Ghost Hunting Before the Victorians…with Tim Prasil

When it comes to occult detectives, ghostbusters, and monster hunters, the casual gothic appreciator can point to the Ghostbusters franchise, Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Supernatural…you know, the movies and shows that put monster hunting on the pop culture map. Or they can take the classic route via Bram Stoker’s Van Helsing, the parapsychologist and vampire hunter—and Dracula’s nemesis.  

But this genre of slayers and experts in all things spooky has a long history in literature and film, dating all the way back to the Victorian era, thanks to the Spiritualism movement and the budding mystery genre. What better way for Victorians to enjoy their love of the supernatural and literary detectives than to combine them in the figure of the supernatural sleuth? In fact, any connoisseur of the genre can find a treasure trove of wonderful tales involving ghost hunters and supernatural sleuths throughout the 1800s and into the 1900s, ranging from the spooky to the silly to the downright terrifying!  

And that’s not even getting into the history of real-life ghost hunters and occult practitioners that inspired this sub-genre of gothic literature. It should come as no surprise that our relationship to the unknown and the spirit realm is as common as it is timeless, which only leads us to conclude that the idea of ghost hunting must also predate the Victorian era.  Luckily, where there are paranormal investigators and investigators, there are also investigators of those paranormal activities, namely, scholars.  

One such literary historian, Tim Prasil, author of the Vera Van Slyke Ghostly Mystery series, was kind enough to walk us through some of the early histories of ghost hunting before the Victorians. He was kind enough to share an excerpt of his latest book, Certain Nocturnal Disturbances: Ghost Hunting Before the Victorians, that explores the world of paranormal investigators that predates what we’ve previously considered to be the starting point for the genre. In this excerpted introduction, Tim gives a brief overview of the origin of the term “ghost hunt” and the history of the early ghostbusters in fact and fiction.  Enjoy!

Introduction: Ghost Hunting Before the Victorians

The Victorian era began in 1837 and ended in 1901, the years that Queen Victoria ruled what was then called the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. In this time and in this place, the question of why ghosts have tantalized and baffled humanity across the globe for millennia garnered serious, scholarly attention. Among those voices calling for such study was Catherine Crowe, who gathered a wide variety of reports about supernatural and occult experiences, then organized them into a surprisingly popular book titled The Night Side of Nature; Or, Ghosts and Ghost Seers (1848). Meanwhile, around 1850, a number of Cambridge University students began to meet with the intention of examining reports of hauntings. Apparently, not much came of the project, but it inspired the more formal Ghost Club, founded in 1862—and this led to the Society for Psychical Research, founded in 1882. The latter two organizations still exist today, and neither has confined its focus to only ghosts. Along with mesmerism, clairvoyance, and similar topics, both groups were especially motivated to validate or debunk the phenomena occurring at Spiritualist séances.

Consider, too, the contribution the Victorians made to the literary ghost-story tradition with writers such as Charles Dickens (1812-1870), Sheridan Le Fanu (1814-1873), Charlotte Riddell (1832-1906), and Edith Nesbit (1858-1924). It’s little wonder, then, that in the early 2000s, we envision the ectoplasm of ghosts swirling with the fog of Ripper-era London and sense something charming—yet slightly chilling—in those cornices, cupulas, and other ornate flourishes of houses built during the 1800s. One might reasonably conclude that ghost hunting started in the Victorian era.

But there’s a substantial history to this noble quest that predates the Victorians. In fact, the term ghost hunt and its derivations ghost hunting and ghost hunter(s) appear in pre-1837 publications with some regularity. The longer I look, the farther back in time I go, but so far one of the earliest uses I’ve unearthed is in Elizabeth Gunning’s 1794 novel, The Packet. There, a character named Sir William Montreville interviews people who claim to have seen a specter at the local church. Though he’s skeptical, Sir William joins with his servant to form what Gunning calls a “ghost-hunting party.” Late at night, the duo patiently hide in one of the pews at the haunted site to conduct some nocturnal surveillance, the time-honored practice of ghost hunters. Other documents that use the term include 1804 newspaper and magazine articles about that year’s Hammersmith Ghost case (covered in Chapter Seven of this book), an 1808 play, an 1817 book about premature burial, and an 1820 family history. Remember that the term ghost hunt was quite likely spoken before written. Figure in any documents using it that have been lost or that remain untouched on dusty library shelves or in decaying trunks. With this in mind, I suspect various forms of ghost hunting were fairly well known with that label in Britain for about four or five decades before the Victorians.

Ghost hunting teams have a history that reaches back even further. They certainly looked differently than how we see them today on television, YouTube, and elsewhere, but Chapter Four addresses how assembling a committee to investigate claims of ghostly phenomena dates back at least to 1534. That’s the year Francis I, King of France, appointed a group—a mix of clergy and lay people—to investigate claims that a church graveyard in Orleans was haunted. One of the most famous paranormal investigative teams was assembled in 1762, when a ghost was purported to be visiting Cock Lane in London. I discuss this in Chapter Four.

Side note: You can also read more about it on Tim’s blog here.

All along, ghost hunters have had to position their work against those who insisted that phenomena being misinterpreted as supernatural or paranormal were, in actuality, entirely natural and pretty darned normal. Indeed, as we’ll see, many important ghost hunters were among those seeking to debunk a haunting. It’s misguided to assume that “everyone back then believed in ghosts,” a sweeping generalization often aimed at people in some vague part of the past. An example of this appeared in 1863, when George Cruikshank described people of a century-and-a-half earlier this way: “The gullibility of the public was much greater at that time than now, and they would swallow anything in the shape of a ghost.” As discussed in Chapter Three, Joseph Glanvill (1636-1680) was carefully debating such things about the time Cruikshank indicates. Even Pliny the Younger—a man born when years had only two digits and who died when they had three—retold the story of a ghost hunt to someone he knew might think it questionable, if not complete baloney. (This ancient investigation is discussed in Chapter One.) In other words, debates about whether or not ghosts are real seem to be almost as old as recorded encounters with them. It is as if disagreement is embedded into the DNA of humanity.

The opposition faced by those working to prove the existence of ghosts leads to the need for sound, convincing evidence. A conscious pursuit of exactly that also comes before the Victorians. The above-mentioned Glanvill was an investigator who strongly believed in interaction between the supernatural and natural realms, but who also valued reliable, firsthand testimony supporting the reality of that interaction. We’ll see that he applied this method to his investigation of a case commonly called “The Drummer of Tedworth.”

Even the notion of the purposeless ghost—a ghost with no clear mission for manifesting and no special message to convey—appears prior to the 1800s. This has been presented by some ghostlore scholars as something unique to the nineteenth-century. However, in Chapter Five, I make the case that the Hinton Ampner haunting of the late 1760s features exactly this kind of phenomena despite various attempts to make the haunting fit the traditional pattern of a ghost returning to, say, guide the living to a hidden deed or to serve as observable evidence of the cursed existence following a sinful life.

In a nutshell, then, ghost hunting—its key methods, its main challenges, even the term itself—all predate the Victorian era.

Defining “Ghost Hunter”

Side note: You can read more about this on Tim’s blog here.

Of course, all of this talk about pre-Victorian ghost hunting depends on clarification of who exactly constitutes a ghost hunter. The definition used in this book involves individuals who fit the following criteria:

1. Ghost hunters are not themselves the haunted party. Rather, they learn of a stranger’s alleged haunting, travel to it, and make the necessary arrangements to investigate. A slight exception here is John Jervis. He investigated weird phenomena at Hinton Ampner, his sister’s haunted manor. He didn’t permanently reside there, but unlike most of the other ghost hunters I’ll discuss, he was related to the residents. If this compromised his objectivity in any way, it might have been counterbalanced by his co-investigators, John Bolton and James Luttrell.

2. While some of the ghost hunters to be discussed have a clear bias for or against the possibility of spirits crossing between the dimensions, they all are open-minded enough to bother investigating a situation in which such a crossing is suspected. Belief in ghosts might best be understood as existing on a sliding scale. Those on the far ends are so convinced, so rigid, they probably wouldn’t bother confirming their convictions or risk having them challenged. The ghost hunters in this book might lean one way or the other—but they do so from somewhere in the middle of that scale.

3. They apply the basic, time-tested strategies of paranormal investigation. This often means interrogating witnesses and/or closely examining the site by listening to how sound travels through walls, vents, or chimneys; looking for evidence of rodents or similar animals; checking the pipes, etc. Almost always, it involves those overnight stakeouts that I call nocturnal surveillance.

My hope is that each of the historical figures I present reflects more than a glimmer of how ghost hunting is understood and conducted now in the early 21st century. Indeed, tracking the evolution of ghost hunting across the centuries might stir feelings of connection between ghost hunters still living and their very long, very fascinating heritage.

Notes:

1. Elizabeth Gunning, The Packet: A Novel, vol. 4 (Printed for J. Bell, 1794) p. 5. Regarding the Hammersmith case, see “Melancholy Accident,” True Briton, January 6, 1804, p. 4, and “Domestic Incidents,” Universal Magazine 1 (January 1804) p. 63. The play is D. Lawler’s The School for Daughters (Printed for the author by R. Juigné, 1808) p. 50. The books are John Snart’s Thesaurus of Horror: Or, The Charnel House Explored!!! (Sherwood, Neely, Jones, 1817) p. 166, and Henry Nugent Bell’s The Huntington Peerage (Printed for Baldwin, Cradock, and Joy, 1820) p. 251.

2. George Cruikshank, A Discovery Concerning Ghosts; With a Rap at the “Spirit Rappers” (Frederick Arnold, 1863) p. 6. The actual dates of Pliny’s birth and death are circa 61 CE and circa 113 CE respectively.

3. See Andrew Lang, Cock Lane and Common-Sense (Longmans, Green, and Co., 1894) p. 95, and R.C. Finucane, Ghosts: Appearances of the Dead & Cultural Transformation (Prometheus, 1996) pp. 194-204.

Guest Contributor Bio

Tim Prasil writes ghostly mysteries; anthologizes quirky, old fiction; and explores historical ghostlier. He also reads (aloud) Tales Told When the Widows Rattle on YouTube.  You can find out more about him at www.brombonesbooks.com.

The Bruja Professor, a witchy take on literature, the occult & pop culture, is the scholarly sister to Enchantment Learning & Living, an inspirational blog celebrating life’s simple pleasures, everyday mysticism, and delectable recipes that are guaranteed to stir the kitchen witch in you.

If you enjoyed what you just read and believe that stories are magic & true magic is in the everyday…or your next good read, subscribe to my newsletter below for regular doses of enchantment.

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Joy as a form of Resistance: Talk Transcript from Folklore and Resistance Roundtable - The Carterhaugh School

Last month, I had the wonderful honor of participating in The Carterhaugh School of Folklore and the Fantastic’s wonderful panel on Folkore and Resistance, along with an incredible lineup of scholars, folklorists, and creators, including Dr. Jean Jorgensen, Dr. Margaret Yocom, Daisy Ahlstone, and Terri Windling. It was a celebration of community, storytelling, and more than a little magic!

To keep the magic of this event going, I’m posting the full transcript of my talk below and the full recording, which is so worth the watch—my fellow panelists had so much joy and wisdom to share. Enjoy!

Joy as a form of Resistance: Conjuring Change by Rewriting Trauma Narratives to be Narratives of Hope

Storytelling has always been one of the most profound acts of magic-making, the most beautiful and healing of spells, the thing I turn to when I need to conjure a new way of being in this complicated, fraught world. As a New Mexican mestiza, a woman of mixed raced heritage, so many stories about people like me are ones of trauma, be it ancestral, generational, or rooted in systemic oppression. And, let’s be real, sometimes we go through things in life that can make us feel closed off, perpetually trying to protect the self from further injury—but that’s no way to live. So when I put pen to paper, I conjure change, a shift away from these trauma narratives towards narratives of joy and hope. And this can be especially important when perpetuating trauma narratives can be a way to reinforce systemic oppression. 

As I explain the spell work of writing in the short prose poem “My Joy is My Resistance,” in my first book Everyday Enchantments, “I let my hands relish the feel of my dreams being coaxed to life between my fingers like the red clay of my beloved desert. I mold the clay and I love the earth and shape it into stories they do not want me to tell: the ones of hope.  The ones of healing. The ones that remind us of the moon's power and our own capacity for abundance and possibility.”

In fact, all of Everyday Enchantments was written because I was trying to figure out what happiness looks like and what FEELS like day-to-day and to do that, I had to reimagine my life as a sort of fairytale, a place where the mystic could be found in the mundane, where synchronicities and archetypal messages were as common as fairy-godmothers and enchanted objects.  In essence, I started focusing on life as a form of lived folklore. Like the fairytales and stories I grew up reading, I was on my own journey of discovery, only instead of saving Middle Earth, traveling to Narnia, or making friends will all the animals of the forest, I was relearned the magic of everyday life. 

So folklore and the imagination became a lifeline for me, a way to imagine happiness and fulfillment in a world that doesn’t want people like me to have it.  One of the ways I conjured this sense of joy in a fraught world was by examining my relationship to pleasure.  It can teach us so much about ourselves. Think about.

In a world that always feeds the negative, which our own fears can magnify, we have to remember that pleasure is a valuable healing tool. It’s something we have to actively nourish and celebrate, like 12 dancing princesses sneaking off each night to dance in a magical kingdom (although I’m simplifying that tale quite a bit). It’s also something we can feel disconnected from when we go on autopilot in a effort to cope with the world around us or our own inner turmoils. Healing our relationship to pleasure can help us process difficult emotions and get real about what we want in life: abundance, meaningful relationships…you name it.

You see this play out in my gothic fairytales, too, like Weep, Woman, Weep, based on the Legend of La Llorona.  For those of you who don’t know, La Llorona, or the Weeping Woman is an urban legend that terrifies most Hispanic communities…she is the spirit of a woman who drowned her children in a fit of rage and now sends all eternity roaming the Rio Grande trying to get them back…she just might take you.  I have my own spin on this tale in Weep, Woman, Weep, where La Llorona only drowns girls so that they come back and live lives as sorrowful as her own.  La Llorona wants to perpetuate the trauma she had to live through in her own life.

The protagonist, Mercy begins her story by telling us, “I am built for tears. It’s in my blood. The women in my life don’t know how to have a life without sorrows.” In the story, she survives an encounter with the Weeping Woman. Mercy survives but doesn’t come back quite right—her tears now have the power to hurt or, she later finds, to heal. She starts in a dark place. She’s dealing with generational trauma, ancestral hauntings, and history of colonization and enforced cultural assimilation written in her blood. 

But she chooses to define herself outside of those things. Through her focus on pleasure, the things that make her happy, the things that define and shape her outside of these traumas, she comes into her own—and, eventually, finds a love so strong that not even La Llorona can break it.  

Mercy’s pleasures are small, like trashy novels and pretty rocks, really really good turnips and old records. And they’re big pleasures, too, like building a thriving farm from the ground up and nurturing her magical ability with plants. They’re unexpected, like the sweet lemon balm soap made for her by a man who is half-Angel, half-wildcrafter. And sometimes, her pleasures allow her to process her pain as she reconciles herself to the fact that La Llorona has irrevocably changed her life but that she still has a life to live. Through these experiences of pleasure, she learns that she is not just some weed but a seed.  By the end of the tale, she is no longer a victim of La Llorona or the often whispered about reviled figure in her small town of Sueno, NM, but Miracle Mercy, the woman who can change fates, the woman who has turned her grief into joy. 

This transformation sneaks up on her. She’s been working toward it every day, but she’s never quite able to see the big picture until after she’s developed some magical relationships. There’s a moment, near the end of her story, where she sees this wonderful abundant life she’s created for herself—Mercy’s been so focused on the small little pleasures and the small acts of moving forward from her family’s history of trauma, that she hasn’t quite seen all she’s accomplished, the big picture, until now. 

As Mercy says near the end of the story, reflecting on what it’s taken for her to find her joy:

“[La Llorona] was the Weeping Woman, sure. But I was the woman who made rainwater out of tears. I would use them to water my crops through this drought. When people bought my fat turnips and sharp radishes and long, thick carrots, they would taste of freshly turned earth and freshly turned futures, hope, and the bittersweet taste of things past, and the salty tang of possibility. This I would do to remind others that we are the seeds we plant, not the histories forced upon us. This I would do to wash away the sorrow from my soul.

Was I scared? You bet.

But nothing makes a woman brave except living.”

So here we have at the end of this gothic fairytale, another transformation.  A girl turned weeping woman turned miracle worker through the simple act of turning away from feeding and perpetuating trauma and learning, one small step at a time, what it means to embody joy and abundance.  

In fact, the joy of folklore is that it can be a form of resistance, of changing the kind of stories we tell about ourselves and our communities.  It helps us choose magic and possibility over stifling conventions that would regulate our bodies and our minds.

So in closing, I want to leave you with a meditation or ritual to help you when things get difficult, to remind you that you are the author of your own story and nobody can talk that from you.  Or, as Mercy puts it, “that we are the seeds we plant, not the histories forced upon us.”

This exercise is fairly simple, but it helps me a lot when I get too in my head and need to ground myself. Think about something that brings you joy, specifically a simple pleasure.  It can be anything. For Mercy—okay, and me!—it’s listening to old records and reading trashy novels.

Now visualize that simple pleasure as sacred.  It’s not just something you do for fun.  It’s not a bonus.  It’s a necessity.  Resist the temptation to trivialize it!  There is no room for guilty pleasures here. You can either visualize this or write down details about it, depending on what works best for you.  As you do, imagine the story it tells about you.  How does it soothe? Heal? Transform?  What emotions emerge as you meditate on this pleasure? They don’t always have to be pleasurable, either. Sometimes enjoyment can give us a safe space or relax enough to process difficult emotions.  

Lastly, imagine yourself as your favorite fairytale character—I’m personally very fond of thinking of myself as a hobbit—or who you would be as a folklore protagonist.  Imagine it down to the last detail, including how your sacred simple pleasure fits into your quest. What magic does it offer you?  What wisdom or insights to help you conquer your foes or inner dragons?  How does it help you transform your tears into rainwater?  

In closing, always remember to reword Mercy a bit, “nothing makes a person brave, except living.”

And, to add to that, miracles don’t happen unless you show up, every day, ready to work magic.  

The Bruja Professor, a witchy take on literature, the occult & pop culture, is the scholarly sister to Enchantment Learning & Living, an inspirational blog celebrating life’s simple pleasures, everyday mysticism, and delectable recipes that are guaranteed to stir the kitchen witch in you.

If you enjoyed what you just read and believe that stories are magic & true magic is in the everyday…or your next good read, subscribe to my newsletter below for regular doses of enchantment.

Want even more inspiration? Follow me on Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter. Here’s to a magical life!

Not Like Other Writers: The Toxic Literary Trope that Needs to Die

If you are a reader of genre fiction of any kind, but most especially romance, you probably know that one of the most common and, yes, toxic tropes, is Not Like Other Girls. 

You know the trope. The heroine is made more interesting/fascinating/beautiful/smart because she isn’t like all the other women. This is probably best personified by Lizzy Bennet in Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice (one of my students in a course on the history of sex, gender, of romance in pop culture once wrote a spectacular essay on this a few years ago and now I can’t unsee it. Thank you, Brigit!).  A woman who is less pretty than her elder sister Jane and not as affluent as Caroline Bingley, Lizzy goes from “tolerably handsome” to one of the most interesting and attractive women in the eyes of Mr. Darcy as he begins to distinguish her from the many women throwing themselves at his wealthy, awkward feet (I refuse to think of Darcy as a snob, but a socially award introvert, but that’s another discussion for another time). She takes long walks across the countryside, muddy hems be damned!  She talks back!  She is, in fact, quite witty!  And very pretty after rigorous exercise!  And she has fine eyes!

Lizzy Bennet, in short, is Not Like Other Girls. 

On the one hand, you can see why it’s a classic trope. Who doesn’t want to be Not Like Other Girls (and I mean that in a gender-inclusive way) in the eyes of someone you’re sweet on?  It’s a heady feeling to know that someone sees you as a distinct, autonomous—and delightful—human being rather than just another warm body, or worse, fitting their “type” which, if you’re a woman of color, can dip into some fetishy territory pretty quickly. It’s the reason why we love Lizzy Bennet so much in Pride & Prejudice and hate Caroline Bingley. Caroline is more than happy to be Like Everyone Else and is pretty transparent about staking her claim on the most eligible man within eyesight. Lizzy, on the other hand, has standards. She is different. She is cool. She is Not Like Other Girls.  

