Think Out Loud

Swimming in conversation for the Portland Book Festival

By Sage Van Wing (OPB)
Dec. 21, 2022 2 p.m. Updated: Jan. 5, 2023 12:18 a.m.

Broadcast: Thursday, Dec. 29

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Today we bring you several conversations recorded for the Portland Book Festival.

THANKS TO OUR SPONSOR:

Over half of the world’s population doesn’t know how to swim. But it wasn’t always that way. Swimming has been practiced by humans for thousands of years for fun, health, survival, competition and community. Swimming has also been used by some cultures to differentiate themselves from others — the swimmers from the non-swimmers. OPB’s Paul Marshall talks with Bonnie Tsui, author of “Why We Swim,” and Karen Eva Carr, author of “Shifting Currents: A World History of Swimming,” about what swimming can tell us about ourselves as individuals and as a culture.

And last year, OPB’s Crystal Ligori spoke with Rivka Galchen, author of “Everyone Knows Your Mother is a Witch,” and A.K. Blakemore, author of “The Manningtree Witches.”

Note: This transcript was computer generated and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Today on the show, we’ll bring you two conversations recorded for the Portland Book Festival. We start with one about swimming. Over half the people in the world don’t know how to swim, but it wasn’t always that way. Swimming has been practiced by humans for thousands of years for fun, health, survival, competition and community. In some cultures, it was a way to differentiate people, to separate the swimmers from the non-swimmers. OPB’s Paul Marshall sat down with Bonnie Tsui, the author of “Why We Swim” and Karen Eva Carr, the author of “Shifting Currents: A World History of Swimming.”

Paul Marshall: Good morning Karen, and good morning Bonnie. How are you all?

Bonnie Tsui: Hi, great, thanks.

Karen Eva Carr: Hi, how are you?

Marshall: Good, good. I guess I’d like to start here. What’s one of your earliest memories of swimming and what’s your relationship with swimming right now? I’ll go ahead and toss it to you, Karen.

Carr: I don’t really remember not knowing how to swim, but I remember my mother teaching me to swim when we first got to Ithaca in the late 60s, in open water, in a creek and then joining the newly constructed swimming pool and how different that was from swimming in the open water. I don’t swim now as much as I intend to. Years of being really busy raising children and stuff, I got used to the kids swimming and now it seems funny to go to the pool without them, now that they’re grown.

Marshall: Bonnie, I know water was kind of unavoidable in your upbringing, so I’m curious as well, where it started for you?

Tsui: I would say that I’m like Karen, in that I don’t remember not knowing how to swim. I don’t remember that and I have very vivid memories of being in the ocean at Jones Beach in New York, as a kid just bobbing in the waves. And I think that’s there’s a reason, that’s in the opening of “Why We Swim,” because it’s such a visceral feeling of, every time you go to the beach in the summer, you see people kind of like going up and down, up and down in the shore break, and when the the swell comes, and everyone just sort of goes “whoa!” up and down, and that feeling I think of as the ocean breathing. And I think that that’s a memory and also a sensory thing that I go back to again and again, now in my adult life for sure.

Marshall: Karen, in your book, “Shifting Currents”, as a species, we don’t know how to swim naturally and it’s something we have to learn. But you looked at early evidence for human swimming and it was all over the place. Can you give us a quick hitting rundown of how early were humans swimming and how universal was it?

Carr: Well, I think all early humans probably knew how to swim. I mean, like before they left Africa or as Neanderthals spread out over the world, but even before modern humans, I think they were all swimmers. We come from warm parts of the planet and I think in those warm parts of the planet, everybody swam. I think the big break comes with the last Ice Age. The most recent Ice Age is the first one where humans had enough control of fire and clothing and stuff that they stuck it out in the north. And I think those people who stuck it out in the north, stopped swimming because, even in the summer, it didn’t really get hot enough for that to be attractive. And after the Ice Age, when they met people who swam again, they were really weirded out by it. And I think that’s the distinction that I’m trying to make in the book, that between the people who kept swimming and the people who forgot how, there’s this gap.

