Guest Post! The Bookish Witch Tag

[helloladies]

"The Bookish Witch Tag - ORIGINAL" (Watch on YouTube)

Hi, I'm Claire and welcome back to the Claire Witch Project in which I spend the month of October reading about witches, watching witchy movies, all around thinking witchcrafty thoughts. So today I have prepared an original tag all about bookish witches and media witches, so I have some questions. We're going to pick some favourite witchy aspects from books and media. So if you're also into witches and witchcrafty things, or if you're looking for a new spooky tag to do this Halloween season, then please consider doing this one. And let me know if you've done it. I would love, love, love to see as many folks’s takes on it as possible. But without further ado, let's get onto the questions.

Starting with question one, which is: hop on your broomstick and pick a favorite witchy setting. Will it be spooky? Will it be cozy? Will it be a little bit in between?

Now I'm going to pick my witchy setting from Circe by Madeline Miller, but I'm not going to pick the Island of Aeaea because that's where Circe is being banished—she can't leave, that doesn't sound remotely pleasant. But I am going to pick like a stretch of Mediterranean countryside. I'm going to pick some of the settings where Circe does magic earlier in the book before she is banished, when she is discovering magic for the first time. She's in the countryside, presumably in Greece. The weather's lovely. She's picking some herbs. She's looking over the sea while she's doing all of this. Now first of all, it sounds like a really lovely setting, anyway. I love the warm weather but also it would be a pretty good setting to just like be picking ingredients for spells and all of that, as well. So I think it works for me, Claire, the person who really likes warm Mediterranean summers but also for witchcraft.

Question two is: whip out your wand and choose a favorite magic system. Will it have lots and lots of rules or will the magic be mostly unexplained?

Now this one was a little bit tricky for me because I love a magic system that is kind of organic and you never have a lot of rules laid out, but you understand it and it makes a lot of sense and that's really down to the writing a lot of the time. I think the person that does that the absolute best is Diana Wynne Jones. I think you read a Diana Wynne Jones book and there's never a big thing that tells you how the magic works, but for me it's always made complete sense. Deep Secret, which is her book set at a science fiction convention ,is one that did that really, really well for me, but I'm not going to pick the magic system from Deep Secret. I'm going to pick the magic system from Snowspelled by Stephanie Burgis, which is a delightful historical fantasy romance set in a world where there is magic and the magic is known, but the magic is mainly the domain of men whilst the politics is mainly the domain of women. Now what I found really interesting about the way the magic system is explored in this novella is that our main character, Cassandra, used to have magic. She fought tooth and nail to do magic even though she's a woman and that's not what women normally do in that society, but now she doesn't have magic anymore. Something bad happened to her and she can't use her powers anymore, but we still get a lot about the magic system and we still get to see how it works. She knows a lot about how it works, so there's not really, you know, from the ground up explanation. There's a lot of things she kind of takes for granted because she's got so much experience so it doesn't feel like an info dump. But it's really, really interesting in the way she interacts with it being a person who doesn't have that magic anymore I think is really, really cool. I love that novella. I love that setting. I didn't pick it for setting because it's so hugely segregated in terms of gender—different from our world now but still really bad so I don't like it as a setting for me to be in, but I love the way that it explored the magic through the lens of that setting.

Question three is: gather up your magical herbs and occult ingredients and pick some favourite tropes about witchy stories.

Now there are so many things I love about witchy stories. I love the power being too much and something that the witch doesn't want at the beginning, but by the end she has accepted it and she wants it. I love a secret identity story, having to hide from everybody around you what it is that you and your family does. But specifically the two things that I love in witch stories is that I don't think we find enough of elsewhere is, one, that they also often about families. Right now I'm reading Practical Magic by Alice Hoffman, this is the book that the Sandra Bullock movie was adapted from. And it is all about sisters. And I love Gillian and Sally so much and I loved to see their relationship. And it's not a perfect relationship, but they're working on it and they're supporting each other and it's lovely. And I think especially in SFF, we don't get to see a whole lot of books about family relations, mothers and daughters, sisters. I mean, even relationships between women that work together aren’t the most common thing. The witches from Terry Pratchett, they're just a bunch of colleagues that hang out together. That's quite rare, I think, still. So I want more of that.

