies is set in the sixteen-hundreds on the Norwegian island of Vardø. When the men of the tiny community are drowned in a storm that seems to come out of nowhere, the women band together to make a new life without them. Touching on folk magic and belief, it’s a beautifully told portrayal of women in extreme circumstances. Kiran kindly agreed to an email interview ahead of the release of The Mercies. 

Molly Aitken When did you first discover the story of the women of Vardø and what was it that inspired you to write it?

Kiran Millwood Hargrave A couple of years ago, I read an article about Louise Bourgeois’ final major installation. She’s one of my favourite artists, and The Damned, The Possessed and the Loved is an extraordinary piece of work: a metal chair perpetually aflame, surrounded by tarnished mirrors. Of course, I wanted to see it and looked up where it was. The answer was equal parts surprising, frustrating, and intriguing. It was on a tiny, remote, Arctic Circle island off the coast of Norway, named Vardø. What’s more, it was part of a memorial to ninety-one men and women who were burned on that spot for witchcraft in the 1620s. I had heard of Salem, of the Pendle witch trials and Trier, but never ones in Norway. The intrigue deepened when I learned that some of the women were accused of conjuring a storm that killed most of the island’s men three years prior to the first trial. I’m always drawn to bold images, and could see a structure emerging, beginning with the storm and ending with the trials. Further research threw up so little information, I knew I’d found a gap I wanted to write into.

MA The Mercies follows two women: an outsider from Bergen, Ursa and a Vardø woman, Maren. Was it important to you to have these different perspectives on the story?

KMH Not originally, but I always learn so much during the drafting of a story. The first draft was entirely from Maren’s perspective. She’s lived all her life in Vardø, and witnesses the storm that kills her brother, father, and lover. I loved being in her head but she’s so mired in this world, so caught by it, I was longing to let the story breathe. I wanted to allow it, and Maren, to lighten a little. This is where Ursa comes in, and being married to a witch hunter, she also allows the reader access to the other side of the story: the perpetrators of the violence. As I threw them together, a whole new story began to blossom. I always feel like the first moment when we switch to Ursa’s perspective is like opening curtains to let in a little light. Their names reflect this: Maren, for the sea, and Ursa, for the stars.

MA What was the Christian position on folk magic and folk belief in Norway at this time?

KMH Very, very grave. Folk magic was rife in Norway, but increasingly the old ways were given up in favour of Christian iconography and superstitions. At the time The Mercies is set, folk beliefs were seen to be the realm of the indigenous population, the Sámi people, and so of the devil. The prejudice and racism they faced had deadly consequences, and the only men killed in the Vardø witch trials were Sámi. 

MA How significant was the weather and the character’s belief in its influence over them? 

KMH Weather ruled everything, because the weather ruled the seas. The sea was this tiny island’s only resource, and fish was their main food, trade, livelihood. Wind weaving was one of the Sámi customs that went largely unquestioned, because sailors were so reliant on good weather. Certain Sámi men, known as noaidi, were said to have control over the tides and wind. The men burned at Vardø were noaidis.

To an extent, the weather still rules everything. The population shrinks vastly in winter. I’ve visited Vardø once in June, at the time of the midnight sun, and once in January, when the sun never rose past the horizon. The extremes are extraordinary to anyone from a temperate climate, or even just one that has days and nights with the sun rising and setting each day, all year round. My visit in winter was the most startling – the cold was absolute, the light never rising beyond a deep purple-blue. This was the season when the women were ducked in 1620, and it brought home the complete cruelty and violence of what happened. They would have had to break the sea ice to duck them. It still makes me shudder.

MA The persecution of the Sámi is a little known history. Did it feel important to shed light on it? And why do you think now is an important time for a tale like this?

KMH Indigenous populations are so often ignored in historical fiction, as well as contemporary, but their presence and influence is undeniable. They existed, and continue to exist, and to tell this story without them would have been to only tell part of the story. We accept exclusionary narratives with a very limited, othering view of them, because that is what we are used to. Even the word ‘Lapp’ is derogatory, because it was forced upon them by the settlers. 

In The Mercies, I wanted to ‘other’ the settled population. The people who stay in this bleak, difficult place, year round, rather than roaming – it is stranger than the way the Sámi live. Maren’s sister-in-law Dinna represents the tension between the white and the indigenous peoples, but she also shows co-existence is possible and desirable. At this time in Vardø there were stark divisions between the two populations, exacerbated by the Church’s disapproval of Sámi ways. The message feels more prescient than ever, with fear-mongering and othering rife in the media and politics. Any society that divides itself into ‘us’ and ‘them’ is a dangerous one, for both sides and most of all for minorities. The first victims of the trials were Sámi – they were seen as easy targets by the Church.

