The witchcraft just keeps coming...

I've been amazed in recent weeks that the witchcraft news keeps evidencing itself.

A few weeks ago, there was the riot at a soccer game in Congo. It began with taunts that one of the players was a witch, and then fisticuffs got involved, and then the police fired warning shots in the air which totally terrified everyone. The crowd stampeded towards the exits, leaving 15 trampled... to death. Many of them were youths. This is so sad and ridiculous.

Then, of course, there's the YouTube video of Sarah Palin being blessed against witchcraft.

I shake my head in disbelief.


. . . .

The Malleus is scientific

The Malleus Maleficarum, written in the 1480s, very carefully outlines how to locate witches, question them, and punish them. The authors, two friars, structured the book like a legal argument, with questions posed, considered and then answered. This structure makes the book feel reasonable and logical. That's one of the most chilling things about it.

Here is a scientific analysis of how dreams work. It's under Question VII of Part I: "Whether Witches can Sway the Minds of Men to Love or Hatred." Among other methods, witches work to sway opinion while the person sleeps:

The apparitions that come in dreams to sleepers proceed from the ideas retained in the repository of their mind, through a natural local motion caused by the flow of blood to the first and inmost seat of their faculties of perception; and we speak of an intrinsic local motion in the head and the cells of the brain.

And this can also happen through a similar local motion created by devils. Also such things happen not only to the sleeping, but even to those who are awake.

See, we are influenced by the scientific-sounding description of blood through the cells... and then the friars slide in the reference to devils. It is hard to argue with such authoritative-sounding facts. And unhappily, few medieval folks did.




. . .

Be careful who you burn

The Malleus Maleficarum notes that those who bring the witches to the stake may put themselves in fatal danger:

And lastly, in the same diocese, in the territory of the Black Forest, a witch was being lifted by a gaoler on to the pile of wood prepared for her burning, and she said: ”I will pay you”; and blew into his face. And he was at once afflicted with a horrible leprosy all over his body, and did not survive many days.

In my novel The Witch's Trinity, the officials at the witchcraft trials take pains to protect themselves, both by the use of salt (which the Malleus says can protect them) and by covering the eyes of the accused so she cannot give them the evil eye. Here's a Malleus quote about salt:

They [inquisitors] must not allow themselves to be touched physically by the witch, especially any contact of their bare arms or hands, but they must always carry about them some salt consecrated on Palm Sunday and some Blessed Herbs.

I think if I was minutes away from burning, I would also pretend to hex my executioners... after all, what do you have to lose at that point? And much to gain... the reverse placebo effect, where whatever ills they endured would be accounted back to the angry spell. (Although how often does leprosy just hit you?)




. . . . .

Incubus

Incubus is not only a great band, but also a word dating to the 1100s, referring to a demon that comes in the night and has sex with a woman as she sleeps. (A succubus is the accompanying demon for men… interestingly, that word dates to 1350, so men didn’t get their nightly visits for another couple centuries.)

For today’s selection from the Malleus Maleficarum, the famous witch hunting bible from 1400s Germany, we will look at a passage about incubi (plural of incubus). This section deals with whether incubi are visible to bystanders, or if they do their nocturnal pleasuring invisibly:

But with regard to any bystanders, the witches themselves have often been seen lying on their backs in the fields or the woods, naked up to the very navel, and it has been apparent from the disposition of those limbs and members which pertain to the venereal act and orgasm, as also from the agitation of their legs and thighs, that, all invisibly to the bystanders, they have been copulating with Incubus devils; yet sometimes, howbeit this is rare, at the end of the act a very black vapour, of about the stature of a man, rises up into the air from the witch.

But true to the contradictory, irrational nature of the Malleus, a paragraph later the authors state that incubi are sometimes visible:

It is certain also that the following has happened. Husbands have actually seen Incubus devils swiving their wives, although they have thought that they were not devils but men. And when they have taken up a weapon and tried to run them through, the devil has suddenly disappeared, making himself invisible. And then their wives have thrown their arms around them, although they have sometimes been hurt, and railed at their husbands, mocking them, and asking them if they had eyes, or whether they were possessed of devils.

In my novel The Witch’s Trinity, I did not include accusations of incubus visitations. However, there is one moment where my character Güde reflects that the cat sitting on her chest is similar to an incubus.

. . . .

Hallelujah

As a former community college English instructor, I've spent a lot of time thinking about the sad state of American literacy. Why don't (many) people enjoy reading?

Reading helps you develop compassion, as you learn to experience life through other people's eyes. It helps you become a better writer, as you unknowingly pick up vocabulary, style and grammar. It opens up new options for how you might live your own life, as you see how others live.

Laurie Halse Anderson has a wonderful essay that is now several years old (an address she gave to high school English teachers) but I just came across it and it rang true for me. It moved me, actually.

It's called, Loving the Young Adult Reader Even When You Want to Strangle Him (or Her). I hope you enjoy it. Click here.

Art makes writing possible

My best friend is artist Kirsten Stolle. She has been making a living as an artist for at least a decade now. She has had solo shows and group shows in major metropolitan areas, and her art is in the collection of the Crocker Art Museum and the San Jose Art Museum. Most recently, her solo show at Dolby-Chadwick Gallery in San Francisco included an exhibition catalog. See images here.

She let me purchase some master proofs recently at a friend price, and I just adore them. Someday I hope to finish a non-historical novel and talk the publisher into using her work for the book jacket. I actually showed some darker abstract images to Random House for possibility with Hexe, as the Witch's Trinity was initially called.

The more things change, the more they stay the same

Jon Stewart the other night spoke of the Congolese Penis Theft Panic, where men fear witches either steal or shrink their members.

My own heart shrank when I heard this. This is directly out of the middle ages, literally. In the Malleus Maleficarum, the 1500s witchhunting manual that figures in my novel The Witch’s Trinity, there are many passages about witches shrinking penises or making them outright disappear. It is puzzling and sad that parts of the world still labor under superstitions of the Dark Ages.

A quick glance at the Malleus table of contents reveals that Part One addresses the question “whether witches may work some Prestidigitatory Illusion so that the Male Organ appears to be entirely removed and separate from the Body.” In Part Two, that sticky issue rears its head again (oh the terrible puns): “How, as it were, [witches] Deprive Man of his Virile Member.”

Luckily, there was hope offered for those miserable emasculated peasants, as Chapter Four of Part Two offers “Remedies prescribed for those who by Prestidigitatory Art has lost their Virile Members or have seemingly been Transformed into the Shapes of Beasts.”

