When I was seventeen, I horrified my animist writer parents when I announced that I wanted to go to John Jay to become a criminal investigator. They were wise enough to resist voicing their disbelief which might have caused me to double down and instead they waited until, predictably, a week later I swung hard back into my desire to be a turtlenecked philosopher poet. But this strange impulse would emerge again when I became obsessed with the television show Dexter alongside my descent into chronic illness. My obsession with criminal justice versus vigilante justice was not the garden variety obsession with true crime, podcast detectives, and serial killers of millennials raised on Law & Order SVU and Ted Bundy lore.

This was the nagging, twisting nausea that although I had escaped what happened to me when I was younger, some other version of me was every day, every minute of every day not escaping. I was once with a therapist who paused our session and informed me that I might be better suited to a therapist who worked with veterans: “You see, I think a large component of your PTSD is survivor’s guilt.”

I think calling it survivor’s guilt neuters something about the sense of living haunted by other timelines that unspool alongside my sunlit, mundane days. Something about the screams that live in my jawbone such that the nerve is beginning to clamp and degenerate, fractals of nerve pain climbing up into my face and eye, and down into my arm, turning my hand into a claw. Turning me into a wild animal of howls unvoiced, screams unanswered. It wasn’t until years later, running at top speed on a treadmill, tears streaming down my face, that I began to practice a macabre sort of visualization. I imagined myself leather-clad, adamantine, something between an angel and an avenging vampire , breaking into the cellars, the locked rooms, the back rooms, the motels, all the airless, horrible places where it happens every day, all the time, and gathering them up in my arms, racing out of the rooms holding children, girls, little girls, young women, turning back towards him – always wearing the face of one of my own bogeymen – aiming the gun, the arrow, the lethal precision laser/superpower, to obliterate his ability to ever “do it again” that I realized I didn’t need another trauma breathwork workshop or EMDR session.

I needed revenge.

I didn’t have survivor’s guilt. I had survivor’s rage.

I wasn’t sad. I wasn’t guilty. Those were paralyzing emotions foisted on survivors to keep them from ever demanding justice, demanding life, demanding nevee again.

I had survivor’s rage. Survivor’s fury.

As writes in her fabulous book Rage Becomes Her, anger is a realization of worth and a demand for better treatment. It is the moment when you start to climb out of hell and hunt down your demons so they can never hurt another child. It is dangerous – to others as much as it is to you. But it is fundamentally life force in the face of annihilation. Sorrow is defeat. Guilt mildews in our emotional cellars, breeding paralyzing resentment.

“Anger is the expression of hope. How much anger is too much? Certainly not the anger that, for many of us, is a remembering of a self we learned to hide and quiet. It is willful and disobedient. It is survival, liberation, creativity, urgency, and vibrancy. It is a statement of need. An insistence of acknowledgment. Anger is a boundary. Anger is boundless. An opportunity for contemplation and self-awareness. It is commitment. Empathy. Self-love. Social responsibility. If it is poison, it is also the antidote. The anger we have as women is an act of radical imagination. Angry women burn brighter than the sun….Anger is usually about saying “no” in a world where women are conditioned to say almost anything but “no.” – Soraya Chemaly.

Women deserve more. They deserve to be furious when months unfold with little to no movement on the Epstein Files and the testimony of survivors and a recent Supreme Court ruling that allows for the private manufacture and ownership of AI child abuse pornography.

What the actual f**K.

There will be no justice. No accountability.

I want to offer that the single best TV show I have seen in recent years is also the perfect distillation of this mounting collective female rage – Furious, starring Emmy Rossum and written by the brilliant Liz Merriweather. The show follows Rossum as a rookie FBI agent with a history of domestic abuse by her police officer boyfriend (first nod to the corruption that makes the organizations that should be dealing with this violence totally ineffectual) tries to hunt down a sex worker serial killer slowly killing off the men we soon learn have been actively involved in trafficking her and killing her best friend. The Black Widow theme has been played to death but let me assure you this update it is frothing at the mouth with feminist fury and brilliant, elevated to Olympusby the alcoholic, unruffled FBI agent Nora Washington played by Quincy Tyler Bernstine who regularly calls on the sexual abuse survivors from Greek Myths.

In one of the most memorable moments, Nora confronts one of her superiors she knows is embroiled with a network of corrupt and powerful men, purposefully undermining the justice he purports to serve, in the middle of his performative workshop on workplace mental health (the show repeatedly makes jibes at the expensive, sanitized, and wholly ineffectual trauma modalities force fed to survivors of Actual Hell), discussing the different ways the Ancient Greeks conceptualized rage. First there is Menis, the collective anger of a nation or a people. Then Thumos, the impulsive life-force anger that inspires someone to fight and murder to survive. Then there is Orge, the deep volcanic reserves of anger that wait and build and wait and build until they explode. She concludes by saying, “Of course, all of them can make you insane.”

But when she says this, we, the viewer, know that when confronted with rampant sex trafficking, corruption, child abuse, rape, and domestic violence….is it really so insane to explode? Isn’t the more insane position to curl up and accept this? To retreat into guilt and sorrow and defeat.

And isn’t the really insane position the one of the abusers themselves – those who think that power renders them untouchable and that that it is their privilege to abuse children, women, the disenfranchised, the very earth itself?

There’s another moment that stuck with me personally when Catherine, the survivor turned serial killer, returns from one of her killing quests, sitting down at a desk top computer to complete some breathwork trauma modality online. She’s trying! We learn that she has wholly tried to metabolize the catastrophic violence she has endured.

I agree with Catherine that breathwork might not do it.

And while I think revenge almost always backfires in real life, I find that when we move that energy in fiction, in storytelling, it can provide catharsis. I’m harkening back to the ancient Greek root of catharsis – a cleansing or purification process - as connected to dramaturgy. Watching a tragedy unfold onstage we can project onto the actors, living through their revenge.

Although Catherine isn’t thinking of purification by the end of the series and I wholly enjoy her articulation of her revenge: “When I’m killing him, it’s like I’m eating him. Like, I’m swallowing him, like everything he’s ever done is disappearing inside me, and I have all the fucking power in the world, and they don’t want us to have that. They wanna take that from us. But I want you to feel it.”

I don’t want to be cleansed of my trauma. I don’t want to be pacified.

I want to eat them alive. All of the Epstein Class. All of the traffickers. All of those who abuse and hurt women and children and animals. I want to digest them and I want them to build back my body stronger and more powerful.

I want you – all those who have crawled out of hell – to feel it. The holy howl.

I won’t ever get revenge in real life. The answer isn’t to become an FBI agent or to mete out my own vigilante justice like Dexter or Catherine. But you better bet I’m going to take a leaf out of Merriweather and Rossum’s book and get my revenge in storytelling. Lately, I’ve been thinking that I don’t want to write nonfiction about what happened to me. I want to write my Count of Monte Cristo where I get revenge against every single man that treat me like an object.

I don’t want to spoil the series, but I will say that comparing the thousands of dollars I spent on EMDR, somatic experiencing, breathwork, psychedelic therapy, constellation therapy…every trauma modality in the book, I would say watching this show was more helpful and significantly cheaper than all of them.

Subscribe now

Share

Build A Lover: Wicker, Bread Husbands, and Heterofabulism

“You’ve got some scheme going with natural world, don’t you?” Olivia Coleman as lusty fisher woman probes Peter Dinklage as enchanted basket-weaver in the trailer for the highly-anticipated woven-smut Wicker. “Mother nature provides, I merely augment.”

If you’re not chronically online, let me bring you up to speed. Alexander Skarsgard whose desirability has proved durable through stints as a weaponized neurodivergent robot, a vampire, a gay BDSM biker, is now…wait for it…a basket. The film features a woman tired with village dating who commissions a husband from local basket weaver. Honestly, relatable. If Woodstock had a basket weaver, I think they would be overbooked. The trailer is delightfully naughty and has inspired female mirth and a spate of NSW rattan-themed memes.

But the exchange between basket-weaver and fisherwife alludes to something beyond the sheer lunacy of a romance featuring a basket-husband and Olivia Coleman: when patriarchal conditions are limiting, the natural world will always provide. Delete hinge and look to the materials most-ready-to-hand. The Wicker story is not novel. It’s derivative of a very old and popular folktale type (as classified by the Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index of folktales) ATU: The Search for the Lost Husband. These are tales where a woman crafts or commissions a husband made out of raw materials explains folklorist D.L. Ashliman, although its type falls under the umbrella of the Animal Bridegroom where a woman marries an animal. These tales span geography and culture but always feature a desirous and creative woman who is not defeated by a lack of suitable mates. She’ll bake or braid or build one herself. A Greek fairytale called Mr Simigdáli (The Gentleman Made of Groats) features a princess who refuses all her suits and instead prays to god to bring to life a “bread husband” called Mr. Groats made of almonds and sugar and groats and, in some versions, semolina. So handsome and charismatic is this bread husband that an evil queen absconds with him inspiring the action of the story and the princess’s quest to retrieve her baked-mate. From Palestine we have the story Lü’lü, where a princess builds a husband from pearls. Betta, a merchant’s daughter, refuses inadequate proposals from human men, and crafts her own lover from sweet almonds, perfumed water, musk, gilded thread, amber, and gemstones in the oral Italian folktale Pintosmalto. From folktales spanning the globe from West Virginia to Iraq we repeatedly see the motif of the husband built from bread, honey, and other sweet and oftentimes costly materials.

Watching the Wicker trailer as I’ve been working on my research in Romantic Animism, I was reminded not only of folktales but of a beloved sacred canticle: The Song of Songs. In the sensuous poem attributed to King Solomon, the lovers compare each other to pomegranates, palm trees, doves, apricots…the list goes on and on until the human lover disappears replaced by an ecosystem of species. This may seem fantastical, but science tells us this chimerical existence is actually closer to what weaves together our bodies and the entire biosphere. We are all holobionts: basket-beings holding other beings, complex inter-species ecosystems pretending at singular selfhood.

Subscribe now

Share

In an age when anthropocentrism is paving the world over with one monologuing species, building an ecological lover out of other species seems like the antidote to me. I don’t think it’s a stretch for me to also be reminded of Ursula K. Le Guin’s Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction when I think of wicker. A basket, even when he is a sexy husband, still implies a woven vessel built to carry and transport other objects and beings. Baskets are some of the oldest, female-coded instruments used when gathering berries and herbs.

A basket husband is a necessarily inclusive metaphor: a vessel built to carry other beings. An ecosystem that is home to other species.

Not a day goes by when I’m not assaulted by another op-ed about the end of dating and despair of heterosexual women. On my lowest days I’m susceptible to the sense of scarcity and lack.

But Mother Nature provides. Build your lover from the plants and animals and stones outside your door. As a writer of fiction, I feel that my job is to step into the folktale of the Lost Husband with a decided ecological lens. I must write a lover that is a carrier bag for other species. I must not be a hetero-pessimist. I must practice radical hetero-fabulism, which is a term I’ve been using to describe the impulse to imagine better romantic narratives and archetypes instead of admitting defeat.

In a moment when men want to build AI sexbot brides out of binary code, I shake my head and say: “Nope”.

Women don’t want binary code. They want baskets.

This is the ninth installment in my ongoing series Confessions of a Romantic Animist.

I want to reclaim romance as a celebration that includes the entire earth. I want to throw another party. A love party. And I want to invite you along.

I’m going to take the same approach to love stories as I took to myths of the masculine in The Flowering Wand. I will reroot, rewild, and retell classical love stories within an ecological framework. I’m also going to write about my fascination with contemporary romance, animal courtship rituals, and fantasy. I have questions about how romance is a powerful tool in combatting and dismantling empire and I’m going to think and write through them in real time in conversation with you.

Most of the essays in this series will be offered for free. I want to think and love and dance with you. But alongside this series on courtship, ecology, fantasy, and eros, I’m also going to offer reading lists and excerpts for of my upcoming fantasy series: one inspired by Joan of Arc and the other a queer retelling of Tristan & Isolde for my paid subscribers as well as occasional personal essays on romance.

Subscribe now

Share

Happy eclipse portal / ragweed season / waxing summer magic days! As promised back when I started my series Confessions of a Romantic Animist, I’m going to share some excerpts of my own romantic fantasy series I’ve been writing these past three years. This time last year I was in that manic sprint of finishing the first draft of my Joan of Arc inspired romantasy They Do Not Burn. As someone who has written and taught a lot about Joan, when I actually think of her story I fell compelled not to add another non-fiction “take” to the already bloated tradition, but to spin the story into something wholly new. What does it mean to save a saint from herself? What if martyrdom wasn’t the only answer? Below is the synposis of the first book in what I’m calling The Eternity Knot Duology and the Preface of the book that takes place some hundred years before the main action!

They Do Not Burn: Book One of the Eternity Knot Duology

LOVE IS LONGER THAN A SINGLE LIFE

Life after life, he remembers. Life after life, she forgets.

Haunted by nightmares of fire, lost love, and demanding angels, Beatrice Marle, a peasant girl, receives prophetic visions telling her that she alone can lead her country to victory against an enemy kingdom…if she preserves her maidenhood. With the help of a ragtag group of soldiers and a handsome nobleman, Beatrice is thrust into the high stakes of courtly intrigue and religious conspiracy where she soon realizes that not all is as it seems. Can she trust the dashing Lord Perrin who believes in her mission? Can saints fall in love? Who is the Duke de Roulay and why does he think she is a spy? Is the Prince really worthy of the crown? And more importantly, can Beatrice trust herself? Plagued by violent memories that seem like warnings from past lives, Beatrice finds herself entangled in complex bids for power and begins to doubt her visions and her heavenly voices. What if this isn’t the first time she’s lived this story and what if the only person who can help her avoid repeating an ancient tragedy is the very man she has been told to mistrust?

This reimagining of the Hundred Years’ War casts Joan of Arc as the reincarnated version of a mother goddess seeking to find her lost beloved over a series of lifetimes where she continually forgets her past and he is doomed to remember, forever trying and failing to save her from martyrdom for a religion that was started by her ancient adversary.

Preface:

“Will she really burn?” Fifo Danvier asked his master.

“She always does.” The tall, dark-haired man answered enigmatically, looking at the wooden platform where the pyre had already been constructed around a tall stake, a tightening of his hooded brown eyes the only sign that this admission was painful. “In every life. Although we try our best.”

Read more

Seven years ago from today I was finishing the final edits on my novel The Madonna Secret and preparing to submit it to agents. I’d never envisioned myself having to be a public-facing envoy of my work, preferring a hazy idea of a tiny, black and white author photo and the occasional phone interviews where I mainly discussed my fictional craft and historical research.

But we can’t just be authors right now. We also have to be visible brands: easily digestible with certain catch-phrases and identity captures.

I thought I’d write books. I never wanted to be seen. But cue the pandemic and cue my rude awakening that to be an author who makes a living means constantly negotiating social media’s algorithmic enticement that we self-cannibalize our lives and our worst experiences in real time, updating our audience before we’ve done the tricky, unglamorous work of actually processing these things. Or not processing them….just merely surviving.

I’ve done quite a bit of narrating my own survival. There may come a time when it feels necessary. And I do think it comes from the isolation of illness, especially my own during the early pandemic. This writing turned into a memoir that attempted to encapsulate what it means to keep surviving with illness that doesn’t easily resolve. That meant really putting myself – my story and my body – front facing. Something I’d never put on the bingo card of my life as a writer. And it was really difficult. Incredible connections were made but I also noticed that it correlated with a steep decline in my personal mental and physical well-being. In the past year I have decided that I don’t want to narrate my bodily decline or struggles for an audience. I’m living it. And it’s hard enough that way. I don’t want to pray to a certain story about what is happening to my body and prematurely limit what physical ease and miraculous changes are possible. I have always, most of all, wanted to be a writer of epic stories – rich ecologies of relationship – not a narrator of personal calamity.

