A New Land

This is the second story I had published in an anthology, and am sharing here for the first time. (Read the first, The Fisherman & the Cormorant here.)

I wrote it in 2016, it references the Welsh tale of Bloudewedd, and is a tale for the spring equinox.

A New Land

‘Oak, broom and meadowsweet.’

‘What, Agnieszka?’ my husband asked.

I was sitting in the armchair by the window, sun pouring over me. The book I was reading lay open on my lap. It told the story of two magicians who magicked a woman from the blossoms of oak, broom and meadowsweet.

‘No oak or meadowsweet here,’ Gregor said wistfully. ‘And broom is a weed. How do you say? Noxious.’ 

Perhaps we are like the weeds, I thought. Introduced. Noxious. Do we really belong?

‘She was a woman not born of woman,’ I told him, ‘but created by men. Made to be the bride of a man cursed never to have a human wife.’ I sighed. ‘She had no say in her life.’

‘Poor girl. And made from flowers. It is unnatural.’

Yes, poor girl, I agreed. But what could be more natural than flowers? 

It seemed an age since I had been in the garden, or worked on a painting. I’d been laid up in bed with a bad case of early spring flu. Gregor had been tending to me, and to the vegetable patch too, which was springing into new life. Though something, or someone, had been eating things during the night.

‘A possum,’ I said.

‘What damn possum pulls up beets and radishes by the roots?’

Gregor led me out to see the damage. Some nibbled kale, a small round beet with a bite out of it so that it looked like a waning moon. It did not seem so bad.

‘It’s good-for-nothing kids, I tell you.’

But I knew it could not have been. Some bored children might vandalise a garden, but what children would then eat what they had found? Raw beetroot and radishes, Russian kale and spinach. No, it could not have been children.

That night I woke, my mouth dry, and I carefully descended the stairs in the dark. In the kitchen I poured water into a glass and drank. How lucky we are to have water come straight out of the tap like that. It was not that way in the old country. But, I wondered, will our luck one day run out, like the water?

I looked through the kitchen window over the dark garden and then put down the glass in surprise. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a shadow begin to move towards the veggie patch. Slight, oddly-shaped. I stared. She stooped and seemed to take something before moving off into the darkness. 

Why did I say she? Something about her size, her quick, graceful movements. I knew she was a girl. And something moved in my belly, a fleeting recollection of sad tenderness. 

If Gregor and I had had children, perhaps we would have felt more like we belonged here, their births and lives rooting us with this soil, this land. But little Jezebella did not live even a week, and there were no others after her. It is so hard to be a mother without a child, never called mama, never to be called babcia, grandmother. Yet we made a life here, Gregor with his piano, his teaching. Me with my painting. Both long-since retired, mostly we pottered about the garden, tended the vegetables and roses, ate kasha and schnitzel and cabbage rolls.

Our house is the very last one on this street, quiet (as we had wanted), but surrounded by the bush. So we grew a European garden around it, and our beloved vegetables, sealing ourselves in to our own little domesticated place of old memories. Despite many decades living in this land, we still did not understand the wild landscape here, the strange spikiness of the plants, the grey-green drabness of the eucalyptus forest. We shut it out, thinking only of Europe, what we had had to leave behind—the green countryside, the great cities, the culture—ignoring the way the sealed road ended abruptly just beyond our driveway, degenerating into dirt and continuing on into the bush, nothing more than a fire trail. Sometimes it felt like we had emigrated to a place at the very end of the earth. What was there beyond us but emptiness?

I didn’t tell Gregor about what I had seen. I don’t know why. She seemed like my secret, come to me out of the empty, unknown place beyond the garden. And the next night, when Gregor’s slow, deep breathing told me that he was sleeping soundly, I crept down to the kitchen again, for I knew I would see her. Yet, I must have stood in the dark for hours, in a daze, for just when I thought I had glimpsed a movement in the moonlit garden, Gregor found me, switching on the light.

‘Agnieszka, what are you doing standing in the cold? You mustn’t get ill again.’

Startled, I stood gaping at my sleep-bedraggled reflection in the blackness of the window. 

*

I woke to the sound of kookaburras laughing loudly, yodelling magpies, and the sweet song of a blackbird—yet another creature who did not belong. Like the weeds. Like rats, rabbits and foxes. All emigrants, like Gregor and I. Though had any of us had a choice? We had all been subject to human intervention—species introduced unwisely, wars waged. We were all here now, and we had to go on living. 

