“Half-Hanged Mary,” by Margaret Atwood tells the story of the author’s eccentric ancestor, Mary Webster, who was hanged for a witch in the 1680s and lived to tell the tale.

Atwood’s rendering of Mary’s long night—the hunt (and the hypocrisy of her Puritan hunters), the lynching, the excruciating hours hanging by her neck, and the trippy liberation that came after “listening to the gospel/ of the red hot stars”—has both dazzled and disturbed me for years. Atwood’s imagined outcome of the night—Mary’s wild radicalization—has always felt both right and painfully familiar, as it might to any woman or girl who has dwelt on the fringe and faced the pitchfork-wielding horde.

As Mary says at the end of her ordeal, “Before, I was not a witch/But now I am one.”

For one bizarre year of my life, I was the subject of a witch-hunt.

A strange and unlovely twelve-year-old with buck teeth and electroshock hair (and an undiagnosed case of ADHD, it turns out), I had just moved to a leafy bedroom community in Westchester County, where the young girls were as impeccably groomed as the rolling lawns.

When my new classmates asked how old I was (probably because I looked about ten), I told them I was 744 years old. I rhapsodized about my close relationships with Mozart and Beethoven, the hell I’d raised during the French Revolution, my great love of flying. In retrospect, it seems pretty obvious why they thought I was a witch, but I was honestly just riffing, spinning tales from whatever came out of my frizz-haloed cranium.

Anyway, news traveled fast. I was a witch, a theory confirmed by myriad proofs. Exhibit A, my cluelessness: after a twenty-minute rant by the history teacher about how the word environment “has an N in the middle of it! Woe to any child who forgets!” I was the only kid to spell it without the N. Exhibit B, my freakish speed-reading: the English teacher timed us for half an hour, and I read 120 pages, more than twice anybody else. Exhibit C, my childishness: I was the only kid in phys-ed who neither shaved her legs nor wore a bra. Bonus: my weird adult vocabulary, which I refused to tone down, and my uncanny ability to guess 'heads or tails' correctly thirteen times at a McDonalds during a school field trip, a detail I worked into my new novel.

After the initial glee my eccentricity excited in my classmates, we settled into a long year of zealous persecution on their part, sullen silence on mine. Walking between classes, kids shouted, “Zap! She’s a witch,” or, worse, whispered to each other. There were rumors of my evil powers and my perverse midnight rituals. Some people claimed to have seen me fly; others sucked their teeth with pity that I really believed I had magical powers. One boy took me aside in homeroom and asked, with all sincerity, “Do you have any friends?”

I realized that everything I said would be used against me, so I shut up, taking long bathroom breaks between classes to cry in the stalls, preferring chronic lateness to the shame of passing bullies in the halls. I stayed home as often as my mother would let me, complaining of psychosomatic maladies no less debilitating because they were imaginary. I took refuge in fantasies—sometimes of popularity, more often of vengeance. And I developed a lifelong affinity for literary witches and outcasts of all stripes—Hester Prynne and Abigail Williams and Jane Eyre and Bertha and Pecola and Sula and Carrie (both Stephen King’s and Theodore Dreiser’s). Not to mention Samantha and Tabitha and Sabrina.

In eighth grade, we moved from Westchester to rural Maine. As I grew into myself, my differences became less obvious because I learned to hide them, to protect myself. I experienced sparky moments of insight that both frightened and exhilarated me, but I knew better than to discuss them. I developed chronic sleepwalking, waking once on the icy lake near my home to find myself lying my back and gazing at the stars. I lived in a liminal state. I flew so often in my dreams that it seemed I could almost lift off at other times, too. A high school English teacher introduced me to the Transcendentalists, and I discovered the church of the woods, my church.

Several years ago, I decided to write a novel featuring my own witchy heroine. At first, I imagined her as a young, misunderstood girl like me—an eccentric persecuted for her difference. But the deeper I looked into her story, the more curious I became about real witches—not the Harry Potter kind, which had made fantasy witches cool, nor the Halloween witch riding astride her broom. I wanted to know about the women (and men) who owned the taunt and made it their own, much as feminists had owned bitch and LGBT people had owned queer. I wanted to find the people who had teased an identity out of prehistory and persecution, who had co-created a spiritual path with the gods.

So I started seeking out books. Then ritual. Then friends. Then community. And I found kindred spirits—lovers of stories, worshippers of nature, fierce activists and odd ducks who dressed-up and drew down the moon.

Over time (and many revisions), my poor persecuted character grew to be a proper Witch, Hero Green, who draws no line between worshipper and warrior for Nature. I am so excited to share her with readers. She joins the growing ranks of real activists no longer willing to accept a broken world.

Before, I was not a witch/But now I am one.