A Q&A with Grady Hendrix, Author of January Indie Next List Top Pick “Witchcraft for Wayward Girls”

Bookselling This Week: While all of your horror is remarkably relatable, I feel like this one hit particularly hard, perhaps because the most horrifying element is the system these girls are trapped in, rather than the supernatural aspects. Do you want to talk a little bit about the process of building this story and deciding where it would go? 

Grady Hendrix: For me, the key to this book was going deep on 1970. I went to the St. Augustine Historical Society and read every issue of the St. Augustine Daily Record from April through September of 1970, which is when my book takes place. Those papers told the story of a country where old people were deeply afraid of young people with their long hair, their radical politics, and their demands to end the War. And young people were terrified of old people who were quite literally shooting them in the streets and sending cops to crack their skulls to keep them in their place.

It felt like the country was breaking apart and a real, not metaphorical, generational war was taking place. Old people applauded cops laying into peaceful protestors with nightsticks while young people retreated into underground cells to come up with tactics to bring the Vietnam War home. I realized that the way these girls in the homes were treated was another symptom of this, another front in the war against young people, and that they needed an occult version of the Weather Underground to help them fight back.

BTW: You went to a lot of trouble to make sure you had the facts about these homes and the body horror aspects of pregnancy and delivery. Is there anything — I'm sure it was all horrifying and memorable — but anything in particular that you learned that really stuck with you?

GH: The specifics of how we had babies in the Seventies, Eighties, and Nineties were horrifying enough: doctors inducing labor because they don’t want to have to stay late at the hospital on a Friday afternoon, doctors telling women their morning sickness was due to their subconscious revulsion at having babies, doctors strapping women’s wrists and ankles down during labor. But what really took my breath away was the sheer hatred we’ve had for unwed mothers, and the fact that it continues today.

From the 1920s to now, we’ve called for unwed mothers to be housed in prisons, blamed them for the collapse of Western civilization, called them “sick”, “neurotic”, and “unstable.” These days we tend to use code words like “welfare moms” or “single parents” (meaning “single mothers”) but the hatred never changes. Where are men in this equation? Why is everything always mom’s fault? My wake-up call was a book from 1964 aimed at teaching ministers to deal with unwed mothers. It gave the standard scare statistics about how many unwed mothers there were every year, how old they were, and then came this simple passage, “Nothing has been mentioned and little will be throughout the rest of this book about the numbers of unwed fathers. There simply are no statistics.” And the author was right. In all the books I read about the “illegitimacy problem” from the Fifties, Sixties, and Seventies (and even more recently) not once are fathers mentioned. The last time I checked, it took two people to make a baby. But we only ever punished one of them for it.

BTW: I’d love to hear more about the creation of the librarian and the literal application of the idea that knowledge is power. 

GH: Once I realized Witchcraft would revolve around a cheap pulp paperback that contained the actual occult power, I knew that the most likely person to get that book to the people who needed it would be a librarian. I meet a ton of librarians at book events and they’re always asking me to write about a librarian, and this was the moment when it finally made sense.

Librarians do so much more than check out books — they help people fill out paperwork, apply for jobs, help raise their children, provide one of the few truly safe spaces in communities where everyone is welcome. They keep people from freezing to death in the winter and from dying of heat stroke in the summer. Sometimes they’re the only person an individual might talk to all day.

As far as I’m concerned, librarians are as important as doctors and firefighters. They’re one of the few, free public services we have left. And at its heart, at its best, their job is to get people the information they need, at the moment they need it most. To me, that’s what a revolutionary does. That’s what a freedom fighter does. That’s what a hero does.

BTW: Since we’ve interviewed you before, you’ve already talked to us a bit about how indie bookstores have impacted your life. So this time I’d love to know if you have a favorite memory of an indie bookstore. 

GH: I’ve had every experience you can imagine in indie bookstores, from giving a presentation to absolutely no one (the owner made the staff sit and be my audience), to trying to address a genuinely bereft family on how to communicate with their daughter who claimed to be possessed and had fallen under the influence of a con artist “exorcist,” to giving a presentation for hundreds of people packed into every available inch of space in a used bookstore in Texas.

I’ve had indie bookstore owners do health checks on my mother during the pandemic, and I’ve seen indie bookstore owners start fundraisers for victims of natural disasters. But what I’ve seen them do more than anything is thrive. Right now, I feel like indie bookstores are finally being treated like truly vital members of their community. The fact that you can also go to them and pick up your latest dose of smutty vampire romance just makes them that much better.