“We do not write to remember what was lost. We write to remind the land that we are still listening.”
Before I could name myself as a writer, I was a listener. I grew up in the hush between stories—in the cadence of my grandmother’s and auntie’s voices, in the pauses that carried more truth than the sentences. She spoke in fragments, half-remembered songs that felt older than her body, words that hung in the air like incense.
The first stories I inherited were not written down. They lived in breath, in rhythm, in the pulse of kitchen light and the sound of rain on a tin roof. I did not yet know they were mythology—or that I would one day spend my life trying to rewrite them before they disappeared.
Red Lineages: A Song Made Visible
When I began writing Red Lineages, I wasn’t crafting a book of poems. I was stitching together the threads my ancestors had left behind—the syllables that survived allotment, the silences that colonial archives mistook for absence.
Every poem became an act of recovery, a slow unbraiding of what was taken and a reweaving of what remained. Some pieces came through dream, others through the steady hum of memory. In each, I heard the same heartbeat: that our languages and lineages are not past tense—they are present and pulsing, waiting for us to speak them back into being. The page, I discovered, is not a graveyard. It is a ceremonial ground.
Dreamcatcher: The Bridge Between Worlds
In Dreamcatcher: Between the Real and the Woven, I followed Dash, a Dakota Sioux girl who stumbles into a dream realm shaped by ancestral wisdom and modern ache. Her journey began as fantasy—but became a map of cultural survival.
Baumwelt, that mythic world between sleep and story, is the same world our elders spoke of when they said the spirits travel through dreams. Dash’s courage to walk between them mirrors the courage of every Indigenous storyteller who must translate myth into modern language without losing its sacred center.
We do not invent our worlds—we remember them.
Vanished on Tribal Land: Truth in the Echo
When I wrote Vanished on Tribal Land, I stepped into darker terrain—where myth meets the machinery of disappearance. The novel draws on the ongoing crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous people. It refuses the comfort of distance.
The story is not simply mystery; it is testimony. Each vanished girl in the book speaks through the wind, the rivers, the empty rooms. Their absence becomes presence. Writing it meant facing the legacy of erasure—not only by telling their stories but by indicting the silence that surrounds them.
To write such a story is to walk with ghosts—and to promise them visibility.
Bdóte: Where Rivers Remember
In Bdóte, I return to the confluence—the meeting place of the Minnesota and Mississippi Rivers, a sacred Dakota site and origin of our people. The land itself speaks in that work, carrying both grief and renewal.
Writing Bdóte taught me that myth is not ancient; it’s alive each time the rivers meet. Every current carries an old name. Every bend remembers the treaties broken along its banks. When I stand there, notebook open, I feel both the wound and the inheritance—the truth that the river keeps our story better than any book ever could.
The Inheritance of Silence
Colonialism doesn’t only take land. It takes language—and the right to mythologize oneself. For generations, our stories were re-told for us: edited, mistranslated, sanitized. But the body remembers what the archive forgets.
Each time I write, I ask: whose silence am I breaking? Each line becomes an offering to those whose voices were edited out of history’s margins. In this way, writing is not an act of ownership—it is one of return.
Reclaiming the Narrative
Rewriting ancestry is dangerous work. It requires tenderness, research, and reverence—not just for what was, but for what still is. It demands we listen to rivers, to elders, to languages we may not yet understand.
But it also offers healing. It reminds us that identity is not a fixed inheritance—it’s a living river, carrying memory forward even when the current splits and disappears underground.
When we write from that current, we are not inventing myth. We are participating in its continuation.
For the Next Storyteller
If you are reading this and feeling the tug of your own unnamed lineage—follow it. Ask your grandparents what songs they remember. Sit in the quiet. Let the land remind you of your origin.
Our myths were never meant to be locked in museums. They are meant to breathe through us—through the next poem, the next painting, the next generation that refuses to forget.
The work is never about reclaiming what was lost. It’s about remembering that it was never truly gone.
When Healing Becomes Art: Writing Through Mental Health
Before I ever wrote a word about healing, I was simply trying to survive. The blank page was the only space where the noise quieted—where I could make sense of panic, obsession, grief, and that endless hum of almost okay. What began as journaling at the edge of exhaustion slowly became its own language. Somewhere between the chaos of thought and the order of sentences, I started to understand that writing wasn’t just an expression. It was survival.