Curiosity compels me to learn about these remedies. I have a copy of the Malleus, which is alive and unwell in reprints.

Well, pshaw, the member is still there, only “hidden by a glamour.” So how might these suffering men make the invisible visible again? The authors of the Malleus suggest that “They should as far as possible come to an amicable agreement with the witch herself.”

Riiiiiiiight. ‘Cause she’s gonna want to help with that right before she steps up to the stake to be burned.

You may notice that the section title also includes how to get out of being transformed into a beast. This section explores the anecdote of a sailor ashore in Cyprus who ate the eggs sold him by a local. An hour later, he went back to his ship, but his fellow sailors ran him off with a stick, crying, “Look what this ass is doing! Curse the beast, you are not coming on board.” The eggs had rendered him into a donkey.

He went back to the witch’s house, since his ship had sailed, and served her for three years as a beast of burden—with a few coffee breaks in which she and her fellow witches acknowledged him as a man and talked with him.

In the fourth year of his servitude, he and the witch passed by a church ringing its bell at the moment the Host was elevated. He knelt outside it, which piety was remarked by some merchants. The witch tried to beat him to get him to move, which only exposed her witchcraft. She was questioned and tortured, confessed. She agreed to transform him back to a man in return for her release. He sailed home, but she…well, the Malleus puts it in this succinct, chilling language: “Being again arrested, she paid the debt which her crimes merited.”

The New York Times recently wrote about children being accused of witchcraft in Angola, the Congo Republic and Congo, where this penis theft panic is happening. My blog post about it is here.

Write Free

My friend Jordan Rosenfeld recently interviewed me for her monthly e-newsletter Write Free. This is a newsletter supporting the book she co-authored of the same title.

I picked up a copy and it’s a great way to start thinking about how to turn negatives to positives. There are exercises inside to start changing the way you think and write.

The website is http://www.writefree.us/. You can subscribe to her e-newsletter, which is FREE and has good content to help you on your writing path.

Jordan’s also written a book called Make a Scene, which I’m eager to read next.

On the shelf

This jpeg sent to me by someone very, very cool. She saw Witch's Trinity at Book Passage in San Francisco's Ferry Building.

Stoker results

The Bram Stoker Awards were given out Saturday night in Salt Lake City. I couldn't attend, but the ceremony live streamed, so I sat in front of my computer (along with 75 other people--the website kept a tally!) to watch.

I was pleased Jonathan Mayberry won in his category, since we have corresponded a bit and he is a very nice guy. Gary Braunbeck gave an absolutely extraordinary acceptance speech in his category, about a loss he experienced which had me blinking back tears and counting my blessings.

And since I couldn't win in my category, I was very happy that the person who did is also a Colby graduate! Congratulations, Sarah Langan!

The next day, I attended the "Have you read it yet" bookclub in Oakland, which has met for an astonishing 18 years! These ladies know how to have fun. Unlike my book club, which merely tries to (sometimes) cook meals to match the book we read, they actually dress up. Since they had read Woman of Ill Fame, they all showed up in garters and lingerie with curled hair and ribbons and boas...they certainly dispelled any momentary gloominess over the Stoker!

Not only that, but they had created cardboard replicas of the signs the prostitutes hang over their beds so their fellas know who to request next time, replete with flowers and cirlicue handwriting. I've got my Erika sign, so if I ever fall on hard times...

We drank champagne, ate a fabulous brunch, and they actually read aloud passages from the book that they liked... I pretty much wanted to lie on the floor in a delirium of shamefaced happiness.

Thank you, Dale Marie and all you wonderful "lasses with asses."

Forgery associated with the Malleus Maleficarum?

A reader contacted me about the Malleus Maleficarum, the witch hunter’s Bible mentioned in my novel The Witch’s Trinity. She wanted to be sure I knew that the pope’s endorsement of the Malleus Maleficarum was a forgery—but research shows something a little different.

Printed at the beginning of the Malleus is a papal bull from Innocent VIII, a reference letter of sorts for the authors, Kramer and Sprenger. The bull, known as the Summis Desiderantes Affectibus, says that the two inquisitors, “our dear sons,” were empowered to witch hunt and preach the word of God to the faithful. The bull dates to 1484. It is not a forgery, but its placement at the beginning of the book may be somewhat misleading, as if the pope endorsed the book and not simply the witch hunting activities of its authors.

There is difficulty dating the first edition of the Malleus, but certainly the bull predates it by a few years.

There is, however, a forgery (at least most scholars think it is a forgery)—a letter of endorsement for the Malleus Maleficarum purportedly written by the faculty of the University of Cologne. This too was inserted in some editions of the Malleus, but not in my Dover reprint of the Montague Summers’ 1928 translation so I didn’t know about it.

However, a little quick googling yields the information that at least one scholar is opening the case back up and asserting that the letter is not a forgery. This scholar recently translated the Malleus –actually there were two new translations in 2006 and 2007. Read this article for more information.

The Montague Summers translation is very strange because he believed in witches and in witch hunting. Rather than writing an introduction that reflected dolefully on how women and men of the past were persecuted, he calls the Malleus “one of the most important, wisest and weightiest books of the world.” More on this later.

Van, what ARE you talking about?

On the way home from Sacramento from the Authors on the Move event, I was listening to the radio and an old Van Morrison song came on. I vaguely knew the chorus, “Oh, the water, oh, the water” but because I was trying fiercely to stay awake, I listened to the lyrics for the first time.

And immediately I was confused. What was that song about? Something stung him to his soul… something in the water stung him. Was it a jellyfish? He does talk of a jellyroll, but is that what they call jellyfish in Ireland?

I listened and puzzled and finally had to google when I got home.

Actually, he was STONED to his soul.

That makes sense.

This has nothing to do with the Witch's Trinity.

. . . .

Authors on the Move

The event I participated in this weekend in Sacramento was amazing! Incredible orchestration on the part of the organizers, who drew together 300+ guests and around 30 writers for a dinner and auction.

We writers would sit at an eight-top for 20 minutes and talk about our books with the guests, then move on to another table. That sounds nervewracking...but the kindness of the people I sat with made it actually very pleasant. Plus, what a great cause: the Sacramento Public Library's literacy programs and other library projects.

The writers pre-ate together before the guests arrived, and that was really nice too. I got to meet some great people and talk shop. I haven't met any writers in my new community, so it was so relieving to get a chance to hang with other writers.

Thanks, Kathy Les and other organizers!

It gets naughty

My editor suggested I subscribe to Google Alerts, a free service that emails you anytime your specified search term shows up on any website. So whenever someone writes about "Witch's Trinity" or the misspelled "Witches' Trinity," I get a link to it.

