Springer: Really. I never thought of myself as a "fantasy" writer when I was starting out. I thought I was writing the American Novel. I was very surprised to discover that I was a category writer. Then I became a category writer because that was the professional thing to do, with marketing, and knowing about editors, and slanting things toward a market. It was all very heady. It made me feel very important for a while. Now I've gotten beyond that again and simply realized that writing what one does best or what you have in you to write is more important.
WT: When you went to research The Hex Witch of Seldom and such material, how did you do the research? Were you able to talk to real hex witches, or did you get all your information out of books?
Springer: Over the years I have met several people who have been powwowed, healed, including my own father-in-law, who was pow-wowed as a child by hex witches. I have since fantasized the hex magic. Your typical hex witch is nothing more than an Appalachian faith-healer: laying on of hands, mumble a few prayers, recommend chicken wings buried under the eaves to draw off the warts, that sort of thing. So my hex witches are not true to life as far as what hex magic is actually like.
WT: Do you find yourself tempted to say, "Oh what an ignorant superstition," when encountering something like this? Inasmuch as it is a religion rather than an attempted science, one has to respect it, for all you and I know that burying chicken wings is not going to cure warts. So, how do you deal with this problem?
Springer: As long as they do no harm — I think they do some good along the way — sure. What's the problem? I have the cynical "Oh what a superstitious lot" streak in me too, but I recall that as a girl I had about eighteen warts on my hand. This was when I was in high school. I was wretched, and my mother and my father kept telling me, "Go put milkweed juice on those, and they'll go away." I would never do it. I'd say, "Oh, that's dumb. That's an old wives' tale." The summer before I went to college I finally couldn't take it any longer and I snuck out back and put milkweed juice on my warts. Blamed if the blasted things didn't go away within a week. So there's always that possibility that there is something beyond scientific knowledge.
WT: If milkweed juice works for warts, that's not beyond scientific knowledge at all. The plant must have some beneficial property. Possibly no scientist has described it. But if you were told to bury chicken wings, that would have been a different matter.
Springer: If it works . . . [Laughs.] I don't know. I probably would have found ways to rationalize it.
WT: We have this problem with the influx of New Agers, that people are devoting their whole lives to things which are demonstrably untrue. Those of us who know this is untrue — astrology is a good example, or psychic surgery, which is even worse because it can kill you — are in a peculiar position. We know the Earth is not flat. What do you do when you meet a flat-Earther?
Springer: I myself think, well, let's talk to this person politely and go someplace else as soon as possible. I have myself always made a firm distinction between fantasy and reality. I write about bizarre, supernatural occurrences. I do not necessarily believe in them. I don't usually believe in them. And I have difficulty with people who don't seem to be able to make the same distinction between fiction and reality. For instance, people might write me letters and say "How do I get to live forever like your characters?" Or, "How do I get to visit the countries you write about?" We don't answer this kind of mail. . . . But it's like Horatio says to Hamlet — there is this corner of my mind which recognized that there are things we don't understand which might still be true. It's a deeply hidden corner and it's not part of my daily functioning, but it is there.
WT: It seems to me that skepticism is not merely desirable but essential for the fantasy writer because otherwise you will begin to make writing and plotting decisions on a doctrinaire rather than artistic basis. If you have your own ideas about how magic works in the "real" world and your story requires otherwise, you're going to run into trouble. This is why most occultists do not write good supernatural fiction.
Springer: I agree with you. It bothers me deeply when a writer gets so buried in their fictional world that they start to let it impinge on their real life, as in, for example, forming societies of people who actually believe in the fantasy, or forming their own religions or believer-groups or establishing colonies, or whatever they do. Several examples come to mind but I don't want to name names.
WT: If a writer were in fact a scoundrel, it would be very easy to say that all the stuff in your novels is true, then start a religion — please send money.
Springer: [Laughs.] It's been done.
WT: Are you getting any strange mail for The Hex Witch of Seldom? People who say, "That all happened to me . . .
Springer: Not for The Hex Witch, no. It's almost a young-adult book, and it's just been accepted cheerfully as a nice sort of fun book to read. Lord knows what sort of mail I'll get for Apocalypse. Apocalypse is a very different sort of book. It's almost horror. It's a very angry, yet a very loving book, and it's very multi-leveled, by far the biggest thing I've ever written, both in terms of impact and in terms of number of characters and plot complexity, that sort of thing. I expect some misunderstanding from the part of the world where it is set. (It's set in western Pennsylvania, and the Four Horsewomen of the Apocalypse begin the end of the world there.) Most fantasies save the world. This one purports to destroy it. I won't tell you whether it succeeds.
WT: So, if not Hex Witch, what did generate the strange mail?
Springer: It came more from the earlier books. I got a letter from a guy in Leavenworth prison who wanted to know how to live forever. As a matter of fact he wanted me to donate a hundred thousand dollars to his society for the furtherance of research into eternal life so he wouldn't have to die shortly after he finished his sentence. Then, I think every writer has had this experience at some time or another: you run into someone who genuinely understands your work. They're discussing your book with you in depth, and you're lapping it up and saying, "Yes, yes, you understand," and all the sudden they say something and you realize they are cold-out crazy. Like, really wild in the eyes. I ran into one at a convention once who said he had been using my poetry in his rites to invoke the Mother Goddess. Then he followed me into my poetry reading and chanted along with me. He made me so freaked that, I think, if the door had slammed I probably would have fainted.
