Excerpted and adapted with permission from Becoming Baba Yaga: Trickster, Feminist, and Witch of the Woods, by Kris Spisak, published September 2024 by Hampton Roads Publishing. All rights reserved. When my grandmother was a little girl and took a shortcut through the woods, she kept her head down. The pine needle path before her feet held her full attention. Birdsong tittered and warbled in the branches overhead. The shadows of horse chestnut and silver birch leaves fell in patches, then blankets, then shrouds. But nothing tempted her attention away from…
