newsletter – Jennifer Shelby

Posted on September 20, 2025 by JenniferShelby

Printing with the sun

Hello Enchanted Side Questers,

I’m afraid this month’s side quest got a little… obsessive. It might have been the heat, which shuts down my brain in many ways, or stress, or just not having enough time to devote to creativity. In fact, it was an awesome creative outlet that really only took a few minutes a day.

My friend Aimee set me the video that started it all, showing someone making anthotype sunprints (like a cyanotype) with turmeric and fixing it with Borax. “Huh,” I thought, “I have that in my cupboard.” Then I did some internet sleuthing to find the full recipe, which you can find here.

It ended up being the most soothing, lovely bit of creativity. There were just so many variables and things that I couldn’t control that I didn’t have any choice but to let go and enjoy the process. It certainly doesn’t hurt that the chemical reaction of the borax + water developer is an immediate and thrilling bit of magic when you brush it on.

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I’ve spent August printing stories with the sun
Jennifer Shelby
Aug 21

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I soon dug out my old microwave flower press (a terra cotta beast I picked up at a yard sale decades ago because it was pretty) and put it to use, drying pressed flowers and vegetation in minutes rather than months or years.

I started appreciating the shape of things in a new way. My eyes tend to hunger for colour and texture, but caterpillar damage and flaws were suddenly beautiful because they could create such visual interest in the prints. A pristine feather is beautiful, but a raggedy one has drama. Yesterday’s squash flowers became candles, petunias became dresses, and a skeletonized leaf became one of my most prized treasures.

“What are you going to do with those?” asked my youngest, as my pile of prints got unweildy.

And… I don’t know. I want to frame some of them. I want to look at them. Like drying herbs, storing squash, pickling cukes, and the flowers I grow because they dry so pretty, it’s another way to save a bit of summer for the dark winter days when you need the reminder of green plants and flowers and a sun that can print a story on a page.

a deer with flowers on his antlers sits beside words that read Jennifer Shelby's nature notes

We’ve been in an extreme drought with forest fires cropping up left and right. The trees are suffering, the bottom leaves shrivelled green and falling off in gentlest breezes. It’s been hard, and autumn is happening very early as trees are choosing dormancy over the risk of remaining for what little summer is left.

I have checked the springs in the enchanted forest, and some are still holding out, providing much needed water for the wild critters. We put out an extra hummingbird feeder after the population at ours exploded. I researched why and it turns out flowers can’t produce as much nectar in a drought, natch. Wow are they entertaining, aggressive little creatures.

Since our rain barrels went dry, we’ve been loading the truck with containers and filling them at the river for the garden, which it has been thriving on. And because it is a little oasis of green, the bees are bumbling happily, pollinating everything without any help from us.

Still… we would very much appreciate some rain. Days of it. Just pouring on the roof while I stay inside and read or write and do lovely, forgotten rainy day things.

a golden key with a green ribbon tied into a bow sits as a page break

Work continues on my Binding novel, made possible by a grant from artsnb. It has grown and stretched and tells me “I think I’d like to be a duology” now. I think it might be right.

The ‘fictional essay’ I mentioned in July’s newsletter, written from the perspective of Binding’s main character, has been accepted for publication! I will share those details as soon as I am able. It’s a nice little boost for my novel, and also a lovely marketing opportunity.

Happily, they don’t require an exclusivity period, so I can also include it in my short story collection that I’ll be putting out to coincide with the Polaris launch of the Lunar Codex in (hopefully) December 2025, in which some of my short stories are being archived on the Moon. The Binding book should be done by then, so it will give me the chance to share that world with a wider audience. I’m also hoping to tuck a Little Banned Bookshop short story in there, the reason being that I think some local reporters will be interested in a local author’s work going to the Moon. Fingers crossed!

That’s all the news I have to share in this letter, friends. I hope you are able to get away from the news cycle and make some magic to protect your heart and creative spirit. Did you find any new side quests this month? I’d love to hear about them!

