In her post about body image and the beautiful teen witches of the 90s, Cass wrote about the influence that characters like Buffy and Sabrina the Teenage Witch had on her self-confidence when she was a young girl. These witches were powerful, cool, sexy, and almost all white and straight.

For our first ever notyrgirls interview, Jac D.B. speaks with literary scholar Kayla Penteliuk. She has studied the evolution of literature about witches over the past 100+ years, and has noticed some big changes.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Jac D.B.: When you were growing up, what were you watching and reading? Were there witches involved? 

Kayla Penteliuk: When I was a kid, I read a lot of Victorian novels for the most part – the abridged version of Victorian novels – which then kind of led me into this rabbit hole of these weird novels that my mom had, which were old children's stories from the 40s and 50s, and some of them were original Brothers Grimm translations from German. They were so horrifying and so scary. But I loved them. 

Jac: They weren't the sanitized versions of the fairy tales. These were the originals.

Kayla: Yeah! It was this big box in the basement. My mom said: “Read at your own risk.” I was like, “Okay, I guess I will!” These are books that had graphic illustrations of witches being maimed, hurt, burned and melted. But that was my gateway into it. And then, maybe when I was five or six years old, I started watching Sabrina the Teenage Witch, the 90s sitcom with my mom, and I loved that. I watched Practical Magic with her. It was mostly things that I was watching with her or things that she introduced to me. So that was the pathway… the very graphic Grimms’ fairy tales, and then I got to see the more sanitized, celestial fun, very trendy 90s witches that were everywhere at the time, and then I watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer as I, like, went into my teenage years, also with my mom. 

Jac: It sounds like there is a strong connection for you between these fairy tales and watching the TV shows and your mom. Does this all relate back to your relationship with your mom?

Kayla: Oh, absolutely. I think when you spend time with your mom, when you're bonding with your mom, you have this special shared time. And for us, for some reason it was Sabrina, maybe it's because the witch is a very feminine figure, and it feels like something you don't watch with your dad. You're watching it with your mom. That's mom time. When I think about who was reading me fairy tales, it was my mom, too. So that's how I ended up being interested in it. I don't know why. I think most young people are introduced to fairy tales at a really young age, but I was frustrated with the way that witches were depicted, because I always thought they were really cool, and I wanted to be one. 

Jac: Even when you were a kid reading a fairy tale with a witch who was super evil and terrible, you were like “No, but this is cool.” 

Kayla: In Hansel and Gretel, for example, there's the wicked crone who eats the children. I was never afraid that a witch was gonna come and eat me. I was always pretending with my friends like, when we'd get a big rainfall, there would be puddles and me and some of the neighbours’ kids, all young girls, would throw things into it and pretend that it was witches’ brew. We were gonna be witches. 

Jac: Do you feel you’ve carried this interest in witches in culture with that for you throughout life? You're nodding yes. Tell me more about how you found your way into this from a scholarly perspective.

Kayla: When I was a teenager, in the 2010s, it wasn't as cool anymore to have that aesthetic, the 90s aesthetic that I loved so much when I was a kid. But also, being a witch wasn’t a thing that people cared about at that point, right? In history, for some reason, it was kind of a dead period for it. So I left it behind for a while, but I was always really curious about media representing witches, books representing witches. For 10 years, I stopped consuming it because it felt like something that belonged to childhood.

Then in 2020, I read this book by Sylvia Townsend Warner for the first time. It's called Lolly Willowes, and it's about this spinster living in the UK that denounces her life as a Victorian aunt and caregiver. She’s taking care of everyone in the house and managing their emotions, and she moves to a cottage in the middle of nowhere and sells her soul to the devil. The devil is this incredible figure that's kind of handsome, actually – 

Jac: Sexy.

Kayla: Exactly. And when I read that, I don't know, something awakened in me. I have a Lolly Willowes tattoo, I love that book so much. I thought: Wait, this is so much like the tales of my childhood, but it feels more adult. I saw this author having this awakening in her own life. That really kicked things off for me. All of a sudden, I was just living and breathing witches all over again, this time as a 20-something year-old.

