We’re still in a severe drought here, and with it is coming a lot of anxiety of how we’ll handle this through the winter, but also a sense of melancholy for the things we lost. A part of me thinks, no, the world is really bad right now, don’t dwell, move on, but on the other hand, noticing the small things, appreciating them, are what makes us human. So, a short list of everything I will not be taking for granted next summer:
raindrops on cobwebs
the smell of summer rain
soft rainy days that are so lovely to spend the whole day writing
thunderstorms so close they make your heart flutter
hunting mushrooms after a day of rain
But I’ve also gained appreciation for natural springs, little oases of green that make me ponder fairy wells, water elementals, and naiads.
Because the world’s been awful, I haven’t spent much time on social media, stuffing that time with books instead. I saw a movie trailer that reignited a childhood fascination with the Brontës, which lead to a sidequest tracking down a few books that might be the one I read in my middle school’s library once upon a time. Cross your fingers for me?
On the writing front, I’ve set A Binding of Spellwork and Story to the side for the moment to ready my story collection, Borrowed Wings and other stories. The Lunar edition is being launched as part of the Polaris collection of the Lunar Codex “no earlier than December 2025” and I’m timing the terrestrial edition release to coincide and maybe catch a few Christmas shopping sales.
Which I means I’m looking at how to put this kind of collection together. How best to flow from one story to the next, which ones pair well with the last, that sort of thing. Likewise, I’m writing a few new stories to include, ones to pull themes together, and a few to introduce readers to my story worlds. There will a Little Banned Bookshop story, and also a few stories set in the world of a trilogy I’ve been writing in the background and I’m hoping to release in 2027 (I get excited just writing that).
I’ve ordered my cover, sent it back for revisions twice, and if I can squeeze my hands very tight, maybe I’ll be to share a reveal of that with you next month. Stay tuned!
The garden is almost done. Or maybe I’m done hauling water from the river. The chamomile was my favourite this year, the little ritual of collecting the flat flowers every day sustaining me. But there are still some lovely views:
Sunflowers are remarkably drought-tolerant, I must say. With the exception of a red-tailed hawk that swooped past me one morning and enchanted that entire day with the memory, there hasn’t been much wildlife around. They’re probably staying to water sources. But we did get a visit from Fae, a not-stray who wanders down our driveway a few times a summer to check on us. Sometimes he lets us give him a snuggle, sometimes not. His mood is willful, quick to change, and he has startlingly turquoise eyes that don’t seem entirely natural. We call him Fae because he probably is.
Soon it will be Halloween, and this house is getting excited. Do you have a favorite Halloween-season book? I’d love to read it!
You know it’s summer when you lose track of the date, then look over and realize you missed sharing your newsletter to the blog until it was almost time to write the next one *nervous laughter*
Anyways, there’s owl pics in the Nature Notes this month, so don’t skip that. I’ve mostly spent my month tearing my hair out over my Binding of Spellwork and Story book, which I’m writing thanks to a lovely creation grant from artsnb.
I’ve rewritten my first chapters multiple times and just couldn’t get them right. The typical advice I get in this situation is that I should just leave them and go back and fix them later, and that’s good advice that never works for me. When I get blocked and start mentally fretting over a section, there’s a reason. And until I figure it out I’m that ridiculous fly that keeps bumping into the window when there’s an open door right beside him.
So after a solid week of fretting, I took the problematic character by the arms, shook him, and begged him to tell me what he wanted. “I wanted [REDACTED] to remain a secret until a later part of the book,” he admitted, mid shake.
“Oh.” I said. “Huh.” I crossed my arms. Paced a little. “You know, that could work. It would take care of that cringe-y part that was bothering me, too.”
“I know.”
My eyes widened. “Oh, wow, you know, that adds so much potential drama to your connection with that other character, too.”
“I know.”