Let us pause for a moment and reflect how scary that really is. Privacy is a thing of the past.

And paranoia and egotism are a thing of the now!

Anyway, this morning I got an alert about a blogger who thought my book was a little too risque. Here's what she wrote:

So as of yesterday I finished a book called the Witches Trinity. Not one I would recommend to anyone. It gets naughty and I am embarrassed to say that I read it.

I had to laugh and say, if you think that's naughty, don't read my first book!




. . .

The Pterodactyl Interview

I’ve been nominated for a Bram Stoker award by the Horror Writers Association, and here is a quick 10-minute podcast interview about it with Rick Kleffel. It’s not the smartest I’ve ever sounded—among other things, I’ve somehow picked up an annoying overuse of the word “certainly”—but I love this interview because my 10-month-old stars in it! In the background you will hear her pterodactyl shrieks.

Rick's a great interviewer and, as we talk about in the interview, he's the one who suggested I look into the Stoker awards. I owe him big-time!

Here's the link to the podcast.


. . .

Murder, a la Francais

I’ve had the pleasure of meeting writer Cara Black several times. Her mystery series is set in Paris—not the moony Paris of the Eiffel Tower, but the gritty working-class city of hidden WWII Nazis, immigrants without papers and 1970s terrorists—and that’s just the first three books!

Her main character Aimee Leduc is clever, sexy and vulnerable, and I’ve loved the unfolding story, as the series progresses, of what happened to her parents. Cara’s latest is out, Murder in the Rue de Paradis, and here are a few of the events you can catch her at, to get a signed copy and hear her read.

February 28th @ 7:00 pm
*** Launch Party for Murder in the Rue de Paradis! ***with Pari Taichert
M Is for Mystery
86 East Third Avenue
San Mateo, CA 94401
Contact: Ed Kaufmann
Phone: (650) 401-8077
Email: ed@mformystery.com

March 4th @ 7:00 pm at Book Passage, 51 Tamal Vista Blvd. in Corte Madera

March 5th @ 12:30 pm at Stacey’s Bookstore, 581 Market St. in San Francisco

More events are listed at www.carablack.com.





. . .

I'm stoked about the Stoker!

I am so happy to announce that The Witch’s Trinity has been nominated for a Bram Stoker Award in the category “Superior Achievement in a Novel.” The awards are given by the Horror Writers Association—their definition of horror includes psychological as well as supernatural. There is fierce competition just to land on the ballot, so I’m honored and amazed.

The trophy is a sculpture of a haunted house. The front door opens to show a plaque with the winner’s name. What could be more cool?

My international class

The other day I posted about my upcoming Mediabistro class which, as it is online, is accessible to people around the world. The course starts Thursday, February 21, with online chats each Thursday thereafter.

As my novel has been released in England and Australia (and other countries) by the publisher Hodder & Stoughton, I thought it might be useful for potential students in those countries to know when that chat happens.

So I did some googling of Greenwich Mean Time. I actually prefer to use GNT (Greenwich Nice Time), but alas the world is as it is. Here's the results:

If you are in London, the Thursday chat actually happens on FRIDAYS... at 2 a.m. Perhaps not that manageable for most folks...either you're safely in bed, or you're out clubbing and a class on writing is not the most attractive thing to do on a Friday night.

If you are in Melbourne, the chat also happens on Fridays, but at 1 p.m. You could make it a late lunch break if you are working!

If you're American, the class is at 9 p.m. EST.

For me, it's 6 p.m. PST.

The world is very large, it turns out.

Write for Me

I like to teach novel writing, and through a great organization called Mediabistro, I'm able to do it from the comfort of my own home.

That is to say, I teach online. My next class starts in a few weeks (Feb. 21) and it'd be great to have you. Since the course is online, you can live anywhere in the world. Two semesters ago, I had a student from Sweden--for her, the class was at 3 a.m. or something!

The format is:

1. I post a lecture every week that students read at their leisure
2. Students post assignments several times during the 12 week course--either portions of a novel-in-progress or introspection on some aspect of their own writing--on an electronic bulletin board only visible to those in the class
3. Other students comment on those posts, as do I.
4. Finally, once a week for one hour, we gather "live" in a chat room to discuss the posts, the lectures and whatever else comes up.

The course is designed for students to complete a novel draft in 12 weeks. That sounds very ambitious, but many have done it. I coach students and cheer them on, but also provide feedback to improve their writing. One aspect of the course I really like is when we talk about the publication business--how to draft query letters to get an agent's attention, how to format the manuscript properly, and the ins and outs of the tough business of getting your book published.

If this sounds interesting to you, please check out the official course site at mediabistro.

Witches and cows

In the Malleus Maleficarum, there seems to be a lot of discussion of witchcraft vis a vis cows. Probably not surprising, given how important cows were to daily life in the middle ages: milk to drink and render into cheese, meat at slaughtertime, heat for those who kept them indoors with them.

Here's a passage about how cows inform on witches:

For sometimes when a cow has been injured in this way, and they wish to discover who has bewitched it, they drive it out into the fields with a man's trousers, or some unclean thing, upon its head or back. And this they do chiefly on Feast Days and Holy Days, and possibly with some sort of invocation of the devil; and they beat the cow with a stick and drive it away. Then the cow runs straight to the house of the witch, and beats vehemently upon the door with its horns, lowing loudly all the while; and the devil causes the cow to go on doing this until it is pacified by some other witchcraft.

A frightening image, the cow battering the door with its horns. And god save you if it was your door the cow chose.

Did the Malleus Maleficarum really exist?

Emphatically and unfortunately, yes.

You can buy a copy of the Malleus Maleficarum today on Amazon. At my website, www.erikamailman.com, in the right hand column there is a running display of some particularly egregious quotes from the book (each time you refresh, a new one appears).

The authors, Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger, wrote it to guide courts in their prosecution of witches. The book reads like a pseudo (and psycho) legal text, including questions to be put to these witches, and how to proceed based on what they report.

Freud would have a field day with the recurring sections on how women can make the male genitals either shrink or completely disappear.

The book is threaded through with anecdotes that break your heart. I’ll be writing about some of those, so please check back later (but not too soon. Blogging with a newborn is a tenuous undertaking!)

The second painting of "Mary Bliss Parsons"

This doesn't depict Mary Bliss Parsons; see discussion in previous post.

I had saved the image on my hard drive so I'm able to post it, although I can't refind where a google image search led to information on the artist, sitter and provenance. The yellow garment is the tip-off, somehow an extraordinary choice for a painting of this time period.


