But actually, they're just normal, everyday people who are just trying to make it through the day. It's interesting to me that we look to these people to serve such a heavy symbolic weight for us. And those myths have to do with religious freedom and the search for toleration, things like that. We are trying to cobble together a common past and a common narrative and one of the ways we do that is subscribing to these sweeping myths about why North America was colonized in the first place. And I think particularly - this is kind of a sweeping generalization - but oftentimes in American culture, because our culture is so young, that we look to the colonial period for our foundation myths. One of the things that really interests me about writing about the 17th century is that it is just such a completely different mindset from our own. KATHERINE HOWE: It's an old chestnut to say 'the past is a foreign country,' but it's absolutely true. What compels you about this period of history? Howe talked with me about the echoes we can still see of Salem is current day United States, what that means for adolescent girls, and what exactly happened to the teenagers in Le Roy, N.Y.īUSTLE: The Salem Witch Trials have really influenced your literary career, with Conversion and The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane.

This period in colonial Massachusetts, from 1692 to 1692, is not an anomaly - either in the past or even in modern day.

Her latest novel, Conversion(Putnam Juvenile), instead gives a voice to one of young girls doing the accusing.Ĭonversion is told from two timelines: teenage girls suffering what can only be described as mass hysteria in Danvers, Mass., a story based in real events, and the story of one of the young girls who accused her community members of witchcraft, as she confesses to a reverend in Salem in 1706. Howe's first novel, The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane, tells a historical fiction tale of one of the accused witches. As a descendant of three accused witches, novelist Katherine Howe draws a lot of inspiration for her work from the Salem Witch Trials.

Conversion by Katherine Howe