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Loyalty, Compassion, and Determination
Arcadian Alcove centers around a woman who discovers that tales of fae, telepathic cats, and hidden magic of her youth were not just stories. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
Although Arcadian Alcove is a fantasy, the very real plight of endangered species was the actual inspiration. A family with a long history of caring for creatures, supernatural and actual, became the foundation of the story. Their battle with a corrupt governor whose greed threatened a forest sanctuary seemed like an effective way to draw attention to the need to protect wildlife, while creating a mystical world, where a grieving child could find a new life as he realized an uncanny connection to the fae.
Arcadian Alcove feels like a character itself. How did you build the house, gardens, and land so they carry such emotional weight?
Arcadian Alcove is a world that, in many ways, blurs the line between fantasy and reality. The grounds and gardens are inhabited by the fae living under rosemary bushes, building homes in hollow logs, and interacting with the wildlife. More importantly, the mystical beings reflect human emotions: happiness, sadness, fear, and stubborn determination. Since little people also spend time in the guardians’ home, over the years, adjustments have been made to accommodate them. Porcelain thimbles are kept in the kitchen drawer for them to use as tea cups. Hidden entryways allow the fae access to the house when the doors and windows are closed. The house has its own personality.
Great-aunt Melissa’s presence lingers through the story. How important was the idea that family can leave behind values as much as possessions?
It’s important to know who your ancestors were, where they came from, and how they lived. Characteristics like loyalty, compassion, and determination tend to be passed down through generations. I wanted the source of Lia’s resoluteness to be remembered as a gift from her great-aunt, but I also wanted the connection to be a reminder that the legacy of past generations affects us all.
Can we look forward to more books from you soon? What are you currently working on?
Oh, yes. There will be more books. You can expect a mystery to be my next one.
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Navigating her new role as a guardian of the fae, Lia must protect the delicate balance of this supernatural realm while facing threats of eminent domain signed by the governor of North Carolina, a greedy politician whose self-serving plans for a highway could destroy the territory where the little people dwell. With the help of her nephew Michael, who, recovering from the loss of his parents, possesses an intuitive connection to the mystical beings, Lia, Eric, and Athena, a telecat, enlist the help of the inhabitants of Arcadian Alcove to fight the governor’s threat to their sanctuary and defend the enchanted land they call home.
As they navigate the challenges of grief, magic, and environmental preservation, they learn that some battles are worth risking everything and that love transcends even the greatest of losses. Sometimes, the most extraordinary adventures lie just beyond the ordinary.
Atlas Falls to Earth
Atlas Falls to Earth, by Ashley Christopher Leach, is a literary coming-of-age novel with strong Southern Gothic and magical realist elements. It follows Atlas, a sensitive thirteen-year-old boy in rural North Carolina, as he struggles under the weight of his father Jason’s expectations, finds comfort in Alex’s quiet care, and escapes into a strange book-within-the-book called Misadventures in Being: The Strange Tale of Bunny and Munk. The novel moves between Atlas’s painful real world and the eerie, fable-like world of Bunny and Munk, using both stories to explore loneliness, identity, imagination, violence, and the aching need to be understood.
I liked how intensely Leach writes atmosphere. The book is full of damp fields, old wood, cold rooms, wounded birds, smoke, and silence. You can feel the farmhouse pressing in on Atlas. The prose often lingers, sometimes beautifully, sometimes heavily, and I found myself admiring its ambition. This isn’t a spare novel. It wants to be lush, strange, sad, and philosophical all at once. That choice gives the story a haunted quality, especially in the scenes where Atlas’s gentleness clashes with Jason’s rough idea of masculinity. Those moments hurt. As they should.
I was also fascinated by the author’s decision to fold Bunny and Munk’s fantasy tale into Atlas’s story so deeply. At first, it feels whimsical and odd, almost like a dark children’s book hidden inside adult literary fiction. But the longer I sat with it, the more it felt like a mirror Atlas uses to understand himself. Munk’s longing to be human and Bunny’s simple, instinctive joy play against Atlas’s own fear of being wrong in the body, family, and world he has been given. The inner story is dense, and the dialect is heavy. Still, there is real vision here.
