Literary Witches | A Celebration of Women Writers Wielding Magic Through Words

Vir­ginia Woolf

As Hal­loween bar­rels towards us (and I still don’t have a cos­tume…), there’s one recent­ly released book that is in keep­ing with the spooky month, but won’t scare you; it will make you cel­e­brate the tal­ents of women! Called Lit­er­ary Witch­es, it’s a col­lab­o­ra­tion between writer Taisia Kitaiska­ia and illus­tra­tor Katy Horan (pre­vi­ous­ly). “Lit­er­ary Witch­es came from the idea that to write or cre­ate art is to con­jure,” Katy tells me in an email, “so it fol­lows that female writ­ers are witch­es wield­ing their par­tic­u­lar brand of magick.”

The book reimag­ines 30 of these authors as true witch­es; not the stereo­typ­i­cal broom-rid­ing beings with a point­ed hat, but rather “fig­ures of rad­i­cal cre­ativ­i­ty, orig­i­nal­i­ty, and empow­er­ment.” Each woman has a vignette writ­ten by Taisia and an accom­pa­ny­ing por­trait paint­ed by Katy. Their recre­ations are new ways to think about lit­er­ary fig­ures like Emi­ly Dick­in­son and Toni Morrison.

Katy is fond of her illus­tra­tion for Octavia Butler:

She was new to me and this project led me to some of her short sto­ries, one of which (“Blood­child”) was about an alien species sub­ju­gat­ing humans and the com­pli­cat­ed rela­tion­ship between the two. So rather than fill­ing her por­trait with the type of imagery that many of the oth­ers had (flow­ers, water, ani­mals, etc…), I got to dream up humanoid fig­ures, paint some ten­ta­cles and pon­der how to por­tray the dom­i­na­tion of one species over anoth­er. It was a real­ly sat­is­fy­ing chal­lenge and I am so hap­py with how it turned out.

Lit­er­ary Witch­es is now avail­able through Ama­zon.

Writer Taisia Kitaiskaia and illustrator Katy Horan have created Literary Witches, a celebration of 30 women writers conjuring magic through their words.

Emi­ly Bronte

Anna Akham­to­va

Jamaica Kin­caid

Anne Car­son

Shirley Jack­son