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February 18, 2021
Kathryn Nuernberger's Playlist for Her Essay Collection "The Witch of Eye"
In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.
Kathryn Nuernberger's essay collection The Witch of Eye delves into lives both past and present with amazing clarity to share their truths.
Booklist wrote of the book:
"This book is a social history, threaded through with folklore, mythology, current events, and glimpses into the author's own marriage. It is a poetic and hypnotic trance of a read."
In her words, here is Kathryn Nuernberger's Book Notes music playlist for her essay collection The Witch of Eye:
In “The Invention of Mothers,” an essay from The Witch of Eye that is close to my heart, I wrote about Rhiannon, the fairy queen accused of eating her own child. The victim of a coup, she fell asleep and woke smeared in blood and surrounded by the bones of a dog her accusers said was her baby. For this was she bridled like a horse at the gates to the city until her son grew up to escape from captivity and return home to her. She is best known, though, for having called forth the Alder Rhiannon, those three magical birds who sing so beautifully they send the living to sleep and raise the dead from their slumber.
So of course a The Witch of Eye playlist must include Fleetwood Mac’s “Rhiannon.” But how to represent so many other wrongfully accused women – the midwives, healers, activists, leaders, philosophers, and successful business owners – whose ways of being in the world gave some priest or friar or judge or king a bedeviled feeling? Whose songs would call to mind Lisbet Nypan, who, even under the most dire circumstances, refused to apologize for herself or for her work healing the sick with rituals of salt. Whose voice could echo that of the midwife Walpurga Hausmännin’s as she confessed to every crime the village had ever known, every stillbirth, every miscarriage, every sick cow or hail storm, so that the inquisition of Dillingin, Germany could be snuffed out with her? Is there a song in the key of Agnes Naismith laying a dying woman’s curse on the mob gathered to watch her hang, then burn?
With these notes of defiance in mind, I chose “Bruja” by La Perla, “Black Dove” by Tori Amos, “Testify” from Rage Against the Machine, and “For Her” by Fiona Apple.
But what about those who understood themselves to be not merely scapegoats but also actual witches who loved the power and connectedness they derived from their connection to their gods, goddesses, and the natural world? What music could do justice to a fierce shaman like Isobel Gowdie, a masterful practitioner of the Scottish oral tradition? She was an acclaimed flyter, a flinger of insults as a literary art form, which was a common practice among professional storytellers in her time and place. She also said with pride that she knew how to heal sick children with traditional magic and with righteous and vengeful notes added that she knew how to punish those who had it coming. A playlist for The Witch of Eye must also reflect the spirit of sorceresses like Maria Gonçalves Cajada, who once said, “If the bishop has a mitre, I have a mitre, and if the bishop preaches from the pulpit, I preach from the cadeira.” Some song must parallel the work of the abolitionist Marie Laveau who visited the imprisoned, nursed the sick during outbreaks of yellow fever with plant medicines that were far more effective than anything the doctors had to offer, and invited Choctaw women displaced once again from their land by the U. S. government to set up camp in her own front yard.
With their spirits in mind, I offer “All That You Have is Your Soul” by Tracy Chapman, “Untitled God Song” from Haley Heynderickx, and “God Is Alive Magic Is Afoot” by Buffy Sainte-Marie.
I also want a The Witch of Eye playlist to hold verses of love spells, like the one Maria Barbosa would have offered her desperately pining clients, the kind Agnes Sampson offered women to ease their labor pains, the one in the letter Johannes Junius had smuggled out of prison to his beloved daughter to be sure she knew every word of his confession to being a warlock was a torture-induced lie. To that end, you will hear Nina Simone’s “I Put a Spell on You,” Billy Holliday’s “Blue Moon,” “Twice” by Little Dragon, and “Hex” by Neko Case.
Let’s make a little more room here too for the witches of myth and legend. It’s such a pleasure to see Baba Yaga’s house running through the pages of a book on her chicken feet. And what an enchanting spell poem Macbeth’s weird sisters cast on us with “double, double boil and trouble.” There are songs on this playlist for Medea and Medusa and Circe and Dido, as well as for all those hags and crones we love as we love our own grandmothers. Let’s sing along with Michael Kiwanuka’s “Tell Me a Tale,” Donovan’s “Season of the Witch,” Bjork’s “Pagan Poetry,” and Mirah’s “The Forest.” The inquisitors tried to make monsters of our grandmothers’ agedness, their infirmity, their vulnerability, and their hard-won wisdom, but we can see through that mean propaganda to the heart of the tale, that they love us still across that difficult ravine of infirmity, dementia, or death. They will even let us carry their spirits with us, if we can figure out the recipe, the story, the spell, the song to bring their memories racing back to us.
Kathryn Nuernberger is the author of 3 poetry collections, RUE, The End of Pink and Rag & Bone. Her essay collection is Brief Interviews with the Romantic Past. She teaches creative writing at University of Minnesota.
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