The Hedgewitch’s Charm follows a struggling hedgewitch and a haunted duke as they confront a deadly, possibly deliberate plague, discovering that compassion and failure can be as powerful and as dangerous as magic itself. What inspired you to center the story on failure and helplessness?

I felt that this was an interesting starting point for the story. The idea of fighting against something so small, and so unknowable as a sickness, it’s something that’s universal and also something that everyone can identify with. So many heroes in stories profess to have all the answers, and all the power. It’s this attitude of “I’m Superman, of course I can save the day.” What happens if our heroes are small? What happens if they don’t know what to do? What happens if they’re so very human? For me, that was an interesting place to start the story. Ipsinki has been there from the beginning of the series, and he has known failure. He’s just a man, and Gwendolyn, the hedgewitch is just a woman. They’re not wizards. They’re not powerful. They’re just people who want to do some good; and there’s real power in that. 

Gwendolyn’s magic feels intimate and exhausting. How did you shape her relationship with magic and its limits?

I write her as kind of the anti-Kralc. He’s this wizard who acts as if he knows all the answers, and he’s almost cocky, in a way, with his power. She’s someone whose affinity with the earth, and with this desire to heal, grants her these gifts. Her power is of a much more humble nature, and so, like anyone confronting a large scale problem, she has her limits, and she is acutely aware of them. Whatever magic she has is limited in scope by her calling. She has a true sense of what’s right, and what is necessary. It’s from this place that her power comes from, and she accepts her limits. 

Ipsinki carries both political responsibility and personal grief. How did you balance those two sides of his character?

For me, it’s these traits that make him a good leader. He recognizes what’s at stake on a far more intimate level than many of the other characters in the book. Here is a man who, through his years as a soldier, and through his mother who owns an inn, has cultivated a real relationship with the people on an individual level. This is something that is truly lacking with the royal family, with the rest of the nobility. It’s this quality that makes all of this so painful for him, but also makes him the perfect person to help tackle this problem. With the others in charge, it’s sad, but the lives being lost are just numbers on a page. It’s all so abstract. With Ipsinki, it’s not that at all. It’s “Oh my god, you mean Sarah died? I just spoke with her yesterday.” It’s his desire to know the people, and his relationships that drive him, and make him good at his job. 

Disease and fear play a role in the story. Were there real-world anxieties or experiences that influenced how you portrayed the plague?

In a way, yes. I believe that all writers draw on their lives to some degree when they write. Funnily enough, I came up with this idea before the pandemic. It’s something that I came up with with my friend, An Tran, when we were working Bath Salts. The idea of a disease used as a weapon was something so scary to me. Add some magic to it, and we have The Hedgewitch’s Charm.  There’s something so intrinsically tense that comes from a spreading disease. How does one fight against germs? It’s an invisible enemy that you can’t really confront. Writing it was interesting, as the disease almost became a character in itself. 

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