There is always an excuse not to write. And, then there are always ample reasons to write my life as a catastrophe.

I want to write it as a love story that acts like a pitcher plant, hosting other species of love story. Make my body and life the soil that grows love stories, not tragic monologues.

My one personal health update for the past six months and the next six months: the body is not good and complicated and exhausting and expensive. Just because I’m not writing about my health, does not mean it is going well. It is…going and going. I guess the continuance is a miracle in and of itself?

Yes, there is wild fire smoke and pain all around. And there is also so much love. So much joy made brighter by the anguished times from which it emerges improbably. As Tolkien writes so eloquently:

“…joy which produces tears because it is qualitatively so like sorrow, because it comes from those places where Joy and Sorrow are at one, reconciled, as selfishness and altruism are lost in Love.”

Joy polished by tears to brightness. That is the flavor of this summer for me.

What I most want to share with all of you who very practically keep me alive are the nodes of love in my romantic ecology this summer.

Read more

I am so thrilled to share the cover and pre-order link for my upcoming collection of ecological poetry forthcoming March 23rd, 2027 from Running Press. You can order online from any bookseller and from any bookstore (yay indies!) you love to support. I am also so honored to share that Willow Defebaugh - a writer whose ecological wisdom I cherish and deeply admire - has written a forward to these poetic spores, seedlings, and sprouts.

For fans of Ada Limón and Kate Baer, Make Me Good Soil is a luminous, intimate new poetry collection from celebrated author Sophie Strand that explores personal love, loss, trauma healing, and illness through the lens of interspecies connection.

Sophie Strand’s poetry is attuned to the too-often ignored truth that human beings are not self-contained, and are rather sustained by vast, living networks beyond their physical selves. Writing through this lens of attention, Strand traces the threads between language and the ecosystems that sustain it, opening poetry itself into a multi-voiced chorus.

Tender yet unflinching, immersive and visionary, Make Me Good Soil invites readers into this interspecies conversation. In an age of increasing isolation and decreasing access to nature, Strand reclaims poetry as a symbiotic exchange—one that nurtures collective connection, shared responsibility, and the possibility of flourishing.

Make Me Good Soil is comprised of 115 poems both brand-new and already beloved by readers, with a foreword from Willow Defebaugh, co-founder and editor-in-chief of the award-winning climate and culture magazine Atmos.

You can pre-order here

“Sometimes the only true thing is a poem. In this luminous collection, Sophie Strand’s uncommon genius takes root in the soil of the body. It is love song to Mother Earth, lament for the ravages of illness, equal homage to science and magic. I read this book like an oracle. I am setting my compass by Sophie’s star.” Mirabai Starr, author of Wild Mercy and Ordinary Mysticism

“Strand, like Dickinson, leads us in verse back to the original cathedral—the holiest, forgotten place, somewhere between earth and the dark matter of our own miraculous embodiment.” Meggan Watterson, The Wall Street Journal bestselling author of Mary Magdalene Revealed

“Strand’s work feels like standing in a high place above a dramatic vista, feeling the awe of nature rising up like a tide to meet you; yet, there is a quality of sacredness and intimacy in her voice, nudging us with earnest emotion to look out on that huge and sweeping landscape below.” Jarod K. Anderson, poet, novelist, and author of Something in the Woods Loves You

Thank you so much to the Hudson Valley that grew my body and the body that wrote these poems. Thank you to my incredible agent Kara Rota and the team at Thompson Literary Agency and to the astute and generous editorial support of Kate Anderson and Julianna Holshue (and the whole team of support!) at Running Press. Pre-orders really help authors prove to their publishers that they are worth an investment of publicity and support. I will also be selling signed copies through The Golden Notebook in Woodstock and announcing a big book party as we get closer to the release!

Imagine you are sitting in front of a psychic at a summer fair. Her tarot cards are sun-faded and finger-smudged such that only she can decode their symbols. She asks you to pick three and lay them face up.

“Ah. A choice.” She cants her chin, eyes squinting not at the cards but at the noon sun itself, warming both your heads; you can imagine it kindling your spines to wicks, lighting your bodies like candles.

You study the cards. On one a throne. On the next a sword. On the last a heart.

“What do you want most? Power over all. Domination over all. The intellect and status to force all others to your will.” She presses her thumb to the throne and then slowly moves onto the sword. “Or perhaps you would like to be the strongest and most lethal? A warrior able to cut down any enemy and strike fear into the hearts of all?”

You say nothing.

She finally plucks the heart. “Or love. Beauty and love. You will not gain power over others. In fact, you will be powerless before your lover, before the pull of your own heart towards another.”

The wildfire haze burns your throat. The heat strains your veins trying to pump blood from your feet to your head.

Do you want to be a tyrant? A warrior? Or a lover?

“Love.” It’s the only answer when the world is burning.

In the famous ethical thought experiment of the trolly problem that demands you choose between saving one life or many lives, the answer I’ve always desired is the complete refusal of a binaristic dilemma. When faced with two tragedies, I think we must imagine and choose a third rail, a third way.

Between violence and domination there is another road: the lover’s foot path where we must walk with our own two feet, depending on no horse or manpower to accelerate our progress.

The answer seems clear to me which is why it has always perplexed me that Paris, prince of Troy, is painted as frivolous when he forgoes Athena and Hera’s promises of domination and violent power to choose Aphrodite’s promise of love.

If you ask a contemporary schoolchild who the hero of the Iliad is they will usually give you one of the Greeks who ultimately stormed Troy raping women and throwing babies from the walls: Achilles, Ajax, the cunning Odysseus. When identifying a villain, Paris is often summoned as the instigator of the violent conflict. The interloper. The coward. The adulterer.

As a woman, it is to my benefit to read stories cynically. Is this a hero? Or an abusive man creating a narrative to justify his bad behavior? Is that a monstrous villain or is it really the snake goddess of the earth-centered egalitarian society you just decimated? Myths are very often rewrites of older stories, retold to serve as a violent victor’s propaganda.

And lest we forget history does not come to us unbiased. Luke Kemp, senior research associate at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge explains in his excellent analysis of societal collapse Goliath’s Curse that history is almost always written by the one percent. History tells us domination is necessary, cities are nodes of cosmopolitan creativity, bigger is better, and collapse is bad. But just as we must question whether Medusa is monster or an old subjugated mother goddess, so must we question the conflation of civilization with hierarchy and domination. Kemp draws attention to these largely invisible biases with another interesting observation that bronze was mainly used for ornamentation and weaponry only afforded to the very wealthy. Calling the Bronze Age the Bronze Age is a subtle wink to the bias of historical accounts both archeological and anthropological that prizes the 1 percent’s well-being over the 99 percents. Bronze lasts. Leather and grass and wood decay. We are interested in the funeral hordes of bronze weapons and jewelry, the huge monuments, and the individuals who gained enough power over others to leave their material stamp on the geological record. Kemp tells us mostly, for millennia, it was the Wood Age. For most of human history, 99 percent of people have been along some continuum of peasant, farmer, and hunter gatherer, not the bronze-weapon wielding minority amassing wealth and prestige, leaving behind funerary monuments and stone stele.

When I look at the Iliad I see a trolley problem. There is no good choice between the Trojans and the Achaeans (The Greeks). Hector and Achilles alike always choose the gifts of Hera and Athena, ready to sacrifice the NPC peasant populus to defend their prestige and place on the pinnacle of a hierarchy. The end of the Bronze Age was characterized by highly stratified city-states and the movements from egalitarian earth-reverent cultures to dominator cultures (see Riane Eisler’s case study of this in The Chalice and The Blade). We see a rise in mass casualty events, human sacrifice, infectious disease, patriarchy, and corvee labor. Both the Trojans and the Greeks alike are tied into a game of violence, resource accumulation, and status jockeying where only the one percent ever have a chance of winning although the chess pieces they use are the disposable 99 percent.

And then comes Paris. A son of Troy – a son of domination – who is paradoxically not raised in the city as a prince. As a lover of medieval romances and the troubadours, I always saw Paris as an early proto-hero of the romantic tradition, on a direct rhizomatic continuity with other interloping lovers like Tristan and Lancelot. But looking into the mist behind Paris I saw something older and even more dangerous.

I saw the gods of vegetation and social upheaval who, like Paris, always arrive as a newcomer to a city, ready to topple dominant paradigms with their seductive appeal, empowering women and slaves alike to don animal skins and revolt. I am speaking of Dionysus who when he arrives is the epitome of the interloping and empire-toppling lover except that the Helen he steals is not a single woman, but the entire population of women and other marginalized communities.

Paris, a son of Troy, is a Trojan Horse for a way of life already quickly disappearing towards the end of the Bronze Age: nature-reverent, animist egalitarianism. Populaces who still had a strong “counter dominance intuition”, choosing to walk away from cities and situations that demanded their subjugation. We see countless examples of this counter dominance intuition across the archeological record. People, time and time again, choose to experiment with dominance and social stratification and then quickly shrug it off when it impacts their well-being.

Given the past two thousand years of empire and domination and highly biased historical accounts, it is easy to forget that for most of human existence, we have been choosing love and beauty and leisure, creating social structures that ridicule and ostracize those who try to hoard resources or create dominance systems.

We have walked away from cities leaving them as ghostly warnings to those who seek to gain power over each other and over the earth. Unlike Troy, many of these examples are quiet and without violet collapse. The archeological record suggests that people actually just got up and walked back into the fields and forests and mountains.

Paris, although he is born to Troy’s King Priam, comes with a foreboding prediction that he will cause the downfall of his home city. Priam is instructed to kill the infant but cannot bring himself to carry out the murder of his son, refusing the trolley problem of saving one child or saving an entire city, choosing instead to gift the decision to the shepherd Agelaus. In some accounts, the infant Paris is left exposed on Mount Ida where he is found and suckled by a mother bear.

Paris the prince is not suckled at patriarchy but by the very symbol of wildness itself: the bear. The enemy of the city and its system of domination is suckled at the teat of the wilderness and claimed by the animals. And it will be another animal long associated with Dionysus and vegetation gods that Paris will love so much that he follows it back into Troy: the bull.

Paris is not raised in a city but on a mountain long believed to be a holy spot for the earth goddess. He is raised as a shepherd, tending to animals and attuned to the give and take of nature’s cycles. As is often the case in stories about prophecy, Priam ensures the prophecy’s outcome by trying to outsmart it. When he sends baby Paris out of Troy, he ensures that the boy will become a Trojan Horse for bears, bulls, mother goddess, mountains, and love itself.

The real Trojan Horse is not a wooden instrument designed by the cunning Odysseus.

The real Trojan Horse is Paris. And he enters Troy long before war begins. He is not carrying warriors inside of him. He is carrying that anarchic counter dominance intuition that wants us walk away from systems of oppression and fortified cities, returning to nature reverence and collective effervescence.

There are no warriors inside of Paris. There are lovers.

Subscribe now

Share

This is the eighth installment in my ongoing series Confessions of a Romantic Animist.

I want to reclaim romance as a celebration that includes the entire earth. I want to throw another party. A love party. And I want to invite you along.

I’m going to take the same approach to love stories as I took to myths of the masculine in The Flowering Wand. I will reroot, rewild, and retell classical love stories within an ecological framework. I’m also going to write about my fascination with contemporary romance, animal courtship rituals, and fantasy. I have questions about how romance is a powerful tool in combatting and dismantling empire and I’m going to think and write through them in real time in conversation with you.

Most of the essays in this series will be offered for free. I want to think and love and dance with you. But alongside this series on courtship, ecology, fantasy, and eros, I’m also going to offer reading lists and excerpts for of my upcoming fantasy series: one inspired by Joan of Arc and the other a queer retelling of Tristan & Isolde for my paid subscribers as well as occasional personal essays on romance.

Thank you to for asking me to offer some writing advice to the young writers she is teaching at Interlochen this summer. Kate’s own writing advice often nudges me out of a rut. Her book Word Witch is a fantastic writer’s companion that I have turned to often since it came out!

Writing Advice for Young Writers

The best writing advice is to read. Read as much as possible. And read omnivorously. Literature. Mystery. Paperbacks. Substacks. Fan fiction. Romantic fantasy. Non-fiction. Memoirs. Biography. Scientific papers. Manga. Self-help. Follow your curiosities. Flip to the back of a book and read the acknowledgements and bibliography and find breadcrumbs to follow to your next author, your next book. Becoming a writer is learning slowly what, for you, constitutes good writing. When I say good I do not mean some highly polished and well applauded spare piece of literary fiction. What narratives compel you? What is good is what is delicious, what you want to eat. What you want to keep ordering off the menu. What sentences halt your breath, stain phosphines into your retina that remain long after you have read the final page? What stays with you? Like learning a sport or a physical craft, much of learning how to write is mystical and sub-perceptual: a slowly strengthened muscle memory and sonic intuition for that hard to define confluence of rhythmicity, texture, and theme that creates the roaring current of a propulsive book. Or the spiderweb strung with dew indefinable scaffolding of an effective poem.

Then, when you have read widely, you must also imitate and symbiotically fuse genres and styles. You must make mistakes. It is through this messy interplay of reading and writing in response to other authors that we can begin to pick out one voice among the polyphony: our own voice. It may arise from mentors and favorite poets and musicians. It may be tinged and inflected with birdsong and the echoes that live in limestone-sculpted landscapes. But it will be yours because when you close all the books at the end of a day of reading, it will be the one still singing.

As I continue my series Confessions of a Romantic Animist, I’m offering a Part II of my Reading List for paid subscribers! Upcoming essays will feature Trojan Horses, Troubadours, Love Potions, Romeo and Juliet, writing the character of Yeshua in The Madonna Secret, and the Song of Songs.

Subscribe now

Share

Romantic Animist Reading List Part 2

Read more

It was a banner year for daylilies, and they gilded the bottom of every early summer scene like some magical fire that stoked passion and beauty without ever reducing the world to ash. Black bears and foxes emerged from between the multiflora bushes that exuded scents so delicate they seemed like molecular poetry stitched in care and sacred syntax into the air by some invisible poet. Civil dusk – that blue summer hour after the sunset where the shadows disappear but every tree seems to glow like a lantern still burning with a wick of daylight – stretched and stretched past its regular hour.

Summer was brighter, bolder. And every encounter yielded surprising connections, laughter, and opportunities. An 18^th century farmhouse sitting on my favorite mountain stream was somehow available for rent for the laughably small amount that I could afford. A ghost-writing gig landed in my lap the day I began to worry about money. And then another. The flea market vendor had the pair of perfectly worn in Levi’s that had been tailored by some earlier owner to my exact dimensions. And when I slipped them on and felt them cinch me into my own skin, my precise shape, I felt like those Levis were a metaphor for my experience: everything felt lucky, tailored to my exact dimensions and desires.

Only six months prior I had been cycling in and out of anaphylaxis, spinal issues, cascading nutrient deficiencies, and mysterious kidney injuries fueled by autoimmunity. Recently diagnosed with Ehlers Danlos after years of degenerating health, I was facing a laundry lists of issues and symptoms I was supposed to prepare for if I didn’t already experience them. I’d graduated college and been too sick to continue into grad school. While my peers moved to cities and higher education, I’d moved back in with my parent’s knowing full well that this might be the final move of my life.

