“To be a witch is to know words. To be a witch is to know, in your bones (your tired bones), where the word witch might come from. Birth stories, origin myths, are wandering and plural, partial, but yours.”
-So Mayer
Earlier this year, I had the honour and absolute pleasure to spend a few weeks as a Creator-in-Residence at Nottingham Central Library, in collaboration with Nottingham UNESCO City of Literature. The Creators in Residence scheme at Nottingham Central Library invites artists and writers to develop their work through public workshops and a final showcase, sharing that process with the wider community.
The invitation was magical: to create a series of workshops exploring feminist folklore, poetry, and creative practice.
The deep dark forest and the witches have always called to me, with the croaking voices of blossoming foxglove, the luring whispers of old oaks in the spring storms, or more recently, straight from the delicately wrapped treasures of the feminist archives in Nottingham. I found myself returning, once again, to listen to the wise women, wild women, hags, selkies, and other shapeshifters. It was an amazing opportunity: to spend time with the lore of witches in the company of others, and to see what might unfold when stories are approached collectively.
Like many of our witchy writers, I have followed the traces of witches through literature and myth since I was very young: utterly obsessed with Charmed and devouring the saga of the Mayfair Witches. I even ended up writing my entire Master’s thesis on reclaiming “the witch”. I could not let go of her, so in my poetry film series #witchesbelike, the witch surfaced again. The prospect of completely nerding out with wonderful writers and those who would become writers was maybe the best assignment of my entire writing life.
It is a familiar pairing: witches and libraries (you have all seen A Discovery of Witches, right?). I like to think the workshops lived up to the trope, by bringing a certain atmospheric transformation to the library: Picture a drizzly, grey Saturday morning, and at the strike of 11am, some thirty whimsical witches with cups of magic bean juice, a.k.a iced lattes, float up the stairs into Rooms 6 and 7. A perfect picture (poem?) of dangling earrings, whimsical fern prints, countless amethyst rings, long sweeping skirts, and laughter ringing like a Stevie Nicks song.
What does it mean to be a witch? What is a witch?
During the workshops, this was the question we asked ourselves again and again with personal as well as collective intention. The word itself seems to hold an ancient secret. Witch. Its roots are uncertain, commonly traced back to old German wikked, wikken meaning “something of obscure origin”. “To know”, in German, is wissen. The closeness of the words does not seem coincidental. Many stories and fairy tales carry hidden messages or are once forbidden knowledge in disguise, obscured throughout the centuries. The origins of the word “witch” are unclear, in part because they come from traditions carried through long nights full of gossip by the fire and memory, rather than being written down and formally recorded.
Into the Woods
Once upon a time…this is how many of the stories we explored started. Frau Holle, the snowmaker. Baba Yaga in her chicken-legged house. Cailleach Bheur howling as the icy wind, or even the darker tales such as Perchta, winter hag and belly slitter. We find these figures under many different names throughout time and all over the globe. We discovered that almost every country in the world has its own Night Hag – a sleep demon that delivers you nightmares while you were dreaming of a good night’s sleep.
When we read these stories, told each other the versions our grandmothers knew, we didn’t encounter them as something entirely new. There is a sense, almost immediately, of having met them before. Folktales move and travel beyond all borders. They change as they travel, but their essence within remains. They hold the core memories, emotions, hopes, and dreams of humanity. There is a particular kind of recognising that happens in stories like these. Clarissa Pinkola Estés writes about how certain tales endure because they speak to something instinctive, very anciently human. These stories carry deep, embodied knowledge, passed on across generations, often through those whose voices were not preserved in writing.
To me, it was most important that within the framework of my residency I would do my very best to create a safe and open space for FLINTA*: women, lesbians, intersex, non-binary, trans and agender people, because our stories have historically gone unheard or unrecognised, and are more often than not still actively silenced.
Experiences of sexism, violence, and trauma are part of many of our lives, yet speaking our truth always comes with risks and repercussions, and such experiences are often still answered with shame and stigma. The workshops sought to remedy this, at least for the brief time we had together to write. I wanted to create a space of solidarity and compassion, where these very intimate and personal stories could be shared and held: A space for transformation, where we could draw on the power of storytelling, finding parts of ourselves reflected in witches and other powerful figures, and begin to reimagine them and ourselves.
I firmly, firmly! believe that when we begin to tell our stories and share them with each other, we realise we are not alone; patterns of our struggles but also our power emerge, and what once felt personal begins to reveal something larger, and from there, something like collective, communal change for a world beyond sexism becomes possible.
Folklore has historically belonged to the oppressed, the rebellious, the defiant. Folk tales are the dandelions of storytelling thriving in the cracks. Worst case scenario, a weed fought and eradicated and best case scenario, ignored by those in power while spreading fluffy storyseeds of resistance, sprouting all over the world.
Much of what we now understand as folklore is healing practices, oral storytelling, history, rituals, songs, and everyday forms of knowledge that have historically been carried and sustained by women and other marginalised groups. These practices often existed outside of formal institutions and written archives and were not granted legitimacy or protection. Scholars like Silvia Federici have shown how forms of knowledge associated with women, particularly around the body, reproduction, and land, were violently suppressed during periods such as the witch hunts. At the same time, what was collected and preserved as “official” folklore was often shaped by male, colonial, and middle-class perspectives, leaving many parallel traditions underrepresented or erased.
