Hexes of the Deadwood Forest, the debut novel from Polish writer Agnieszka Szpila, was translated into English from Polish by Scotia Gilroy. The novel has been called “a torpedo of a book” by Olga Tokarczuk and follows a disgraced oil executive whose public scandal fractures her identity, sending her spiraling across time and consciousness until she is absorbed into a radical, centuries-old sisterhood of women whose ecstatic rebellion against patriarchy builds toward a violent and transformative reckoning.
In our latest interview series, “Writer/Translator,” we ask a writer and their translator to interview each other about their work. Below, Szpila and Gilroy discuss the origins and inspirations behind the novel, the role of sexuality and political/ecological themes, and the process of translation as a creative, transformative act.
SCOTIA: Where did the idea for Hexes of the Deadwood Forest come from? Can you recall the moment when inspiration for the novel first struck you? All the vivid characters — Anna Frenza, Helene, Mathilde, Ursula, Kunegunde — how did they find you?
AGNIESZKA: I followed two of my alchemical dreams: one about a pile of bodies experiencing a collective orgasm, and another about dead cows in a river with udders full of warm milk — both deeply mystical. I followed real witch trials in Poland and Germany. I followed stories passed on to me many years ago by people close to me, and sometimes by people I met by chance — stories that kept me going, demanding to be deciphered, as if there was something in them for me to discover.
Do you know the song Strange Angels by Laurie Anderson? It’s about old stories that come back to haunt you. That’s how it is with stories that someone once told you. They have their spirits, their ghosts. They hunt you down. They come suddenly, completely unannounced — sometimes in your sleep, sometimes when you’re taking a bath, brushing your hair, or talking to someone. They’re rude, interruptive, extremely urgent beings. But they also give you a chance to save your life from real disaster by solving the charade they arrive with.
The ghosts in Hexes of the Deadwood Forest are the Earthen Ones — spirits of the past seeking opportunities to survive on devastated land. I strongly believe that these kinds of spirits come for us in the present, capturing us, abducting us, at the moment of our greatest crisis — when our identity cracks, as in Anna Frenza’s story. That’s why all the Earthen Ones share the surname SPALT (which means crack or cleft in German). They need a cleft to get through the reality we so firmly believe in, the reality so thoroughly programmed by politics, repetitive media narratives, religion and culture — and to spread their knowledge within us. What kind of knowledge, you might ask? How to survive. Is there any knowledge more urgently needed in the age of climate catastrophe and geopolitical crisis, in a world ruled by rodkins such as Trump, Putin and Netanyahu — a world of what juts upward, rigid and hard, when it should be spreading outward? Like the rhizosphere. Like mycelium. The Earthen Ones are guides through the devastated world of capitalist ruins.
And, coming back to your question — last but not least, I followed the social reality, which at that time in Poland was becoming more and more oppressive for women. The Polish anti-abortion law was growing crueller and more life-threatening. It was the time of the Black Marches, during which we fought for our reproductive rights and dignity, and mourned the women who died in hospitals during forced births — because doctors, intimidated by the right-wing conservative government, refused to perform abortions even when they knew that neither the foetus nor the mother would survive. In 2026, the situation still hasn’t changed. We are still in the same place.
SCOTIA: Some readers find Hexes of the Deadwood Forest too radical, and the sexual aspects too graphic. What would you say to them?
AGNIESZKA: Hexes of the Deadwood Forest is a post-porn novel in which I present specific subversive sexual strategies, but it is also a major work of magical realism — an attempt to overcome the disaster of imagination in the face of ubiquitous capitalism. And to overcome this disaster of imagination, one must reconfigure mystery. There is no other way. Where to seek mystery in this process of reconfiguration? At the obstinate edges of reason — precisely where disturbances occur, where reason gets stuck and leaks into a kind of madness. To write oneself out of the order of the Enlightenment. Is that radical? I’m not entirely sure, but if they say so…
I have one thing in common with Anna Frenza, the novel’s antiheroine: like her, I’m not very interested in ordinary, binary sex. But instead of saying “piss on my face” to someone I’m with when what I really want is to be held — which is Anna Frenza’s case — I look for a different solution, one that’s much more post-anthropocentric.
She sleepwalks and has eco-sex with a tree. She does something that causes a crack in the system of desire she had obeyed until then. I do this constantly, but with awareness — not unconsciously, as Frenza does. I call this process unsealing, because Hexes is really a story about unsealing the system, disrupting its basic programmes and fundamental narratives. About creating cracks through which we can penetrate to an extra-patriarchal and extra-capitalist reality.
I think that those who find the novel too radical are fairly comfortable in their position — comfortable with conventional sex, conventional roles, and conventional Enlightened Reason. Meanwhile, I have established my vagina as my Reason in a world where Reason has fallen and collapsed before our eyes. I don’t believe that everybody should abandon penetrative sex or any other form that suits them, but there will always be a percentage of the population who will insist, with a sense of social responsibility, that sexuality is political and that every orgasm has a meaning. This is my sexual activism in literature. I am a literary sex worker.
