With passion for words
Colleen Passard is an author, screenwriter, and conflict resolution mediator. Her first novel The Betrayal of Innocence, a spiritual thriller, is available on Amazon.
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During a trip to Dornoch, Scotland, Colleen came upon the rock that marks the place where, Janet Horne, the last witch in Scotland, was burned alive in 1727.
Colleen learned from a local woman that Janet had been an elderly woman most likely suffering from dementia: she had been stripped, smeared with tar, paraded through the town and then burned alive.
Shaken, as she walked back to her hotel, it suddenly grew eerily dark and Colleen felt the damp move through her like a ghost; and for the first time, she heard the whisperings of Elspeth MacGregor.
And Diary of a Witch was born.
“...I can only tell you that true power is the ability to live the life you are given and to live it bravely and well.”
Diary of a Witch is a raw and haunting novel based on a four hundred year old manuscript discovered in 2012 buried in the walls of a Scottish farmhouse. The secret diary of Elspeth MacGregor, a midwife accused of being a witch, is the first female chronicle of “The Burning Times.” Imprisoned in a frigid, rat-infested tolbooth in Kilmarnock, Scotland, Elspeth MacGregor confesses a story untold in the annals of time: the true story of midwives, healers, herbalists and common women who practiced the "old religion," revered the earth, and exulted in their sexuality. In the graveyard of her filthy cell, a breathless hope sings through Elspeth’s words—will she escape her fate?