Marshall: Bonnie, in the book, you tell the story of an Icelandic fisherman who survived in the cold water for a really long time. What did scientists learn about humans and swimming from studying his biology?

Tsui: This is the story of Guðlaugur Friðþórsson, of course the Icelandic fishermen who, his fishing vessel capsized back in 1984 and he ended up swimming six hours in 41 degree water, six kilometers back to shore and he was the only one who survived. What they ended up finding out about him was, he was obviously a very good swimmer to be able to swim that long and that far, but that his body composition was really unique and the biological quirk was that his fat was 2-3 times normal human thickness and more dense. And so the critical difference, of course, was that he was able to keep his core body temperature stable in this freezing water.

What I love about the story is that it is this convergence of our cultural evolution, of swimming being something that is taught and passed down and is an important skill. But also those stories around swimming tell us why it’s important. And also it’s that our bodies, we’re not that far removed from the sea. I know that’s a romantic notion, but we do all, in our bodies, hold all these remnants, physiologically from our former evolutionary past for sure. What I loved finding out too is that he is a joyous person. He is a beloved person, on his island in a small town and they also protected him from all the prying eyes of the world in the decades after this accident and his miraculous survival.

The reality is he knows that these kinds of heroic survival stories are things that we all want to know. We want to hear these stories, we love stories, that’s how we pass the stories on, but also that we want to know what happens in these moments of intense life or death situations, what would we do? We are so not put in those situations very often. I think that’s why swimming is one of those activities now that you can feel that line, that permeable membrane between life and death and swimming and drowning and being above the water and being below it. It’s something that you can move between states and I think that there is that really wonderful allure there.

Carr: One thing that Bonnie is making me think about is the difference between that kind of swimming that you talk so much about in your book - about people swimming in the ocean or in a lake or in these very cold environments, where you can really feel that you’re doing something adventurous - and so many kids who grow up in poverty, where they’re swimming in the local municipal pool and everything is about safety and about rules and about control. Maybe that’s an important dividing line for swimmers, whether you get to have that beach experience or whether you’re limited to a much more controlled safety experience.

Tsui: Yeah, for sure. This is like a little bit of a romantic eye to it too, but I also think about if you had a local swimming hole as a kid you could just walk to, and in the summers that that was something that you learn, once you learn how to swim and be proficient in the water, that that was something that you could all have access to. There are stories that feel more equitable to me and ways of accessing the water that feel more equitable to me. But to your point, at least in the states, there is this real cultural divide between pool swimming and open water swimming. And I think in the pandemic, it was blurred a little bit more than it has been for a long time because all the pools closed and so people really had to hunt around in a way that they hadn’t been forced to do for places that they could swim, right? Because they realized that it was something that they really needed and wanted in their lives.

I have been really interested in seeing this kind of resurgence or renewed interest in all the open waters near us, here in this country, because people kind of took to open water. In this recent, I don’t know, 50 years or 30 years, that that’s something that has been embraced much more in the popular imagination than had been here. And so again, this divide between “I’m an open water swimmer, I love the ocean, I love lakes, rivers, creeks, whatever. And I don’t like swimming pools.” Or “I’m a pool swimmer, I don’t like open water, I don’t trust myself there, it feels dangerous, it doesn’t feel safe.” Again, this is a preoccupation with safety for a good reason. But also, I think that the fear kind of encroaches and limits what’s possible.

Carr: I think I would take that back even if you look a couple of centuries earlier, into the 1600s and 1700s, well into the early 1800s, that there’s a sense where Europeans that are relearning to swim after not knowing how are drawing a line between wild swimming, open water swimming - which is for Indigenous people, for Native Americans, for Africans, for the Indonesian swimmers - and their own swimming, which is going to be civilized and controlled and scientific and safe and is going to involve lessons and lifeguards and competition. And I think a lot of that, we’re still feeling the effects of that distinction, even though a lot of people, a lot of European descended people, now do open water swimming.

Marshall: I’m curious, Karen, when you set out to write the book, it was about the history of swimming, but there is also this examination of not just race, but also swimming and power dynamics. Can you talk a little bit about that relationship and what stood out to you when you were doing the book?