I was still regaining my strength, and walked unsteadily along the driveway to the letterbox. I knew the postman had been. You could always hear the squeaking brakes of his motorcycle from a mile off. Though as I reached in to get the mail the neighbour’s German shepherd appeared from nowhere, barking madly. I froze, remembering all of the vicious dogs I had seen during the war, and their even more vicious handlers.

‘Fred, no!’ a young man shouted, running out and grabbing the dog.

Fred? More like Killer, or Fang.

‘Sorry, sorry,’ he said, as he roughly dragged the dog by the collar back through the gate. ‘Bad dog!’

I shook with anger and fear. Why did I dislike the dog? If anything it was the humans who owned him who were at fault. And that fence was not high enough to keep in an animal of that size. It worried me. He could bite someone. What poor creatures might die in those powerful jaws?

After that shock I felt listless, tired. I busied myself for a time, laying out our traditional decorated eggs to mark the season (I had never learnt to celebrate Easter in autumn), but I could not bring myself to paint. Gregor made me comfortable outside where I could breathe in the peace of my plants, the vitality of spring. The faint sound of the piano drifted out the open door, and I strayed in and out of sleep.

But that night I could not sleep at all. I crept downstairs again—I could not help myself—and I saw her, touched by the moonlight, crouching in the garden, her hair so long it flowed right round her small body. And then I heard the dog bark.

‘No! No! No!’ I fumbled with the lock, then flung the door open, rushing out, yelling, ‘Run! Run!’ And I saw her turn to me, eyes wide, before she skittered away like a frightened rabbit.

Gregor came stumbling down the stairs and outside. ‘Agnieszka, what on earth?’

‘She is not safe, she is hungry. She’s just a little girl. Oh Gregor, we must help her.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘There was a girl in the garden, eating the vegetables.’

‘A girl? What girl would be out there at this hour?’

Even after all his talk of vandal-children, I could tell from the tone of his voice that he didn’t quite believe me. He was worried. I trembled in his arms as he coaxed me back into the house. He warmed some milk on the stove and poured it into a mug, holding it to my lips, making me drink. 

‘I saw her.’

‘Yes, my Agnieszka, I know. But now you must go back to sleep.’

Calmed by the milk, I did sleep. Though I dreamed over and over of a rabbit running, running, a dog snapping at her heels. She plunged into a hole in the ground just in time to escape his jaws, and I knew, somehow, that she was running still, through the underworld, just like the sun did each night.

*

I left food out every night after that. Bread and milk, and vegetables, peeled and sliced. More palatable like that than straight out of the ground. Gregor was not pleased about this new obsession,  still not convinced there was a hungry girl visiting our garden, but he indulged me. And every morning the food was gone, down to the last drop of milk, the veggie patch left untouched. 

Now it was his turn to say, ‘Possums, foxes, rats’. I only shook my head.

I began to ponder, to dream. If I were to charm a woman out of flowers, what blossoms would I use? Not oak, broom and meadowsweet. Perhaps eucalyptus, wattle and native iris. I knew my woman would be sharp and spiky like this place, but beautiful. She would belong. And unlike the men in the story who created their hapless, captive bride, I would set her free.

I started to paint again, but not my usual still lifes. Now I painted landscapes. Olive green and ochre and ironbark grey, full of light. The land that had been empty now seemed full of great mystery and splendour. I would stand at the letterbox some days, staring at the pale road disappearing into the trees. It was like I had brand new eyes.

I was sleeping more soundly now, knowing that the girl was well fed, but one night I was woken. Perhaps I heard the dog bark, or an owl screech. Whatever the cause, I was suddenly wide awake, and carefully eased myself out of bed. I tiptoed down the stairs, opened the back door as silently as I could, and crept out into the garden. I sat myself on a bench, the bench I would often sit on during the day, to read, or admire my roses. In the gentle quiet and dark perfume of the night world I waited until she came. 

And she did come. Cautiously, with an animal grace, moving in complete silence. She watched me alertly as she ate the food I had provided. And I watched her, her tiny mouth nibbling so neatly, her long, tangled hair, the worn rabbit-skin clothing that covered her delicate frame. When she had had her fill she came to me and crawled right onto my lap, her weight little more than that of dead leaves, as if she was just a wisp of air in the shape of a girl. The fur she wore was soft under my hands.