UPDATE THANKS TO MY MOTHER:

My mom was able to locate the painting; it's in the collection of the Worcester Art Museum. It's a painting of Mrs. Elizabeth Clarke Freake and her daughter Mary. View the info on provenance here (you will then click on the painting on the upper left--for some reason, the specific page isn't clickable). Thank you, Mom!


. . . . .

Mary Bliss Parsons, is that you?

Yipes!

I was looking through my archives and realized I never corrected a major error. In this post, I attached an image that I identified as a painting of my ancestor Mary Bliss Parsons. It’s not! (and one of the commenters references another painting of her with a child, which also cannot be the case.) The image was posted at the UMass website with no caption. Because the site is about MBP and because (I must say it) the woman looks VERY MUCH like members of my family, I made the hopefully-understandable assumption that it depicts her.

I got in touch with the UMass webmistress to request permission to possibly use the image in The Witch’s Trinity, which has an extensive afterword about Mary Bliss Parsons. She informed me that there are no images of MBP. The UMass people had simply noticed the website was devoid of images and cast about to find some. The painting is of the same era, illustrating “Colonial America,” so they used it. They ran out of time and funding to properly caption the image.

(But I hasten to say the website is in all other regards completely amazing. Where else would I have been able to see—handwriting and all—the testimony in Mary Bliss Parsons’ witchcraft cases, without traveling all the way to Massachusetts? It also has a very in-depth analysis of my ancestor’s circumstances versus her accuser’s.)

The funny thing is, the woman in the image is basically a dead-ringer for my mom dressed as a Colonial woman. I’m blown away that this doesn’t depict our ancestor! (By the same token, it initially amazed me that after eleven generations, faces could still be so similar).

Interesting crinkle #1:

There was a second painting on the website (the one I think the commenter on my original post was referring to). I have to give my mother credit for questioning it. She said that she had seen it somewhere before (no, not in our attic!). With a strong interest in Colonial painting/furniture/antiques, she recalled that this portrait was unusual for that era in its use of yellow for the woman’s garment. I googled while she pulled out her books. And I was able to locate the painting, which identified the sitter as the wife of someone—not a Parsons. I just now tried to again locate the image; why didn’t I bookmark it? Can’t find it now.

Interesting crinkle #2:

I just went back to the Umass website and am unable to locate either painting. Looks like they took them down. And added some new content: nice work, guys!

Calling Down the Rain

This image from De Lamiis shows witches bringing down the rain. It looks like they are feeding the cauldron with a snake and a rooster.

Witches were feared for their ability to affect natural phenomena. For people whose lives were staked upon whether crops would fail or succeed, the elements were a fearsome unknown. A cold snap could kill the harvest, or too much or too little rain. If power to affect these elements was in the hands of malevolent neighbors, who were assisted by the devil, well, they were to be hated. And executed.

In The Witch's Trinity, townspeople whose village has been famine-struck look about themselves wildly to find who has kept the fields barren. And thus the witch hunt begins.

***
Image is from Witchcraft in Europe 1100-1700 by Alan C. Kors and Peter Edwards

Names

Going through some old paperwork tonight, I found a draft copy of my first novel with a completely different title on it—a name I had forgotten. You see, various attempts to position it as more of a mystery or less of a mystery had me and a former agent trying on different names. I don’t believe it ever went to an editor under the title “The Blood-Soaked Bonnet” (the title page I just unearthed), but it was submitted under “The China Silk Murders.” The book at that point had plot points surrounding a scrap of silk found clenched in one of the murdered women’s hands. My original title for the novel had been “Ill Fame,” and it was published earlier this year under the much-better expansion, “Woman of Ill Fame.”

Similarly, The Witch’s Trinity was named Hexe (the German word for witch). I loved this title and thought it could really lend itself to some gorgeous cover art. I was ultimately won over by arguments against this title (hard to pronounce! confusing!) and am pleased with what went to press. I’ve seen online reviews poke fun at it and say it is not a serious-enough title, but I like the fact that it makes more sense once you’ve read the book.

And let’s not even talk about my unpublished young adult novel that has had five titles…

Hodder & Stoughton

Today The Witch's Trinity launches in England from the publisher Hodder & Stoughton--perfect timing, being the 13th of the month!

Welcome to any of you coming to this blog from across the big pond. My intent here is to continue to post witchcraft-related content for those who are interested in learning more. It's tough, though, during the holiday season, which for us stateside began in November with Thanksgiving.

During readings, people often ask me how the witch craze finally drew to a close. After all, why stop after four hundred years of persecution? That's got a lot of momentum.

There are many, interconnected and complex reasons for the witch craze coming to an end. One, that I'll quickly explore here, is the fact that they simply ran out of women. Literally, in a few cases: there were two German towns that were left with one woman each.

Can you imagine being that one woman?

In a more general sense, though, the villages and cities ran out of women who were stereotypically able to fulfill the role of witch. These would be women outside of society somehow: whether poverty-stricken, displaying mental health issues, or perhaps just outside the bounds of what was "normal" for a woman at this time--marrying and producing offspring. These women were easy to capture, interrogate and execute.

But when all those women are gone and the roving accusatorial eye then rested on women who were not the typical witchlike woman... women important to their society, who were married, linked with upright men of the community... well, then it became a little more unsettling. Instead of a self-righteous certainty that your village has executed a witch, you begin to be a little worried that she was actually innocent.

In Salem, Massachusetts, the witch hunts came to a fairly abrupt halt when the governor's own wife was accused.

There were of course many other facets to the closure of witchcraft (which actually is not a solidly-closed door--please see my previous post about the agonizing tragedy of young children in Africa facing accusations of witchcraft today) and I will touch on those in later posts.

Thanks for checking in!

Nausea

Two friends sent me a link to this New York Times story ("In Africa, Accusation of Witchcraft Leads to Abuse") on children accused of witchcraft. I read it with a growing sense of nausea.

In my novel The Witch’s Trinity, a family member has possibly accused her mother-in-law of witchcraft because there is not enough food, and she wants one less mouth around the table. And that’s exactly what is happening today in Angola, Congo and the Congo Republic. Except instead of happening to grownups, it’s happening to children.

The article reports:

Officials attribute the surge in persecutions of children to war — 27 years in Angola, ending in 2002, and near constant strife in Congo. The conflicts orphaned many children, while leaving other families intact but too destitute to feed themselves.

“The witches situation started when fathers became unable to care for the children,” said Ana Silva, who is in charge of child protection for the children’s institute. “So they started seeking any justification to expel them from the family.”

