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Chelsea Iversen has been reading and writing stories since before she knew what verbs were. She loves tea and trees and travel and reads her runes at every full moon. Chelsea lives with her husband and Pepper the dog in Colorado. The Witches at the End of the World is her debut novel.
Chelsea Iversen's website
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Your novel takes place in such a unique historical moment and setting: Norway in the seventeenth century. What inspired you to write this story in this specific time and place?
The story of these two sisters whose lives were defined by their mother being burned at the stake came to me separate from time and place, in a way. Or at least, that was how it seemed. But I knew these sisters needed to live somewhere isolated, somewhere life was difficult. After doing a little digging about witch hunts in Europe, I learned just how intense the witch trials and executions in northern Norway were, especially for women, of course. I have Norwegian family heritage, so maybe in part that helped, but that remote, arctic setting felt like the only location this story could take place.
There are so many theories about why the Finnmark witch hunts were so intense, but one is that the isolated landscape and harshness of the environment meant that there were lots of natural disasters—storms and capsized boats and lean seasons—that seemed to require explanation. Witches were the perfect scapegoat, I suppose. Anyway, the zoomed-in look at human cruelty that happens in this story had to take place in the northernmost stretches of the ...
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