“Gone for A Spell,” tells the story of my great-great-great grandmother who became a rural midwife in Eastern Kentucky around the turn of the last century simply by being in the right place at the right time and having willing hands to catch a neighbor’s baby. In over half a century of practice, she lost just one baby, who had a split spine (spinal bifida). Her astoundingly low infant mortality rate has led some in my family to speculate that she might have also been a hill witch in addition to being a midwife. Along with the narrative information about my ancestor midwife, the essay weaves in research about the occult, the link between womanhood, midwifery, and witchcraft, and how the topography of Appalachia impacts all these threads. “Gone for a Spell” is forthcoming in The Best American Essays 2025, appeared in The Kenyon Review’s fall 2024 issue, was the recipient of the Ohio Arts Council’s Individual Excellence Award in 2024, and was a semi-finalist in the North American Review Terry Tempest Williams Creative Nonfiction Prize in 2024.

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Bio - Angie Romines is a writer, teacher at Ohio State, and Dolly Parton enthusiast living in Columbus, Ohio, with her husband, and two sons. Her work has appeared in The Best American Essays 2025, The Kenyon Review, New England Review, Literary Hub, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. She is currently working on an essay collection digging into the fascinating lives of Kentucky women in her family tree.