Two new books on getting witchy

Literary Witches: A Celebration of Magical Women Writers by Taisia Kitaiskaia with illustrations by Katy Horan, Seal Press, 128 pages

At first glance, Basic Witches: How to Summon Success, Banish Drama, and Raise Hell With Your Coven, by Jaya Saxena and Jess Zimmerman, and Literary Witches: A Celebration of Magical Women Writers, by Taisa Kitaiskaia, appear fundamentally different in their purpose. Basic Witches is a breezy romp through watered-down feminism, seemingly aimed at women who struggle with self-reliance and the ability to eschew the male gaze once in a while. Or it is written as reinforcement for adolescent girls, which they probably need but which makes the multiple casual references to sex toys a bit confusing.

Literary Witches — an illustrated, poetic roundup of famous and respected women writers — seems to target intellectually minded women who would find the first book a little, well, basic. But these books exist on a pop-culture continuum of mainstream ideas about women’s empowerment.

Their first commonality, beyond the word “witches” in their titles, is that neither book is about witches. Both offer readers the opportunity to reclaim the word “witch” — from men who use it as a slur against women they find too brash, and from women who consider the moniker part of their religious identity as pagans or Wiccans. In Basic

Witches, readers are encouraged to cast “spells” for the confidence to wear bright red lipstick as an expression of their fabulous self-esteem. (To be fair, there is also a spell for the confidence to go makeupfree.) Literary Witches places more emphasis on interior concerns of the mind and heart. The author labels as witches women writers (who do not or did not necessarily practice witchcraft) based on their talents with dark and mysterious subject matter.

The authors of Basic Witches spend time in the first chapter preemptively protecting themselves from potential charges of cultural appropriation. “In this book, witchcraft doesn’t mean occult or religious practices that historical witches may (or may not) have engaged in, nor does it mean the religious practice that is a sacred tradition for many people worldwide,” they write. “For our purposes,

witchcraft means the kind of mundane pursuits that might once have resulted in accusation: enjoying sex, controlling reproductive health, hanging out with other women, not caring what men think, disagreeing, and just knowing stuff.” A few chapters on, however, in a section on Magical Exercise, or “How to Become One Fit Witch,” an illustration of “witch calisthenics” assigns names like “Light as a feather, stiff as a board” and “flying monkey” to unnamed yet easily recognizable yoga poses (in this case, plank and warrior). The authors do not mention that yoga is also a sacred religious practice for many people, which seems a curious misstep in a book that is so carefully inclusive of color, culture, and diverse ideas about femininity, sexuality, and gender presentation.

Literary Witches is altogether more artful in its approach. Kitaiskaia has created homages to a tantalizingly broad list of 30 writers, each of whom she gives an incantatory label. Octavia Butler is Sower of Strange Seeds, Species, and the Future; Emily Dickinson is Specter of Windows, Flies, and the Unexpected; Sandra Cisneros is Hechicera de los Nombres, las Casas, y la Soledad. She then describes the writers’ work and process in imaginative lines of prose poetry. “The Deaths of Anna’s people are woven into her shawl. She sucks on these silver threads during the famine to stay alive,” she writes of the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966), whom she dubs Koldunya of Winter, Endurance, and Willows. Each writer’s section includes a short biography and a list of recommended readings, and is accompanied by a tarot card-like portrait by illustrator Katy Horan. No doubt some of the writers included would be honored to be called witches, and others may well dabble in the dark arts, but this small volume is more of a cute gift book than a penetrating take on what it means to be a woman writing against society’s grain.

These books, albeit shallow, are not harmful. Surely, I could lighten up about them, seeing as how it’s Halloween season. Some of the spells in Basic

Witches are just standard self-care activities like cooking healthful meals and moisturizing regularly, and I certainly don’t begrudge anyone a bubble bath. My quibble with labeling and packaging historical female artists and unapologetically bold women as “witches” is that no matter how cheeky or alluring it might be to refer to your friend-group as a coven or call Canadian poet Anne Carson the High Priestess of Scholars, Volcanoes, and Eros, “witch” is still a label and a package. Women don’t actually need those anymore, and there is something mercenary and cynical about selling feminine strength as something akin to a goth fashion accessory. I am all for scaring off the kind of men who find women inherently threatening when they express themselves, but I don’t believe that doing so requires a real or contrived connection to the supernatural. We can stand up to misogyny all by ourselves. — Jennifer Levin