Carr: I guess in a sense that’s kind of where I started. I ran a big history website and every day I would try to write a new article. One day it was hot and I was like, “I’ll write an article about the history of swimming” and I went to read some things about the history of swimming to get set in my mind what I was going to write in the article. I realized that I just didn’t believe a lot of the stuff I was reading. As a historian who’s worked a lot with power dynamics and racial dynamics, I was like, “These histories of swimming are just totally ignoring that.” That doesn’t seem real, that doesn’t seem satisfying to me.

So I started looking more into it and I found something I thought was really important: swimming, like a lot of other things, like clothing or horseback riding or what kind of house you live in, is a way of expressing who you are. And that has meant different things to different people in different centuries, which is why the book is called “Shifting Currents,” because for many years, for most of human history, Africans, generally speaking, were much better swimmers than Europeans. South Chinese people from Hunan and Hong Kong and the south of the Yangtze River were much better swimmers than the North Chinese people. Then there’s this kind of shift in the 19th century where white people, European descended people, decide that they’re going to be the good swimmers and Africans are going to be pushed out of the water. And a lot of people don’t even realize that there was a time when Africans were better swimmers than Europeans. They think it’s just naturally the other way around. But I wanted to show that it changes over time.

Marshall: Bonnie, I thought it was interesting how you said when you check out new places, you like to see where swimming options are available. And in the book you profiled the Baghdad Swim Club, which became a kind of a cultural haven and even an equalizer during the war in Iraq. So how do you think swimming has this ability to bring humans together? I know you guys have touched on it, but in that instance, what stood out to you?

Tsui: Oh gosh, I mean that story is just crazy, right? To think about, during a time of war, active shelling in Baghdad, these people who have come from all over the world to work in the Green Zone, that they are swimming in Saddam Hussein’s Republican Palace pool, right? At that time, this was 2008, 2010. I think it was when a lot of people were in the foreign service and this is the story of Jay Taylor, who was  a foreign service worker there and ended up becoming this coach to a motley crew of what I think we call that ‘Many United Nations’ because there’s people from all over the world. They could have been from Lebanon, they could have been from Texas, they could have been from Mexico, just all of these people who either had low or no swimming ability. I thought of this actually when I was reading your book, Karen, because this was a preoccupation that I had. As many people who do learn how to swim, why don’t people learn how to swim? And I really loved the tracing back in the history of all of these differences, in these geographic areas, but also societally. I mean, really like in the modern day, it comes down to money, right? It is a privilege to learn how to swim.

Carr: Absolutely.

Tsui: So even if you live near a body of water, you may not ever learn how to swim there, because no one in your family ever was able to get you into a place where you had the money to pay for lessons and find a place to learn how to swim, whether it’s a pool or some calm body of water. And that, to me, in our modern day, was something that no matter where you were from, was mainly the reason why many of these people did not learn how to swim. So in this time of war, the fact that there was this community that grew around this pool and then also later on, when the Green Zone moved into a different place, that there was a pool that was a place of solace, a place of community where people of all ranks and jobs and origin stories could come together and be, with their cap and goggles and their swimsuits, beginning from the same place, blowing bubbles in the water, floating in the water, helping each other learn how to swim, no matter what their background was. It was a community building effort in a time of fracture, right?

I think that’s what’s so moving about that story and that it was a way to escape, to be underwater when all of the mortars are falling, so to speak, and that all of these people came together. I imagine them kind of coming together and then flying apart to [go] back to wherever it is that they went to after this. This was a period of a few years, but they all had these very vivid memories and also stories of learning that the water was a place for them. I think that was something that, to me, was the most powerful takeaway from it.

Carr: Absolutely, I think so too. Just wonderful that they went home and they were like, “You know what? We can be comfortable in the water, we can enjoy being in the water.” And when you said that the next guy who was teaching the lessons after Jay went home, totally failed because he didn’t make it any fun, I was like “that is so much, the line that I’m seeing,” that some people think of swimming as not fun and you had the good fortune to be on a swim team that was fun. And Jay made this swim team in the Green Zone that was fun and that swimming has to be something people enjoy and not some kind of punishment.