So now that I’ve got THAT figured it out, I took the original and the rewritten chapter, and sort of frankensteined the best parts of them together into a new chapter, without revealing character’s secret. All the fretting evaporated and my mind has given me the green light to proceed. Phew.
had a bit of a mini side quest when I wrote a writerly advice article written by one of my witch characters in the Binding book. It was actually a really fun little exercise that let me push the envelope of my theme. It was inspired by a submission call, and I sent it in, so we’ll see what happens. If it’s not accepted, it will absolutely be a fun freebie to send out with the book, as bonus contact, and I’m thinking it could also be a fun little tiktok series that would give me a fun excuse to dress up like witch to promote the book.
The typewriter is a lawn ornament at my friend Tiffany’s house. Someone welded the old beast to a base with legs, which is a pretty creative use of an old typewriter. But I’m not showing this to my beloved old Underwood just in case it gets offended.
I got to see a barred owl up close and learned that they are absolutely fascinating:
Those grippy feet! I’m going to imagine dragon skin is textured like this from now on. Also, these owls have feathers with hearts on them:
I wrote a poem about barred owls a while back. Rattle Poetry has a “Poets Respond” feature whereby a poet can submit a poem based on a news article released in the past week, and every Sunday, they publish the best one online. I’ve never had one published with them, but I like that the possibility gets me writing a poem about a news article that strikes me in a particular way.
The following poem was written in response to a news article about a culling of barred owls in the U.S. It’s a bit of a complicated conservation subject, but when I read the number, half a million barred owls to be culled if this plan was approved, the number just staggered me. Here’s the poem I wrote, unpublished as it was except for on my social media, but heed the subject matter as a CW:
Half a Million Owls
Barred owls call back and forth across the forest
And something inside me stills
Something reverential, primal, superstitious,
That insists this is a mystical moment
Maybe it’s the darkness, the gleaming of the stars,
The way the rummaging sounds in the leaf litter cease.
“Half a million owls will be culled…”
My mind stumbles over the number. Glitches.
Stops rummaging through the litter of my thoughts.
“Hoo-hoo. Hoo-hoo,” call the owls, all unknowing.
“Who cooks for you?” I learned as a child,
The same barred owl call I’ve taught my children,
“Who cooks for you? Who cooks for y’all?”
Half a million dead barred owls. Shot.
I try again to grasp the scale and fail
Instead, I imagine feathers scattered across a clearcut
“Who kills for you? Who kills for y’all?” the corpses call
And something rummaging through bullet casings stills.
That’s it for this month’s newsletter, Enchanted friends. I’m currently working on a quilt square for the Nova Scotia Grief and Solidarity Quilt for Palestine, a bit outside my wheelhouse, so hopefully I’ll be able to share that next newsletter. I’m stitching a poem onto it, which is proving the most challenging aspect, naturally.
Welcome to the not-quite summer solstice edition of Enchanted Side Quests. Summer is arriving a little late hereabouts and we’ve only been spotting the fireflies for the past two-three nights, while off the coast, they’ve been out for weeks. I was relieved to see them, worried some unseen pollutant had disappeared them like so many insect populations you hear about. They’re an important source of magic for children and writers.
I am steadily plotting A Binding of Spellwork and Story, for which I received a grant from artsnb to write, and I know what you’re thinking, “Still?” and yeah, I am not fast at this. Plotting for me includes multiple notebooks filled and every scene broken down to the very best version of itself. I end up with a very messy not-draft of some 50 000 words, and then I get to writing in earnest.
I started taking photos of my plot board so I can SEE some progress beyond notebooks filling up. The one below is from a few weeks back and wow, it’s very heartening to know how much fuller it is already. And maybe I can sequence them all in a video for social media purposes? Like a time lapse of a slow motion plotter.
There is no rhyme or reason to the colours involved, I just like chaotic colour. What DOES matter is the order. Here you can see I have a lot of beginning, a bit of a middle, and some ending stuff.
Life is still chaotic and some family members are still in crisis, but I’ve forced myself to spend a few hours every morning working on my writing despite it all, and it’s helped a lot. My mental health is better and my anxiety lower, which makes me an all-around better parent and better equipped to handle the day’s crises as they come.
