Category: YA liminal fiction

The Real Magic Is Survival: Reimagining Girlhood Through Myth

There is a kind of myth that begins not with a goddess or a monster, but with a girl—ordinary, fragile, luminous in her unknowing. She doesn’t lift a sword or command the seas. Her weapon is quieter: endurance. Her myth begins the moment she decides to live.

In my novels—Some Species of Outsider-ness, Whimsy and Bliss, Dreamcatcher, The Cartography of First Love, The Shadows We Carry, and Dancing Without Music—I return again and again to this quieter mythology of survival. These are stories where mental illness, trauma, and identity fracture are not narrative detours but sacred terrains. Where girls and boys on the edge of unraveling become the new myth-makers—reclaiming the right to define themselves, to choose love in the face of despair, to say: I am still here.

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Girlhood as Mythic Terrain

For too long, the myths told about girls—especially those living with mental illness—have been either tragic or ornamental. They are Ophelia, drowned; Persephone, abducted; the muse, never the maker. But the modern myth I want to tell is not one of passivity. It’s about the interior odyssey: what it means to fight through panic and self-doubt, through disordered thoughts and despair, and to still reach toward connection.

In Some Species of Outsider-ness, Piper and Slater—two teens navigating bullying, chronic illness, and a dark web of secrets—are outsiders not because they are weak, but because they see too much. Their sensitivity is not a flaw; it’s a kind of second sight. In a world obsessed with belonging, they learn that empathy can be both their wound and their weapon. Their survival is the magic.

Whimsy and Bliss reimagines the coming-of-age myth as a map of thin places—the unseen seams between childhood wonder and adult loss. Abigail Whimsy, ever the dreamer, and Lainey Bliss, her pragmatic counterpart, move through a lakeside summer like two halves of the same soul, searching for the portals where wonder still seeps through. It’s less about escaping reality than about expanding it—about realizing that the magic we’re looking for was always inside the friendship itself. Girlhood, here, is its own mythic realm: ordinary and holy, bruised and glittering.

Mental Illness as Modern Myth

To write about mental illness is to write about thresholds. Between the seen and unseen. Between the mind that betrays and the mind that longs to heal. In The Cartography of First Love, Zibby and Nico meet inside a psychiatric unit—a place both sterile and sacred. Their story isn’t about illness as spectacle, but about love as witness. Within those six weeks, they trace the coordinates of first love across therapy rooms, greenhouses, and whispered library exchanges.

There’s a map inside both of them, drawn in scars and tenderness. The miracle isn’t that they find each other—it’s that they find themselves. Years later, when they meet again by chance, the question isn’t whether love survives time, but whether healing does. The myth of recovery is rarely linear. It spirals, it falters, it returns. It asks us to keep choosing life, even when it hurts.

Mia and Milo, the central pair in Dancing Without Music, echo this theme in a rawer, more dangerous register. Two teens falling in love while their worlds are falling apart: Mia fighting an eating disorder, Milo hiding seizures and depression. Their story—threaded with bullying, trauma, addiction—pulls from the real language of survival. These aren’t heroes in shining armor. They’re kids clawing their way toward light through the rubble of social media cruelty, systemic failure, and internal chaos.

Their resilience is not romanticized. It’s messy, imperfect, human. Love doesn’t save them—but it steadies them long enough to seek help, to speak truth, to begin the slow choreography of recovery. The real dance, as the title suggests, happens in silence—in the small, defiant act of staying alive when everything tells you not to.

Dream as Ancestral Healing

If Dancing Without Music is rooted in realism, Dreamcatcher drifts through the luminous realm of allegory. Here, girlhood is not only psychological terrain but spiritual inheritance. Dash, a Dakota Sioux girl grieving her parents’ mysterious deaths, touches a dreamcatcher in her window and falls through clouds into Baumwelt—a world woven from collective memory and ancestral wisdom.

In Baumwelt, survival takes the form of mythic questing: dragons, shapeshifters, and lands that mirror trauma back as a test. But beneath its fantasy lies the same heartbeat as every other book I’ve written—the belief that facing one’s fears, honoring one’s lineage, and listening to the quiet voice within can heal what the world tries to silence. Dash learns that courage isn’t the absence of fear but the decision to keep walking through it.