How did I end up in one the most charmed summers of my life only months later?

There are several different answers and they are all equally true. One is that I managed to survive and climb out of a moment that seemed dire by sheer force of will. Another is that I remembered my love of writing stories and started writing The Madonna Secret, letting the erotic energy of creation kindle me into resilience.

But as someone who struggles with ongoing health issues and autoimmunity, I am very curious about the brief moments in my life where I have experienced something not exactly like remission but close to a radical diminishment in symptoms and increased physical vitality. What allowed these moments to happen? They almost never correlate to a new treatment or conscious lifestyle change.

No. The moments my autoimmunity has briefly stood down have correlated very precisely with the moments when I have fallen in love.

I’m not talking about crushes or brief intimacies. I’m speaking of those rare moments in a human lifetime when you grow wings on your feet and suddenly you can hover just a bit above the grit of daily life, gliding where you might otherwise drag or stumble.

When I actually look at the facts of that summer, it was not at all charmed. I was very poor, shouldering massive medical and student loan debt, recently graduated, stringing together freelance gigs and beginning what would become a near decade long process of trying to launch a career as a writer under my own name. I was seven years deep into declining health with only a handful of safe foods and had recently been told all the ways I should prepare to fall apart by the specialists of my condition. I was struggling navigating this complexity with my young able-bodied friends, feeling increasingly isolated in upstate New York years before the influx of young people and creatives during Covid.

And yet, somehow none of this mattered. I could dodge every obstacle without a thought. I felt lucky…which in a sense made me more available to lucky circumstances. This is a phenomenon I’ve been curious about my whole life. I am luckiest when I think I’m luckiest. I can’t game it.

I am luckiest, I am shiniest, I am most generous with others, most expansive and charitable, when I believe I am luckiest. And I believe I am lucky when I am in love.

We’ve all seen and experienced this in our own lives. We run into a friend and she seems cast in rosy light, bubbling, suddenly wittier. We are not surprised when we hear her news.

There is someone. And there is something with this someone. There is reciprocal passion. There is a big confidence vote from the universe that things can work out. That someone wants to return our loving gaze with their loving gaze. I believe that moment when two loving gazes intersect is an an ecotone of miracles, the shoreline of interfacing otherness where a third term emerges: the trinitarian quality of new love is that it briefly produces a child of good luck that can benefit anyone – even casual bystanders - in its wake.

I was a more thoughtful, more patient friend during this period. A happier, more enjoyable daughter and sister. And my immune system was convinced by the placebo effect of so much lightness, so much trust in the universe, that it performed a magic trick of calming down, reducing my inflammation and briefly delivering me a moment of improved health.

Most importantly my love spilled over from my human lover into the Hudson Valley: the salamanders and chanterelles, the daylilies and bears, the goldfinches and bluestone mountains. I was a better lover of my wider ecology. And although that human lover is now gone, that wider, ecological love put down roots and leafed and branched and overtook my entire life.

Three years ago, I did not feel lucky. I was forced during one of the most severe moments of intersecting health crises to move twice in six months. My eyesight had degraded such that I could hardly see. I was covered in rashes and could hardly eat, developing a laundry list of weird ailments only Victorian consumptives could usually boast of (scurvy and severe mercury poisoning). And amidst this a random scan revealed masses in my lung that doctors initially thought might be cancer.

I was also four years out of the collapse of my long-term relationship that had lasted through my twenties, four years deep into increasingly depressing dating and extended situationships that laughed at my earlier faith in romance.

But I remember sitting in my new house, surrounded by unpacked boxes and medical bills, thinking about how bitter I felt and how that bitterness made me meaner, stricter, and less gracious with friends, family, and strangers. The more cursed I felt, the more cursed I became. And with the news that we couldn’t biopsy my lungs given my poor health and that I would have to live with constant scans and uncertainty for the next year, I realized I had to change something.

I needed to find my faith in the universe again and wake up that daylily fire in my heart. But I knew that I couldn’t wait for the slot machine of the universe to deliver me a win.

I had to make my own good luck. As spring turned into summer and my new rental flooded, partially destroying my library, as my kidneys glitched in and out of dysfunction, as wildfire smoke thickened the air, I started to ask myself this question.

Would this feel difficult if I was in love? How easily would I slide through this if I was in love? How much more patient would I be with my parents, my friends, my brother, if I felt like I was carrying a lit fire of love within me?

What would a love fool do? They would sing. They would find an escape hatch out of a tight spot. They would unfurl a picnic blanket and invite the entire neighborhood.

The question didn’t deliver me to a lover. But it opened a door. And it literally had me opening the door to my new home, stepping out onto my oak-tree shaded porch, noticing the pair of mated red-tail hawks that lived in my new backyard, noticing the fawn a mother deer took to leaving in the barberry buses near the woods, making me feel proud that I had in some way been designated as the good vibe, hands off babysitter for her child.

Bears arrived. Coyotes and foxes streaked in front of me. The more I tried to cultivate what I was calling “honeymoon mind”, the more nourishment seemed available from the world. And as I drank in rainbows and dove song, creek swims and monarch butterflies, I started to feel something emerge that had deeper foundations than the surface storm of human love.

I wanted to orient towards life as my widest, most expansive, luckiest self. I wanted to be a safe place for a deer to trust her fawn. For the birds to roots. I wanted to orient into life as a love fool. I started to understand that Honeymoon Mind was not something that happened to you, gifted through external intervention. It was an active and embodied choice. It was a way of orienting into my life to find the downhill, the compassionate gradient that pulled me toward community and creativity.

Honeymoon mind has not diminished the difficulty of living with chronic and incurable illness. It has not delivered me to a partner or a family.

What it has done is relaxed my fist so that my hands fall open to catch feathers, raindrops, paws, leaves, flower petals, other hands.

Falling in love doesn’t depend on another person or a healthy body or a perfect scenario. Falling in love is a lens - a mode of interpretation. It is a way of orienting towards circumstances that feel tragic and confining. When you can’t change the facts, it helps sometimes to be a fool who doesn’t know that failure is an option. When you turn towards the world with love, it always sends back song and fragrance and invitations to wider more-than-human community.

Subscribe now

This is the seventh installment in my ongoing series Confessions of a Romantic Animist.

I want to reclaim romance as a celebration that includes the entire earth. I want to throw another party. A love party. And I want to invite you along.

I’m going to take the same approach to love stories as I took to myths of the masculine in The Flowering Wand. I will reroot, rewild, and retell classical love stories within an ecological framework. I’m also going to write about my fascination with contemporary romance, animal courtship rituals, and fantasy. I have questions about how romance is a powerful tool in combatting and dismantling empire and I’m going to think and write through them in real time in conversation with you.

Most of the essays in this series will be offered for free. I want to think and love and dance with you. But alongside this series on courtship, ecology, fantasy, and eros, I’m also going to offer reading lists and excerpts for of my upcoming fantasy series: one inspired by Joan of Arc and the other a queer retelling of Tristan & Isolde for my paid subscribers as well as occasional personal essays on romance.

A continuation of my series of Paris pieces for Confessions of a Romantic Animist.

The mountain stream knows his body as well as a lover. At least he would assume the silken slip and delighted caress of the current tracing the sinews of his long legs and muscled arms might be like the physical fluency between lovers.

Paris sighs. Not that he really knows. Although all Paris thinks of is love, the closest he has come to it is in his dreams.

Dreams of a woman with golden-red skin and chestnut hair waving down her back almost to her feet, supple and polished as if she had been fashioned from hammered bronze. He can see her lips always hovering on the edge of an unspoken word, the lower fuller than the top giving her an exaggerated pout. Her wide eyes are the frosted blue of juniper berries. And with the dream always comes a scent. Peonies. Like those that flower in early spring around the lower girth of Mount Ida.

“Where are you?” he whispers now, unable to hear his own voice over the babble of the stream, the papery rustle of leaves played by a late day breeze.

Above Paris the sun has sunk below the tree line; the blue-sky purples as if below its pellucid skin starry capillaries are flooding with wine.

It was a long day taking the cows out to the furthest pasture, helping to process the first summer grain harvest with the local boys, and then helping his father Agelaus repair a crumbling boundary wall. The stream kneads the sore muscles of his shoulders as he relaxes back in the shallows, fitting himself between two large, submerged stones.

His eyes flutter shut, and he sees another pair of eyes blinking at him, glossy and dark. He feels fur against his cheek, remembers the soft nuzzle of some giant being, the soil-dark warm of her body sheltering him.

Mother, Paris thinks. Although Agelaus says his mother died in childbirth, Paris has memories of being suckled and held, protected and nourished - but not by a human woman. No, he remembers her on all fours, furred and glossy-obsidian, scent like a lightning-strike, wet nose pressed to his forehead.

He remembers her as an animal.

“Look there! Him!” a bright, high voice dances across the water like a skipped stone. Paris sits up abruptly, shaking out his wet hair, peering around for its source.

“He’s quite pretty, isn’t he?”

The voice, lower than the first, belongs to a tall blonde girl wearing a simple linen sheath that hangs from her muscular shoulders like a sail from a mast. She is standing downstream, ankle-deep in the water, flanked by two other girls – one buxom and red-headed, a smirk across her heart-shaped face, the other slender and dark-skinned with eyes as shrewd and green as the first narcissus leaves slipping from snowmelt in early spring.

They are too beautiful, too obviously refined, to be village girls. Paris has never seen them before. The green-eyed beauty is wearing gold cuffs up her arms. The redhead wears a long strand of pink pearls over her sheath.

They are wealthy and confident. Daughters of Troy, he thinks. They must be wandering outside the city to celebrate the spring beauty.

He rises, suddenly embarrassed that all he is wearing is his loincloth, running a hand through his disordered curls. “Forgive me, I did not mean to interrupt your bathing.”

“And he’s polite, too.” The blonde woman smiles, sapphire blue eyes glinting with approval. “Are you the son of Agelaus?”

“Yes….” Paris is confused. How do they know his father. “Did he send you? Does he need me?”

“Come here…” The redhead crooks a finger, giggling. “Let us get a better look at you.”

As if he had been hooked like a fish, Paris feels himself walking forward, the stream’s current pushing against his calves. He reaches them quickly. The blonde woman walks to his side, and he surprised to find her taller than him. He’s the tallest boy for miles, easily a head taller than his own father, so it’s strange to find this beautiful woman forces him to look up.

“Come share our picnic? We walked through your father’s pasture, and he was kind enough to point us toward this stream to bathe.”

Spread out on the opposite shore are baskets and long bolt of red cloth. He follows the girls across the water and sits with them, watching as they pull out a wineskin, apricots, a jar of honey, honeycomb, grapes, and a loaf of dark-brown bread speckled with seeds. They have brought wooden cups they fill with the yellow wine and soon they are all drunk with laughter and honey and the small moments of contact where they brush limbs, passing along the small lump of hard cheese and a silver knife, reaching for the wineskin that never seems to empty. Paris lets the redhead feed him a piece of bread dripping honey, entranced by her long golden eyelashes and soft, creamy arms. He’s so entranced he doesn’t seem to notice that dusk stretches and stretches, and the shadows have paused.

The dark-skinned girl produces a peacock feather from one of the baskets and begins to tease Paris, tracing his face with it, tickling his nose until he sneezes, giggling when he attempts to pluck it from her grasp.

“Tell us Paris. Which of us is the most beautiful?” the blonde girl asks suddenly, her voice throaty and sleepy. She’s pressing her cup to her lips, her blue eyes hooded as she gazes at Paris.

Paris is young. But he is not stupid. He looks between the girls and knows that there is no choosing. It would be like comparing the fluted-elegance of lilies to the foaming reds of the many-petaled roses. The blonde is statuesque and elegant. The dark-skinned, green-eyed woman is sleek and sensual as a river given female form. The redhead reminds him of the peonies he so loves….indulgent, petal after profligate petal.

“I’ll not answer that. I’d prefer to keep my head…” he laughs, pointing at the long knife the riverine girl is using to slice up an apple. She flicks it at him playfully.

The girls exchange knowing glances.

“Alright…” the blonde leans back on her arms, chin tucked into her neck. “Let’s think of another game then.”

“Are you sure?” the redhead purrs, accepting a slice of apple. “Do we really need more games when we have such delightful company?”

“Yes.” The dark-skinned girl sits up straight, using one hand to arrange the crescent apple slices into a circle. Then, slowly, she picks up one and offers it to Paris. “Paris, I will offer you the chance to rule the world. To be a king of all lands.”

He frowns, confused by this statement.

The blonde plucks up another apple slice and holds it out on her palm. “A king is a symbol. Wouldn’t you rather be the most powerful and skilled warrior? A true hero remembered for generations? You would win every battle and strike fear into the hearts of all your enemies.”

Unlike her friends, the redhead is not smiling. She looks faintly concerned. She studies Paris hard, red lips pressed together in a line. After a long pause, she finally reaches and picks up an apple slice, pinching it between her fingers and holding it up against the periwinkle sky.

“Paris. I offer you the heart and love of the most beautiful woman in the world.”

He sees her suddenly. The dream girl. Her smiling eyes and curious mouth.

He doesn’t think. He reaches out and grabs the redhead’s apple slice.

“Love. I choose love.”

Francios Xavier Fabre

~~

It is many years later, an ocean away, that Paris remembers this moment as he descends from the ship into the busy port of Gytheio.

He never saw the girls again. And he never found the dream-girl. But so much has happened since then. Revelations of his noble birth, claimed by King Priam as a prince of Troy.

Is it terrible that he misses those simple days in the fields, those long crepuscular swims in the mountain streams, drunk on pollen and sunlight?

He is following the envoy sent by Menelaus through the crush of bodies when he hears a bell-like laugh and glances over his shoulder and comes to a surprised stop.

There, years later and completely unaged, is the redheaded girl. Now she is dressed in deep red robes and her hair is caught up in a golden net atop her head.

“Paris!” she smiles and reaches into the folds of her robes, pulling out a golden-skinned apple. “Are you ready?”

Before he can respond she twirls away, disappearing between two merchants and their horses.

But later that night, arriving at the feast King Menelaus is hosting in his honor, Paris finally understands.

“Love. I choose love…” he murmurs as he watches the king’s wife enter the great hall.

Her chestnut curls wave around her face, her lips pout. But this time the word arrives, and he finally hears her voice: the whisper of a stream cutting through a mountain, a nightingale transcribing starlight with its song.

“It is an honor to meet a son of Troy….” She dips her head, the smell of peonies reaching down the table to where Paris is seated.

“Helen.” Menelaus speaks through a mouthful of meat, gesturing over his shoulder. “My wife.”

Not for long, Paris thinks, and he sends up a prayer to the redheaded girl with her golden apple. I choose her. I choose love.

Subscribe now

Share

This is the sixth installment in my ongoing series Confessions of a Romantic Animist.

I want to reclaim romance as a celebration that includes the entire earth. I want to throw another party. A love party. And I want to invite you along.

I’m going to take the same approach to love stories as I took to myths of the masculine in The Flowering Wand. I will reroot, rewild, and retell classical love stories within an ecological framework. I’m also going to write about my fascination with contemporary romance, animal courtship rituals, and fantasy. I have questions about how romance is a powerful tool in combatting and dismantling empire and I’m going to think and write through them in real time in conversation with you.

Most of the essays in this series will be offered for free. I want to think and love and dance with you. But alongside this series on courtship, ecology, fantasy, and eros, I’m also going to offer reading lists and excerpts for of my upcoming fantasy series: one inspired by Joan of Arc and the other a queer retelling of Tristan & Isolde for my paid subscribers as well as occasional personal essays on romance.

