Posted on by JenniferShelby

Escape as resistance and other stories

Dear Side Questers,

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.

Posted on 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 by JenniferShelby · 4 Comments

Care and Feeding of Your Little Banned Bookshop

You know that phenomenon where you don’t hear from your writer friend for a while and then they suddenly show up and announce they’ve written a book?

I wrote a book.

A novella, actually. It felt like it was time to write about some of my experiences as a cult survivor with everything happening in the world and then this book just sort of poured out of me. I wrote it in a summer workshop, and next came edits, then four amazing beta readers and now… I’ve hit publish on the ‘zon.

Here is my blurb so you don’t have to squint at the cover photo:

Be the magic bookshop you want to see in the world.

Gabby has moved on since she escaped the fundamentalist cult she was raised in 25 years ago, but when an evangelist accuses her of grooming because of the LGBTQIA+ books in her Little Free Library, her life begins to fall apart. Gabby finds solace in the pages of a slim book entitled Care and Feeding of Your Little Banned Bookshop, which details how to look after a living, magical bookshop. But a magical bookshop that gives out banned books to those who need them couldn’t be real… or could it?

Find out in the book readers are calling “Studio Ghibli meets Roald Dahl-for grownups.”

Links! I should share links!

Amazon Canada

Amazon U.S.

Ingram is coming for you Chapters and Barnes&Noble fans.

And I will say that writing something so deeply personal is terrifying, exhausting, and ever so meaningful. The feedback I’ve received from early had reduced me to tears more than once. One of my beta readers told me that “this is the book needs right now” and that it reminded her that she should be the main character in her own story. Another told me that she knew “this book will stay with me for a long time.” This is the stuff that FEEDS writers, I swear.

That’s all for now, I’ve been going full speed and need to have a lil nap before I wake up and tackle the marketing aspect (gulp!).

Talk soon,

Posted on by JenniferShelby

autumn leaves and funky skulls

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: 

Source: https://skullsite.com/wp-content/uploads/dbimages/large/phalacrocoraxauritus_s.jpg

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.

Until next month,

Posted on 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 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 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.

Posted on by JenniferShelby

Swan Sister

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.

Posted on by JenniferShelby

New poem – Essence

My wee poem about the delight of discovering a beloved new story and the desire to carry it with you after the words have all been read is now available to read in Polar Starlight.

You can download the pdf issue to read for free by clicking here. Essence is on page 22 and I’d love to hear what you think of it!

Posted on by JenniferShelby

The Second Form of Ginny Elder

I’m delighted to let you know that my story, The Second Form of Ginny Elder, is now available in the inaugural issue of Hearth Stories.

Ginny calls herself a failed human, but she’s also a grandmother, a hermit who looks after the ghosts of the animals who live in her wood, and maybe a leshy????

You can read all about her in the Winter Solstice 2023 Issue of Hearth Stories, available to download here.