Anna Rasche, The Stone Witch of Florence and Claret

When will I be tired of witches? Never. And especially when they come in a quirky and fascinating debut like The Stone Witch of Florence. Anna Rasche is pretty fascinating herself  - pour yourself a glass of whatever you're thirsty for and listen to this great conversation about history, folklore, The Plague, religious idols and subversive nuns.

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Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):

Molly Fader (00:29):

Hello everybody. Welcome to Day Drinking with Authors, the podcast where I pick a book and the author picks a drink and we discuss both. I'm your host Molly Fader, and today we are talking about the Stone Witch of Florence with debut author Anna Rasche. Now, if this book is, if Leo Bardogo's the Familiars and the Decameron, the Netflix television show had a baby, it would be this book. It is feminist, subversive, magical, historical, and absolutely page turning. So I'm going to read the back cover copy because my mom really likes that. And then we will introduce Anna, ancient sorcery magic gemstones. Only one woman can save a city. In ruins 1348 as the black plague ravages Italy, genere Dero is summoned to Florence. After nearly a decade of lonely exile, Geneva has a gift harnessing the hidden powers of gemstones. She can heal the sick, but when the word spread of her usual abilities, she was condemned as a witch and banished.

(01:25):

Now the same men who expel Geneva are begging for her return. Geneva obliges, assuming the city's leaders are finally ready to accept her unorthodox cures amid a pandemic. But upon arrival, she's tasked with a much different task. She must use her collection of jewels to track down a ruthless thief who is ransacking florence's churches for their priceless relics. The city's only hope for protection. If she succeeds, she'll be a recognised physician and never accused of witchcraft again. But as her investigation progresses, she never discovers. She's merely a pawn in a much larger scheme than the one she's been hired to solve. And the dangerous man, men behind the conspiracy won't think twice about killing a stone witch to get what they want. It sounds thrilling. It is thrilling. Anna, thank you so much for being here today.

Anna Rasche (02:08):

Thank you so much for having me. I'm delighted to be here with you.

Molly Fader (02:12):

So you picked for the drink that we're enjoying a clarat, and my confession to you is I have read historical fiction and more importantly, historical romance for over 25 years, and I had no idea what a claret was, and I was like, when you picked it, I was like, how in the world am I going to find a clarat? Anna, please tell us what clarat is.

Anna Rasche (02:33):

I didn't know either. I chose this drink because when I was researching the book, it was something that well, to do Italian merchants might have as a fancy offering. And then I was like, oh yeah, what is this wine? So I went to my local liquor store and was like, hi, do you have a Ruby red Clat and bless this band without blinking an eye? He was like, oh, yes, write this way. So I learned a clat is basically just a wine from Bordeaux, like a red wine from Bordeaux, and Clat is like an old timey term for it, so it's a light French red wine.

Molly Fader (03:12):

I'm sorry, do you have clat? And they're like, yes, a wall. Wall

Anna Rasche (03:16):

Oft, yeah. I was like, I don't really know what it is, but thank you very much. So yes, so he was very helpful and it's nice. I'm having a little glass right now and needed appropriately

Molly Fader (03:28):

Day drinking. I love it. Yes, yes. So before we start talking about your experience writing this book and the history and the magic and all of these marvellous things, we have to talk about the tone of this book. It is like if Wes Anderson was making a movie about the plague, it is so subversive and just slightly off centre in a way that I found so delightful. Can you talk to me about choosing that kind of tone and how hard it was to maintain it?

Anna Rasche (04:03):

Yeah, thank you for that question. I love it. The plague was so awful. So all encompassing, awful, and everyone's living through this time of death, but they're still trying to exist, right? There's still the will to live and to enjoy your life and get back to the things that you were doing before. So there's this really weird juxtaposition, and some people during that time took it to a really extreme place, kind of just very hedonistic and debaucherous and forsaking all responsibilities and kind of social niceties. And then there was everyone on down the line down to the flag who had whip themselves in the streets. So you have to try and punish themselves for whatever God is mad at us for. So you have this whole array of attitudes. So that's part of it is how do you capture the ridiculousness of living in the face of such omnipresent death?

(05:09):

And then on a smaller level, on a line level, I wanted the characters to speak to each other. I wanted them to sound to us when we were reading it, how they might've sounded to each other. So I tried to stay away from the formal language that we see in a lot of historical fiction, which I definitely love reading, and I think it works really well. But even if the proper translation is the and thou to each other, it still would've sounded like, Hey guys, what's going on? And there's a newer translation of CIO's de camera on, I think the English translator is Wayne Horne, sorry, Wayne, I don't know how to say her last name. But he did a really nice job, I think, of capturing this kind of realistic tone. And the tone Bacio was writing in the vernacular. This was meant to be a novel or to be stories for the people and not to be some sort of high art form, maybe commercial fiction of its day wouldn't have been a terrible term for it. So I tried to lean into that part, and that's how it comes to be in kind of this particular tone that it is in.