This picture is of a six-year-old boy Afonso Garcia, pushed out of his family home because of accusations of witchcraft. He now lives in a shelter with other boys who were accused. Children are being beaten, abandoned and even killed for being witches.

Although my novel describes a horrifying situation, I appreciated the buffer of its being long ago and far away (and fictional, although it certainly could be any woman’s story from medieval Germany). This New York Times story just makes my heart ache… it is happening now.

Talk of the Bay with Rick Kleffel

I'm excited to report that an interview with Rick Kleffel will broadcast on Halloween, Oct. 31, between 10 am and 11 am on KUSP's Talk of the Bay program. This is 88.9 fm or for those not in earshot, it streams at kusp.org/live. I'll be talking about The Witch's Trinity with Rick.

Read it and eat

Instead of "read it and weep," Towne Center Books has come up with a monthly event called Read it and Eat. It's a luncheon where the author answers questions, reads a passage or two... a low-key, fun thing to do.

For my book, this is quite ironic, since the characters in The Witch's Trinity are starving... but I'll be participating Nov. 30.

Towne Center Books is an absolutely lovely indie bookstore in Pleasanton, California, at 555 Main Street. Please call 925-846-8826 for more information and to register. Hope to see you there.

Death of the Stablehand

First of all, two bloggers were generous enough to post interviews with me: please see Michelle Moran's History Buff and Kelly Hewitt's Loaded Questions.

And here's an image titled Death of the Stablehand by Hans Baldung Grien. Although it appears more modern than the Compendium Maleficarum images I've been posting lately, this is actually older, from the early 1500s. As you can see, the witch in the upper right, wielding what looks like an upside-down broom, has either killed or stupefied the poor stablehand, as the horse looks on bewildered.

Trampling the Cross

Much of witchcraft is a reversal of Christanity. For instance, witches say the Catholic Mass backwards, and it becomes the Black Mass. They accept the Eucharist but underneath their tongue instead of on top--and then spit it out into the privy. In The Witch's Trinity, they pray with their hands pressed together and facing downwards rather than towards heaven. I'm actually not sure if I made up that detail or if I saw it somewhere in my research.

Old witchcraft woodcuts illustrate these reversals. Here is a new witch trampling upon the cross rather than venerating it. And please note--the witch is a male! The image comes from the Compendium Maleficarum, a book that explained everything about witches (borrowing some information from the earlier Malleus Maleficarum, another witch hunting Bible). This woodcut is from a 1610 edition, reproduced in Brian Levack's The Witch Hunt in Early Modern Europe. The Compendium Maleficarum was written by a Milanese monk named Francesco Maria Guazzo.

Is the pebble trial real or invented?

People ask me whether The Witch's Trinity is based on a particular case of witchcraft I found in my research. It's not--it's an amalgam of all the different things I read, as well as some invention.

The pebble trial is a good example of this. In The Witch's Trinity, a character must endure a test of her innocence. A kettle of water is boiled, and three pebbles are thrown into the steaming, rupturing water. The character is asked to retrieve the pebbles--if she can get them, and if she remains unburned, she is innocent.

In my reading, I learned about the pebble trial. It did exist. But I altered it slightly to suit my story--rather than one pebble, the character must collect three, a reference to the Holy Trinity. Like many of the witchcraft tests, this one is impossible to pass successfully.

If you have read The Witch's Trinity (or even if you haven't!) and would like to ask me any questions, please feel free to do so either by writing a comment on any post--the comments automatically go to my in-box, so I always see them--or by sending me an email to (my first name) (the AT symbol) (erikamailman.com). I would love to hear from you.

Witch's Trinity on the radio

I will be on KPFA this Monday the 15th from 3-3:30 p.m. as part of Denny Smithson's Word for Word program, 94.1 FM, discussing The Witch’s Trinity. I don't know if KPFA has live streaming, but the website KPFA.org does indeed post the recordings after the fact

Precursor to the broom

In this image from De Lamiis et Phitonicis Mulieribus--a very old tome on witchcraft--shapeshifted witches ride the air on a stick, a more ancient concept than that of women riding brooms.

De Lamiis was written by German Ulrich Molitor in 1493. He was a law professor, and his book went into several editions, illustrated by woodcuts that were updated so it is possible to find different versions of the same image. I'll post two of those next time for comparison purposes.

Here's what Wikipedia has to say about Molitor:

Ulrich Molitor (15th century) was a Professor of Law at the University of Konstanz, Germany.

He wrote one of the first books on witchcraft, De Lamiis et Pythonicis Mulieribus (The Witches and Diviner Women), published in 1489.

Although Molitor supported the death sentence for heretics and practitioners of witchcraft, from a moderate point of view for his time he considered that the Sabbaths were an illusion caused by the Devil and not a reality.

This image located in Alan C. Kors and Peter Edwards: Witchcraft in Europe 1100-1700.

Shapeshifters

This image is from a 1610 edition of the book Compendium Maleficarum (found in Brian Levack's The Witch Hunt in Early Modern Europe). It shows witches who have taken the form of creatures--including a slow but very evil snail--to work their maleficence.

Shapeshifting plays a role in The Witch's Trinity, as an owl and a cat are possibly imbued with human souls.

It is ON SALE!

My local bookstore (only bookstore in my new "hometown") had not received The Witch's Trinity by the on-sale date of Sept. 25. I had to check back three different times to see this stunning vision: a pile of my books! I knew the store had ordered five copies, so I was thrilled to see only four. That means one got bought! Heady stuff. ;)

Litquake update

Here's the word on the Litquake panel I'm so happy to be part of:

Monday, October 8, 5:30-7:30 pm
The Journey to Being Discovered:
First-Time Authors Reveal All
Foundation Center, 312 Sutter St., Second Floor Conference Room. FREE

Learn from a panel of newly published, first time writers at this panel discussion, a co-production with The Foundation Center. Three novelists and one nonfiction author will talk about all that was involved in making their dream of writing a reality. We’ll cover finding the time and discipline to write regularly, identifying potential publishers, getting noticed by literary professionals, dealing with rejection, and publicizing your book. In Litquake festival fashion, the writers will also be reading from their newly published works. Bring your questions. Space is limited and advance registration required. Please visit http://foundationcenter.org/sanfrancisco/wksjourneyOct_8.html to register.

Participants include: Anita Amirrezvani, Bridget Kinsella, Erika Mailman, and Kemble Scott

The next Witch's Trinity reading is 7 p.m. this Thursday the 4th, at A Great Good Place for Books in Oakland's Montclair District, 6120 La

San Francisco Chronicle

A really nice review ran in the Chronicle for The Witch's Trinity, which you can read here. I really like the reviewer's writing style; she must be a writer herself.