Also, I come from a Ukrainian background, and so there is a witchiness in the culture, even though my family is technically Orthodox Christian. There are a lot of superstitions in folklore, and there's tons of research that's just starting to be written about how a lot of the practices of Ukrainian women were really suppressed forms of witchcraft, because of Soviet suppression. With any pagan stuff in Ukraine, they had to suppress it because Christianity had to reign.

Jac: I'm Italian on my dad's side, and Italians can also be very witchy and superstitious in their own way. We have all these different forms of pagan culture that just had a light rebrand into Christian practice, very superficially, and then couched underneath are these layers of really deep traditions that evolved in their own right, rooted in something that was pre-Christian, or parallel to it. It sounds like something similar evolved historically in Ukraine.

Kayla: Nonnas and Babas, they're doing all the same kinds of things! I grew up around that superstition, hearing stories about how my Baba Vicky would put garlic in four corners of the pasture to keep the cows safe. I grew up around it, and as you grow older, you also become more curious about your heritage in that way, right? I was like, maybe this is a part of me, and I should care more.

Jac: From childhood, you have had this exposure and interest in witches in fairy tales and TV through your mom. You rediscover it in the early 2020s after moving away from it. Now in 2026 you've written this chapter for Routledge around graphic novels and contemporary representations of witches, which are very different from those fairy tales. How would you describe that shift? How does that evolution of the representation occur?

Kayla: I was a children's bookseller for two years in Saskatoon, from 2015 to 2017. At that time, there were few graphic novels that revolved around witches. There were a few, but nothing like the sheer amount we have now. I argue in this piece that it’s an easy way to appeal to a child's imagination, while also making space for marginalized identities. 

WitchTok and the huge resurgence of people loving astrology again contributes to this. Astrology has never gone away, but they're using platforms like TikTok to talk about how to do witchy rituals and things like that. There's also been a revival of it in modern culture. So why wouldn't there be a literary culture, too? 

This is something that I've been grappling with too: Why, especially during my pre-teen and teenage years, was there just such a huge lull in writing about witches? The 90s was just rife with: Young girls are wicked, and this is so scary, and they're worshiping the devil, and then it just died out. 

Jac: There was a moral panic right around, what teens are doing these days? Which we have seen over time, kind of just pops up every so often. There's the concern and anxiety over what the kids are doing. We can't really control them anymore, but that manifested in the 90s in a very different way that it did in the 2000s.

Kayla: I don't have a resolute answer, but I think that it's because the witch is such a subversive and rebellious identity, it's teaching young children that they can be whatever they want to be. And maybe it's not necessarily being a witch, but you can be on the fringes of acceptability, and it's okay. That translates well as positive messaging.

Jac: Especially for young girls, right? You really trace this expansion in the chapter. The conception of what a witch can be, can now accommodate different cultures and identities and versions of itself and still make sense in the culture. And you're interested in three different ways in which you see the witch changing over time: The queer witch, the racialized witch – specifically the Black witch – and the elder witch. Did you find more diversity in the authors who are writing, that accompanies this diversity of representation?

Kayla: Huge diversity. In the book project that I'm working on, I’m looking at Britain specifically, and so I'm also thinking about early to mid 20th century Britain, and tracing that form of witchcraft to try and explain why this is happening, why we care so much about witches in the 21st century. But it’s so focused white British women's experiences that it was really refreshing to go and look at the middle grade graphic novels and see that nine times out of 10, the author is usually somebody who identifies with some of the identity markers of the story. Mooncakes is one narrative I write about in the chapter. There are two authors, and they’ve spoken about wanting to create better representation through their characters, to represent their own experiences. I feel like a lot of these authors are trying to do the same thing.

Jac: Oftentimes, those specific identity markers aren't the most important thing about the narrative, but it's part of a more comprehensive, nicely rounded out story. You write about how in stories where there is queerness, queerness is not the central conflict. It just happens to be a part of who that protagonist is.

Kayla: Queerness in particular is in literally every single one of these graphic novels.

Jac: That’s really interesting. Why do you think that is?