But guess what? 

Every person I know would much rather be a Lizzy over a Carline which makes us…just like everyone else. We want to be different, seen as individuals who bring something special to the table no matter the context—but we also want to be just like the things we love. The plucky witty feisty heroine has become something of a cliche in the romance genre simply because, as much as we want to be seen as different, we also love sharing our perceived difference with others who understand the joys of certain tropes or character types when done well.  

Yet, we also have to acknowledge that most, if not all of us, want what Caroline Bingley thirsts after: the proverbial rich, handsome man with the big…estate. We’re just as mundane in our desires, in other words, as the Caroline Bingley’s of the world, if a little more palatable and not quite so obvious. I’m talking broad-strokes here, but put another way, there’s nothing wrong with wanting to be Not Like Other Girls in the eyes of your beloved(s).  But it becomes toxic when that singular desirability is at the expense of putting others down or signaling that there is only room for One Kind of Woman—the woman we all want to be, but, by her very singularity, can only be one of us. Everyone else is just window dressing—the Boring Besty or the Evil Competitor—in her story.  

Don’t worry—this won't be an essay hypothesizing about who would win in a Lizzy vs Caroline duel. I merely used Austen’s classic novel to highlight what we love—and what is deeply problematic—about the Not Like Other Girls trope to introduce you to a very similar trope I often see in writing circles, specifically in genre fiction, what I like to call Not Like Other Writers.

Not Like Other Writers

It makes sense that this trope would find its way into the world of writing marketing. We authors want to distinguish ourselves. We want to stand out from the crowd so that people see our stories and know that we are one of a kind. We also want them to buy our books, because, well, it’s nice to see money coming in from doing something you love. And yes, fulfilling a dream of making a living from what we love is the artistic equivalent of Lizzy sticking to her principles and still ending up with a rich lord and living on a grand estate—not always realistic but it sometimes happens. It’s also a deeply intoxicating dream and one that can’t happen, when it does, without significant commercial success.  

So there we have the same conundrum in the Not Like Other Writers trope. We want to be unique and stand apart from the rest of the writing world, but popular enough, common enough, to get a hefty paycheck from what we do. We want to be a rebel, but also be so well-loved that we can survive on the written word alone, no day job necessary (or at the very least, become an auto-buy author for more readers). Just as the Not Like Others Girls trope easily becomes the Every Girl trope, so too, does the Not Like Other Writers become Just Like the Rest. We all basically want the same things as authors—to write good stories and ideally make a name and some money from it.

How do we distinguish ourselves, you might ask? By showing how we stand out from the crowd, and, in some cases, how we are just like the rest.

Some of this is only logical.  We want to highlight what we do differently from the rest of the pack and I’m no different. I’m a professor, writer, and bruja—I write in the genres that I love reading and teaching, and there’s more than a dash of magic in everything I do. Yay! Not everyone can claim to be both a scholar in genre fiction and write in it—although there are more of us than you think. Not everyone can write witchy fiction AND be witchy herself. Again, though, more of us than you think can claim that ability. I’m not the only one by any means. And guess what? I love knowing that I’m not alone in any of this! I have found my people.

Too often, though, many authors fall into the Not Like Other Writers trope by throwing the thing they (sometimes secretly) love under the bus: genre fiction. They are not romance authors or fantasy writers. They are Serious Authors who have Elevated/Subverted/Transcended the Genre. Or they secretly want to write in their chosen genre but for whatever reason feel they must qualify or otherwise distance their work from said genre—they must be better or somehow elevate it. Take for example the many authors who think they “subvert” the romance genre by not having a HEA (Happily Ever After). Guess what? That’s not subverting the genre—that’s writing something completely different! The HEA is one of the requirements for a book to be called a romance. Don’t want that HEA in your book? Fine—just don’t call it romance or say you’re subverting the genre. (I think the term many use now is Romantic Narrative, to show that the book has a lot of romantic elements but may not end happily—but correct me if I’m wrong.)

Let’s be honest, this mostly happens with writers who have more “literary” aspirations, authors who are desperate for some sort of artistic legitimacy (whatever that means), or authors who think their concept is “novel” or a “critique” of a certain type of story without even understanding the very narratives or genres they are critiquing. Any time spent within the bowls of social media should tell you that it is entirely possible to argue a claim vehemently while knowing very little about the topic itself. Just say it strongly enough and it might *seem* like you know what you’re doing (not to belabor the point, but whole presidential elections have succeeded on strategies like this, so it stands to reason a joyfully ignorant writer might think they could succeed with this model, too).

These type of authors, in other words, are like the worst of college creative writing program workshops: a bunch of people acting like they know fuck-all about what they’re doing while having read very little and having understood even less. Their critiques are invariably set up to elevate their own work—So edgy! So literary! So obscure!—by putting down others’—So formulaic! So predictable! So READABLE!

*Pauses as eyes roll into the back of my head as I recall all the condescension and idiocy that polluted my BFA years.*

The Lost Writer

I’ve been marinating on this trope as I watched The Lost City (2022), an action-adventure romance that is clearly paying homage to Romancing the Stone (1984).  Think pieces abound about how this movie and the success of Netflix’s Bridgerton highlight the fact that the romance genre is a real moneymaker and should be taken more seriously. The mainstream romance community can’t stop gushing about it. I’m a fan of Romancing the Stone, and really, most adventure romances (gimme more please). So as I watched this movie, I was so struck that, even in the midst of media insisting on the importance of romance and highlighting how this movie, in particular, celebrates the genre for what it is, I stumbled across a Not Like Other Writers in the heroine of the movie, Loretta Sage (Sandra Bullock), albeit she embodies this trope, ostensibly, because she is grieving. Even this film, marketed as a joyful celebration of romance, has to imbed genre critiques within the story as if to explain why it’s okay to watch a shamelessly frothy narrative to genre outsiders—and to set down anyone who might critique it.

In the film, Loretta is a highly successful award-winning romance author who writes a bestselling franchise with twenty books to her name and, presumably, more to follow. She has an avid fanbase who have dubbed themselves “Lovemoreheads” after the protagonist in her books. And despite the movie making pains to point out that the romance genre is one of the most profitable in the publishing industry, Loretta is frequently dismissive if not downright condescending to her audience. She is resentful that they don’t want to know about the cool history she imbedded in the books and would rather ogle her clinch cover model Dash McMahon (Channing Tatum). She so often emphasizes the fact that no one reads her books for the really well-researched historical facts, it’s hard not to see her positioning herself above or as better than the average romance author, simply because she isn’t buying into the fantasy of the genre that he clinch cover model embodies and comes from a more scholarly background. She even gets annoyed when a “smart-looking” young woman in the audience (read: she wears glasses) asks Dash to rip his shirt off instead of asking a more thoughtful “smart” question about Loretta’s research interests.

Later, when Loretta and Dash are both trying to escape the clutches of an evil mastermind, she goes on a long rant about her writing. She describes her situation as being a woman who “couldn’t publish a book on Spanish colonization” so she “decided to write a romance novel.” Luckily for her, her novels were a “smashing success” so “she kept writing her schlock.”

Schlock.  

I know—we’ll get to that wording in a bit. But first, she ends her speech admitting that she isn’t who she’d hoped to be at this point in her life. Dash rightly calls her out, when he admits he was very embarrassed at first to be the cover model for her stories.  Then he recalls the appreciation of the fans and asked himself, “How could I be this embarrassed about something that makes people this happy?”

Perhaps one of the best lines of the film comes when Dash gives her a much-needed talking-to. He tells her, “You can do whatever you want. If you don’t want to write anymore, don’t write. But don’t minimize the people that love your work by calling it schlock. It’s not fair to them.”

THANK YOU, DASH. (Read: Iloveyouwillyoumarryme?)

On the surface, many a viewer can see that her resistance to her chosen genre is played for humor and romantic tension between her and her cover model. Dash’s perfect response is also shutting down anyone who will ever criticize the genre, including Loretta. But she spends over half the movie hating on romance and I have to wonder at the choice the movie makes to frame so much of her character around being Not Like Other (Romance) Writers, as she both tries to distance herself from the genre while also profiting from it.

She clearly dislikes doing her book tours. As an introvert, I can appreciate the fact that Loretta hates being in front of large crowds and the stress of having to be “on” all the time. Many also have attributed her obvious distaste for her writing as really a form of grieving, since a huge part of the plot is that her partner passed away five years ago and she is struggling to move on, perhaps wondering if she will ever find love again. Yup. I get all that. The problem with these readings is that we never see a clear Before and After Loretta. That is, we never get to see her happy with her partner, loving her writing career, then spiraling into a deep depression after his passing, wondering what the meaning of life is. This means we never get to see her love of the genre.  For most of her screen time, she is Not Like Other Writers.

I can’t help comparing her to Joan Wilder in Romancing the Stone.  While most 80s movies don’t age well, casual sexism being a pervasive form of “humor” in many of the era’s films, Romancing the Stone is surprisingly progressive in how it depicts Joan. She is a wildly successful (pun intended), awarding-winning, best-selling romance author—and she is proud of it! Her apartment is decorated with posters of her clinch covers and awards. She is confident in her identity as a writer. And even when unforeseen circumstances force her into a very dangerous world of treasure hunts and dubious characters, it is her writing-know how that gets the job done—not the dashing rogue she teams up with. 

When all seems lost, she is aided by a huge fan, and yeah, okay, drug lord (Who doesn’t love his exclamation of “THE Joan Wilder?” when he meets her?). Later, when she is trying to find the treasure, she draws on her book plots to uncover where the jewel is located. It is never questioned that she respects her writing. Others respect her writing—and get great enjoyment from it. Her experience as a romance adventure author even helps her untangle the wild adventure she's been thrust into. In other words, the joke in this movie is not that she’s a romance author, it’s that she hasn’t yet lived—or loved—like the stories she’s writing (another cliche yes, but how often do romance authors have their sisters kidnapped and held hostage until they deliver a treasure map to some baddies?).

Even in the sequel, Jewel of the Nile (1985), Joan struggles to finish her latest romance. The movie opens with an elaborate pirate-esque fantasy starting her and Jack Colton, only she can’t quite figure out how they end up together. Hence her writer’s block. Meanwhile, he’s living his best carefree party life, completely oblivious to her desire for something more. At the start of the movie, she tells him she wants to do something more serious—romance writing? A biography commissioned by a sketchy fan, perhaps? But the subtext is clear: It’s not about writing something more serious, just as her writer’s block doesn’t have anything to do with a rejection of her chosen genre.  It’s in her wondering if her Happy For Now with Jack might have run its course or if it can become a Happily Ever After. 

Now, all these similar issues play out in The Lost City, and yes, I do think the movie was trying to frame Loretta as a grieving woman and not necessarily as Not Like Other (Romance) Writers. But the problem is that this isn’t made clear enough and as a result, her resistance to the genre reads as a qualifier (we can like this adventure romance while separating our enjoyment of the genre from the silly “Lovemoreheads”). Like I said, earlier, we see no Before and After of her life. No sense that she once really loved what she wrote and her grief has made her bitter about so much. It would take nothing to show framed images of her book covers on the wall or her awards proudly displayed or even photos of her and her partner celebrating her first book, for example. Instead, she becomes the stand-in for the romantic skeptics in the audience, the ones that want to enjoy an adventure romance but also are maybe embarrassed by the fact that they do, just as we only see Loretta as embarrassed and reluctant to embrace her romance writing, although she does eventually get there, thanks again to knowing she can love again.  

Is this meant to trash The Lost City? No—go see it and enjoy. It is a delight! This issue I’m picking at is a subtle thing, one I only likely noticed as I’ve been drafting this essay, and one most viewers would likely watch past, especially romance viewers who are just so happy to see their stories included on the big screen, or perhaps the average viewer, who might be relieved to be watching a blockbuster film that isn’t a Marvel universe spin-off. But is interesting to me that the creators of the movie deliberately chose to show us a version of Loretta who is deeply dismissive of the genre she writes in for a large part of the movie. Grief-stricken? Yes. Wondering what it all means? Absolutely. Introverted? I get that. But without seeing her past where she is deeply happy with her unexpected career path—I mean, she must have been to write twenty novels, right?—her story arc of falling back in love with life, her writing, and yes, actual love, falls short of truly celebrating the romance genre. That is, we never get to see her as Just Like Other Romance Writers Living Her Best Life, only as Not Like Other Romance Writers Because Grief. 

Her story arc might not feel fully formed, but the movie works as a whole because her ultimate journey becomes one of moving from her grief-induced Not Like Other (Romance) Writers to Just Like Other (Happy Romance) Writers Because, Yay! Romance! That is, she might start the film as Not Like Other Writers but ends, through healing, adventure, and the promise of new love, with the knowledge that she is a romance author capable of loving again who embraces the genre she writes in and all it has brought her.  I would just like to see more Happy Joan Wilders or Jane Villanuevas (Jane the Virgin 2014-2019) who are happily writing genre fiction, in this case, romance, without having to justify anything. Happy to see more genre authors in media who aren’t in conflict about what they write or why they write it.

This trope of being Not Like Other Writers becomes more of an issue when we take it into the broader context of genre fiction, the writers who inhabit it, and how we’re represented in pop culture. We need more Joan Wilders, happily writing in their chosen genres, a less Loretta Sages (sans tragic backstory) who are at times resistant to the idea of writing in a certain genre or are constantly trying to explain why their work is better than [fill in the blank].

A Tale of Two Romance Authors

We recently saw this issue resurface again with a recent interview of Elizabeth Conte and her new book, Finding Jane, and her new publishing house, Jane Writes Press. While clearly trying to align herself with the likes of Elizabeth Gaskell and Jane Austen, not like those “‘wham, bam; thank you ma’am’ romances” (her words). She both wants to write romance and is also saying that she is smarter than the average romance reader. It’s an old trick to align yourself with classic authors, it’s why everything gets compared to Dickens or Austen or whoever because you want to signal longevity or a sort of timelessness—Not Like Your Contemporaries.

Romance Twitter had a field day reading her book blurb and her excerpts which basically boiled down to the fact that her book is pretty much like a lot of romances…just not as well written. It became clear in her interview, that her understanding of the romance genre started and ended with Netflix’s Bridgerton. In trying to set herself apart, she only insulted potential readers by explaining to them why their appreciation of “schlock” was embarrassing, wrong, and just plain un-Jane-like (although I would like to point out that even her beloved Jane Austen read horrid novels, gothic romances, and general trashy fiction, ahem).  

Can’t we just enjoy a romance because it is a romance without having to reference Gaskell or Austen to somehow legitimize it? I mean, you can love Austen and Gaskell—I certainly do—and also other romances. You can even debate if Gaskell and Austen write romance! You can also frame your work around those authors, if you must, without trashing an entire genre you know little about. And if you want to write a romance that doesn’t go all “wham bam thank you ma’am,” at least not right away, it’s called a Slow Burn Romance.  Someone who understands the genre they are trying to write in would know that.

Perhaps one of the most frequently cited examples of being Not Like Other Writers would be Diana Gabaldon, who famously refuses to call her work romance, although she has plenty of romance-reading fans and purportedly won’t allow the cast of the series adaptation to use the “R” word in interviews and press conferences. Now, I will admit that this made me roll my eyes hard when I heard this because the people I know who enjoy Outlander (the books and the show) are primarily romance readers. But after doing some digging for this article, I found that Gabaldon is NOT trying to be Not Like Other Writers, although she is often accused of doing so (I’m so guilty of this—sorry Gabaldon!).

Ah…the power of research.  

If you read through her FAQ page on her website, she explains that back in the day, many romance authors and readers roasted her for winning a RITA for Outlander. To them, she was not a romance author.  Her books ended on cliffhangers, not HEAs. Jamie was a younger man, Claire was older—not a romance, according to some. WHAT?!?!?! Clearly, the genre has changed as we see a lot of these tropes put to good use now: time-traveling romances, younger man-older woman romances, Scottish romances, historical romances, romances that end on cliffhangers but end with a HEA at the end of the series…I could go on but won’t.

So, as often as Gabaldon gets flack for trying to distance herself from the genre, she is, in fact, an avid lover of romance (at least according to her FAQ page), but she doesn’t want to mislead readers by selling her stories as romances, given the concerns those in the community raised. She prefers to think of her work as genre-blending. Cool!   

Gabaldon is a great example of an author who can appreciate a genre while also wanting to make sure that lovers of the said genre won’t accidentally pick up her book and regret it, thanks to false advertising. She’d rather err on the side of caution than give her readers a false expectation of her work. I also suspect she is recovering from battles with Romance Gatekeeping, a notoriously tough business if you don’t toe the line in just the right way, but that’s just my speculation. She isn’t putting anyone down—fellow authors or readers—and she isn’t trying to position her stories as “above” anyone else’s, unlike the laughable Conte, who clearly knows very little about the market she is trying to position her books and publishing house in.

Whose Fantasy is it Anyway?

Not Like Other Writers is not just a trope that plagues the romance genre. We see the same issue in fantasy.  Many literary-minded fans of George R.R. Martin and Neil Gaiman position those two authors as Not Like Other (Fantasy) Writers, although, to my knowledge, neither author frames themselves in that way, thankfully.  Gaiman writes, if anything, love letters to the fantasy and horror genres he writes in. Martin, meanwhile, is often credited with revolutionizing the fantasy genre by creating a “gritty” and “realistic” story that wasn’t just about magic and dragons. 

Game of Thrones, you see, is Not Like Other Fantasies.

Um. Okay. Sure. It’s true that Martin changed how people think of the genre and got many non-fantasy readers into his books, the HBO series, and the genre, just as Gabaldon got many non-romance readers to appreciate romantic narratives (or at least the prospect of traveling back in time to deflower a nubile Scottish warrior). But Martin is also participating in an important subgenre of fantasy called “Grimdark,” the name of which I think explains itself. Gaiman has likewise made fantasy more mainstream, appreciated by people both in and out of the genre, and contributed much to the canon. The issue is not these writers nor their contribution to their respective genres. It’s that many people, mostly readers of more “literary” aspirations, frame them as Better Than the genres these authors are in loving communication with.  

I can't tell you how many literary fiction types I know that use the words “elevate” or “subvert” when it comes to Martin or Gaiman. After listening to them talk, it becomes clear that few, if any, have a real working knowledge of the horror or fantasy genres to talk about how these authors “subvert” or “transcend” them. In fact, all they are really saying is that they are surprised they liked genre fiction and are finding ways to make it make sense!

This idea of Not Like Other Authors resurfaces again with the likes of J.K. Rowling. Again, many of her fans aren’t necessarily fantasy genre readers. Perhaps she is their gateway into the genre or the only magical series they read. We also can’t doubt that her work has changed the way pop culture sees fantasy in terms of commercial success and how it has shaped the imaginations of generations of children. To many, she is Not Like Other Writers because she INVENTED MAGIC SCHOOL.  

But she didn’t. In fact, she is drawing from a long legacy of magic school fantasies, the most famous and iconic of which would be Jill Murphy’s The Worst Witch. The first book in the series was first published in 1974, long before J.K. Rowling’s series ever emerged. There are many who question the fact that Rowling never once credited Murphy with her inspiration which you can learn more about on the Reel Magic podcast.  Her singularity, her uniqueness, her identity as Not Like Other (Fantasy) Writers is built on the silencing of the many authors who came before her writing about magic schools, dark academia, and general secret magical worlds existing right beside the mundane world. This insistence that we must hold up one author as The First or The Only only leads to the erasure of important genre history that should be celebrated.

As a recent Twitter thread explains to newbie writers, it’s never a good idea for an author to claim that they are The First to write a Never Before Seen Story! All it reveals to readers is that the author has never read a story like that, not that stories like that don’t exist. It also often reveals a complete lack of knowledge of a genre and sometimes, complete distaste for it. Very off-putting to readers.

There are also other issues in dealing with subverting, transforming, or elevating genre tropes. For example, Martin’s gritty take on the high fantasy world has become almost cliche where it was once a hot take on the genre. In fact, there’s a new subgenre writing against Grimdark called Hopepunk. It literally wants to SUBVERT the bleakness of Grimdark stories like Game of Thrones and return to more hopeful fantasy narratives. See? One person’s subversion is another person’s cliche and vice versa.

As Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time series was adapted to screen by Amazon Prime, we have a different type of subversion…the subversion of the subversion if you will. The screen adaptation leans hard into old high fantasy tropes, paying loving homage to worlds of bright colors and in-your-face magic. It’s a classic sword and sorcery tale, not a gritty grey-cast drama that just happens to have dragons.  And yet, for as much as it adheres to traditional genre conventions, it also interestingly subverts some Martin-esque conventions by avoiding torture porn, rape-as-plot-point (also a Gabaldon convention), and gratuitous female nudity.  Instead, The Wheel of Time show reminds us that you can tell a compelling fast-paced series without relying on shock value. Casual viewers might even think that the addition of queer and BIPOC characters in high fantasy fiction is a subversion of a typically white genre…and it is, but that’s Robert Jordan’s doing, as his books, first published in 1990, featured a more inclusive world from the get-go.  

Do you see what I’m getting at here? So often, when specific authors either claim the label of Not Like Other Writers or are given it by fans, there’s a lack of understanding of those authors’ place within the history of the genre they write in.

The (Elevator) Horror!

We have the same issue in horror. I won’t go on much longer here, promise! Just long enough to share this hilarious thread asking horror fans what “elevated horror” means to them. The responses ranged from horror stories that subvert or transcend various genre tropes, make the audience think more, or offer up more than stringing along a bunch of horror cliches. More often than not, however, it was described as a term used to make horror lovers feel bad about their taste for the gothic or to make a really boring or bad piece of horror seem more interesting or smarter or more literary. Oh. And a few people said it had to do with horror stories that took place on elevators. That last response is clearly the winner.

As I read through this thread I realized this poll could work for any genre and the answers would be the same. In fact, the idea of “elevating” a genre is a red flag for any true genre lover. It signals to us that the story is likely catering to a non-genre audience and will make our eyes roll to the back of our heads Exorcist style. Or that we can expect some sort of Loretta Sage-type character, the Non-Believer of the genre or imaginative world where the story is set so that their character arc can act as our gateway into the genre proper. It also signals that the people invoking the Not Like Other Writers trope are, Lord help us, trying to make genre RESPECTABLE—at least in the eyes of literary types.

But the truth is, many of us love genre fiction because it pushes back against the dry tedium of the “respectable” (read: boring) literary world. Genre fiction pops out human experience and emotion with adventure! Love triangles! DRAGONS! Oh, and those skeletons in our proverbial closets? They become literal skeletons or specters as supernatural horror unpacks our psychological fears and exploration of the known.  

We also know that the genres we love to read and write in are vast, only loosely tied together by themes, tropes, and narrative conventions, but that one author’s haunted house story can be incredibly different from another’s. At the end of the day, when it comes to genre fiction, there are only a few absolutes:

There are VERY bad stories with any given genre. 

And there are VERY good stories with any given genre. 

And there are just as many forgettable ones with any given genre.  

And opinions will vary wildly as to which stories fall into each category.  

So, what I’m getting at here, is that even if we are looking at an author who might be Not Like Other Writers, we can’t make those claims without deep contextualization and an understanding of the genres they write in. To an outsider, Martin looks like someone who revolutionized the genre! And he did, in a sense, but so did Jordan, in a different way, and so does any author writing in a genre they sincerely love. Even Larry McMurtry, who famously set out to write a western that subverted the heavily romanticized version of the American West that the genre. is so famous for, ended up writing one of the most iconic books in the canon, Lonesome Dove. He is not above or outside of the classic western, but an important part of that genre. We each make our mark on the genres we write in, and choose what tropes and narratives to subvert and which of them we want to render without transgressions.  

In other words, as any genre-lover knows, it’s impossible to say that any book in a genre really “transcends” it. As Cat Sebastian explains in this Twitter thread, what many people perceive as “genre-transcending” is really an author playing to genre conventions. Sometimes they play with them, subverting and twisting and playing with the ones they want to draw attention to, and lovingly, earnestly writing their favorites without embellishment.  

Just Like Other Writers

So, dear reader, thank you for following me on my rant about authors, stories, and readers who love to invoke the Not Like Other Writers trope in order to elevate themselves at the expense of fellow authors and genre readers.

I’ll let you in on a little secret, something only true connoisseurs of any genre know: We love to discuss the genre, the art of storytelling, and the similarities between authors we love. As writers, we like to let people know who we are like and find a bone-deep joy when a reader compares us to an author we love. I just about swooned when a reviewer of Weep, Woman, Weep compared me to Alice Hoffman and Terri Windling, two of my favorite authors. The fact that this reader saw elements of their writing in my own made me feel part of the witchy-fantasy-fairytale community that I so love to write in. And when that same reader compared me to Francesca Lia Block, well, it introduced me to a new author I’m dying to read. Jim Butcher? Beyond flattered when people compared his Dresden Files series to Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake series. Circling back to The Lost City, many of us watched it because it was like Romancing the Stone. 

And guess what? Most readers, when looking for book recommendations, ask for someone similar to authors they already love or specific tropes or narratives that they want more of.  Elevator pitches are often designed so that you can like your work to Famous Author/Book + Other Famous Author/Book sometimes with the addition of But With or But For or But In. I once auto-purchased a holiday-themed book because it was described as a gay Practical Magic.  Another friend picked up Gaskell’s North & South because it was explained as Pride & Prejudice BUT FOR socialists. Why did I pick up Diana Raybourn’s Veronica Speedwell series? Because I was told it was like Miss Fisher’s Mysteries BUT IN the Victorian Era. Yes, please!

I see this with my creative writing students, too. They come to my classes and writing group because they want to write stories like Supernatural or Harry Potter. Or they want to keep living in the world of Riverdale or Once Upon a Time or a variety of other media, so they create fan fiction set in those worlds. They aren’t trying to be different—they are trying to be a part of the stories that have shaped them most. They are wanting to celebrate and explore those worlds they have found a home in.  

And yes, sometimes they want to subvert certain tropes or rethink a plot point or narrative arc that bugged them about the stories they’re drawing from. Some of them even go on to use those stories to begin building their own worlds and characters inspired by the books that have shaped them. Those stories become something altogether different as they consider the types of stories they want to tell. They search for similarities within the genre they want to write in. They explore these genres with tenderness and love and joy—and critique what needs to be critiqued.  

Those of us who love and write genre fiction are basically always paying homage to those who came before us. We are writing love letters to the stories that made us who we are today. We are having a conversation about stories and genre, not trying to burn down narrative conventions.

In other words, we want to be Just Like Other Writers. 

And just like many genre fans have worked to subvert the trope of Not Like Other Girls in fiction and in life, creating and writing stories of women supporting women, no one stepping on anyone else to get to the proverbial top, I think it time to throw out the Not Like Other Writers trope. Tell us about your work, without trashing anybody else, or explaining why your book is so much better than anything else in the genre o by erasing important genre histories. Better yet, tell us what conversations you’re a part of in your chosen genre. What do you love about it?  What do you want to play with or challenge or embrace or resist? 

While you’re at it, will you help me murder and bury the Not Like Other Writers Trope in the bowels of our literary boneyard on a night when the moon is full and the setting is lush with gothic cliches? Will you dance upon its grave with me and invite all our other writing friends who love genre fiction to celebrate this most sacred of sacrifices? We can indulge in Midnight Margaritas back at my Hobbit hole while examining ancient artifacts which might or might not have magical properties (spoiler alert: they do).

Tell everyone. 

Party starts at midnight.

The Bruja Professor, a witchy take on literature, the occult & pop culture, is the scholarly sister to Enchantment Learning & Living, an inspirational blog celebrating life’s simple pleasures, everyday mysticism, and delectable recipes that are guaranteed to stir the kitchen witch in you.

If you enjoyed what you just read and believe that stories are magic & true magic is in the everyday…or your next good read, subscribe to my newsletter below for regular doses of enchantment.

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My Love Affair with the Urban Fantasy Heroine by Sarah Sproston

I first fell for the urban fantasy heroine in my local Waterstones when I was 17. She’d found her way into the horror section, where I spent most of my time, and it was love at first sight. Her name was Elena and she was a werewolf.  

I didn’t know what urban fantasy was at this point, had never even heard the term, but from this moment I was hooked. 

Elena Michaels was created by author Kelley Armstrong and featured in the first Women of the Otherworld novel, Bitten, released in 2001. In this series I met werewolves, witches, demons, necromancers. And I wanted more. 

More and more of these books started creeping onto the horror shelves. I wandered into another Otherworld, this time Yasmine Galenorn’s, where I met the three half-human, half-Fae D'Artigo sisters. 

Then I met and fell hard for Rachel Morgan. I remember being bought the first book in Kim Harrison’s The Hollows series, being struck by the bright yellow cover, but being convinced this book wasn’t for me after just the first page. But a chapter in? I was addicted. Rachel, the protagonist of the series, and her friends vampire Ivy and pixy Jenks, became my family. I devoured every novel, novella, short story and graphic novel until the series ended in 2014. When Kim Harrison returned to the world of The Hollows last year it really felt like having my family back. 

I went on to meet Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake, Rachel Vincent’s Faythe Sanders, Patricia Briggs’ Mercy Thompson, Carrie Vaughn’s Kitty Norville, Rachel Caine’s Joanne Baldwin. 

Then in 2016, after I’d completed my Master’s in the Gothic, I started thinking about a PhD. I started thinking about researching urban fantasy. And from the very first, the heroine became central to my research. The strong female protagonist had first lured me into the genre and to me she seemed integral to urban fantasy. 

One of the first books I read when starting my research was Joseph Crawford’s The Twilight of the Gothic?: Vampire Fiction and the Rise of the Paranormal Romance 1991-2012 (2014), and he wrote that all urban fantasy heroines are so alike that they ‘swiftly start to blur together’ (p.147). He argues that the urban fantasy heroine is always a ‘tough, assertive, sexually attractive, capable’ young woman with supernatural powers, often hiding her ‘inner vulnerability beneath a veneer of hardness and cynicism’, and that she is a skilled fighter with an ‘ever-escalating body count’ to her name. She will inhabit an ‘urban fantasy world’ that features ‘vampires, werewolves, shape-changers and magicians’. She will work as a detective, bounty hunter or covert government operative, and become ‘regularly entangled in violence and mysteries in the line of duty’. She will have ‘one or more supernatural love interests’, and ‘explicit sex scenes generally follow sooner rather than later’ (p.147). 

Now this sounded just like the urban fantasy heroine I knew and loved. But are they all so alike? 

I can’t agree. For me, each heroine offers something unique. Her supernatural skill, her world and work, her friends and lovers – each offer something different to the story of the heroine. Rather than seeing these similar features as limitations or shortcomings, I believe that these are the traits that truly define the genre. 

However, as well as being considered too alike, the urban fantasy heroine also finds herself criticized for two of her main characteristics – her outer strength and her inner vulnerability. She is at once too masculine, too tough, too violent, yet also weak, submissive and insecure. Some urban fantasy heroines of course fit this stereotype, but I would argue that the best work to subvert it. These offer us heroines who refuse to accept the status quo. She uses her strength and refuses to submit. Gender inequality and sexism, racism and classism are all topics that the best urban fantasy will confront, with the heroine disrupting and challenging the prejudice and hatred present in her world. Her strength and skill allow her to do this, and her inner vulnerability, which is often caused by the prejudice she herself has received, allows her to relate to these injustices. 

So while she may be tough, assertive and capable, she is also determined to stand up for others. She wants to make a difference in her world. She will fight for right, stand up to bullies and triumph over evil. 

And despite her supernatural nature, she is also very human, because she lives in two worlds. A world of monsters mixed up with humans. She learns that humans can be just as monstrous as the monsters. She and many of the monsters that make up her world are just like us. She has a past; she has vulnerabilities. She is scared at times. But she never gives up. 

She has taught me so much: Kelley Armstrong and Elena taught me about refusing ‘to let my past explain my present’ (Stolen). Laurell K. Hamilton and Anita taught me that ‘girls can do anything they want’ (Obsidian Butterfly). Kim Harrison and Rachel taught me to ‘do what you need to do to be happy and deal with the consequences’ (The Witch With No Name). 

She will never be perfect and there will always be criticisms, but I’m so glad I opened that first book, because I think that the urban fantasy heroine can teach us a lot about ourselves. 

Guest Contributor Bio

Sarah Sproston is a fifth year, part-time PhD student at the University of Wolverhampton. She has a BA in English from the University of Wolverhampton and an MA in English Studies: The Gothic from Manchester Metropolitan University. Her current area of research is the urban fantasy genre and her other areas of interest include the Gothic, paranormal romance, fantasy, young adult literature and series fiction. Follow Sarah on Twitter @urbanfantasyphd.

The Bruja Professor, a witchy take on literature, the occult & pop culture, is the scholarly sister to Enchantment Learning & Living, an inspirational blog celebrating life’s simple pleasures, everyday mysticism, and delectable recipes that are guaranteed to stir the kitchen witch in you.

If you enjoyed what you just read and believe that stories are magic & true magic is in the everyday…or your next good read, subscribe to my newsletter below for regular doses of enchantment.

Want even more inspiration? Follow me on Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter. Here’s to a magical life!

Love Potions, Spells & Romantic Conjurings in Pop Culture

It’s Valentine’s Day season so that means we’re thinking about love. True love. True lust. Happily Ever Afters. Happy For Nows. Broken hearts and hopeful gazes. And anyone who has ever suffered through the dumpster fire that is the dating world is also likely thinking about—wishing for?—some sort of magical potion or spell that would make the search for love just a little easier.  Make us feel more confident. Sexier. Attractive—or somehow able to attract the kind of partner we’re looking for. 

It’s the kind of wishful thinking that’s ripe for storytelling. In stories, we get all the fun of indulging in this too-good-to-be-true magical solution to our mundane romantic woes and none of the risks. One carefully cast spell could make the person you’re crushing on fall for you, like in Teen Witch (1989). Side effects include better outfits and epic dance-offs. And a conscience. Eventually, if you are at all a good person, you have to realize that giving your crush the equivalent of a magical roofie probably isn’t the best way to find true love. 

Or maybe, if you’re not quite as wholesome as our little teen witch, that’s exactly what you want to do, as The Love Witch (2016) plays out. It’s less about the man and more about the need to be the center of someone’s world. To take power in being an object of desire. Of course, that too, has its side effects, like spontaneous combustion and downward-spiraling insanity for those hit with our love witch’s magic. That’s the thing with manufactured love: It can never be sustained.  Like a bad come-on line, it never quite works and always leaves you feeling a little sullied.  

Cooking up edible love spells…

Sometimes, though, love spells are accidental.  Sometimes, you accidentally cook all your passionate feelings into your quail with rose sauce, so your whole family (except the icy matriarchy) feels so much overpowering passion that your sister sheds her clothes, causes the outhouse to burst into flames, and runs away with a passing soldier.  Or maybe that’s just the case for the heroine in Like Water for Chocolate, both Laura Esquivel’s book and the film adaptation (both 1992), but which the film so exquisitely depicts. Sometimes we conjure the thing we feel we can’t have and others benefit from that unintentional enchantment. Food is one of the most common forms of spell-work after all, as we take ingredients and our feelings and stir them into something magical.

Sometimes, wishes are small quiet things written under the guise of protecting your heart, like the chocolate witch in Laura Florand’s The Chocolate Kiss (2012) where wishes can be whispered into chocolat chaud and love is as sweet and sensuous as a handcrafted macaron…if you can let your guard down enough to be tempted. Or this love magic is born from desperation and a desire to be simply irresistible to the person you’re crushing on, just like the budding chef in Simply Irresistible (1999). Clearly, food magic is a topic for a whole other essay, but for now, let’s just say that food and love are closely linked.

We also have romantic spells born out of heartfelt pain.  Take little Sally Owens in the 1998 film adaptation of Practical Magic, for example.  Love is unpredictable, something that makes you wild—a terrifying thought for a young girl who wants nothing more than a normal life.  And yet, as we’ll later see, she unconsciously conjures the one wild, unpredictable thing that will make her normal life worth living—and just a little more magical.  

And sometimes, these love spells are about self-love, in the form of sensual body lotions, like in Tasha L. Harrison’s A Taste of Her Own Medicine (2019).  The heroine slathers herself in her own magical concoction not to seduce the man she’s lusting after, but to give herself permission to be a passionate woman and to revel in her own sensuality.  Her love potion, of sorts, is for her and her alone—and leads to fantastic consequences as she learns to open herself to love. That’s what makes it the best kind of love spell.

What you need is Love Potion No. 9…

One of the most iconic and hilarious examples of love spells in popular culture is the 1992 movie Love Potion No. 9, based on the song of the same name.  It’s got it all, from the frothy wish-fulfillment fun of taking dating anxiety off the table and being able to get whoever you want without really having to try.  It’s also got the inevitable downside of anything that seems too good to be true, namely the consent issues inherent in any type of love magic that’s designed to manipulate someone else.  Love Potion No. 9 expertly grapples with these issues in the way only a cheesy 90s movie can—with gusto and some genuine B movie wisdom.

Seriously, what doesn’t this movie have? It’s got magical potions! It’s got romantic fantasies galore! It’s got Sandra Bullock! And strange gypsies! (Yeah, I guess “gypsy” is kind of considered a slur now for the Romani, but that doesn’t stop pop culture from using the gypsy other as a catch-all term for “strange non-white magics” in the same way they use voodoo. But that’s another conversation for another time. Sigh.) But most of all, this movie has geeky scientists willing to experiment on themselves (read use the love potion) for the greater good of humanity! 

It’s FOR SCIENCE. 

Here’s what I love about this movie: It takes the simple premise of wishing there was a magical potion that would make a person more attractive to potential partners, here the opposite sex, since this is a very 90s het-cis movie. All dating anxiety vanishes because you don’t have to be funny, or sexy, or even all that interesting to be attractive as the narrator explains. You just have to open your potion-coated mouth and—voilà!—you’ve cast a love spell on whoever you desire.

The protagonists, Paul (Tate Donovan) and Diane (Sandra Bullock), are also very relatable in their search for love. Diane is in a terrible “situationship” with Gary, which is really more of a string of booty calls.  Paul can't seem to approach women without breaking into hives (thankfully this movie deals with his shyness without sliding into incel territory).  

The plot twist?  These two nerdy scientists are actually perfect for each other if they could just get out of their own way long enough to see it.  Instead, they end up being partners in crime, studying the effects of the love potion Paul got from the gypsy and, frankly, enjoying the new power they have in being desirable with a spray that’s the equivalent of a romantic breath mint. It’s literally that simple: Spray the magic into your mouth, speak, and the lovers will follow. The only catch is that this love potion only lasts four hours.

So this isn’t like Teen Witch or other movies that feature one protagonist using love magic on one person to artificially win their love. Instead, they both indulge in the fantasy of their hearts’ desires but never with each other. In fact, they make it a point never to speak to one another when they are “under the influence” of this magical potion.  It’s perhaps the only rule they adhere to so that neither feels disempowered by the other.  

There’s a fun intimacy that develops between the two since they are the only ones who know the secret to their romantic success…and it really goes to show that all they needed was a little confidence and a playful spirit to get what they really wanted: each other.

But before we can get to their HEA, we have a lot of fun reveling in many a romantic fantasy, the biggest being Diane’s make-over.  In a way that only Sandra Bullock can pull off (okay, and Audrey Hepburn and Anne Hathaway), Diane goes from a frumpy nerd to a sexy and beautiful confident woman. Yeah, it’s a problematic trope but I’m a sucker for it! 

Diane dates a rich man and then a prince, both of whom shower her in gifts, from jewels and fancy dresses to her complete cosmetic makeover. And while there are consumerist underpinnings to these fantasies, there’s also this sense that Diane is, for perhaps the first time, being appreciated, cared for, and adored.  She is literally fulfilling many a stereotypical romance fantasy, right down to getting your tool of an ex to realize just how great you are.

Paul, on the other hand, epitomizes a very human revenge fantasy. He makes a woman who publicly and painfully rejected him do everything she can to make him hers. This scene stays on the right side of funny because the woman was truly awful and went out of her way to publicly humiliate him during their first encounter when he did nothing but be his awkward self. He also doesn’t sleep with her. He just rejects her and does a happy dance in the street afterward. It’s a great scene that keeps him from falling into the creepy nice guy territory. Then he does some typical sex fantasy stuff worthy of any porno—the sorority house orgy being the highlight.

And yet, what all these fantasies do in this movie is highlight that what really matters is genuine affection and love, as we see when the two protagonists get together and fall madly in love simply by being themselves without the help of a potion.  In fact, the real magic this potion works is helping them relax enough to actually talk and get to know one another.