(detail from a photo by A. J Hamilton)

The Apples of Discord: Re-reading the Wedding of Thetis and Peleus

TW: assault. This is Part 1 in a series of essays rewilding the character of Paris for Confessions of a Romantic Animist.

A beautiful water nymph and a handsome King of Phthia are getting married. The wedding feast attendance is a who’s who of Mount Olympus. Zeus is flirting with all the bridesmaids while Hera fumes. A pair of giant immortal horses almost upset the wine jugs when Poseidon leads them into the celebration, presenting them to the bridegroom Peleus. Everyone has a present for the handsome king who is already deep in his cups, ruddy-faced, trying to keep pace with his divine in-laws. Aphrodite gives him a sly wink when she hands over a crystal bowl inscribed with the word Eros. Hephaestus gifts him a finely wrought knife. Athena has fashioned him a flute.

His new wife Thetis is pale, and she is not drunk. She has eaten nothing. She has said nothing. She sits back in the shadows below the olive trees, eyes eerily blank. No one gives her a gift until Zeus shoots up a bolt of lightning into the purple dusk to signal a pause. All the immortals and humans alike grow still and look towards Zeus.

“I would like to present a gift to this most….” Here the burly storm god leers, his eyes moving down the length of the young bride, hovering on her chest. “This most beautiful bride. A gift that befits her manifold charms.”

Thetis says nothing but her face visibly tightens.

“We are most honored.” Peleus slurs. “Most…most honored…”

Zeus waves a hand and out of thin air blooms two giant wings made of feathers that glisten opalescent, sending out a radiant multi-hued glow. A collective gasp travels the wedding revelers.

The Wedding of Peleus and Thetis by Joachim Wtewael

Only the bride Thetis is not transfixed by the stunning beauty of the wings. Instead, she is staring at the place where the wings should connect to a body. Frayed sinew and bone poke through. Below the wings a puddle of oily blood forms.

“I have conquered Arke, that loathsome Titan sister of Rainbows. I have punished her and have brought you her wings. They will suit you better than that hag,” Zeus booms.

The collective applause drowns out the screams.

Thetis has slid from her bench and is hunched over her knees. She is clawing her face, screaming and screaming. It is only now that you can see the slight swell of her belly under her silken sheath. The bride is already pregnant.

“No…No….no!”

At first it sounds as if her screaming has cleaved in two, two sonic snakes twisting above and below the guests. But as Thetis falls silent, the second scream differentiates from beyond the trees that circle the wedding feast.

“How dare you! How dare you not invite me!”

The speaker is invisible although her piercing scream is heard by all.

And then something appears. The golden orb momentarily suspended in the sky, doubles the full moon: two lunar eyes glaring down upon the shocked revelers.

Aphrodite who was the only one other than Thetis to hold her applause at the appearance of the bloody wings seizes the moment to run forward, easily plucking the apple from its fall. But she is quickly flanked by Hera and Athena.

“Damned Eris!” Zeus is fuming, obviously ready to stalk through the forest to punish the goddess of discord.

“I said that you should invite her….” Aphrodite murmurs sweetly as she turns the apple over in her hand.

“What does it say?” Hera prompts.

Aphrodite tosses one of her long red braids over her graceful shoulder, grinning as she holds the golden fruit out for all to see.

“Kallisti! To the fairest!”

~~

Thetis trying to escape capture.

The Wedding of Peleus and Thetis is a footnote to the event that many argue is the origin of the Trojan War and its many tragedies. The goddess of discord Eris - a goddess of misty origins whose first divine role seems to occur in the legends surrounding the Iliad - is the only divinity consciously excluded from the wedding festivities. The daughter of Nyx (night) is angered and seeks retribution by throwing discord right into the middle of the celebrations in the form of a divine trap: an apple addressed to the fairest goddess. Athena, Hera, and Aphrodite all assume this title belongs to them and to settle the dispute Zeus seeks a mortal prince of Troy. The young prince who at the time still believes himself a humble shepherd chooses Aphrodite and her offer of the love of the most beautiful woman. And so begins the cascade of events that will lead to Prince Paris stealing Helen from Menelaus, the fall of Troy, and the death of thousands.

The fault lies with Eris. The fault lies with Paris. The capricious goddess who adds fuel to the fire is vain Aphrodite.

But I want to offer that the origins of the Trojan War merits a much closer reading. Wherever we encounter easy heroes and villains, seductresses and pliant virgins, it is important to remember that every story – even epic stories with mythical and historical claims - is a story written by an author with a bias. A story of a violent hero is expertly constructed to render a victorious murderer a hero, justifying his actions while demonizing his victim’s behaviors.

The Iliad begins with the wrath of Achilles, son of Thetis. Is Achilles really our hero? Is Paris really our villain? Is Eris really the bad-fairy Maleficent she will morph into in Perrault’s Sleeping Beauty thousands of years later?

As masterful as the stories of the Trojan War are from Ovid to Catullus to Homer, they are still outgrowths of Greek and then Roman propaganda justifying the violence of men and the treatment of women as chattel. And the killing of children. But I’ll get to that in a later essay.

Let us follow the thread of wrath back up the umbilical cord to Achilles’ mother Thetis, the water nymph bride.

Across accounts, the most famous from Ovid and Catullus, we learn that Thetis was an extremely beautiful water nymph and that both Zeus and Poseidon lusted after her. There was the small issue that she was the subject of Prometheus’ prophecy that the son she bore would be powerful enough to overthrow his father, echoing the exact circumstances of Zeus’s own ascent to divine dominance when he overthrew the Titans and his father Cronus. Seeking to neutralize the fertile threat of the water nymph, unable to bed her but looking for someone else to act as their proxy, Poseidon and Zeus schemed to set the immortal nymph up with a mortal man.

The mortal man the two lecherous gods found was their worthy proxy indeed in that he came trailing a history of having killed his brother, killed a scorned lover, and forced a former wife to suicide. Peleus the bridegroom was a brother killer, a woman killer, and an accused rapist. So we should not be surprised that once the gods told him that Thetis was his to wed, he did little to secure her affections or win her consent.

Instead, he aggressively gives chase. Thetis is unwilling and evades capture by repeatedly changing shape into a fire, a serpent, twisting water, a lion, a bird. Finally, another male god Proteus intervenes and gives Peleus instructions on how to capture and rape a sea nymph:

“Son of Aeacus, you can have the lovemaking you’re after. All you have to do is wait until Thetis is relaxed, asleep in her stony cave. Then tie her up, unawares, with cords and tight bindings. Don’t be fooled by the hundred false shapes she makes, but hold her close whatever she is, until she resumes her original shape.’ When Proteus had said this, he hid his face in the sea and cast waves over his final words.” (Ovid)

Peleus succeeds in kidnapping, raping, and impregnating Thetis against her will. Then Zeus, happy that the prophecy has been neutralized and his dominance protected and acted out through Peleus as his sexual surrogate, sets up a wedding.

At this point we have to ask if we can really call this a wedding when the bride has been kidnapped and assaulted? It is a celebration of male violence and dominance.And to this celebration, the Eris, goddess of discord and the daughter of night, is explicitly barred entrance.

Discord is exiled from the wedding. But when we realize this isn’t really a wedding but the celebration of a rape and forced pregnancy, we wonder where the true discord really lives.

When Zeus gifts Thetis the wings of Arke, he is gifting her a trophy from his latest female torture victim and the message is clear.: “I may not have been able to personally rape you. But I own you. I can kill you and destroy you whenever I want. You think this is bad? It can get so much worse.”

If order is a rape dressed up as a wedding is that really the order you seek and the party you want to attend? I think I’d rather be out in the orchards of disorder and discord with Eris. Order is a slippery word often assumed to be a universal: but the conception of the harmonious operation of society is quite often a term that masks hierarchical power paradigms and classifies anything that threatens them as “disorderly”.

Luke Kemp in his fantastic book Goliath’s Curse: The History and Shape of Societal Collapse works through dozens of case examples where the “collapse” of a city or a civilization is enshrined as a negative event by the surviving elite in narrative but that these early collapses are almost always followed by a period where archeological evidence shows common people growing taller, living longer with better teeth, bones, and nutritional profiles and less signs of both infectious disease and violence. We live in fear of collapse because that is what the richest and most powerful among us want us to fear. Zeus tells us not to invite Eris. And then he goes and orchestrates the rape of another sea nymph. But the truth is that moment when systems of orderly domination and hierarchy collapse, over a period of decades people tend to get taller and wilder and happier and healthier. People leave cities and nodes of infectious disease collapse. People walk away from systems that benefit the few while bleeding out the many.

Good stories are compelling. And so are stories that are built to covertly ensure our own submission to systems of oppression. All stories – good and bad alike - always bare the trace of an author’s bias and an author’s attempt to create justification for the system that most benefits them.

The origins of the Trojan war lie in the moment a water nymph is raped. It is little surprise that Thetis gives birth to a man who will slay many and will himself father a son renown for slaughtering children. At that wedding, the seeds of discord were not in Eris’s apple but in Thetis’s womb.

Hiding behind the hitjob on Aphrodite and Paris and Eris are two divine patriarchs seeking to protect their power while also raping a woman who might threaten their dominion.

And there is the rainbow goddess Arke bleeding out in Tartarus, her wings stolen by Zeus.

Rainbow stealers. Rapists. Abusers. Is this the order you want to protect? Are these really our heroes?

But there is an antidote hiding in this story. Behind the heroes and villains lurks a bear-suckled lover ready to serve love at all costs, ready to bring down the cities of men with wildness.

Eris winks at Aphrodite, clearly the fairest of them all, and whispers, “Isn’t discord the twin of passion?”

Eris. Eros. Paris.

Apple of Discord by Ruben

Resources:

Catullus 64

The Iliad

Book 11 of Ovid’s Metamorphosis

Goliath’s Curse by Luke Kemp

Share

Subscribe now

This is the fifth installment in my ongoing series Confessions of a Romantic Animist.

I want to reclaim romance as a celebration that includes the entire earth. I want to throw another party. A love party. And I want to invite you along.

I’m going to take the same approach to love stories as I took to myths of the masculine in The Flowering Wand. I will reroot, rewild, and retell classical love stories within an ecological framework. I’m also going to write about my fascination with contemporary romance, animal courtship rituals, and fantasy. I have questions about how romance is a powerful tool in combatting and dismantling empire and I’m going to think and write through them in real time in conversation with you.

Most of the essays in this series will be offered for free. I want to think and love and dance with you. But alongside this series on courtship, ecology, fantasy, and eros, I’m also going to offer reading lists and excerpts for of my upcoming fantasy series: one inspired by Joan of Arc and the other a queer retelling of Tristan & Isolde for my paid subscribers as well as occasional personal essays on romance.

I’ve had so much fun with Confessions of a Romantic Animist. As someone who was writing about illness for the past three years while getting increasingly sicker, I’ve found it remarkably liberating/nourishing to write mostly about love. If attention is a type of prayer (Simone Weil) then I’m putting my attention on romance. The main essays of this series will all be free, while the reading list and personal memoir pieces will be for paid subscribers. Upcoming essays will feature Eros and Aphrodite, Paris and Helen, Love Potions, Romeo and Juliet, writing the character of Yeshua in The Madonna Secret, and the Song of Songs. If you missed the first four parts of the series you can find them here and below is part 1 of my recommended reading list for a romantic animist:

Romantic Animist Recommended Reading Part 1

Part 1

Eros the Bittersweet by Anne Carson

Matter and Desire and Enlivenment by Andreas Weber

Dancing in the Streets by Barbara Ehrenreich

Read more

After falling into a cave and getting covered in a weird gooey substance, a young couple find themselves physically fusing together until in the final scene they completely merge, creating an androgynous holobiont. So goes the plot of Together, a 2025 body horror film that A.V. Club’s Brianna Zigler declared, “the greatest romance of the year, even if it’s also a film that happens to feature a motorized, saw-toothed blade slicing through mutated flesh. It takes more than gore to undermine the sensation of being so in love with someone that you want to get inside their skin”. The plot is intentionally campy and supernatural, featuring grotesque visuals and new age cults. But it’s themes of love as violent, symbiotic fusion while exaggerated are in no way novel or supernatural. Romance before it got its contemporary Hallmark makeover has always been dangerous enough that it should really be marketed with a black box warning: May cause bodily harm and dissolution of the self.

Watching Together’s couple contemplate suicide rather than undergoing the somehow even worse death of the self by complete bodily fusion, I was reminded of another romantic couple facing a similar substance-fueled compulsion to merge: Tristan and Isolde. “They who were two and divided became one and united. No longer were they at variance…They shared a single heart. The two were both one in joy and sorrow,” writes Gottfried von Strassburg in his 13^th century version of the Tristan and Isolde romance. The two lovers, initially divided by the sea and by conflicting loyalties, suspended in a boat between their warring countries, are alchemically fused by accidentally ingesting a love-potion. Across different versions of the legend, the lovers are not portrayed as practicing courtship or as falling in love. Instead, they are fused. Chemically bonded. And, afterwards, they are something stranger than a couple, functioning more like a single being, that for the sake of narrative tension, gets stretched and twisted only so that it can violently, dramatically, snap back into its original cohesion. “A man, a woman; a woman, a man. Tristan, Isolde; Isolde, Tristan,” Gottfried writes, suggesting that what has been created is not a romantic union, but a single, poly-gendered, multi-named entity.

When I think of Tristan and Isolde, I think of lichen. Albert Bernhard Frank coined the word symbiosis to describe the mutualism of fungi and algae that compose lichen. The relationship was initially looked at with consternation. Modern science, in particular Neo-Darwinism, articulated through the social stratification of Victorian England, couldn’t understand two unlike organisms collaborating, and even more so, living “inside” each other. It must be a conflict. But I am reminded of the wonderful quote by Ursula K. Le Guin: “Modernist manuals of writing often conflate story with conflict. This reductionism reflects a culture that inflates aggression and competition while cultivating ignorance of other behavioral options. No narrative of any complexity can be built on or reduced to a single element. Conflict is one kind of behavior. There are others, equally important in any human life, such as relating, finding, losing, bearing, discovering, parting, changing. Change is the universal aspect of all these sources of story. Story is something moving, something happening, something or somebody changing.”

Even today, scientific narratives are troubled by commensalisms and parasitisms – both included on the spectrum of symbiosis. Who is winning and who is losing? Who benefits who? How can quantify and measure this relationship? Recent studies have uncovered that lichen is even stranger than initially thought. Yeasts and other bacteria have been identified as members of the union. This isn’t a monogamous partnership. Perhaps it can’t really be called a partnership at all. Symbiosis means “becoming with”. Becoming-with is not a positive or negative attribute. It is a metamorphosis. It simply means to change. For me, symbiosis is the ultimate symbol of narrative propulsion. We collaborate, we merge, and we fuse, in order to keep telling the story be evolutionary or romantic. And the story, like lichen, is always wider and weirder and queerer than any of the single parts, or characters, that constitute it.

Gaia’s Garden by Linda Brunker

Recently I learned that certain compounds, including several of the life-saving antibiotics we depend upon today, can only be created and “learned” by lichenized algae and fungi. Lichenized partnerships aren’t permanent either. Fungi “learn” how to make these compounds and then later, separated from their symbiont, still remember how to produce them. Unruly collaborations create novel creative opportunities. When two narratives, seemingly opposed, interrupt each other, they can fuse into a new kind of story. One, that like lichen, can digest rock, liberate minerals, and create miraculous medicines. Or, like the romantic human lovers I began with, they fuse to create storytelling that intentionally confounds our expectations. Across retellings, Tristan “dies” multiple times. Tristan is Isolde, Isolde is Tristan. Isolde is impersonated by Bragnae. Tristan pretends to be a harpist called Tantrist. There are three different Isoldes in the earliest versions of the story. Love blurs and binds. It transforms. Everything is lichenized.