I would recommend Atlas Falls to Earth to readers who like literary fiction that is dark, symbolic, and emotionally raw. It will especially appeal to people drawn to Southern Gothic family stories, magical realism, and novels about fragile young outsiders trying to survive a world that keeps asking them to become harder than they are. It has a strange tenderness that stayed with me after I finished the book.
Pages: 159 | ASIN : B0F2GSBN2V
Arcadian Alcove
Arcadian Alcove, by Karen Black, is a cozy contemporary fantasy about Lia Alexander Sinclair, who inherits her great-aunt Melissa’s secluded North Carolina estate and discovers that the family stories about fae, telepathic cats, and hidden magic were never just stories. As Lia and her husband Eric settle into Arcadian Alcove, she becomes the guardian of its supernatural residents, including bropis, elves, talking animals, and Athena the telecat, while also fighting to protect the land from political greed and an eminent domain threat. It is a gentle fantasy with an environmental heart, built around inheritance, wonder, family, and the duty to protect what cannot protect itself.
What I liked most about the book is how sincerely it believes in its own magic. Karen Black doesn’t treat the fae as a clever twist or a dark secret waiting to explode. She lets them sit at the kitchen table, drink peppermint tea from thimbles, worry about their homes, and become part of Lia’s daily rhythm. That choice gives the story a warm, lived-in feeling. It’s not trying to be flashy. It’s trying to be kind. I found that refreshing. The writing is plainspoken and direct, sometimes almost old-fashioned in its sweetness, but that fits the genre and the mood. This is the kind of fantasy where the house matters, the garden matters, and a small creature’s fear can carry as much weight as a courtroom battle.
I also appreciated the way the book ties magic to responsibility. Lia does not just inherit land. She inherits a promise. That idea gives the story more shape than a simple “woman discovers magical world” plot. The conflict with Governor Lassiter and the highway project adds real stakes, and I liked that the book connects the survival of the fae with the survival of ordinary wildlife. The wolves, fish, frogs, birds, and little people all belong to the same fragile web. Some parts favor clarity and comfort, which gives the story a softer touch than more intense fantasy, but that gentleness feels in keeping with the book’s overall spirit. Still, I did not mind that much. The book’s heart is so clear. It wants to argue that belief is not childish when it leads to care, courage, and protection.
I would recommend Arcadian Alcove to readers who enjoy gentle fantasy, cozy magical realism, nature-centered stories, and books where family legacy and found community matter more than battles or darkness. It will especially appeal to readers who like talking animals, benevolent fae, protective homes, and a hopeful tone. This is a quiet, warm fantasy for anyone who wants a story that feels like stepping into a sunlit herb garden and finding out the whispers in the leaves are real.
Pages: 311 | ASIN : B0GDS6FCFB
Authentic Love
Sea and Stars follows a healer from the Isle of Skye whose life is split open by a letter from her dead mother, sending her to America to find the family she never knew existed. Why place the story specifically between the Isle of Skye and Mystic, Connecticut?
I set Sea and Stars between The Isle of Skye and Mystic, Connecticut, because they are both liminal places haunted by history and steeped in magic. The Isle of Skye, an island located off the Northwest coast of Scotland, is rich in fairy folklore. Its rugged mountains, windswept moors, and rocky shores represent the independent spirit and natural beauty of the Porter line from which the main female character, Arabella, springs. Mystic, Connecticut, a village carved from two neighboring towns and named for its tidal river, represents the main male character, James Alden, and his privileged family. Although Mystic seems civilized on the surface, a troubled past bubbles beneath it, and this informs the secret at the heart of the novel. Since Sea and Stars engages with the traditions of Gothic romance, I wanted the settings in my story to function as living, breathing spaces that reflect and shape my characters’ identities.
In fairy tales and folklore, danger lurks in liminal spaces, but so does the capacity for meaningful transformation. Both the Isle of Skye and Mystic function as dangerous landscapes in Sea and Stars, but they also support the miraculous changes that come from emotional growth and authentic love. The temporal setting of Sea and Stars (1847—a year in the middle of the 19th century) also functions in a liminal way, and the spiritual transformations the characters undergo are meant to mirror the social and political changes of the 1840’s.
William Stafford represents a promise that doesn’t hold. What did you want to explore about expectations versus reality in the family?