The second half of the movie does a great job of looking at the other side of this gypsy-gifted potion when Gary exacts his revenge on Diane by hitting her with some of the love potion.  After a non-potion-induced magical time with Paul, she suddenly decides to return to Gary and, in fact, plans to marry him. Then Paul gets whammied too when a prostitute and petty criminal hits him with the love potion and strips him of his valuables.  

It’s all fun and games when you’re the one using the love option, but it’s actually kind of scary and awful when someone is using it on you! 

Paul realizes that he never wants to be on the receiving end of that kind of magic—realizes, too, that’s how many of his conquests must feel, and how Diane would feel once she falls out from under Gary’s spell.  

In the end, Paul rescues Diane, they get their love—without the potion. Oh, and the prostitute gets doused in the stuff and has her fun with a hoard of men at her beck and call, a reminder that we can still have fun with this love potion trope while also realizing that the ephemeral thing we want—love—can’t be bottled or commodified.

I wished for you, too…

On the flip side of Love Potion No. 9’s manufactured romance, we have Practical Magic (another Bullock classic). Little Sally’s love spell is perhaps the best example in pop culture of what this bruja would call an ethical love spell.

By this point in the movie, Sally knows her mother died of a broken heart and the women in her family are cursed to be unhappy in love. She’s even witnessed her aunts help more than a few lovesick women with their magic.  Her sister Gillian can’t wait to experience love. Sally, on the other hand, is terrified of what it might do to her.
So she does what any witch would do. She crafts a love spell.  As she collects white rose petals from her balcony and a variety of other ingredients, she lists all the traits of an impossible love in the way only a young girl can. He must be able to ride a horse backward, flip pancakes in the air, be incredibly kind. His favorite shape must be a start. And he should have one green eye and one blue.  

When Gillian exclaims that those traits are impossible, Sally replies, “That’s the point. The guy I dreamed up doesn’t exist. If he doesn't exist, I won’t die of a broken heart.”

But he does exist. 

Later in the movie, we meet Gary (this time a good Gary), who is a sheriff looking for Gillian’s evil—and dead—ex.  He can flip pancakes. He has one green eye and one blue eye.  And his sheriff’s badge is in the shape of a star, so it isn’t a reach to assume he likes the shape a lot. 

Of course, Sally being Sally, she doesn’t trust that their attraction is real. She fears her spell is the only thing making him want to stay, in the same way her aunts bespelled her to fall in love earlier in the film.  She’s also afraid of the curse that will once again break her heart.

This is the point of the film where Gary works a little magic of his own. 

He tells Sally, “Curses only have power when you believe in them and I don’t.” 

As any witch will tell you, belief is half of the battle when it comes to conjuring—or breaking—spells.

And then he goes on to say, “You know what? I wished for you, too.”

*pauses to dry eyes before continuing to type*

That’s a pivotal moment in the movie because it tells Sally—and the viewer—that it’s not just Sally working her magic. Love is its own ungovernable force, its own kind of magic that even the most mundane human can conjure.  So their meeting is pure synchronous magic not just because Sally wished for him but because he wished for her, too.

SWOON.

It’s romantic conjuring at its finest: When you want someone—even if you don’t know who they are yet—that you cast that energy out into the universe and open yourself to the possibility of the thing.  Even young Sally didn’t realize what she was conjuring with her original love spell.  Consciously she might have been trying to protect herself from heartbreak. Unconsciously? She wanted a love so strong—something that seemed so unreal to her at the time—that it would help her break the love curse on the Owen’s women.  No more curse, no more heartbreak.

That’s how the universe works: You wish for what you think you want and it gives you what you need.  Sally’s spell did protect her from future romantic heartbreak not because this dream man didn’t exist, but because Gary and his love helped Sally to break the generational cycle of generational trauma. If that doesn’t make you swoon or sign or even cry a little, then there’s no help for you.

Love is its own kind of magic…

However you look at love magic in pop culture, one thing is for sure: Love is its own kind of magic, one you can’t control, quantify, or force. If this bruja is going to get a little After School Special about it, the best love magic is the kind that comes synchronously, naturally, when we allow ourselves to just be ourselves and let relationships develop out of mutual interest and a willingness to be vulnerable and open.  Also pants feelings! Easier said than done, of course.  All you have to do is Google “dating tips” or open any lifestyle magazine to get 100 tips on how to be sexy or get the one you want—or think you want. I mean, sometimes the person you’re lusting after is more a bunch of projected fantasies in human form than a living breathing person you can actually connect with.  Other times, the one you’re looking for is right in front of you if you’d just be open to it.

Let’s face it, if love were easy, we’d all have it.  Which is what makes love magic so damn tempting.  Sally’s kind of love magic is something we all aspire to (if you’re romantically inclined). But it’s a lot harder to cast and takes longer to be fulfilled.  

As for a potion that can lower your inhibitions and make you desirable to others? 

It’s called alcohol. That, too, only lasts about four hours.

The Bruja Professor, a witchy take on literature, the occult & pop culture, is the scholarly sister to Enchantment Learning & Living, an inspirational blog celebrating life’s simple pleasures, everyday mysticism, and delectable recipes that are guaranteed to stir the kitchen witch in you.

If you enjoyed what you just read and believe that stories are magic & true magic is in the everyday…or your next good read, subscribe to my newsletter below for regular doses of enchantment.

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The Problematic History of "Indian Romances" with Steve Ammidown

Here’s the thing about being a bruja—and a professor for that matter: Sooner or later (the correct answer is sooner), you need to get real about social justice and historical erasure. In a lot of ways, you can’t really call yourself a witch if you aren’t invested in inclusion and equity, and, yes, mason jars. The same goes for being an ethical professor—minus the mason jars.

This means that a lot of the work we do is about undoing historical erasure and figuring out a healthier, happier way forward. In life. In politics. In the arts. For me, that includes finding and teaching narratives that center people with historically marginalized identities working through their stuff and getting happy endings. Enough trauma porn already! It’s time we see ourselves in stories of growth, change, and possibility.

Sometimes, in order to do that, however, we need to look at when inclusion is not done right. There’s a real difference between stories that center BIPOC characters, for example, and stories that do that well, meaning in a way that is authentic to that community and not sanitized for a broader, whiter audience, or that doesn’t fetishize that marginalized identity.

As we celebrate Indigenous history month this November, I want to take a closer look at the problematic history of the Indian romance, a typically western romance featuring an Indigenous man and a white woman, and how the genre is evolving to celebrate actual Indigenous romances written by Indigenous authors.

Steve Ammindown has become a bit of an expert on the Indian romance and the complex and wild history surrounding it. I was so delighted to interview him about this history and how it might represent issues within the genre more generally. As Steve said in the interview, this is not just important genre history, but an important slive of American history that we can learn from. You can read his brief history of Indian romances here.

But before we dive into that conversation, I’d like to share some wonderful Indigenous romances, in case you are as eager as I am to continue diversifying your reading list and celebrate Indigenous voices living in the here and now, not treated as relics of the past. Carolina Ciucci wrote about eight fantastic romance novels by Indigenous authors, and Jessica Avery developed this list of Native American romance novels by Native authors, both on Book Riot. Rebekah Weatherspoon, a fantastic romance author in her own right (seriously, read her work!), created this thread on Indigenous Peoples Day to celebrate Indigenous romance authors. One of my personal farotive books, Love Beyond Body, Space, and Time: An Indgenous LGBT Sci-Fi Anthology, features a serious of hopeful stories exploring centering Indigenous LGTBQ+ identities in a myriad of fantastical settings.

So, who is ready to deep-dive into the fascinating and sometimes cringe-worthy history of Indian romances, how they are representeative of issues within the genre, and how we can read and support Indigenous romance authors living and writint today? Discover all this, and more, in my interview with Steve below.

Guest Contributor Bio

Steve Ammidown is an archivist currently based in Northwest Ohio. In 2019, he was the Romance Writers of America Cathie Linz Librarian of the Year for his work in preserving and sharing the history of the romance genre with scholars and the public. He currently writes about the history of romance fiction on his blog, romancehistory.com.

The Bruja Professor, a witchy take on literature, the occult & pop culture, is the scholarly sister to Enchantment Learning & Living, an inspirational blog celebrating life’s simple pleasures, everyday mysticism, and delectable recipes that are guaranteed to stir the kitchen witch in you.

If you enjoyed what you just read and believe that stories are magic & true magic is in the everyday…or your next good read, subscribe to my newsletter below for regular doses of enchantment.

Want even more inspiration? Follow me on Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter. Here’s to a magical life!

The Origin of the Tarot with Jessica Mason

As witches and pagans, it’s almost a given that we have to spend a lot of time thinking about the past. After all we are engaging with practices and faiths that are thousands of years old, many with roots before recorded history. We’re piecing together ancient stories and arts, trying to fit them into our modern lives and so it feels almost like a given that some of the most common and well-known tools of our trade must come from a source shrouded in mystery and magic. That’s the default conception of the Tarot. The default assumption is that these cards are some sort of ancient mystery, handed down from high priests of Egypt, hidden from the church, and only recently revealed. Or it was invented by Romani fortune-tellers and should not be touched by outside hands.

These stories are compelling and captivating … but they’re wrong. The history of the Tarot isn’t quite as complicated or mysterious, though there are some unknown parts. This divination tool has a far more modern origin, at least compared to ancient Egypt. But the story of the tarot is fascinating nonetheless.

Tarot began as a card game, pure and simple and the story of tarot is the same as the history of playing cards in general. Playing cards themselves began to show up in Europe around the late 14th century. These were hand-painted cards, but they were made of paper and used a lot so not many survived the centuries. However, we know these cards had suits like modern tarot and playing cards. The real mystery is where did those come from?

We actually don’t really know but the most likely explanation and origin is Asia, specifically China where games played with cards and tiles like Mah Jong, were popular. Mah Jong itself had suits and special trump-type tiles that are suspiciously similar to Tarot, so it’s probably a distant ancestor of the cards we used today. The games likely moved along the silk road until they made it to Europe.

The oldest known Tarot deck is the Visconti-Sforza deck from around 1440. This Italian deck was used for the game which game tarot its name, Tarocchi. The major arcana, as we now know them, were inspired by allegorical figures used in festivals and carnivals, and so the symbolism of the journey of a soul through life, death, and resurrection, was already built in. The game was popular in Italy and eventually caught on in France as well. Eventually, decks like the famous Tarot of Marseilles became popular aby by the time that deck was popular, around 1750, Tarot as a divinatory tool was popular.

And that’s not surprising. Divination has always been part of human culture, from the most ancient of times, and humans will use anything to do it. But it won’t always be recorded. By the 18th century Tarot as a divination tool was popular enough that occultist Jean-Baptiste Alliette, or Etteilla, wrote a famous work analyzing the mystic meaning of the Tarot … and falsely connecting it to the ancient Egyptians. This isn’t surprising however given that a lot of secret societies at the time, including the Freemasons, were all about connecting their rites to Egypt since it was the most ancient culture that the majority of folks knew of. Alliette was also the first to name the major and minor arcana.

Occultism itself grew and developed into the 19th and early 20th century, perhaps most famously with the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, which had roots in Freemasonry and Rosicrucianism much like Alliette’s work. Therefore it’s not surprising that the modern Tarot we know best was developed by members of that organization. The deck which made Tarot famous globally is commonly referred to as the “Rider-Waite” but is more accurately called the Rider-Waite-Colman-Smith deck. That’s because while Rider was the publisher and golden dawn member Arthur Waite wrote the guide, it was the amazing Pamela Colman-Smith who created the cards we know so well today and it was she who first put allegorical images to all 78 cards. 

Tarot isn’t ancient Egyptian, but it does tap into an ancient practice, that is, divination itself and using it as a tool to speak to the divine, to the otherworld, or even simply to ourselves. The real history of the Tarot may not be as sexy as “ancient manuscript revealed to a select few” but that’s okay. A tool doesn’t have to be ancient to work and a system doesn’t need to be shrouded in mystery to be magical.

Guest Contributor Bio

Jessica Mason lives near Portland, Oregon with her wife, daughter, and corgi. She is a journalist and author of nonfiction, fiction, and fan fiction. She hosts the Reel Magic podcast and when she’s not writing or being a fangirl, she enjoys gardening, writing other things, music, and witchcraft.

The Bruja Professor, a witchy take on literature, the occult & pop culture, is the scholarly sister to Enchantment Learning & Living, an inspirational blog celebrating life’s simple pleasures, everyday mysticism, and delectable recipes that are guaranteed to stir the kitchen witch in you.

If you enjoyed what you just read and believe that stories are magic & true magic is in the everyday…or your next good read, subscribe to my newsletter below for regular doses of enchantment.

Want even more inspiration? Follow me on Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter. Here’s to a magical life!

Eldritch Gothic with C.M. Rosens...Bonus writing prompts included!

CWs for discussions of darker Gothic tropes, including cults, sibling incest, and mentions of body horror, medical/surgical horror. 

I was invited to write a blog post about the Eldritch and the Gothic, which is such a big topic that I struggled to narrow it down! So here’s a brief outline of what I think of when we use these terms, and how I choose to play with this in my own writing.

‘Eldritch’ means weird, sinister, ghostly. The old Sussex dialect term ‘ellynge’ to mean ‘eerie’ might also be cognate, which is from the Old English word el-lende, ele-lænde; adj., for ‘foreign’ or ‘strange’ (Bosworth-Toller Old English Dictionary), and can also be used to mean ‘uncanny, lonely, solitary’. Some think the word is linked to ‘elf’, and reflects the fear of Otherworldly spirits, evoking images of spectral mists, the lure of inexplicable music in the night, and the dire warnings of certain death to those who harm or insult these uncanny creatures.

It certainly has come to Otherworld connotations, and in a cosmic horror context has come to be associated with ‘Eldritch Gods’, beings beyond human imagination and understanding. Such beings are typically insectoid, or appear to come from the Deep Sea, or sometimes both. They generally relate in some way to H. P. Lovecraft’s mythos, and the concept of an Eldritch Abomination is now understood in the following way (at least, according to TV Tropes):

The Eldritch Abomination is a type of creature defined by its disregard for the natural laws of the universe as we understand them. They are grotesque mockeries of reality beyond comprehension whose disturbing otherness cannot be encompassed in any mortal tongue. ... Reality itself warps around them.

It is fairly obvious why Weird fiction – a subgenre that has almost as much debate around its scope and development as Gothic fiction does – overlaps with the Gothic and often uses the same kinds of tropes and themes. Weird fiction was, naturally, an offshoot of Gothic fiction to begin with, in much the same way that the wide umbrella of ‘Horror’ owes its many lives to the Horror Gothic and Terror Gothic novels.

Something ‘eldritch’ is meant to inspire fear, while the Gothic doesn’t always have to do that. Something can be Gothic but its effect could be horror (in the sense of deep disgust, discomfort, and shock) rather than fear or terror – something does not have to be frightening in order to horrify you. The Gothic can be a vibe, an aesthetic, and carry a sense of familiarity – the Addams Family are undoubtedly a Gothic franchise, but they play with both bathos (where the tone lapses from the sublime and highbrow to the trivial or ridiculous, often with comedic effect) and pathos (evoking pity or sadness). The Gothic can be hilarious to make a point – dark humour can be deployed to throw the horrific things into stark contrast, let the reader catch their breath at a crucial moment, or to force the reader into complicity with the horror by making laugh.

So what happens when you blend the eldritch with the Gothic as vehicles for themes and tropes that have been done to death?

Some of the things I like to play with (hopefully you will come up with more)…

1. The Eldritch Abomination as a metaphor (in my case, metaphors for class struggles, and the monstrous beings people can become when they engage in particular modes of behaviour and ideologies relating to class and status). I like to play with ‘the eldritch horror among us’ (like Lovecraft’s THE SHADOW OVER INNSMOUTH or THE DUNWICH HORROR), but have them blending with the mundane. The site of horror is not necessarily the weirdness of the monstrosity, it’s the toxic cycles of abuse they perpetuate, with their upwardly-mobile middle-class aspirations at the root of that behaviour. 

2. Real or Not? I enjoy playing with tropes where the protagonist questions their reality. In THE CROWS, the only person who was genuinely haunted by the (completely unanswered) question of ‘is this supernatural or not?’ was the Gothic Horror Monster figure, who can’t figure out if his taxidermy creation is alive in its own way, or if that’s a figment of his imagination, a hangover from his childhood where he was an abused and neglected creative child. This is a question that haunts him through the novel and acts as a reminder that even as he experiences a lot of destabilisation of his world and worldview, his world was never stable to begin with. 

3. The Gothic Horror Monster/Antihero. In my novels, the soothsayer figure is also an Eldritch Horror who regurgitates tendrils like carnivorous air-roots from a mouth at the back of his skull, the lips of which look like scar tissue. In his human form, he can see the future and conducts blood sacrifice and entrail-readings in the manner of an Etruscan or Ancient Roman haruspex, is self-taught and fluent in Old English, and does bone readings. He doesn’t think twice about human sacrifice, and believes he is destined to ascend to Eldritch Godhood. He’s also 5’5” in his human form, is chronically lonely with disordered eating issues, has depression and social anxiety, dresses in a tracksuit and grey hoodie complete with arcane tattoo sleeves and gold signet rings, is on the aromantic and asexual spectrums and so has no interest in either being the love interest or being a sexual aggressor, and is undersocialised to the point that he struggles to appropriately gauge boundaries and express his emotions. I also set him against the very human toxic abusive ex-boyfriend, who is more of an active threat to the main character than he is. 

There are so many other tropes I like to play with too - THE CROWS has Gothic tropes as chapter titles - and in making the eldritch (in the sense of Eldritch Horror/Cosmic Horror, or as eerie, strange, uncanny) the focus of a Gothic tale, rather than an element within it, you can do a lot more fun things with staples of the genre! Particularly as what’s now considered ‘uncanny’ or ‘strange’ is different from the Gothic novels of the past, and it is possible for different people from all kinds of underrepresented backgrounds/identities to take control of these elements and make them their own. 

Writing Prompts

If you’ve been inspired to try writing something with a Gothic aesthetic and eldritch elements, here are some ideas! You could brainstorm the tropes you get to see how they might be updated for a modern setting and readership, but also how they can be problematic and ways to avoid this or subvert this. 

You can spin the wheel linked here to see what you get (simply click on the image to get started). If you want to pair up your elements (X + Y) you can uncheck the box next to the one you landed on first (DON’T click the red cross, that deletes it!) and spin again to get a different result. If you find any options unchecked for your first go, make sure you add them all back in!

Liminal Spaces: if you land on this, remember that liminal spaces are spaces of transition from one state of being to another or from one place to another, they are not inherently weird or eerie. Your task here is to think about how to make it so. For example, something as simple as an open window could be classed as a liminal space, with the windowsill becoming both inside and outside. Cats often occupy liminal spaces like this! If you’re thinking in terms of the Gothic, however, a liminal space might be a crossroads or a graveyard. Who or what occupies such a space and why are they there? What happens when they travel through it, or get stuck? Is this physical or metaphorical, or both? How might this work as an eldritch (strange, eerie, uncanny) element? How might it work as a Gothic setting or aesthetic? 

Uncanny Valley: if you land on this, you might immediately think ‘What has SciFi got to do with the Gothic or Eldritch?’ If you’re unfamiliar with the term, the ‘uncanny valley’ is the hypothesised relationship between an image of a person and how closely it resembles a human being WHEN IT IS KNOWN NOT TO BE, and the strength of the [negative] emotional reaction to it. Where the line on the hypothetical graph dips further down to the “more revulsion” axis before it starts to rise again, all images that inspire those levels of revulsion dwell in the ‘uncanny valley’. In this case, I’m using this label as a shorthand for a situation where the human protagonist is faced with something they know isn’t human, but very closely resembles one, and the emotional reaction is visceral and negative. It doesn’t have to be robotic or computer-related here, you can bend and reshape it however you like, but try to figure out how to make it Gothic! (Sci-Fi can be Gothic too, of course - look at Alien as the obvious example!)

Human-Passing: Unlike ‘uncanny valley’, this is where a character is believed to be human but they are not. Or - not quite. Perhaps there’s something very subtle about them, perhaps they have a second form, perhaps they turn out to be something very different and Other, or perhaps they never really existed at all. But when the protagonist and/or the reader meets them, they pass as human, and the journey of discovering they are not is the one the reader is set on. 

