Interviews
Celia Rees on Conjuring Up Witch Child
"What interests me is why people believe things," says Celia Rees, author of the acclaimed novel Witch Child. "Why do people believe that some people have powers? And what could those powers really be?"
Told in the form of a diary, Witch Child is the spellbinding story of Mary Newbury, a teenage girl who escapes England's witch hysteria in the 1600s only to face intolerance among the Puritans in the New World. While illuminating one of the darker times in history -- a time when simply being different could cost you your life -- Witch Child evokes powerful themes that continue to resonate.
Why would young readers today care about a girl who lived hundreds of years ago? One obvious reason is the current fascination with the occult (think Blair Witch Trials, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and a blockbuster series about a certain wizard, which shares a U.K. publisher with Celia Rees). But readers will be drawn more by Witch Child's perennial themes of adolescence -- social isolation, prejudice against those who don't conform, and the struggle to stay true to yourself.
"In any institutionalized setting like the one in which Mary finds herself -- it could be a school, it could be a neighborhood, it could be anywhere -- there will always be some people who are against you," Celia Rees says. "And you've got to stick by what you believe and what you think." While Mary is not without her faults -- "She's headstrong and she can make mistakes," the author says -- she stands as a strong role model. "There comes a point where you can't compromise any more," says the author. "You have to decide whether you're prepared to change yourself entirely or whether you're going to keep your integrity."
A long time brewing
A meticulous researcher, Celia Rees has long been curious about the era in which Witch Child takes place. "Even when I was studying history in college, I remember thinking how isolated the first communities in America were," she says. She was also intrigued by the hysteria of the witch trials and wondered whether the sense of strangeness and fear felt by the early settlers may have helped to fuel these awful events.
It was in such musings that the idea for Witch Child had its beginnings. "But the complete story would be quite a long time brewing," Celia Rees says. The magical moment came when she was reading a book about Native American shamanism and realized that many of the beliefs this community embraced -- such as natural healing and the ability to change shapes -- were also attributed to women who were called witches. She found it amazing that at a single point in time, a person with such "powers" would be persecuted in one culture but revered in another.
Is it real?
Because of the story's striking immediacy, many readers of Witch Child have wondered whether it is a real girl's journal. The premise of the book is that the pages of Mary's private diary have recently been discovered within the layers of an antique quilt, a quilt Mary herself pieced together. There is even an afterword from a fictional scholar who found the document, inviting readers to e-mail her if they have any information about Mary.
"I wanted to write it as a diary and not like a historical novel because I didn't want there to be any distance between the reader and Mary," Celia Rees explains. "It's easy when you read a historical novel to think, 'Well, that's a shame, isn't it, but it happened a long time ago so it doesn't really matter to me.' But I wanted it to matter with the readers right away. I wanted them to feel her anger, her fear, and her hatred, really, of what was going on."
Judging from the tone of the e-mails Celia Rees has received, Witch Child has indeed sparked some fervent interest in Mary's fate. "They're very, very positive," she says of her many correspondents. "They feel empathy for Mary and identify with her and want to know what happened to her." (Readers will not be left hanging -- a sequel is in the works that will reveal a surprising new episode in Mary's life.)
And what about Celia Rees herself -- does she believe in the supernatural? "Well, that's a tough question," the author admits. "I like to say that I'm a little bit like Fox Mulder on The X-Files. I want to believe. After all, it would be a boring sort of world if there weren't things we couldn't explain, now, wouldn't it?"
Interview courtesy of Candlewick Press, Inc., Cambridge, MA.