Human life is full of conflicts between expectation and reality, and I wanted to explore the impact those conflicts have upon our sense of identity. Arabella is a hopeful young woman who believes her long-lost father, William Stafford, will rescue her from her lonely and isolated life, but the father she imagines is very different than the father she meets. It takes Arabella quite a while to reconcile her desire to know her father with her realization that he is not the savior she hoped he would be.
Since Sea and Stars is a retelling of Beauty and the Beast set in the real world, it was important for me to explore the fairy tale trope of the ineffective father in its pages. In finally understanding that her father is a flawed human being, Arabella learns to distinguish between action and intention, and she uses this knowledge to navigate her complex relationship with James. Once Arabella comes to terms with her father’s broken promises, she can move forward with her own life and follow through with the promises she chooses to make.
The relationships between Arabella, Catherine, Elinor, and Anne form a powerful thread. What drew you to explore generational female knowledge?
When I first began writing about Arabella (in a short character vignette titled Midsummer Magic), she was the last living member in a matriarchal line of healing practitioners, so generational female knowledge is at the heart of her identity. In the real world, knowledge passed down from mothers to daughters is often dismissed as gossip or categorized as “old wives’ tales,” but it continues to circulate because it has great value, and I wanted to honor the powerful wisdom and intuition of women in Sea and Stars. Although Arabella’s mother, Catherine, and her grandmother, Caitriona, are both deceased when Sea and Stars begins, they permeate the story, and their words guide Arabella when she needs them most.
Arabella meets Elinor and Anne in Mystic, and they soon become treasured parts of her found family. They are quite different than the women of the Porter Clan, but they care for Arabella in their own way. The love between Arabella and the many women who guide and protect her is an important part of her story.
The novel suggests that home is something built, not simply found. What does “home” mean for Arabella by the end of the story?
At the beginning of Sea and Stars, each setting is a specific place that the characters inhabit and move through, but as the story progresses, the settings take on metaphorical meanings. Arabella learns that home is not a physical landscape, but a space that can be crafted from the places and people we love. Together, she and James create a new home forged of memory, desire, acceptance, and an enduring commitment to stand by each other no matter what challenges may come. By the end of the story, Arabella defines “home” as a place she can carry with her because it is inseparable from her heart and soul.
Author Links: GoodReads | X (Twitter) | Facebook | Website | Amazon
The Isle of Skye, 1847.
When Arabella Porter, a lonely healer gifted with fairy magic, receives a mysterious letter from the past, she journeys to Mystic, Connecticut in search of the father she has never known. There she crosses paths with James Alden, a handsome shipbuilder whose shadowy history hides secrets of its own.
Both thrown together and kept apart by circumstances beyond their control, James and Arabella must reconcile their forbidden desires for each other with their loyalty to their families, their longing for choice, and their need for freedom. When Arabella’s independence stirs town gossip and suspicion, James must decide how much he is willing to sacrifice to protect her from a past far more dangerous than it seems.
Filled with Gothic imagery and Celtic folklore, Sea and Stars is a slow burn but sensual Beauty and the Beast retelling set in the real world. It isfor all those who believe in the transformative power of true love.
Sea and Stars
Sea and Stars follows Arabella Porter, a healer from the Isle of Skye whose life is split open by a letter from her dead mother, Catherine, naming William Stafford of Mystic, Connecticut as her father. Arabella leaves the moors, the old Porter magic, and the ghostly shelter of her grandmother’s teachings to cross the Atlantic, only to find that America holds not the family romance she imagined, but a harsher inheritance: a cold half-sister, a self-serving father, the buried truth of Catherine’s life, and James Alden, a wounded shipbuilder whose guarded heart becomes one of the book’s deepest mysteries. The novel moves through folklore, historical romance, Gothic unease, and female lineage with a steady fascination for thresholds: between Scotland and America, life and death, duty and desire, enchantment and ordinary courage.