‘My Jezebella,’ I crooned. ‘My child.’

I must have fallen into a doze, nestled there with the girl’s small, warm body pressed against mine, because suddenly it was dawn, the world emerging in shades of pale blue and grey, and I felt her slip from my arms. A coldness immediately moved into the place where she had been. And when I opened my eyes I saw a rabbit turn to look at me before hopping away into the bush.

As I slipped back inside the house, back up the stairs and into bed, I realised that I felt different. I even smelled different, covered in the musty scent of a feral creature. I pulled the covers around me and closed my eyes, imagining the dirt road outside that pierced through the trees, and smiled. I knew what I must do. I felt a new wildness in me, and in my heart I went into the grey-green forest, and I never looked back.

~

This story was first published in Heroines: An Anthology of Short Fiction and Poetry – Volume 2, The Neo Perennial Press, 2019.

The Fisherman & the Cormorant

I don’t know if I will ever return to writing fiction, but I have decided to share the two stories that I had published in anthologies a few years back, and therefore had not shared here.  

This is the first, written in 2016. It’s an upside-down reimagining of the tale of the Wild Swans, and a story of Samhain.

I’ll share the second story on the spring equinox.

The Fisherman & the Cormorant

It was better this way. To have supple wings instead of arms, and dark as night feathers covering my skin. To be able to dive deep down into the brownish-blue below, to fly amongst water weeds and catch fish in my bill. 

He didn’t know when he flung his curse that I would thank him for changing me. He had wanted me, the old leer-eyed lech; and wanted to grow his own power by stealing from mine. When I refused him, showed him that my womanly wisdom was so much more than his, he feared me, as men so often fear women. Now, blinded by sour jealousy, by bitter contempt, he wanted nothing but revenge.

He struck me with his wand carved with magic symbols, and bellowed hateful spell-words, and at first I was horrified and in terrible pain. My body shrank and narrowed and my neck stretched out long and lithe; I grew clumsy webbed feet and a clacking bill; and my hands, perhaps the one thing I do miss, were no longer able to touch or hold, as they stretched out and fledged and I became winged. 

Changing is always a difficult undertaking. We avoid it more often than we embrace it. But I had no choice in the matter. Frightened, and still in some agony, I did all I could do at the time: I flew away. 

It was in my flight that I looked down at the earth below me, and I suppose you could say I gained a new perspective on my predicament. It didn’t take me long, no more than a wingbeat or two, to accept my new body, for I could fly!—and don’t we all dream of that? In flight I was free, free as no human could ever be. So I flew away from the vengeful he-witch who had turned me, and I wholeheartedly adopted my new form.

After some time in the air, when I knew I was safe, I smelt cold, welcoming water on the wind, and came to rest at a lake. There, I set about learning to swim, flying underwater like a black comet; and there were plenty of frogs and silvery fish to eat, so I was more than content. Indeed, I came to love my sleek new body, my glossy feathers, my bright blue-green eyes, more than I had ever loved myself as a woman.

I would sometimes sit on a rock by the water, drying my lovely, green-tinged wings, and think of people, remembering them always doing doing doing, as if their lives depended on it. As a bird I knew better, for being is so much more satisfying, so much more delightful and virtuous. When the elders had said that the animals, in their wildness, were wiser and worthier than humans, they spoke the elemental truth. I knew this because I felt it, in my hollow bones and bird-flesh and right to the tips of my feathers. I was air and water, earth too, and fire was in my heart. I dwelt joyously by my lake. Simply being. Being cormorant.

Though on the night of the first new moon, when starlight was all there was to see by, I changed back. I had just got cosy in my nighttime roost, when I was overcome by a keen-edged pain, and I fell from my perch to the ground, writhing and crying out. Arms and legs burst from my bird limbs, my graceful neck receded, my gleaming feathers recoiled, and my pointed bill shrank back to smooth, wide lips. After my few weeks in bird-form, I lay in shock, confused by my huge size, my great soft and gangling body. 

This, then, was the curse: to be animal, yet not wholly so. To be turned back, excruciatingly, every dark of the moon, so I was neither one thing nor the other. Torn from the bliss of being, and shackled to doing once more, a mere human. It was only for one night, each turn of the moon, but it was still too much. I would spend those long nights longing for my bird body, shivering with the cold on my bare, goosebumped skin. A woman alone, dreaming only of fish and flight.