I felt a nice inner glow when I saw someone post about my book Care and Feeding of Your Little Banned Bookshop on social media with a caption that read “I think of this book whenever I see a little free library.”
Now I’m grinning again, thinking of all the little library magics in the book and outside of the book, like when a friend of mine took a copy of Bornstein’s Hello Cruel World that I sent them to put in a Little Free Library in Florida during a visit. That book plays a pivotal role in Care and Feeding, so this felt like making magic. I’ve also had friends buy copies of the book specifically to put inside Little Free Libraries, knowing how magical it would be to read this book if that’s where you found it.
Writers, I tell ya. We can’t get enough of that magic.
Which brings us to this month’s side quest: my chipmunk rescue adventure.
So. We all know (one hopes) that if you have a big tub to collect rainwater in, that you put a stick in it in case any critters or bees fall in, they can climb out. For some reason, I put in one of the kids’ snow shovels this year, thinking it would suffice. It didn’t, I think the plastic was too slippery for wet paws. This is important.
I was on the phone with my friend from BC (because I am old and still use the phone for such things) and outside because we tend to get loud and silly when I wandered to our rainwater tub. And there, floating, was a drowned chipmunk.
My heart got heavy with dread. (Please put a stick in your tubs if you haven’t already).
I put the phone down, cursing the shovel for not doing it’s job, and then I took the shovel to remove the small, furry corpse before the kids could see it, which is when the little fella blinked.
Shovel be damned, I scooped the little critter up in my hands and put him on the grass, where he lay there, shivering or maybe shaking with shock. I told my friend I’d call her back and picked him back up to hold against my chest in case he was cold and went around to the front door to ask my partner for help finding something to put the poor thing in.
The chipmunk was moving significantly more already, which was a really good sign.
Mike brought out a box with a t-shirt to hold him and the chipmunk immediately flopped over, probably from exhaustion.
Then came the internet searching of nesting material and food. The kids picked him some wild strawberries to eat while Mike found some clean sawdust and old grass. Little chippy was started to move more still, made himself a cozy nest to hide in, and rested.
Its hard to get closure with stuff like this, because it does have deep affect on the mind to experience this with a wild critter. Last summer I found a baby snowshoe hare in rough shape that we took to the wildlife vet and I still wonder what happened to her. This time, success is waking up to an empty box and a hope that our chipmunk returned to his forest home.
But when nature give you the opportunity to be kind, you also get the chance to rescue yourself a little bit, too.
It has been a WILD month. The hummingbirds have returned, the garden is planted and happily growing, and the critters are out and about.
You can imagine my shock when I was at my desk, working through my morning plotting hours, when I saw something dark through the window, out of the corner of my eye. Was that a bear?
I went around to the front of the house, going out into our mud room which has the only place with windows facing the direction the bear went in. Sure enough, there was the bear, sauntering over to our compost barrel. And then INTO our compost barrel.
Where he pulled out the remains of a half-rotten squash rind covered in coffee grounds.
He then lost interest in the rotten squash rind and compost entirely, choosing to saunter over the vehicles, give them a sniff, then wandered up the driveway and into the woods.
While cautious, I’ll admit it was exciting to be able to watch a young, wild black bear explore from a safe location. It was also a good opportunity to teach the kids some safety stuff and while I was worried we’d have to stop composting, the bear hasn’t come back a few weeks in. We do live in nature’s home, and big wild animals come with the small ones.
That said, I do prefer the smaller ones when it comes to my kids, who have asked to keep thousands of snakes and toads as pets so far this summer.
And with this flurry of pet requests, there is a small feeling of finally. THIS is why we wanted to raise them here, amid the fireflies and the toads and the sometimes bears. My youngest is terrified of snakes, UNLESS the snake is being held by my eldest, who has suddenly started channeling Steve Irwin for reasons unbeknownst, but welcome.
That’s it for this month’s newsletter, Enchanted friends. What adventures have you been having? Have you read any books I should add to my TBR?