Author Kelly Jarvis writes landscape as if it’s alive. The Isle of Skye isn’t just a setting; it breathes around Arabella, all sea mist, thistle, moor wind, and starlight. I felt the tenderness of the early chapters especially, when Arabella’s healing practice is rendered through small, tactile acts: tea, salves, candles, herbs gathered from difficult ground. The prose can be lavish, but it’s rarely an empty ornament. Its richness suits a story about women who have been taught to read the world symbolically, to find meaning in weather, flowers, wounds, and dreams. I also loved how the book lets magic remain intimate rather than flashy. The healer’s cloak, Catherine’s letters, the solstice ritual, and the veil between worlds all feel less like spectacle than inheritance.
Arabella’s journey begins as a search for a father, but the book is wiser than that premise first suggests. William Stafford’s name promises identity, then curdles into disillusionment, and that reversal gives the novel its moral weight. I was moved by the way Arabella slowly understands that blood alone doesn’t make a home, and that love without accountability can become another kind of prison. Her relationships with Anne, Catherine, Elinor, and James are all shaped by incomplete knowledge, which makes the book feel emotionally true. People inherit stories before they inherit facts. The novel’s strongest passages, for me, are the ones where Arabella stops trying to be claimed by someone else and begins claiming her own power, especially when she becomes the Wise Woman in her mother’s cottage and turns exile into vocation.
Sea and Stars felt to me like a lush, earnest, and feminine novel about choosing which traditions to keep and which ones to cut loose. I found its emotional generosity persuasive. Its conclusion brings the story full circle in a way that feels both romantic and spiritually grounded. I’d recommend it to readers who enjoy historical romance with folklore in its bones, Gothic family secrets, strong heroines, sea-haunted settings, and stories about women learning that home can be inherited, built, and bravely reimagined.
Pages: 448 | ASIN : B0GQD3S5DQ
Where Reality Tips Into Wonder
Shinbone Lane follows a runaway teenager in 1974 San Francisco who finds refuge and a found family in a hidden street of artists, misfits, quiet magic, and a wisecracking pigeon. What first sparked the idea for Shinbone Lane as a hidden pocket of San Francisco?
When I moved from San Francisco to Sonoma County about 20 years ago, I was looking for additional freelance writing work. I answered a Craigslist ad and met a young man at a coffee shop for an interview. The ongoing work he had in mind would have required more time than I had, so it wasn’t a good fit. Still, we enjoyed talking and shared things about our backgrounds.
He was a Gen Xer; I’m a baby boomer. I told him about arriving in San Francisco in the 1970s with about $200 in my pocket. I thought I’d visit for a couple of weeks and wound up living there for almost 30 years. He said my early adventures in San Francisco sounded like a fairytale to him—something a young person couldn’t replicate so easily anymore. Housing had already become so much more expensive.
That conversation stayed with me. The idea of writing about that time sat on the back burner for years, gradually taking shape as I returned to it from time to time, until Shinbone Lane emerged.
San Francisco does have many real hidden pockets—places so beautiful they seem magical, and people so inventive and intriguing they seem magical too. I just followed my imagination where it wanted to go. As a storyteller, I’m drawn to spaces where reality tips into wonder. This is true for both my written work and for stories I tell live in performance.
Shinbone Lane almost feels alive. Did you think of the lane as a character?
Yes, I did. The area where I situated the lane is one I’m very familiar with. I lived near the corner of 29th and Sanchez streets for eighteen years, so I walked our dog up the 29th Street hill and drove up to Diamond Heights to shop routinely. That steep hill feels like a part of me now.
Shinbone Lane, an imagined side street easy to miss when driving by, became a living, breathing presence with its own rhythms and moods.
Place has always been important in my work, and Northern California continues to shape my imagination. It was a great amount of fun bringing the lane to life and letting it influence the characters who find their way there.
Found family is central to the story. Why is that theme important to you, and why was it important that the community be imperfect, messy, and sometimes conflicted?
I think almost all of us have some issues to work out with our families when we grow independent as young adults. For some, the issues are minor and family support is a constant. For others, too much trauma stands in the way of family ties being anything but harmful at the time. And there are many shades in between.
It’s a blessing that people can find each other and build a supportive base that becomes a different kind of family. How lucky we are to be able to do that for one another.
As for the community being imperfect, messy, and sometimes conflicted, that reflects both life in this world of ours and my approach to storytelling. And while I want love to be the most powerful force in the end, I don’t shy away from the complications that come with being human.