I have four more events scheduled before I lapse into quietude:

* Oct. 4: A Great Good Place for Books, Oakland , at 7 p.m. (6120 LaSalle Ave.)

* Oct. 8: Litquake, San Francisco’s Foundation Center near Union Square, at 5:30 p.m. (312 Sutter St.)

* Oct. 13: Book Passage, Corte Madera, at 4 p.m. (51 Tamal Vista Blvd.)

* Oct. 17: Rickshaw Stop, San Francisco, at 7 p.m. (155 Fell St., at Van Ness)

Witches offer children to the devil

This image was included in a pamphlet for the witchcraft trial of a Scottish woman, Agnes Sampson, in 1591.

Here's what Wikipedia has to say about her trial:

(b.unknown- executed 28 January 1591) Agnes Sampson was a Scottish healer and purported witch. Also known as the "Wise Wife of Keith", Sampson is most famous for her part in the North Berwick Witch trials in the later part of the sixteenth century.

Sampson lived at Nether Keith, a part of the Barony of Keith, East Lothian, Scotland. She was considered to have healing powers and acted as a midwife for a large section of local society.

In the spring of 1590, James VI returned from Oslo after marrying Anne, daughter of the King of Denmark-Norway. The Danish court at that time was greatly perplexed by witchcraft and the black arts, and this must have impressed on the young King James. The regal voyage back from Denmark was beset by storms. "In the summer of 1590 a great witch hunt was instituted in Copenhagen. One of the first victims was Anna Koldings, who under pressure divulged the names of five other women, one of whom was Mail the wife of the burgomaster of Copenhagen. They all confessed that they had been guilty of sorcery in raising storms which menaced Queen Anne's voyage and that they had sent devils to climb up the keel of her ship. In September two women were burnt as witches at Kronborg" ^[1] James heard news from Denmark regarding this and decided to set up his own tribunal.

By the autumn of 1590, Scotland was aflame with witch hunts and many of those sent to trial were questioned by the King himself.

Agnes Sampson was arrested along "sundrie" [sic] others, questioned regarding her role in the storm raising, and that of others. She was put to the torture which she resisted at first but:

"This aforeaside Agnis Sampson which was the elder Witch, was taken and brought to Haliruid house before the Kings Maiestie and sundry other of the nobility of Scotland, where she was straitly examined, but all the perswasions which the Kings maiestie vsed to her with ye rest of his counsell, might not prouoke or induce her to confesse any thing, but stood stiffely in the deniall of all that was laide to her charge: whervpon they caused her to be conueied awaye to prison, there to receiue such torture as hath been lately prouided for witches in that country: and forasmuch as by due examination of witchcraft and witches in Scotland, it hath latelye beene found that the Deuill dooth generallye marke them with a priuie marke, by reason the Witches haue confessed themselues, that the Diuell dooth lick them with his tung in some priuy part of their bodie, before hee dooth receiue them to be his seruants, which marke commonly is giuen them vnder the haire in some part of their bodye, wherby it may not easily be found out or seene, although they be searched: and generally so long as the marke is not seene to those which search them, so long the parties that hath the marke will neuer confesse any thing. Therfore by special commaundement this Agnis Sampson had all her haire shauen of, in each parte of her bodie, and her head thrawen with a rope according to the custome of that Countrye, beeing a paine most greeuous, which she continued almost an hower, during which time she would not confesse any thing vntill the Diuels marke was found vpon her priuities, then she immediatlye confessed whatsoeuer was demaunded of her, and iustifying those persons aforesaid to be notorious witches."

also:

"Item, the saide Agnis Sampson confessed before the Kings Maiestie sundrye thinges which were so miraculous and strange, as that his Maiestie saide they were all extreame lyars, wherat she answered, she would not wishe his Maiestie to suppose her woords to be false, but rather to beleeue them, in that she would discouer such matter vnto him as his maiestie should not any way doubt off. And therupon taking his Maiestie a little aside, she declared vnto him the verye woordes which passed betweene the Kings Maiestie and his Queene at Vpslo in Norway the first night of their mariage, with their answere eache to other: whereat the Kinges Maiestie wondered greatlye, and swore by the liuing God, that he beleeued that all the Diuels in hell could not haue discouered the same: acknowledging her woords to be most true, and therefore gaue the more credit to the rest which is before declared."(Newes from Scotland)^[2]

Prior to this last confession James had not been convinced of Sampson's guilt, but afterwards he was convinced. Sampson was taken to the Scaffold on Castlehill, garotted then burnt to ashes.

Edinburgh Burgh Treasurer's accounts itemise the cost of Agnes Sampson's execution, giving the date as the 16 day of January 1590 [OS] 'quha wes burnt' as £6 8s 10d.

This image is from Alan C. Kors and Peter Edwards: Witchcraft in Europe 1100-1700

Book release is tomorrow

We went to Cody's today to drop off wine for tomorrow's event. Although the book isn't on display because it doesn't release until tomorrow, there was a wonderful big poster for it on the front table. The reading is tomorrow, Sept. 25, at Cody's on Fourth Street in Berkeley.

It feels like forever ago that I learned the book was going to be published... and it also feels like just yesterday. I am thrilled and grateful.

Mediabistro course

I'm teaching novel writing again, starting Oct. 9. This is an online course with chats on Tuesday nights. Visit www.mediabistro.com to enroll.

I really enjoy teaching creative writing... it's great to take a look at part of someone's novel in progress and hopefully offer some useful critique. Like a brick-and-mortar workshop, the website allows other students to comment on each other's work, building community. I've taught with MB three times, and twice the students decided to continue contact with each other after the class ended, forming their own writers groups. That makes me feel great... since writing is such a solitary activity, we need the support of our peers to help make it possible.

Ancient Egypt beckons

Apologies for the long hiatus in posting... we moved out of our beloved Oakland! Hard choice to make, but necessary to avoid my poor partner commuting three hours a day for work. We all breathe a little easier now.

Want to recommend a great book on ancient Egypt, Nefertiti. It's written by Michelle Moran; we both work with the same fantastic Random House editor. In this book, iconic Egyptians come alive and walk and talk and scheme...and temples are built and destroyed. I recommend it highly.

Litquake!

Litquake is coming up again... was it a whole YEAR ago?

I'm excited to be part of it again with The Witch's Trinity. I'll be appearing with other authors including good friend Kemble Scott. Litquake is San Francisco's literary festival on an astonishing scale... a whole week of event after event, with simultaneous event! See below for this one.