And the second thing that I really, really love to see in a witchy story is the witch or wizard having to work for the magic, almost—like not just having to figure out how the magic functions and like, learn it, but also I love it when in order to do the magic, you have to also make something at the same time. If your magic is related to food, whilst you're cooking food, it also makes some magic happen. That kind of thing. Obviously, this is the kind of thing I adore because I am a person who loves to make things and for me there's something very special about taking some disparate components and making something else out of it or making something out of pretty much nothing and that is something that I think resonates with magic a lot. There's a reason we sometimes call magic the craft.

The thing I wanted to bring up for this specifically is Toil & Trouble, which is an anthology of YA witchy stories edited by Jessica Spotswood and Tess Sharpe and more specifically the story "The Heart in her Hands" written by Tess Sharpe, which is a really interesting take on the traditional fanfic trope of a world in which soulmates are a thing that exists and I think it deals with that really, really well. Loved that about the story, but specifically I absolutely adored that in the story, one of the characters, Auggie, is a kitchen witch. She's a baker, she creates these magical baked goods and also instead of a wand, she has a frying pan, and that just sounds delightful to me. That is the kind of thing that I will absolutely gobble up in a witchy story.

And now for question four: it is time to open up your grimoire, pick a book of magic to help in your casting. Will it be a dusty family tome or the Monster Book of Monsters or indeed a volume of prophecies?

Honestly, when I first came up with this question, I was thinking of The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch, which is a book of prophecy in Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett because in that book, Agnes Nutter tells her descendants how to get really rich by buying early Apple shares. But since that book only goes to basically the apocalypse, which is averted at the end of Good Omens, that doesn't work. What I have decided to go for instead is the Book of Shadows of the Halliwell sisters in the TV show Charmed. Because first of all I was a teenager in the 90s and the 00s, I have very, very fond memories of Charmed but also wouldn't it be great to have like a family spellbook that can help you figure out all your life's problem and like every week whatever monster of the week problem that you have, it's definitely covered in the book. You can find the right page. I think they even have a thing where like the book will open at the right page for them. Like they don't even have to do that much research, if I recall correctly. I haven't actually watched the new Charmed show. I definitely want to catch it at some point; I just haven't yet. So please let me know in the comments if you've watched that and if you've enjoyed it because I'm very curious.

At number five we have: stir that bubbling cauldron, pick a witchy snack and/or drink.

Originally when I came up with this question, I was going to say Midnight Margaritas from Practical Magic, but I don't want to be only allowed to drink margaritas at midnight so I had to pick something else. Very, very obviously the most basic answer that you can go for, I am going to shamelessly go for—I want a pumpkin spice latte. It's fall, it's raining outside. I want something nice and warm and lovely and it's going to be pumpkin spice because it's not gingerbread time yet. So for a drink that's either pumpkin spice latte, if it's early enough in the day or pumpkin spice hot chocolate if it's after four or five in the afternoon and I don't want to keep having loads and loads of caffeine late in the day. And then for a snack I am very, very partial to a chocolate covered pretzel little snack bag, that kind of thing. Anything chocolate orange also does me very, very well.

Question six is summon your familiar! And for this one you have two options. You can either show us your actual familiar and give them some scritches behind the ears.

I don't know if you can see: Tabby is right here on the bed. That unmoving blob over there is Tabby sleeping. She's sometimes a bit skittish about the big camera being in her face, so I don't know if I'm going to be able to show her to you in more of a closeup. I'll try after I'm done filming this segment. Fingers crossed she's going to let me do that, but just in case she doesn't or if you don't, at the moment, have a familiar of your own, you can also tell me about your favorite fictional animal. I was all ready to talk about my favorite flerken of all time, Goose from Captain Marvel. But then obviously because her name is Goose, it reminded me of the goose in Untitled Goose Game and I've got to give it to the goose from Untitled Goose Game. I love that damn goose. It's such a dick.