The Unexplained: This is an element in the story which might never be explained to the reader, because it’s never explained to the protagonist. Something that defies explanation, that is never resolved, that leaves the reader with a sense of being haunted by the mystery after they have finished the tale itself. Perhaps a creeping, eerie feeling that the tale itself is eldritch. 

Mysterious Cult: A staple of the German tradition of Gothic fiction, featured in the Shudder novels (Schauerroman) of the late eighteenth century, cults are also a staple of Weird Fiction, a spin-off of the Gothic but also its own, equally hard to define, genre. Whether the cult was something from the past worshipping beings that came from … Elsewhere, (could be aliens, could be elves, who knows), or whether it’s more of an intimate family affair, the Mysterious Cult can solidify the protagonist’s position as an outsider. Films like Society (1989) play with a lot of Gothic tropes but not the aesthetic, setting it in Affluent American Suburbia and turn it into a metaphor for capitalism and corruption in the (very white) inward-looking, inward-loving, homogenous suburban elite. There’s a lot you can do with this. 

Tainted Bloodline: This is the most obviously problematic storyline, and it was used in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to explore anxieties around hereditary mental health conditions and racial ideologies. H. P. Lovecraft was particularly prone to this one, with two of the most obvious examples being The Shadow Over Innsmouth and The Dunwich Horror. Edgar Allan Poe explored these themes too, particularly in The Fall of the House of Usher. It’s a coded reason behind the madness of Bertha Mason in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, since she’s from Jamaica and colonial British and European families who had been there since the 1600s were suspected of having ‘tainted’ blood through their ‘relations’ with their slaves. Heathcliff’s origins are mysterious but he is explicitly a Romani child, and the novel implies that this is the reason for his early wildness as a child and then aggressive and abusive behaviour as an adult in Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights: he never ‘belongs’ to society, and becomes monstrous when set against it. 

Moving away from this to anxieties around ‘changing DNA’ or forced experiments and/or procedures which can create mutated or monstrous offspring, extreme body horror novels, like Geek Love by Katherine Dunn, play with this in terms of genetic mutations, sometimes caused by radiation poisoning (sometimes on purpose, in grotesque experiments), and focus on more modern anxieties around nuclear technology, nuclear warfare, medical experimentation, and cosmetic surgery or other kinds of surgical horror. Arguably, Arthur Machen’s classic, The Great God Pan, falls under this kind of category, as the female antagonist is the result of a doctor’s cruel experiments upon his wife’s brain. 

Other kinds of tales that fall under this are stories that deal with this involve (often tragic) histories of sibling incest (so many of these, but the Irish film The Lodgers (2017) is one example, as is Crimson Peak (2015)), bestiality or offspring of a monster (La Bête, a 1975 French erotic horror film written, edited, and directed by Walerian Borowczyk, banned in most countries after its release). With this one, you might want to not use it but consider if it is possible to move away from these problematic usages, and dig into how it can be used to express other anxieties, or if you do use it in a fiction prompt, think how it can be subverted to reimagine other, potentially better ways of being.

Tentacles: A tongue-in-cheek one to end on, but take this to mean a symbol of something that does not belong in our reality, that warps reality to shape itself, that may have recognisable components but is not a whole that can be easily described or comprehended. It doesn’t have to be a cosmic horror scale story. Tentacles can show up in unexpected and mundane places, warping our perception of that place and turning everything we thought we knew upside down. See what you can come up with. 
Guest Contributor Bio

C.M. Rosens (she/her) is a dark fiction author with an academic alter-ego, podcaster, and blogger. if you’d like to know more about her work, you can find her links (including Newsletter, Website and Podcast) here: cmrosens.carrd.co.  

The Bruja Professor, a witchy take on literature, the occult & pop culture, is the scholarly sister to Enchantment Learning & Living, an inspirational blog celebrating life’s simple pleasures, everyday mysticism, and delectable recipes that are guaranteed to stir the kitchen witch in you.

If you enjoyed what you just read and believe that stories are magic & true magic is in the everyday…or your next good read, subscribe to my newsletter below for regular doses of enchantment.

Want even more inspiration? Follow me on Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter. Here’s to a magical life!

The Food of Witchcraft in Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby, with A Gothic Cookbook’s Alessandra Pino

“They had the coffee and cake in the kitchen, Mrs. Castevet refusing to let Rosemary disturb the living-room on her account. ‘Listen, Rosemary,’ she said, swallowing cake and coffee at once, ‘I’ve got a two-inch-thick sirloin steak sitting defrosting right this minute […] Why don’t you and Guy come over and have supper with us tonight, what do you say?’”  ~ Rosemary’s Baby, Part One, Chapter Four

Isn’t this inviting? How often does food, either an abundance or lack thereof, mark the beginning of an innocent hero or heroine’s journey to cross over to the dark side? 

Time and time again at the heart of the Gothic lies an unsuspecting female protagonist, beckoning readers to follow her on an odyssey of malevolence, betrayal and hardship. Such is the story of Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby (1967), in which a young woman is tricked, abused and manipulated into bearing a terrible secret. A masterpiece of modern Gothic literature, this novel exemplifies the most intimate fears of betrayal, contamination of the body and oppression by potent forces of evil. And food guides us, giving us the crumbs to follow, revealing what lurks in the shadows of neighbourly politeness and social pleasantry.

It's 1965, and newlyweds Rosemary and Guy Woodhouse have taken a beautiful apartment at the Bramford in a deal that is too good to be true. It’s not like they weren’t warned though; their old friend Hutch tells them over lunch that the building was also ‘where the Trench sisters performed their little dietary experiments…’ (Part One, Chapter Two). The Trench sisters were two Victorian cannibals who cooked and ate young children, and are now said to haunt the apartment building, where witchcraft is rife. This unsavoury piece of information does cause Rosemary to hesitate over her melon dish starter, but it doesn’t discourage her from wanting to move into the new place, driven by the desire to start a family with Guy, perhaps due to not having strong ties to her own.  

The Woodhouses' eccentric old neighbours, Roman and Minnie Castevet, make themselves a daily feature in the couple's lives soon after they move in, and food is their point of entry. Not-so-tasty offerings become a recurring excuse to worm their way in, and the door is opened to them.  After all, why wouldn’t Rosemary trust a friendly face and dishes of homemade food? And yet, Rosemary’s thoughts about her own husband set the tone for all the horror to come: ‘He was an actor; could anyone know when an actor was true and not acting?’ (Part One, Chapter Nine). Guy, arguably her real enemy, right beside her all along, arouses that sense of the Uncanny in the reader: that which is unfamiliar in the familiar. But it is a dessert – the chocolate mousse Minnie brings straight to her door in a seemingly sweet gesture – that gives us an insight into exactly how Guy controls Rosemary and ultimately betrays her trust:

‘The mousse was excellent, but it had a chalky undertaste that reminded Rosemary of blackboards and grade school. Guy tried but could find no ‘undertaste’ at all, chalky or otherwise. Rosemary put her spoon down after two swallows. Guy said, ‘Aren’t you going to finish it? That’s silly honey; there’s no ‘undertaste […] eat it.’” (Part One, Chapter Eight). 

Guy, initially a struggling actor, gains popularity and abandons Rosemary, leaving her to take refuge in the company of the other women in the apartment block. These women gather in domestic areas of the home like the kitchen, and a distinction is drawn between men and women, husbands and wives. The kitchen, part of the female domestic sphere, is typically a site of trust and as such the food produced is, by default, considered nutritious by Rosemary initially. This renders her open and vulnerable to unspeakable monstrosities – and the insidious witchcraft of her neighbours, who cast their spells through food.

The success of Rosemary’s Baby shows how we are still haunted and fascinated by ideas about witchcraft, inherited from previous centuries. Modern culture has its own use for witches now, particularly in expressing the role of women in society. Minnie’s ‘miniature greenhouse in the kitchen’ (Part One, Chapter Three), for everyone to see, is evil hiding in plain sight. This is a recurring theme in the other novels which feature in A Gothic Cookbook; from Jane Eyre to Rebecca the real dangers are in these women’s own home, often right beside them.

About A Gothic Cookbook

This fantastic cookbook, illustrated by Lee Henry, and written by Ella Buchan and Alessandra Pino, has 13 chapters, each focusing on a different Gothic novel or short story, with a blend of literary discussion, recipes and hand-drawn images. Stories covered include Rosemary’s Baby, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, and Toni Morrison’s Beloved.

The cookbook is signed with crowdfunding publishers Unbound and you can help make it a cloth-bound reality by pledging for a copy, along with original artwork and other merchandise, here.

You can also follow them on Twitter and Instagram.

I can’t wait to get my copy!

Guest Contributor Bio

Alessandra Pino is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Westminster, studying Gothic literature and anxiety with roots in food. She is co-writing A Gothic Cookbook, a celebration of food in Gothic literature, with food journalist Ella Buchan. Follow Alessandra on Twitter at @foodforflo.

The Bruja Professor, a witchy take on literature, the occult & pop culture, is the scholarly sister to Enchantment Learning & Living, an inspirational blog celebrating life’s simple pleasures, everyday mysticism, and delectable recipes that are guaranteed to stir the kitchen witch in you.

If you enjoyed what you just read and believe that stories are magic & true magic is in the everyday…or your next good read, subscribe to my newsletter below for regular doses of enchantment.

Want even more inspiration? Follow me on Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter. Here’s to a magical life!

Finding Fairies for Fiction...& Life! with Morgan Daimler

Fairies are seeing something of a renaissance in fiction particularly genres like urban fantasy and paranormal romance with books including characters, sometimes even protagonists, based on fairy folklore becoming increasingly common over the last few decades. The fairies of fiction vary greatly with some staying fairly close to folklore and others resembling the fairies of folk belief only in the most superficial ways. There are of course many reasons for this but one can be the difficulty authors may have in accessing – or even being aware of – good resources on fairies in folklore. These resources can be a key thing for those who want their fictional fairies to be as close to the fairies of folklore as possible.

The fairies of older literature – even material like Spenser’s Faerie Queene which was a political allegory – usually adhered closely to the fairies of folk belief because they were presented to an audience that had very specific expectations rooted in those beliefs. The fairies of today’s fiction however more often than not come from people without a strong grounding in a living belief system that includes fairies and so reflect the author’s individual opinions or understanding gathered from reading other modern worlds of fiction rather than folklore.

For those that are interested in crafting stories that are based on or adhere more closely to folk beliefs about fairies, the best option is to study the subject and, to do that, I’d like to suggest some possible sources:

Katherine Briggs

One of the main and most reliable go-to’s for fairy information is undoubtedly the esteemed folklorist Katherine Briggs who has multiple books on both aspects of fairylore as well as discussing individual fairies. Her work can be hard to find, as most was printed originally more than 40 years ago, but is worth the effort. Briggs’ A Dictionary of Fairies is a particularly useful reference for writers. 

John Kruse

One of the best present-day resources to look to for all things British fairies is author and blogger John Kruse. He currently has a variety of books on fairies generally as well as specific aspects of fairy belief. 

Lizanne Henderson

An excellent source to look to for Scottish fairies, in particular, is Lizanne Henderson who has both a dissertation ‘The Guid Neighbours: Fairy Belief in Early Modern Scotland’ as well as a book ‘Scottish Fairy Beliefs’ (co-written with Edward Cowan) that offer an in-depth look at fairy beliefs across Scotland.

Claude Lecouteux

Writing about European fairies generally and including French and German folklore, Lecouteux offers an overview of material that is less often covered in other sources. He writes in French but many of his books have been translated into English. 

Simon Young

Another great resource on English fairies is Dr. Simon Young who has written a wide range of articles on specific fairies, such as Boggarts, as well as general fairylore including a discussion of when and how fairies gained wings in the popular imagination. His work can be found shared on Academia.

Eddie Lenihan

A renowned Irish storyteller, Eddie Lenihan has a Youtube channel as well as a book ‘Meeting the Othercrowd’ (with Carolyn Green) where people can learn more about Irish fairies. 

National Folklore Collection UCD Digitization Project

Duchas.ie is a site that offers a digitized collection of folklore recorded through a school project in the early 20th century. While not all the material is in English quite a bit is and the search function allows specific types of Irish fairies to be researched as well as fairies more generally in Irish belief. 

The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns, and Fairies

This book was written by rev, Robert Kirk in 1691, available in multiple different editions with various editors. Kirk’s humble book may be one of the most well-known resources on fairy beliefs, particularly Scottish, and offers a great quick way to understand the broad strokes of the folk beliefs. 

Of course, a writer doesn’t necessarily need to pull from all of these sources and, for fairies in a specific culture that isn’t touched on here, such as Welsh or Manx, you would want to seek out the best options but this is a good place to start. For people who want to insert as much folklore as possible into their fiction, the ideal approach is to use one or more of these resources to understand who and what folkloric fairies are. This can add a depth and nuance to these depictions that can otherwise be lacking and help provide a context for fantastical aspects in stories. 

Guest Contributor Bio

Morgan Daimler writes about Irish myth and magical practices, fairies, and related subjects. Their writing has appeared in a variety of magazines and anthologies including Pagan Dawn and Naming the Goddess. They have presented papers on the intersection of fairies and fiction for Ohio State University’s ‘Fairies and the Fantastic’ conference as well as the ‘Ill Met By Moonlight’ conference. Morgan is also the author of a variety of fiction and non-fiction books including the urban fantasy/paranormal romance series Between the Worlds, and through Moon Books a selection including bestsellers Fairy Witchcraft, Fairies, Pagan Portals: The Morrigan, and Pagan Portals: Brigid.

The Bruja Professor, a witchy take on literature, the occult & pop culture, is the scholarly sister to Enchantment Learning & Living, an inspirational blog celebrating life’s simple pleasures, everyday mysticism, and delectable recipes that are guaranteed to stir the kitchen witch in you.

If you enjoyed what you just read and believe that stories are magic & true magic is in the everyday…or your next good read, subscribe to my newsletter below for regular doses of enchantment.

Want even more inspiration? Follow me on Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter. Here’s to a magical life!

The Literary Figure of The Rake with Dr. Angela Toscano

Who doesn’t love a bad boy? Okay, plenty of people! But there’s no denying that the archetype of the rake—both in history and literature—is one that has captured the heart (and loins) of popular culture. Me? While I love a good fake rake like the kind that finds his home in historical romances, I tend to find that the real rakes of yore are kind of terrifying for their entitlement and lack of feeling. And, real talk, you know those rakes—real or fake—likely have mommy issues and venereal disease but that’s a topic for another time!

In any case, rakes are beloved because they represent a rejection of social norms. They’re just above all. Literally. They have the class, money, and prestige to do whatever they want and get away with it. That’s also why the figure of the rake isn’t quite everyone’s cup of tea. Like the bad boy billionaire in romance (aka the rake reincarnated), the rake also represents typically white male entitlement and privilege, along with a real sense that other bodies—typically female bodies—are commodities for his amusement. So on the one hand, we have the titillating fantasy of the freedoms wealth and position can buy a person and on the other, we have the terrifying realities of the freedoms wealth and position can buy a person. Of course, we also have everything in between, most notably fake rakes in historical romances that are charming, good at the sexy stuff, and secretly harboring a heart of gold.

The history of the rake is, in many ways, the history of the romance novel, and I can think of no better scholar to unpack this figure than Dr. Angela Toscano. She walks us through the origin of the rake in the 1600s to the modern manifestations of the character in romance novels. Prepare yourself for a lecture on drinking, gambling, whoring, and general rakish behavior! Oh, and politics, royal beheadings, religion…you know, all the low-stakes first date topics. Enjoy!

Guest Contributor Bio

Dr. Angela Toscano specializes in the long history of the romance, from the Byzantine period to the present. She received her doctorate from the University of Iowa, specializing in early modern fiction. Currently, she is the book review editor for the Journal of Popular Romance Studies. Most recently, her chapter on the Gothic was published in the Routledge Companion to Popular Romance Fiction. Her lectures, writings, and other work can be found on her website: angelartoscano.com and on Twitter at @lazaraspaste.

The Bruja Professor, a witchy take on literature, the occult & pop culture, is the scholarly sister to Enchantment Learning & Living, an inspirational blog celebrating life’s simple pleasures, everyday mysticism, and delectable recipes that are guaranteed to stir the kitchen witch in you.

If you enjoyed what you just read and believe that stories are magic & true magic is in the everyday…or your next good read, subscribe to my newsletter below for regular doses of enchantment.

Want even more inspiration? Follow me on Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter. Here’s to a magical life!

Gone with the Wind, Banned Books Week & Uncomfortable Histories

A few years ago, I started a project at my primary teaching institution centered on Banned Books Week. I invited my creative writing group, students in my classes, and colleagues to post pictures of themselves reading banned books. I then started taking photos of myself reading banned books to help generate conversations about these hidden histories. Some of the photos were thoughtful, some funny. Most of them included stories about how a specific book shaped me, in good ways or bad, or explained why even deeply problematic books need to be read and understood so we don’t perpetuate trauma, either intentionally or unintentionally. Sometimes it was just because the reason a book was banned was, frankly, bananas. 

I provided context to each book: Why was it banned? How ethical were the reasons for banning that book? While I’m against banning books in general, I do think there is a real difference between wanting to ban Lord of the Rings because it promotes tobacco use and wanting to ban Huckleberry Finn for its racial stereotypes and questions about the text’s inherent racism.  I don’t think either should be banned, but I do understand why questions of racism in Mark Twain’s book need to be taken seriously, and framed and addressed in a way that is more meaningful than what a basic American lit class typically offers.

This project was meant to get communities to think beyond the simplistic and reductive ways history and literature are presented in popular culture. We also explored how Banned Books Week is likewise a more complicated event than we’d like to think (you can read more about why here). I wanted to move the conversation of difficult texts away from binary extremes like “book banning is always bad” versus “banning books is necessary to protect the tender souls of our children.” Instead, we explored how banning books can be another way of sweeping awkward conversations and uncomfortable legacies under the table.

What we should be doing, instead of banning things that make us uncomfortable or challenge our understanding of the world, is to create a safe, joyful space to explore these texts and the culture of eraser surrounding them so we can be more informed, conscious consumers of stories, histories, and media in general.  Together, my students and I laughed at the stories we loved and the bonkers reasons they were banned—and cringed at the hidden histories behind some beloved stories, while also gently exploring what those revelations meant to use now, how they might reshape our relationship to those stories.  We learned, we laughed, we had fun exploring these issues without judgment.

I was more interested, in other words, in thinking about why something was banned, what it told us about the text, the social and historical context, and our own relationships to that information than any sense of righteous morality surrounding the issue meant to shame people for what they did or didn’t love or what they knew or didn’t know about a given book.  

Gone with the Context

At one point, I tried to make this project go beyond my given campus and make it a community-wide event.  We got official college photographers involved and had a formal photoshoot.  They took pictures of me, students, and employees gathered around chatting and smiling while holding banned books from the campus library. It looked like we were having a good time! And we were! We enjoyed a lively conversation about how deeply uncomfortable it can be to look at the hidden histories of most famous books. But it also looked like we were endorsing the content of all the books we were reading—which ended up being a huge problem.

The pictures were originally posted to the institution’s social media accounts with simple phrases that celebrated Banned Books Week without any of the context about why it’s important to read banned books and why you don’t have to agree with or like the content of something in order to meaningfully engage with it.  I later decided, because of this framing issue, that I didn’t want to make my Banned Books Week celebration bigger than what I could comfortably manage on my own, so as to better control the messaging (reading doesn’t not equal endorsement).

A year or so later, an image of me from that photoshoot resurfaced on my institution’s social media accounts. It featured me smiling broadly while holding a copy of Gone with the Wind. You can see where this is going. A random photo made it look like I was celebrating a racist book.

This image of me was used out of context and without my permission to promote, of all things, National Poetry Month in the spring of 2021 (but that’s another story entirely).  Within the hour of that image being posted (and subsequently removed), I found myself in the unenviable position of having to explain myself and my beliefs for something that didn’t actually have anything to do with me, simply because it was my face in the photo.  

Scandal ensued. I wrote up a response about the actual context of this image and also posted a joking/not joking example of how easy it is to take images out of context. There were meetings. There were letters written and responded to. I was promised that those photos would never see the light again without my explicit permission (so, like, never).  The institution apologized and published an interview with me so I could showcase what I actually stand for.  The social media department promised to make important changes, including removing old images from their stockpile and tightening up their consent-form policy, not to mention developing better social media presentations and framing, along with a tighter editorial process that would have stopped that random image from being posted in the first place.  