WT: This is one of those cases where it becomes difficult to respect the believer. You came to the conclusion the person was crazy. You didn't say, "Well, maybe there is something in this."
Springer: He had the look, as the Roxette song says.
WT: So we need a working crap-detector in everyday life.
Springer: You have to go with your instincts on some things. There have been times at conventions when I have met people whom I immediately and greatly liked for no discernible reason, and times when I met people whom I immediately and passionately disliked for no discernible reason. Then I later discovered that the first impressions were correct in most cases. So saying this person was crazy was a subjective judgment, but I've learned to go on the basis of that.
WT: Have you ever met a real, live practicing hex witch?
Springer: Not knowingly. I've just met a lot of people who said, "We used to have one in the neighborhood," or, "That house there. That's where the hex witch lives." I would have fictionalized said encounter anyhow. The hex witch in my book is based on my husband's grandmother. She was not a hex witch herself, but in other regards the characterization was pretty much based on her.
WT: I suppose the most famous example of hex witchcraft is the famous hex murder case of the 1920s.
Springer: Yes. That took place about six miles from where I presently live, and rendered that entire area — York County — very, very sensitive about its belief in hex magic. To this day there are people who really would prefer not to discuss it. My next-door neighbor, now in her lat
e seventies, was a schoolteacher. When she went away to college to become a schoolteacher she was teased and called "Dumb Dutch" because she came from that area where people believed in hex magic.
WT: Could you explain for our readers what the whole incident was about?
Springer: Certainly. There was a youngish man whose name I have forgotten who was obviously very gifted. He could stop rabid dogs in their tracks by saying, "Down, hound, put your nose to the ground," or words to that effect. He could pow-wow all the usual ailments, take the fire out of burns, that sort of thing. Everything was going all right for him. He had a nice young wife, and so forth. Then everything started going badly for him. He lost his job. He lost his health. He lost his wife. And he lost his gift. Eventually he realized he had been hexed, and he spent the next ten years or so wandering around trying to figure out who had hexed him. He finally went to the river witch, who lived in Marietta, across on the Lancaster side, and she told him it was a chap named Nelson Rehmeyer of Reh-meyer's Hollow. The way to take off the hex was to go to Nelson Rehmeyer, get his pow-wow book, and a lock of his hair, I think it was. He and a couple of friends went there, but bungled the whole thing and ended up killing Rehmeyer. They bludgeoned him to death and they made a botched job of trying to burn the body, and then they went off leaving their personal traces everywhere. But the really sensational aspect of it was not that somebody murdered somebody else — that's fairly commonplace — but the hex-magic motivation.
WT: Presumably this didn't shake the belief of any of the faithful.
Springer: What it did was bring in news media from all over the country. Everybody converged on York County to see about this ever-so-exotic murder. I don't think it shook anyone's belief, no, but it made hex magic go underground. It used to be quite open. There would be shingles out in front of the houses — Pow-wow Doctor, or whatever. It was on pretty much the same basis as chiropractors are today, an alternative to the other kinds of medicines. Now you sneak off to the powwow doctor rather than just walk in.
WT: We may have had a few witchcraft murders in the United States recently. Certainly there was a human-sacrifice cult along the Mexican border recently. I can't help but feel that the Twenties were a more skeptical period, when people could be embarrassed by this sort of thing. If it happened today, no one would blink.
Springer: We've got a Satanic cult operating in Glen Rock right now — that's a small town in western York County — which is a matter of grave concern to the local Parent-Teacher Organization, but it certainly hasn't attracted any reporters from New York.
WT: The more straightforward aspect of the problem is not black magic, but simply that people who are in love with the idea of evil and engage in sadistic pastimes aren't the kind of folks you want your kids to associate with.
Springer: There have been a couple of teenage suicides which were blamed on it, and there have been mutilated animals. Rightly or wrongly blamed, I have no idea. It's hard to tell how much is hysteria and how much is actual fact.
WT: If after all this you were to go back and write an imaginary-kingdom fantasy, how do you think it would be different from the sort of book you did originally?
Springer: It would probably have modern, 20th-century people talking the way people really talk and acting with all the usual modern neuroses and phobias and whatnot. I'm not sure other than that. It would probably incorporate some sort of contemporary mythology. We build our own mythologies. We have baseball mythologies. We have rock-music mythologies, motorcycle-gang mythologies, street-gang mythologies. I would probably be more interested in using one of those than going back to some sort of ancient gods and goddesses. Modern gods. We have those too.
WT: Do you find New Age beliefs at all useful in creating fantasy?
Springer: No. Not really. I am aware they are out there. They don't particularly interest me. I'm at the point now where I want most of what is in my fantasy to come out of my personal experiences and/or my own head. That way I can be sure it's original.
