Behind the Book: Why I Wrote Under The Witch's Moon
I studied literature before I studied the moon, though looking back, I'm not sure the two were ever separate. There is something almost liturgical about a good poem: the way it asks to be returned to, read aloud, sat with until its meaning shifts beneath you. The moon asks the same of us. Neither one gives up all of itself on a first pass.
Under The Witch's Moon began as a whisper: fragments of poems, pieces of ritual, gathered slowly over years of practicing as a hedge witch. There was no manuscript at first, only scraps: a line written down after a working, a correspondence noted in the margin of another book entirely, a ritual pieced together from instinct and inheritance rather than instruction. Craft, in both senses of the word, has always been how I metabolize what I'm living through.
At some point the fragments stopped being scattered and started being a shape I recognized: a cycle, complete and returning. Thirty poems, one for each phase of the moon, each paired with a small ritual and a correspondence to hold in your hand.
This was never meant to be a book you read once and shelve. It's meant to be lived with; read aloud by moonlight if you can manage it, and the spaces at the back and the margins are left open on purpose, waiting for your own insights, your own corrections to the practice, your own handwriting layered over mine until the book becomes as much yours as it is mine.
Above all, this book is a love letter — to lunar magic, and to my son Callum, whose unwavering belief in my path breathed life into these pages. There were fragments that might have stayed fragments forever if not for him.
Under The Witch's Moon is available now on Amazon, and signed copies are available directly here at Cat & Cauldron.
This book grew out of the same intention behind everything we make at Cat & Cauldron: small, careful things meant to help you slow down and reconnect.