Have You Met the Witch of the Wood? A Watercolor Picture Book Honoring Baba Yaga

Have You Met the Witch of the Wood?
If you haven't, one day you should.

This little picture book was written and hand-illustrated by yours truly, Annie Dowdell. It is my gentle homage to the wildest witch of all, Baba Yaga. It features 12 whimsical watercolor paintings, and the text is a poem I wrote honoring the bony-legged Witch of the Wood. Everything I write for picture books is intended to be shared orally with an easeful and engaging whimsical flow. Why even write a picture book if it isn't fun to read and hear?? The goal of all my books is to give the listener a felt sense of connection with nature, wonder, and the liminal... our animate world.

Each full-color paperback book is roughly 4.75x6.75 inches, and is printed using fair and sustainable practices in the US. The cover is a thick textured watercolor paper and the interior pages are a high quality coated matte. I lovingly hand-bind each copy myself with beeswaxed linen thread.

All of the illustrations in this book feature little snippets of Slavic Baba Yaga tales, such as the comb that becomes a forest, her geese, her "children," her chicken-footed house, her golden apples, and of course, her classic skeleton garden gate.

For those who would like to nerd out a bit deeper with me about myth, animism, initiation, hags, and fairytales, here is why I chose to do this particular piece:

Before writing my little picture book about Baba Yaga, I started to hear modern commentary within New Age parent circles that hags needed to be removed from children's literature and imagery because women who want to identify as "witches," or "wild women," essentially don't want to be associated with anything ugly or evil. That is understandable, given that we live in a society that values the highly commodifiable Maiden, but not the Mother, and never the Crone. That disdain for the elderly wise woman harkens all the way back to the original witch trials of Europe. The greatest threat to the Church's consolidation of power as it bleached the paganism out of Europe, was in fact village wise women, who held the old ways for their people. So, when modern day "witches," reject her in the name of feminism, I sigh. Because that's essentially burning her all over again. Hags are a result of the vilification and othering of powerful wise women throughout history. Her physical form is the enduring embodiment of the fears of toxic patriarchy. The more powerful the witch, the longer we imagine her nose to be.

Baba Yaga and others like her are hidden relics of old goddesses and wise women who could not be erased. They persisted... reimagined and nestled into folklore. What was once perhaps a Scythian fire goddess became a canibalistic and capricious witch of the wood. She still holds the fire of ancestral wisdom in her skull fence. She still blesses and initiates those her make their way to her, but she is reduced a little bit. she became the stuff of fairytale and legend.


So..... this book is my little way of saying "NO! The Witch of the Wood has so much to teach us and our children. She must not be forgotten or erased. Please read your children her stories, for she is nature itself! We need to know her."


But why does she give some children golden apples and eat others? Because she's nature. Nature nurtures us, yes... but she also consumes. That's not evil. It's the nature of life. We, like all things, return to the earth one day. Deep down children wisely know that, and even find it a little bit tantalizing (don't we all). Hansel and Gretel is an infamously popular fairytale for a reason. To learn from a hag is to learn the nature of life, and how to step into our place in it. Baba Yaga doesn't "eat people," because she's evil. She eats fools, because the woods eat fools. For example, wolves aren't pets. If you pet one like a puppy and lose a hand, that's Baba Yaga. When you respect their space and their nature, and they help maintain the balance of their whole ecosystem so the rivers run clean enough to drink, that's Baba Yaga too. When you learn to listen to nature and your own gut, she can be incredibly generous. She, with her skull-capped garden gate is a supreme initiator as her guests transition from youth to adulthood. She prepares them to successfully navigate the challenges life will confront them with. From my perspective, we need more of her energy these days.

So at my house, we read her stories, and the stories of many other hags, and we discuss them. I want my kids to strive for sovereignty rather than obedience, and to listen to nature and the nature that speaks through them when something doesn't feel right, and when it does. To erase her, would not be a kindness to anyone except the demons of late-stage capitalism that would have us believe a woman is only as good and valuable as she is meek and youthfully attractive. So let's not.... Let's go meet her, the Witch of the Wood. She's calling her children back to the wood.