Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves (2017) won multiple honors for young adult fiction, including the Kirkus Prize. That novel is informed by the author’s Métis heritage, and so is her new novel for adults. VenCo (Morrow/HarperCollins, Feb. 7) is the story of Lucky St. James, who finds a souvenir spoon from Salem, Massachusetts, that sends her—and her grandmother Stella—on a journey from the East End of Toronto to various points across North America. Along the way, Lucky discovers her powers as a witch and learns that her ultimate task is nothing less than to save the world. Part coming-of-age tale, part road story, and part thriller, VenCo is a fun read—which probably explains why AMC has optioned the book for a series. But Dimaline has some serious things to say about magic and colonization.

The author has a book for young adults coming out this year, Funeral Songs for Dying Girls (Tundra, April 4), and she’s also begun writing for the screen. Most recently, she was in the writers room for Welcome to Derry, an HBO Max series that serves as a prequel to Stephen King’s It. We spoke with the author via Zoom from her home on Georgian Bay in Ontario, Canada; our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

As you know, contemporary witchcraft has a bit of an appropriation problem. One of the things I loved about your book is that it included so many different styles of folk magic and witchcraft from all over Turtle Island [North America] and that the characters who practice these different types of magic are actually attached to the places and the cultures where the practices originate.  

All of this magic is grounded. It’s all real, right? I spent so much time traveling and talking to people from different traditions, reading old texts. Every type of magic I include in the book is rooted in a real place, in a real culture. I was insistent about it with AMC. None of my characters is going to put on a cloak and become invisible.

You use the words grounded and rooted, and I didn’t miss the scene in the novel where land back is spray-painted on a mailbox. The more I learn about efforts to reestablish Indigenous sovereignty throughout the United States and Canada, the more I understand how much people lose when their connection to the land is severed. Settler colonialism isn’t just about real estate.

Absolutely! Lucky is an Indigenous witch. This doesn’t give her a pass when she’s moving through landscapes far from her home. For instance, when she’s in New Orleans, she can’t just automatically use Vodou, because she hasn’t studied it, she has no connection to it. If place didn’t matter, it would smooth out the narrative, but I’m not going to sell out real traditions. There would be no point, for me, in writing this book if I did that.

And this is, I think, the book I’ve been wanting to write my whole life. I grew up with really strong, very knowledgeable women. I was mentored by incredible women. There’s just so much I wanted to say about how we learn about ourselves through the land and through our connections and also having respect for other people’s knowledge and stories. When the pandemic hit—when we were totally isolated from each other—I started thinking about community.

You know, it’s been almost two years since I moved back to my own community on the Georgian Bay. The entire shoreline where I grew up is just million-dollar cottages now, which is both heartbreaking and incredibly empowering. I kind of feel sorry for the cottagers. They’ve paid a lot of money to live here, but they clearly haven’t connected with the land, because if they had, they would treat their property in our territory very differently.

For me, though, just doing something like climbing a tree in my backyard feels like ceremony. I’m always interested in the extraordinary inside the ordinary—the ceremony of every day. That’s exciting to me. And that’s how I decided on the spoons. I needed a magic object that wasn’t, you know, some jeweled artifact. I needed something mundane, so I tried to think about really boring things. I thought about souvenirs right away—you know, throwaway culture, something that only has value because of the intent we pour into it. My mere collected souvenir spoons—which is funny because she didn’t travel, people would just bring them to her. You know what I’m talking about?

Of course. They’re spoons that you don’t actually use as spoons, which is ridiculous.

Right! Anyway, I realized that I didn’t know how far back I could take the narrative until I knew about the history of souvenir spoons in North America. So, I literally did a Google search for “history souvenir spoons north america.” And the first search result was the Daniel Low & Co. Salem witch spoon—

Wait. The spoons in VenCo are real?

Yes! I have one right here!

That’s fantastic.

It gets better! So, Daniel Low runs a jewelry shop in Salem. In 1892, his son Seth gets invited to Germany and ends up in the region around the Brocken—the mountain where the witches gather for their Sabbath once a year. As soon as Seth gets back, the Lows start producing these spoons commemorating the Salem witch trials. This is the first mass-produced souvenir spoon in North America. And here’s the thing about the Low company’s shop: It started out in the basement of a church in Salem that was a meetinghouse where the witch trials were held.

So, yeah. When that pops up, I was, like, All right, universe. I get it. I guess I’m gonna write this witch story.

I wonder if we can talk about Stella. When I realized that she would be tagging along as Lucky went on her quest, I was annoyed. I did not want to go on an adventure saddled with a high-maintenance old lady. But as the story progressed, I realized that I needed to have a little more respect for my elders, and I realized that—of course—she had to be there.

I have a lot of writer friends who make everything out. They have charts and grids, and their offices are tidy. That is not me. I get an idea, I get obsessed, and I fall down a rabbit hole—and I mean a real rabbit hole with a lot of branching tunnels, and, from there, I have to write my way out. So, when I got to the point where Lucky starts her journey, I really didn’t want Stella to go. I didn’t want Lucky to have to take care of her. But, as I kept writing forward, Stella just kept being there. It was superannoying at first, but I finally realized that I needed to pay attention to her. As I started to figure out who she was, I understood why she just wouldn’t go away.

I can tell you that when I was first talking to people about the story, no one thought for even a second that Stella was in any way important. They had the same initial reaction that you and I did: They rolled their eyes and asked, “Does she have to be here?” And I asked them to please just finish the book.

Jessica Jernigan is a writer and editor who lives and works on Anishinaabe land in Central Michigan.