Quick Take
Santa Cruz-based Clifford Mae Henderson is poised to release her sixth novel, “Bait and Witch,” with a reading and book signing at Bookshop Santa Cruz on Jan. 18. But many locals might be surprised to learn that Henderson has ever written fiction at all. That’s because she’s best known for performing and teaching improv comedy with the Fun Institute.
It certainly makes sense that a good improv performer would be a good writer, and vice versa, because there is practically no difference between working without a script and creating the script itself. And if you want to prove the point, you don’t have to look beyond Clifford Mae Henderson.
The Santa Cruz-based writer is poised to release her sixth novel, “Bait and Witch,” with a reading and book signing at Bookshop Santa Cruz on Thursday, Jan. 18. But many locals might be surprised to learn that Henderson has ever written fiction at all. That’s because she’s been well-known and admired in Santa Cruz County in an entirely different realm.
For more than 30 years, Henderson has been performing and teaching the fine art of improv comedy. With her longtime partner, Dixie Cox, Henderson runs the Fun Institute, where through prompts, exercises and other creative what-ifs, she’s inspired hundreds (thousands?) of people to explore their own creativity.
In her experience, Henderson said that writing and improv share a fundamental goal. “When you’re on stage, and you’re making an offer to somebody, the clearer you can make that offer to them — through language often, but it’s also physical — the clearer the scene will be. It gives them something. And it’s the same with writing. It’s all about clarity. I feel my life is all about trying to find clarity.”
For years, in her improv classes, Henderson has worked with “long-form improv,” creating a story on the fly that not only makes sense but has its own momentum toward a satisfying conclusion. That sounds a whole lot like writing fiction.
“We do a whole story,” she said, “with scenes and chapters, and it builds and gets very exciting. That’s just the love of story.”
The story in “Bait and Witch” is a murder mystery. The book’s protagonist, single mom Zeddi, is working as a house cleaner in the fictional California city of Tres Ojos when she happens upon the body of an old friend and longtime client. She soon finds out that the dead woman was a high priestess in a coven of witches, and might have been murdered.
“Witch,” of course, can mean many things, from cackling Halloween icons to supernatural genies to practitioners of the pagan belief system known as Wicca. Who are Clifford Henderson’s witches?
“They’re pretty regular people who were given a gift,” she said. “They go to this thing in Big Sur when they’re young — this is the ’70s we’re talking about — and get involved in this practice where there’s this particular power that is given to them. And it’s the power of sound.”
Soon, the trio of young witches find that they can create sounds that serve as a communication medium with the spirit world and the realm of the dead.
“They are a very specific kind of witch because I made up the kind of magic that they do. It’s not like Harry Potter-esque or anything like that,” Henderson said, “I was very interested for a while in sound, and how there’s all these sounds that we can’t hear. And I came across this NASA site, where you can listen to the sound that each individual planet makes. And I started thinking, ‘What if it’s sound that’s binding us together? And what would it be like if there were people who in some ways could harness that and shift things and move things in that way?’ It was just a fun premise to mess around.”
Henderson said she knew little about Wicca before beginning the writing of “Bait and Witch.” She, like many people, has a certain degree of respect for meaningful ritual. And her research led her to a wider understanding of some forms of Wicca. But she doesn’t consider herself part of that community.
“I will pull a tarot card if I’m in a tough state in my life,” she said. “I’ll light a candle if I’m thinking about somebody. But would I call myself a witch? No, not really at all. Occasionally I’ll do ritualistic things, I guess — like, just recently, I’m burning some old diaries rather than throwing them away. Is that a ritual? Yeah, it is. A lot of witchcraft is just that. As one of my witches says, it’s prayer with props. That’s basically what it is to me.”
Clifford Henderson, author of the new novel “Bait and Witch,” will be at Bookshop Santa Cruz on Thursday, Jan. 18. The event is free and begins at 7 p.m.
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