This was my life. Mostly bird, but woman too.

Then one day a man arrived on the shore of the lake. A man with sad eyes and a sweet, humble face, carrying a swag and dragging a little canoe. He set up camp in a sandy clearing where the ground was ridged with tree roots, and made a little shack for shelter from the rain beside a golden-flowered banksia tree. Lighting a fire to warm himself, he sat staring into the flames, looking forlorn.

The sun soon set on that beguiling scene, and the smell of smoke from the campfire lingered in the air all night.

The next morning the man sat on a stone by the water’s edge, like a shag on a rock, watching the sunlight igniting the shallows, rippling them with flares of gold. Later, he paddled out in his canoe, slow and steady, handmade fishing rod in his fist, and I saw him catch a brown trout. He killed it dead, quick, hitting it over the head, and it slid with a wet slap onto the floor of the canoe. With head bowed for a time, as if in a posture of grief or reverence, the man sat with his elbows resting on his knees, his hands hanging limply, a tear in his eye. Then he slowly paddled back to the shore. 

The smell of cooking trout drifted over that evening, and for a moment, just one bird-flown  moment, I wanted my human form again, so I could taste it. Mild and slightly greasy in my mouth, chewed between two rows of white teeth. Then I caught a fish and swallowed it whole, raw, straight down my gullet, with a gratified snap. 

It seemed the man had come to stay at my lake, and I wasn’t sure how I felt about this, to have a human so close by, so tempting and repelling. I was cautious, but curious too.

Each day I swam closer and closer, popping up near his canoe, and watching his shy face. Sometimes he would look down into the water, as if he could see right to the bottom, into the green and weedy deepness, and I wondered what he saw there, this human with his limited human eyes. 

He saw me, eventually. My streamlined, sheeny body, my azure eyes that saw through water and air. He did not speak, but smiled, and watched, and wondered. He did not need to say I was beautiful, for I knew it already. 

Then the moon hid once more, on a dark, overcast night, and I could not help crying out, whimpering as I transformed and trembled on the cold ground. And he came through the blackness, the sweet-faced man, with concern and awe resonant in his breathing. He lifted me, carried me in his strong human arms, back to the camp, laying me gently in his shack. He said not a word, but breathed out softly, and slept, invisible by my side. 

That night I wasn’t cold or alone. 

Though before the blush of dawn I left him, with a whisper of thanks, a shriek and a soft splash, as I changed back and entered the water. From the lake’s cool centre I saw him on the shore, poor bewildered man, wondering if he had been dreaming. 

That day I swam to him as he fished, darting around and under the canoe, a black shooting star in an upside-down sky. He was silent, as ever; but we animals know that language is so much more than just words. His sweet face and his sad eyes and his man’s body, all said, Come, my dear little cormorant, my black water-raven. Come, catch me a fish. 

So I did. I caught him a glistening, wriggling silver fish, and he took it from my bill, dispatched its water-full life with tenderness, and gazed quizzically into my vivid avian eyes. 

He knew me then.

That night we dreamed—the man in his shack and me in my tree. We dreamed of a grey fishwife, with a dillybag full of moon-bright fish, and waterweed in her grizzly hair. The old woman said there was a way to break the spell, to make me changeless once more.

‘Take cormorant-caught fish,’ she said, with a glance at me, ‘and skin them without tearing. Smoke the skins dry, and sew them together with fishbone needle and fish-gut thread. Make a fish-skin blanket, and speak not a word until it is done. Then,’ she said, with a cock of her head to him, ‘throw it over your love.’

So I caught fish for him, I did. I sped through the water like an aquatic acrobat, seizing my slippery prey. He cut away their flashing skins with a skilled hand, and hung them over a low, smokey fire, before piercing the skins with his fine bone needle, joining them seam to seam. 

By the next new moon the blanket was half-made, and I came to his camp when I changed, spent the dark night with him, warm skin against skin, my hands taking their fill of touch. Man and woman. All too human.

This is how we were—a fisherman and a cormorant, a human and a bird—making a magic fish-skin blanket, together. To break a spell.

Then the moon changed again, in her unceasing round, hid her face anew; the blanket was finally finished, and I came to him in woman-form once more. That night was joyous, expectant, all cares laid aside. But before daybreak, he took the blanket in his hands, smoke-smelling and fish-sweet, and spoke his first and only words to me: ‘Will you stay?’