Tsui: Water is such a place of play, it’s so obviously, instinctively that.

Marshall: I noted in the book, Bonnie, that you said that “even in grief, time could be marked by water and conversely, I think water can also work as even a healing agent to process one’s grief.”

Tsui: Oh, for sure.

Marshall: And that was a really poignant line. Karen, swimming has these cultural issues that we’ve talked about, whether class or race, and it seems like there’s been difficulty creating separation from that, and a lot of this took place historically. Why hasn’t swimming been able to fully separate itself from those issues, if you will?

Carr: People identified 2,000 [to] 3,000 years ago that swimming is a great way to distinguish upper class in-group people, from people who aren’t in the in-group, because it’s inherently difficult to learn and impossible to fake. You can’t just be like, “oh yeah, sure I can swim” and jump into the pool. And like reading - because Plato associates swimming with reading in what was apparently a proverb in Ancient Greece, that [for] a person who was ignorant where we would say “they can’t read or write,” they would say “they can’t read or swim.” It’s something that nobody can take away from you that marks you as upper class. And I think people are still making use of that. They still want to feel like, “oh yeah, we have a lake house, we have a swimming pool. And you brought home this boyfriend who didn’t grow up with that privilege and we can tell because he can’t swim.” People are still using it.

Marshall: I’m curious when you both were coming up, was there an emphasis on understanding certain swim strokes versus others? I noticed in the book that there were more than just the common associated swim strokes, but I think about the class’s conversation of like this is the way to swim, this isn’t the way to swim. So did you notice those things when you all were coming up in the water?

Carr: I’m actually old enough that I remember when I was learning the crawl stroke, that it was still being called the “Australian crawl” by some of the people who were teaching us, as if it was a foreign kind of suspicious thing to do. We learned the crawl first, unlike in Europe, where most people learned the breaststroke first. But the crawl was, for a long time, the Indigenous peoples’ stroke. So the stroke of people who weren’t swimming in swimming pools and being scientific and safe, where the breaststroke was the European stroke. And even now most Europeans can only swim the breaststroke.

Marshall: This question is again, for both of you and I’m going to start with Bonnie. What would you say to someone who maybe never learned to swim or is scared of swimming themselves?

Tsui: I would say it’s never too late, it really isn’t. And I will say that one of the most gorgeous things that came out of the pandemic is I’ve gotten these amazing letters from people who decided that this was the time that they were going to learn how to swim and either to learn how to just be comfortable in the water, to play with their kids, in the pool or the ocean or lake, that they did it, conquered their fears. And I just want to point out that especially in adulthood, this is not a small thing. I mean, this is like a lifetime of fear again, this very existential, visceral fear of the water. And what I always tell people is that door doesn’t shut, even when you’re 80.

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Carr: It’s easy to kind of dismiss people’s fears about the water as their personal fears. And people trace it to their personal trauma of some terrible swim instructor who yelled at them or forced them to jump in the water or something like that. But we should remember that these fears are fears that go back to the Bronze Age, when those first Ice-Age non-swimmers started to think about learning to swim again and they made up a lot of very reasonable excuses for why they weren’t going to do it: it’s dangerous, it’s too sexual, you take off your clothes and people see your body, it’s not modest.

A lot of people worried in the past, and still kind of worry about whether it’s religiously acceptable to swim. That’s where this whole fear of people peeing in the water comes from. We can trace that back to the Bronze Age and people are like, “yeah, you shouldn’t wash your hands in the water, you shouldn’t get in the water, you shouldn’t pee in the water, the gods don’t like it.” And we retain this feeling that it’s kind of wrong to go in the water that people inherit from older generations.

Then there’s just this feeling that swimming is something other people do. It marks you as a stranger, not a member of your community, if you grew up in a non-swimming community. So I think it’s important to realize that it’s not just your personal trauma, but thousands of years of history that are pushing you out of the pool, but that that can also change. That whole populations of people who weren’t swimmers have become swimmers and you can too, but you have to find a way in that accommodates all of those fears.

