BY CAMARYN WHEELER
During the Fall semester of my junior year at Moravian College, I gave my Writing Arts presentation on witches as a discourse community, a research project titled “Witches and Their Multimodal Discourse.” When I began presenting, I proposed a question to my classmates: “What do you think a witch is?”
Immediately, hands shot up, and I got answers ranging from “online I’ve seen that they practice magic as like, a religion” to “someone with green skin and a pointy black hat.” Someone asked me, very politely, if I was a witch. For a second, I was nervous, staring back at an audience of classmates and my professor.
Did I know what I was saying? Did I know what I was getting myself into? How should I answer the question of whether or not I was a witch?
In the small crowd, I saw Kailey Tedesco, a professor who had come to watch my presentation, and saw her smiling back at me. Suddenly, I recalled everything I had studied about witches, how I had learned about them, the wonderful witches who I had met and interviewed, and all of the things that I’d learned about myself through years of accidental research.
I answered that yes, I was a witch.
***
My freshman year of college was when I started becoming interested in witches. I took an English course to fulfill a literature requirement, but the course that I had chosen in a hurry had no proper title or course description. The listed course professor was simply “Department Staff.” In some stroke of luck, it ended up being Kailey Tedesco’s Examination of the Literary Witch course.
Meeting her and taking the class was something of a catalyst for a paradigm shift in the way that I approached my education; I declared an English major, got a job at the Writing Center, became the Writing Fellow for the witch course, and started writing poetry. Throughout my sophomore year, I met with Tedesco during her office hours and found that I didn’t want to stop talking about her introductory experiences with, and self discovery through, witchcraft.
Sure, I had always known a bit about witches and witchcraft. But this was different. I had never met someone who had been so involved in magic and the communities that came with it. I felt like there had to have been a reason for meeting this person and the world of witches and their magic.
Up until my writing arts project, Tedesco had never discussed claiming the word “witch” for herself, and the thought never crossed my mind for myself. I was still so new to the world of witchcraft and only viewed myself as an outsider looking in with fascination. All the while, I had my friends read my Tarot cards and my collection of witch poetry grew. Still, that didn’t make me a witch.
Did it?
***
One day, my professor announced that our final project would be centered around research of a discourse community, the way that it functions as a whole, and the way that its members communicate. We were asked to analyze literature about the rhetoric and genres within that community, and then interview and observe this community in order to make some generalizations about how the members interact. We also had to choose a community that we were familiar with but wanted to learn more about.
Instantly, witches came to mind, but there was one problem: I wasn’t sure if I even knew any witches. When I brought up my idea to Tedesco, she offered to reach out to writer and poet friends who she thought would identify as witches. I also ended up finding a few friends on campus who (to my surprise) casually confirmed that they were witches.
Before I could interview any witches, I studied texts like Pam Grossman’s Waking the Witch: Reflections on Women, Magic, and Power, Maggie Rosen’s “A Feminist Perspective on the History of Women as Witches”, Light Magic for Dark Times by Lisa Marie Basile, and “The New Generation of Witches: Teenage Witchcraft in Contemporary Culture” by Chas S. Clifton. What I did not expect from this project was that I began inventing new questions for myself.
Were the authors of these texts witches themselves? If so, how much of what they have written is from personal experience? If not, where did this information come from? Did other witches read these texts?
With my newfound knowledge of rhetorical studies, genre studies, and the stipulations of a discourse community also came confusions about witches themselves. The texts claimed that practically anyone could be a witch, so I wondered how and if that included me.
If I enjoyed learning about witches and was reading works which were written by and for them, couldn’t that mean that I was a witch?
***
I fell in love with the witches who I conducted my interviews with. They all seemed to have one thing that I realized I was missing: the confidence to be themselves through their witchcraft. I was in awe at the way that they responded to my question, “Do you identify as a witch?” There was an ease in their voices, even in those who responded with, “Not exactly, but…”
Sabrina Nelson taught me that “true witches” have a shared respect and understanding of the world, and that to call yourself a witch, you must be “mindful of power structures and fight against them.” From Angelo Colavita (whose poetry is absolutely genius), I learned that “anything that you can touch is magical” and that everything around us can be altered by magic.
It is through these interviews that I secretly began to form my own definition of a witch: someone who either identifies as a witch through their use of magic or through a social and political identity.
***
When I compiled all of the information from my research and interviews into my final presentation, I was ultimately unable to reach a conclusion. Everything that I had learned only seemed to form a big question mark in my mind. I wasn’t even sure if witches were a discourse community.
In a way, I felt defeated, as if all of my research had never even pointed me to an answer. Still, I was honest about this in my presentation, admitting that in some cases witches fit into the rules of a discourse community and in other cases they seemed to ignore the rules completely. Yet again, witches had become a gigantic mystery to me. I shouldn’t have been so distressed over it; it was just a class project and I wasn’t concerned about my grade in the course.
Something else was guiding my desire to answer all of the questions: my desperation to feel less of an outside observer and more of an insider.
Along with my confusion over witches in the world of rhetorical studies came confusion over my own identification. In my interviews, I had been hoping that my witches would look at me with some form of solidarity; maybe say something along the lines of, “This is what I do, but you probably already knew that, right? Since you’re a witch too?” Not that I wanted my research and their time to speak to be centered around myself.
I had been hoping that I would find any answer about whether or not witches were a discourse community so that I could determine what made someone a witch; in this way, I could determine if I was a witch, too.
***
To try and answer this seemingly impossible question, I decided to start an independent study in the Spring semester with Tedesco. I reexamined the transcriptions of the interviews with my witches and studied texts such as Revolutionary Witchcraft by Sarah Lyons and two articles from Cunning Folk Magazine and Mookychick Magazine. I had planned on doing observation for my study, but everything was cut short by quarantine and online classes. I was left to make connections within the work that I had already done.
One day, I was talking to my housemate, Alison, who was taking the Witch Lit course, about a movie that they were watching for class. At one point, I don’t remember exactly what she said, but it was something along the lines of, “You’re a witch, can you explain this to me?” Suddenly, I remembered the first day of class when Tedesco had asked everyone to raise their hands if they knew someone who was a witch. Alison had raised her hand and smiled at me.
In that moment, I realized that I had the answer to my research question, and to a question that I had been trying to answer about myself for years. I realized it doesn’t matter what others think of me, nor can anyone else make decisions for me. Trying to find a “definition” for what a witch is, I also realized, was short-sighted: I finally understood that what a witch is doesn’t fit a strict definition, but fits into a broad definition of a community which is connected through shared goals.
For the longest time, I had been trying to stuff myself and the witch community into two distinct boxes. I was stressing myself out just attempting to make everything work.
All along, I didn’t need to fit anyone else’s definition but my own.
Camaryn Wheeler is an English and French student at Moravian College in Pennsylvania, where she works as a Writing Fellow and Writing Tutor, an editor for the Moravian Manuscript, and the treasurer for Moravian's American Association of University Women, and runs for the Track & Field Team. She writes realistic fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction, published a children’s book at 12 years old, and has a published book review in Rag Queen Periodical.