Molly Fader (06:28):

I found that some of the historical details of it lent itself to this sort of borderline ridiculous, subversive nature, the guild that she wants to be a part of. She is a healer and she wants to come back to her city and be admitted into the guild of, and this is real doctors and grocers. You can understand how that would be lumped together in the 13 hundreds, but to our modern ear, that is hilarious.

Anna Rasche (07:02):

I thought so too. Yeah, it made sense, right? Because all of these trades are using similar ingredients. They need to source herbs and different sorts of plants and things like that. So that's how they come to be lumped together. Very sensible. But yes, it sounds so silly. So I did kind of run with that.

Molly Fader (07:23):

Oh yeah. And the other thing that I was sure that you were making up some of these relics, so there's a big part in the last half of the book where she has to go around trying to find these relics and all of these churches in parishes where everybody has died and they are things like this one guy's thumb and this other guy's shoe and this piece of bread vr, this person's ankle. And I just thought, there's just no way that there are that many body parts that were saved and revered and put into gold cages and then buried underneath the altars. And no, they were all real.

Anna Rasche (08:08):

Not every exact piece is a real, I did try to find as many real ones as I could, but one of the fun parts of fiction is sometimes you're like, I'm stuck. Okay, I'm going to make something up that works. But they all could be real. They're just very much based on the actuality of how relics were used and what they were, which was little bits of saints,

Molly Fader (08:33):

Little bits of saints. One of the things that I really appreciated, I love a good author note, and you've got a very nice author note at the end of yours, and it feels like this is sort of a twofold question. The first is, it feels like this woman, the witch, has been a part of your life for a long time. You've been thinking about her for a long time.

Anna Rasche (08:58):

Yes. Sorry, and I'm muting because my cat is just continuing to wreak havoc on the audio. Yes. So she first came to me, I was working, so I work with antique jewellery as my day job, and while I was in this, I went back to get a graduate degree in the history of decorative arts where you kind of can carve your jewellery niche out of that because there aren't really any particular programmes focusing on jewellery as an art in the art historical context. Hopefully that's changing. But anyhow, so I was doing this paper researching coral in the uses of precious red coral in Italy, and of which there are many and diverse ways that it was used, and not all of them seem to mesh with each other, but one way was kind of related to this old folk magic belief that goes back to classical myth and legend, that coral can keep away the evil eye.

(10:08):

So while I was researching this, I was like, how cool would that be if there was a story, a fictional story where somebody had a coral amulet that could protect them from the evil eye? And then my head went to the black plague because what bad thing happened, middle ages, the first thing that comes to your mind is the Black death. And then as part of this research on coral, I came across this whole category of mediaeval writings called Lapidary. So they're manuscripts that record the different properties of stones. So it might be something that's very normal sounding to us right now. Like an amethyst is purple and it's found in these locations, but also if you put it under your tongue, you can drink as much as you want and you'll never get drunk. I should have had an amethyst today.

(11:04):

It's based on the principle of sympathetic magic a lot of the time, which the idea is that affects, so since an amethyst has a purple colour that's similar to wine, it might be able to affect wine somehow. So I just got really intrigued by exploring all of these different traditions about gemstones. Many of them are alive and well in different cultures and different manifestations around the world. And it was just a fun little tweak on reality to have a very subtle fantasy world where everything else is kind of normal, except these gemstone powers actually work in a tangible way.

Molly Fader (11:54):

I found the effect of that to be so, I mean, I am a reader who willingly and delightfully suspends disbelief, you can sell me anything in a book pretty much. And at one point I was like, wait, this, were these real. And obviously Amethyst doesn't do that, but did you have a thousand things to pick and choose from that people believed gems would protect them from or provide them or,

Anna Rasche (12:27):

Yeah, some of them are very specific, but a lot of them are really repetitive actually. So it's interesting because you can see what society, what people were, what was giving them angst. Then a lot of them protect against poison. A lot of them

Molly Fader (12:48):

Are a lot of poisoning,

Anna Rasche (12:50):

A lot of poisoning. A lot of them are, ambulance can be used to help in childbirth, right? Medicine isn't really at a place right now to do much to help complications of pregnancy or labour, which is really scary. So you see a lot that are ascribed powers of that nature. A lot of them help you gain influence and fortune and things like this. And yeah, I think mostly their powers are for good. Mostly it's like AIC or bringing good stuff to you more than doing bad to others, which is nice.