MA Each section of the novel features a beautiful illustration by your husband Tom de Freston. Could you tell us about these images and how you came to use them in the novel?

KMH Tom’s art influences my writing in so many ways, but one thing that really permeated this novel was the tension between the domestic and the sublime, humans and nature, people and power. His art has always explored this, and throughout writing I had on my desk one of the first pieces of his I ever bought, from before we were together. A monoprint on glass, I came to know it very well, and saw so much more in it than I ever had before.

It’s now heading up the ‘Storm’ section, and I think it’s extraordinary in how it floats between tenderness and violence, possessing a weight and lightness that speaks of water or air, of rising and descent. It is absolutely beautiful, and absolutely threatening, and that is the quality I want The Mercies to hold too: multiplicity. I was overjoyed when he agreed to draw two new pieces for the other sections. 

MA Can you speak about the folk magic in the story and perhaps something you discovered that you weren’t able to include in the book?

KMH Belief in the cunning folk and magic was a very practical part of life in Scandinavia before it was set up in opposition to religion. Indeed, religion adopted many folk practises, and set up services in traditional stave churches – look them up, they are incredible! – but still persecuted anyone who would use them outside their strictures. Many wise men and women (later labelled as inciting superstition) would have a ‘Svartbook’, or Black Book, which was said to hold parts of the Old Testament excised by the cunning folk, and in an early draft Kirsten held such a book. I decided to leave it out as it was rare to own a book at this time and in this place, but the research was fascinating. The Black Book contained spells and natural remedies for healing, and was often added to by different generations of the same families.

MA The women in The Mercies use folk magic to soothe their grief and trauma after losing almost all the island’s men. Is this how you define magic in the story: an attempt to heal from pain?

KMH At its heart The Mercies is about trauma, and how we heal, and so yes – many of the rituals and superstitions the women undertake after the storm are ways to cope. Rune stones for safety, fox skins as offerings: the women revert to the old ways because religion isn’t providing the relief they need in order to survive. As I say above, magic is a practical way of life and certainly not a source of evil for them.

MA And finally, what are you reading at the moment? 

KMH Currently I’m on holiday in Hawaii, so my reading is determinedly unrelated to work, i.e. books unlike anything I am writing about. I’m reading the brilliant A Rising Man by Abir Mukherjee, a thriller set in colonial Calcutta, and next have lined up Scapegoat by Daphne Du Maurier. While I wrote The Mercies I repeatedly referred to Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood, and Burial Rites by Hannah Kent. They were the touchstones for The Mercies.

In conversation with Fernanda Melchor

Fernanda Melchor is a Mexican author. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Pen Club Prize for Journalistic and Literary Excellence, 2018 and the Anna Seghers-Preis, 2019. Her novel Hurricane Season (Temporada de Huracanes) paints a portrait of a Mexican village divided by superstition, violence and machismo. The witch is dead, and through rumour and hearsay we might learn who killed her. Hurricane Season will be available in the UK from 19 February 2020. It is translated by Sophie Hughes and published by Fitzcarraldo Editions. This interview has been translated from Spanish. 

Elizabeth Sulis Kim Can you tell us a little bit about the real event that inspired this book?

Fernanda Melchor A few years ago, in a newspaper from Veracruz, where I was born, I read an article about a body that was found in an irrigation canal. The body, according to the article, belonged to a sorcerer from a nearby town, and the suspects detained by the police had killed him as self-defence against his spells. I was shocked, especially due to the fact that in the 21st Century, neither the journalist, nor the police, nor the witnesses had even the shadow of a doubt that sorcery could be a justifiable motive for murder. And unsurprisingly, this piqued my curiosity and I decided to do research on the whole story. First, I thought I wanted to write a non-fiction novel, a literary reportage about the crime in the manner of In Cold Blood or The Executioner’s Song, but ultimately I thought it would be more interesting to explore this story and its context through fiction.

ESK To the villagers of the imaginary town La Matosa, the various witches and mujeres malas of Mexican folklore, e.g. la Llorona, become conflated. To what extent is this true in Mexico today?

FM Mexico is a huge country; there are several and very different Mexicos within it. In this novel I was interested in writing about the beliefs and practices that exist in a very specific region, the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. There is a spirituality, of a Caribbean nature, with fascinating rituals, that emerged from the blend of European, African, and indigenous religions. I wanted to talked to talk about these practices and beliefs in the novel, but not with an ethnographic or sociological perspective, but by telling a story. I couldn’t say that what happens in Temporada de Huracanes is real. Rather, it plays with the elements of a reality that I know very well.