To speak of (feminist) folklore as belonging to FLINTA* communities, then, is not to claim ownership in an exclusive sense, but to recognise a long history of cultural production and knowledge-making that has been central to us often without acknowledgment. It is also to insist that these practices continue, evolving in contemporary forms, and remain spaces of connection, resistance, and creativity.
Poetry is the way into your own story.
So why Feminist Folklore and Poetry? First and foremost, I am a poet, and if I know something about poetry, like folklore, it is rooted in rebellion. Poetry, especially in free verse, can help set our words free. It can hold fragments, contradictions, and half-formed thoughts. It leaves space for our emotions, our experiences, and above all, to connect with other stories or to turn them on their head. The workshops unfolded from there.
Our first workshop put us in touch with our inner hag. Reading stories of women casting spells at the edge of the village who were little concerned with their appearances and wielded terrifying powers while dwelling in forest cabins, we all dream of and save on our Pinterest board.
Our conversations and writing turned towards ageing and uprooting the male gaze, to defying patriarchal beauty standards and societal expectations. Together, we wrote poems towards mutual and self-care, towards forms of work that remain largely unappreciated, and towards our very own personal connection with these figures. We found that despite being feared or misunderstood, they were holding something for those who came to them. In stories like Baba Yaga or Frau Holle, we began to notice women guiding other women towards their own strength, sometimes through challenge, sometimes through care. We came to the hags through the dark, dangerous paths, and they rewarded our bravery in looking inward with stories of solidarity.
The second session moved towards our connections with the earth, with each other, and our inner wilderness, which, given the circumstances of our domesticated, civilised surroundings, needs some tending. We rewrote environmental protest songs into our own spells for change. Some were quiet, almost like offerings. Others, sharper, edged with absolutely justified female rage. Reading from Loba by Diane di Prima, the work also once again turned inward, towards the less contained parts of the self. We were guided by wolf-women and shapeshifters: drawing lines between what we were reading and what we were living. Assembling the bones of our inner landscapes and dreams for a world beyond inequality..
The final workshop stayed close to home, introducing us to the witches of Nottingham. We wandered the caves of Cresswell Crags, marked with protective signs against witches, to local stories of the Mapperley witch steps and the Nuthall witches and their vicious cat familiar, and to feminist pagan poetry from the East Midlands Feminist Archive of the 1970s. The past felt close, and after some time travel, we finally got to practise some… WitchCraft. We began to work more physically with material from zines published in Nottingham: cutting, layering, rearranging, and collaging fragments of text and image into something new, letting the present come into conversation with the past. A séance, no Ouija board necessary, and much less scary!
Working with these local treasures and traces, we place ourselves within the stories, recognising that many of the struggles of women and genderqueer people stay the same, but also that we are not alone in them. We are held in the company of these rebellious women from the past, and of each other, which brought a sense of courage and hope.
To be able to gather like this within the library, with the support of the City of Literature, made it possible to share an incredibly authentic, vulnerable, and courageous space where there was time to listen, to speak, to write without needing to arrive at something finished. Across our sessions, a sense of connection took hold. Between people, and between stories. Everyone kept showing up (literally) for their writing and each other.
The COVEN gathers
Out of this, the zine COVEN began to take shape. A shared archive of what we had written. Seeing the powerful poems in print was a special kind of magic. Evidence of our journey together and a sort of reward for our courage to tell stories with intention. On the eve of International Women’s Day, we gathered by candlelight to read our incantations from it. We created a space where nothing needed to be explained or defended in order to be shared. That kind of openness carried through the evening. People backing one another, holding the space steady, and casting their spells for healing and against the patriarchy.
I was amazed at how quickly that sense of community had formed over just a few meetings. How much could shift when people allowed themselves to be both vulnerable and loud? I truly believe we moved something within us and found our place in Nottingham’s writing community. Creating such a space requires care. To write within the library surrounded by brave books, with the full support of the City of Literature, made it possible. As a house full of stories, I have to say that there is something really special about the library itself. The openness of the space, the sense that people can simply come and be there, made everything else possible. I feel very grateful to the team for their support, their trust, and for holding the space so generously.
Stories are our magic connection. They build something precious and intangible between us. In the telling and the listening, in the making together, community can unfold and connect even if it is still finding its shape. This, too, feels like a kind of witchcraft, a transmutation. And I am so grateful for the trust and courage every single person has brought to my workshops by carrying, sharing and reclaiming (their) stories. In a time where so much can be generated, choosing to write, to make, to tell our stories in our own voices feels insistently magical, enchantingly radical.
Kate MacAlister is a poet, award winning film maker and feminist activist.
She has studied Creative Writing (M.A.) at the Manchester Writing School under the tutelage of Carol Ann Duffy and Kim Moore and graduated with distinction. She is currently pursuing a Creative Writing PhD at the University of Nottingham working on a collection of poetry focusing on the female body as antipatriarchal resistance, inspired by the activist poet Diane Di Prima.
Kate’s work has been widely published in magazines all over the world. Her two full-length collections of feminist poetry are available at and Sunday Mornings at the River Publishing. She is also part of the poetry film collective and has produced, written and directed two multi-award winning poetry films. Watch them
Kate is the founder of the multilingual community arts and literature project Stimmen der Rebellion/Dengê Berxwedane/Voices of Rebellion. She has been leading poetry workshops for women and genderqueer persons for over 5 years and is the Editor-in-Chief for the project’s literary magazine.