Molly Fader (13:35):

I mean, it gives you a little, humankind is mostly good forever. Yeah. So can you talk briefly about how you got into your formal studies in decorative? I'm sorry, you said decorative arts, but that felt like not right? Yeah, no, that's right. What a specific and incredible thing. And your experiences you, you've done work at museums, you've been busy with this.

Anna Rasche (14:06):

Yeah, I feel really lucky. It's a really cool field to be in. So I always loved history and art. My undergrad was in archaeology at Boston University, and that was where I first kind of became interested in jewellery. I grew up in Maine and not the big a town, big jewellery wasn't a part of my life growing up and for the most part, but when I was studying archaeology, you see a lot of these artefacts from ancient cultures, and I was like, oh my God, this stuff is so impressive and beautiful in a way that grabs you that I hadn't been grabbed flipping through a fashion magazine and seeing ads like you do today. So I decided I was interested to learn to make it. So I moved to New York as one does when one graduates a college in Boston, you get your little bartending job.

(15:07):

And I went to a trade school during the day to learn about making it, and I was okay at it, but I realised maybe I need a better way to pay the bill. So from there, I took an entry-level job at Gemological Institute of America, which is a big lab that grades diamonds, if you've ever, people usually have heard of it if you've bought an engagement ring. And the diamond comes with a little certificate confirming its quality and size and all that. And so I was one of the people who helped create those reports. And at gis where I learned the whole science of gemology, so how to tell one stone from another if it's been treated, if it's synthetic, things like this. And then from there, it was in the Diamond District in New York, and there was a really beautiful window display in one booth on 47th Street for an antique dealer with old Victorian pieces, lots of art deco stuff.

(16:16):

And I struck up a conversation with the owner and she needed an extra person on staff. I applied and was given the job, and that was really how everything kind of came together, is working with these old pieces every day and cataloguing them, helping wow, telling them and getting them refurbished. So that's really how all of my other experiences, how I was able to have the background knowledge to do that, to help out at the Met and other places. But it's a really cool career. And if anyone likes art, I definitely recommend considering jewellery because there's a lot of, it's an industry with a lot of jobs to be had where sometimes it can feel hard to find your way in and other ways.

Molly Fader (17:10):

Anna, that's incredible. This is another sort of two part question. The first is relating to the book, and then the second is your experience researching the book. So can you tell us why Florence, of all the places Plague was everywhere. Evil Eye was everywhere. What drove you to Florence?

Anna Rasche (17:32):

I think it's because I had the thought of a healer during the plague, and for whatever reason, my mind, I must have read the intro to the Decameron at some point in my past or read something. But for whatever reason, I knew that had been particularly bad in Florence and that there was records of it. So that was the location that came into my head, and when I started doing research and following it, everything clicked and made sense. So there's never anywhere else that could have been in my head.

Molly Fader (18:14):

This is the dream author experience. Your husband was like, look at you go, let's go to Florence for three months and dive into this.

Anna Rasche (18:26):

Yeah, definitely. My husband will get so much credit for this actually being a thing. So at the time, we weren't married, but I was working a really cool job, but it was really a really intense startup job and was feeling kind of burnt out. And this was kind of my side back idea, this story that I would talk about all the time, but I didn't really have any time to work on it in any substantial way. So yeah, he is posed, he's an adventurer, so he posed that we figure out a way to make this trip happen. So I was ready to part ways with this job anyhow, so I quit. He was able to get a leave of absence from his job, and so just took some savings that I had, and you can be in Italy for three months on a tourist visa.

(19:22):

So that was how long we stayed, and we airbnbed an apartment and bopped around to all sorts of places, a lot that I was interested in for book research, a lot that just sounded neat and gathered up all of when I was there. I wasn't so much writing the story as just taking notes and taking it all in. Anything interesting. And I think for the mystery of the relics, being in Florence, seeing where the churches are placed in relation to each other, the art that's still on the walls, a lot of the stuff from the 14th century has been covered up, so you kind of have to go on a hunt to

(20:07):

Figure out where it is, but are still, the plague was really depressing. So once they were past it kind of into the Renaissance, people covered up a lot of the art that reminded you of the plague. But you can still see piece, I think it was in Santa Croce, there's pieces of these frescoes where it just shows the decimation, but they're just fragments that have been painted over and just preserved by an accident. So all sorts of cool, I could go on forever about this, but all sorts of cool details that you only would know because you stumbled upon it in the place. So I was able to find those, and I hope they bring kind of a level of specificity to the story that I couldn't have gotten to just by researching.

