A first-rate bard, Isobel Gowdie’s power came from storytelling and flyting (the fine Scottish art of flinging curses.) Her “crime” was being too mouthy in the direction of the landlord. It’s day 9 on the Advent Calendar of Witches, we’re in a global pandemic, and the rent is still too damn high.
You can read more about Isobel Gowdie, flyting, the role of witch trials played in divesting land from its peoples, and the magical properties of hagstones (like the one pictured above), in “The Eye of the Hagstone” over at Salamander.
Kathryn Nuernberger's latest books are THE WITCH OF EYE (Sarabande), an essay collection about witches and witch trials coming out in February 2021, and RUE (BOA, 2020), a collection of poems about plants historically used for birth control and pissed off feelings about patriarchal bullshit. The End of Pink (BOA 2016) won the James Laughlin Prize from the Academy of American Poets. Her collection of lyric essays is Brief Interviews with the Romantic Past (The Ohio State University Press, 2017). A recipient of fellowships from the NEA, American Antiquarian Society, Bakken Museum of Electricity in Life, H. J. Andrews Research Forest, She teaches in the creative writing program at University of Minnesota. Recent work appears in 32 Poems, Cincinnati Review, Copper Nickel, Gulf Coast, Paris Review, The Southern Review, and Waxwing.
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Kathryn Nuernberger 