Q&A: Alice Markham-Cantor on ‘The Once & Future Witch Hunt’

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In her debut book, ‘The Once & Future Witch Hunt,’ author Alice Markham-Cantor is fact-checking the Salem witch trials.

Have you ever read a book and wished it came with a syllabus? Welcome to Works Cited, where we ask authors about the books, movies, music, art, and TV that influenced or inspired their writing.When she was in the eighth grade, Alice Markham-Cantor discovered that she was the descendant of Martha Carrier, a woman hanged in Salem in 1692 for witchcraft. Back then, she knew that it would earn her bragging rights at school the next day.

Markham-Cantor is keen on correcting the narrative — Carrier’s, of course, but also that of the Salem witch trials, a story that has been told so many times, and in so many ways, in part because there is such a wealth of documentation of it. But there’s also plenty of highly inaccurate conjecture.

For most of the movie, they’re living in a house at the edge of the woods because they’ve been expelled from the community, which is a thing that Puritans did to each other. They could try to run you out of town, which they tried to do to Martha and her husband. But living at the edge of the woods is so important for understanding that the Puritans, on some level, were afraid of the land that they were on. They thought that this was the Devil’s land.

I create playlists while I write for every book I work on, every story I work on. For this one, the title of the playlist is“Lilias,” by Heal & Harrow, just came across my Spotify. I have not listened to anything else by this artist. I don’t know who they are. But it’s about witch-hunting, almost exclusively. My playlist is. I have a Hozier song on there, the recomposed–by–Max Richter Vivaldi album, James Taylor. It’s truly vibes-based.

 

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