Talk soon,

a signature line has a picture of a woman wearing glasses in front of a writing desk. The words Jennifer Shelby author entangle a stick with a green butterfly resting on it

Posted on June 8, 2025 by JenniferShelby

Shh… don’t scare the story

Do you ever decide to ignore that little voice in your head that says “I’m not sure this is how the story is supposed to go” and plough ahead anyway? I know better, but I do it anyway. Sometimes I think I need to shake the story loose, but all it seems to do is make the story hide deeper in the shadowy depths of my mind.

That’s what happened with my “Binding of Spellwork and Story” novel that I’ve committed to write AND received a generous grant from artsnb to do just that.

I wrote about 22 000 words, hemming and hawing, poking and prodding. Maybe it’s too writerly. It probably is too writerly. This is a word I use that intend the same way that the art world uses “painterly” for techniques that makes the painter real and present in the final artwork. Painterly gets a whole term in art, while writers are not supposed to present in the finished “product” (here the quotations are to represent me cringing because I referred to art as a product). Writers are told things like “never break the fourth wall.” As a reader and a writer who delights in any sort of authorly asides, I co-opted the word painterly back in grade 11 art history class and wrote things are writerly as my rogue heart desired. Look at my brush strokes! An author was here, a human, a (gasp, horror) WRITER wrote this.

Then I had to stop that if I ever wanted to get published. There’s a whole thing about this, “first you have to learn the rules before you can break them,” but you also have to PROVE you know the rules, which is a whole other thing.

Then along comes AI and I’m thinking it’s time to get writerly AF. Forget about creating a story where the writer is ignorable, now is the time to make writers a FEATURE rather than a bug.

So when it came up when I workshopping those early chapters, I got quiet and paid attention to what was being said. “I’m not sure how appealing this will be to non-writers,” one writer told me, “but I like it.” This gave me pause, because that’s the trick isn’t it? Convincing non-writers to like something deliciously writerly.

And I think I need a challenge like that to really lose myself into a project. So these past weeks, I’ve been dismantling the story that was starting to feel forced and stalled, and instead, I’ve been gently coaxing the story it wants to be, and I want it to be, to come out of hiding. Some writers call this plotting, but it feels more like trying to soothe a feral cat so they come out of the hole they’ve hidden themself in after I tried to pick them up before they were ready.

Which requires I put my ego aside and learn oh so much patience. Bless the writers who don’t need to plot before they write; they clearly sacrifice to very different gods than I.

As I write these words, the feral story has started responding to my pleading mews and is revealing itself, however slowly. It nibbles the food I’ve left out for it when I’m sleeping. Patience. We’ll get there.

Last month I mentioned that my first ever book fair was coming up and on this side of time, I’m happy to report that it was a smashing success.

It wasn’t without its tense moments. The first few hours, as readers trickled past, not interested in me or my book and the smile on my face started to ache, my heart began to sink and oh gods what if I don’t sell a single book. But then the cozy fantasy readers, who had apparently just slept late (very cozy of them, if I’m honest), arrived and everything got much better after that.

I was especially thrilled when an academic of banned books picked up a copy of Care and Feeding of Your Little Banned Bookshop. I hope they leave a review!

The real stars of the spring ephemerals are the fawn lilies (aka trout lilies or dogtooth violets) and trilliums, followed by the tiny white violets that grew in the Lover’s Lane of the woods where I grew up and now, my lawn. But this year, I was all about the inedible cinnamon fern fiddleheads.

As they grow, they huddle together, a tightknit little fern family. Encouraging each other, no doubt, as they gather their bravest thoughts and slowly unfurl.

My family’s been doing a lot of this this spring. Leaning on each other, supporting each other through difficult things. It hasn’t been easy, but we’ve got each other.

And of course I have one of those brains that sees faces everywhere and cheerfully assign characterhood to just about everything so the horsey little fella eyeing us in the picture above while his hair flops downward and a line of drool escapes him unbeknownst, well, that’s just joy.