Marshall: Karen, Bonnie, thank you for joining us. I appreciate this conversation and thank you all for taking the time.

Tsui: Thanks so much.

Carr: Thank you so much.

Miller: That was Bonnie Tsui and Karen Eva Carr in conversation with Paul Marshall.

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Miller: Authors A.K. Blakemore and Rivka Galchen each have new books out that explore the witch trials of the 17th century, but their approaches to this same subject and the characters at the center of each story are very different. OPB’s Crystal Ligori sat down with the pair to discuss the process of basing fiction on historical events, how personal experiences can be wrapped up in global circumstances and what it really means to be a witch.

Crystal Ligori: I want to start off with a big overarching question for you both: what is a witch, both in how it’s popularly defined in the time period of your book and what your own definition is?

A.K. Blakemore: It’s obviously quite difficult, and I think one of the reasons we feel at such a remove from the witch crazes of the 17th century now and why we almost fetishize them in terms of the sort of aesthetics, is because what they believed - which was in the broadest sense - is something the vast majority of people would now find it impossible to believe in. In the sense of, it was someone who had commerce with the devil and if you don’t believe in the devil, which like I say, the vast majority of people now don’t, that it’s a ridiculous accusation to level against someone. But at this time in England - so my book is set in the 1640s, which was during the English Civil War, the sense of observation and judgment by God, the sense that the devil moved through the world intentionally trying to corrupt people, was very real in people’s lives. And that was something I found incredibly fascinating from [a] psychological point of view.

What would it have been like to have lived your life with the idea that the devil was almost a real person, an active force in your life? He could appear in your dreams, he could appear as a man, you wouldn’t know where he was or what he was trying to do. And what a witch now is . . . a friend of mine, the writer Rebecca Thomas, who’s done a lot of research on witchcraft and then sort of, witches are her area of study, has a really kind of neat way of putting it that I somewhat sort of paraphrase in my book: a witch is someone who makes things happen by saying them. And obviously that’s a much broader definition, but one I quite like, and in a fairly self regarding way, I guess a lot of writers would quite like.

Rivka Galchen: I think the other side of it, I guess, is what makes someone a witch? And also, I know something we were both thinking through in words and on the page is what makes someone see witches - which is kind of the other side - what is it that generates the vision like that? And one of the offshoots that I thought was interesting when I was reading, is just how upsetting it is to see power located somewhere where one doesn’t want to see it and I sort of feel like that might be part of why again and again, it wasn’t only women who were burned for commerce with the devil, but it was mostly women or overwhelmingly women. Then you see that this is [a] kind of irreducible sexual power and sexual aversion that can’t be taken away from women. And it’s disturbing to see it with all of the vaccine talk.

I was reading about how basically all these people who worked with cows, all these dairy maids, wouldn’t get smallpox. And it was just seen as devilish, their health was sort of seen as devilish and it wasn’t understood. They were incidentally inoculated from cowpox in a way that people eventually learned how to get on top of. But seeing that health and not understanding it, not understanding why it was happening to this lower class group of people and not to other people and just how disturbing it is to see power located somewhere that seems unsettling to the perceiver.

Blakemore: I think the point about power is a really interesting one because with British witch hunts, there’s power and powerlessness at work. I think very often something people say about witch hunts is, “oh, it could have happened to anyone.” And after researching it for a little while you sort of think, “well no, that wasn’t the case.” Power and the fact that very often these women were women who were living without male protection, for whatever reason.

Ligori: I was totally thinking about that when I was reading both of these books, that the women who are accused of being witches are often poor, they’re widows, they’re single women. They’re folks who are vulnerable, who don’t have anyone to”defend them.” Or they live outside of acceptable social norms of the time, they’re not owned, they’re not claimed, per se. And I feel like that sort of element also leaves it open for, you mentioned, temptation and sexual desire.

How were you thinking about, A.K., the desire and the policing of it? I feel like your main character is a younger woman, whereas Rivka, yours is a widow and an older woman in her 70s, I believe. So I think that it’s a little bit of a different dynamic in each book.

Blakemore: I think one of the starting points is that my main antagonist, the Witchfinder General, was a real person [and] was responsible for the persecution and death of at least 200 women and men in about a five year period. He wrote “The Discovery of Witches,” essentially his own guide to witch hunting. I became really fascinated by this book because there is such a sensual charge to his language and I guess this kind of connects to what Rivka was saying, about women having kind of an irreducible sexuality or repulsion that can’t be controlled or taken away from them. His obsession with witches definitely had this really powerful sexual element to it.

It’s strange because I almost came away from writing it and from my research thinking, “God, yeah, obviously it was much harder to be a woman, but it must have been incredibly difficult psychologically to be a Puritan man as well,” to have to sublimate natural sexual desires into something very much other.

Ligori: What’s interesting is, I feel like both Rebecca and Katarina, wrestle with this idea at points in each of your books where they’re like, “maybe I am a witch.”

Galchen: Yeah, I think you’ve sort of gotten it, that strange kind of satiny quality to seeing the world in terms of good and bad or even power and powerlessness, that those are on the one hand legitimate frameworks, but also unstable and shifting. With Katarina, one thing I thought was interesting about an older woman versus a younger woman, in her case in particular, is [that] a lot of the testimony showed that the people who found her to be witchy were basically people who had neglected to help her. So again, when you come across these situations in which someone was saying, “well, I had a cart and she didn’t have a cart and she asked if she could borrow my cart to carry it out her hay,” I said “no,” and then terrible things happened to me.

So you see the psychological narrative being written and then you see the light switching. And it’s interesting to see the way that both of our central characters, themselves, are not excluded from this shifting of the moral valence on the story, just so that they can understand things in a new way.

Ligori: Rivka, you mentioned trials, and obviously both you and A.K.’s books are focused on trials throughout the story. Do you think that the legal system and the idea of justice is actually making the situations worse for the characters in your book?

Blakemore: It’s particularly interesting, I think, in terms of the English witch trials because there were lots of very kind of key differences between how things tended to play out in England and on the continent. The key one, which is sort of reflected in our books, is that traditional torture methods - the rack, thumbscrews, things like that - have been outlawed in England since the reign of Queen Elizabeth. So you couldn’t torture people to confession. You would think that being the case, there would be far fewer confessions from alleged witches in England. But still, the majority of people who were hung as witches had confessed.

The 1640s, when the Civil War was raging, was known as the “upside-down time,” this time of legal, political chaos. People didn’t necessarily know who was in charge of the country or who had the authority to put you in prison on any given day. And there’s a lot of historical debate around whether or not someone like the Witchfinder General would have been able to do what he did at any other time.

Ligori: These books have so much in common, but the tone is really different. Rivka, you chose almost this modern ironic tone for your book. It reminded me a little bit of, not reality TV - and that’s not a diss, because I love reality TV - but the idea was so salacious and gossipy and very like it was tongue-in-cheek. Where did you come up with that? How did you decide to go for that in the writing of “Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch?”

Galchen: It’s sort of absurd. But the one thing I felt really confident about when I was writing this book was the voice. The voice came quite clearly to me. I think I wanted to write a modern book. I knew I was writing a modern book. It was a translation in the language and time and space and for me that was the way it was gonna work. And it was raised specifically in my mind, Johannes Kepler’s mother, it wasn’t just anyone. I really associate that mathematical mind and he did sort of identify with her much more than with his father. And there’s a lot of indications she wasn’t educated, obviously, but that she had, what I like to think of as, this mathematical mind, which I think of as someone who is very sensitive to patterns and takes great pleasure in rupturing the pattern. That’s a comic mind on some level. So that was how her voice came to me with this conviction.

Ligori: A.K., your book is much more somber in tone. How did you go about finding Rebecca’s voice? Because, I mean, just the introduction page of her describing her mom, I was like, “oh that cuts.” So she does have a very sharp tongue.