Monday, October 8, 5:30-7:30 pm
The Journey to Being Discovered:
First-Time Authors Reveal All
The Foundation Center, 312 Sutter St., Second Floor Conference Room. FREE

Learn from a panel of newly published, first time writers at The Journey to Being Discovered: First Time Authors Reveal All. Three novelists and one nonfiction author will talk about all that was involved in making their dream of writing a reality. We’ll cover finding the time and discipline to regularly write, identifying potential publishers, getting noticed by literary professionals, dealing with rejection, and publicizing your book. In Litquake festival fashion, the writers will also be reading from their newly published works. Bring your questions. Space limited. Advance registration required. Please visit foundationcenter.org/sanfrancisco/sf_october.html starting September 4, 2007 to register

Participants include: Anita Amirrezvani, Bridget Kinsella, Erika Mailman, and Kemble Scott.

English cover

The English publisher Hodder will be bringing The Witch's Trinity out in December, with a different cover. Can't wait to see it "live"--the colors are amazing.

Witch's Trinity book cover

The Witch’s Trinity comes out September 25, and I can’t wait. Three months away, but given how time has been flying now that I have a baby, it’ll probably be here tomorrow.

My wonderful publicist has set me up with six readings in the Bay Area, as follows:

• Sept. 25 (the launch): Cody’s Books, Berkeley
• Sept. 26: M is for Mystery, San Mateo
• Oct. 4: A Great Good Place for Books, Oakland
• Oct. 13: Book Passage, Corte Madera, at 4 p.m. (changed from the 12th)
  
• Oct. 17: Rickshaw Stop, San Francisco (changed from the 18th)
  
• Oct. 30: Books Inc., Alameda CANCELLED
  

This last weekend I was a panelist at the Book Group Expo in San Jose. A wonderful event! I really enjoyed meeting the other authors – and a panel is so much easier than a reading. It’s more comfortable to present as a team rather than a solo flyer, and answering questions is more fun than reading a chapter from your book.

I’m posting two different covers of Witch’s Trinity. Can you tell which one is the one Crown is going with?

Initially, Crown created the fire cover. I liked this because the wood shape against the fire is mysterious and Rorschachian. But apparently it doesn’t look literary enough (and could even be mistaken for fantasy genre), so the cream-colored cover with the small demons woodcut is the official cover now. I think this was ultimately a good decision!

P.S. Now that I've uploaded the "fire" cover, I'm seeing that it's coming in as a wonderful eerie blue... something to do with me converting a PDF to a jpeg and it being rasterized. Let me scout around for a true-color version, or if worse comes to worse, I'll scan in my galley. But I kind of like it in blue!

P.P.S. Here's the galley.

P.P.P.S. I looked at an older post and saw that I had referred to my newborn as "preternatally wise." Pretty funny malapropism... getting the word "natal" in there. I meant, of course, preternaturally.

Book Group Expo

I'll be at the Book Group Expo in San Jose on June 9, as part of a panel called "Beats, Shoots, and Bleeds: Characters on the Edge." My fellow panelists are Kemble Scott, Peter Plate and Cara Black, with Eddie Muller as moderator. Our panel is at 11:30 a.m.

The expo is a fun, two-day event with lots of writers, chocolate, wine tasting... I went last year and had a great time. The headliners are Amy Tan and Khaled Hosseini.

Take my fiction class!

Later this month, I will begin teaching Novel Writing through Mediabistro. This 12-week class starts May 30 and goes through Aug. 22... and it's all online. No pesky commute!

The class convenes every Wednesday from 9 to 10 eastern time (6 -7 p.m. California time) and lectures are posted throughout the week as well for your leisure in downloading. I' ve taught with Mediabistro several times before but this is the first time doing it online--I'm excited to see how it all goes.

Click here if you are interested in learning more. There are price breaks the earlier you sign up.

In other news, I will be a panelist June 9 at the San Jose Book Group Expo with Kemble Scott, Cara Black and Peter Plate. Can't wait!

And in other news.... well, I determined not too long ago that this blog would transition into strictly writing-related news, but there are some personal things that are just too exciting to contain. On April 19, Alan and I became the proud parents of a fantastic little girl who is healthy and happy and preternatally wise. Life is GOOD.

Ill Fame cover design

One of my favorite blogs to check regularly is The Book Design Review. As someone who has loved books all her life and spent a lot of time looking at covers, I thoroughly enjoy reading a designer's reaction to covers he comes across.

Joseph and I emailed a little bit about Woman of Ill Fame, and he very generously posted the cover with a little bit of critique. You can read his post here. Like most people, he was struck by the photograph of the woman on the cover, just as I was when I first came across her. I feel so lucky that Heyday Books was willing to incorporate her image into the design.

New review of WOIF

Kel Munger of the Sacramento News and Review wrote a short review of Woman of Ill Fame that you can read here. I'm always grateful and excited to see media coverage.

Remember, next week is my last reading for this novel.
7 p.m. Wednesday, April 4 at Black Oak Books, 1491 Shattuck Ave. in Berkeley, 510-486-0698.
Come see me in all my pregnant splendor as I talk about the closed-door activities that got me to this gravid state.
;)

Reading at Black Oak Books

I'm delighted that I will be reading at Black Oak Books in Berkeley at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, April 4.

Black Oak is a venerable institution, and all of us indy bookstore lovers chewed our nails for a little bit on hearing that the store might close. Looks like things are back in order, and I'm thrilled to be booked with them.

This will probably be my last Woman of Ill Fame reading, so I hope I can give it a good send-off. Would love to see you there! Black Oak Books is at 1491 Shattuck Ave. in Berkeley, 510-486-0698.

Trying to make it all real

Historical accuracy is a tough thing to keep your eyes open about. When I first began writing Woman of Ill Fame, my intention was to make it absolutely true (while the characters were fictional)… so, for instance, I was going to situate Nora’s brothel at the same address that I would be able to locate one on a map of the time, any saloon she frequented would be an actual one from 1849, etc., etc.

However, right away (first page!) I ran into a sticky mess: the name of the ship Nora comes to San Francisco on. I knew I wanted Nora to arrive on November 11—a little bit of number superstition on my part—so I went to the UC Berkeley library microfilm room to look at the Alta California newspaper. That’s the actual newspaper that the Gold Rushers read—pretty astonishing that somehow copies existed long enough to be photographed and stowed on microfilm. The Alta California ran lists of the ships coming into harbor on any given day. And to my dismay, none of the November 11 ships had evocative names. I even loosened my superstition enough to look a few days after and before the 11th… nothing good. I always thought ships had very cool names!