That’s my news for May. The leaves are just about half-sized here and I get a lovely gasp of green delight still when I look out a window or go outside. The hummingbird feeder is up and my laundry basket is full of tomatoes and petunias traveling inside and back out again while we get through the final frosts of the year. I’m excited to get the garden in and welcome the fireflies this June. What are you most looking forward to this summer?

Until then, keep writing, keep reading, keep dreaming.

Posted on May 20, 2025 by JenniferShelby · 1 Comment

Cozy readers and frosty feathers

The book fair upon us! I’ve been busy getting ready and planning out my table. I’m very excited about what I’m calling my ‘Cozy Reader Packs,’ in which I’ve packed some Easter eggs (very appropriate for an Easter weekend post, amirite?).

If you’ve read the book, you might notice the key and the mug right away. But if you haven’t, and you happen to have them on hand while reading THAT particular book, well, I think you’d be in for a treat.

And, of course, if you have read it and you loved it, you might just want them for story reasons.

I actually designed the mug when I was still writing the book, because I wanted one. Then I had them made to say thank you to my beta-readers (and to have one to smile over), so it was just a matter of ordering them again. There’s another image on the other side featuring Toebeans:

The other goodies include a packet of apple cider, a Little Banned Bookshop bookmark, bookish stickers, and a gift bag. I think people will like them and I will have ten with me at the book fair. The keys themselves vary in style, but otherwise they’re all quite uniform.

I had a friend reach out to me from the States who mentioned that their friend fell asleep with Care and Feeding of Your Little Banned Bookshop in their arms. And all of the sudden, the psychological struggles I’ve been having with the sequel (what if I ruin the magic?) cleared up. That is the point of the Bookshop: to give comfort.

To the reader, to whomever needs it, and even to the writer, who is going through all of this too.

I think as long as I hold onto that, the sequel, however plural that may be, will be everything it needs to be.

The marsh is a lovely escape this time of year. I have to drive there, which makes it feel like an Event, and it’s usually a lonely place, which I prefer. I like to walk the game trails looking for all the secrets that piled up under the snow, and it’s so lovely to hear the birds singing again. I haven’t spotted my beloved red-winged blackbirds yet, but I have heard them.

I came across several thousand frosty feathers on one of my walks, took far too many pictures, and thus I have to restrain myself from sharing all of them. What is it about unkempt feathers highlighted with frost that captures my imagination so?

The other side of that coin, of course, is feathers of frost:

This newsletter feels a bit thin for my liking, so tell me, what are you reading? My current read is Sarah Beth Durst’s The Spellshop and it is such a lovely, cozy read.

How are you keeping your spirits up in these troubled times? I am peering into nature, limiting my time online, and following creative urges when they appear. Does that work for your spirits, too?

Until next month, keep dreaming, keep writing, keep reading.

Posted on January 10, 2025 by JenniferShelby

into the wintry blue

Dear Side Questers,

This morning is coloured all in shades of blue. There’s fresh snow on the ground and the sun is a timid thing yet.

Exciting things have been happening. Last spring, I wrote an essay and submitted it to a call for writers and artists to respond to L. M. Montgomery’s 150th Birthday. A peer review process soon followed, which was an interesting experience from a fiction writer’s perspective. Several different editors prodded my piece into their journal’s style by tweaking commas, asking questions, making sure this is really what I meant (it was). The editorial process always fascinates me, so seeing behind the veil into nonfiction was a fun romp. Part of me is still amazed they accepted my essay, but it’s out in the world now, and if you’d like to read it, here is a link to it on the Journal of L. M. Montgomery Studies website.

I think the essay reflects the way I’d been watching the Christofascism rising in North America with growing concern. Taking the first, deliberate steps to stop being triggered and start speaking up. It’s fitting to me that the essay came out around the same time as I was launching Care and Feeding of Your Little Banned Bookshop. The novella was originally a short story, written a few years ago, but I didn’t bare my soul in the short story the way I do in Care and Feeding of Your Little Banned Bookshop. I think I needed to be a little radicalized by current events to finally dig that deep.