The Alphabet of Almosts: Naming the Unnamable
In The Alphabet of Almosts, I began with a single rule: tell the truth, even if it trembles. Each chapter began as a letter—A for Admission, B for Breakthrough, C for Control—not because I had answers, but because I needed order when everything else felt unstructured. I was writing through paranoia, disorganization, and recovery. Through language, I found a map. Not out of illness, but deeper into self-compassion.
When readers write to say they saw themselves in those pages—not in the illness, but in the effort—I am reminded that we are all composing alphabets of survival, each in our own handwriting.
Dancing Without Music: The Sound of Staying
Later, in Dancing Without Music, I followed two teens—Mia and Milo—who fall in love in the middle of everything falling apart. Their seizures, eating disorders, and depression are not plot points. They’re part of the ecosystem of being alive, of trying to love while the mind betrays the body.
To write them honestly, I had to sit with discomfort—not romanticize it, not simplify it. Their story isn’t about illness being “overcome.” It’s about learning to dance anyway, to create rhythm in silence, to choose tomorrow again and again. Healing, I’ve learned, is not a straight line. It’s a pulse.
Some Species of Outsider-ness: The Art of Being Seen
With Some Species of Outsider-ness, I turned to adolescence—that fragile threshold where identity and illness often collide. Piper and Slater aren’t defined by bipolar disorder or Guillain-Barré Syndrome. They are artists, friends, detectives of their own souls.
Writing them reminded me that mental illness doesn’t erase humanity; it reframes it. Sometimes the most radical act is to let a character (or ourselves) be messy, brilliant, contradictory—to live beyond diagnosis and still belong to the story.
Why We Write About Pain
There’s a quiet fear that writing about mental health will label you forever: as fragile, unstable, confessional. But the truth is, these stories expand what we mean by human. To tell them with nuance, empathy, and artistic integrity is an act of resistance—against stigma, silence, and the myth that suffering must be hidden to be healed.
Art doesn’t fix us. But it listens when nothing else will.
The Work Beyond the Page
Healing is collaborative. It happens in therapy rooms, hospital corridors, family kitchens, and art studios. I’ve found it in the layered textures of mixed-media collage—the way torn paper, thread, and pigment remind me that wholeness is made of fragments. My visual art, like my writing, speaks the same truth: repair is not about erasing the seams. It’s about learning to love their pattern.
So when I write, I try to honor the body and the mind as storytellers in equal measure—both fallible, both sacred.
For Anyone Writing Through It
If you are writing through mental illness or recovery, know this: your story matters, even if it never becomes a book. You don’t have to be healed to make art. You only have to be honest. Write from the tremor, not despite it. Make beauty from the static. And let your words remind someone—maybe even yourself—that being alive is still an art form.
Shady Oak Press (2025) ISBN: 978-1961841468 Reviewed by Stephanie Elizabeth Long for Reader Views (09/2025)
Abigail Whimsy and Lainey Bliss have been best friends since the second grade. Like yin and yang, their opposites somehow fit together like errant puzzle pieces. Whimsy exists in a world of vibrant dreams and imagination, while Lainey is pragmatic and even-keeled, which anchors Abigail. Because nothing good can last forever, the girls have one final summer together before Lainey goes off to a fancy college, leaving Abigail behind.
Before Lainey leaves, Abigail has devised a plan. They will create a map (complete with a detailed legend) and explore all the mysteries of their town—dismantle the “thin” places, using her late grandmother’s journal (chaotic musings) as a guide.
As they delve deeper into the journey, Abigail’s reality becomes skewed, and Lainey’s attempts to keep her friend’s sanity in check become more difficult. The places they visit awaken a humming within Abigail, and the more they add to the map, the louder the hum becomes.
Whimsy and Bliss is a coming-of-age literary masterpiece. Angela Gray’s writing is known for its vivid imagery and deep metaphors, and this novel is no exception. Readers will quickly be immersed in Abigail’s world of wanderlust, where magic and realism become blurred. Beyond that, the character-driven story explores themes of friendship, self-discovery, and bridging the transition from childhood to young adulthood.
Sometimes it can be hard to decipher the difference between imagination and illness. The author has done an excellent job of illustrating Abigail’s unraveling—the whispering of nature, the ebb and flow of the hum, and the excitement turned obsession. With every place Abigail and Lainey traversed, I fell more in tune with Abigail’s frequency, at times questioning what was real and what was fictitious—this is the type of story that makes you see the world differently.
