A New “Bramblewilde” Story Coming to Uncanny Magazine

I’m so excited to have recently sold a third(!) story to Uncanny Magazine!

Though I don’t have a projected publication date yet, my story “A Recipe for Hope and Honeycake” will be coming out in a future issue soon.

I wrote “Hope and Honeycake” during a very difficult year. The pandemic was nearly “over,” but I had been teaching for almost three years under heavy stress, dealing with my own anxiety caused by *gestures at the world, my husband’s stress and anxiety over his mother’s health and family issues, and my dog’s new anxiety and noise phobias as air traffic and thunderstorm season picked up around us. (Whew!) As the person working fewer hours, a lot of caretaking and home tasks fell on me – a routine I both found comfort in and sometimes felt trapped and suffocated by. I often looked around wondering “Why do I still feel so anxious and bogged down by something that’s just about ‘over?’ What is it I need?”

“Hope and Honeycake” allowed me to explore a lot of these feelings by creating a gentle fairy tale of hard times, loss, and hope played out in an idyllic English fantasy village. The story features a certain fairy you might be familiar with from my previous story “Bramblewilde” – a sort of made-up alter-ego who always talks sense into me and gives me good advice. There’s also a stubborn dreamer of a grocer’s daughter, a band of rowdy children, Pan, and a group of very smug bees.

I hope “A Recipe for Hope and Honeycake” might give someone else the sort of comfort and hope it gave me in writing it. If you’re interested, you can read my previous linked story “Bramblewilde” here. And if you like “Bramblewilde” as a character – good news! – I have several more stories set in Bramblewilde’s village that have been brewing in my head. I’d love to eventually share more of them!