Molly Fader (21:01):

I found it, it makes you want to go to Florence, despite the fact that it's set the blank. There's a lot of, she keeps walking by the same dead body back and forth with the Mason guy. But yeah, which again, sort of fed into the sort of ridiculousness of it, but it was a reminder to me as a writer that specificity opens up the story. You get to a point where you feel like as you're writing that this is going to, oh, nobody cares. It's slowing things down or it's bogging down what I'm trying to say. But it just is one more level of immersion for the reader, and I am so glad you went to Florence for those three months. Thank you.

Anna Rasche (21:50):

Yeah, I love those details. Jonathan Strange and Mr. Nor is my favourites, and I'm there reading every single one of those imaginary footnotes, every little detail for me as a reader, that sort of thing makes the story. So I definitely put a lot of that into my own book.

Molly Fader (22:10):

You could feel it. Another thing that I was, so, I mean, I think it's the reminder that the thing that people are looking for ambulance against are universal. It's not just the 13 hundreds. It's now. And the evil eye is really kind of fascinating because obviously the way that it's depicted in your book isn't possible, but it's such a universal thing. And in your research, was it just everywhere?

Anna Rasche (22:46):

So I didn't focus on traditions all over the world, but some form of it for sure. And it's definitely in Mediterranean cultures and Mediterranean adjacent cultures, it's there and it's, it's still a very big belief or belief. Thank you for a lot of people, especially kind of in Southern Italy and other places. And if you think about it when, the way I think about it is when this, it's kind of the same as the Wheel of Fortune. One day you're up, the next day you're down. And there's no real way to explain it. So people are leery. They don't want to get to comfortable when nice things happen. You don't want to brag about it, you don't want to let anyone else know, or it's basically, the evil eye can kind of be analogous to jealousy in a lot of instances. So you don't want to give anyone reason to be jealous of you, to be spiteful of you, or they may wish you harm. That can manifest in real ways.

Molly Fader (24:01):

And I found that, I mean, we're going to talk about the feminist themes is one of the ways that the evil eye is sort of a, I mean, men obviously felt it too, but it was a tool of almost the patriarchy where women could only be grateful if you have this sort of great stretch of time where your main characters had the evil eye. She's gotten rid of it, and then she's just being grateful and she's being so careful to not have it again. And it makes her pliable and it makes her not argue. I found it really interesting, the feminist, talk a little bit about how you were able to find ways that women had agency in a time where they wouldn't, A time of incredible suppression and fear and violence and childbirth is dangerous. I liked it so much. I liked Lucia, I loved the nuns. Talk a little bit about how you viewed that.

Anna Rasche (25:06):

Okay, my first thought is that I believe that people are fundamentally the same no matter where you live in the world or what time you're born, of course there's cultural differences and influences, but everybody wants the same to feel welcome in their community, to have a sense of purpose, to be able to work on stuff they're proud of, to be safe, financially secure. And you can see these desires manifest in personal writings from wherever, whenever, in my experience. So that was my first thought with these women is that they're like me. So how would I feel if I was living in that time? How would my friends and my sisters and mothers and aunts feel living in this time? And then, although there is not a lot of writing by women from that time, there is some, and there are some that are pretty well known still today that I looked at.

(26:21):

And one is the book of Marjorie Kemp, and the other one is the book of the city of the Ladies, which was written by Christine de Pizan and who's a French Noble woman. Marjorie was English, and they both lived a little bit, or I think they were kids during the plague, but they lived a little bit after this. And they're basically saying in their different ways, like, Hey, Christine Dipan specifically just says, this doesn't make sense. Everything I read about women says, we're incapable, we're evil. But that's not my experience with the women I know who are getting things done, managing households, being kind, being good partners to their husbands. And I think there's a conspiracy among

(27:13):

These male writers from classical times up until now, and I think we need to call them out. So she is a very privileged, educated lady, so she had the platform to express this and write it down and get attention to her writing. But if she felt that, then surely there were women everywhere who felt their own version of that. So I took that to heart that even if they didn't know, even if the term feminism was still centuries away, and even if they still held certain beliefs of that, men and women have their own separate spheres that we think today are not correct, even if they're still bound by this of their time, they still have agency. And

Molly Fader (28:14):

I found the nuns in particular working within the system that they had, the real work that they were doing had to be kept such a secret, and it was important that it stay a secret, but it was all those things they were, I mean, it's not a spoiler. They were sex workers would go there to have their babies. And it was So anyway, I found it. I delighted in those parts, in those moments where women were really a bit of a middle finger to the men who would keep them down. One of the things that I love to ask, this is a debut novel. So one of the things I love to ask, it's again, another two point question. It's just a rambling question in many parts. How did this book change while you were working on it, and what did you find to be the most difficult and most exciting process part of the process?