Whimsy and Bliss certainly highlights the plight of mental illness, particularly hypomania. Still, at its core, the novel’s overarching message is one of connection and trust—it’s the impenetrable sisterhood between two young women on the cusp of adulthood. In a world that is often stuck in the me-versus-you mentality, the solidarity between friends is refreshing, teaching us that we don’t have to suffer alone; we can lean on others for support.
For readers who love young adult books about friendship and adventure with a focus on mental health, this literary gem will appeal to you. Angela Gray’s exquisite prose is unmatched, and the multilayered characters are memorable. Abigail and Lainey’s map of thin places will forever hold a special place in my heart.
This is the summer of locked doors, fragile rituals, and the ghosts that keep count.
I’m Stevie Matthews—almost sixteen, the kind of girl people whisper about. “Bat-shit crazy,” they say. Maybe they’re right. This summer, the order cracks. Obsessive thoughts tighten like barbed wire, rituals multiply, and the only way forward is a hospital stay I never asked for.
Behind those doors, I meet strangers who feel both broken and familiar, each carrying their own secret galaxies of fear and hope. Together, we make a kind of map—messy, jagged, stitched with laughter, unraveling with heartbreak.
This is the story of how I learn that friendship can be born from accident, that healing isn’t neat or pretty, and that sometimes the bravest thing is to stay.
This book is a tender, unflinching portrait of adolescence, OCD, and the fragile alchemy of survival—equal parts bruised and luminous, like a diary written in ink and ghost light.
Some stories begin with a single spark. For me, it was a scene in a psych ward where Nico and Zibby from The Cartography of First Love found themselves alongside Abigail Whimsy from Whimsy and Bliss and Aspen James from Shadows We Carry. At first, they shared the same space—four voices pressed together by circumstance, four fragile hearts mapping escape routes in whispers. But as I wrote, each one began to grow beyond the walls I had built, demanding not just a role in a shared narrative but the full breath of their own.
What began as one writing endeavor quickly branched into three novels. I realized I loved each of them too much to let them be shadows in someone else’s story. Nico and Zibby’s romance needed its own compass. Whimsy’s dreamlike adventures deserved to unfurl before her diagnosis became part of her arc. And Aspen’s haunted sketches needed the weight of silence and discovery only their own narrative could hold. By giving them individual pages, I gave them the freedom to tell me who they really were.
The backstories I first drafted in that shared ward became scaffolding—notes, fragments, hints of a life I would later let bloom fully. For Whimsy and Aspen, I wrote them at a point before hospitalization, while their lives were still luminous with magic and not yet marked by diagnosis, though Whimsy’s epilogue eventually folds that thread in. It was the only way to honor their wonder as much as their struggle. For Nico and Zibby, I leaned into the familiar rhythms of the ward itself—the routines, the hush, and the clamor—because their love story was inseparable from that claustrophobic yet strangely tender landscape.
Each character is close to my heart because their beginnings trace back to my own. I was hospitalized repeatedly between the ages of 13 and 15 for an eating disorder. I remember the unlikely friendships, the long hours, and the way we mapped impossible escape plans—California always our imagined salvation. Those memories, both heartrending and inspiring, found new breath through Zibby, Nico, Whimsy, and Aspen. What started as one shared room became three worlds, each carrying a piece of that past and reshaping it into a story.
Read our review of “The Cartography of First Love.”
The Cartography of First Love
Angela Grey Shady Oak Press (2025) ISBN: 978-1961841444
Angela Grey is an Indigenous novelist, poet, and painter whose work explores the intersections of memory, identity, and healing. She studied creative writing as well as spirituality and healing at the University of Minnesota, where she deepened her commitment to storytelling as both art and medicine. Alongside her writing, Angela finds balance in yoga and mindfulness practices, particularly Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), which shape the reflective quality of her work. She lives in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, with her husband, one spirited pup, and four cats. When she’s not writing, she enjoys camping, budget travel to places like Maine, Oregon, and the coastal Carolinas, and gathering with family around a BBQ grill.
Welcome to Reader Views, Angela. What is The Cartography of First Love about, and what was your inspiration behind the story?
Angela Grey
The Cartography of First Love is about two teens who fall for each other in a psych ward and, years later, collide again by chance, discovering that first love leaves the deepest coordinates on the heart. I drew inspiration from my own first love, Timothy, and the way certain people map us forever, no matter how much time or distance passes.