And in Hexes of the Deadwood Forest, the idea I arrive at is eco-sex. Why? Once, many years ago, I was sitting by a river, watching my three daughters. Two of them — twins who do not communicate verbally — are now adults with significant intellectual disabilities. The youngest is now seven. It was a beautiful sandy dune in Mazovia, on my beloved, meandering Liwiec River. I sat looking at them, feeling an inexpressible joy from the sun’s rays on my face, breasts and thighs, joy at the fact that they were calm and there was no fighting — which often happens because of their unpredictable reactions to stimuli — and suddenly I felt my body overcome by the same sensation that accompanies orgasm. There were many people around me. It was the weekend, the height of summer. And I felt the dune I was sitting on adjusting to me, tuning itself to me, caressing me like the most tender lover. I had a powerful orgasm, trying to make sure that nobody on the beach noticed this moment of wonderful madness in which I had just made love to Mother Earth — or in this particular case, Lover Earth. Is it madness, or the beauty of our desire? Who has the authority to judge?
I can call myself a sexual deviant who experiences orgasms with tap water, a glacier, or a sand dune, with a deep need to experience spiritual ecstasy. But I love my sexuality, and I simply need to stay wet to create.
SCOTIA: What are your hopes for the novel’s next chapter of life in the English-speaking world, after my translation is published? Whom do you hope the book will reach? What do you expect the reaction to be?
AGNIESZKA: First of all, I really want my readers — those who can read the novel in English thanks to you, Scotia — to experience two things: a disruption in their brains as they read this material, and a sexual pleasure drawn from a different source of desire, something that comes not from the sexual programmes in their bodies and imaginations that they knew before. I want this new kind of desire to emerge while reading Hexes of the Deadwood Forest. And I would love for all of us to collectively create a community of body fluids instead of the drought-plagued society of egoistic, self-oriented capitalist individuals.
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AGNIESZKA: Scotia, I remember asking you during our first meeting if you felt any special connection to Hexes of the Deadwood Forest. Then you told me the hauntingly beautiful and wild story of your youth in the Canadian forest. Can you share it now and help us understand why you, and not someone else, translated this novel?
SCOTIA: When I was born, my parents were homeless — not due to poverty. It was a conscious life choice, driven by their desire for freedom and to “get back to the land”. They bought an old bread delivery van and lived inside it for several years, leading an itinerant life. My father put a wood-burning stove inside the van and stuck the chimney up through a hole that he cut in the roof. They travelled far and wide, up and down the Pacific Northwest of the United States where they were from, down to Mexico, and up to Canada. They liked to stay in forests — the old-growth forests of Northern California and Vancouver Island — and on wild beaches of open ocean where the waves pound hard. They would park and camp for a while in these places. And that’s the situation I was born into. Shortly before my birth, they drove up to Canada, following their dream of heading northwards into more pristine wilderness. They drove to the very first hospital they found on the Canadian side of the border, in the town of White Rock, and that’s where I was born on the night of a wild windstorm. My mother took me straight back to the van, where my dad and brother were waiting for us, and headed back into the wildlands.
Later, when it began to feel a bit too crowded in the van, we moved into a house — a small wooden house on a big farmstead, where my parents raised animals and grew vegetables for us to eat. The farm was surrounded by forests. To get to school every day, I walked through groves of tall trees, moss and wildflowers, surrounded by birdsong.
The idyllic landscape of that area where I grew up, about an hour’s drive from Vancouver, is long gone. If you go there today, all you’ll see is an endless stretch of suburbia. Roads, highways, shopping malls, gas stations, and long rows of identical houses crammed together, as far as the eye can see. Where there were trees, rolling hills, meadows and creeks — a lush, vibrant landscape full of wild birds, animals and insects, thrumming and buzzing with life — there’s now a dull, asphalt-heavy stillness of death.
The destruction began shortly after I finished high school and headed off to the city to start university. While I was studying literature at the University of British Columbia, then Simon Fraser University, my parents were forced to move because that entire area was being bought up by ‘developers’ (I hate that word — it would be better to call them ‘devastators’). The residents were all being pushed out, forced to sell their homes. My parents moved to a different area, our old house was knocked down, the orchards, fields, and gorgeous garden that my parents had worked so hard to cultivate were ripped up, the surrounding forests were bulldozed, and the lush soil of that land was paved over. Now it’s a suburban area completely devoid of trees. One wouldn’t even know there had ever been any trees there. But I was a witness to them — I lived in that landscape, and it all still burns vividly in my mind and heart. It dwells within me, incandescent.
The wildlands of Canada are rapidly being swallowed by capitalist greed — the drive to build as much as possible, as fast as possible, not leaving a single tree standing. It’s tragic. And why do people want such massive houses? A tiny house surrounded by nature leads to deeper peace and a healthier mind than a megahouse in a landscape where nature has been annihilated.