I lost both of my parents by the time I was eleven, so there’s an undercurrent of loss and darkness that finds its way into my work. At the same time, I am optimistic and delight in my connections with loved ones, as well as the beauty in the world. That tension between light and shadow, hope and hurt is something I return to often, and I hope it resonates with readers.
What is the next book that you are working on, and when will it be available?
I’m at work on another magical realism novel, Ripplewood, set in an out-of-the-way town of that name in Sonoma County, California. The town was named for a forest of ripplewood trees that once existed, though now only one remains, deep in the woods. It’s the same kind of tree that appears in front of Ted’s home on Shinbone Lane, but this book is not a sequel.
The story begins with Emlyn Grady driving home. She was raised in Ripplewood and has been attending San Francisco State University for six years, changing majors along the way and still not quite finding her footing. When she receives a text from her father urging her to come home immediately because of a crisis, she drops everything—including an important meeting her boyfriend has arranged with investors interested in his startup—and heads directly to Ripplewood.
There she finds out her mother is missing, but she’s gone missing before. So what could have happened is a mystery in a town where family roots and history are imperfect, complicated, messy, conflicted and unresolved (of course). There is folklore unique to Ripplewood, but how much is real, how much is fiction and what effect it has had on the town is a topic debated without resolution by the locals. In this setting, the story begins to unfold. And like Shinbone Lane, the story’s layers reveal themselves over time.
I’m interested in how place, memory, and inherited stories shape us, and how we decide what to carry forward. I’m still in the process of writing and discovering the full shape of the book, which is one of the things I love most about the work. I hope to finish the book this year and publish it in 2027.
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San Francisco, 1974. Sixteen-year-old runaway Maddy is escaping the blame for a crime she didn’t commit. Miles from home, she is taken under the wing of the elderly Clara and her neighbor Ted, and soon finds a place among the kaleidoscope of personalities on the oddly named Shinbone Lane.
Ted’s three-story Italianate Victorian house overflows with travelers, free spirits, and artists. His backyard is a haven for all who are willing to see its magic. But burdened dancer Eloise Watkins can’t tolerate the transient “riffraff” in her neighborhood. Their frivolity flies in the face of her grief over friendship lost and her daughter who’s missing. And nobody — nobody— understands.
But like all who tread on it, Shinbone Lane has secrets of its own. And like all secrets, they lie uneasily in the dark, until the truth emerges to lay the past to rest.
At the intersection of magic and reality lies Shinbone Lane and its lively cast of characters who intertwine in the mesmerizing brew of life.
Click ‘buy now’ to step into Shinbone Lane today!
Tom Ryan’s Shoes
T.A. Keenan’s Tom Ryan’s Shoes is a famine tale told as family legend, with one foot in hard history and the other in Irish folklore. The book opens in 1933 Connecticut, where an old manuscript tucked inside a pair of shoes brings an 1846 story back to life. From there, it turns into a road story, a courtship story, and a ghost-tinged inheritance story all at once. What gives it shape is the sense that memory itself is part of the plot. This is a book about how families carry things forward: land, grief, jokes, warnings, and stories polished by retelling.
What I liked most is the way Keenan lets the famine stay present without reducing every scene to misery. Tom and Frank move through a countryside full of hunger, cruelty, and fear, but the novel keeps making room for talk, oddball humor, local characters, and flashes of generosity. That balance matters. It gives the book motion and humanity. The pig Toto is a smart touch too. She could have been a gimmick, but instead, she helps keep the story earthy and lively, which suits a novel so interested in survival at the level of the body.
The strongest thread running through the book is its belief that folklore and practical life belong together. The bean feasa, the raven, the little men, and the story of Lady Edith all deepen the novel rather than floating above it as decoration. Keenan uses the uncanny to talk about care, justice, and obligation. One of the book’s best lines is, “Farewell! May you never wear a soldier’s buttons.” That lands as both blessing and warning, and it captures the novel’s moral core better than a speech ever could.