I know, right? This month’s side quest was *cough cough* a new kitty. We adopted him from our local SPCA/PAWS facility. We thought a snuggly new buddy would cheer up our sick daughter and, well, I’d rather not talk about the mouse that ran over my foot a few weeks ago.
Our plan sort of worked, mostly by offending our senior cat, Blizzard, so much that he ignores the rest of us completely and devotes his every waking moment to sick kiddo. She is thrilled about this, so our plan worked, just not the way we expected.
New kitty is outrageously cuddly, and what’s lovely is that he doesn’t seem to prefer any of us in particular. He’ll snuggle with anyone available. Which is perfect for our family.
We named him Captain Pickles, because he’s a big dill.
Spring has sprung, the maples are tapped and maple syrup is being bottled, and I feel like the winter accumulation of sludge has been wiped from my brain. It’s been a tough few months, for the world, for my family, and I fell deeply into zombie mode for a while there.
I kept writing through the parts of Little Banned Bookshop 2 that I’d already plotted, but now I can feel the gaps begin to fill in. I’ve also been picking at the plot for A Binding of Spellwork and Story, which I received an artsnb grant to write, after setting it aside in frustration because my brain refused to story. All this comes with a deep sigh of relief because it’s almost emotionally painful when I can’t escape reality. Its like all the magic bleeds out of the world. And this is not the time for that!
As previously mentioned, the sap is running and the local sugar shacks are in full swing. I dialed it back this year, tapping far fewer trees to keep myself from getting overwhelmed. The pace is just right and I’m thankful for that.
The enchanted forest is slowly waking up. The hobblebush is growing wings:
and sometimes the raindrops still freeze,
but the forest folk are returning.
In spare moments, I’ve been prepping for my first ever book fair-the Greater Moncton Dieppe Riverview Book Fair on April 26th at the Riverview Lion’s Center. I’m nervous and excited. There will be another newsletter before the big day, so you’ll probably hear about this again. In the meantime, please enjoy this wee bit of table decor I’ll be thrilled to keep on my bookshelf forevermore:
That’s it for this month, Side Questers! Please soak up all the good mental health vibes of spring every chance you get.
It has been a difficult month. I hope you are well and finding escape in art or music or something that lets you escape. Escape is Resistance!
I’ve been deep into research about Germany in WWll, and specifically the way everyday people resisted. The similarities are brutally astounding
I’d always known that people hid Jews in secret places, but I didn’t realize that they had nowhere else to go. That even the ones who made it out of Germany were turned back. I didn’t know the Pope granted them asylum in the Vatican and even encouraged the creation of false identity papers to help some families remain safe. It makes me realize the plight of refugees everywhere, that even now refugees and immigrants are looked down upon, hated and feared (even in Canada). Its not something that will change when we become the refugees, fleeing fascism and authoritarianism. Is it better to hide in someone’s attic for four years or risk escaping, only to be sent in some official capacity that ensures the baddies catch you and put you in your camps.
It’s a lot. But I do believe reading is resistance. I think we can learn from the past. Even fictionalized accounts of WW2 resistance, of which I’ve realized there is a LOT of. Our imaginations appear to have been collectively caught by the Holocaust in a way that leads to me to wonder, did we know this would happen again?
In contrast, I have a very well-educated friend in the U.S. who mentioned having just learned about the Reichstag fire. Our educations have not been the same, which sent me digging to discover where I learned so much about the Holocaust, because it wasn’t in school.
The weird thing? It was actually from growing up in the fundie cult. This was a big part of their story, and part of this was based in proving faithfulness via enduring persecution. This is a big part of cult psychology, making you separate and “better” than the rest of the world. It’s BIG red flag that’s been showing up in contemporary mega-churches in the U.S. and, increasingly, in Canada.
Okay, getting back to the point. They held up the cult members destroyed in the concentration camps as the example we needed to follow. We needed to suffer for our faith, so that the deity would love us. Job, all the way down. Thus, little bits of persecution were just practice for the Big Persecution to Come and over time, this gets embedded into your identity and whoopsie, turns out that’s exactly how socialization and propaganda works.