ESK Why do you think women, in particular, are regarded with so much fear?

FM I think that women have a creative power that men envy. And I don’t only mean their potential for motherhood, but a vital and powerful force that is different from the male counterpart. 

ESK What research did you do?

FM Before I start to write a novel, I tend to read a lot of fiction as a way of analysing structures that I find interesting or suitable for the project. For several years, I’ve been keeping a file where I save data, testimonies, and stories about topics that interest me and that I later use in my novels. I didn’t really do fieldwork; it’s more of an exercise of the imagination.

ESK Why did you tell this story from the perspective of the villagers who are liable to hearsay, gossip and speculation regarding the witch and the witch’s murderer? Why are the witches, mother and daughter, unable to define themselves?

FM On the one hand, I was interested in incorporating the narrative and poetic structures of gossip and rumours in this novel: how an event can spark conversations that are like ripples when an object falls into the water. On the other hand, we don’t know what’s going on in the witch’s mind because we don’t know what’s in the murderer’s mind either. Silence is a very important literary device.

ESK Are herbalists, or those who provide alternative therapy, still valued and feared in modern day Mexico?

FM Of course, there’s a very strong belief in spirituality in Mexican cultures, and this implies the use of services by witches, healers, and shamans. Also, herbal medicine is sometimes the only kind of health service that poor people have access to.

ESK What were the main challenges in translating this book to English?

FM Sophie Hughes is a wonderful translator, and she knows Mexican Spanish very well. We would have to ask her regarding the challenges, but I suppose the main challenge was to make all the insults and curses sound as real as in Spanish.

ESK Finally, which other contemporary Mexican writers should we be reading? 

FM I really recommend Among the Lost, Emiliano Monge’s novel.

In conversation with Yvonne Battle-Felton

Yvonne Battle-Felton is the author of Women’s Prize for Fiction 2019 longlisted Remembered (Dialogue Books). The novel begins in 1910 and Philadelphia is burning. For Spring, there is nothing worse than sitting up half the night with the ghost of her dead sister and her dying son, finally breaking her silence and reliving a past she would rather not remember. Spring’s story goes all the way back to 1843, when Ella, a free girl, is stolen by a white man to be a slave on his farm in Maryland. Told in a simple and powerful style all her own, Battle-Felton reveals the importance of telling stories about slavery. 

I was lucky enough to meet Yvonne for coffee recently and she kindly agreed to answer even more of my questions over email. 

Molly Aitken Remembered is a novel about storytelling and the power of story. It’s a multigenerational tale, but also features different types of storytelling including reporting through radio and newspapers. Most of what I’m about to tell you ain’t in no history book, no newspaper article, no encyclopedia. There’s a whole heap of stories don’t ever get told. Why was it important to you to tell the personal and first hand accounts of slavery and it’s inheritance? 

Yvonne Battle-Felton History does an interesting job of telling stories about slavery without exploring the internal and external lives of the enslaved. Stories seem to centre on a few powerful narratives or slide to the other side of the spectrum and focus on generalised versions where enslaved people are numbers and not names, personalities, needs and pains. I wanted to tell a story that centred on the enslaved and explored their inner lives, a story where they were free to want, hope, question, imagine, think, and have room for anger. There are slave narratives and interviews of emancipated slaves. I wanted to explore the stories an emancipated slave might tell if she were free to tell them her way in her own time. I also needed these stories though. I wanted and needed to read how mothers might have reconnected with their children and how those families healed after the traumas of slavery. 

MA Why did you decide to set the novel in the North of the US? And is the setting important?

YBF I was born in Philadelphia and I lived in Maryland for 20 years before coming to the UK. The setting is important both personally: I wanted to explore both places through fiction and also historically. The North is often overlooked when it comes to slavery. There was slavery in the North as well as in the South. The differences may have been around what year slavery was abolished where. The North is often remembered as a place of freedom and acceptance; that wasn’t everyone’s experience. Growing up, I remember my grandmother telling us about an uncle who used to visit her as a kid. According to her, he used to run away to come visit his family and then, I guess be dragged back. My grandmother was born in 1919. She was born in Alabama and grew up in Pennsylvania so I don’t know where this would have been. Still, I remember thinking she had to have been mistaken since slavery was abolished decades before. But was she mistaken? What if he was legally free but still enslaved? 

MA You’ve just record the audiobook of Remembered. What was it like bringing your voice as a live storyteller to the character of Spring? And what do you feel is the difference between written and spoken story?

