My contributor copy of the new anthology, Witches and Witchcraft: An Anthology of Stories, Poems, and Essays, from Hippocampus Press, is in the house! Edited by Katherine Kerestman and S.T. Joshi, this lovely volume features my story "Foragers," a frightful tale of the American Revolutionary War, and the horrors that a company of General Cornwallis's men encounter while marching toward the Battle of Guilford Courthouse.
Witches and Witchcraft also features contemporary works
by Ramsey Campbell, Debra K. Every, Wade German, Simon MacCulloch, Darrell Schweitzer, John Shirley, and others, plus classic stories and essays by L. Frank Baum,
Frank Belknap, Long, Cotton Mather, William Shakespeare, Clark Ashton Smith, and many more.
The genesis of "Foragers" comes from a local legend, which I used as the
backstory for a few of my geocaches in Greensboro, NC...except that it's not
really a legend. It was a quick bit of fiction about a witch named Lillian
Gadwick that I came up with to hopefully enrich the experience of hunting
geocaches in the woods at night. This faux legend was apparently convincing
enough to lead some geocachers to believe it was actually based on local
folklore, so when I was invited to contribute a story to Witches and Witchcraft, I decided to re-imagine and embellish the tale.
I think it worked.
You can check out the original story of Lillian Gadwick in the cache description at Geocaching.com here.
You can check out the original story of Lillian Gadwick in the cache description at Geocaching.com here.