As a result, we had buckets and buckets of historical literature about the Holocaust that I was allowed to access (my reading was fairly restricted so this is a big deal). I’m struggling to realize that not everyone received this education, and I think it’s a big part of why this level of fascism-and following the exact same goshdarn pattern-has come ‘round again.
Remember during the BLM protests in the States when Antifa became a bad word and a lot of us were wondering how “antifascist” could possibly be considered a bad thing? Yeah. I’ve been thinking about that a lot.
At this point, you must be wondering, cool Jenn, so are you writing some sort of historical WWll fiction? Sort of. The Little Banned Bookshop is being pulled very strongly in that direction, though possibly not in the way you’d expect. I think if Gabby and the Bookshop are going to learn how to resist, they might need to visit the past. Maybe meet a German Shopkeeper and their Little Banned Buchladen.
I usually have this rule where I never talk about my works-in-progress, but this feels different. The Little Banned Bookshop feels, in a lot of ways, something that belongs to us rather than me, that it exists to give us some hope as we journey through troubling times. The human mind is wired to learn through story, and maybe, through stories like this, we can learn how to survive this together, with our humanity intact.
If we can still call it that in the face of what is happening…again.
I’m also escaping. Not outside to the woods, we keep having ice storms and there’s a terrible crust on the snow currently bashing in my shins. It’s the party pooper of the whole winter… until it starts melting, the sap running…
BUT I’m a member of the facebook group Wild Green Memes for Ecological Fiends (it’s one of the few groups that’s keeping me on the site) and every year around this time we have this event called the Charity Battle. There are several different animal or nature “gangs” and they all battle (by making increasingly unhinged memes) to raise the most money for conservation efforts (these are all visible at wildgreenfuture.org).
I joined character-based IcePack last year about midway and had an absolute blast. So many deep belly laughs. And I’m so glad that it’s come around again because I forgot how much fun it is and what a lovely antidote it is to all the horrors while also helping nature.
These memes are so embedded into gang and group lore that they rarely make sense to outsiders once the battle is more than few days in, but here is a silly sampler of mine to give you some idea of the unhinged nonsense we’re up to.
I don’t have much meme skill, so I mostly make 20-frame comic stories that keep me giggling as I make them, and then doubled over in laughter when the other fiends start commenting on them.
It’s the most fun you’ll ever have helping frosted elfin butterflies! Check it out here and if you want to help, please donate to my gang, IcePack: We have the LORE!
Like many others, the anglerfish recorded by National Geographic that surfaced into the light, only to die, captured my heart this past week. This has resulted in enough daydreams that it is firmly lodged in my imagination, but I’m not sure what that will come to, creatively, just yet. I have been enjoying this song by Paris Paloma about the same.
That’s all for this month, Side Questers. Fingers crossed that the first signs of spring will have sprung by next month, the sap will be running, and maybe we’ll all have something to smile about.
Dear Side Questers, It’s the most colourful time of the year! I hope you’ve had a chance to kick around some autumn leaves, enjoy the colours, and attempt strange leaf crafts that never quite work out. Oh, oops, is that last one just me?
I may have attempted maple leaf faeries.
When I first made them, they looked like this:
The girls thought they were weird. Then a few days passed and they got weirder. Me too, faeries, me too.
But this month’s biggest side quest has been A Binding of Spellwork and Story, the book I received an artsnb grant to write this year. I’m writing the chapters in tandem with a writing class/workshop’s assignments, which is working very well to keep me motivated.
I took a similar course with the same teacher (writer Matthew Ledrew) to get my Care and Feeding of Your Little Banned Bookshop novella drafted as well. In fact, I’m quietly debating taking this course again already. Its helping me get out of my head and I don’t feel so overwhelmed by the larger projects. It’s also giving me the autumn novel writing community that I used to get from NaNoWriMo.
Anyway, back to Binding. It’s a story in which I’m exploring the role of a writer’s manipulation of story from within the story, where it looks more like a sorceress wielding magic. Part of me keeps expecting people to laugh at this entire premise, but it turns out that it’s just as much fun to write as I hoped it would be when I first proposed it. With any luck, it’ll be fun to read as well!
