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Diana Helmuth

Biography

Diana Helmuth

Diana Helmuth writes about urges: to travel, to be in nature, and to feel understood. Her first book, HOW TO SUFFER OUTSIDE, was a National Outdoor Book Award winner, and her freelance work can be found in various anthologies, travel guides and humor magazines. She studied anthropology and Arabic at UC Berkeley, and can often be caught moonlighting in Silicon Valley’s start-up land, or producing the occasional podcast. She was born and raised in Northern California.

Diana Helmuth

Books by Diana Helmuth

The Witching Year: A Memoir of Earnest Fumbling Through Modern Witchcraft
by Diana Helmuth - Memoir, Nonfiction

Thirty-three-year-old Diana Helmuth is skeptical of organized religion. She is also skeptical of disorganized religion. But, more than anything, she is tired of God being dead. So she decides to try on the fastest growing, self-directed faith in America: Witchcraft. The result is 366 days of observation, trial, error, wit and back spasms. Witches today are often presented as confident and finished, proud and powerful. Diana is eager to join them. She wants to follow all the rules, memorize all the incantations and read all the liturgy. But there’s one glaring problem: no Witch can agree on what the right rules, liturgy and incantations are. As with life, Diana will have to define the craft for herself, looking past the fashionable and figuring out how to define the real.