YBF It’s funny, I write out loud. It’s how I think. Before I type a scene I have to hear it. I like listening for the tensions and rhythms, the silences. So I’ve heard Remembered many times. I’ve also read it at readings, talks, and events. I’ve read it in front of audiences quite a few times. Recording the audiobook was an entirely different experience. I was reading/performing it for an audience I could not see. I couldn’t see their reactions and they couldn’t see mine so my facial expressions, hand gestures, etc...wouldn’t help set the scene. My voice had to do that. The audiobook is for the US publisher. I was really fortunate that the publisher, Blackstone Publishing, provided an amazing voice acting coach. She helped me to get past myself and reach for Spring’s voice; to give Spring and all of the characters the freedom to tell their own story in their own way.

I was in the studio with an amazing engineer, my lovely, patient youngest was often there in another room, and I was alone in this darkened booth with my words and these characters, and when I was reading this southern voice came out and I was like, who is that? It was Spring. I am hoping when people listen to the audiobook, they feel as if it’s the characters telling their stories, unburdening their souls.

I love written stories and then I also love spoken ones. For me, it depends on what I need at the time. I get to know people through their stories. I can connect with stories on the page and really empathise. On the page, I see what I need or want to see, sometimes that’s what the writer wants me to see and sometimes, it isn’t. Spoken stories have another layer of intimacy. I can connect in the pauses and breaths, in the hushed tones and whispers. Written stories are the ones I tell myself, spoken ones are the ones the teller tells.

MA Ghosts and hauntings play a central role in Remembered. What did they allow you to do with the storytelling?

YBF Ghosts gave me the freedom to explore what might have happened beyond Spring’s knowing. One of the reasons Tempe became a ghost is because early on I knew she wasn’t going to survive. Her story wasn’t finished yet but I knew she wouldn’t be alive to tell it. Ghosts allowed me to explore motherhood and family in ways that I needed to. We are haunted by the past whether some choose to acknowledge it or not. In a way, Tempe haunts the book in a recognisable sense. There are other ghosts though. Slavery also haunts the book. It’s ghost is in the racism that allows Edward to be beaten for a crime before anyone knows whether he committed it or not, it haunts the conversations Spring is forced to have with people who only want to hear her tell them what they already think they know, in the voice of the angry mob turning on the black community and forcing collective responsibility. Ghosts also allowed me to explore mothering and motherhood from beyond the grave. I think it gives me hope.

MA The women in the story use natural medicines and herbs to try to control their fates. Many of the characters also believe in curses. Can you speak about what this added to the story? 

YBF It was important to me that the women exercise some sort of agency in any way they could. If they didn’t have this sort of agency in life, where could they have it? They could imagine and pray but if I couldn’t give them the World, I could give them the earth. It seemed natural that these characters would turn to something that was around them and readily available. Someone would have been counting the crops but who was paying attention to the weeds? If the enslaved were only given scraps, maybe they could claim that and turn it into some sort of empowerment. They could learn about them and use them as needed. The medicines might be used to heal, ward off, hurt, kill; it was up to them to use as they saw fit. 

Not only did it give them agency, but the use of natural medicines and the decision on how to use them, added to their complexity as characters. How might they use this power? Does power always corrupt? It let me explore the questions of how far a mother would go to protect her child directly. In general terms, I feel like people say they would kill for their children and that there’s nothing they wouldn’t do for their kids. That’s great and all, but if the mother is enslaved, she might have to do something we don’t like or understand. 

MA When you’re not writing you teach creative writing at Sheffield Hallam University. What has working with students given your personal writing? 

YBF This question made me smile. When I’m not writing, I’m momming (though I also mom while I write), teaching, creating and delivering literary events, reading, relaxing, trying to learn new programs, planning one thing or another, and plotting next steps.

Working with students reminds me to allow myself freedom when drafting. Drafts are the places where a character can rise from the dead, a grave can spill its secrets, and words can spring to life all without reason or explanation. If it is to come, the logic can come in the second, third, fourth, or how manyth drafts. The first draft is a place for possibilities. 

MA What’s next for your writing?

YBF I’m writing a few things right now. I’m writing another historical fiction. It’s set between 1907-1919. I want to write about the Red Summer in the US. It’s a violent period of racial violence and terrorism. I thought I was going to write about Black Wall Street and the Tulsa Massacre; I thought that was an isolated incident. It turns out, it wasn’t. The hope is by writing about the ugly sides of history, we can avoid reliving them. I’m also writing a children’s adventure because all children deserve to see themselves fighting dragons and saving the world. In between momming, teaching, projects, and other writing, I’m writing a play. I really want to see women like me living, laughing, and loving on the stage and screen. It’s a simple request but it’s just not something I see a lot of. 