The whole situation was stressful, particularly in the middle of a pandemic when racial violence and hate crimes regularly made front-page news and higher ed institutions were having to deal with the very real fact that they aren’t as inclusive or progressive as they like to think they are. That’s not to say racial inequality didn’t exist in these extremes before, by the way—the pandemic just made it more visible, particularly for (white) people who hadn't had to directly confront the depth of our country’s racism. 

It was also happening at a time when I was feeling particularly burned out, undervalued, and questioning whether it was worth pursuing my more radical projects, like decolonizing our outdated literature classes, when there was so little systemic support. Everything was an uphill battle. The photo debacle was like a final slap in the face, not just to me, but to the institution’s BIPOC community more generally.  

But I stand by what I told the people involved in that situation as we worked to resolve it: I get it, mistakes happen, what I care about is what we do moving forward. How can we use this situation to do better in the future? Nobody in this world is perfect. Bureaucracies complicate things even more. But if we’re going to grow together as a community, we need to leave room for productive conversations that lead to meaningful, concrete change when these things happen.  

Uncomfortable Personal Histories 

Skip forward six months, to September 2021. A week before the next National Banned Books Week, wondering if I should even bother trying to resurrect this celebration. Do I have the energy? Do I even care? Some of the joy of this project has been lost because of that situation.  

I did what I always do in these situations and went to my bookshelf for comfort and advice. I like to pick random books, flip open and page, and see what synchronous wisdom comes to me by way of the written word.  I picked up my first book, Everyday Enchantments, probably because I knew my second book from that publisher would be out in a week. So much had changed for me in the early years of my writing that it's often a comfort to look back and see how far I’ve come.

I flipped open the book to the essay called “A Trip to the Bookstore.” It was a soothing read about the many times I’ve gone into a used bookstore for wisdom, advice, and comfort of books. It focused on one particular outing where I found a stash of wonderfully outrageous pulp books which I collect simply for their covers and over-the-top plots (again, not an endorsement of all the content within those books). 

I was finishing up a section on one of my favorite literary weaknesses, cookbooks based on famous stories, like The Nero Wolf Cookbook, based on Rex Stout’s iconic sleuth, when I saw it: Gone with the Wind. My heart stopped. I reread the passage a few times, then paused to think about what I’d stumbled upon.  

It read, in reference to a stash of epic pulp books I’d found, “Yes, you must have these. And the Gone with the Wind Cookbook, too, for much the same reasons as you need your swashbuckling pair pulp adventure, for the cover and the idea more than the story or a recipe for classic Southern grits” (DeBlassie 113).

Well, now.  That was a doozy of a sentence.  And a whole host of feelings ran through me the moment I read it, ranging from fuuuuuuuuucccckkkkk to oh, the irony…

I couldn’t believe I wrote that.  I still can’t.  While it’s not necessarily a ringing endorsement of a racist book (I focus on “the cover and the idea more than the story”), I still have to reckon with the fact that intent—celebrating pulp and genre fiction—don’t necessarily matter when it comes to how something lands to readers.  In other words, when I wrote that line all those years ago, I wasn’t thinking about the racism of Gone with the Wind. I was thinking about the iconic romance, which is pretty much all I knew about the book at the time.  But that doesn’t mean that what I wrote can’t still be read as problematic.

Looking back, I find it hugely ironic that this book—one I’d spent very little time thinking about up until last spring—ended up making it into my first book and that I didn’t even register that fact until after I’d had to publicly and explicitly distance myself from that story. Never in a million years would I have thought to find a line like that in one of my books.  It was double surprising—and this is perhaps beside the point—because I wasn’t ever a huge fan of Gone with the Wind.

Now here’s the other interesting thing: I’d completely forgotten about that line. Completely forgotten that I’d ever included that book in that essay. Why would I? I purchased the book, stuck it in my cookbook collection, and never looked at it again until I Marie Kondo-d my bookshelves a few years back, getting rid of old graduate school dust-collectors, books that I hated, books I’d never read, and, sometimes, books that had bad memories, or that with which I had no real relationship. The Gone with the Wind Cookbook was one of those books. 

Cooking up Trouble

I remember the day I bought that book years ago, as it marked a turning point, a small moment where I started to think about what I could do with my doctorate (it was, in fact, a sign that I was recovering and beginning to move on from the terrors of graduate school). I remember picking up that cookbook because I liked to collect pulp fiction, literary cookbooks, and (in)famous, if problematic stories, including books like The Sheik, an iconic and deeply racist and othering romance that is, nevertheless, an important artifact in the history of the romance novel—and one that was also made into a movie like Gone with the Wind.

This was before I’d started seriously reading romance or digging deeply into pop culture criticism or undoing historical erasure central to our limited understanding of the literary canon. But I was getting there—curious about history, particularly of the history of genre fiction, that is consistently erased, hidden, and otherwise diminished in the face of High Art and Literary Fiction. I was also getting more curious about how we distance ourselves from or outright ignore uncomfortable histories so we don’t ever directly have to face them. 

I was likewise pushing back hard against an academic elitism that had been telling me for the past ten years what I was and wasn’t allowed to like, what I was and wasn’t allowed to take seriously, what I could and couldn’t enjoy, what thoughts were and weren't correct to have. That meant that I was also being very flip about things I didn’t know enough about like Gone with the Wind, a book which I’d never read, and a movie I’d only sort of remembered from my youth. I had a vague awareness that there were problems with the book and the movie based on it, in the same way that stories only centering white Southerners always made me vaguely uncomfortable. But I didn’t explore that discomfort until later.  

At that time, I knew it as the sweeping technicolor romance, the kind of thing that would make Serious Academics roll their eyes. So naturally, in my resistance to that culture, I ran headlong in the other direction, for better or worse—realistically, for better and worse.

Still, it was one of the first books to go in my massive book-cleanse. By that time, I’d learned more about its racist context, thanks to my Banned Books Week project, and decided I didn’t want that as part of my literary cookbook collection. To be clear: I’m not a saint. I’ve kept plenty of problematic books. I have my H.P. Lovecraft books and my Anais Nin collection, my old pulp westerns, and more bodice rippers than polite society is likely comfortable with.  

I enjoyed these books—still do—for their pulp covers (the idea of the thing, as I said in Everyday Enchantments) and, sometimes, their stories.  But I didn’t ever think they weren’t problematic.  H.P. Lovecraft is both a terrible racist and the father of cosmic horror: two truths can coexist.  Anais Nin was both a feminist sex-positive revelation and also wrote stories that eroticized pedophilia.  So I keep these books on my bookshelves, even now, not because I’m comfortable with everything they embody, but because they have meaning to me in some way.  

I also don’t want to pretend, as can be so fashionable now, that these books and authors haven’t shaped me in meaningful, and yes, sometimes problematic ways. So when it came to getting rid of the Gone with the Wind cookbook, it wasn’t necessarily for intellectually or morally virtuous reasons.  Sure, it was because I didn’t like the way the racism of the iconic book wasn’t ever really unpacked in more visible ways in pop culture (until you went down the research rabbit hole), but I also never had a special affinity for Gone with the Wind, which was why I was so surprised that I bothered to include it in my first book.  There’s plenty of other problematic stories, in other words, that I could have included, and be perfectly comfortable unpacking why I chose to do so. 

Went with the Wind

Here’s what popular culture teaches us about that book: It’s about the 1939 movie. Here’s what popular culture teaches us about the movie: It’s about Scarlet O’Hara and Rhett Butler. It’s about technicolor. It’s about resilience and romance and academy awards. It’s about bad Pride & Prejudice remixes of the movie starting Laurence Olivier as Mr. Darcy circa 1940. This story has been reduced to a soundbite, a clip, a few famous lines, an image of a glamorous past, and, as it does so, it completely erases what it’s also about: racism.  

I haven’t watched Gone with the Wind in over twenty years. I have no doubt I would see it every differently than from when I was a wee tween. In fact, the only thing I really remember clearly from the movie, aside from the iconic final scene, is the scene where Scarlet O’Hara repurposes her curtains to make a fancy dress. More specifically, I remember Carol Burnett’s 1976 spoof on that moment, “Went with the Wind!” That’s how pulp-culture works: a book gets reduced to a scene in a movie that gets passed down, made fun of, and mass-disseminated. Outside of that one specific image, we lose out on the complexity—and the problems—of the original text.

This is literarily the whole reason why I started delving into the murky waters of banned books with my students. We needed to safely explore the tremendous historical erasure behind problematic texts, question our own complicity in the perpetuation of these narratives, become more critical consumers, and more thoughtful producers of stories. Regardless of what academia and liberal intellectual social media make people think, not everyone is always thinking critically about what we consume when we consume it, including me. In fact, a very small number of people stop to consider the real story behind the one popular culture, the literary canon, or mainstream history sell us.  

And that’s exactly what the line in my book reflects: the sweeping romance soundbite of Gone with the Wind that made its home in mainstream culture, not the realities of the book itself. I chose it for the campy cover and the romantic idea of the thing, I said, not the actual content. But the problematic content is there. It’s real. And it can have a real-world traumatic impact on black communities.  

This is something I teach my students in my genre classes now, particularly in my historical romance class, as we wrap up a unit on old-school bodice rippers and clinch covers. The covers are a revelation, a celebration of stories centered on feelings and sexuality and joy. Inside many of those books, however, are also uncomfortable narratives about rape (sometimes euphemistically framed as “forced seduction,” sometimes not), violence against women, Orientalism, racism, and xenophobia, not to mention a bunch of other terrible -isms. The same goes for my beloved occult detective genre, which I also teach a course on.  Within fantastical stories about monster hunters, haunted haunted houses, and murder-solving psychics, there’s also a history of racism, Orientalism, homophobia…you get the idea. We can’t look at these stories without unpacking their complicated histories—and we can’t look away either.  We have to situate them in their historical context, appreciate what, if anything, is there to appreciate (it’s on a text by text basis), and also not shy away from the deeply uncomfortable aspects of those stories. 

Now it wasn’t my intention to be hurtful in my reductive—and celebratory—depiction of the  Gone with the Wind Cookbook in my first book. I simply hadn’t been aware enough to understand the full implications of that line. I didn’t know. But it’s also important to recognize that it’s not always about intention. It’s about how it lands. 

I am absolutely certain, for example, that my college didn’t intend to promote harmful narratives in the photo they posted or make me complicit in that, but that wasn’t how it landed. So here I am, grappling with the fact that, for all I rejected that book’s messaging in that college-wide social media debacle, I did, at one point, seemingly promote the offensive content of that book—or at least ignore its existence—without the “help” of that institution.  

The Illusion of Liberal Perfection

So why am I sharing all this with you?

On the one hand, reading that excerpt of my book synchronously when I did was a very good thing. It puts a lot into perspective: where I’ve been, how I’ve grown, how I want to keep growing. I’ve learned how to take my playful energy and resistance to Old School Academia and channel it in positive ways, like teaching students how to analyze media and explore their relationship to that complicated media, rather than telling them what they should think or feel about what they consume.  I’ve also learned how to curb the destructive side of that impulse—I’m no longer flip about what I don’t know.  In fact, I know enough about a handful of topics to know just how little I know (say that three times fast). In other words, the more you learn, the more you realize that you have even more to learn.  Which is as it should be—I never what to start thinking that I have all the answers or all the facts about anything.

I hope that I continue to grow and can look back at my old work and marvel at my progress (and, yes, sometimes cringe and this or that)—maybe even admire the things that stand the test of time.  In the same way that I look back at my ten-year-old dissertation and cringe at some of the assertions that made me feel very smart at the time, I don’t ever want to look back on my writing and think it’s pure brilliance—some of it was, actually, but a lot wasn’t.  What I thought was radical and thought-provoking ten or even five years ago should look dated as I’ve allowed myself to be shaped by new information, experiences, and conversations.

On the other hand, we’re dealing with other strange components here that complicate things: the paper trail and the ephemeral threat of cancel culture on social media, which Anne Applebaum in a recent article in The Atlantic framed as the new Puritanism. Don't get me wrong.  I’m not freaked out by the idea that pitchfork-wielding folks will come to burn me at the stake for something I wrote years ago. I don’t think cancel culture is a thing so much as call-out culture—more on that in a minute. The fact is, if you’ve been writing or creating for any length of time and posting it on the internet, people will find your outdated ideas. And, yes, we all have outdated ideas—just not everyone has an internet or published record of them. 

Here’s another fact: As a professor and writer (and, yes, bruja), I’m always thinking about how an audience might perceive me—it’s impossible not to. I want to be open and honest about how I’ve grown, simply because I don’t think anyone is born “woke” and I’m leery of anyone who acts like they have all the answers to inclusivity, representation, diversity, ending systemic oppression…all the important stuff.  That sanctimonious pseudo-liberalism is the thing that drove me away from academia in the first place—and, dare I say, uncritically into the arms of Gone with the Wind. I don’t trust it and I think it’s a great way to hide behind progressive rhetoric while reinforcing systemic oppression. 

I tell my creative writing students that my website is littered with good, bad, terrible, and brilliant writing. I didn’t edit out my false starts and early experiments, my bad recipe photos, or so-so posts. If I did, it would see the illusion that artists are born experts in their craft, when, really, everything we do is messy at first.  But keeping that mess up also leaves me open to a good roasting. This is also, quite honestly, at the back of my mind. 

I know bad first drafts aren’t the same thing as unconsciously or unknowingly endorsing problematic materials. But those drafts also document the process of becoming a more informed, humane, and ethical human.  I’m one-hundred percent sure that, if I keep digging, I will find other things that don’t land well now—and maybe didn’t when I wrote them.  It’s just that now, I have a more informed perspective.  

Here’s another uncomfortable truth: There was a fleeting moment when I read that passage of my book that someone, somewhere, will likely see the social media post I had to make about the photo of me reading Gone with the Wind where I wholeheartedly rejected that book and everything it stood for.  That same person might pick up Everyday Enchantments, read the offending passage, and think hypocrite or, more generously, the plot thickens. These are the thoughts that kept me up that night, not just the ones about my own growth.

Hey, I’m only human, and I’d be lying if I didn’t say exposing these messy parts of myself made me nervous. As any professor will tell you, you can teach your heart out and still get that one student who takes a vicious glee in skewering you in your evals for one issue simply because they were in a bad mood that day or for some other reason that makes them feel like they have permission to take their anger out on you. Then there are the book reviewers who are upset that your book isn’t a love story but a scary story and their review is all about how they hate what you write because they hate scary stories and really only want to read love stories. Or the people who struggle to create themselves, and so delight in pointing out every mistake from us creators. 

These are also the type of people who will troll the internet looking for something to nail you on, a small something to cherry-pick out of context, or in some cases, something that is a real issue but not with the intention to address in a meaningful and constructive way.  Now, they aren’t everybody, but that one negative voice can make you feel like everyone is talking badly about you.  In reality, sometimes they’re just the loudest voice or the one we fixate on because of our own impostor syndrome.  

I can’t tell you how many Twitter dumpster fires I walked into where someone is being roasted for [insert random thing here]. Some of the issues need to be addressed, absolutely, although I’m not sure Twitter is the place for a nuanced or meaningful conversation. Sometimes it is, as it can be used in strategic ways to hold people accountable, like the firestorm that hit the Romance Writers of America earlier this year after they gave an award to an inspirational romance that featured Indigenous genocide. This is after years of RWA promising to do better and continuing to perpetuate racist rhetoric and behavior.  They rescinded the award, and rightly so, after this visible outcry.  

Still, other issues are products of a medium that encourages virality: threads and soundbites are taken so far out of context they aren’t even recognizable anymore. Some are just people being argumentative (You like apples? But what about oranges? How dare you leave them out!). It’s not always a healthy space, nor a productive one. It’s anxiety-inducing to the point where you can start second-guessing everything you’ve ever done that might have ended up on the internet.  It likewise conflates different issues: real problems like an institution awarding a book that endorses Indigenous genocide, people’s histories of growth, and the old apples versus oranges argument.  These all are given the same level of importance in call-out culture rather than treated as three very different things.  More importantly, it doesn’t leave room for productive growth or meaningful conversations—or the recognition that people can and do grow beyond statements they made in the past.

Getting Over Always Getting It Right

The intensity of these past two pandemic years seemed to feed this growing frenzy of call-out culture. And, lest I sound like I’m about to dive into a hysterical diatribe about the evils of cancel culture, I’ll leave you, instead, with two very thoughtful podcasts that unpack the phenomenon’s good parts (holding people in power accountable) and bad (shutting down productive conversations, instilling fear in creators of having every mistake they made back up on them). You’re Wrong About Podcast takes a deep dive into all the things related to cancel culture, while Nerdette Podcast takes a micro-look at what it means when creators get called out about old ideas they might not actually believe in anymore, but that are still floating around the internet.

To be clear, we can and should have productive conversations about how we can all do better. But that’s so often not what these things are doing. And here’s the thing: It’s really easy to call out what someone else did wrong. In class. On the internet. In a book. In life. But it’s a lot harder to direct your gaze to yourself, the moments where you fell short, the times where you didn’t know enough to know that what you wrote/said/did was not in alignment with your personal values—or at a time when your personal values weren’t what they are today. 

It’s uncomfortable, which is what makes calling out others so easy and vindicating: You have the right values, you would have said/done the right thing in that situation. But that’s not always productive activism, as former President Obama explained in 2019, at least not when the action stops with the tweet.

Isn’t that the very behavior that I’d been feeling so tired of this past year?  Isn’t that what is contributing to academic burn-out, being surrounded by people who have all the “right values” but never take a step back to consider how their behavior or unconscious bias makes BIPOC faculty feel so isolated and undervalued?  

Academics and liberal intellectuals post their Black Lives Matter images and generally support anti-racism agendas at higher ed institutions. But how often, at the individual and institutional level, do those beliefs move beyond the performative?  In order to have meaningful change, we have to sit with the discomfort of how we are products of systemic racism and contribute to it in small and large ways.  We have to refuse to sweep uncomfortable histories and topics under the table. Otherwise, we just perpetuate social injustice.   

Here’s what we miss out on when we polarize social justice issues or use our own liberal values to shield ourselves from these difficult conversations: actual, meaningful, productive growth for individuals and for communities. These are the conversations we should be creating space for. Nobody is going to get it right all of the time. That’s a terrible, unproductive burden to place on people. A kind of burden that shuts down conversations and turns people against each other so they don’t have to be the one that’s being called out.  

Social justice isn’t, and never should be, about perfection. It should be about progress. 

And, yes, I know there are people in the world who can’t or won’t grow—white-supremacists, bigots, and conspiracy theorists, the likes of which who have made these past two years even more difficult on everyone, simply because “their rights” and “their beliefs” matter more to them than anything else. But I’m speaking here about those of us who do want to grow, to understand, to be more empathetic and humane individuals. There are more of us out there than the drama-hungry media likes to portray.  Again, this collective anxiety has been reduced to a soundbite of violence and struggle—but that’s not all that is happening here.  We also have people deepening their relationship to community, to accountability, to meaningful, sustainable change.

But in order to make that lasting impact, we need to release ourselves from the burden of having unblemished histories and think more seriously about how we can use those histories for a better future.  We need to get over always getting it right.  

Joyful & Generative Activism 

As for me, I’m not sure where to go from here. Maybe my publishers will let me edit out that line, maybe they won’t. But I’m also uncomfortable with that idea of erasure. In the same way that HBO recently reissued Gone with the Wind with an introductory video explaining the context and controversy of this movie in a post-2020 world, I don’t want to pretend what I wrote didn’t happen. For one thing, there are plenty of copies of my first book floating around with that line in it. For another, removing something doesn’t remove the potential damage. 

Maybe the right thing to do is to keep it as a record of growth in a world that is becoming more and more consumed with having the “right” answers, ideals, and products to the point that it can be terrifying to commit ideas to paper (or the internet). It’s why academics don’t finish their dissertation, authors struggle to write the next book, or artists give up on the act of creation period. It’s also why people get automatically defensive when someone (hopefully kindly) points out their outdated or harmful beliefs.  

All the same, I wrote a whole article about this experience because I felt it needed to be addressed, as did the fear of getting something wrong and seeing a past version of yourself in a different light. You might think this is an awful lot of space for one line about one book in another book. In fact, some people will think I’m making something out of nothing. Others will think I haven’t done enough to address the issue. Still others are thinking, “Gone with the Wind is racist? Hmm…didn’t know that.”