Anna Rasche (29:14):

Okay, I'll answer the second part first. I think for me, the first draught is the hardest getting it down because I have never, this is really my first exercise in fiction, so I'm learning the craft of it. I took one, the Gotham Writers Workshop, or if anyone's, they advertise on the subway,

(29:37):

So I took one course with them and a little night class at a local place called the Brooklyn. But other than that, I hadn't really had any training in writing. And so that just took me a really long time to get something that made sense. The editing process, I find when I get feedback that it's so helpful. That makes sense. It'll trigger a new idea for me. So I know once I get somebody whose feedback I know is sound, once I get their take on it, that really helps me, and I feel like I'm really able to run with it. Yes. So I'm sorry.

Molly Fader (30:27):

Well, I know that people will ask, how long did it take you to write this book?

Anna Rasche (30:31):

So when I was writing that paper on Coral, I think it was in 2014, that was when I was in programme. But it was good because I was busy with life and who writes a book if you're not already writing books? So I kind of just noodled on it for a while, and it was probably in 20, not until 2018 when I really started to try and get a significant amount of words on the page. But yeah, so it's been a while. It'll be like 10 years soup to nuts.

Molly Fader (31:04):

That's incredible. So the first part of the question was how much did the book change from your initial idea to the book that everyone's going to be reading October 11th?

Anna Rasche (31:15):

So I think the main change was the arc with the villain. The original villain I wrote is no longer a character in the story. And yeah, RIP,

Molly Fader (31:31):

So many hours spent on that villain. And for

Anna Rasche (31:35):

He was a little too, yeah. So when I first signed with my agent before we went on submission, there was a significant amount of revisions that we did before she felt it was in the best spot it could be to send out to publishers. And so this was her feedback that in order to kind of make the villain more potent and I guess narrow down the scope of the story a little bit, that needed to change. So that was a few months of additional work before then. I sent a new and significantly shorter version back to her.

Molly Fader (32:20):

I find that's the first thing that happens is you send it in and the next thing is, well, we need to trim 5,000 words or however

Anna Rasche (32:30):

Many. Yeah. Oh my gosh. It was much more than 5,000 for me, but yeah, so whole other novela somewhere out there in the world.

Molly Fader (32:43):

Yeah, the villain that never was.

Anna Rasche (32:45):

Yeah.

Molly Fader (32:46):

Anna, can you tell us what's next for you? You are being sent on tour to support this beautiful book. That's exciting. Where will you be?

Anna Rasche (32:54):

Yes, I'm, it starts off next Monday and then the day before launch I'll be at the Barnes and Noble in Cobble Hill in Brooklyn. And then I'm bopping around the Midwest to Ohio and Missouri next week, which I'm super excited about because I haven't spent much time in that part of the country. So send me your restaurant recommendations, everyone in Toledo and St. Charles,

Molly Fader (33:19):

St. Louis. Oh, St. Charles Fun.

Anna Rasche (33:22):

And then the next week I'll be up in New England and some places in Massachusetts and Maine, where is more my home turf. And then there's some other really cool events scattered out through November and I think December. So I'm going to be busy. And

Molly Fader (33:42):

Are you working on anything new that you can talk to us about? I know that a lot of authors, so if you can't, I get it, but if you are,

Anna Rasche (33:49):

I'm working on book two, so it's very early days. What I will say is that it's set in, it's not a sequel, but G sort, the curious lore of gems to the curious lore of gems. To borrow a phrase from George Frederick Koons, that was the name of his book. He was a really cool Tiffany Gemologist, the Curious Lord of Gems will be a thread that remains, that continues into this next story. Wow. That was really rambly. Let me say that. That was the first version of my book. And now let me give you the version that my agent said. Okay, we can move forward. Yes, I'm working on a new book. It's very early days, and it's going to be set in New York City, but the sort of magic curses and things like that of gemstones will be a thread of continuity between Stone Witch and this. But it's not a sequel in any way. It's a whole new thing.

Molly Fader (35:03):

Oh, that's exciting. I can't wait to read it. Anna, good luck to you. This book is beautiful. Everybody go out there and get yourself a copy on the, I'm sorry, is it the 11th?

Anna Rasche (35:14):

The 8th of October

Molly Fader (35:16):

The eighth,

Anna Rasche (35:17):

Yes. But you can pre-order it now. From wherever. From wherever. Why wait, why wait.

Molly Fader (35:24):

Thank you so much, Anna. Everybody out there. Happy reading. Stay safe. Thank you. Thanks everybody. Thanks Anna.