The prose has a storyteller’s ease. It likes voices, side characters, and scenes that feel as if they were meant to be read aloud near a fire. Sometimes that means the book wanders a bit, or leans into anecdotal charm more than momentum, but even then it stays readable because the voice is so enjoyable. I also liked that the ending doesn’t just wrap up a romance. It circles back to storytelling itself, and to the way embellishment becomes part of family truth. When Quill says, “never let the truth get in the way of a good story,” I felt like the book is smiling at you and admitting exactly how it works.
This is an affectionate and imaginative historical novella that treats Irish memory as something lived, argued over, and handed down. It’s interested in courtship, class, famine, faith, and the strange half-magic logic of oral tradition. More than anything, it feels made by someone who wants these people, and this inheritance, to remain vivid. I came away thinking less about plot twists than about atmosphere and lineage: worn shoes, old roads, family voices, and the stubborn desire to keep going.
Pages: 132 | ASIN: B0GRV2NV9D
A Love Letter
Ancilla centers around a bisexual woman in the 80s and 90s in Ohio as she finds herself unraveling her own Catholic upbringing when she enters into a relationship with a magus who becomes her mentor, dom, and soulmate. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
I took my inspiration from a number of different sources.
Some of it came from my own memories of growing up. I, too, was raised in Ohio, at roughly the same time my protagonist grew up. People have asked me just how autobiographical the book is, to which I would have to say, not much, except for the protagonist’s sexual orientation (I, too, am bi/pan and kinked – more on this later) and the book’s setting.
Putting the story in the time I remembered, in places where I had lived, allowed me to do my background descriptions more or less on autopilot so that I could focus on other things. I didn’t want to think too hard about whether or not I was describing a college campus, or downtown library, or city park accurately. It felt like a distraction. I wanted to use familiar material when writing. I prefer to pour my energy into other things: word choice, sentence structure, philosophy, foreshadowing, character development, and style.
Some of it came from a desire to fill a void – to fill multiple voids, actually. Bisexual people, for instance, are rare in literature. They’re rare in general. When we are portrayed, it’s usually in a villainous context (we’re depraved! Remember Basic Instinct?) or a pitiable one (just Google “hot mess bisexual” and “disaster bisexual” and see what you get – it’s an unfortunate trope). When we manage to be the main characters rather than just side characters, we’re still usually villains or “messy.” Or we’re hypersexualized! The bisexual literature category, commercially, is well-stocked with smut. This is not necessarily a bad thing if you are looking for validation or for one-handed reading material, but I think we deserve something serious, as well.
So I wrote something that was sort of like The Bell Jar, only its protagonist is a young bisexual woman. (Also, it takes the historical figures of Heloise and Abelard as its inspiration, and the main characters are vampires who can bend elements when adequately fed or otherwise sufficiently powered, because magical realism. I assume my readers are bright enough to figure that one out for themselves).
I worked in depictions of BDSM that centered informed, enthusiastic consent, because there’s a lot of material out there that romanticizes captivity, “dubious consent” with or without “betraying body syndrome” (news flash: “blurred lines” are just rape), and other abusive dynamics, and that’s not what BDSM is all about. Let’s have some good representation.
And I created characters who were different from what might be otherwise expected in more mainstream love stories. How often have you encountered a story about a couple of academic nerd types falling head over heels in love with each other, despite what was originally meant to be a purely tutorial relationship? And how often have those nerds been obviously neurodivergent? Although I don’t say so explicitly (there’s not a lot I say explicitly in Ancilla, ironically enough for a novel that is explicit enough when it comes to matters of sexuality) I coded “ancilla” and “Magister” as autistic. I am on the spectrum, so this is another way in which Ancilla is own-voice literature written for a demographic that, at least from what I have seen, seldom gets good representation. The autistic characters I’ve seen in books are often caricatures, or at least, our autism is treated as our entire personality, rather than as just part of what makes us who we are and ought to be taken for granted as such. Normalized.
