Authors On Their Writing: Feminist Witch Susan Harper

I’ve chatted to witch, cultural anthropologist, and author Susan Harper about her work, continuing my interview series Authors on Their Own Writing:

Q: Out of all that you’ve written, which is your favourite published book?

A: That’s a tough one! But it’s probably Feminist Witchcraft, from Moon Books. I write for both popular audiences and academic audiences, so if I get to choose my favourite academic work alongside Feminist Witchcraft, it’s the book I recently published with my writing partner, Doing Ethnography.

Q: What’s Feminist Witchcraft about?

A: The book is meant to be an introduction to feminism-centered witchcraft as I practice it, and as it has grown from the Women’s Spirituality of the 1970s and 1980s. It’s a short little book, since it’s in the Pagan Portals series, and is meant to give readers a taste of what feminist witchcraft can look like and how they can begin to build a practice.

Q: Why is it your favourite?

A: It’s the book I wish I had had in my 20s. I had dreamed about writing a book about witchcraft for three decades, so to see it come to life was quite something. It’s also my favourite because it’s my attempt to be a good ancestor — many of the writers who founded feminist witchcraft and whose work shaped me have turned out to hold trans-exclusionary ideologies and to act in ways that are harmful to Black, Brown, and Indigenous women, and this broke my heart because I believe that these attitudes are antithetical to the feminist project. I have met many folks who are skeptical of feminist witchcraft spaces because of the reputation they have due to these public figures. My philosophy has always been that the best way to navigate having ancestors who were not great is to endeavor to be better ancestors for the next generation. Feminist Witchcraft is my way of doing that, by offering a vision of feminist witchcraft that rejects these narrow views and offers a path to empowerment for anyone who wants to walk it.Q: Tell me a bit more about yourself and anything else you’ve written.

A: I’ve been practicing witchcraft in various forms since the mid-1990s, and I am also a scholar of Contemporary Paganism. My doctoral dissertation was entitled Navigating Gender Identity and Social Identity in an American NeoPagan Community and examined the ways in which Pagans in Texas found their paths and built community. I still write for an academic audience about Paganism and a variety of other topics, including pop culture, social science methods, reproductive justice, and queer identity and issues. I’ve been reading tarot for my entire adult life and that is another area in which I do research and offer workshops. I work in higher education at a large public university in the US Midwest. I’m involved with increasing college access through two large scholarship programs principally. When I’m not working or writing, I love to garden, offer workshops on tarot and witchcraft both online and in my local community, crocheting, spending time with my wife and my three cats, and spending time on the beautiful prairies where I live. I’ve written quite a few things, including essays in three Moon Books anthologies — Naming the Goddess, The Goddess in America, and Seven Ages of the Goddess. My favourite among those is probably the piece I wrote for The Goddess in America, “The Goddess and the Feminist.” It holds the seeds of what became Feminist Witchcraft. I’ve published two scholarly articles on Pagan topics — “All Cool Women Should Be Bisexual”: Female Bisexual Identity in an American NeoPagan Community (Journal of Bisexuality, 2010) which also appears in an an edited volume, Sexuality, Religion, and the Sacred; and “In the Service of All LIfe: Towards a Contemporary Pagan Ethics of Abortion” (Gender and Religion, 2022). My writing partner and I published Doing Ethnography, a guide to doing ethnographic research (the signature method of anthropology and sociology) last year (Guilford, 2025). We also published a chapter in an anthology, Monstrous Mothers (Demeter Press, 2023) — our chapter is called “Science Put Babies in My Belly: Motherhood and Monstrosity in Orphan Black.”  

Q: What are you working on now?

I’m working on three major things right now. The first, with my writing partner, is a chapter for an edited volume on the Witch in Popular Culture titled They Can’t Burn Us All. Our contribution is titled “The Revolution Will Not Be Instagrammed: Witchcraft, Wellness, and Commodification in the 21st Century” and looks at the way in which witchcraft is repositioned as self-care or wellness and as something you can purchase. My two larger projects are a volume for Moon Books’ Practical History of Pagan Britain series about the 19th century occult movement — I joking call it the Weird Victorian Guys book, and it’s just fascinating really digging into the history and focusing on Britain since I typically work in the US. The second is an outgrowth of the article I referenced above about Pagan ethics of abortion — Bloomsbury asked me to turn that article into a book length  monograph, which was a bit heady! It focuses on US Pagans and their ethics about abortion, something that there’s not a lot of other writing about. 

You can find out more about Susan Harper here:

• Her website:  www.susanharper.com
• Her Moon Books author page: https://www.collectiveinkbooks.com/moon-books/authors/susan-harper
• You can also view Pagan Portals – Feminist Witchcraft on Amazon.

Please note I earn commission from some links.

Previous related posts

https://www.badwitch.co.uk/2026/07/authors-on-their-own-writing-green.html
https://www.badwitch.co.uk/2023/10/authors-on-their-writing-bard-of-ely.html
https://www.badwitch.co.uk/2023/11/authors-on-their-own-writing-daniela.html
https://www.badwitch.co.uk/2023/09/authors-on-their-own-writing-rachel.html
https://www.badwitch.co.uk/2023/09/authors-on-their-own-writing-laura-perry.html

To read more posts like this visit A Bad Witch’s Blog at www.badwitch.co.uk

Source: http://www.badwitch.co.uk/2026/07/authors-on-their-writing-feminist-witch.html