Welcome to The Creative Council, where I interview creatives about their lives and work and the ups and downs of being a creative soul.
Today’s interviewee is Dorothy Louise Abrams, also known as Dorothy L. Abrams!
Dorothy, known as Webweaver in the magical community, is the author of Witches of Fawsetwood, first in The Cup and The Ring series set in Medieval England and loosely based on her past life dreams, regressions, and meditations. In addition to extensive work with past life exploration, Dorothy has practiced and taught Witchcraft, paganism, and core shamanism since 1984—first as the organizer of The Web PATH Center and lately of a small group that call themselves The Brookside Witches.
Her earlier fiction titles are short stories collected in anthologies: “Cawing Crows and Baying Hounds” (For the Love of the Gods); “The Gambler” (Words from the Cauldron); and “Ela of Salsibury” (Herstory: Fiction Honoring Women’s History Month). Her nonfiction books are Identity and the Quartered Circle and Sacred Sex and Magic. She has a variety of pagan essays collected in anthologies. Most of her nonfiction titles are compiled from her original seminar materials in eclectic Paganism I-IV created for her own students.
“Grounding and ethics are the basis of everything,” she insists. Magic, encounters with the Gods and Goddesses, ritual and meditation grow from grounding. Her approach is from an inclusive cultural base and a feminist theology, usually expressed through magical realism.
Dorothy is a member of F.L.A.R.E in Rochester, NY, and numerous other online writers’ communities including Witch Lit and Real Witches, Real Magic. She holds a BA in literature. She followed her literary passion with graduate studies at the State University of New York at Cortland and a few writing courses at University College, Syracuse University. She taught secondary school language and literature in the early part of her career.
Later, as a community activist in Auburn, NY, she was co-founder of S.A.V.A.R. the sexual assault crisis center. She and four other founding mothers received the S.A.V.A.R Gold Award in 2010 for their work in creating the organization two decades earlier. Dorothy also established the area’s Battered Women’s Shelter through the Cayuga County Action Program. Following that, she worked for the State of New York as a human rights specialist (investigator). Dorothy now writes full time at her home in the Finger Lakes, Central New York’s Lake District.
The Interview
Hi Dorothy! I’m so grateful to have you here! Are you ready to answer some questions?
· When did you start creating? Do you remember what pulled you in?
Two things. My mother, Dee, was a book junky. I mean that in a good way. We had books, read and read out loud from my earliest recollection. She made up my bedtime stories about the fairy dollie who rode on the back of a robin. She also wrote wonderful beginnings to novels she never finished.
Flash forward to high school. My 11th grade English teacher John Paul Cregg, who thought rather a lot of himself, had us writing short stories. I took a narrow miss out of my father’s life (bullet whizzes through car with open windows as he drives along in the countryside) and made a story out of it. Dad was fine. The driver in my story is killed. Nothing Freudian inferred, please. John Paul Cregg returned our stories with public comments. He waved mine around in the air and slammed it down on the desk. I cringed. “This! This is the perfect short story!” he shouted. I was hooked.
· I love that! Teachers can really make us or break us… So, when did you start pursuing your current craft for real? As in, when did you begin to take yourself seriously as a creator?
After a first try like that I always took myself seriously. I went to college expecting to graduate a professional writer. I ended up teaching school because I wanted to eat and pay the rent. I also wanted to write literary fiction. I was too young to have anything important to say in literary fiction. So I went off to the city to teach high school outside of Washington, D.C. I joined a few activist organizations and, next thing I knew, there was no time to write. But I was amassing experience.
· How long did it take you to complete your first work?
I’m going to define this as finishing my first book-length work. I wrote short pieces, edited newsletters, and educational materials all the way through my 9–5 working life, some paid, some not. In 2012, Moon Books published my first book, Identity and the Quartered Circle.
That was drawn from my class materials offered in Wicca I-IV taught at the Web PATH Center, the spiritual community my late husband Eric and I founded in 1993. It takes a unique approach so that, instead of being a beginning text (there are too many of those), each topic is presented from its simplest form through its many esoteric options across pagan practice. There is something there for the beginner, experienced witch, and senior adept. I subtitled it Studies in applied Wicca because Wicca is often a general term in the U.S. I should have said applied Paganism. It took about a year to pull it together out of my extensive files.
· How long does it generally take you to complete a work?
A year? Six months? I write and edit rapidly. When it is flowing, I work four hours a day.
· What has been your biggest ‘mistake’ thus far?
Being slow and resistant to marketing. I want to write. I want somebody else to ‘sell’.
· What would you tell people about to make that same mistake?
Just do it. Or hire somebody. Don’t ignore the effort to sell your work. I have yet to take that advice as keenly as I should.
· I think it might be one of the toughest lessons out there, honestly. Of all the milestones you’ve reached thus far, what has been your favourite?