For me, this issue is more far-reaching than any one book or author. When we make these conversations more mainstream, it’s less likely that someone will primarily associate Gone with the Wind with sweeping romance rather than racism.  We can explore celebrated authors like Roald Dahl and unpack his very real antisemitism which shaped many of his stories like The Witches (both the book and the movie it was based on). We can recognize that once beloved children’s series like The Little House on the Prairie contributed to the erasure and villainization of Indigenous communities.  We can appreciate that Buffy the Vampire Slayer was a groundbreaking feminist show for its time, but also that we need to move beyond white feminism and the cult of Joss Whedon.  We can also develop a language, a framework, for understanding these problematic texts and authors, in a way that promotes curiosity and exploration, rather than censor for what we don’t know, what we’ve enjoyed or appreciated, for what we’ve consumed without thought. 

We can begin to develop a more collaborative space where we can learn from one another’s various backgrounds and experiences to inform our own worldview. There are things I don’t know about which I’m beginning to educate myself on. In the same way, I don’t expect all people to have a working knowledge of the cultural and historical frameworks of the mestizaje in the American Southwest—I don’t even know all of it, just my small slice of the experience. And even there, I’m only just now learning how to unpack and articulate that experience, given the histories of cultural assimilation and erasure that silence complicated conversations about our histories of colonization. But I’m willing to share that experience when others stumble learning a new social literacy, just as I appreciate learning from other people with lived experience outside my own. 

No, I haven’t gotten it right all the time and won’t, moving forward.  It’s foolish to pretend otherwise. Nobody will, and it is unproductive to frame social justice that way. Doing so reduces activism to performativity, rather than meaningful change. In fact, there are probably a hundred things about this very essay I’ll want to change a month or a year from now, but I still needed to write and post it. I’m all about joyful problematization, or learning to unpack complex stories, ideologies, and, yes, personal perspectives and histories, in a way that is generative and positive, rather than hostile and silencing.  This is what I teach in my classes and with my Banned Books Week project.  That’s what I’m exploring here on The Bruja Professor.  It’s what I’m trying to foster more of in my various communities. As I tell my students, there’s no such thing as an unproblematic text. Nothing is perfect in this world.  

Not even my books. 

And there’s no such thing as perfect allyship. Perfection is toxic. It’s the tool of white supremacy that silences growth. So why not choose meaningful, generative conversation? Why not choose progress over perfection?

That’s what real activism looks like. 

The Bruja Professor, a witchy take on literature, the occult & pop culture, is the scholarly sister to Enchantment Learning & Living, an inspirational blog celebrating life’s simple pleasures, everyday mysticism, and delectable recipes that are guaranteed to stir the kitchen witch in you.

If you enjoyed what you just read and believe that stories are magic & true magic is in the everyday…or your next good read, subscribe to my newsletter below for regular doses of enchantment.

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The History of Clinch Cover Art with The Art of the Clinch

Confession: I fell in love with clinch covers long before I read romances. I treated them like art before I started reading the stories behind them and exploring the romance genre more seriously.

There’s that old saying, “Never judge a book by its cover.” But I did—sometimes solely on it, for better or worse—because I loved the promise of wanton joyful hedonism a classic clinch can offer. So I collected the most outrageous bodice rippers and pulp books and proudly displayed them on my writing desk and bookshelves. I still do, although the professor in me now leads with the disclaimer “loving the covers does not mean an endorsement of all of the content.”

This is especially true for the classic bodice ripper out of which the clinch cover was born.

I mean I do endorse some of the content: sweeping romances, joyful sex scenes, women busting out of their bodices from the sheer tensions of sexual desire, men in tight pants with opens shirts melting of them because of the heat of their passion, flowery language for all the sexybits. It’s fun. It’s joyful. It’s over-the-top stories that center our emotional and sexual lives. Yay! But I don’t endorse all of the content: rape, violence against women, the terribly racist “sexy Indian romances,” for example, not to mention all the toxic -isms Georgette Heyer’s legacy brings to the genre.

So, yeah, these stories have their problems and many of them don’t age well. But so often the entire romance genre is associated with two things: clinch covers and Fabio, perhaps the most famous clinch cover model. Now many a romance reader will tell you it’s not all bodice rippers and I-Can’t-Believe-It’s-Not-Butter actors, but the collective unconscious has made it so that the genre can’t escape the association with these two images. I’m not mad about it. I think it’s part of the fun of the genre and I frankly loath the new trend of sanitizing genre book covers—this is happening in romance, horror, sci-fi, and fantasy—to appeal to a wider audience.

I’m still collecting clinch and pulp covers, the more over-the-top the better. And thanks to Jennifer at The Art of the Clinch, I now have a better sense of the history of clinch cover art, its significance to the romance genre, and how to go about adding to my collection.

It’s a fascinating exploration of a style of cover that was selling a new type of book, the bodice ripper, and with it, a gateway into more sexually explicit historical romances that originally centered on women’s lives, emotions, and pleasure. Check out the fantastic video and prepare to get swept away…

There will be flowers. There will be clothes melting off bodies. There will be strategically placed swords and steamy gazes. Also naked Fabio. Enjoy!

Guest Contributor Bio

Jennifer, a vintage clinch cover enthusiast and general lover of all things literary and artistic, is a writer, bibliophile, and librarian living in a renovated 1875 farmhouse in central upstate New York. As a life-long resident of the state, she's fascinated by its cultural and material history in rural and small-town life and the way vitality in these areas has ebbed and flowed over the past 300 years. You can often find her exploring forgotten back roads, wandering old cemeteries, and perusing thrift stores, where she finds many cast-off treasures, including clinch covers.

The Bruja Professor, a witchy take on literature, the occult & pop culture, is the scholarly sister to Enchantment Learning & Living, an inspirational blog celebrating life’s simple pleasures, everyday mysticism, and delectable recipes that are guaranteed to stir the kitchen witch in you.

If you enjoyed what you just read and believe that stories are magic & true magic is in the everyday…or your next good read, subscribe to my newsletter below for regular doses of enchantment.

Want even more inspiration? Follow me on Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter. Here’s to a magical life!

Joyful Problematization with Andrea Martucci

I’d like to start today’s post with an important clarity exercise. First, find a comfortable position and get settled. Then focus on your breath. Breathe in, breathe out. Keep doing that until you feel your body and mind relax. Then repeat the following phrase in sync with your breathing until the message sinks in:

There’s no such this as an unproblematic text.

There’s no such this as an unproblematic text.

There’s no such this as an unproblematic text.

There. Now, don’t you feel better? If not, repeated this exercise until you do.

In all seriousness, I think one of the hardest parts of participating in any fandom is recognizing that all stories GOTZ PROBLEMS. But that doesn’t mean you still can love and appreciate the narratives and spaces that speak to you (within reason—I seriously do not understand people who read and write Nazi-redemption romances, for example, and if that makes me a judge bruja, then so be it).

I say this with a deep and passionate love for genre fiction and media of all kinds. There are some truly powerful things about pop culture and the stories that inspire and are inspired by it—and also some truly terrible things. In all the genres I teach, read, and write about, primarily gothic and romance—I frame them as magical spaces that center social justice narratives. Traditionally silenced voices have space to sing in these genres. Oppression and injustice are brought into the light. Those of use with historically marginalized identities are placed front and center, and the protagonists that get to wrestle with conflict, be flawed human beings, but still, come out the other side as whole, complete, fulfilled individuals. We can even get our HEA.

BUT I also teach these same genres as spaces that reinforce toxic social norms. The gothic is rife with villains who are queered, racialized, or demonized for their class or ability. The romance genre, for as radical as it can be in promising HEAs for everyone, can also be a white-supremacist’s wonderland that strategically excludes people with marginalized identities from narratives of joy.

See what I’m getting at here? More often than not, one genre, one text, one type of media is doing both those things at once. Let’s take, for example, Cristina Rosetti’s Goblin Market. This luscious fairytale of a poem is at once an erotic ode to sapphic romance in its coded representation of sisterly love AND an antisemitic treatise in its depiction of evil goblin money hoarders bend on destroying two innocent girls. So it’s at once deeply progressive for its time and deeply conservative. Yet, I love the poem. I love reading it. I love teaching it. I love how it inspires me to write sexy fairytale imagery in my own creative work—and reminds me not to use goblins as a code for antisemitic rhetoric, like so many fantasy novels do (*cough cough* Harry Potter *cough cough*).

At the end of the day, it’s not about reading only the purest of texts—there’s no such thing and I’m leery of anyone who virtue signals their performatively “woke” reading lists. Those lists, themselves, are sites of problematic content rooted in racism, classism, ableism, & heteronormativity…and a whole bunch of other -isms I have likely forgotten to list. What matters is how we engage with and contextualize that material.

So…how do we engage with media? By joyfully problematizing it, of course! I like to situate a text within its historical, social, and cultural context to get emotional distance from it. I ask the following:

• What cultural, historical, and/or social moment produced this text?

• What is it saying about said cultural, historical, and/or cultural moment?

• What biases do we have in our own consumption?

• How are we products of our own cultural, historical, and/or social moment & how does that shape what/how we consume media?

As for the rest, I leave you in the capable hands of Andrea Martucci, the host of Shelf Love, a podcast and community dedicated to the joyful problematization of romantic stories in popular culture. She has kindly made us an infographic to guide us through our (joyful!) analysis of media.

Dr. Sam Hirst also offers a loving and critical examination of the complicated legacy of Georgette Heyer if you’re looking for an excellent example of joyful problematization (aside from every single episode of Shelf Love Podcast). Likewise, check out Adrienne’s epic exploration of Elizabeth Gaskell’s North & South in terms of class conflict, romance, and passionate fandoms.

In closing, I’d like to offer another phrase to the above breathing exercise, one I’d close out your meditation exercise with:

It’s okay to enjoy problematic content, as long as you don’t pretend it isn’t problematic.

It’s also okay to leave behind media that’s too problematic for personal consumption.

Guest Contributor Bio

Andrea Martucci is the host of Shelf Love, a podcast and community that critically examines the meaning and structure of romantic love stories in pop culture. Andrea's conversations with academics and genre lovers share pop culture criticism that is joyful and accessible. Shelf Love has released nearly 100 episodes since its launch in 2019. In 2021, Andrea presented a paper at the Popular Culture Association on her quantitative research exploring how Bridgerton on Netflix impacted popular perceptions of romance novel readers. Andrea is two-time alum of Emerson College in Boston who has worked in publishing and marketing for over a decade.

The Bruja Professor, a witchy take on literature, the occult & pop culture, is the scholarly sister to Enchantment Learning & Living, an inspirational blog celebrating life’s simple pleasures, everyday mysticism, and delectable recipes that are guaranteed to stir the kitchen witch in you.

If you enjoyed what you just read and believe that stories are magic & true magic is in the everyday…or your next good read, subscribe to my newsletter below for regular doses of enchantment.

Want even more inspiration? Follow me on Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter. Here’s to a magical life!

The Complicated Legacy of Georgette Heyer with Dr. Sam Hirst

Georgette Heyer is perhaps one of the most famous, or infamous, if you prefer, names surrounding the historical romance genre. In fact, she is often credited with starting the genre. Many a romance lover grew up reading her work. Others might not have heard of her, but have no doubt read historical romances designed in her image of Regency England (and other time periods).

Heyer is the author responsible for the historical romance as we know it today: epic romances featuring swashbuckling lords fighting duels and ladies in gorgeous gowns swanning around ballrooms in search of a husband. There is intrigue. There is witty banter. There is kissing. Sometimes there is even fainting. What’s not to love?

Well, I’ll tell you. Much of the romantic world Heyer constructed is framed as a white utopia divorced from the historical realities of the day. In fact, so much of the luxury of Heyer’s world is dependant on the erasure or minimization of people with marginalized identities within her stories, not to mention the erasure of the complex political and social context of the times. It’s not all balls and duels, people!

And yet, so many later historical romances perpetuate the same classicist, racist, ableist, and heteronormative fantasy birthed from Heyer’s mind. In fact, I’m coming to see that the courtship novels that inspired many a historical romance are, in many ways, much more progressive than the texts they inspire. I was marinating on this idea when I came across an audiobook version of Georgette Heyer’s Venetia. It was narrated by Richard Armitage of BBC’s North & South (2004) fame. The agenda couldn’t have been clearer: to get fans of the now-iconic BBC mini-series based on Elizabeth Gaskell’s Victorian social novel interested in Heyer’s work. Surely, we would also love Heyer since she wrote love stories that took place around Gaskell’s time.

Yet the two authors couldn’t be more different. Gaskell was directly and explicitly writing about the politics and social upheaval of her time. She grew up in a progressive household and went on to live a more progressive life with her husband, writing, raising children, and doing her social justice work. North & South is as much a story about the evils of Industrialization, class conflict, religious dissent, and changing social hierarchies as it is about love. Heyer’s worlds, on the other hand, explicitly ignore those historical realities or only tangentially acknowledge them in favor of the glamorously romanticized lives of the aristocracy. But in the minds of many, there is no clear difference between historical romances and courtship novels simply because they are both about romance and the things that happen behind closed doors.

Dr. Sam Hirst does a spectacular job of unpacking Heyer’s legacy in the romance genre and lovingly explores how we can both appreciate, even love, an author while also being critical of where they fall short. As they say in their lecture, Heyer not only passed on a love for stories of the past and laid the foundation for historical romance worlds but also passed on narrative frames that excluded, villainized, or marginalized people with marginalized identities. Thankfully, many authors are moving beyond that limited framework and exploring just how complex, engaging, and inclusive the genre can be.

Guest Lecturer Bio

Dr. Sam Hirst is a Teaching Fellow at Liverpool University. They work on the early Gothic and 20th-century romance and have published on the Gothic romance and Georgette Heyer. They run the online program Romancing the Gothic.

The Bruja Professor, a witchy take on literature, the occult & pop culture, is the scholarly sister to Enchantment Learning & Living, an inspirational blog celebrating life’s simple pleasures, everyday mysticism, and delectable recipes that are guaranteed to stir the kitchen witch in you.

If you enjoyed what you just read and believe that stories are magic & true magic is in the everyday…or your next good read, subscribe to my newsletter below for regular doses of enchantment.

Want even more inspiration? Follow me on Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter. Here’s to a magical life!

Class Struggle in the Romance of North & South with Adrienne

Confession: I started writing this post to introduce one of my first guest contributors, the wonderful Adrienne, and then launched into a whole backstory about how North & South has shaped me as a woman, as a writer, a scholar, and a romantic….that quickly turned into another post that will kick off a series about the stories that shape us. But it just goes to show you how North & South continues to inspire readers in so many ways—and why its fandom only continues to grow.

And speaking of fandoms, Adrienne will walk us through the modern fandom surrounding the BBC series and how it introduced a new generation of readers to Elizabeth Gaskell, who is, by the way, fantastic—read her! Adrienne will also explain how the class struggle shapes not only the romance in North & South (both the book and the movie) but also the shifting gender norms.

It’s a fantastic lecture for anyone who loves this story as deeply as Adrienne and I do. We look forward to hearing your thoughts and welcome lively conversation. Enjoy!

Guest Contributor Bio

Adrienne (she/her) is an ardent Jane Austen and Elizabeth Gaskell fan interested in exploring their work and thinking critically about fandom through her lens as a Latina living in the twenty-first century. She earned her Master’s Degree in English from Syracuse University in 2013. You can find her on Twitter @barelytolerabIe discussing her North and South fanfiction or tweeting about Mr. Darcy’s hand flex in Pride & Prejudice (2005).

The Bruja Professor, a witchy take on literature, the occult & pop culture, is the scholarly sister to Enchantment Learning & Living, an inspirational blog celebrating life’s simple pleasures, everyday mysticism, and delectable recipes that are guaranteed to stir the kitchen witch in you.

If you enjoyed what you just read and believe that stories are magic & true magic is in the everyday…or your next good read, subscribe to my newsletter below for regular doses of enchantment.

Want even more inspiration? Follow me on Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter. Here’s to a magical life!

Grad School, Gaskell & The Wisdom of North & South

This is the first in an ongoing series about the stories that have shaped us, taught us valuable life lessons, and allowed us to conjure better ways of being.

What is there to say about this deeply iconic love story with its own devoted fandom? It’s not hard to see why people fell in love with this Victorian love story framed by a strong social justice narrative when the BBC aired the North & South mini-series in 2004 based on Elizabeth Gaskell’s serialized novel written in 1854.

With echoes of Pride & Prejudice, this story appeals to Austen fans and connoisseurs of a good slow-burn enemies-to-lovers romance. Add in a thought-provoking exploration of class tension, consumerism, religious dissension, and a high body count and you have the makings of a deliciously compelling love story with a surprisingly gothic subtext. It’s a story that’s ripe for fan-fic, meme-i-fication, and repetitive swooning.

It’s also an incredibly relatable story about the struggle between tradition and maternity, ethical humanity and mindless profit, caving to social pressure, and following your heart. It’s about being a fish out of water and figuring out how to make a home for yourself when your whole life has been turned upside down and you have to start over.

Margaret Hale is thrust into that narrative of rebirth at the start of the story when she had to move from her beloved rural Hesltone to the industrial town of Milton. We discover that Mr. Thornton had to live that out as a child when he was forced to leave school to provide for his mother and sister. They both go through it once last time when Margaret becomes an heiress and Mr. Thornton once again loses everything when he refuses to speculate. North & South is as much a classic Victorian social novel as it is a deeply personal story about how to keep moving forward when life is unpredictable, a narrative I desperately needed when I moved away from home in my early twenties.

The Unbearable Whiteness of Graduate School

I first came to this story in graduate school. I was beginning my second year and I writing my Master’s thesis on Mary Wollstonecraft, her life, philosophy, and novels. The first year had been a struggle. I was born and raised in Albuquerque, New Mexico surrounded by a vibrant Hispanic, Latinx, Indigenous, & Mestizaje community. There, I fell in love with Jane Austen and decided to get my doctorate in 18th-century British literature. I wanted to understand how western Enlightenment ideologies shaped us today, for better or worse, regardless of our cultural orientations and background. If we understand the historicity of our beliefs on sexuality, gender, race, and class, we can recognize them for the constructs they are and so dismantle systemic oppression.

Yeah, I was one of those naive hopeful young women want to change the world through stories.

In some ways I still am. In others…well, let’s just say graduate school was a shock to the system. I moved to Seattle, WA where I studied at the University of Washington. It was there I had to confront a horrible reality: reading Jane Austen surrounded by fellow people of color was not the same as reading a white author in a white city surrounded by people who were uncomfortable with my presence. I was regularly stopped on the street there and asked what I was. And I knew what they were asking.

In a deeply segregated pseudo-progressive city, people were trying to categorize me. When I lived there, if you wanted to see black people, you went to the Central District. Asians? The International District. Indigenous peoples? Check out the homeless population in Pioneer Square. Hispanic and Latinx? Well, you had to go to eastern Washington for that. If you were a person of color outside those carefully constructed boundaries, you stood out. Now I’m a mestiza with mixed heritage, light skin, and a white last name. I grew up having my cultural backgrounds challenged because I didn’t perform my culture in the way people wanted me to (I have a complicated relationship to my heritage but that’s a story for another time). In Seattle? I stood out because people knew I wasn’t white…they just couldn’t figure out what I was. They wanted a neat tidy box and mixed-heritage people challenged their fragile social hierarchy. This was a city that was deeply uncomfortable with ambiguity and I had to learn quickly to adapt to those circumstances.

So…why am I talking about this in an essay that’s supposed to be about North & South? Simple. This story, the series and the novel, helped me navigate that strange world. It was hard not to over-identify with Margaret Hale who is ripped from her beloved South (New Mexico in my case) and forced to go North (okay, I wasn’t forced, but graduate school was not the scholarly utopia I thought it would be). I also realized that reading courtship novels surrounded primarily white academics was a very different reading experience from enjoying these stories surrounded by brown people in New Mexico. I was reading these stories as a cultural outsider in a city that didn’t want to acknowledge racial differences while strictly enforcing racial hierarchies.

