Welcome to the latest installment of the Witches Save the World Micro-Interviews! In honor of the upcoming Halloween/Samhain holiday, and in celebration of the release of Witches Save the World, Forests Haunted By Holiness will be featuring a series of interviews with the contributors throughout October.

Witches Save the World was a labor of love. Across these two volumes you will find poems, short stories, and essays celebrating the witch and their role as wisdom keeper, protector of nature, avenger of the forgotten, and defender of the oppressed. Individual poems and stories range from historical fantasy to contemporary horror to science fiction, with many questioning the nature and cost of honor, integrity, and freedom.

In concert with these interviews, one physical copy of Witches Save the World — either Hags, Harridans, and Hexes Gone Right or Covens, Cauldrons, and Curses Gone Right— will be given away at the end of the month! Two books, two winners! To enter the drawing, just comment below and share the interview on your favorite social media platform.

Ready? Let’s get started!

Forests Haunted By Holiness: What is the title of your story and can you give us a spoiler-free summary?

Dana M. Evans: “By Aradia’s Grace” follows the story of Hero. She appears to be an ordinary woman but she is far more. Dedicated to helping others in spaces ranging from domestic violence shelters to food pantries, Hero tries to live up to her name. Using the power of the energy that people put out into the world and gathering it with the help of the #WeAreAradia tag, Hero uses magic to try to balance the world.

FHBH: How did you go about writing your story? Lot of research? Or did you just wing it?

DME: For a relatively short story, I put in a lot of research into Aradia as a figure from folklore. I looked into who she was before the American folklorist, Charles Godfrey Leland‘s 1899 work Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches came out as a ‘real’ pagan religious text. It was later expanded on by Raven Grimassi but is now hotly debated as being an actual religious text especially among the Italian witch community. More likely Aradia was several ancient goddesses conflated with a dash of Christianity mixed in later. Some of those goddess names and the Christian lore that was intertwined with Roman mythology all had to be delved into, and some of it made it into the story.

I even had to research “is a hashtag copyrightable” (luckily no) because nearly a decade ago the #wearearadia hashtag was used much like I used it in the story as a call to fight injustice and oppression. Aradia remains important to large swaths of the witch and pagan communities.

FHBH: What draws you to the character and theme of “the witch”? What do you find so compelling about it?

DME: I have been on the fringes of the witch community since the 1980s with an interest in the Italian versions of witchcraft, which is now easier to find things out about. My interest there is because I am Italian-American. So spellcraft has had a draw for me most of my life.

However, the real reason I find it compelling is the lore behind the witch. In modern practice, it is a female-dominated system, a way of reclaiming some of our agency. When we look back at history we see a pattern with witches. In the Middle Ages and times before that, women were healers and herbalists, a rather powerful position that was eventually taken over by men almost exclusively. Women who practiced herbal healing were labeled witches as a way of removing their power (and gives us the folkloric image of the old woman in the cottage in the woods). There was a time when women being able to read – a sign of independence – was enough to earn an accusation of witchcraft and given the end result of that, it’s easy to see why so few took the chance. Even in Salem, modern scholars see some of the witchcraft accusations as a way to grab land and money from the few women who held it. So now, using the label which women especially are subverting from something meant to hurt, and reclaiming what had been taken, and I find that fascinating.