At the end of Tristan and Isolde the two lovers die and are buried side by side. Above their graves two plants intertwine. The fusion varies between versions but includes two willows, honeysuckle and hazel, vine and a rosebush, and two thorn bushes. Gottfried, writing in the 13^thcentury chose as his source text, the earlier Tristan of Thomas. The two romances overlap. But in an act that even more closely mirrors symbiosis, Gottfried died when 5/6ths of the way through the text, and the only surviving versions of Thomas represent the final 1/6th of the story. Together, the two versions, like the plants above the lovers’ graves have fused and braided. In order to receive the full narrative, they must be read together.

As I studied the Tristan myth in college, I was simultaneously encountering Lyn Margulis’s theory of symbiogenetic cell evolution. Around 542 million years single eukaryotic mitochondria and plastids started to collaborate. They fused together to create the first complex eukaryotic cells that provide the building blocks for our bodies, for plants and animals and fungi. Symbiogenesis paints a decidedly nonlinear picture of evolution. Instead of a straight arrow, biological ingenuity is created through transversal intimacies and unexpected alliances: species-melting fusions that couldn’t neatly be slotted into romantic seduction and partnership.

Scientists agree that extreme environmental pressure often acts a a symbiotic pressure cooker, forcing desperate organisms to depend on body-sharing as a survival tactic. Starving microbes half digest each other and ultimately create multicellular life. Just like the union of the lovers creates narrative propulsion, so did the union of eukaryotes create evolutionary propulsion.

The biological novelty that drives the unfolding aliveness of the biosphere depends on types of fusion that lay well outside our human concepts of safety or well-being. Philosopher Andreas Weber asserts that “Life has a tendency to transform all available resources into a meshwork of bodies”. This meshwork of bodies’ goal is aliveness of the whole, and not aliveness of the individual. An aliveness that “in its innermost core carries the plea that there be more life, not that I am fine. Putting the desire that there be life first might even provoke my own destruction.” To be alive is to be “enmeshed” in a “mess that must be constantly negotiated”.

A question I often ask myself when contemplating deep history, evolutionary biology, and extinction events, is: to what lengths will nature go when it wants to create something new?

Subscribe now

Share

This question is the engine inside my own updated fantasy retelling of Tristan & Isolde. What if the most creative edge of evolution was also the most grotesque?

Let me place us on a seashore that shifts like viridescent snakeskin and summon a decidedly non-human couple. The tidal pool’s green liveliness signals sun hunger. Convula roscoffensis, otherwise known as mint-sauce worm, is a phototropic being, no longer dependent on oxygen to live. The worm eats the sun through the photosynthesizing algae Platymonas that has infiltrated and stained its sheer flesh permanently green. The fusion of worm body and plant hunger so confounded the Englishman J. Keeble, who first identified them, that he dubbed the worms “plant-animals”.

Linda Brunker

What is happening between the worm and the algae? The algae live in the worm like an ecosystem, repurposing the uric acid produced as waste by the worm into their own nourishment, dying and lovemaking and community building all within the bounds of another body. These algae, then, leak their own photosynthetic nourishment into the body of the worm, allowing the worm to subsist on translated sunlight. So tightly coupled is this relationship that the worm’s mouths have atrophied and are no longer used following the hatching of the worm larva. The mouth, then, is a symbol for a more desperate time. The time before union. The time when the worm was just a worm, nothing else.

When do you like your body? “i like my body when it is with your / body. It is so quite new a thing. Muscles better and nerves more,” writes the poet E. E. Cummings. Many of us like our bodies best as hybrid. Body plus lover. Body plus baby. Body plus huge body of water. We forget that it is not the wings of the bird that allow for flight, but the bird plus the lifting air. Where does flight live? In the wings or the air? Or interstitially – between the two? Our bodies become pleasurable, become livable and lovable, not alone but through material interaction. Isn’t it strange, then, that the thing we fear most medically and personally is physical trespass? We fear the infection, the parasite, the physical breach. Body-plus is the calculus that allows for pleasure and flight and birth and digestion but it is also the opening into more ambiguous communions. Those with long term illness and with a legacy of trauma understand that hybridity is not something you order off the menu. It arrives and makes a home in your body. Suddenly you are more than you ever thought you could be, in ways both terrifying and curious.

Tristan and Isolde drink the love potion and are chemically woven into tragic union. But from their graves grow willows and honeysuckle and roses. From the dissolution of a single self sprouts the possibility of more flowers, more species, more life. And from their tragic fusion grows a story that has persisted through different languages and paradigms, constantly being retold. Just as the longest persisting species are built from symbiotic mergers, so are the hardies, most evolutionarily agile narratives created from symbiotic romances that prize syncretism (fusions of different cultural beliefs into a new whole) and taboo romance that defies cultural norms.

As species die out by the hundred every day, it is to these risky collaborations that we should turn. Symbiosis is always a decent survival tactic: species impinged by climatological pressures and scant resources try to eat each other, fail, and at some point, along the way, begin to co-become. The narrative is neither neat nor heart-warming. It is fraught and it often fails. But the other option is starvation and extinction. The singular species is a shipwreck. Symbiosis is always a risk. And so is real love. It comes with a physical cost: the shape you recognize. The familiar boundaries of your own mind.

Life is a process of addition. A concatenation of matter. Even our solitary selves must inhale air. Where does life live? In the air or in our lungs? In a time when safety has become the goal of psychology and political discourse, paired with the talismanic abstraction of boundaries, I want to offer that becoming new is never safe. Survival is never safe. And love is always a risk. Love is always a breach. A break in the skin. It is a leap across the abyss. It is the moment you leap into another body.

I am interested in the love stories that are irreversible. That stain me green. That atrophy my mouth. That teach me how to eat sunlight. I want love stories that scare me but teach me how to survive at all costs. Here world, let me burn the bridge to my old body on my way into your body. I am ready to risk new shapes.

Subscribe now

Share

This is the third installment in my ongoing series Confessions of a Romantic Animist. The next post will be a Romantic Animist Recommended Reading list for paid subscribers.

I want to reclaim romance as a celebration that includes the entire earth. I want to throw another party. A love party. And I want to invite you along.

I’m going to take the same approach to love stories as I took to myths of the masculine in The Flowering Wand. I will reroot, rewild, and retell classical love stories within an ecological framework. I’m also going to write about my fascination with contemporary romance, animal courtship rituals, and fantasy. I have questions about how romance is a powerful tool in combatting and dismantling empire and I’m going to think and write through them in real time in conversation with you.

Most of the essays in this series will be offered for free. I want to think and love and dance with you. But alongside this series on courtship, ecology, fantasy, and eros, I’m also going to offer excerpts for of my upcoming fantasy series: one inspired by Joan of Arc and the other a queer retelling of Tristan & Isolde for my paid subscribers as well as occasional personal essays on romance.

My favorite moment in a romance novel is when a protagonist grudgingly admits that their enemy or loathed rival is good-looking. Variations include mentioning that he/she smells like pine, leather, cedar, smoke…insert some other sensual aroma. In a romantic novel this admittance is a Checkov’s gun, bound to go off by the end of the narrative. By go off, I mean explode into mutual attraction that in the right writerly hands burns slowly, building tension, until a single available bed at an inn or a forced proximity scenario makes it impossible to deny their desire. Enemies brush hands and suddenly combust into lovers.

Just because I know the trope is coming doesn’t make it any less enjoyable. I, like many other readers, will go out of my way to pick books that promise an enemies-to-lovers arc. My personal favorite is the bate and switch drawn out excruciatingly over a series of books where the first lover turns out to have been a red herring (he’s usually blonde and this is its own tell that a love interest is not endgame) and then the formerly villainous character is revealed to be the secretly superior lover. I’ve found that the longer you can build the tension the more delicious the pay-off when your rivals finally drop their swords and leap into each other’s arms. Anne Carson argues in her meditation on Eros that this delay is what lovers and readers of love stories most enjoy, not its ultimate consummation. We desire desire itself, in all its grasping, unsatisfiable complexity. To bring lovers together too quickly without obstacles can run the risk of feeling cheap or unearned. If they could have kissed on the first page, then why are we reading? The “ruse” as Carson calls it, creates a block that keeps the lovers from being together or, in an enemies-to-lovers scenario, even admitting attraction.

In an age of Booktok and fanfiction, this trope has multiplied, evolving into many different subspecies including exes to lovers, off on the wrong foot, betrayal to second chance lovers, circumstantial enemies. It’s debatable what the first instance of an enemies-to-lovers romance is but many argue that it truly emerges as a trope in Jane Austen’s 1813 novel of manners Pride & Prejudice. While I love surly Darcy, I’d say that his offenses are rather trite to truly merit the classification of an enemy or villain. He is dismissive and rude. I’d say the beloved romance is better classified under the subtype “off on the wrong foot” whereby the characters have made assumptions about the other that slow down their unfolding courtship. My favorite version of this dynamic predates Pride & Prejudice, in the “skirmish of wit” between Beatrice and Benedick in Shakespeare’s comedy Much Ado About Nothing.

I love a good skirmish of wit. But I find that the greatest erotic payoff is earned in romances that lean hard into the “enemy” side of the trope’s equation. The more villainous and badly behaved the enemy is, the more surprising and satisfying it is when you realize he was covertly heroic and lovable. The most daring versions of this trope don’t give you a pretend-villain who turns out to have been playacting wickedness. Instead, they give you a true bad guy who through his love of the protagonist is reformed - or reformed enough to love and defend our protagonist’s honor.

In her book, All About Love bell hooks famously articulated love as a verb rather than as an object, stitching us into mutual care and transformation and truth-telling with another person. She writes, “The will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth… Love is as love does. Love is an act of will-namely, both an intention and an action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love.” Love is a conscious decision to mutually transform and evolve with another person. It is always, in some ways, a redemption arc, where within the alembic of another person’s care, we aspire to be our best selves. There’s an amazing self-improvement technology baked into having a crush. When we are attracted to someone and trying to convince them to be our lover, we perform our best selves. There can be a bit of deceit involved but in the best case this act of performance truly pulls us into a better version of ourselves. We playact goodness and then the performance becomes real. Key to this performance is the audience for whom it is constructed: the lover.

Nowhere is this dynamic more apparent than in the exaggerated circumstances of enemies-to-lovers. Antagonism blooms into affection. Anger is no match for sexual attraction. Or maybe it is the match that sparks dry wood into flames? When we burn, we transform. When we yearn, we are yearning for another person just as much as we are yearning for a better, kinder version of ourselves. Enemies-to-lovers also offers the generous possibility of rehabilitation and redemption. No one is cursed to permanent villainy. Yes, we can sin. We can screw up. We can live badly. But we can choose to let love change us. We can make amends. We can live differently. We can transform from villains into lovers.

As much as I enjoy human love stories, I love the ecological love stories that weave us into the forest stories, river stories, mountain stories, ocean stories that underpin the resilient dance of the biosphere even more. And lately I’ve been thinking of human beings as existing in the first chapter of a truly dark narrative with the Earth whereby we have cast ourselves as its enemy.

With our human exceptionalism fueling domination, extractive practices, genocide, and ecocide, it is easy to see our species as villainous. We are like the dark-haired shadow prince in a romantasy, engaging in debauchery and openly disregarding the wellbeing of his subjects. And in our most egotistical moments we cast the Earth as our adversary, positing escalating storms, droughts, viruses, and climatological shifts as being problems we must subdue and solve so that we can continue to assert our authority.

We are the villain. The enemy. If we continue along this narrative trajectory, we won’t end up in a romance. We will find ourselves doomed to tragedy.

I’d rather orient towards the future as romance. And in this conscious act of reimagination, I want to reimagine our villainous role in ongoing extinction and ecocide. What does it mean to be a villain in a romance? It means knowing you may secretly be the lover if you allow love to transform and redeem your character. What if we could fall back in love with the earth and let that love transform us? How can we enact the transformation that turns us back into lovers?

I want us to learn how to court and woo the ecologies that have generously offered us sustenance and gifts and flowers that we have long disregarded. How do we convince the world of our redemption arc? What kind of courtship and repair work is required to turn this tragedy into a romance? How do we, like bell hooks tells us, practice love as an act of nurturing the Earth, stepping into a more ethical and engaged versions of ourselves and our species?

I don’t have a definitive answer. I’m a storyteller so I’m biased towards narrative. I know that human beings love love stories. I think we need to write ecological love stories where the lovers wear human faces and names but are mouthpieces for rivers and butterflies and fungi. I want to write love stories that live inside this question, planting seeds and spores in the narrative soil, using slow burn “skirmishes of wit” to kindle us into romantic engagement with our ecologies.

I want Earth Enemies to turn into Earth Lovers.

Share

Subscribe now

This is the third installment in my ongoing series Confessions of a Romantic Animist.

I want to reclaim romance as a celebration that includes the entire earth. I want to throw another party. A love party. And I want to invite you along.

Over the next month or so I’m going to take the same approach to love stories as I took to myths of the masculine in The Flowering Wand. I will reroot, rewild, and retell classical love stories within an ecological framework. I’m also going to write about my fascination with contemporary romance, animal courtship rituals, and fantasy. I have questions about how romance is a powerful tool in combatting and dismantling empire and I’m going to think and write through them in real time in conversation with you.

All of the essays in this series will be offered for free. I want to think and love and dance with you. But alongside this series on courtship, ecology, fantasy, and eros, I’m also going to offer excerpts for of my upcoming fantasy series: one inspired by Joan of Arc and the other a queer retelling of Tristan & Isolde for my paid subscribers as well as occasional personal essays on romance.

“I will devour you, my natural food,

My host, my final supper on the earth,

And you’ll begin to die again.”

- Carolyn Kizer “The Food of Love”

In January of 2006 I travelled to the local cinema with my parents, my close friend, and her parents to see Kevin Reynold’s new historical drama based on the romance of Tristan and Isolde. I still remember the poster with its teen-girl target audience tagline: “Before Romeo and Juliet there was…” I was a twelve-year-old girl who regularly reread Romeo and Juliet. But I had never heard of Tristan and Isolde. From the opening credits (in Papyrus font no less) I was hooked. The movie starring the now notorious James France, while a fairly accurate representation of life and warfare in Dark Ages Britan, is no cinematic masterpiece. Perhaps its worst sin is the anachronistic use of the 16^th century poet John Donne, although I could argue that this atemporal remixing of materials is deeply aligned with the heterotexuality of medieval romances.

None of this occurred to me on my first watch though. I was spellbound. Although maybe a better metaphor is that I was infected. The story slipped from the screen and began to infiltrate and rewrite my DNA. While the nod to Shakespeare’s tragic teen lovers should have tipped me off that I was watching a tragedy, the death of Tristan hit me with the nauseating wallop of what, many years and relationships later, I would recognize as real heartbreak.

My friend and I went to the cinema bathrooms where I started to choke on my tears. “I don’t see many movies where the main character dies…” my friend observed phlegmatically while she washed her hands. “Do you want to come with me and my parents to get pizza?”