In this way, Dreamcatcher becomes an Indigenous-inflected myth of reclamation: the sacred task of remembering who you are when the world forgets. The land itself participates in her recovery. It’s not an escape from pain—it’s a return to belonging.

The Inheritance of Shadows

The Shadows We Carry extends that mythic inheritance into adolescence and womanhood, where mental illness and memory intertwine. This novel asks: What do we carry that isn’t ours? Which stories, silences, and stigmas do we inherit from generations past?

The protagonist’s journey through grief and genetic mental illness becomes a reckoning with family ghosts—literal and figurative. The book suggests that recovery is never solitary. It’s ancestral, collective. Healing ripples backward as well as forward. When one girl chooses therapy, medication, art, or simply another sunrise, she’s rewriting the myth for everyone who came before her.

Survival as Sacred Art

Across these novels, I see a pattern—a constellation of wounded but luminous characters turning their pain into passage. Whether through art (Some Species of Outsider-ness), friendship (Whimsy and Bliss), heritage (Dreamcatcher), love (The Cartography of First Love), or sheer endurance (Dancing Without Music), they transform suffering into story. To survive, they create. To create, they must survive. The loop is sacred.

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In this sense, writing these books has always felt like both ritual and rebellion. Each story emerged during my own seasons of anxiety, loss, or recovery. Each one asked me to reimagine girlhood not as something fragile but as something feral and enduring—a myth of resilience hidden inside every nervous system, every heartbeat, every moment we choose to stay.

When Mia and Milo hold each other after the worst night of their lives, it’s not a fairytale ending. It’s a beginning. When Zibby and Nico meet again after a decade apart, it’s not closure—it’s continuation. When Dash stands at the edge of the dreamworld, deciding whether to return, it’s not escape—it’s integration. Survival, after all, isn’t static. It’s art in motion.

Toward a New Mythology

What would it mean to tell girls—not just in books but in life—that their feelings are not too much, their minds not too broken, their stories not too dark? That inside every panic attack, every relapse, every sleepless night, there’s still a pulse of mythic power saying go on?

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The old myths taught us that magic was external: fire, lightning, divine intervention. The new myths—those of mental health and recovery—teach us that magic is endurance, empathy, and the quiet work of staying.

In the end, the real magic is survival.
It’s the girl who keeps painting when her hands shake.
It’s the boy who takes his meds and still writes poems.
It’s the friendship that outlasts grief.
It’s the love that doesn’t cure you but holds you steady until you can begin to heal yourself. That, to me, is the truest myth—the one we’re all still writing.

Portals Made of Language: Why Fantasy Still Matters

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Before I ever believed in magic, I believed in words. Not the easy kind—abracadabra, or once upon a time—but the harder ones that carried grief and wonder in equal measure. The kind of words that didn’t promise escape, but understanding. Fantasy, for me, has never been about running away from reality; it has always been about walking toward it through a different door.

That door is language itself. Every metaphor is a threshold, every poem a small, shimmering key. And if you listen closely enough—between syllables, between breaths—you’ll hear the hinge creak open.

1. The Work of Wonder

When I began writing Dreamcatcher, I wasn’t trying to build another world. I was trying to make sense of the one I already lived in—the one that didn’t always make space for silence, for Indigenous belief, for the shimmer between dream and waking. Baumwelt, the world my protagonist Dash steps into through her grandmother’s dreamcatcher, grew from the ache of that absence.

In the beginning, I thought Baumwelt was a fantasy realm. But the longer I wrote, the more I realized: it was a reflection. Every root in that world grew from real soil—the Dakota stories, the wind through Minnesota pines, the ache of losing and finding yourself again.

Fantasy has a way of returning us to what’s most real. It asks us to look at our world through the mirror of the impossible, and in doing so, to see what we’ve overlooked. When Dash touches the dreamcatcher and slips between worlds, she isn’t escaping. She’s being invited to look deeper—to face the dark, to understand grief as something that can be walked through, not avoided.