MA What books influenced and inspired your writing of Remembered? 

YBF I’ve been influenced by all the books I’ve read before and inspired by writers like Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, Maya Angelou, Alice Walker, Gloria Naylor, Tananarive Due, J. California Cooper, Alex Hayley, and more. While researching Remembered, I read and re-read many of these writers and each time I did, their works offered something I needed in terms of space, questions and access.

The paperback edition of Yvonne Battle-Felton’s Remembered is available in the UK from 2 January 2020, published by Dialogue Books.

Photographing The Invisible: In Conversation with Shannon Taggart

In 1989, Shannon Taggart’s cousin received a message at a Spiritualist service that revealed a strange family secret. Despite growing up an hour away from Lily Dale, New York —the world’s largest Spiritualist community—Shannon knew nothing about Spiritualism, the American-born religion that believes in communication with the spirits of the dead. It was her cousin’s experience that drew her in.

Visiting Lily Dale for the first time in 2001, Shannon planned to spend one summer photographing the community, but found she couldn’t leave.

‘Two revelations struck, holding me there,’ she says. ‘The first was my discovering that Spiritualism was once a seminal force in Western culture, influencing late nineteenth-century art, science, technology, entertainment and social reform—a legacy that was absent from every textbook I had ever studied, including my histories of photography. The second was a sinking feeling that the mediums in Lily Dale knew something about life that I didn’t.’

Shannon spent the next eighteen years researching, photographing and visiting Spiritualist communities across New York, the UK and Europe. Her resulting book Séance weaves together photography and text to offer a comprehensive insight into an often misunderstood subject and explore the affinities between the two ‘mediums’.

‘My aim with this book was to tell the story of Spiritualism, both past and present, with a particular focus on the relationship between Spiritualism and photography,’ Shannon explains. ‘My work isn’t arguing for or against the supernatural—the intention was to tell a story that inspired questions.’

While she initially approached the project from a straightforward documentary perspective, Shannon says she struggled to photograph Spiritualism in a way that was true to the psychological-emotional dimension of Lily Dale. She asked herself, ‘how do you photograph the invisible?’ But after a few happy accidents with her camera, she became more open to spontaneity and experimentation (ie. using long exposures).

Often, she’d find the photographic anomalies ‘synced up with the invisible reality of the experience’ she was documenting. Keeping a non-judgemental approach, Shannon invites us to generate our own interpretations.

In her pictures we encounter the womb-like chambers of séance rooms and portholes into private worlds, which evoke questions about truth and visibility. What is real and what is happening all around us that we cannot see and therefore know?

Shannon writes: ‘Spiritualism’s material world pulsates with unseen energies; disembodied communication flows in from unpredictable sources; flesh bodies and discarnate spirits tangle with one another in darkened rooms. Photographing mediums as they navigated these thresholds sometimes felt like catching sand. The resulting images are attempts to capture something from this borderland.’

All images © Shannon Taggart

In conversation With Lucie McKnight Hardy

Lucie McKnight Hardy’s debut novel, Water Shall Refuse Them, released this summer, is set during the infamous heatwave of 1976. It follows sixteen-year-old Nif and her family after they move to a rural village on the Welsh border after a family tragedy. It’s a stunning meditation on folk horror, bringing elements of the gothic together with a coming-of-age narrative. Published by Dead Ink Press, it’s become their fastest selling fiction title. I caught up with Lucie to discuss her inspirations.

Terri-Jane Dow What was your inspiration for Water Shall Refuse Them?

Lucie McKnight Hardy When I was two, my parents moved from London to a tiny village in rural West Wales. I grew up in the house next door to the chapel, and even though we weren’t chapel-goers, I was always aware of how important the chapel was to the dynamics of the village; it was a real core part of village life. A few years ago, the minister attached to the chapel published his autobiography, in which he claimed to not only have witnessed exorcisms being conducted in the area surrounding our village, but that witchcraft was actively being practised in the villages around where I grew up. This struck me as a fascinating premise for a novel: we tend to think of witchcraft as something that belongs to the distant past, but what if it was happening today?

TJD Why did you decide to set the novel in rural Wales?

LMH One of the reasons for setting Water Shall Refuse Them in Wales was because I wanted to take Nif and her family out of the comfortable surroundings of home and put them in an alien landscape. I thought there needed to be a catalyst for change in their lives: they have already lost a sister and a daughter, and it seemed logical to me that they would want to change their environment. This rural village in Wales struck me as the perfect destination for them: remote enough from the urban habitat with which they were accustomed for that unfamiliarity to contribute to the feeling of unease I wanted to establish. 