The book uses the language of geography, such as maps, coordinates, fault lines, and grids as a recurring motif. What drew you to this metaphor, and how did it shape Zibby and Nico’s story?
I’ve always believed that first love is like a map that’s messy, unfinished, and yet it guides you long after you’ve left that place. With Zibby and Nico, the metaphor became their heartbeat: every moment they shared, every scar and smile, became a kind of coordinate. Even when life pulls them apart, the map they drew together continues to shape the routes they take back to themselves and, ultimately, to each other.
What did telling the story from both Zibby and Nico’s perspectives allow you to show that might have been missed if it came from only one of them?
Telling the story from both Zibby and Nico’s perspectives allowed me to show how first love is never just one-sided; instead, it’s a dialogue of hearts, where each carries their own fears, hopes, and unspoken longings. Their alternating voices reminded me of my own first love with Timothy, how two people can remember the same moment differently, yet together those memories form a map that’s more complete, more tender, and more true.
Zibby’s eating disorder and Nico’s depression are handled with both honesty and sensitivity. What guided you in portraying these struggles in a way that felt true to teen readers?
What guided me most was the memory of my own teen years living with an eating disorder, anxiety, and depression. I remember how isolating it felt, how every day was a negotiation between silence and survival, and how desperately I wished to see characters who mirrored that reality without judgment or cliché. Writing about Zibby and Nico, I drew from those struggles, but also from the fragile beauty I found in connection during that time, such as the way even small moments of kindness could feel like lifelines. I wanted teen readers to feel seen, to recognize themselves in the honesty of the pain, but also to believe in the possibility of love and healing that can grow even in the hardest places.
The ward setting with its sterile walls, tiled floors, and glass windows defines Zibby and Nico’s daily life. What guided your choices in bringing that environment to life on the page?
The ward setting came from a very personal place, my own hospitalization as a teen for an eating disorder. I remember the way the sterile walls and glass windows could feel both suffocating and strangely safe, how the rhythm of medication rounds and group sessions became a backdrop against which fragile connections bloomed. I wanted Zibby and Nico’s world to carry that same duality: a place of restriction and routine, but also one where small rebellions such as passing a note, planting something green, laughing at the wrong moment, could feel like acts of freedom. Writing those details was my way of honoring how, even in the most controlled environments, first love and hope find a way through the cracks.
Zibby and Nico’s bond is often expressed without words—through touch, puzzles, and greenhouse afternoons. Ordinary activities also take on extraordinary meaning in the ward. Why did you want their connection and healing to grow out of these quiet, everyday moments?
Because in a place where everything is monitored and spoken words can feel heavy, it’s the quiet, ordinary moments that become extraordinary. For Zibby and Nico, healing wasn’t about grand declarations; it was about finding love in the small spaces where hope could breathe.
The plant named Atlas is one of the most powerful recurring images. What does Atlas symbolize for you within the story? For me, Atlas is both a burden and a prayer in that he carries the gravity of pain, yet in his fragile leaves and quiet growth, he shows how love can turn even the heaviest weight into a living map toward hope.
“Absence” becomes a theme Zibby confronts throughout the story. How did you want readers to think about absence, loss, and the presence that lingers behind?
I wanted readers to feel that absence is never truly empty because it leaves a shape, a breath, a lingering presence that continues to guide us, like a map traced in negative space. In Zibby’s world, loss becomes its own kind of presence, reminding her, and us, that love endures even in what’s missing.
Many young adult romances end when the couple parts ways, but you carried the story through separation, silence, and even a ten-year reunion. What compelled you to extend their map beyond the hospital walls?
Because first love doesn’t end at goodbye; instead, it lingers, shaping every road we take afterward. I wanted to show that Zibby and Nico’s map wasn’t just drawn inside the hospital walls, but continued through distance, silence, and time, proving that some coordinates remain etched in the heart until fate brings you back to them.
The epilogue introduces a “map legend” with entries like “Tiles,” “Cracks,” and “Coordinates.” How did you envision this legend as a closing note to the novel?
The legend is a map of absences as much as presences, where even cracks and silences become markers or proof that love leaves traces long after the moment has passed.
Readers might see Zibby and Nico as ‘two broken kids,’ yet your story shows another side of what it means to endure. How do you define strength in the context of their relationship?