I especially thought about breaking convention when crafting “Magister,” because I wanted to create a male character who didn’t fit at all into the “man box,” but who was nevertheless unquestionably masculine. Whereas most men in romance novels are alphas, even when they aren’t alphaholes, “Magister” is shy and reserved, and he is more than content to let other people take the lead when BDSM is not involved. He’s not a billionaire CEO or sports figure or firefighter or cowboy or spy or in some other hyper-masculinized, unrealistically romanticized line of work – he’s a librarian. He’s middle class, and that only barely. Hobbies? He cooks and bakes, listens to opera, reads, and plays tabletop role-playing games. Is he “ripped?” No, he’s actually rather slender, and his muscles are not prominent (although he is strong enough to carry “ancilla” in his arms without struggling – let the readers assume what they like about whether or not vampiric power factored into that one). He’s comfortable with showing his feelings and being vulnerable, too, although introvert that he is, he’s usually rather subtle about it… He is masculine, though. Very obviously. You wouldn’t have accused people like Bob Ross and Fred Rogers of not being men just because they didn’t fit into the prescribed masculine mold when they were alive, and I don’t think anybody could accuse “Magister” of not being a man, either. He is a wrecking ball to toxic masculinity.
I put these people into a setting I knew, and knew intimately, so that I could focus on them rather than on the setting. I wanted them to shine.
On another level, Ancilla is a love letter. The people I wrote it for know who they are. They might not see themselves in the characters – in fact, I sincerely hope they don’t, because my characters are distinct people in their own right, and were never meant to be based closely on anybody in particular, even in instances where I ransacked my memories, took things out of context that I thought would read well if fictionalized, and embroidered like mad – but they know who they are.
One of them was my first beta reader. She lost internet access soon after I completed the rough draft and sent her the final chapter in its raw form, and I hope she finds the final product on Amazon or in a library somewhere, reads it, and approves of it. And if she ever sees this interview, I hope she reads far enough to see that I say I miss her.
What drew you to frame your narrative in this particular setting?
Why northeast Ohio in the early 1990s, of all times?
Partly because, again, I wanted to rely on memory for descriptions of the setting. Nearly all the places described in the book are real, whether I’m describing a mansion in Cincinnati within walking distance of a posh private school, a small college on the edge of northeast Ohio’s Amish country, Severance Hall, or the neighborhoods and metroparks of Akron and Cleveland. The only made-up place in the entire book is “Magister’s” apartment, which I nevertheless set at the end of a real street. I didn’t want to interrupt my creative processes by researching locales. I just wanted to write my story and let the setting more or less take care of itself. I trusted my memory when thinking about how to describe places.
I also decided on northeast Ohio because it was generic. A colourful setting – say, Manhattan – would have become almost a character in itself. I wanted a setting that felt real, but not one that would steal the focus from my characters and from the book’s esoteric themes.
If I’d set the story too early, it would have been historical fiction, which would have required extra research. If I’d set it later, it would eventually become science fiction, because this is going to be part of a trilogy, and the third book covers “ancilla’s” later years. She’s writing her memoirs, and at the time of her writing, she’s either a centenarian or a late nonagenarian. That’s still going to put the final chapters of the last book in the future, but not very far. I don’t want the focus to pivot to science fiction scenarios… So the time is set where it is.
The eighties and nineties were not a good time to be queer in any way, unless you were maybe living in a haven like San Francisco. While I didn’t want to make that hostility to sexual divergence the most central part of the plot, it is nevertheless part of the background. It was all too common for kids to get disowned by their parents after coming out, or to be packed off to “deprogramming.” Coming out was terrifying if you lived in a conservative part of the country, which was most of the country at the time.
It was also difficult to be kinked back then. There wasn’t much support for it unless, again, you had the good fortune to live in a large city where there was an active subculture. Today, “ancilla” and “Magister” could have booked sessions with a kink-friendly, polyamory-friendly couples counselor to work on the challenges they faced (okay, that I set up for them). That option did not exist for them in their time and place.
The chapters are structured around the Tree of Life and its sephiroth, turning the novel into a kind of spiritual ladder. Why did you decide to organize the book this way?
It came to me.
It demanded to be written that way.
I still don’t know if I was up to the task that seemed to have been set before me. Only time will tell.
What do you hope readers ultimately take away from your protagonist’s journey through belief, identity, and desire?
Enlightenment.
Failing that, I hope I created something so beautiful that it felt like a dream, and so immersive that it felt like a pleasant form of drowning.
And for the readers on the margins of our heteronormative, neurotypical society, I hope they see themselves represented and know that they are not alone, and that they are valid.
We exist. We have a right to exist. We have a right to be visible.
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