Publication of the Witches of Fawsetwood and the contract for its sequel out this autumn 2024, Knights of Lancaster. Some of the knights are witches too. And some of them are spies.
Witches was released May 1, 2024. These are big books set in Medieval England as a community of witches struggle with the powers of the King and Church to cut out a strategy for survival. Along the way, young people fall in and out of love, knights go to war, people sicken and heal or die, and always there is the question: How do we increase our magic to defeat the Church of the Tortured God? The book includes real magic and ritual from my own practice fantasized a wee bit. Even sceptics say it works despite the fact that modern practices were not suited to the 1170s.
· When was the last time you celebrated a creative milestone?
Yesterday? These books are in a series: The Cup and the Ring. I am hard at work editing book 3, Priestess of Heppeshaw. Yesterday, my priestess refused to behave on the page and fell in love with the wrong guy. That was not planned, but it set my heart a-tingle. This plot twist changes everything and makes a much better story. I’m excited.
· What do you struggle with most as a creative person?
It is challenging to maintain consistency across three books and the drafts of 4-6. I wouldn’t call it a struggle. I have continuity files. The search and find features in my program help me check descriptions I’ve used or places they’ve been.
I don’t find writing and editing a struggle. It’s my form of entertainment. I live in the 12th century. Staying grounded in the 21st...now that’s a challenge.
The other challenge is proofreading. I read right over typos.
· Have you always had that struggle or has it changed over time?
This is the first historical series I’ve written, so that part of the challenge is new.
I have never been a good proofreader. I read the manuscript backward from the bottom up to triple check myself and still I miss them.
· What advice would you give to creatives dealing with the same?
Ground and center every morning before you work. Listen to the news and late night tv to stay up on what’s happening. Then, don’t worry about it. The past is a fine place to visit.
Oh and if you can, hire a couple Virgos to do your proofreading and your housework.
· What do you do to stay inspired?
I give myself permission not to write, take mini vacations and sit in the sun. I read other people’s work and stay involved in contemporary books and music, theatre and film. The last two seen most often on TV now.
· What is the biggest compliment you ever received about your work?
Nimue Brown reviewed Witches of Fawsetwood. She said many good things. My favorite is:
‘Here we have witchcraft as the survival of pre-Christian Pagan practice, presented as though these are the roots of modern witchcraft. While I was reading I found it easy to suspend my disbelief and go along with the story. Let me tell you that given how much disbelief I had to suspend in the first place, this is no small achievement. She makes the witchcraft work in a way I have never seen before.”
I value her opinion because I know we come at things differently and that is 100% OK. She also is a truthteller so I believe her. Her comments are emblazoned on my brain as I write, repeating “the witchcraft has to work, the witchcraft has to work.”
The other high complement came from an editor who did not sign me on. She said “This is not genre fiction. It’s literary fiction.” Maybe, maybe not, but I liked hearing it.
You can find Nimue Brown’s review at Druid Life.
· What’s the best creative advice you ever received?
From my college creative writing professor Ed Greenwood: If you want to send a message, write a telegram.
You can find and connect with Dorothy on Facebook, Twitter/X, and here on Substack. You can read the blurb for Witches of Fawsetwood below.
12th century Cumberland, Northern England.
On the borders of the wild lands and isolated crofts, Fawsetwood sits precariously between Scots and Normans in the shadows of the Roman Catholic priests. The witches grow ever more wary as they peer ahead, trying to avoid Church arrest. Alec and his sister Elspet are joined by the new apprentice Alain who is as powerfully Fairborn as they are. Together they are meant for magic to preserve the old ways; but they are children tossed about by secrets and expectations they cannot understand. They forge bonds to survive in an unfair world.
The will of adults is near as strong as the will of the Goddess, and both seek to order their paths. Elspeth will have none of that. Alain is determined to win her heart. Elspet will have none of that either. Alec is sent off to preserve their lives. But none see the ripples in Fate magic makes. With each turning of the wheel, changes trip them up. Babes are born and mothers die. Farmers become soldiers. The new boy Grantford joins them as an orphan. Grief and hope pull the witches forward to dance before the Gods under the nose of the Church.
The turmoil of the world invades Fawsetwood as the Elders disagree on Elspet's role as May Queen in the Sacred Marriage to banish the Christians. She remain adamant she'll have no crown nor king. Then a new man comes among them, carrying Alec home more dead than alive. Callum’s threads entangle with the others when he sees what they do to save Alec’s life. Can they trust Callum as Elspet takes hold of peace and power to oppose the ways of war and incest laid to trap them, or will the ways of the Goddess fade for good?
Are you a creative and would you like to be interviewed next? E-mail me at marielle@mswordsmith.nl and we’ll make it happen!