Gratuitous mushrooms!
Between sick kids and a brother in hospital, I took to walking my local Ducks Unlimited marsh in an attempt to save my sanity (and avoid hunters in the woods). There are few birds left at this point, though the dragonflies are plentiful. The dying vegetation has taken to revealing secrets. Following a game trail, I happened upon an almost shockingly intact cormorant skull.
There’s a whole spiritual aspect to finding bones like this in nature that I’m never entirely certain if I should unpack. I did touch on the subject in my short story The Second Form of Ginny Elder. There’s something very sacred to the discovery that sits a sense of quiet in my chest. Other people feel a sense of disgust. With that in mind, I’m sharing a photo of the kind of skull I found from the internet, since skulls in nature can be a bit yuck:
Cormorants are common along the Bay of Fundy and they always tug at the memory of reading Island of the Blue Dolphins when I was young. I don’t remember much else about the book these days, but somehow the skirt she made from the cormorant feathers-and especially the way they took it away at the end of the book to put it in a museum-always stayed with me.
Speaking of books – this week marks the publication of my friend Nancy SM Waldman’s debut novel, Every Rule Undone. I had the pleasure of reading an ARC, so I thought I’d share my review:
This story follows the lead character of Aza Gen, that last name indicating which magical clan she belongs to and thus, her loyalties and abilities. The Gen in this world act as a submissive partner to the Puraples, the leading magical clan. In contrast, their enemies, the Cruiks, have their own submissive clan, the Besin healers. The Puraples and the Cruiks spend their time tossing magical curses at each other, and their submissives scramble to clean them up. If this sounds like an endless cycle, it is, and revolution is brewing when a full-on magical curse plague breaks out. Added to these four clans is another set of people, folks whose parents broke the law by cross-breeding between magical clans and abilities. If they manage to escape execution, these Undones have no place in society.
Aza leads the reader through this world as unrest grows and builds, becoming the sort of delicious revolution story where unexpected heroes emerge simply because of the situations they find themselves. It is a pleasure to read how Aza and her friends grow, change, and become different people across the events in the book.
I don’t want to spoil anything, so I’ll leave it at that. If you enjoy a character-driven story filled with difficult decisions that change their worlds forever, this needs to go on your TBR!
Every Rule Undone can be found everywhere, but if you’d like a link, here you are.
That’s it for this month, Enchanted friends! Wishing you a lovely Halloween, fuzzy socks on chilly mornings, and your favourite warm beverage in the perfect mug.
I’m delighted to announce that 99 Fleeting Fantasies has been released as an ebook! My story “Swan Sister” is one of the 99 stories published therein. It’s a snarky retelling of the Six Swans fairy tale (sometimes called the Swan Brothers) wherein the Sister fails to complete the task required to save her brothers, but looks after them anyway.
This story was inspired by a viral video from a few years ago of an elderly lady picking up a swan on the Berlin bridge and tossing it off the side. Swans need 25-30m of water to be able to take off and fly, so this swan was effectively stranded on the bridge. Along comes our brave heroine, who picks up the swan with obvious understanding of how to handle large avian species. She quickly huffs it over the railing into the water, where it presumably lives happily ever after. You can view the video here.
Needless to say, that lady struck me as an awesome character. Once I started wondering about her swan hero origin story, “Swan Sister” spilled out onto the page. If you have the chance to read it, I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Here is a universal book link if you’d like to give the collection a closer inspection: https://books2read.com/99FleetingFantasies Pulse Publishing has let us know that there will be an upcoming Kickstarter campaign that will offer a hardback copy of this collection as well, if that’s more your style. I’ll post about that here on the blog when it happens.
My story, Forest Season for the Sometimes Tree, is now up at Small Wonders magazine. You can read it by clicking on this link. This is one of those stories that starts out as a daydream and then just sort of shifts into something more. I hope you like it!
Jennifer Shelby 