The response has been truly wonderful. A writer and teacher I admire listed Care and Feeding of Your Little Banned Bookshop as his #1 for 2024, I’ve had a few cult survivors reach out (this meant the world to me), and more than a few private messages from people who were touched by it.

Reviews have been slowly collecting on Amazon. I’m still struggling to get Ingram sorted and I’m so sorry it’s taking this long, the holiday season has always been a struggle for me and I’m doing my best to reserve spoons for my mental health.

These are a few of my favourite reviews:

Thank you to everyone who has read and left a rating or a review so far, and especially to people who have been sharing this book with people they think would also enjoy it. Thank you for coming on this journey with me.

And, if you haven’t read it yet and are a bit curious, you can find Care and Feeding of Your Little Banned Bookshop right here.

As for this month’s side quest – it’s been marketing. I’ve been making videos and carousels, just doing my best to find the readers who might need this book as much as I did. There’s a decided learning curve, but I’m carrying on, allowing myself my mistakes.

One of the weirdest parts has been determining my “niche” without limiting myself. We’ll see how that goes…

This month has been wintry. A neighbour’s dog from up the mountain a bit has taken a liking to our porch and we often find him sleeping there in the morning, resulting in some rather stunning walks up the mountain for me as I attempt to take him home.

Have you ever seen needle ice? They are ice columns formed by groundwater that pop up above the soil and twist into strange ice flowers. I’ve been enjoying them during our freeze/thaw cycles of early winter.

That’s it for this month, Side Questers. Hold your loved ones close, 2025 is shaping up to be a bumpy ride and we’ll need each other to break through to the other side.

Take care and keep reading,

Posted on October 3, 2024 by JenniferShelby · 1 Comment

Septembering (in October)

I’m still confused by the autumn of it all. The kids are back in school, leaving me these vast quiet hours to work and write. True to form, it’s too quiet and I’m fighting to get anything done… until they come through the door and everything is back to normal. SIGH. Why is my brain like this?

It doesn’t help that I’m STUCK in my edits. The good news is that first draft of Care and Feeding of Your Little Banned Bookshop is complete! There’s just this one scene at the beginning that I need to add. I’m a firm believer that the beginning informs the ending, so it’s holding everything up. I have this vague sketch of what to write, but I can’t bring myself to pick up my pen and just write it. And I know myself enough to know that this means the idea hasn’t come yet and there’s no point in fighting it, but it’s frustrating. Editing is fun to do, but gosh, it’s awful when it’s just sitting there, waiting.

In the meantime, I’m teasing out my next project, the Binding of Story and Spellwork novel I received an artsnb grant to write. It’s still in the early plotting stages, but it’s surprising me with how it wants to be told and I find myself rushing for my notebook to write down the ideas as they come with a grin on my face.

That probably sounds strange, so I’ll explain myself. Somewhere over the summer, my hearing still a major issue and just feeling very punchy in general, I stopped listening to the voice that tells me what a story should be, and I started listening to what the story wanted to be. To what I wanted the story to be. This probably sounds like common sense to a non-writer, but it’s not. Writers’ heads get filled with every rejection letter they’ve ever received, internet sages doling out lessons about markets and do you want to be an artist or do you want to make money, and you end up spinning around like a spider on a broken web. It had gotten to the point where I couldn’t hear the stories anymore. Then, when my actual hearing went and I couldn’t do anything about it, I fixed the one hearing I could: the stories. I’m not even sure I knew I’d stopped listening, but something that was missing feels like it has returned.

Anyways. Oh, look! A moth shadow:

It’s oak gall season! I tried collecting these too late last year, so I started while the leaves are still on the trees this year. These little balls are created by gall wasps on oak leaves. They’re meant to be nurseries for the wasp larvae, but once they’ve left, some clever medieval folks figured out that you can turn the galls into ink.