For me, the strength in Zibby and Nico’s relationship isn’t about being unbreakable; instead, it’s about choosing to reach for each other even in their most fragile moments. They teach us that endurance isn’t the absence of pain, but the courage to let love in, to share the weight of what feels unbearable, and to believe that two so-called “broken” hearts can still map out something whole together.
Family, whether present or absent or in the background, shapes both characters deeply. How did you decide how much of their family lives to bring into the novel?
I wanted family to be like a shadow in the story that’s sometimes heavy, sometimes faint, but always shaping how Zibby and Nico move through the world. By showing just enough of their families, I could reveal the fractures and absences that made them vulnerable, while leaving space for the found family they create in each other. In that way, family becomes both the wound and the soil from which their love takes root.
The Cartography of First Love is lyrical, often more like poetry than straightforward prose. What role does style play in how you tell such a tender but heavy story?
The lyrical style lets the story breathe by turning silence, touch, and small moments into poetry, so Zibby and Nico’s love feels as tender as it is heavy.
You dedicate the novel both to your husband and to your first love. How did your own experiences of love influence the emotional landscape of this book?
My own experiences of love gave the book its emotional compass. My first love taught me the intensity and fragility of being truly seen for the first time and the way those early feelings etch themselves into you forever. My husband has shown me what it means for love to endure, to grow deeper with time, and to hold both joy and struggle. Together, those experiences shaped the novel’s landscape: the passion of first love, the ache of loss, and the hope of finding a love that lasts.
Art in the form of sketches, puzzles, and drawings, along with movement such as counting tiles, tracing cracks, or standing in an airport, gives the story texture. How do creative expression and place tie into your idea of recovery and love?
Art and place are the coordinates of healing, like each sketch, crack, and step is a reminder that love maps itself onto the world as we learn to recover.
Young adult readers often look for themselves in fiction. What do you hope a teen facing struggles with mental health or belonging might take away from Zibby and Nico’s journey?
I hope a teen reading this story feels less alone. Zibby and Nico are proof that you don’t have to be “fixed” to be worthy of love or belonging and that even in the middle of struggle, you can still laugh, create, connect, and dream. My wish is that readers carry away the sense that their story isn’t over, that healing isn’t linear, and that the coordinates of first love, friendship, and hope can guide them forward no matter how heavy things feel.
There’s something unforgettable about the emotions of first love. How did you work to capture that fleeting intensity on the page?
To me, first love feels like a spark that lights up everything around it, even if only for a moment, and I wanted the language to carry that same glow. I leaned into the fleeting intensity: the way a brush of a hand can feel seismic, or how a single glance can echo louder than a thousand words. By writing with that kind of urgency and tenderness, I tried to bottle the impossibility of first love like the way it vanishes and yet marks you forever.
The book closes with a kind of map legend, almost like a guide to memory. What do you hope readers carry with them after finishing the story?
I hope readers carry away the truth that first love is never lost because it simply becomes a compass, guiding the heart forward.
Do you have another piece of work in mind after you finish promoting The Cartography of First Love?
Yes, while I was writing The Cartography of First Love, I was also working on another novel, Whimsy and Bliss, over the span of ten years. In some ways, the two books grew up alongside each other: Cartography carries the raw intensity of first love, while Whimsy and Bliss leans into memory, family, and the thin places where the ordinary brushes against the extraordinary. Now that Cartography is stepping into the world, I’m excited to give Whimsy and Bliss the attention it deserves and to share how the two stories, though different, echo each other in the ways they explore love, loss, and belonging.
Is there anything else you’d like to add for our readers today?
Only that I’m deeply grateful to every reader who picks up The Cartography of First Love. This story was born out of my own struggles and first love, but it belongs just as much to anyone who’s ever felt fragile, out of place, or overwhelmed by the intensity of their heart. If readers walk away feeling seen, less alone, and reminded that love, whether first love, lasting love, or the love we’re still searching for, can guide us forward, then I’ve given the book all I hoped it could be.
Angela Grey is an Indigenous novelist, poet, and painter whose work explores the intersections of memory, identity, and healing. She studied creative writing, as well as spirituality and healing, at the University of Minnesota, where she deepened her commitment to storytelling as both an art and a form of medicine. Alongside her writing, Angela finds balance in yoga and mindfulness practices, particularly Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), which shape the reflective quality of her work. She lives in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, with her husband, one spirited pup, and four cats. When she’s not writing, she enjoys camping, budget travel to places like Maine, Oregon, and the coastal Carolinas, and gathering with family around a BBQ grill.
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