Fantasy matters because it teaches us the work of wonder: that curiosity is not naiveté, and awe is not ignorance. It is an act of radical attention.

2. Language as Portal

In Ink & Ivy, language becomes a literal form of creation. Marisol, a young lady who runs a magical bookshop, discovers that what she writes can change the world around her. Her stories don’t just describe—they summon. But with every word comes responsibility; every metaphor has consequences.

This, too, is the work of writers: to understand that words are not harmless. They shape what we see. They summon possibility—or erase it.

In Ink & Ivy, the girls’ language becomes a living thing, something that resists control. The “pale man,” a figure who feeds on imitation and distortion, thrives on empty words—stories written without care, without truth. The girls learn that creation, to be sacred, must be done with reverence.

Fantasy, at its best, reminds us of the power of language. We speak worlds into being. We dream communities into possibility. We write our own maps through darkness. The portal isn’t the wardrobe or the dreamcatcher or the bookshop door. It’s the sentence itself—the turning of one word into another.

3. The Sacred Ordinary

Many people think fantasy is escapist because it contains dragons, spells, or portals. But what if those things are simply metaphors for what already lives within us? The dragon, in Dreamcatcher, isn’t just a beast—it’s fear, grief, the inheritance of pain. When Dash confronts it, she’s really confronting the trauma of generations, the unspoken stories that haunt her family.

And when Marisol in Ink & Ivy writes her way through grief, her pen becomes both wand and weapon—an instrument of creation that heals by revealing.

Fantasy is the literature of the sacred ordinary. It allows us to approach heavy truths with the gentleness of myth. It helps us say what cannot otherwise be said.

I think of Indigenous storytelling—how coyote and wind, willow and raven are not just symbols, but relatives. Fantasy, in its truest sense, carries that same heartbeat: it teaches us that the world is alive, responsive, and holy in its strangeness.

When readers step into Dreamcatcher or Ink & Ivy, I don’t want them to find an escape hatch. I want them to find a mirror. I want them to feel what it means to hold grief and beauty in the same breath, to remember that imagination is not a luxury—it’s an inheritance.

4. Why We Still Need Fantasy

In an age of data and disconnection, we need stories that remind us what it feels like to be human. Fantasy does that. It re-enchants the world. The modern world is noisy with explanation. We want everything to be understood, categorized, proven. But what if the point of wonder is not to be solved, but to be stayed with? Fantasy slows us down. It asks us to listen. It gives us permission to imagine again—a radical act in a culture of cynicism.

When I visit workshops, I often tell young writers that fantasy is not an escape from truth; it’s a different route to it. The language of magic lets us speak about mental illness, loss, and love in ways realism sometimes can’t. A dragon can hold more honesty than a diary entry. A spell can say what a scream cannot.

In Dreamcatcher, the dream world exists because Dash’s waking life is too painful to face directly. In Ink & Ivy, the written world becomes a refuge from grief—but also a reminder that creation without integrity can destroy as easily as it heals. Both stories are, at their heart, about the power of imagination to rebuild us.

We still need fantasy because the world is still breaking—and fantasy shows us how to mend.

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5. The Door Within the Reader

Every time a reader opens a book, they cross a threshold. They leave behind their certainty and step into language. That act—quiet, solitary, miraculous—is the closest thing we have to magic. When I write, I try to make that doorway visible. Sometimes it’s a dreamcatcher. Sometimes it’s a bookshop in a forgotten town. But always, it’s a passage between the seen and the unseen, the possible and the impossible.

Fantasy matters because it reminds us that those borders are permeable. It whispers that the ordinary world is threaded with portals if only we know how to look. And maybe that’s the point—not to lose ourselves in the unreal, but to find our way back to the real with our eyes open wider, our hearts more attuned to wonder.

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6. Closing the Circle

In Dreamcatcher, Dash returns home after her journey through Baumwelt, carrying both loss and wisdom. In Ink & Ivy, Marisol learns that creation is not about control—it’s about connection. Both stories close with the same truth: that every world we build through language eventually leads us back to ourselves.

