Heather Cleary, a friend of Lozano whom she calls “brilliant,” handled this lofty task. The magic within the text of Witches exists in language - Feliciana calls herself the curandera of language and uses local psychedelic mushrooms in her healing ceremonies to communicate with a person’s inner self - and Lozano considers translating another kind of magic. But instead of strictly gathering the facts of Paloma’s life, Zoe starts trading stories from her childhood with Feliciana. Zoe first meets Feliciana while attempting to write an article about the murder of Feliciana’s mentor, Paloma. Lozano’s second novel that’s been translated into English follows two women from very different walks of life: Feliciana, an indigenous curandera, and Zoe, a thoroughly contemporary journalist from Mexico City. Witches is Mexican author Brenda Lozano’s attempt to bring a María Sabina-esque character into the present. María Sabina Magdalena Garcia was a curandera, a traditional healer in indigenous communities in Mexico, whose ceremonial work with psychedelic mushrooms brought people from all over the world to her small town in Oaxaca in the 1960s and ’70s. “Have you heard of María Sabina?” he asked. There were amorphous themes floating around in her mind - a mystic healer, gender-based violence, a small town - but it was a friend’s suggestion that turned her loose scraps of a story into a fledgling novel. Brenda Lozano’s third novel crystallized while she was perched on a barstool in New York City.
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