And finally at number seven we're going to call to our covens by tagging some friends to also do this video.

I am going to start by tagging Chelsea at The Reading Outlaw, Bree at BreeReadsBooks and Kayla at krakentoagoodbook because they have all asked to be tagged in this video so thank you for volunteering. I'm also going to tag the members of our wonderful con coven from Worldcon 2019, that's the people that I roomed with in Dublin. So that’s Rachel from Kalanadi, Andreea from Infinite Text, and Reija from The Book Finch. Obviously Bree from BreeReadsBooks was also there, so you're double tagged Bree; you have no excuse. And finally I'm going to round it up to a nice magically seven and tag Maija from Maija Reads because I feel like this whole witchy video would fit her vibe and her aesthetic quite well. So these are the folks that I am tagging as my coven for this video. And of course I will leave all of their links in the description box below. You should go check out their channels because they are all amazing. I think I've talked about all of them before on the channel except for maybe Kayla from krakentoagoodbook. Her channel is a newer find for me, but I really, really enjoy it. She's a regular commenter here and that's how I found her videos, but they're super great, so you should definitely check her out as well as everybody else, they're all fantastic.

So that's it, this was my bookish witch tag, although of course I picked from books as well as other various media.

But from this tag, what have we learned? I think we've learned that if I were a witch I would be a witch who practices magic in the South of Greece with a bunch of buddies and a dickish goose whilst the making magical cake and drinking pumpkin spice and also presumably my sister and my mum would have to be there so we can have family dynamics and we would also all be using the Book of Shadows from Charmed while doing magic that women aren't supposed to do. So that's a nice image to have in my head at the end of this tag. I hope you enjoyed this video as much as I enjoyed putting it together, and I hope that you will do this tag too, and let me know once you've done it, because I would love to see it.

Tibs, is it okay to do scritches? "Oh, I dunno if it’s okay to do scritches to be honest, you woke me up, hoomin." Ooh, look at this long suffering girl.

If you'd like to see more from me, you can check out a previous video onscreen right now, and if you haven't yet, please hit the subscribe button that's on my face for a new video from me every week. I've been Claire, thanks so much for watching, and see you soon.

QUESTIONS
1. Hop on your broomstick and pick a favourite witchy setting.
2. Whip out your wand and choose a favourite magic system.
3. Gather up your magical herbs & occult ingredients, and pick some favourite tropes from witch stories.
4. Open up your grimoire & pick a book of magic to help in your casting.
5. Stir that bubbling cauldron & choose a witchy brew and/or wizardy snack.
6. Summon your familiar! Either show us your actual familiar and give them some scritches behind the ears OR tell us about your favourite fictional animal.
7. And finally, call to your coven by tagging some fellow Halloween loving book nerds.

RESPONSES:
TheReadingOutlaw: The Bookish Witch Tag
renay: Let's Get Literate! Witches (Bookish, and Otherwise)

★ Claire is a Booktuber and the producer of Radio Free Fandom. You can find her on Twitter at ClaireRousseau.

Comments

[lokifan]

I love a magic system that is kind of organic and you never have a lot of rules laid out, but you understand it and it makes a lot of sense and that's really down to the writing a lot of the time. I think the person that does that the absolute best is Diana Wynne Jones. I think you read a Diana Wynne Jones book and there's never a big thing that tells you how the magic works, but for me it's always made complete sense

YESSSS SO AGREE.

I love it when in order to do the magic, you have to also make something at the same time. If your magic is related to food, whilst you're cooking food, it also makes some magic happen. That kind of thing. Obviously, this is the kind of thing I adore because I am a person who loves to make things and for me there's something very special about taking some disparate components and making something else out of it or making something out of pretty much nothing and that is something that I think resonates with magic a lot.

That's something I love about Tamora Pierce's Circle of Magic books.