About Sasha

Sasha Bailyn is an author and the Editor-in-Chief of Inglenook Lit, an online magazine for magic and speculative prose. She is the recipient of the IAFA David G. Hartwell Emerging Scholar Award, and her creative nonfiction, fiction, and literary analysis is forthcoming and published in journals such as New Ohio Review, Tupelo Quarterly, The Maine Review, The Journal for the Fantastic in the Arts, and Marvels & Tales. She earned her dual-genre MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts and is working towards a PhD at Bath Spa University. Spells to Start Believing is her memoir about magic and motherhood.

Memoir

Publications

Contact

Inglenook

Pre-order on Amazon

Spells to Start Believing

A memoir about magic, madness, and motherhood

(Demeter Press, Feb 25, 2027)

“This is a raw, compelling story that explores an atypical mother-daughter bond, and how the human heart processes wounds for which we don’t have simple names.”

— Diana Helmuth, author of The Witching Year

“Bailyn shows us what it means to grow up and keep hold of magic and belief in oneself.”

— Sue William Silverman, author of Selected Misdemeanors: Essays at the Mercy of the Reader

What fills the void when a mother is missing? For Sasha, it’s both madness and magic.

A child of divorce in the 1990s, Sasha grows up with her father and blended family in a sunny San Francisco suburb, making visits to her mother’s apartment in the mist. Her mother is creative, New Age spiritual, and unreachable—often depressed, always somehow far away. In a home fractured by tension, Sasha turns to imagination for comfort, carrying its spells and shadows with her into adulthood.

When Sasha becomes a mother herself, a heavy postpartum fog forces her to reckon with the mother wound she has long carried. To understand her family’s haunting yet mythical legacy, she follows the threads of memory through interviews and primary sources, investigating motherhood, mental illness, and seemingly magical abilities.

Told through lyrical vignettes in the form of a spell book, Spells to Start Believing is a modern grimoire of motherhood, memory, and becoming. A luminous memoir of maternal absence, family inheritance, and the possibility of transformation.

“Of Bread and Belly Buttons” (New Ohio Review, December 2026)

“Bedfellows” (Glint, December 2025)

“Fairy Tales and Fluidity in Memoir,” Troubling Wonder, online symposium on fairy-tale studies, Cambridge University, October 2025

“In Praise of Quiet Memoir: Review of Karen Babine’s The Allure of Elsewhere” (Tupelo Quarterly, July 2025)

“Review of Snake Sisters and Ghost Daughters by Cathy Yue Wang,” Marvels & Tales: Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies, Vol. 39 No.1, 2025, Wayne State University Press

Wandering Aengus & Trail to Table Book Award Finalist, 2025 for memoir manuscript Spells to Start Believing

“Memoir as Womb Space,” presented at the London Arts-Based Research Centre’s Women Who Create conference, Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge, England, March 2025

“Good Old Goat” (Silly Goose Press, April 2024)

“Anatomy of a Wave” (Open: Journal of Arts and Letters, January 2024)

“Toxic Tales: The Craft of Enchantment in Fiction and Memoir,” Journal for the Fantastic in the Arts, Volume 35, No. 2, 2024

“The Craft of Enchantment,” International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts, Orlando, Florida, March 2024

“Erasure: How You Were Made” (The Maine Review, September 2022)

“Rocky Road” (Literary Mama, January 2020)

“Making Mom Friends is Hard AF” (The Bold Italic, November 2019)

"Of Bread and Belly Buttons" (New Ohio Review, December 2026)

“Bedfellows” (Glint, December 2025)