Blakemore: Another thing that I guess I knew straight away, going into writing, was that I didn’t want any of the witches. When I say “witches,” I just mean shorthand for women accused of being witches, for clarity. I didn’t want them to be necessarily good people, because you don’t need to be a good person to deserve sympathy when horrible things happen to you, obviously.

In the trial documents I was working with, you get the sense that these women, they were troublemakers, they were interfering, they did have sharp tongues. There’s a brilliant bit - I didn’t manage to work it into the book - Mother Clark, Elizabeth Bedingfield was her real name, it’s after she confessed to being a witch and she says that she was visited by the devil in the shape of a man in a coat with black tips. And John Stearns, one of the interrogators, gestures to the Witchfinder General and says, “A man like this?” and she says, “No, no, no, way better looking than him.” Ligori: No, not like that [Laughing].

Blakemore: It’s one of these, it’s kind of hard to quite interpret, but it just seems so much like a sub-tweet, a mean joke that you could see someone making on Twitter today and it’s hard not to read it as this kind of gesture of defiance from a woman in a very desperate situation. So I knew that I didn’t want them to be helpless.

Ligori: I think in both these books, the time spent waiting for the trial to happen feels especially important to call out. I don’t know if, because some of this may have been crafted during the pandemic, if that seeped into these novels, the unknowing of our fate.

Galchen: I think that there’s really nothing more excruciating than suspense. I actually can’t even read certain kinds of suspense. I find them too painful and I felt that I had to manage not letting the book be like a sort of pornography of suffering. And then the waiting was part of it and I felt like, yes they have, there is a lot of waiting. But I remember in the actual historical record with Katarina, for example, she actually waited six years. The whole family is in a kind of state of suspended crisis for six years and I didn’t change it, but I did wave my hands to condense it, so that it was humanly relatable. I actually almost couldn’t relate to six years of that kind of suspense.

Blakemore: Yeah I had the same problem, in fact, possibly an even worse problem, which was that all of my main characters ended up in prison and I visited the cell where they were kept under Colchester Castle. It is literally a very small cell completely underground with no windows and the only light they would have had was a candle. They were kept there for about a year and a half. So, I also had to do that, the waving of the hands and the condensing of time.

Ligori: I just wanted to end on this question of what do you think that we can learn today from these stories of women accused of witchcraft? Rivka?

Galchen: There is something, to me, [that] was in retrospect quite overwhelming and maybe drew me to the story, in terms of why it felt urgent to me in the present day. Just being so up close with how inconsequential truth and reasoning were because that felt very contemporary to me to be shocked by that.

Blakemore: For me, it’s maybe something not uniquely English. I think something we’ve seen here, perhaps in a more subtle way than it’s happened in America, is a sort of disintegration of solidarity between communities and across communities and particularly along class lines. And that was something that is reflected in these stories, I think.

As Rivka said earlier, this idea of who was given help and who was denied help in a very insular community, and particularly when religious justification, or religious drives towards charity, collapse, people find ways to justify withdrawing charity and withdrawing solidarity from other people around them. So that was something I thought was very relevant in kind of a conservative England, where we’ve had decades of the demonization of people receiving social support from the government. And that part of that was also to do with the process of “othering,” how you have to make someone not a human being anymore before you do horrible things to them and how that was part of what happened to these women. They weren’t women anymore. They were witches. And that could justify the sleep deprivation torture they endured, throwing them in prison, hanging them, eventually. That’s something that we very much see now in England. It’s most obviously directed towards refugees. I’ve never really had time for this “we are the daughters of the witches, you could not burn thing.” [It] sort of leaves me a bit cold because I’ve often thought the women who were actually accused of witchcraft and hung as witches probably have less in common with a white middle class woman now and more in common with, as I say, a refugee.

Ligori: A.K., Rivka, thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me today. I really appreciate it and I loved both “Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch” and “The Manningtree Witches.” So, thanks for taking the time to chat.

Blakemore: Thank you.

Galchen: Thank you very much.

Miller: You just heard the authors A.K Blakemore and Rivka Galchen in conversation with host Crystal Ligori at the Portland Book Festival.

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