Later, as a university student, I became involved in protests on Vancouver Island to save the old-growth forests there, which were being clearcut by toilet paper companies. I took a ferry to the island with other students, we camped together in the dense, mossy forests where the trees are hundreds of years old, and we woke up before dawn to block the logging roads. It’s precisely this — the sadness, pain, and helpless fury I’ve felt in my life while witnessing the destruction of the beautiful, essential landscapes that were so important to me — that makes me feel a deep resonance with the women in your novel. I share their eco-grief.
AGNIESZKA: Did working on Hexes of the Deadwood Forest change you in any way? For me, it’s an alchemical novel. One of its most crucial elements is the alchemical principle of solve et coagula — dissolve and coagulate. Was this principle important to you as a translator in any way? Did the novel touch you deeply, perhaps even transform you? And if so, do you still feel influenced by it, or is it over?
SCOTIA: This question gets to the heart of what it means to transform a literary work from one language into another. The act of translation feels, for me, very much akin to alchemy — both practices begin with a substance that already exists and attempt to transform it into something of equal or greater value without destroying what made it precious in the first place. Alchemy is about revealing the hidden essence of a material through a slow, exacting process of distillation and refinement. Translation works the same way: I don’t create meaning from nothing; I strive to release the meaning that already dwells in the source text, coaxing it into a new form that will resonate with readers in a different part of the world. And like an alchemist, I’m not a passive vessel. I bring my own ear, my own sensibility, my own understanding of how language behaves — ultimately producing not a copy of the original but something born from the encounter between two languages and the creative process through which the transformation takes place.
But you’re asking me something more personal than that — whether I, as the translator-alchemist, have been transformed, myself, through the work of transmuting your text. Before beginning any translation, I always read the work deeply, aiming to get the author’s voice into my bloodstream. Every text I translate leaves some mark on me, becoming something I carry around with me afterwards. And Hexes of the Deadwood Forest is such a wild, incandescent, ferociously imaginative book that it burned its way into my imagination in a way I still feel. Its restless energy passed through me during the intense days and nights I spent with it, leaving a trail of its luminous vitality. But this is all quite hard to express in words. If you hand me a piece of fabric, Agnieszka, perhaps I’ll embroider my answer more clearly for you… like your indomitable, silent Helene.
AGNIESZKA: Hexes of the Deadwood Forest is full of words and phrases I invented. Can you tell me about your creative process while translating them into English?
SCOTIA: Finding equivalents in English for your neologisms, wordplay, and unusual use of language was the most exciting aspect for me. Although my main priority was to channel your unique literary voice from Polish to English, I loved the fact that there was also space for me to be very creative! The invented vocabulary is central to your novel, and it was a great linguistic adventure for me to invent my own versions of these terms and names. It involved a long, slow process of trying out various options to discover what sounded best in English while reflecting the essential significance. I kept lists of various options, but it was only as I reached the end of my first draft that I felt certain about what each should be.
I’ll give a specific example with a key word that runs all the way through the novel, through the various interwoven plotlines: sterczek. It’s a diminutive, invented word formed from the Polish verb sterczeć — to protrude, jut, stand erect. It’s a small, almost affectionate noun for a thing that sticks out. Semantically it means penis — specifically the penis while erect — but the -ek ending turns it into a comic-pathetic object. It’s simultaneously belittling, mocking, folksy, and slightly archaic-sounding. It fits the historical sections well (the monks whose sterczki betray them under their habits; the husbands who frantically try to coax their sterczki into performing but fail to comedic effect) but it also works in the modern timeframe. It reduces the phallus, the towering symbolic apparatus the novel is attacking, to something small and ridiculous. The book’s whole argument is against sterczenie as a cosmic principle (political, economic, sexual, religious), so naming the organ itself with a dismissive diminutive is part of the polemic. So much in the book hinges on the word. I needed to invent something in English that captured the diminutive and the erection-specificity, as well as the folk-archaic colour that it has in the chapters about Helene and the Earthen Ones. I thought long and hard, for many months, about what this should be, until one day it hit me suddenly, almost in a flash: rodkin. The “-kin” suffix is one of the few diminutive endings left in English. I love how rodkin rhymes with bodkin — the archaic word for ‘dagger’, famously invoked by Hamlet in his “to be or not to be” soliloquy, when he imagines ending his life with a bare bodkin. But I feel that it goes even further in English than it does in the original Polish, for it’s a diminutive of the word “rod”, which is what the women use in the forests when “banging the deadwood”. They grab their huge, powerful “rods” and free the trees of the dead branches weighing them down. So a nice parallel emerged in the English version: between “rod” and “rodkin”.And then, Agnieszka, you carried my invented term rodkin even further one day when you sassily wrote on social media: Down with the Rodkingdom! I love how the term keeps evolving, gaining momentum, as if the language of your novel is regenerating itself, taking on new forms of life and burning with renewed intensity. It has been so exciting and fascinating for me to be part of this.