TJD How important is the setting?

LMH I also wanted to sustain a sense of ambiguity: nothing in Water Shall Refuse Them is black and white, but rather shades of grey. I wanted to reflect this in the location of the village – it is on the border of Wales and England, a hinterland. It’s a liminal place—neither one thing or the other—and this in a way is also a reflection of Nif; she’s caught in the middle between childhood and adulthood.

TJD I found Nif and her mother’s responses to no longer being part of a churchgoing family really interesting — Nif makes up her own rituals while her mother leans into Janet’s paganism/witchery. Could you tell me a bit about the occult influences on the book?

LMH I was conscious when I was writing Water Shall Refuse Them that I didn’t want to repeat the usual tropes of witchcraft. The Creed—Nif’s own form of witchcraft—is her own invention. She isn’t versed in the practise of back magic, so I deliberately didn’t spend a great deal of time researching it. I was more interested in the witchhunts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the heatwave of 1976. One good piece of writing advice I received was to constantly interrogate your characters’ motivations: what makes them tick and act as they do. I wanted to know more about this pseudo-religion that Nif has created with its relics and incantation, so I asked her. I ‘interviewed’ her, and transcribed what she ‘told’ me and this informed my understanding of the Creed better than borrowing ideas from established texts on witchcraft. Sounds bizarre, but it seems to have worked!

In presenting Janet’s own practises, I deliberately held back from naming the herbs and plants she uses in her ‘potions’. This wasn’t just laziness on my part—again, I wanted her set of beliefs to inform a collection of home-made actions, rather than something that conforms to historical practice. Is she a practising witch or is she someone who is using her own version of homeopathy to help Linda manage her grief? I’ve left it deliberately ambiguous.

TJD Water Shall Refuse Them is published with Dead Ink, and has become their fastest selling title — what has your experience of working with a small publisher been like?

LMH I’d had my eye on a number of independent publishers (particularly those in the Northern Fiction Alliance) while I was writing Water Shall Refuse Them as part of my MA in creative writing at Manchester Metropolitan University. After I submitted the novel as my dissertation, I started looking in earnest at finding a publisher. I was particularly keen on Dead Ink – they struck me as bold and innovative and prepared to take risks. As soon as they opened for submissions I sent them a sample of my book and was delighted when they requested the full manuscript. Soon afterwards, they made an offer of publication. That makes it sound like it was easy: it wasn’t. I’d had a few rejections from agents before I submitted to Dead Ink, so it wasn’t all plain sailing.

I have no experience of working with a large publisher, but I imagine there are several layers of hierarchy to be navigated, whereas with a small press, the author is much closer to the production process. For example, I was consulted on the cover design which, I’m told, is often presented as a fait accompli with larger publishers. On the whole, working with Dead Ink has been a lot of fun.

TJD You also have a story in this year’s Best British Short Stories collection, and a chapbook out with Nightjar Press — what was the biggest challenge for you in writing a novel versus writing shorter fiction?

LMH I think the hardest part for me of writing a novel compared with a short story is holding everything in your head for the time it takes to write the thing! I was constantly having to re-read to make sure that there weren’t any continuity errors or glaring omissions. With a short story, it’s possible to read the whole thing in ten or twenty minutes, and so it is very much a self-contained entity. After I finished Water Shall Refuse Them, I started writing short stories as an antidote to the long slog. I don’t mean that short stories are easier to write—if anything, the writing experience is a lot more intense—but the pay-off comes quicker. When you finish the first draft of a short story and know that it’s something you can work with and refine, it’s a fantastic feeling.

TJD What’s next for your writing?

LMH I’m still writing short stories and would love to be able to put together a collection. I am also in the early stages of a new novel, which I just need to crack on with, really. I’m also tempted to return to a novella that stalled last year, but which I’m very fond of, so would really like to finish. Decisions, decisions!

TJD And finally, what are you reading at the moment?

LMH I’m currently reading Broken Ghost by Niall Griffiths, which is astoundingly good and tells the story of three people whose lives are changed when they witness a vision on a Welsh hill. He establishes the different voices beautifully. I’ve just finished Susanna Moore’s In the Cut which is a very violent and disturbing novel, but one that I enjoyed immensely.

In conversation With Lisa Sterle, Creator Of The Modern Witch Tarot

Lisa Sterle is the creator of the Modern Witch Tarot, a new inclusive tarot deck inspired by modern witches. Charlotte Richardson Andrews (The Culture Witch) had a chat with Lisa about her tarot journey and her new inclusive deck.