It pained me, then, his soft-hearted humanness, his confusion about the curse. In the growing grey light, the bird in me shook my head, resolute, for I was done with doing, though the woman did so with regret. He nodded, acceptant, bowing to my bird-wish, sorrowful and silent. He let the blanket, all our weeks of work, drop heavily by his side. Had it all been for nothing?

And then the sun’s light broke free of the horizon and I began to change, right before his sad, human eyes. To shrink and lengthen and fledge, until I was small and black and beautiful. I flapped my wings, turned my head on its long, graceful neck, and he remembered what the fishwife had said. Throw it over your love.

Picking up the fish-skin blanket, he took me gently in his arms, held me close to his fluttering heart, and cast the magic blanket around us both. Then we beat our gleaming wings as one, and dived down deep. 

~

This story was first published in Heroines: An Anthology of Short Fiction and Poetry – Volume 1, The Neo Perennial Press, 2018.

Persistence

First there was the drought. Then came record-breaking temperatures and the worst bushfires Australia has ever endured. Next came the much-needed and prayed for rain … but it rained and rained and rained, and then rained some more, and there were floods and landslides and trees came down.

To say that this has been one of the worst summers I have lived through is an understatement. For weeks I was trapped indoors due to intense heat and/or smoke, and constantly on alert; then trapped indoors again because of the excessive rain. Then I ended the season with a cold.

Because of all the disturbance I barely entered my studio over the last few months, and my routine (such as it was) was lost. Now that autumn has officially begun, and I am almost recovered from my cold, I feel that some sense of normality is slowly beginning to return. Though with the knowledge that so much has changed that life here will not be the same, it is bittersweet. I dread the thought of next summer.

To top things off, I am now in one of those horrible and uncomfortable phases of the creative process when NOTHING seems to go right and I doubt my abilities completely. I have no idea how to paint, and don’t know how I ever did! And I seem to be undoing more stitches than I am sewing. I can only hope that in persisting, I will make it through to the other side of this obstructive period and find flow and fluency again, just as the destructive summer is gentling into autumn.

It is, perhaps, a good time to take stock of what has gone (mostly) right so far this year: I have made two Strata Tops designed by Sew Liberated, which I am really pleased with, and a couple more sewing projects are in progress, including one partially self-designed. I’ve completed a small knitting project, and am eager to do more. I am working on a new painting, the design of which I am happy with, if I can only work out how to paint it. And I just came across this lovely review of Heroines: Volume 2, which mentions my story. This has cheered me.

So, all in all, maybe things are not so bad. Still, bring on autumn, I say!

The Accumulation Of Small Things

With my ability to write as I had been a few years ago at the lowest of low ebbs (and practically gone), it seems like another year has passed by without the achievement of much. I’ve posted much less often here than I would have liked. And yet, image-making has become possible, when it was a source of inaction and frustration for so many years. 

 Looking back at all of the artworks I have created this year, starting with Necklace of Mouths, I can see a progression of forms and ideas. Each painting has taught me something, and gradually I’ve been developing a methodical way of working, completing things bit by bit, day by day. 

That said, the reality is that most of the time I dwell within in-between periods of inactivity, some of them a time of well-earned rest and gestation of new ideas; but most times seemingly empty, and very difficult to endure. But what has constantly surprised me is that I keep trying again and again. I go into my studio and thumb through books, reading and absorbing imagery, and I scribble down ideas. Sometimes I just stare into space, or get distracted by birds in the garden. And sometimes I avoid my studio altogether and languish in bed. Yet somehow the work keeps coming, even when I think I have lost all faith, all ability. For that I am grateful. 

I sometimes worry that I am repeating myself—the same words, themes, images—over and over again. But perhaps that’s just the way I work, within ‘a feminine symbolic which privileges multiplicity, plurality and connection, “ebb and flow, multiple beginnings, and multiple paths…doubling back”, as Luce Irigaray described women’s subjectivity (1). 

I like this way of understanding the seasons of creative life. I’ve doubled back and started again so many times, exploring old ground, drawing more meaning out of what came before, refining and expanding, creating layers and layers of material that I will never finish excavating. There has been an accumulation of small things this year, built upon my Witchlines work from last year, as well as upon the art I made and the dreams I had half a lifetime ago! I guess that’s quite an achievement after all.