“No!” I sobbed and let my confused parents shepherd me home where I promptly wept for four days, refusing comfort and food, before asking my parents for every medieval text pertaining to Tristan and Isolde. As a child of writers, I’d grown up making stories and poems, but within weeks of seeing the movie, I had graduated to the determined daily word count of a novel that soon amassed 600 pages that I revised and rewrote multiple times. In many ways Tristan and Isolde is my writer’s origin story. It’s certainly what took me deep into a study of the middle age and romances and the Arthurian tales. It broke my heart and the only way to process that feeling was to try to create stories that simultaneously replicated and healed that rupture. I now recognize what happened when I watched the movie as best described through metaphors of virology. I was infected by a story that permanently altered me. I think this happens to many artists, maybe once or twice in a lifetime. But it is interesting to note that Tristan & Isolde has proven to be a remarkably durable and infectious narrative virus, infecting artists, musicians, and philosophers with intensity and regularity since the 10^th century.

In case you are unfamiliar, the tragic romance tells of a British knight skilled in warfare, music, hunting, and love, who through misadventure ends up in the enemy Irish court where he encounters the Princess Isolde. Isolde views Tristan as her enemy when she realizes he has killed the Irish warrior Morholt. Tristan arranges that the princess is wed to his dear friend the Cornish King Mark but two accidentally ingest a love potion (or slow-acting poison as its ingestion creates the conditions for their ultimate death) initiating the beloved enemies to lovers trope. What follows is the classic love triangle that possibly prefigures King Arthur, Lancelot, and Guinevere’s doomed triad: Tristan and Isolde try to resist their magical attraction but eventually slip into adultery. King Mark varies from ineffectual cuckold to wrathful spited lover in different versions of the story. Isolde and Tristan enjoy a brief respite in the Forest of Morois but are ultimately separated. Across versions of the romance, we encounter doubled Isoldes, malicious dwarves, mystical pilgrims, lepers, magical statues, and dragons. But the narrative always ends in the same way. Tristan dies. And Isolde dies from heartbreak.

The earliest versions of the romance come to us as fragments: verses in Norman from 12th century poet named Beroul and the 3,300 final lines of the tragedy’s ending from 12^th century English poet Thomas. Just as the lovers experience themselves as incomplete without each other, so does the fragmentary nature of these romances encourage a symbiotic, almost reproductive reading, fusing texts to complete the full narrative. Textual interdependence mirrors the lover’s tragic compulsion to merge.

My favorite version though comes to us from the German poet Gottfried von Strassburg, composed in the early 1200s, representing a marked shift from the earlier version’s concern with feudalism to a focus on courtly love. Although influenced by the lyric poetry of the troubadours and their ideology of unrequited love, Gottfried serves us this romance not as entertainment but as sacrament.

“This is bread to all noble hearts. With this their death lives on. We read their life, we read their death, and to us it is sweet as bread. Their life, their death are our bread. Thus lives their life, thus lives their death. Thus they live still and yet are dead, and their death is the bread of the living,” reads Gottfried’s prologue. In 13^th century Europe, proclaiming something “bread” that allows for the continued life of the dead would have an obvious association with the Christian Eucharist. Gottfried begins his romance with a statement of decidedly blasphemous intent.

There is a new Eucharist, and it is the love-story. There is a new religion, and it is the religion of love.

Gottfried never completed Tristan. For a narrative that ends in tragedy, the fragmented versions that survive seem desperate to leave space open, refusing tragic closure. But the truth of why Gottfried never finished the romance may be tragic indeed, hinted at in his decidedly heterodox argument for a religion of love. We must remember he was writing at a time when any overt criticism or alternative take on Church doctrine could get your burned at the stake. The troubadours and their courtly love would fade following the Albigensian Crusades and massacres of the early 13^th century, an ideology that placed veneration of women and love at its center extinguished alongside the Cathars who may have shared similar beliefs. We know that Gottfried disappears and presumably dies around the year 1210, leaving his Tristan unfinished. It doesn’t seem inconsequential to me that this is the same year the bloody crusade against the Cathars began and that the following year 1211 saw the burning of 80 Waldensians (a sect that was parallel to Catharism) in Strassburg. While we know little of Gottfried’s biography, we can infer that he was a scholar and that his beliefs about agape and eros ran counter to Church doctrine. The Cathars famously did not believe in the Eucharist so Gottfried’s decidedly blasphemous and erotic take on the Eucharist is a strong indication that he was in some sort of dialogue with these heterodoxies.

The love-story is a holy meal where those that have died are ingested as bread and resurrected in the eater. One unfinished narrative of Tristan is half digested and then retold by a subsequent author. Gottfried’s lovers do not die because they are eaten as bread and assimilated into the body of the reader. And similarly, Gottfried the writer of the love story will not die because his narrative sacrament outlasts his death, The love-story is imbricated metabolism, tying lovers and storytellers together with erotic appetite. The nutritive aspects of love are returned to again and again through the narrative, reaching their mystical apotheosis in the Forest of Morois where the lovers find that they no longer need to eat real food to survive. Instead, they fast and Gottfried writes, “I mean pure devotion, love made sweet as balm that consoles body and sense so tenderly and sustains the heart and spirit- this was their best nourishment”.

The Cathars are said to have abhorred the material realm, believing it impure. In one interpretation of the text, Gottfried’s formulation of lovers as ascending material needs, supping on love alone, and ultimately dying, aligns him with this Cathar desire to ascend from the world of bodies and messy materiality. But he also is writing about adulterous lovers who are decidedly breaking sexual and feudal taboos. If they ultimately ascend into purity, it will be through committing whole-heartedly, whole-bodily, to radical impurity. Gottfried’s supper of love is a sanitized version of a less wholesome Eucharist in earlier versions of the Tristan Romance.

I am speaking of the Eaten Heart, a cannibalistic motif of an adulterous woman being fed the heart of her murdered lover by her cuckolded husband, that first occurs in the 1150 Tristan by Thomas as sung in story-form by Isolde. Scholars have found over twenty-four different versions of the Eaten Heart, some featuring 12 women echoing the 12 apostles and the last supper. While it’s easy to read these stories as horrifying, I believe something more complicated is happening. In the Christian theology that permeated the time, women are considered Fallen. Courtly love and the beliefs of the troubadour countered the fall, uplifting the Lady as the central object of devotion and worship. We must read the romances that flower from this romantic tradition as playing with Christian themes while slyly working to upend them. On the surface it seems as if the adulterous woman is being punished. But on a deeper level, her husband is fulfilling her deepest erotic desire to merge with her lover. What is closer than sex? Ingestion. How do the lovers live on? By being consumed and reincarnated in another body.

Unlike the abstract Eucharist of the Church, the Sacrament of Love is the one that actually underpins the dynamism of the biosphere: reproduction fueling evolutionary unfolding and the metabolic churning that turns bodies into other bodies, turns death into life into death into more life. Metabole, the root of metabolism, derives from the Greek word for “change”. Our bodies stay alive by changing. Our bodies stay alive by taking in otherness, finding ourselves reconstituted by our yearnings for a certain sugar, flickering scent molecule, or bitter herb. Life is not fair or just or even human. But it is metabolic: a constant churning of chemicals and carbon to keep creating more of itself at all costs. Life is not so much red in tooth in claw as it is hungry and horny. The bread of the dead is always creating the bodies of the living.

If Gottfried is offering a new religion of love stories, what better scripture than the ever-unfinished fragments of all the variations of Tristan and Isolde. Yes, tragedy beckons but the fragments refuse closure: “Thus they live still and yet are dead, and their death is the bread of the living”. The death becomes the food-fuel of future love stories. Even if the lover is dead, someone new can still eat his heart, turn that heart into her own body, and then open her mouth to start telling the story again.

I’ll end this with one of my favorite poems that best encapsulates the dangerous sacraments of Tristan and Isolde.

Food of Love

by Carolyn Kizer

Eating is touch carried to the bitter end.
Samuel Butler II 

I’m going to murder you with love;

I’m going to suffocate you with embraces;

I’m going to hug you, bone by bone,

Till you’re dead all over.

Then I will dine on your delectable marrow.

You will become my personal Sahara;

I’ll sun myself in you, then with one swallow

Drain your remaining brackish well.

With my female blade I’ll carve my name

In your most aspiring palm

Before I chop it down.

Then I’ll inhale your last oasis whole.

But in the total desert you become

You’ll see me stretch, horizon to horizon,

Opulent mirage!

Wisteria balconies dripping cyclamen.

Vistas ablaze with crystal, laced in gold.

So you will summon each dry grain of sand

And move toward me in undulating dunes

Till you arrive at sudden ultramarine:

A Mediterranean to stroke your dusty shores;

Obstinate verdure, creeping inland, fast renudes

Your barrens; succulents spring up everywhere,

Surprising life! And I will be that green.

When you are fed and watered, flourishing

With shoots entwining trellis, dome, and spire,

Till you are resurrected field in bloom,

I will devour you, my natural food,

My host, my final supper on the earth,

And you’ll begin to die again.

Further Reading:

Gottfried of Strassburg’s Tristan

Tristan of Thomas

Beroul’s Tristan

Eating your lover’s otherness: The narrative theme of the Eaten Heart in the Lai d’Ignaure by Amy Heneveld

Béroul’s Tristran: Emblems of Sublimation, Exhibitionism, and Castration Fantasy by Reid Fuller Hardaway

The Dissonant History of Tristan and Isolde by Amanda Persaud

Subscribe now

Share

This is the second installment in my ongoing series Confessions of a Romantic Animist.

I want to reclaim romance as a celebration that includes the entire earth. I want to throw another party. A love party. And I want to invite you along.

Over the next month or so I’m going to take the same approach to love stories as I took to myths of the masculine in The Flowering Wand. I will reroot, rewild, and retell classical love stories within an ecological framework. I’m also going to write about my fascination with contemporary romance, animal courtship rituals, and fantasy. I have questions about how romance is a powerful tool in combatting and dismantling empire and I’m going to think and write through them in real time in conversation with you.

All of the essays in this series will be offered for free. I want to think and love and dance with you. But alongside this series on courtship, ecology, fantasy, and eros, I’m also going to offer excerpts for of my upcoming fantasy series: one inspired by Joan of Arc and the other a queer retelling of Tristan & Isolde for my paid subscribers as well as occasional personal essays on romance.

Men Written by Women: Off Campus, Shakespeare, and Narrative Drag

“I love your book. A lot actually. Who could live up to Edward? He’s smart, athletic, charming, and a really lovable jerk at times…How could you create Edward, the most absolutely perfect guy for me, without knowing me at all? Because you see, I’m Bella, the narrator. We listen to the same music and love to snuggle up with Shakespeare…I’m writing myself these days. I guess that’s the only way I can have my own perfect “Edward” is to create one for myself…”

So reads a painfully earnest excerpt from a fan letter I wrote Stephenie Meyer after reading Twilight in 2006. Her vampire love story hit me at my freshly poured concrete phase of prepubescent hormones, imprinting me permanently with the handprint of brooding, dangerous, hundred-year-old love interests. I’m happy to say I graduated quickly to the more complex and bisexual Lestat and the queer vampires of Anne Rice’s worlds. But there was a moment when I lived and breathed Edward Cullen, becoming so obsessed with the series that I wrote my own fanfiction. In my longest running one, I turned Bella into a cross-dressing vampire that time travels to seduce Carlisle Cullen in 18^th century France. It was on these largely female and queer populated fanfiction forums of the early internet that I came into my romantic and creative identity and power. What is interesting to me now, looking back on this phase of my life as a lover and writer of romance, is that I loved male characters that weren’t just written by women, but reinterpreted and rewritten by other women. The internalized misogyny still clinging to Stephenie Meyer’s Edward Cullen was titrated through other writer’s reinterpretations.

(Very embarrassing proof of said letter that I also copied and handed in as extra credit to my English teacher because I was that nerdy.)

Give me a man translated through multiple women and we finally have a winner. I didn’t just want Edward Cullen. I wanted a queer highschooler’s fanfiction of Edward Cullen.

In some ways all contemporary romances written by women are a kind of fanfiction. Although calling women a fan of the sexist paradigms that constrain their desire is a bit of a stretch. But there is a similar operation at work when women insert themselves into dominant paradigms and dominant narratives that have largely been authored by men and choose to write a story with a happy ending when that happiness is often denied in the canon version of the narrative. By canon version of the narrative, I mean…reality in late-stage capitalism.

Romance by non-men even when it features heterosexual pairings is essentially queer: female and queer writers parasitically enter and digest and take over narratives that were previously designed to exclude and oppress them.

I like to think of women writing romance as a form of cymothoa exigua also known as the tongue-eating louse, hermaphroditic ectoparasites that begin their lives female and switch over to male later, named for their practice of entering a fish through its gills, severing the fish’s blood vessels causing its tongue to necrotize and fall off. The cymothoid essentially becomes the fish’s tongue. While this is a gruesome visualization, it often minimally effects the host fish.

As a lover of romance and researcher of sexism, colonialism, and patriarchy, I often find myself in a bind. How do I write love stories that are liberatory rather than constricting? More and more I want to say to myself and other female writers: write yourself into a narrative built to oppress you and cut off its tongue, become its tongue, and start speaking from its mouth.

Become a romance-loving, tongue-eating louse. Write fanfiction that, like most Harry Potter fanfiction, disturbs and ecstatically betrays its original author. Write fanfiction that turns the old narrative on its head and shakes its pockets for stray coins and seeds of wisdom. And sex. Lots of consensual, gender-bending, satisfying sex.

Women, slip in through the masculine gills, and give your tongue to men. Speak with a man’s voice. I say if you can’t find a good man, then you must write one.

I was reminded of my fanfiction musings when I started watching Amazon Prime’s recent adaptation of a popular hockey romance series Off Campus. What I had planned as a momentary distraction while I lay in bed with a flare of chronic health issues, soon became a two-day binge, something I rarely if ever do. I’ll stay up all night reading, but I hardly ever let one episode of tv run into the next.

Well, I confess that I binged this hockey romance. And then I told all my friends about it. Too late. It turned out many of them had already secretly been watching it as well. And I went back and read all the books from which it had been adapted. The internet echoed my fascination churning out memes and clips and Threads commentary from women obsessed with the Off Campus men. College girls and millennial moms alike were obsessed with these somehow introspective and tender athletes who courted the show’s female leads with wit and empathy.

Why were these characters so compelling to so many different women?

Well. For one, because although they are played by chiseled and talented actors, they were originally written by a woman. And then that woman’s books were adapted by another woman.

There’s a scene a lot of women have been referring to where Garrett Graham, the main male love interests, visits the protagonist at the diner where she works. As they talk, he clocks that she is going through the process of opening the diner, setting out napkins and polishing silverware and immediately starts to help with the process. You might not notice this initially, more attracted to the witty banter between the two as he tries to convince her to tutor him. The showrunner and writer Louisa Levy is skilled at adding in these flourishes subtly so that rather than hitting you over the head, the effect is cumulative. You come to trust these male characters. They can anticipate a woman’s needs. They can read her emotions and respond with care. They can help before you are forced to ask them to help. This is the type of anticipatory empathy and intelligence women long for in their mates and so rarely experience.

Like Meyer, the original books by Elle Kennedy still feature trace amounts of internalized sexism and homophobia that are corrected in the second “translation” by showrunner Louisa Levy. I give you the ideal man: one written by a woman and then REWRITTEN by another woman. Two different levels of translation to correct inbuilt patriarchy and sexism. A clarifying process.

Also. Closer to fanfiction than to reality. I would argue that Off Campus could be classified as romantasy: it resembles fantasy more than it does reality. Its empathic beefcake main male characters are as improbable as dragons or fairies.