Cunning Folk Congratulations on creating such a beautiful deck. Is it safe to assume you identity as a modern witch? And if so, could you speak a bit about your practice?

Lisa Sterle Thank you, and yes I’d consider myself a modern witch. As far as my practice goes, I actually mainly only practise tarot at the moment. It was the first thing that got me into witchcraft.

CF How did you first discover the tarot?

LS I think I first ran across tarot in high school, and I’m thinking it was probably through some witchy movie or YA book that I discovered it. I didn’t get my own deck and start reading myself until college; I had a few friends that regularly practiced tarot and looking through their decks was instantly fascinating and inspiring. I totally felt it calling to me right away. My first deck was the Thoth deck.

CF You say in the instruction guide to the Modern Witch Deck (MWD) that you began making this deck during a time of professional and personal (creative) gloom. Could you elaborate?

LS Yes, it’s a bit strange of an origin story. I was working a dead-end graphic design job that was draining away my passion for art and my faith in humanity. I was 100% burnt out and felt totally unappreciated and uninspired; I felt like my art hadn’t really gone anywhere new for a while. I didn’t know what to do. So the Ten of Swords was really calling to me during this really bleak period of my life. And like sort of this divine spark, I had my idea for the first card of the deck. The fact that I was able to transform a really bleak and negative period of my life into something positive is one of the things I really love about this deck and it speaks to my general mission with art.

CF Would you say the MWD helped you to course correct?

LS For sure. This deck was one of the projects that allowed me to go full-time freelance and my art has taken on such a new life creatively ever since. I’m so grateful for it.

CF The instructions feature a foreword by (New York fiction writer) Vita Ayala. How did you cross paths?

LS I first worked with Vita on a creator-owned comic back in 2018 called Submerged. They are a supremely talented writer and we really bonded on a lot of shared interests and similar creative inspirations when working on that comic. I really admire Vita; they are driven, super smart and inspiring as a creator. When it came time to figuring out who would be writing the foreword, I knew they were the perfect choice and they did an absolutely beautiful job. I couldn't be happier.

CF Now to the deck itself: did other tarot artists inspire you? If so, who and why?

LS Pamela Coleman Smith’s art was a big influence. There’s something about her bold, graphic style that has always spoken to me, but it really wasn’t until this deck that I really tried to explore it.

CF Alternative tarot decks have been around a while now, but the first one that really spoke to me as a queer millennial was Cristy C. Road’s Next World Tarot. Are you familiar with this deck?

LS I am not, but I’ll definitely be checking it out. I love getting deck recommendations.

CF I’m guessing you drew on pre-existing scholarship when it came to researching tarot symbols and archetypes. What/who were your go-to tarot books and experts?

LS I had a big stack of different books that I’d reference for each card design as a refresher on the different ways to interpret each deck. The books I went to most often though were Seventy Eight Degrees of Wisdom by Rachel Pollack, and Modern Tarot by Michelle Tea.

CF In total, how long did the MWD take to craft?

LS I’d say about four months to design and illustrate all the cards I think.

CF Talk me through the creative process. Did you work in the way that you’d normally create art? Or did you add tarot-adjacent practices into the mix? For example, did you ever experiment with meditating, divination or fugue states in order to divine which directions to go in art-wise?

LS My process didn’t differ too much from my normal way of working. I’d usually focus on a card per day, and spend time with the card itself. Studying the art in the Rider-Waite-Smith and other decks; reading up different interpretations and getting as deep as I could into the symbols and context. The whole while I’d be jotting down ideas and really trying to get to the heart of what I felt was most true about the card. From there it was sketching and layout time, where I’d take what notes I’d jotted down and focused on filtering those meanings through a modern filter. Then came a fun part, where I’d do fashion and style research and figure out the characters and personalities I’d be crafting for the card. All in all, it was actually a super fun and relatively painless process.

CF What medium(s) did you use? Were the images created digitally, by hand, or a mixture of both?

LS This deck was all digital, though I do make an effort to add an organic, traditional looking feel to my digital artwork. I do my sketching in Procreate on an iPad Pro, then I finish the inking/colouring and everything else in Photoshop on my desktop.

CF One of the first things that drew me to the deck when I came across it on Instagram was the palette you’ve used. Can you talk a bit about the hues and tones you chose to work with, and the meaning behind them?