Kayla: It might be with graphic novels in particular. It makes sense to me that they want to show young children – because you have to remember that it's an act of a demonstration, like a way of modeling good behavior – a way of seeing diversity in the world around you.I feel like authors insert queerness into these narratives because they want children to see that it's okay to be queer. That was the sense that I got. The market is so saturated with queer narratives that it almost just feels so normal, like you don't even think about it as extraordinary, until you write something like this, and you see a pattern, and you're like, Whoa.

Jac: You’re also researching what this literature looks like 100 years prior and seeing such a huge evolution. 

Kayla: The witch has been seen as a queer figure for hundreds and hundreds of years. When we think of the old definition of queer, which is strange and weird, and then we start or putting it together with these, this reclamation of the term.

Jac: There is this longstanding identification between queerness and villains. The difference is that you were supposed to fear or revile or otherwise shun a villain in the story, whereas now we're meant to identify, to relate. The believability of the protagonist is a huge selling point.

Kayla: If there is any fear of the crone or the wicked witch character, it's usually diffused by the end. In Snapdragon, there's this older character, and everybody's like, “She's a witch!” And she is a witch, but she doesn't eat dogs or, like, harm people. The storyline is that she’s preserving animals [after they die from natural causes], and she actually is this beautiful taxidermy artist. So if the witch is shown as wicked, the plot is usually rewritten by the end to show that you shouldn't judge people based on rumours that you hear. 

Jac: Usually, the message, the moral is different there. By the end, that figure gives way to understanding and re-contextualization, connection. Then when it comes to representations of Blackness, specifically, you write that you are seeing more representation, but it is not always as integrated in the story. How would you characterize these representations?

Kayla: In the first book of The Okay Witch series, this main character is not really thinking about Blackness. She has this family, she’s sort of thinking about her heritage and history, but not really. In the second book, it's almost like the author wanted to dig deeper into that background and so much of the book is about that, and it's so neat to see the progression. But a lot of these books are just standalone, so you don't get to see the character growth, or they touch on it really lightly. That said, I think that most of the time it's enough that they're just drawn as a person of color. Even that is huge. The Witches of Brooklyn series is so cool because it was one of the earlier examples of a main character who is Asian-American, and it’s not talked about, but it's visible, and that's super important.

Jac: Once again, it’s not the central point or the only thing that is remarkable about this character, but one of many identity or character traits.

What effect do you think these are having on children? I’m going to pull out the last sentence of your chapter now, which is about the witch child.and the potential of the witch child as “a voice for and alongside the subaltern and marginal, the old and the young, and when she embraces her powers, a radical, queer, and postcolonial future is possible.” There's a lot in there, right? Unpack this a little bit for me.

Kayla: The emergence of the character-type of the witch child was a really interesting discovery for me, because I've found that the witch child has been around for hundreds of years. 

A lot of the books that I've been reading from the twentieth century, the witches’ stories start when they're 12 or 13, so it's almost like there's this raw, special power that comes with childhood. 

Jac: And on the cusp, too, of adolescence, just when things are changing.

Kayla: Somehow that transition makes you more perceptive to a greater power. Feels like a big metaphor for childhood, like it's magical. You can access these special realms. You can be a witch. The witch-child is just this big category, and there's really not much written about it, because I think that the re-emergence of it is what has made it relevant again. It wasn't relevant for a long time. I give one historical example, although there are hundreds of them, of children who were accusing witches. And apparently, just because they were kids, they were more perceptive to magic. So who’s to say they can’t be the witches in these contemporary narratives? They become the witches instead of the finger pointers. 

Jac: To what extent does this indicate a shift in how we perceive and understand childhood on a broader level?

Kayla: There's such a deep understanding of childhood psychology in these graphic novels. They see childhood as a unique experience, and then narratives have to be written to speak to children where they are right. There isn’t that gender binary that I was so used to as a 90s kid, where it's like, this is a narrative for girls and this is for boys. It's like, anybody could read these and it would be fine, because there's so much diverse representation.

Thank you, Kayla, for being our inaugural notyrgirls interviewee! Read Kayla’s work: