Delilah Recovered follows an unemployed accountant with an anxiety disorder when she’s attacked by witch hunters and learns that she’s actually a powerful witch. What was the inspiration for the setup to your story?

Anxiety is something that I have firsthand experience with, and I wanted to write about it. I wanted it to be my heroine’s fatal flaw, the obstacle within herself that she’d be forced at every turn to face and overcome with each challenge thrown her way. I am a huge fan of Victorian gothic novels, and Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte is an inspiration for this story. There are several Easter eggs throughout the book that refer to Jane Eyre, and some are not so subtle. In many ways, Delilah is a modern-day Jane thrown into a supernatural world.

I enjoyed watching Dee’s character evolution throughout the story. What were some driving ideals behind her character’s development?

The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers by writer Christopher Vogler is one of the best go-to screenwriting textbooks of all time. It breaks down the hero’s journey. Once you read it, you can see it in every single Disney movie you watch. I wanted to write about the hero’s journey from a distinct female POV. I wanted to turn the trope of the sweet and innocent girl-woman who meets the big bad wolf man. She loses her virginity. He falls in love. She tries to reform him with her love. He pulls away. They get back together. He’s saved by her love. They get married and live happily ever after. I was interested in exploring what would happen to a heroine—if her reward wasn’t romantic love but something else. What if her reward was finding herself and her strength instead?

What were some themes that were important for you to explore in this book?

Nelson Mandela once said: “I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.” I wanted to explore that theme throughout the book. I believe that is why we love movies about superheroes. We love seeing them overcome their fears, challenges, and villains. I believe that if you spend time truly talking to someone and you hear their story, they have, on many occasions, overcome a fear to do something courageous. It might not be saving the world from annihilation, but it is courageous nonetheless. It takes courage to go to school, to get married, to stay single, to go on a date, to have children, to help a neighbor, to start a new career, to go to the doctor, to overcome an illness—to be human.

Another theme that I wanted to explore was the feminine, and witches confound us. They scare us because they are the maiden, the mother, and the crone. They have power that is deeply rooted in what we consider feminine traits, such as intuition, healing, and cooking up spells. For example, Merriam-Webster currently distinguishes four meanings of the noun witch, and two of them refer to the crone, “a mean or ugly old woman: hag crone,” and to the maiden, “a charming or alluring girl or woman.”

What is the next book that you are working on, and when will it be available?

I am an MFA candidate at Columbia College Chicago. I am working on my thesis, which is auto-fiction about my mother’s death and the grief that followed. It is a sharp turn from speculative paranormal fiction! I am challenging myself to look at structure and narrative in a new way. If it is up to my thesis advisor, it will be ready by June 2023. It took me ten years to complete Delilah Recovered, it is my intention to have my next novel out in no less than two years.

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