When I walk along the lake near my home in Minnesota, I often think about the way water mirrors sky—the way two worlds touch without truly merging. That thin line of reflection is where my stories live: the between-place where reality brushes against dream. Fantasy still matters because it keeps that shimmer alive.

In the end, every book is a portal. Every reader, a traveler. Every word, a small act of faith that the invisible still matters—that imagination, like water, can still cleanse, connect, and carry us home.

The Art of Liminality: Writing the Spaces Between Worlds

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“Between waking and dream, girlhood and grief, there is a place that language almost reaches—and that’s where I write from.”

Some stories do not belong entirely to one world.
They hover in the threshold—that delicate, dangerous space between what we know and what we believe. The in-between has always been my country. It’s where I’ve found the most honest versions of myself, and where my characters seem to find me first—half-shadow, half-light, whispering: write the crossing.

To live in the liminal is to refuse the false choice between realism and magic, sanity and madness, childhood and adulthood. It is to see both—and to find the trembling beauty in the blur.

Whimsy and Bliss: Growing Up Inside Wonder

In Whimsy and Bliss, I wanted to write about that final summer before the horizon changes—the cusp between friendship and farewell, between the girls they were and the women they’re about to become.

Abigail Whimsy and Lainey Bliss live inside this threshold. Their adventures—climbing water towers at midnight, mapping “thin places,” chasing the remnants of childhood magic—are less about fantasy and more about memory. Each act of wonder becomes an act of grief for the selves they’re outgrowing.

To write them was to remember the ache of adolescence: that strange ache of realizing that magic was never lost, only waiting for you to look differently.

Ink & Ivy: Creation as Refuge

When I began Ink & Ivy, I was thinking about art as survival—about how creation can become a sanctuary when the world fractures. The story’s young booksellers and illustrators discover that their drawings begin to breathe, that the ink itself can resist darkness.

But underneath the fantastical premise lies a human truth: we build worlds not to escape the real, but to understand it. Ink becomes rebellion. Story becomes shelter. For Marisol and her circle, creation is both resistance and refuge—the liminal act of turning despair into design, shadow into shape.

That’s what writing feels like for me, too—a quiet act of defiance against silence.

Shadows We Carry: The Weight of Inheritance

Then came Shadows We Carry, a book born from the tension between remembering and release. It lives in the psychological dusk—between grief and growth, silence and confession. Its characters inherit what isn’t visible: generational trauma, unspoken histories, ghosts of choices that still breathe through bloodlines.

Writing it taught me that the liminal isn’t always mystical; sometimes it’s painfully human. The space between who we were raised to be and who we are becoming can feel like a haunting—and yet, it’s also where healing begins. The shadows we carry are not just burdens; they are thresholds. Step through them, and you find yourself rewritten.

Déjà vu: The Echo Between Memory and Madness

In Déjà vu, the line between dream and waking frays entirely. Ivy Lancaster’s visions, her looping déjà vu, and her haunting sense of repetition are not supernatural tricks—they’re metaphors for what trauma does to time.

To live with memory is to live in a loop: to relive, re-see, re-feel what logic insists is over. Writing this book meant surrendering to that repetition—finding beauty in the recursion, empathy in the confusion.

The story asks: what if madness isn’t madness at all, but a language the world has forgotten how to read?

Why We Need the In-Between

Liminality terrifies because it resists certainty. It’s a door that never entirely shuts, a sky that never chooses day or night. But within that uncertainty is grace. It’s where imagination lives, where empathy begins.

The young and the haunted, the dreamers and the doubters—they all live here, straddling worlds, speaking in metaphors because plain speech fails. To write the liminal is to honor the unseen bridges: between sanity and sensitivity, between what was and what will be.

When I write, I try not to choose a side. I let both worlds breathe.

For the Reader Between Worlds

If you’ve ever felt too much, or too early, or too in-between—this space is for you. Hold the blur. Let your contradictions coexist. The liminal is not indecision; it’s artistry.

And maybe, somewhere between dusk and dawn, story and silence, you’ll find yourself not trapped between worlds—but finally belonging to both.“To write the crossing is to remember: thresholds are not barriers, but invitations.”