Today we chat with Hannah Abigail Clarke, author of the upcoming queer, witchy YA novel The Scapegracers, the first in a three-book series, which follows an outcast teenage lesbian witch that suddenly finds herself part of the popular girls in school and details complex female friendships, and witches fighting back against the dark forces in the world. We got to ask Hannah all of our burning questions about spooky movies, witchy covens, and the magic of the written word!
Hi, Hannah! Thanks for joining us! Tell us a bit about yourself! How are you (considering the current state of the world)? What do you do on the daily (besides write awesome books)?
Hello! Pleasure’s mine. I am leo sun themsbian who reads Kropotkin aloud to house plants and is generally amped about tattoos, the occult, weird comics, and Wikipedia rabbit holes. I recently acquired my MA, and it turns out that writing a thesis during a pandemic is bonkers! Since that point, as much as is possible during this time of compounding trauma, I’ve been doing my damnedest to vibe. Much drinking of water, much laying on the floor.
Now tell us about The Scapegracers! What can readers expect when they pick it up?
The Scapegracers is about a crusty 18 y/o lesbian witch named Sideways who stumbles into a clique/coven/found family/murder of Popular Girls™ after blacking out and accidentally casting a spell on their Halloween party. Moreover, it is about a prickly queer kid who wants desperately to feel powerful and cared about and is willing to do reckless things to pursue said feelings. I intend for this book to be the literary equivalent of a sugar rush, crash included—anticipate bad decisions and oversaturated emotions. Lots of gay stuff. Also, a mysterious wriggling shape.
What inspired you to write this story that is full of gay witch power and ferocious female friendships?
I wrote this book when I was nineteen and hankering for stories about angry queer protagonists in speculative fiction. The lack of queer protagonists four years ago left me feeling kind of like a phantom, in that I was this thing that clearly existed in flesh but rarely in prose or on screen. It was lonely! I was pissed about being lonely. Meanwhile, I’m a huge fan of late nineties, early aughts Popular Clique movies, but found myself endlessly frustrated by the fact that they 1) almost exclusively involve the group cannibalizing itself and 2) were direly straight. I mean, the whole conceit of Mean Girls is that the accusation of lesbianism warrants psychological torture. Imagine that movie if Janice was actually a lesbian! Wild how she’s not and yet the plot is what it is! So anyway, I rubbed all my consternations together and the friction sparked a fire that became The Scapegracers.
Your writing style is very descriptive and made the entire setting of the book a really visual experience – the exploration of the town and all the different places from Sideways’ fathers’ shop to the party and many more felt eerie and haunted. Were these places modeled after real ones or what inspired them?
There’s weird energy in the triangle of space between the rust belt, the bible belt, and Appalachia. Alongside that weird energy, I came of age in a rural Ohioan town, and maneuvering through said town as a visibly queer teenager did fun house mirror things to my perception of certain spaces. Sycamore Gorge isn’t a real town and lacks direct geographic parallels, but there are splinters of it all over the place if you know where, and how, to look.
There’s this line in The Scapegracers that is about passages in books and a certain character underlining them “because those lines were magic and they meant something on a cosmic scale” which I just really loved. How did your love of reading/writing books come about? What’s your earliest memory associated with writing or reading?
My mom read to me every day until seventh grade or so—I don’t think I’ve spent much time alive without being soaked in prose. I believe I wrote a book about my cat when I was five? We bound it and everything. It was pretty rad.
Sideways gets to be part of a really diverse coven. If you were to create your own coven out of book or movie characters, who would be in it?
An EXCELLENT question—Ianthe from Tamsyn Muir’s Locked Tomb trilogy, Prudence from Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, Katya from Emily A. Duncan’s Something Dark and Holy trilogy, Ines from Elisabeth Thomas’s Catherine House, Junji Ito’s Tomie from Tomie, and Jennifer from Jennifer’s Body. Chaos.
Obviously, there are more books to follow and thus we don’t know everything about all of the characters yet – but, speaking of Sideways’ coven, could you maybe share a little tidbit of Jing, Yates and Daisy that might surprise readers to find out after having read The Scapegracers?
Some word of god fun facts:
- Jing writes fanfiction. The other Scapegracers do not know this.
- Yates has an ASMR affirmations channel.
- Daisy writes love letters and then burns them immediately to symbolically purge herself of genuine crushes whenever they arise.
There are a few references and nods to fantastic movies about witches – such as Practical Magic and Hocus Pocus. What are your favorite spooky movies? Are you someone who really enjoys horror movies or a scaredy-cat (like me)?
I am a huge horror fan! For sake of scaredy-cat-ness, some stories I love in the non-frightening category include Over the Garden Wall (a series, not a film), Beetlejuice, Interview with the Vampire, Paranorman, Coraline, the Lost Boys, and Rocky Horror (which is problematique but nonetheless). Otherwise, some of my more frightening favorites include Suspiria (both of ‘em), Antiviral, The Witch, Jennifer’s Body, Ginger Snaps, All Cheerleaders Die, Raw, Midsommar, Battle Royal, Let the Right One In, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, Viy, Knife+Heart, High Tension, Possession, Videodrome, Pan’s Labyrinth, The Love Witch, The Awakening, Scream, and American Mary. Whew!
Follow-up to that last question: if you could live in any setting inspired by the supernatural, where would you go?
This fluctuates wildly, but I could really go for the world of Chana Porter’s The Seep right around now. Broadly into queer utopian spaces—aesthetically I’m also super into both gritty neon cyberpunk settings and super goth historical settings, but I am the wrong kind of butch to do well in a lot of them. I am not built for combat! I am built for laying down on various couches. I want to be in a place where this is not only feasible but applauded.
The Scapegracers is the first in a trilogy – how did you go about planning everything? Do you already know how the entire arc of the series ends? And since The Scapegracers is set to release soon, can you give us greedy readers a bit of a sneak peek of what we can look forward to in the sequel?
Writing ideas come to me in prophetic mental music videos. Vibe first, before setting or context or even character. Initially when I wrote this, I knew how things felt as they went along, but I didn’t know the story architecture that surrounded those feelings, and I certainly didn’t know how the first book scaffolded the next two. At this point though, the map’s drawn! The game’s set! Sideways, honey, you’ve got a big storm coming dot gif. We meet and meaningfully re-meet characters in the next book, some of whom I’m pretty hype about. Also, Sideways eats weird snacks and gives someone a tattoo. It’s good fun.
Last but not least, do you have any bookish recommendations for us?
So many! So many. Right now I’m really into Catherine House by Elisabeth Thomas, The Year of the Witching by Alexis Henderson, Burn Our Bodies Down by Rory Power, Harrow the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir (a sequel but LISTEN), Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado, The Brooklyn Bruja series by Zoraida Córdova, The F-gg-ts and Their Friends Between Revolutions by Larry Mitchell, the Something Dark and Holy series by Emily A. Duncan, and Cemetery Boys by Aiden Thomas.
