Where I Come From

 

I've started this blog out of presumed necessity. Prospective agents will likely be looking to see it. And, once my books are published, others may be looking to see it, as well. Now is when I should begin to prepare for what the end result will be: the publication of my books, and an audience of readers who will want to hear from me. I'm operating at present on the principle of "Act As If." So it is that I'll continue to create content here, knowing that at some point, someone will indeed read it. 

I want to start off sharing a little about why it is that this series exists, in the prose I used to communicate with prospective agents:

This is a piece of historical Appalachian literature that avoids romanticizing the old South; in truth, there is little that should be romanticized and much that should be looked at for exactly what it was: an exclusionist culture that punished anyone who didn't fit into white heteronormativity. The Melungeon people, Appalachia’s mixed racial group who suffered a near century of racial persecution and exclusion, are given a distinct voice. I demonstrate the reality of bigotry and racism rampant in the region in the late 1930’s, which was still alive and well in the late 1990s when I was growing up there.

Hell was Southwest Virginia. I was neurodivergent, after an early childhood TBI damaged my frontal lobe and left me with an organic personality disorder that rendered me powerless to regulate myself socially and emotionally and presented like bipolar, autism, ADHD, OCD, and a number of other diagnoses. I didn’t respond to any medication until my mid-twenties when my brain finished developing.  I was on the LGBTQA+ spectrum, and came out as gender nonconforming and pansexual in my early teens. I identified as a Unitarian Universalist christeopagan, someone who decided to create her own religious identity. This was at a time before the internet in one of the most isolated, backward places in the country, in a world where if you weren’t white, conservative, christian, cisgender, straight and neurotypical, then you were an enemy to be vanquished.  I can’t begin to describe the bullying, bigotry, and hatred that came to define my teenage years, contributing to my succumbing to drug addiction and alcoholism later in life, from which I have now been in recovery for six years. But I survived. And this series of books is a metaphor for that survival. 

This is a summary of the foundation upon which the series is built. I will expand on certain elements of my experience in more detail in future posts, for, paradoxically, my intentional choice to be unknown allows a greater ability for me to allow myself to be known. My hope is that in disclosing what my experience has been like, what happened, and what my experience is like today, that others may borrow strength and be better able to bloom where they are planted.