Rose Rahtz: 'What if you did have magical powers in a toddler?'

Fictionable

This spring we've already heard from Jenny Erpenbeck, Grahame Williams and Lauren Caroline Smith. This time we welcome Rose Rahtz and her short story Where Hast Thou Been, Sister?

Rahtz tells us how the story started as a response to the opening of Macbeth, where there is a roll of thunder and Shakespeare's First Witch asks, "Where hast thou been, sister?"

"I've always really liked the witch's response, because she's so perfunctory about it," she says. "She just goes 'I've been killing swine, obviously, I'm a witch'."

Thinking about female power and powerful children, Rahtz transported Shakespeare's blasted heath to a farm park and turned his witch into a toddler. There's something mighty about a small child, she explains, "It's that tug between huge power of emotion and complete impotence within the world."

Channelling her eldest daughter, who was a "force of nature" when she was young, Rahtz sets her uncanny toddler loose – though she insists that no animals were harmed in the making of this story.

Witches are outlaw figures who disrupt the patriarchy, Rahtz continues, and writing is a kind of disruption to her job as an English teacher. While the GCSE English language paper is a "horrorshow" where children are being asked to dance a grammatical jig, "the joy of being an English teacher is you teach around the edges of the curriculum".

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