It didn’t surprise me when I came to the pivotal episode of the series where all the main couples initiate their romances and found that the romances all hinged on a drunk, interactive performance of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (you can read my Ecological Reading of Midsummer Night’s Dream here).

Shakespeare was not a female writer (although some have argued he could be I don’t find their evidence compelling). But he is a key genetic component in all modern romance, fanfiction, and gender-bending. Most of his plays are fanfictions of older popular narratives. And in Shakespeare’s day, theater was a man’s domain and all the characters, both male and female alike, were played by men. I’ve written before about how this fact further complicates the cross-dressing and gender-play of Shakespeare’s comedies Twelfth Night and As You Like It. We must remember these plays were participatory events before they were texts studied and analyzed. They first existed as dynamic performances where a male actor playing female Viola cosplaying her male twin Sebastian was a palimpsest of genders so dense it would be hard to pin down a stable identity. But Viola is the most seductive character in Twelfth Night, becoming the central romantic node around which all the eventual matches organize, managing to attract the attention of both the Duke Orsino and the Countess Olivia.

The most romantically compelling character is one that refuses easy classification. For Shakespeare that was a female love interest played by a man crossdressing as a man. For women raised on Shakespeare, it is a man written by a woman.

The best example that maps onto my own experience as both a writer and reader/watcher of romantic stories is the character of Rosalind in Shakespeare’s As You Like It. Rosalind, seeking shelter in the Forest Arden after her evil uncle banishes her from court, adopts the disguise of a young man she calls Ganymede. Shakespeare knew well that this name summoned the beautiful youth Ganymede that Zeus (Jove) abducted to become his cupbearer. The name Gaynemede would have been a clear nod to queer desire in Shakespeare’s day. Disguised as Ganymede, Rosalind encounters her love interest Orlando and decides to test his love while in disguise, promising to cure Orlando of his love of Rosalind.

What ensues is a delightful queering of courtship. Rosalind becomes the author of her own courtship by pretending to cure Orlando and then complicating her own narrative drag when Rosalind disguised as Gaynmede pretends to be Rosalind to playact scenarios with Orlando. If we follow the chain of translations, we see a male actor playing a young woman disguised as a man who then plays a version of the young woman. We can laugh at Rosalind proposing to “cure” Orlando when she obviously wants the opposite. Yet there is some truth flickering in the word cure.

How do we cure our romantic male partners of patriarchy and domination? Orlando can only be a truly worthy lover of Rosalind if he learns how to court from a woman. But given gender dynamics, he only trusts a man to give him this type of education. Thankfully this is a man played by the very woman he needs to learn how to court.

Here seems to the key potency of men written by women. People socialized as men tend to unconsciously prioritize information that comes from the mouths of men. But what if hiding behind those men were modern Rosalinds, writing their own courtship?

Rosalind as Ganymede manages to seduce both Orlando and the shepherdess Phoebe. As a lover and writer of romantic fantasy I see myself in both Rosalind and Phoebe. On the one hand, I like to imagine myself as Rosalind, writing Ganymedes to teach men how to enter back into courtship not just with women but with the Earth itself. The true lover that holds all other lovers is the Forest Arden itself in As You Like It, a name Shakespeare amalgamated from the mythic utopias of Arcadia and Eden. Arden is the land before extraction, the land where humans can escape domination and gender dynamics and oppression.

But on the other hand, I am obviously Phoebe, falling in love with men written by women, falling in love with Ganymede again and again. Nothing about this surprises me. But it is powerful to uncover this dynamic as being a key ingredient in many beloved male protagonists of romance. These men are men, but they are also Rosalind in disguise. They always represent a desire that is palimpsestic, essentially queer as it relates to its original Germanic origins in “twerh” meaning oblique and transverse.

Women love Gaynemede. And men could learn from Orlando learning from Ganymede. He does get the girl at the end of the play.

And the invitation to women is step into their full narrative drag as romance-writing tongue-eating louse Rosalinds. This is what I’m calling hetero-fabulism, a writing into the pessimism afflicting modern romance and dating, switching the genders of the characters, then switching them again, creating so much confusion and identity slippage, that everyone can shake loose the strictures of their socialized roles and finally land in a happy ending.

But I want to offer an even deeper invitation. In both A Midsummer Night’s Dream and As You Like It, the forest represents a clear contrast to the civilized world. The lovers are only able to escape their preconceived and sterile ideas of identity and romance when they leave the world of men behind and escape to the forest. It is funny to note that hundreds of years later, Stephenie Meyer makes a subtle nod to this motif when Edward and Bella are only able to acknowledge their love deep in the old-growth forests of the Pacific Northwest.

Women can write their tongues into the mouths of male characters. But women are not blameless in an age of extinction and ecocide. Women also need to let their own tongues be overtaken by other species that desperately need their voices written back into love stories.

I want to open my mouth up to the monarch butterflies, the chestnut trees, the mycorrhizal systems, the rivers. When I write a male character, I want to be a Trojan Horse for the entire forest. If you fall in love with my characters, you will be falling back in love with the entire world.

Picture from 2006. This is my truest form.

Share

Subscribe now

This is the first installment in my ongoing series Confessions of a Romantic Animist.

I want to reclaim romance as a celebration that includes the entire earth. I want to throw another party. A love party. And I want to invite you along.

Over the next month or so I’m going to take the same approach to love stories as I took to myths of the masculine in The Flowering Wand. I will reroot, rewild, and retell classical love stories within an ecological framework. I’m also going to write about my fascination with contemporary romance, animal courtship rituals, and fantasy. I have questions about how romance is a powerful tool in combatting and dismantling empire and I’m going to think and write through them in real time in conversation with you.

All of the essays in this series will be offered for free. I want to think and love and dance with you. But alongside this series on courtship, ecology, fantasy, and eros, I’m also going to offer excerpts for of my upcoming fantasy series: one inspired by Joan of Arc and the other a queer retelling of Tristan & Isolde for my paid subscribers as well as occasional personal essays on romance.

On one of the first podcast interviews I ever did back in 2021, I was asked to introduce myself.

“I’m a troubadour animist. A romantic animist,” I answered without thinking, passing over the obvious writer, author, poet, mythologist, tarot reader.

No. All of those other human identities were offshoots of this declaration. I am a lover. I love love and I love love stories and love poetry. I evolve, research, travel, quest, write, and survive through my love of…love. And I am an animist. I believe all beings are conscious and agential albeit in ways that are profoundly different than my own flavor of aliveness. It is these differences that keep me curious and interrogative, always aware that I am participating in ecological love stories that don’t belong just to me.

I am a romantic animist. I believe that everything is alive. And that eros and love are a key part of that aliveness and its continual unfolding.

As someone who studies myth and civilization, it is obvious to me that I am not alone in this fascination. The most durable stories that survive civilizational and ecological collapse are often, at their foundation, love stories. Human beings love love. We love love stories. When we look at the history of medieval romances, we can see that romances are where the ecological wisdom of a culture (its animism) often survives long after those beliefs have been snuffed out in other narrative modes. Chairs can still talk. People can still turn into beasts. And love inhabits everything. In contemporary fantasy, romantasy is described as fantasy where the story does not function if you remove the romance. I like to think of it in terms of an engine in a car. If you remove the love and sex from a romantasy plot, it won’t drive you anywhere. A culture without romance is a culture that won’t drive. That won’t move. That won’t drive us anywhere but into extinction and isolation. Do you want your “craft” to be lightly applauded by a privileged elite? Or do you want to tell stories that keep people alive? Do you have something urgent you want to communicate? An environmental cause? Do you have a being – a species – you want to champion? As I think about what I desperately want to save – flowers, butterflies, mycorrhizal systems, chestnut trees, mountains – I must consider what is the best way to make people care about how alive the world is. I want to claim romantic fantasy as a genre that is a sturdy and swift boat. It is a boat within which we can place our most important cargo and know that it will travel across the waters, connecting us to each other, to readers, and to our wider environment.

When I talk about love stories, I am always rooting back to that original love story that contains all other species of love story: the erotic wheel of evolution, spinning matter into new shapes, symbiotically fusing two different species, and the dynamic homeostasis dance of the biosphere.

I’m taking about the earth itself, our first lover. Our most generous lover. And the one whose love letters we have been ignoring.

Every day I hear new horror stories about dating. As a thirty-year old single woman who primarily dates men, I have plenty of horror stories of my own. It is easy to feel sad and lonely and defeated as a woman looking for a love story with a man. I’m guilty of this.

But I also know this is bad story. As someone dealing with incurable illness I often think about the dark twin of the placebo effect: the nocebo effect. Negative expectations in clinical encounters produce negative outcomes. A list of side-effects for a medication, a degenerative diagnosis, or a bad prognosis may turn out to be erroneous and yet a patient will still manifest them. A story is powerful. And a bad story can cause us to predict and live into our downfall. I think this is very true when it comes to writing dystopias. What happens when we write Nocebos of the future, predicting the worst outcome? Will we make those nightmares more thinkable, more possible?

I believe this also applies to the pitfalls of modern romance. Lately, there’s been a lot of discussion of Asa Seresin’s idea of hetero-pessimism. Why do we want men when they treat us so badly? What does it mean to keep wanting something that usually ends up being bad for you?

I’m not sure how helpful this idea is and I’m worried that it functions as a nocebo.

I think what is called for is the creation of a placebo. Yes, the romantic landscape is dystopic. Why make it worse? What is called for is fantasy. I’d prefer to dive into romantic fantasy for escape and to help me imagine a better future for myself and other women. I’m not a hetero pessimist. I’m a hetero-fabulist. I want to write hetero-romantic fanfiction that imagines better love lives for women. If we can write it, maybe we can live it.

Back in 2021 I was writing about masculinity. I wrote and shared pieces in real time with a real audience, benefiting from their input, questions, and help with my ongoing research. It was a party that saved my life at a time when I had been quarantining alone and struggling with chronic illness.

I want to reclaim romance as a celebration that includes the entire earth. I want to throw another party. A love party. And I want to invite you along.

Over the next month or so I’m going to take the same approach to love stories as I took to myths of the masculine in The Flowering Wand. I will reroot, rewild, and retell classical love stories within an ecological framework. I’m also going to write about my fascination with contemporary romance, animal courtship rituals, and fantasy. I have questions about how romance is a powerful tool in combatting and dismantling empire and I’m going to think and write through them in real time in conversation with you.

All of the essays in this series will be offered for free. I want to think and love and dance with you. But alongside this series on courtship, ecology, fantasy, and eros, I’m also going to offer excerpts for of my upcoming fantasy series: one inspired by Joan of Arc and the other a queer retelling of Tristan & Isolde for my paid subscribers as well as occasional personal essays on romance.

I am summoning my patron saints of romantic fantasy and animism and will also offer creative reflections about their work: Octavia Butler, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Anne Rice.

If there are love stories you’d like me to research and compost, please comment below!

Subscribe now

Share

This has been the free version of my newsletter. If you choose to support the paid version of this newsletter, you will receive at least two newsletters a month featuring everything from new essays, reflection on writing craft, poetry, excerpts from my upcoming books and projects, mythic research, reading lists, poetry, book reviews to ecological embodiment exercises, playlists, personal updates, and generally a whole lot of funk and texture.

I am overwhelmed with gratitude by how many of you have showed up here to support my work and widen my thinking. Right now you are literally keeping me alive and funding the out-of-pocket medical expenses and connective tissue specialists.

I am grateful in a way that is wide and deep and low. I hope you can feel some sonorous note of it - the hum and grind of ice relaxing under the sun - in your body. I am sending the song of my thanks your way. I love you all so much

The Millstream

I remember a moment in the summer of 2011 when I was nearing a year of unexplainable and devastating physical collapse. I’d been ejected from health and from teenage fun. I’d been in and out of the ER and doctor’s offices all year, on countless different rounds of antibiotics, and had gone from a hardy omnivorous athlete to a wraith only able to manage two or three safe foods without debilitating gastroparesis or allergic reactions. That summer I was close to something you could call suicidal ideation. I was forced to cancel my attendance at the Sewanee Young Writer’s Conference. I cancelled the month-long canoe trip with my wilderness survival group up in Canada. While my peers partied and went on summer vacation, I could hardly leave bed where I was increasingly sick after a misdiagnosis and subsequent mistreatment of Lyme (I never tested positive but that didn’t keep doctors from ignoring my symptoms, giving me their diagnosis of the day, and treating me like a lab rat, putting me on dozens of heavy duty antiparasitics and antibiotics that left me sicker than ever before).

I did not want to be alive. But every time I looked at this feeling I also thought with complete sincerity, “I’ve just got to stay alive for the next season of Dexter.”

Yup. Really. Embarrassing yet true.

I so wish I could say it was anticipation for the next Lauren Groff novel or the Wolf Hall adaptation. But no. It was the TV melodrama about a serial killer who kills other serial killers.

I can laugh about this now and how my life-saving raft was….a TV show about a serial killer. I can now see that there were core elements of the story that resonated with my own frustrations: an abused child gets revenge against the bad guys. But the truth is that when the lighthouse of the future is extinguished by illegible and incurable illness, any story that gives us proper fictional escape can conversely help keep us from permanently escaping our real lives and bodies. The ones that do this most effectively are not spare, academic novels.

Mostly they are romances and melodramas and fantasies. Worlds fully realized enough that they can allow us temporary distraction from our physical agony.

Lately, I’ve been leaning hard on stories (written, auditory, and visual) to keep pulling me through physical distress. The past couple of months have been a hard time in my body. With chronic illness, hard times are misty and cyclical rather than linear landscapes to be traversed and exited. There’s no clear end or cure to a particular ailment in sight. You just have to trust and keep walking.

And it’s easier to keep walking with good company. Today I’m sharing some of the stories that have helped me continue from day to day.

1. Famesick by

I laughed. I cried. I laughed again. I rang like a bell.And I was so thankful that Lena brought her characteristic bravery to her descriptions of living with chronic illnesses (Ehlers Danlos Syndrome and Endometriosis) that we both have and that have long gone under-researched and misunderstood. A incredibly generous exploration of what it means to live with illness that doesn’t easily resolve. I often say the dignity is in the details when it comes to writing about illness. Tell me about the smells, the endless days rotting in bed, the taste of bile and the vice of nausea, the rash that changed the landscape of your body. Tell me about what it was actually like to survive in your body. When you pair a dignified accounting of illness with deep belly laughter then you’ve won my heart. Lena has won my heart countless times over the years.

2. The Watchmaker of Filigree Street by Natasha Pulley

I’ll read anything Pulley writes. I think she could make any subject compelling and vibratory with undeclared queer yearning. Somehow I’d missed her first book and I gulped it down. Absolutely delicious. Magical realism. Victorian politics. Meditations on time and prediction.

Read more

In honor of Ehlers Danlos Awareness Month I’m sharing an adapted excerpt from my memoir The Body Is a Doorway about living with connective tissue disease.

Flint-bright. Nerve strikes nerve. I lie flat on the large river stone and feel its steadiness locate the unsteadiness in my own form: the places in my spine that, like this river, overflow the line, and meander into another, less linear shape. Make my herniated discs a silted riverbank, I think. A question mark of water curving into the forest. I breathe, feel the river splint itself against my spine, correct me not into straightness, but the cursive intelligence of liquid lovemaking with landscape. I blink up the sky, sunlight pooling at the bottom of my irises, creating a tidal pool of my eyes. A place for crustaceans and lichen to congregate. My hips roll. I lightly rest my hands against these bone parentheses that cannot keep what lives between them contained. I spill and sublux. I am painfully, ecstatically aware that I am less a unity and more a confederacy of differences, flesh that sometimes agrees with itself and mostly does not.