Much like Margaret Hale trying to figure out the new social hierarchy in Milton based on earned economic advantages, I was having to adapt to the unspoken social hierarchies of academia—teaching level, grad student level, whiteness, masculinity, the unspoken social cache of liking this or that—not to mention a city built on performative liberalism and the celebration of The Well-Meaning White Person. I spent my days trying to figure it all out and my nights devouring stories that took me far far away from the stress of my academic life. I learned how to parcel subtext and understand the deadly nature of silence or a passive-aggressive faux-compliment from Jane Austen novels. I got a thicker skin reading urban fantasy books featuring leather-clad monster-hunting heroines and, to this day, I don’t know where I would have been without these stories.

But North & South was the story that finally got me to admit that I was unhappy in graduate school.

I remember the first time I watched this series so clearly. I had just received feedback on a draft of my Master’s thesis from an advisor who took vicious glee in marking up each and every tiny typo and misplaced comma, going so far as to say that I needed grammar and writing lessons, despite the fact that I was given a full scholarship in part, on the strength of my writing. (BIPOC academics will know this gaslighting technique well: we are not white so we must have bad grammar. While that led to an enduring fear of typos, I can now look back from the comfort of ten years and a strong publication record and see that what he was correcting were the things any writer reads past when they’ve been staring at the same manuscript for too long.). So I did what any self-respecting graduate student would: I drowned my sorrows in good food, wine, and Austen adaptations.

There I was, watching the first episode of North & South from my old dell laptop, curled on my too-small sofa, and devouring this story about reinventing and rediscovering yourself when you’re in the midst of a city so different from what you grew up with the very customs and social hierarchies seem foreign to you. I will never forget the last line of that first episode. Margaret is writing to Edith about the stifling life in Milton. She says, “I believe I have seen hell... and it's white. It's snow-white.”

I burst into tears.

Okay, so I’d had a lot of wine. Don’t judge me! And, yes, I knew Margaret was talking about the cotton floating around the factories, not the struggles of a young woman of color in a white city, but those words and that story helped me to get real about what I was going through and that, by being open and honest with myself about my struggles (it would take another year to work up the courage to confide in any advisors), I could find a way forward. And, yes, I also realize the irony of finding comfort in a white narrative, but by the end of the fourth episode, I felt soothed, reborn, and ready to find my way through this difficult time.

We Can’t Go Back

Still, A corner had been turned after I’d consumed that story. I knew I couldn't go back to the idealized version of graduate school I’d had in my head, or retreat into the comfort of my undergrad years at The University of New Mexico—a space, I now realize years later, is more fraught than I remembered now that I’m teaching there. Just as Margaret realizes her beloved Helstone wasn’t the idyll she remembered, I had to come to terms with the fact that my undergrad life wasn’t the pure space I imagined it to be (although my hometown was and always will be the place where my heart is happiest). As Margaret says near the end of the series about her beloved Helstone, "Try as we might, happy as we were, we can't go back."

It was time to move on with things, older, perhaps wiser, but no less melodramatic a twenty-something for over-identifying with the novel heroines I studied.

So instead of constantly trying to reclaim my early exuberance for scholarly work or recreate the warm playful learning dynamics in graduate school that I was used to in undergrad, I chose to move on and figure out a new way of doing things. I started by devouring Gaskell’s book and then went on to write a whole dissertation chapter on it, using it as a time to really unpack what it meant to be a woman writer, a female intellectual, and how courtship novels, which center the domestic and internal lives of their characters, help us find our way through our own struggles in a world that isn’t designed for our success—and when we aren’t rich heiress who can throw caution to the wind, hex our salty advisors, and joyfully leave the torture of the ivory tower behind.

Studies in Social Justice

Of course, I left out the intersectional lens in my initial reading—how those things are complicated when you’re a woman of color—because I didn’t yet have the emotional distance or vocabulary for expressing it, nor the inclusive community in which I felt that I could safely unpack those issues while still fangirling over Gaskell’s story in equal measure. In many ways, I’m still unpacking my relationship to these stories and how they shape me as a woman of color—and, in turn, how my reading of them is different as a non-white woman. And let’s not forget that this story GOTZ PROBLEMS, like Gaskell’s overly-sentimental depiction of poor people whose poverty makes them “closer to God.” Hard nope in my book. And others feel conflicted about liking Mr. Thornton (if they do), given his complicity in an economic system designed to reinforce class hierarchies, even though, at the time Gaskell was writing, Capitalism was more of an equalizing force that broke down the economic barriers set up by Feudalism. Plus he runs a cotton mill and cotton was a product of enslaved labor. And we also now know that Industrialization, while revolutionary at the time, is also wreaking havoc on our environment today. But unpacking those issues is part of the joy of the story for me.

Still, Gaskell remains one of the few authors who thoughtfully unpacks and explores complex social and political issues. The fact that she shows the humanity—and the tyranny—of various fighting factions is an important reminder that living ethically and equitably isn’t as clear-cut as many would like it to be. The union leader Mr. Higgins, although his values are in the right place, literally becomes like the very thing he is fighting against, when, he bullies a desperate man into suicide. Mr. Thornton, as the rich factory owner, isn’t without his own class struggle, as a man who literally raised his family from poverty into prosperity, one of the many possibilities capitalism opened up for the working class. And yes, capitalism is a dirty word now. But in Gaskell’s time, it was also a system, however flawed, that helped break the feudalist structure that kept class mobility minimal.

I often return to her studies after a hard week in academia, or, frankly, Twitter, when the conversations seem to be angry, polarizing, and fueled by a self-righteous need to be right, rather than a genuine desire to foster more humane, inclusive spaces or generate tangible positive change. Gaskell offers me a new way forward, asking me to explore all sides of an issue, think through each layer, and look for the most humane and ethical solution. She also often cautions me not to become, like Higgins, the very thing I’m trying to work against. It is no small thing to fight for equity without hardening your heart or losing your own fundamental sense of humanity in a system that increasingly makes you feel as if you are a cog in a wheel and not a living, breathing being.

Her solution, it so often seems to me, is not to fix all the world’s injustices, a truly Sisyphean task, but to live well (humanely, responsibly, lovingly) and make our proverbial corner of the world a better place.

HEAs are Possible

North & South is still a book I go back to a few times a year when I need the solid comfort of a familiar story and a guaranteed HEA, a HEA, moreover, that doesn’t shy away from the very real social and economic issues that we’re still grappling with today. If I’m getting witchy about it (I am the Bruja Professor, after all), this story helped me conjure a way forward at a time when I could only see heartache and roadblocks. I couldn't go back, I didn’t like where I was at the moment, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t manifest a better future for myself. And I know I’m not the only fan who over-identified with Margaret Hale (what’s the fun of stories if you can’t put yourself in a character’s shoes?), nor the only one who used her journey as a template for their own. That’s the magic of a good story: we find hope, healing, and a profound sense of being seen, even if those stories are about people that don’t look like us.

So did I find my Mr. Thornton there, teach him how to be a more ethical human, let him watch me suggestively adjust my bracelet, and live happily ever after as a sudden heiress in my proverbial Milton?

No. Seattle wasn’t for me.

I moved back to New Mexico just as soon as I could and established my teaching and writing career there. Hey, sometimes it takes getting to know yourself a little bit better before you’re ready for a romantic HEA. Or maybe I just needed to be in a city that’s more inclusive. It’s probably a little bit of both.

Regardless, this was a book that told me HEAs are possible, even in a messy, complicated world.

Taking Responsibility for Your Life

I’m now returning to this story in the middle of the pandemic and all I can think about is the ending of both the book and the series when Margaret becomes an heiress. In the book, she increasingly shows her autonomy, especially once she becomes an heiress, by advocating for her bother, rejecting the quiet hurtfulness and banality of polite society learning her financial responsibilities, and, later, in being alone in a room with Mr. Thornton to discuss finances and, yes, love.

The TV series perfectly captures this sense of agency and empowerment when the now-rich Margaret tells her cousin and aunt, “I am of age, and I am of means…it is time for me to take responsibility for my life…I would like to make my own decisions for my day-to-day life…I would like to keep to my room if I wish. I would like not to go to the Piper’s if I wish. and I don’t. I can’t stand them. I don’t like London society.”

She says this, of course, after surviving terrible trials, including being uprooted from her home, suffering the loss of loved ones, and many other experiences. So when she voices this, it is not as a petulant child, but as a fully autonomous woman who knows her own mind and knows, likewise, that it is useless to cater to social convention.

This has become something of a personal goal of mine, especially these past few years when the pandemic has eroded my desire to be seen as accommodating or nice and, in fact, has made me realize how often I’m asked to sit with discomfort (overwork, emotional labor, extroversion) so that others don’t have to be accountable or share in the labor or because it is so much easier to just maintain the status quo. Now, however, I think I would like to be more of a Margaret Hale, a woman of age and means, taking responsibility for my life, and making my own decisions about what will make me happiest (which, like Margaret, doesn’t include not liking much in terms of society, ha).

She then ends that speech with those important lines about her beloved Helstone: “I learned something when I went back to Helston expecting it to be the paradise I knew as a child. Try as we might, happy as we were, we can’t go back.”

I reflect on this line again as I look back to pre-pandemic life when negotiating the third year of the pandemic and those lines have a whole new meaning to me when I feel pangs of nostalgia for the way things were. The wisdom in those words, however, are still the same as 15 years ago when I first heard them: We can’t reclaim or go back to the ways things were. The only solution is to move forward into the life we want to live.

In any case, Gaskell’s story stayed with me and I’m only just now rediscovering how it has shaped me as a woman, as a writer, and as a romantic. As for what it taught me about romance…well, that’s a topic for another post. What I will say for now, though, is that North & South taught me about the importance of “delicious silence.” If you know, you know, wink wink.

What do you love most about this story?

The Bruja Professor, a witchy take on literature, the occult & pop culture, is the scholarly sister to Enchantment Learning & Living, an inspirational blog celebrating life’s simple pleasures, everyday mysticism, and delectable recipes that are guaranteed to stir the kitchen witch in you.

If you enjoyed what you just read and believe that stories are magic & true magic is in the everyday…or your next good read, subscribe to my newsletter below for regular doses of enchantment.

Want even more inspiration? Follow me on Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter. Here’s to a magical life!

A Brief (Personal) Exploration of Courtship Novels

Courtship novels, whose heyday was between 1740 -1820, are defined as stories that feature the classic marriage plot, in which a young woman enters society, meets some suitors, goes through some stuff and then resolves everything by marrying a man who is both financially and emotionally sound. Huzzah! So romantic!

Okay, I know that’s not the sexiest description in the world, but trust me, as you get older, you begin to appreciate someone who is fiscally responsibly while also being a beast in the sack.

But, back to our discussion of courtship novels.

They are traditionally framed as “for, by, and about women.” This feminist phrase is both important to understanding the historical significance of the genre, and, well, outdated, especially as this same phrase is used in the romance genre more widely today. Originally, this was a genre that centered on women’s lives, essentially advocating that the domestic or private sphere, was worthy of star treatment. Now? Romance novels do the same thing, though it’s important to point out that it’s not just for het-cis women' readers or writers anymore, and really never was—they’re just the ones who get the most attention.

Still, this genre really took off because it focused on all juicy, gossipy fun stuff that we like to talk about: dating, social dramas, broken hearts and hearts in love, social duties versus personal desires, sexytimes…they were like telenovelas before there were telenovelas.

Becoming a Heroine

Of course, courtship novels and the marriage plot are nothing without the central figure of the heroine. If there are a few lines that have always stuck with me in the fifteen-odd years I’ve been studying courtship novels, they’re from Rachel M. Brownstien’s Introduction to Becoming a Heroine: Reading About Women in Novels (1994). She writes, “[N]ovel heroines, like novel readers, are often women who want to become heroines…To want to be a heroine is to want to be something special, something else, to want to change, to be changed, and also to want to stay the same” (xv).

This is the most magical part about the genre to me: centering ourselves in narratives that will ultimately lead to happiness, even as we stumble, struggle, and figure out how to live deeply, authentically in a world of shallow living…okay, I’m getting swept away with all this, I know!

But who doesn’t want to be the heroine of their own life? Or, to strip this of gendered terms, who doesn’t want to be the protagonist of an epic story? What book lover doesn’t frame their experiences in terms of a storybook narrative?

Domestic Spheres, Intimate Spaces

The appeal of the courtship novel is in how it centers our domestic and internal lives. I first fell in love with courtship novels by watching Jane Austen adaptations with my mom and later, in college, when I learned that there was a whole genre dedicated to the marriage plot. To be honest, I was less interested in the marriage plot itself, and more fascinated by the fact that these stories centered on women and domestic spaces.

I wanted to read stories about people figuring themselves out, of the importance of everything going on inside us, the stuff we can’t communicate or even know how to articulate out loud. And I wanted the guarantee of an HEA (Happily Ever After). When so many narratives about women of color amounted to trauma porn, I was trying to carve my way out of generational and ancestral trauma long before I even had the vocabulary for it or consciously knew what I was doing. All I knew was that I needed a space to explore what it meant to find happiness even when you felt hemmed in on all sides by a society that didn’t have your best interest in mind.

I devoted 18th- and 19th-century courtship novels that spent pages upon pages of unpacking the internal monologue of the characters, reveling in how one look, one phrase, can be mulled over, analyzed, picked apart for meaning. Didn’t I do just that after a date or other encounter? It was a revelation to see people moved, transformed, stirred internally and so deeply the outside world couldn’t even see it happening. And yet, those ephemeral revelations lead to concrete personal transformations in the external world. Elinor Dashwood’s internal struggles in Sense & Sensibility are things readers feel deeply, just as she does, though she isn’t allowed to express it because she’s trying to keep her family together—until the end, when she goes to another room to cry, with the knowledge that the man she loves is free to marry her (finally!).

These are the stories that show us what people look like with their hair down—the messy realities behind courtship and dating, the anxieties of being “out in society” in any era, the sweet satisfaction of knowing someone truly gets you…these are the emotional parts of our lives, the stuff people often say aren’t important. But really, what is more, important than meaningful relationships, romantic or otherwise?

The Legacy of the Courtship Novel

Now, to be clear, it’s a real problem that I had to go to Dead White People Stories to find this heroine’s journey with the promise of an HEA. And I’m not saying there were happy stories written by authors of color. What I am saying is that I grew up before the internet and remained a technophobe through most of graduate school (hilarious seeing the trajectory of my work now, I know). That means it was much, much harder to find those stories—and I did, slowly but surely thanks to persistence and the internet. But the courtship novels came first.

Of course, their appeal was in the fact that they felt so far away from the actual life I lived, a genteel universe untouched by the world around it. Pauses typing to look back at 20-something me with a pitying glance. In reality, I later learned that these books were, in fact, very much of their time, and ours, as they dealt with social and political issues that the modern audience often overlooked or, sometimes, erased.

Let’s face it, the heroines of these books couldn’t live that genteel life without Imperialism, colonialism, classism…all sorts of -isms. In fact, they are so deeply entrenched in their own systemic oppression, it’s hard for a modern reader to notice unless they seriously situate these books within their historical context—and beyond upper and middle-class het-cis white feminism. We also have to acknowledge that the many romance novels that were born from the courtship novel, especially historical romances, can perpetuate these terrible -isms by framing the past as a rich white utopia.

And I still a sucker for a night of scandal at Almack’s or a visit to the socially questionable city of Bath? Yes, totally. The enjoyment of these things is dependant only on the quality of the writer. And, looking back, it makes total sense that my work on courtship novels would eventually lead me to write about, read, and adore romance novels, too.

But it’s important to remember that the narrative we’re often sold about courtship novels and historical romances is that they take us back to a “simpler time” where things were “more genteel.” Not so! There was still plenty of sex, drugs, rock and roll…and system oppression which authors and the general public were (and still are) either reinforcing, resisting, or, frankly, doing a bit of both. History and the literary canon also aren’t as white, hetero, or ableist as people often make it out to be. But that’s a story for another time.

My advice? Enjoy your courtship novels. Enjoy your romances. Just read responsibility…and have your smelling salts nearby. Fainting fits are so last century!

The Bruja Professor, a witchy take on literature, the occult & pop culture, is the scholarly sister to Enchantment Learning & Living, an inspirational blog celebrating life’s simple pleasures, everyday mysticism, and delectable recipes that are guaranteed to stir the kitchen witch in you.

If you enjoyed what you just read and believe that stories are magic & true magic is in the everyday…or your next good read, subscribe to my newsletter below for regular doses of enchantment.

Want even more inspiration? Follow me on Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter. Here’s to a magical life!

Welcome to The Bruja Professor…

Welcome to The Bruja Professor…

A witchy take on literature, the occult & pop culture!

This is the corner of my website where I share articles, insights, and other resources to help fellow story lovers explore the world of literature and popular culture through an intersectional lens. I’ll be writing about the genres that most nourish me as a writer and bruja while hosting like-minded magical nerdy folk to share their expertise on the genres and lifestyles we love.  

So if you like spooky stuff, bodice rippers, witchy business, and occult detectives, look no further than The Bruja Professor for lively conversations about the stories that make our lives more magical. 

Guiding Philosophy

Here we believe that our shared love of stories, fandoms, and genres can be a numinous experience. This inclusive space celebrates the fundamental magic of stories—what we write, what we read, what we watch, what we talk about—and how they shape us as magical beings.  

And yes, to shamelessly quote the film Practical Magic, there’s a little witch in all of us. Stories help us tap into that numinous energy.  As any book lover can tell you, there’s something transformative, enchanting even, about a story’s ability to heal, revive, empower, terrify, and inspire.  

My witchy practice is also all about social justice, so you’ll see me and fellow contributors breaking down what I call the ordinary gothic side of the genres we love, you know, the casual racism, sexism, homophobia, ableism, xenophobia, etc. that we can normalize when we don’t explicitly and directly address those issues.

Sometimes, we are so used to seeing those terrible -isms in the media that we consume that we read right past them…terrifying! Hence, it’s ordinary gothic, the thing that is all the more shocking for how we normalize it. We’re invested in dragging these things into the light so they can’t feed on the shadows—it’s one way of breaking the cycles of systemic oppression. Just another day in the life of a bruja.

Also, you might be wondering who this ‘we’ is in The Bruja Professor.  That’s me and my familiar, Smoke.  He’s my editor.  Nothing gets posted on this website unless it’s familiar approved. 

The Magic of Dynamic Discussion 

The Bruja Professor is all about fun and engaging explorations and yes, problematization, of the genres we love.  It should be a joy to learn and discover new ways of looking at the world. And we should be able to happily unpack and dismantle systemic oppression by becoming more self-aware and informed consumers and creators. 

That’s why this space is devoted to dynamic, complex discussions about the stories that shape us, in good ways, in bad ways, in complex ways, with the fundamental knowledge that there’s no such thing as a perfect story, only stories that deeply affect us.  This blog embraces the magical intersection between social justice, intellectual curiosity, and the love of storytelling in all forms. 

So, to recap, here’s everything you need to know about The Bruja Professor:

What it is…

A magical virtual salon where we can joyfully explore the complicated and wonderful world of storytelling, from the delightful to the dreadful. Here the personal is political (trite but true), storytelling is political AND personal, as is our relationship to the stories we consume.  This space celebrates inclusive, intersectional explorations of literature, the occult, and popular culture. 

This is also a safe space for those of us with marginalized identities.  Anyone violating that will be hexed.

What it isn’t…

This isn’t a place to roast internet trolls (however much they deserve it) or blithely and uncritically wax poetic about stories and genres that, to put it mildly, GOTZ PROBLEMS.  Nor is it a place to share academic treaties (sorry, there’s other venues for that!) or snooze-worthy diatribes on [fill in the blank].  Don’t get me wrong—we want people to gush about their passions in an informed and thoughtful way, just don’t be so formal about it!

Lastly, I feel like I need to say this since we will be discussing witchy and occult stuff from time to time, but this is not a space where we will accidentally post ancient Latin spells (lifted from the internet, naturally) which could accidentally summon a demon or resurrect an ancient spirit bent on world domination.  Let’s leave that stuff for the B horror movies and campy occult detective shows.  Now those, we’ll talk about.  

As for those ancient spells, you might go looking for on the internet…just don’t.  It never ends well. 

The Bruja Professor, a witchy take on literature, the occult & pop culture, is the scholarly sister to Enchantment Learning & Living, an inspirational blog celebrating life’s simple pleasures, everyday mysticism, and delectable recipes that are guaranteed to stir the kitchen witch in you.

If you enjoyed what you just read and believe that stories are magic & true magic is in the everyday…or your next good read, subscribe to my newsletter below for regular doses of enchantment.

Want even more inspiration? Follow me on Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter. Here’s to a magical life!