I have been asked to do a presentation to a history class at Memorial University on the European witchcraft persecutions in the early seventeenth century. The students have just read my novel Dancing in the Palm of His Hand. I am both honoured and a tad apprehensive. The novel was published in 2005, meaning that I was deep into that research in 2003, ten years ago now. But in some ways it will be interesting to think deeply about that whole phenomenon again, as the tendency to label “an other” and to be afraid and to persecute the targets of our fear is always with us.