May is Ehlers Danlos Syndrome Awareness month, the name for the genetic connective tissue disease with over thirteen different subtypes. Think of mycorrhizal fungi, those thin filamentous threads that weave together a forest, ferrying nutrients from tree to tree, decomposing dead matter, constituting the very structural integrity of the soil. Connective tissue is the mycorrhizal system of the body. It is the tissue that supports, communicates between, connects, and distinguishes all the different systems in your body. But in Ehlers Danlos, collagen is undermined, and your connective tissue is as well. This doesn’t just cause joint issues and pain. It implicates multiple bodily systems and organs. Your eyes get milky, tracking floaters. Your aorta droops and dissects. Your vascular system is like delicate tissue paper, susceptible to minute weather pressure systems and environmental changes, wind and thunderstorms and heat playing you like an instrument. You stand up and your heart races and you faint. Your joints pop in and out of joint throughout the day. True, you are unusually extremely flexible which can be seen as a boon. It’s hypothesized that both Elvis and Houdini had EDS, and that both of these conditions are what contributed to their deaths. Your spine curves and herniates. The very cells of your lung relax out of shape so that you no longer breathe correctly. Your stomach suffers from paralysis. Your skin is velveteen, pleasing to the touch but easily scarred and hard to heal. And, for reasons that have yet to be proven, Ehlers-Danlos predisposes you to mast cell disease, endometriosis, orthostatic tachycardia and a host of other strange immunological diseases.

While Ehlers-Danlos was considered rare when I was diagnosed almost 10 years ago, its prevalence seems to be rising for reasons not completely understood. It is considered one of the most painful conditions in the world, ranked next to Complex Regional Pain Syndrome and bone cancer. It is degenerative; and it is, as of today, incurable. There are plenty of experimental therapies and symptom alleviating medicines you can “try”. Diet and exercise seem to play crucial roles in cardiac and vascular symptoms. But the burden of pain management and multiplying contingent conditions largely rests on symptoms and the motley crew of specialists they assemble to try and keep their body from literally falling apart. Why is so little known about EDS and how to heal/cure it? Lack of funding. Lack of research. The rarity of the disease means that it receives little attention.

While I am trying to raise awareness with the hope that someday there may be research that offers better symptom management and treatment, I am also increasingly trying to understand how to collaborate with the indigestibility of a degenerative condition with no current cure. In most people’s bodies, connective tissue provides a stable sense of unity. The body is legible as an individual. But I think there is a tricky and interesting perspective that opens up to the Ehlers Danlos patient. We see that we are webworks of complicated kinship rather than single being. We are unruly ecosystems radically susceptible to the disagreements and coalitions that form and unform within our bounds. We are soil that depends intimately on the mycorrhizal collaboration of other beings to hold us together. Often, I have planted myself on the forest floor and secretly intoned to the fungi spooling out below me, “Come and colonize me. If there’s too much open space in my body, maybe that space was left open for you.” If I can’t have properly working human connective tissue, then perhaps mycelial connective tissue will do. It is interesting to me that the other people I know with EDS are highly attuned to ecology, to animals, to environmentalism, to plants, to the aliveness of the more than human world. Perhaps there is a way that the absent connective tissue opens up interstices in the body where other species slip in.

Subscribe now

Share

I think also dark matter and energy, the very invisible connective tissue of the cosmos. Although we cannot measure this matter, it makes up 27% of the universe and our own bodies. All of us, whether we know it or not, are made up of otherness. We are threaded through with unknowability. We are more like constellations, a few stars flung against empty space, pretending at a shape.

I want a cure for Ehlers Danlos and its comorbidities including but not limited to POTS (postural orthostatic tachycardia), gastroparesis, mast cell activation syndrome, endometriosis…the list goes on and on. I want more people to understand the complexity of this condition and to advocate for research into its management and cure. But I also desperately want to join hands with those of you who are also navigating this disease and I want to say, “We are constellated beings. We are masters of interstitial intelligence, thinking with relationships rather than individualism. We think in-between the joints. In the friction and uncertainty. We are the tilled ground where other species can take root.”

You can read more about living with chronic illness in my memoir The Body Is a Doorway.

We are taking the dogs on a “snifferari’ which is what I’ve begun to refer to walks where pace and destination are ignored in favor of good smells and side quests. Research show that dog’s get better cardiovascular benefits from sniff walks as opposed to speed walks. My mom’s new puppy Namu hovers like an inky raincloud above hillocks of moss and forget-me-nots. Baba, my fur-child, is a silver-sheened chocolate, otter-like, and he’s totally enamored with his new sibling/cousin, cautiously nosing her, looking back to check that she’s keeping up.

The spring has been chilly, the temperature acting like a chisel in green stone, carving away the blurrier and blowsier aspects of the season to reveal the fractal precision of each uncurling blade of grass and fern leading up to the sharpened complexity of the foliating mountains and fields. But finally, the lilacs uplift their purple florets, and everything smells like limerence, like love running full speed downhill wearing a blindfold.

These walks with my mother and our dogs make me profoundly happy even amid ongoing health struggles. We talk about the books we weekly exchange (“You won’t be able to put this down” or conversely “I hated this so much and I need someone to talk about it with”), happy that someone else reads as fast and as discerningly as the other. We talk about the books we are writing and the books that we want to write. Most of all, we laugh and laugh.

My mom’s book Mothers of Magic came out this week and while it is a wide and generous offering to the wider world, I also recognize it as a profound and specific gift for me as her daughter. In its pages are the stories of my grandmothers and great-grandmothers and the sensuous details that honors their embodied reality that persists in the grammar of my own bones, the way my skin smiles with freckles under the gentle touch of sunshine. It also honors that mothering is not a singular event or one that is confined to biological reproduction.

As a single thirty-two-year-old woman with health issues this is an important reminder. I’ve been feeling heartbroken lately about what feels like the steadily-receding possibility of biological motherhood. By my age my mother was married to my father and had already brought me and my brother into the world. I always think of that line in one of my favorite Fleet Foxes songs “Montezuma”:

There will be no ignoring the heartbreak. And I’m sure I won’t be able to kill hope until the door is fully closed (or alternatively maybe it will be flung wide open!). But my mother’s book offers a loving alternative that I can also cultivate and honor in the meantime. Mothering is a verb available to everyone. It does not require a partner or a functioning uterus. It is a way of turning towards the world with care and “washing my hands of looking out just for me”. How can I make myself a wide and generous lap where other beings – babies, friends, animals, family – can feel safe? How can I make stories that feed more than just me? That imagine futures where we all survive?

Sitting at my mother’s book launch this past Sunday I felt moved to tears watching her read her invitations to imagine our mothers as animals, her invitation for all of us to think about what it means to mother each other and the earth. And then I realized something that is still, like the first spring flowers, unfolding its blossoms.

The dominant culture insists that a love story requires a mate and a marriage. This cultural idea of the love story is out of reach and renders our life impoverished as we keep missing the mark.

But what if I’ve been ignoring the greatest love story of my life? I was lucky to be born to a mother who is also my favorite coconspirator, writer, collaborator, and friend. I am so lucky to be able to walk with her and our dogs, laughing.

Do yourself a favor and pick up her brilliant new book Mothers of Magic. It is potent medicine for these times.

Subscribe now

Share

Harvest of Pomegranates by Michelangelo Cerquozzi

This lecture was written for my session of Joanna Gilar’s course Rewilding Fairytales

In a distant land there lived a king with seven sons who worried about his youngest unmarried son. When the king questioned her son he responded

“Father, I desire to find a wife that’s beauty is comparable to rose petals on white sand. As shocking as a scarlet drop of blood on snow.”

“Well, then you must seek beyond the realm of the human and find yourself a fairy bride.”

The prince set out, traveling through the forests on the westernmost coast of his father’s kingdom. His shoes wore out and his beard grew long. He felt himself as wild as the animals he encountered. One day, while he washed in the shallows of a river, he encountered a traveling holy man. The prince was charmed by the man’s tales and soon confessed his royal status and the aim of his quest. The holy man was sympathetic and agreed to turn the prince into a parrot so that he could fly to the magical island where a fairy princess lived inside a pomegranate fruit guarded by seven dragons. “You must fly there and pluck the fruit and return to this kingdom without looking back. If you look back, you will undo this magic.”

The parrot prince took wing and after flying for a day and a night arrived at the island. As a parrot he was small and quick and managed to fly under the leathery wings of the massive dragons, plucking the magical pomegranate, but as he went to take off with his prize, he made the mistake of looking back.

The seventh dragon took this moment of hesitation to spew forth flames that consumed the parrot prince, turning him into a pile of ash.

The holy man had made camp on the beaches closest to the island and waited for the prince to return. When he finally grew impatient and flew to the island himself, he found the prince reduced to ashes. “Wake up and resume your form!” The holy man resurrected the prince, and the ash hovered in the air before weaving back into the glossy feathers of a parrot. Encouraged by the holy man to try again, the prince retrieved the pomegranate for a second time from below the leathery wings of the dragons.

“Quick, we must go!” The dragons gave the holy man and the parrot chase. The holy man transformed the parrot prince into a fly so that when the dragons arrived at the holy man’s hut back in the prince’s kingdom, they did not see the parrot or prince and gave up their chase.

“Become again the form of a man!” The fly expanded and was once again a human prince. The holy man handed him the magical pomegranate. “Return home and then release your fairy bride from within the fruit.”

Once back in his father’s palace, the prince went to the garden and used a knife to slice the red leather of the pomegranate skin. No sooner had he made a cut then the fruit curled away revealing a fairy princess with skin as creamy as milk and lips as crimson as wine. He was so overcome by her beauty that he swooned.

As the fairy princess tried to revive the prince, a young servant girl arrived to draw water from the nearby well. She questioned the fairy princess who she did not recognize and learned that she was the magical bride of the handsome prince.

“What a hideous dress though!” The servant girl was cunning. “How can I judge your beauty when you disguise it? Here, trade clothes with me and then let us look into the well water at our reflections to judge who is the real beauty.”

The pomegranate princess exchanged garments with the servant and then joined her at the well. But the servant girl quickly pushed the princess into the well.

Upon waking, the prince was initially suspicious of the servant girl but finally agreed that she must be the princess and took her back into the palace to introduce her to his royal family. They wed that same night.

Still, the prince remembered a beauty that his new wife did not seem to possess. Was it all a dream? He wandered from his marriage bed back to the garden where he saw a white lotus flower floating in the air. He plucked it from the air and brought it with him back into the palace. The false princes was alarmed by the iridescent white petals of the flower. It was surely a magical flower! Worried about the prince’s fascination, the princess waited till he departed and then shred the flower, scattering it out the window. The petals landed amongst the spice garden of the palace kitchen. When the cook came to pick mint, she was shocked to find that the mint sprout was vibrating and squawking! It spoke to her in a human voice, insisting that the prince had married an imposter! The alarmed cook cast away the mint onto a creeping vine that wound its way back under the prince’s window. The servant princess was alarmed by the tenacious green tendrils and ordered her servants to cut it back. But a small fruit sprouted from the vine as it was pruned, tumbling into a jessamine bush where the palace gardener’s daughter was weeding. She took the fruit home and the gardener’s family watched with disbelief as the fruit melted away to reveal the new incarnation of the beautiful fairy princess who had survived many different vegetal permutations. The gardener’s daughter and the princess became fast friends and the fairy princess granted her magic to aid in her chores and gardening tasks. One day, when they finished with work, they braided flower garlands together. The fairy princess instructed the gardener’s daughter to deliver the garland of flowers to the young prince.

The prince was overwhelmed by the beauty of the garland gifted to him by the gardener’s daughter. The flowers were exquisite – crimson and cream – and they remind him of someone. The pomegranate princess! He began to suspect his wife was an imposter and the flower garland was a message sent from his real bride.

But the false princess is once again aware that her husband’s fascination with the garland is dangerous. She demanded that her husband have the pretty girl who lives with the gardener executed, saying she would like the girl’s heart as a gift.

After weeks of refusing, the prince finally acquiesced. The fairy princess begged the gardener and his family to scatter her body parts to the four winds and to throw her eyes up into the air after her execution.

Although heartbroken and confused by this tragedy, they agreed. When they threw her eyes up into the wind they were buffeted into the branches of a tree where they grew feathers, wings, and became a pair of lovebirds.

Many moons later, the prince who was nagged by a sense of having forgotten something important, journeyed into the forest to hunt. When he took a break to drink from his water skin below a flowering tree, he overheard two birds speaking with human language. They spoke of a fairy princess who was killed by a servant girl who assumed her royal identity to wed a young prince.

“I was right!” the prince exclaimed. “Please, help me birds. Help me find a way to be reunited with my real bride!”

All it took was his request. The pair of birds disappeared with a flash with feather and glitter and flower pollen and then in their place was the fairy form of the beautiful pomegranate princess. This time the prince did not swoon. He recognized her beauty as belonging to his true beloved and grasped her hand, begging for forgiveness that it had taken him so long to realize he had been fooled.

When they returned to the palace they banished the servant girl in punishment for her impersonation. The prince happily wed his true bride and rewarded the gardener’s family for caring for his beloved while he was deluded. The gardener’s family was doubly blessed by the magic of the fairy princess who returned to them with magical seeds for flowers and fruits that promised them good fortune and wealth. The princess and the gardener’s daughter wove garlands together to celebrate being reunited.

~~

This my retelling of Anar Pari – the pomegranate princess folk tale that comes to us from India.

A prince seeks a magical wife in a fruit but can only reach her by becoming a bird. The bird dies and is reborn. The bird is transformed into a fly. Then back into a man. A woman comes out of the fruit that is then replaced with another woman. The fairy princess is translated through the well, through death, into the form of a lotus flower, a mint plant, a creeping vine, and then a fruit. She is born again as a girl, killed, returned as lovebirds, and then finally reincarnate as a fairy bride.

While this tale may seem utterly bizarre, it is actually representative of a common story form known as “The Three Oranges” that crops up across the world, perhaps dating back to the ancient Egyptian tale of the Two Brothers, classified as tale type ATU 408 in the Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index of folktale types. Scholars have some of the dominant refrains that show up in what I’ve been calling “fruit bride plots”. A prince seeks a bride and is turned into a bird. Another woman replaces this fruit bride at a certain point. The prince finds more fruit – most commonly three – and then the real bride is once again revealed. A reflection in water allows for another woman to steal the princess’s identity. but through a series of metamorphoses, the prince and the princess are finally allowed to reunite in human form.

It is very easy as a modern reader primed to prize mechanistic paradigms of proof and quantification to misunderstand the “fanciful” nature of a fairytale as somehow invalidating it as a mode of truth-telling. Women do not come out of fruit. Prince’s do not turn into parrots and flies. We can not be killed and come back to life.

But what if anthropocentrism and human individuality are the real fairytales?

First, let’s remember all stories have a root system in bodies. For most of human history, knowledge transmission has been oral. All narratives, all wisdom, all important information, has been an embodied chain of telling and retelling. The fairytales that get written down have been transmitted, reincarnated, and retold to suit specific audience and demands, for many hundreds of years before they are solidified on the page. Oral knowledge never goes extinct, because it keeps evolving and changing each time it is resurrected by a new voice issuing from a new teller, seeking to updated an older narrative to a particular, audience, community, and wider ecology. Before we had the idea that truth is static and quantifiable – that it can be hoarded, stored, and owned – we knew that stories were living transmissions -more verb than object. Before we stored our information in computer, we stored it in books, and before we had books, we had bodies.

Read more