WT: I suspect most fantasy writers have very little use for New Agers or professional occultists, largely because we have better imaginations. We can make it up better than they can.
Springer: And why take someone else's rehash when you can mix up something fresh?
WT: And only the believers would be upset at your seeming "inaccuracy."
Springer: Please, don't anybody try to believe in what I write.
WT: Have you ever had anyone write to you and say, "It's interesting that you write about magic, but you've got it wrong. It really works like this?"
Springer: Yes, but that amuses me more than irritates me. It's like the vampire panel I was on today. Someone said, "Vampires are like this." "No, the more recent versions say they're like that." Such-and-such a writer says this about them and such-and-such says that. Of course it's all perfectly true because it's an evolving mythology. The good mythologies are alive and continue to grow and change. It's sort of like the folklore process. Everyone has a voice in it. But for one person to say "This is the right way" to do magic or whatever is as ridiculous as to set up a dogma like that of an established religion. It makes no sense to me.
WT: It's also fun to make up folklore, where you take up genuine, traditional elements and you add some of your own, as if they were real folklore elements, including spurious verses of folk songs, which you quote.
Springer: [Laughs.] Darrell, you are a slimy person. . . . No, actually when I was writing the high fantasy I felt rather guilty sometimes about borrowing the mythological names. I felt as if I were leading future generations of readers astray, that they might never discover how glorious the original, say, Celtic myths, were, that they'd think that what I had written about a character with a silver hand was gospel; whereas this was adapted from something else entirely. So I am really quite glad to get away from that.
WT: What can we expect from you beyond Apocalypse?
Springer: I'm finishing the rough draft of something called Volos the Unholy, which deals with angelology — the mythology of angels, which is very complex, and with rock music, which has its own gods and its own mythology.
WT: Any idea when it'll appear?
Springer: Really, no. I'll probably finish it by the end of next year, but when it will be coming out and from whom I don't know at this point.
WT: Thank you, Nancy Springer. V
IMPROBABLE BESTIARY: THE POOKAH
A bold Irish spook, a weird beast is the Pookah, The mischievous imp of indefinite shape. And if, by some fluke, a pestiferous Pookah Should latch on to you there's no chance of escape. The Pookah resembles a hound or a hare, An ox or a fox or a boar or a bear. The prank-loving Pookah seeks fun; nothing more. So never insult him, or else . . . he'll get sore! And any palooka who tries to rebuke a Pestiferous Pookah gets trouble galore!
Though Celtic by nature, and Irish by birth,
The Pookah's been sighted all over the Earth.
Reliable sources have spotted the Pookah
In Upper Zambezi and downtown Paducah.
A huge hairy Pookah, for reasons quite strange,
Invaded the U.S. Marines' target range.
"Kill that Pookah!" the general screeched to his aides.
"Use pistols! Use rifles! Use rocket grenades!
Unleash the commandos, and fetch my bazooka!
Declare total war! But just kill that damn Pookah!"
A joint Army-Navy-Marine exercise
Fired howitzer shells and rained death from the skies.
But when the dust settled, and then came the dawn
"What's for breakfast?" the Pookah remarked with a yawn.
A soldier named Duke, a John Wayne type of hero,
Said "Let's blast the Pookah; we'll make him Ground Zero."
And thus was constructed, with grace and aplomb,
A ninety-five megaton hydrogen bomb.
The bomber crew dropped its unstoppable load
>
On the spot where the Pookah relaxed in the road.
And then came a flash; the whole neighborhood glowed
While the Pookah-bomb's atoms began to explode!
And when it was over . . . there, in his peruke (A
small wig that he wore) — yes, and smoking a hookah,
And daintily sipping a glass of Sambouca
While strumming a uke . . . ah, you've guessed it: The Pookah!
And thus was established what none can deny:
You can't nuke a Pookah, so don't even try.
— F. Gwynplaine Maclntyre
THE DEER LAKE SIGHTINGS
by Patricia Anthony
The people on the north side of the lake had given him good information, but on the south side, closest to where the sightings had occurred, the families were so reticent as to be rude. By the time he'd reached the fifth house, where a woman was scrubbing her porch, his feet were tired and his temper worn.
As he started up the drive a liver hound rounded the side of the house. Harry stopped dead and stared suspiciously at it. "Shit," he said under his breath, holding his camera and tape recorder a little closer to his chest in case he had to run.
But it was the dog that fled, backing away with a hesitant growl at first and then taking to its heels with a yelp as if Harry had really flung the rock he'd considered throwing.
Harry took a long breath and let it out before he continued his trudge up the hill. At the bottom of the porch steps he stopped and pushed his glasses back up on the bridge of his nose with an irritated gesture. It was a hot day and the skin of his face was oily, his armpits damp.
"I'm Harold Sterns with Mutual UFO Network," he said, trying to conjure some warmth into his voice, "and I've been told that some of your neighbors have seen strange lights."
The woman didn't look up from her cleaning. She was on her hands and knees, a position which looked oddly natural for her; and her face was stamped with the seal of the mountains, an old-before-its-time sort of look.
Weird Tales - Summer 1990 Page 5