The witch and the personal essay: feminism, magic, and the auto/biographical 'I'

What experiments, limitations, and subjectivities does the figure of the witch allow us to explore in writing about gender and power in this cultural moment? This panel includes three different creative/critical papers on the revival of the figure of the witch as a symbol of feminine and feminist power. One of us (Butterworth) is looking at revising witch characters in a post #MeToo landscape; another (Pryor) is looking at witches through a lens of ecofeminist writing; and I (Maguire) am suggesting that creative nonfiction is a mode suited to recovering the witch for contemporary feminist purposes. Each of these papers presents practice-led research and are all quite different in their approach, scope, and subject matter. We each explore different theoretical and practical approaches to ‘writing through the witch’ in the literary forms in which we are working: the historical novel, literary memoir, and the personal essay, respectively. The three panellists have a strong history of collaboration on writing, scholarly, and community projects.