(I wonder about that a lot.)

If you see a hole in the oak gall, you know the wasp has vacated the gall and it’s time to collect.

For now, I’ve only collected the galls, so I won’t pretend I have the expertise to teach you the recipe, but if you’d like to try this yourself, you can find plenty of oak gall ink recipes online. Basically you make a sort of tea with the galls, which reacts with iron (so be careful if you’re secretly Fae) to create a rich black ink for painting, for your non-metal dipping pens, or for keeping stories alive in that horrible dystopian future without ink that keeps plaguing your nightmares.

Ahem.

That’s it for this month, Side Questers, the leaves are just starting to change but I’m sure the fall colours will be almost over by the time I begin writing you about my October Side Quests.

I do enjoy fall. The crispy leaves, the colours, the mushrooms, the smell of coming frost. The first few fires in the woodstove that seem more cozy than the chore they’ll soon become. Sweaters. Wearing socks again! What’s your favourite part? Hit reply and let me know, I’d love to hear from you.

Until then,

Posted on August 30, 2024 by JenniferShelby · 1 Comment

August is with the banned

Dear Side Questers,

First off, the big news:

I’m thrilled to announce that artsnb has awarded me a grant to write a novel with the working title A Binding of Story and Spellwork! I’ll be drafting this book over the next year and I’m so thankful to everyone who wrote me a letter of recommendation, helped me with my grant application, and especially to artsnb for believing in this story!

(if you’ve noticed the date, please note that there is a significant delay between when I receive this news and I’m allowed to share it publicly.)

Some of you may have also noticed that I didn’t send out a newsletter last month. The short story is that I was in zero shape to write a newsletter.

The LONG story is that I caught a virus in late June/early July and it spread to my ears, cutting off my hearing entirely on one side, and partially on the other. At first I made some jokes, haha, it’s summer and the kids are home but somehow I’ve still got quiet time.

Then the first round of antibiotics didn’t do anything and it wasn’t funny anymore. Nothing sounds right, which is disorienting. Birdsong sounds like a distant banshee wail. The sussurrus of the wind in the leaves sounds like bacon sizzling. A big truck with a jake brake going down the mountain sounds like nothing I can place but let me tell you it opens a void of horror at my feet until someone explains what I just heard. I can’t tell what direction sounds are coming from. Everything is WEIRD.

I never realized how much I depend on sounds to navigate my world, how changes of pressure can alter sounds. Details I’ll definitely be considering the next time I write a portal fantasy.

And yeah, mental health. I fell in a pit.

Then I got a second, longer round of antibiotics. That also did nothing to help, brutalized my guts, and at this point, people are fed up. At first, people are frustrated that you can’t hear them. Then they give up, or get mad. You can read it in their face. “You’re not even trying. You just don’t want to listen to me. You aren’t worth the trouble it takes to talk to you.” At one point my seven-year-old burst into tears because she “has no one to talk to anymore.”

I’ve come to realize that people don’t buy hearing aids for themselves, they buy them for other people.

The pit got deeper.

Last week I went back to the doctor and finally got some answers. Basically, I have a fluid buildup in my middle ear caused by that bad cough we had in late June, but it isn’t an infection, it isn’t contagious, it’s just… there. And it should clear up on it’s own within twelve weeks. If it doesn’t, there’s an outpatient surgery, the same one little kids get when you hear they’re getting tubes in their ear. Three months of deafness sounds like a long time, but not if you’ve been in a super deep pit of depression worrying that this might be permanent.

I can do three months. Three months is a ladder down the side of the pit that I can use to climb out. Heck, it’s already been one month. Two to go!

If you spend a lot of time in the woods, you’ve probably noticed that birds go quiet when there’s a predator around. Quiet woods, like when you’re temporarily deaf, aren’t an easy place to relax, so my forays have been short. But long enough to see this cutie:

I have been spending all of this quiet working on a novella that is very much what I needed. Someone in my workshop group calls it ‘message fic’ which once would have horrified me, but yeah, it is and I should probably just lean into it. It’s a fairy tale for people who are horrified with all the book banning that’s been happening to the South.