So I decided to break my own self-imposed historical accuracy rule and just completely made up the name of the ship, The Lady’s Peril. And what a relief! This instantly freed me up to invent addresses and names of liveries and such. The historical background of the novel is still truthful: things like the Christmas Eve fire, the details surrounding contraception and prostitution…but I felt free to devise small details.

And then came… the final editing phase.

For a writer, few things are as scary as realizing the pages in front of you are your last chance to fix any errors. I was frantically googling and using my dictionary to determine whether things like isinglass windows, the penile appellation John Thomas, and Panama hats were in existence in 1849. And then, too, I was trying to go through garment history to see whether women wore bell sleeves at that point, because I really liked the consonant sound of them –and boy, if you try to google anything about clothing online, you get hundreds of hits for Renaissance Festival costumes and it’s hard to navigate around that stuff to get to solid historical clothing history…

And then you come up on bigger issues.

Here’s my little frustrated note to myself at the time:

Major sticking point. Shit. All along, I’ve had Nora on the ship called The Lady’s Peril, but also had her crossing the isthmus of Panama, canoeing the Chagres River… I did not think it through to realize that if she got off the ship, the ship couldn’t continue… so it would be a different ship that brought her the rest of the way. I got confused between the ships that go round Cape Horn and the ships that make the Panama cutoff.

Shit. So, now I have to restructure all the references to her ship and to the other prostitute on board… or should I make her a Cape Horn person as well and cut all the stuff about the canoe trip?

Damn. Exactly NOT what I need when I’m trying to finish my edits a mere 14 hours before I have to go to the airport for a two-week trip to Paris I haven’t even packed for yet.

Well, I got to Paris and I think/hope I caught all the glaring mistakes. Note to self: next time, write a novel set in the modern day!

Real life prostitutes

Rob Tocalino has posted this review of Woman of Ill Fame over at his very fun Egg Blog--and accompanying his text is a great oldtime photograph of some ladies of the evening.

Recently I've been trying to track down some 1800s brothels here in Oakland, where we once had a legalized prostitution zone (roughly 1870 to 1913). Click the links to read these Montclarion columns in order:

1. A brothel site in the midst of the redwood forest whose timbers built San Francisco. Pictured here is Dee Rosario of the East Bay Regional Park District, lifting fallen limbs to reveal the moss-covered staircase of Ruby's brothel. Nothing other than a second staircase remains of the structure.

2. A reputed house of prostitution in the middle of Oakland's Victorian Row. The photo at left shows the lavish double staircase that quite possibly allowed men to engage the services of higher-class prostitutes than the women who serviced the rough lumbermen in the redwoods. This is now an attorneys' office.

3. One possible brothel near the waterfront and nine confirmed in West Oakland. The photo of the rudimentary map seen here is West Oakland's Pacific Street as logged by the Sanborn Fire Insurance Company. See the lettering that reads "Female Boarding" and "Fem. Board'g?" If you click the link above, you'll learn that this was a euphemism for a brothel, which the fire insurance company took into account since such places were a low fire risk.

Could you do it?

Do you think you have what it takes to have been a Gold Rusher?

First of all, you need a lot of greed. You’ve got to want to race out there and fill your pockets with gold.

Secondly, you need a certain amount of arrogance/fearlessness. Think for a moment about whether you’d be willing to undertake a seven-months journey to a land very few people you know personally (or maybe none) have actually visited. On the way:

Overland: You face being attacked and possibly killed by Native Americans protecting their land. You may get lost and perish, like the Donners. You may fall prey to the diseases that stalked the wagon trains: diptheria, smallpox and the like. You may die of starvation or thirst as your supplies run out and you can’t replenish them. You may die of heatstroke. Or pure exhaustion, since most emigrants, to spare the cattle already pulling a very heavy load, walked the whole distance.

By ship: You face the perils of being vulnerable to the sea: shipwrecks, mutinies, rogue waves. Wooden ships, paired with open flame lighting, introduce the very real danger of a ship fire. Plus there’s scurvy, rats, nausea… Oh, and there’s no Panama Canal built yet, so when you arrive in Panama, you’re going to have to deboard and keep watch of your trunk and belongings as you are canoed across the isthmus and then ride a mule to reach open sea on the other side.

And once you get there, you’re not sure what it’s going to be like. Will it be safe? Is everyone so gold-blind that they’ll kill you as soon as look at you? Will there be things to eat? Will you regret coming? (And if you do, can you face doing that same horrible long voyage in reverse?) Will you think of all the folks you left behind in the East and weep?

Based on all of this, I admire the Gold Rushers for their fortitude and brassiness, even while I admit probably a fair number of them were depraved and unprincipled.

And then, when you think of unescorted women making their way to the West Coast… well, the admiration becomes a little stronger, because this was an era when women (at least high class women) were not supposed to even step outside by themselves without a chaperone. This was the Victorian age, with all its rules for “protecting” females. Certainly, many of the women who came to California during that time did not arrive under their own steam (my novel talks about the deplorable plight of Chinese prostitutes brought over in cages), but those who did make the journey willingly and under their own power earn my respect.

Prostitution in the 1800s was a different undertaking, at least psychologically, than today. Women had so few options for employment, and so many real possibilities for starving to death, that embarking on prostitution was more of a put-food-in-mouth situation than today. Supermarkets did not exist. Many people grew their own food, or bought it directly from those who did. Same with meat: the same guy who owned the animals was the one who butchered them and sold the meat, at least in the very early days of San Francisco. In many cases, reform had not yet hit charity houses, so women shied away from the prison-like institutions that might be able to help them.

In 1869, the transcontinental railroad was completed, allowing faster and safer travel across the country. By 1900, 50 years after the Gold Rush, the Bay Area had significantly grown up. My city, Oakland, had a city hall built as a skyscraper. The landscape looked very different, with buildings galore and streetcars connecting the various neighborhoods. And while women were now permitted to gain employment in ways previously unheard of, they were still not making the wages that their male counterparts made (still the case today). In 1913, a prostitute told the Oakland Welfare Commission, “If working girls were paid living wages, there would be fewer prostitutes."

For more on Gold Rush prostitution--in fictional form--read my novel Woman of Ill Fame.

Friend's book does better than mine

But I ain't bitter! I fully congratulate Kemble Scott on his novel SoMa making it to the San Francisco Chronicle Bestseller List. His book deserves all this play--and you should check out his SoMa related video offerings on YouTube.

Now, I'll just place this wet kleenex over here... did my mascara run?