These are my favourite artworks from this year:

Mothertongue

Messenger of the Invisible

Rainmaker

The Broad One

Fluency

Despite my often wordless state, a few poems have found their way through:

Where My Being Waits

An Ode to Brain Fog

A Dark Place

Non-renewable

I had another story published in the Heroines anthology. Hurrah!

And I have even written some wise things, which I really should try to keep in mind:

With words I can defy my inner critic, and defy the powers that be that dictate how I should think and feel, and how I should even perceive and understand the world. I can defy my own sense of helplessness. This is a kind of healing magic. (From (Not) Being & (Not) Doing)

I have no idea what next year will bring, but I intend to keep gathering ideas, images and words, small though they may be, to build the soil from which I continue to grow. 

References:

1. Dr. Sarah Nicholson, The Evolutionary Journey of Woman: From the Goddess to Integral Feminism, Integral Publishers: Tucson, Arizona, 2013, p. 26

Memories of Spring

Since finishing my last painting, which I thought was returning me to a more sustained state of creative flow, I have not been able to do much. Another painting was begun, but then abandoned. Another idea was scribbled into my sketchbook, but has not progressed. Susan Griffin’s quote about the illusion of wellness has never seemed more apt.

The imagery and words that had started to spill out have now retreated within, tangling inside me, with no outlet, no freedom. Such are the seasons of illness, I suppose. I must simply endure, and wait.

Still, I can at least share with you some memories of spring …

A silver-eyed Australian raven.

Reading my story published in the second volume of Heroines, from the Neo Perennial Press.

Showy blossoms and new green.

The beautiful fabrics I bought for (yet to begin) sewing projects.

Mist on the mountains, and the pitter-patter of rain—particularly sweet memories in these dry and dangerous days of fire around the state.

Two red wattlebird chicks, waiting patiently for their next feed.

This handsome little man, strutting his stuff—a superb fairy-wren.

A fast growing wattlebird chick feeding herself from one of the thirteen waratah blooms we had on the bush in our front yard.

Expansive skies.

And sweet little gifts.

It looks like a long, hot and very dry summer is ahead of us. Rain would be most welcome, but in its absence I will keep seeking what small, succulent gifts I can find.

Heroines II

The second Heroines anthology is launched today, featuring my story, A New Land. It’s about an old Polish immigrant couple—Agnieszka and Gregor—and a mysterious nighttime visitor to their vegetable garden.

This tale (along with The Fisherman and the Cormorant, which appeared in the first anthology last year), is part of a series of stories I began to write as I completed Sharon Blackie’s online course, Sisterhood of the Bones (now called Sisters of Rock & Root). This course revolves—quite literally!—around the wheel of the year by examining each of the eight Celtic seasonal festivals, delving into the meanings and themes of each, and connecting it with an associated myth or folktale. 

When I began with Samhain in April 2016, my aim was to use the course to deepen my connection to the land I live on, not just by observing the seasonal changes, and thinking about how I could connect my embodiment here in Australia back to my European ancestry, but also to write a story for each seasonal celebration, thus creating my own local mythology. 

Each story would have a number of features: 

1. It would be set, obliquely or otherwise, at the time of the festival in question

2. It would take place either in, or in relation to, a real place near where I live, in the compass direction associated with the festival

3. It would feature, or at least refer to, an animal associated with the festival, though with an Australian twist

With each story I would take inspiration from the themes of the festival, the associated myth/folktale, or a combination of the two, along with what arose from contemplation of the places and animals.

I completed five of these stories, and was very excited about the possibility of self-publishing the whole series, perhaps with artworks too, before I became stuck. That I got stuck at the story for the summer solstice, one of the festivals I feel a little ambivalent about, says something. As does the idea of voicelessness that seems to need expression through it. I feel as if I have lost my voice over the past couple of years, and this is something I wish to overcome. 

That two of my stories from this mythic series have now been published suggests that I was onto something with this idea. At the very least it was enabling me to create more of a feeling of belonging with my own landscape, and that was a powerful thing. I miss that.

I don’t know if I will ever finish writing the series, though I dearly hope I will. Right now I am just trying to take heart from the fact that two of my stories have flown out into the world! For someone who only started writing fiction in 2014, that is a great achievement in itself.

Heroines: Volume II is available now from the Neo Perennial Press.