LS Figuring out the colour schemes was one of my favorite parts of working on this deck. I definitely wanted it to be bright and eye-catching, with a mix of pastels and bright, saturated colors. I think it also has a vaguely ‘90s feel. My goal was to make sure all the cards looked great next to each other in a spread, so I had to have some strict rules for the palette to make it feel cohesive. One odd rule is that I almost entirely omitted the ‘standard’ blue hue, and everything that would have been blue is now shifted to mint. All yellows are more golden. Green is mostly absent unless it’s a teal. I also wanted each suite to have it’s own color scheme that visually ties it to its element. So Cups has a lot of mint/blues and pinks for water, Wands has a lot of golds and reds for fire, etc.

CF The MWD has a very glossy finish, and, when stacked, is rather wide and heavy for my rather small, thin hands – much wider than my Morgan Greer and Rider-Waite-Smith decks. Was this an intentional design choice?

LS Yes, mostly. The publisher and I hoped to have cards that felt quality, so we didn’t want anything too thin or small. We decided to do a larger-sized deck so that the art can really shine, and that was the case with the glossy finish as well; colors print more vibrantly with a glossy finish. But as someone who also has small hands, I understand the difficulty! I have to cut the deck and shuffle in smaller piles, which works. But maybe we can do a smaller sized deck in the future as well.

CF There’s a very clear commitment to diversity in regards to the way figures and archetypes are both named and depicted in this deck – from people of colour and plus size figures, to queered, androgynous archetypes and same-sex couples. You’ve also flipped some of the gendered cards – for example, The Magician (I), usually a white guy, is a young woman of colour, the King of Cups looks like a cis woman and The Hanged Man (XII) has become The Hanged One. Why was making this deck inclusive important to you?

LS It’s an inclusive feminist deck. Most of the people I know that practice witchcraft are women, or nonbinary, or anything but the white men that adorn the majority of the cards in the traditonal Rider-Waite-Smith deck. We have an incredibly diverse world, so much more than we see represented in a lot of popular media; I wanted to create characters within this deck that reflected the readers and their friends, figures they could relate to or aspire to be. I wanted the figures within these cards to feel like they could be part of your coven today.

CF You’ve employed unmistakably modern imagery in the cards – for example, The Fool (0) is listening to an iPod-type device, while The Chariot (XII) is riding a motorcycle. Were you ever worried that modernizing the cards might date them, perhaps detracting from their traditionally timeless occult qualities?

LS I think attempting to create ‘timeless’ art is a sort of a fool’s errand. Sure, I’d love my work to persist through the decades, but that’s not really up to me as an artist. I can only try and create what feels true to me right now.

CF As well as updating the imagery of cards, I notice you’ve also updated some of its more traditional symbols around. The pomegranate print we usually see The Empress (III) wearing has transformed into a lemon print in your deck. What was the thinking behind this?

LS That was a nod to a particular musician that inspired that card in a big way.

CF You’ve also flipped other, traditional images; for example, The Lovers (VI) are usually pictured in daylight. In the MWD, we find them in a night garden. Were the changes you’ve made ever purely aesthetic, or was there a clear reasoning behind all of these updates?

LS Sometimes they were aesthetic, sometimes not, With The Lovers in particular, I think the night time setting adds a nice romantic element to their union.

CF Do you yourself appear anywhere in the deck? You’ve said the Ten of Swords was the first card you drew, but I wonder if we might also see you in a card like the Eight of Pentacles, hard at work at the drawing board?

LS Haha, yes! The Eight of Pentacles is indeed a self-portrait. I wasn’t originally planning on it, but when I got to that card, the meaning just felt too perfect for a bit of a self-insert.

CF Which card are you most proud of reinterpreting? Which card proved the most challenging?

LS It’s so hard to pick a favourite. The Ten of Swords will always stand out to me as the card that started the entire deck, and was actually the easiest for me to reimagine. I also love The Chariot and The Magician. As far as the most challenging, it tended to be the simpler cards that actually proved the hardest to reinterpret. For example, The Star was tough to figure out how to put my own spin on. Ditto the Aces. Mainly, because the imagery in the RWS is already so strong and iconic on it’s own, it was tougher to figure out how much or what to alter.

CF You say that you hope the deck will allow would-be diviners to “find a path to your best self.” Has making it allowed the MWD allowed you to find your own best self?

LS Definitely. Working on this deck was such a joy, and honestly one of the most creatively fulfilling projects I’ve worked on. It really helped me get closer to figuring out my own personal artistic style as well, which is something I’ve struggled with for a long time. I hope that these cards speak to readers, and that the love and care I’ve put into creating them shines through.

The Modern Witch Tarot by Lisa Sterle is published by Liminal 11 in November 2019. Pre-order now, £21.99 standard or £65 for the special limited edition. All images © Lisa Sterle and Liminal 11.