The ideas all started with a wand and a bear.

Inspiration is a wild thing. Ideas creep out from the dustiest, darkest corners. Or, sometimes, when the universe is especially bold, they strike, electric and blinding, the way light reflects off metal and into the eyes. My first book Vines and Fire has its roots in Appalachia. I was born in southern West Virginia and spent my childhood there. I was in fifth grade when my mother and her husband moved us across the Virginia border to Burke’s Garden, a large, bowl-shaped valley in Tazewell County where there are (or at least were at the time) more cows than people. Mountains surrounded me until I moved to Fredericksburg, Virginia in 2000 to attend college. Fredericksburg is fine, as is North Carolina, but returning home brings me back to my very soul. When I’m nestled in the hills, I’m less restless. Less homesick. 

The spark of this story came after a year and a half hiatus from writing and one NaNoWriMo win. I had to start over in many ways. I’d spent too much time rehashing stories I couldn’t massage into anything of substance. I left all the worlds I had built, the character’s I’d created, and the themes I’d worked over time and time again, behind, grieving, as writers do.

At the time, I was exploring spirituality through the avenues of yoga, new age practices, and Wicca. Books on crystals, herbs, and meditations still line my bookshelves, and jars of resins and incense blends hide behind the reading materials. Sometimes, I pay attention to the moon and pull tarot when it’s full or new. But I’m forgetful and inconsistent. 

I once kept an alter where I kept the tools that I thought were necessary for a Wiccan practice: a pentacle, a chalice, and a wand. I never found a knife I was comfortable with. A wand maker from West Virginia had carved the wand that now rests on my book shelf and sold it through a small metaphysical shop in another small town in neighboring Virginia. In many ways, it’s nothing special. There are no ornate carvings or crystals embedded in the wood. (I went with what I could afford at the time.) All that matters and has ever mattered about the piece is that it came from a living thing from my home. 

The identity of the wand maker occupied quite a bit of my headspace for some time until I finally decided to give him shape and imagine who he was, how he lived, and what he believed. This fictional wand maker’s name is Forest, like my grandfather—though my grandfather spelled his name with two r’s—and he lives in the woods atop a mountain where the trees can talk. He has a bear companion. Not a familiar or a spirit animal. Certainly not a pet. An animal equal who shares space and friendship. Forest loves the mountain, and he loves his mother, but he wants more than the isolated space he inhabits. 

One of my creative writing students let me bounce ideas off her—thank you Grace—and I came up with this: Forest the wand maker lived with his mother, a demigoddess born of the Goddess of the trees, with his bear Arcas. His life was interrupted by Stella, a New York city reporter, who I initially included as a potential love interest. The story took a violent turn. Aside from the keeping the main characters, many of the elements have changed. Though I wrote through multiple points of view, I certainly expected Forest to be my main protagonist. But then, I got to know Beatrice, his mother, on a much deeper level. The more she spoke, the more times she cocked her eyebrow, the more I learned about her life, I knew this story was hers and all the women who came before her. 

I didn’t set out to write a trilogy. I wanted to win NaNoWriMo again, and I did. But, unlike the novels I’d written before, this felt different. Heavier. Full of life and death. More mature. It took me another year to finish the story, and I’ve written and rewritten, whacked the rugs to get out all the dust. I abandoned Forest’s point-of-view in this book to give voice to his mother and his grandmother’s.

So, it all started with a real wand, a fictional wand maker, his mother, and a bear.