Originally, this was a YA short story I wrote for Cast of Wonders’ annual Banned Books Week. It ended up being held for consideration, but then returned with the kind of feedback that made me trunk the story completely. A recent newsletter from Charlie Jane Anders made me pull it back out and I decided to see how it would work with a mature protagonist and more space to tell the story. This rewrite is really turning into something that I’m proud of. I’ve kept the original title, Care and Feeding of Your Little Banned Bookshop and I’m happy to say that this time around, the feedback has been positive thus far (finger crossed!).

Not incidentally, Charlie Jane Anders ALSO wrote the book Never Say You Can’t Survive: How to Get Through Hard Times by Making Up Stories which I’ve been rereading this month, for obvious reasons. I highly recommend the book and her newsletter!

That’s it for this month Side Questers. I hope you’re having a wonderful summer with lots of wild adventures. Feel free to hit reply and tell me about them so I can live vicariously through you!

Until next month,

Posted on June 26, 2024 by JenniferShelby · 2 Comments

Juneliness

As some of you know, I started up a newsletter a year (two?) or so ago. That’s what writers do for marketing, they say, and that tracks. But then they just sort of disappear forever, so I’ve a mind to start sharing them here as well, where at least the content remains visible for future readers. And me, when I went to rummage through last summer’s adventures.

So, without further ado, let me introduce to you Jennifer Shelby’s Enchanted Side Quests.

Dear Side Questers,

I’m DELIGHTED to write that I’ve had an essay accepted into The Journal of L. M. Montgomery Studies. I wrote my essay, Of Daydreams and Influence, when I saw a call for submissions to a “Writers and Artists Respond” to L. M. Montgomery for what would have been her 150th birthday this year.

As a girl growing up in Atlantic Canada, it meant a lot to me that L. M. Montgomery was from this area. That she was a writer. That she was FAMOUS. She was my hero. I read and re-read all of her books, especially the Emily trilogy, over and over growing up. My parents put very strict limits on what I was allowed to read (no dragons or fairies on the cover, as they might bring demons into the house, etc., etc.). But I was always allowed to read LMM.

It would be easy to write another essay here, which I’ll avoid for now, but I can trace my life through which LMM book was most important to me at the time, and that’s where I focused my essay. Even The Blue Castle was there for me when I was excommunicated and disowned by my parents.

I’m not entirely sure when this is coming out, but you can be sure I’ll share it here when the time comes.

Last month, I watched a robin build a nest in a yellow birch tree from my hammock chair. Since then, I’ve been keeping an eye on mama. She didn’t leave the nest until after the first little ones hatched, which is when I snuck over and snapped this picture.

A few years ago, we had a junco bird build a nest in our woodshed behind a few cans of spray paint, and the girls and I spent a wonderful June watching them grow into fledgelings. Every time we see a junco in the garden, one of us always wonders if they’re “one of our babies.” So this robin family is definitely bringing up memories of that summer.

Here are some more pictures, taken a week later because I can’t help myself.

All three fledged a week after this picture was taken, looking very much like small robins by then. I’m looking forward to remembering their dinosaur-looking selves whenever I see a robin from here onward.

I’m writing this month’s missive while waiting for the wildlife rehab to call me back over another of this season’s babies, a lil snowshoe hare we found lying, hurt but alive, in our driveway early this morning. It means something, in a world that feels very cruel and chaotic right now, to have the chance to show kindness. To take that chance whenever we can. To remember that kindness is still a big part of what it means to be a human.
I hope everyone is getting the chance to enjoy the short, sweet summer while it lasts. Soon the girls will be out of school and chaos will be queen! I love the unstructured days of summer and the freedom it offers for creativity.

Until next month,

If you’d like to sign up to receive my newsletter on the 21st of every month (before I post it here), you can do that here.

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