Tag: Pages

As the weather turns cool, curling up with a short-story collection can plunge you deep into another world in mere minutes, with a few turns of the page between other commitments and concerns. This fall, two new short-story collections by Virginia authors offer ample opportunities for reflection and escapism.

Richmond-based author SJ Sindu’s new book, The Goth House Experiment, grapples with life in our contemporary reality through tales of wild imagination and speculative fiction. Largely unconnected in terms of overly specific themes or throughlines, these are stories that examine anti-Asian and anti-LGBTQ+ violence, TikTok and the dangers of going viral, and even the perils of a writer’s ego. The book also celebrates queer joy and embraces a wry sense of humor about the state of our collective reality. In many ways, these are stories about how we cope in the face of countless catastrophes, personal and societal, and where we find community and delight.

“Wild Ale,” one of the tightest stories in the collection, exemplifies Sindu’s skillful use of dialogue and tension over the course of an unexpected narrative arc. An on-the-nose exploration of a couple’s pandemic quarantine stresses, the story revolves around a core disagreement about homebrewing in a small apartment during lockdown. Despite this, the couple’s relationship serves as a buttress against the outside world that is largely seen from balconies and cautious walks in the park. Social media and MAGA anti-maskers show up as well, and the claustrophobic tension that infuses each page is so well-written, it’s lightly triggering in the ways it captures the earliest months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Sindu wraps it all up with a cheeky conclusion that provides a welcome reminder of some of the ways we came together to support our neighbors in the worst of times. It’s a story that suggests we can heal together, if only we choose to not forget.

Currently a professor at VCU, Sindu is a Tamil diaspora author who was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award with her latest novel, Blue-Skinned Gods. Her Marriage of a Thousand Lies won the Publishing Triangle Edmund White Award for debut novels by writers within the LGBTQ+ community.

For readers of Sindu’s other work, “Miracle Boy” is perhaps the story that aligns most strongly with her novels and their explorations of belief, family, and communities of faith. The concluding story in The Goth House Experiment, it is the most somber as well. Set in Sri Lanka, this magical realist tale is about a boy who grows wings and can perform miracles, whose community begins to worship him for his abilities, and who ultimately suffers as a result. We never learn the boy’s real name since everyone calls him Peter, “the most popular Christian name in a town full of Hindus who had never even seen a Bible,” Sindu writes. It is a visceral story, full of bodies that don’t work and those that work differently than one might expect. It is a story about the lengths we’ll go to in order to be healed and what it means to be saved.

Sindu will host a free launch party for The Goth House Experiment, in conversation with Geoff Bouvier, at Fountain Bookstore in Richmond on October 17.

For readers more in the mood for realism, Bronwyn Hughes’ debut collection of short stories, Swing Bridge: Stories from Tidewater Virginia, conjures the Tidewater region through multigenerational characters and places that represent decades of accreted memories. The collection balances an at-times peripatetic nature, drawing lines between the Tidewater and the cities where people move, with its more site-specific histories like a Beatles-infused story that visits Poplar Grove, John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s one-time country home in Mathews County.

Throughout, Hughes’ clear-eyed stories are accompanied by drawings by Kat Sharp, her “illustrator-spouse,” as she puts it. Sharp’s drawings are a highlight, offering detailed glimpses into the inner workings of this world that feels at once familiar and foreign to those who have not spent time in the Tidewater area. The featured art includes diagrams of the fig wasp life cycle and the creation of the Chesapeake Impact Crater, which eventually became the Chesapeake Bay.

Hughes herself is not a Tidewater native but has made her life there for the past two decades. After concluding a career in the foreign service, she completed her creative writing MFA during the pandemic and this is her debut book. Just as Sharp excels at depicting details in her drawings, Hughes is excellent at teasing out layers of reality, in the relationships between her characters and the places they inhabit, but also between past and present versions of themselves. The stories in Swing Bridge are imbued with the ache of coming to know oneself and the ups and downs that come with trying to share that self with others. 

“Fig-girl” is one story where this is especially true, featuring two characters at points of transition in their lives, attempting to navigate queerness as well as both chosen and unchosen changes while being held to expectations of others. Resonating with Sindu’s collection, Hughes’ stories meditate on the opportunities presented by community, by choosing to care for each other. 

Bronwyn Hughes will give a free talk about Swing Bridge at The Center on October 28. 

A queer mountain lion in “ellay” is the narrator of Open Throat, the new novel by Charlottesville’s own Henry Hoke. If that doesn’t pique your interest, we interviewed Hoke to take a deeper dive into his fifth book, which has garnered widespread attention and acclaim, and tops many of the year’s best-of lists.  

C-VILLE: The mountain lion narrator of Open Throat has a name from their mother that is “not made of noises a person can make” and later comes to be called heckit. The character was based on the real-life mountain lion who was known by his wildlife tracking identifier number, P-22 (though Indigenous tribes found this too similar to dehumanizing numbering used in residential schools). Combined, this points to the power of identity-affirming names. How does your work explore this? 

HH: The core of all my writing seems to be identity exploration, and the futility of truly capturing a place or being, whether it’s my infamous hometown, or the gender journey of a puma. I love how literary work can refract and warp our perceptions and allegiances. In my practice I tend to find some (often bizarre) constraint or conceptual approach as the engine for creation: a memoir of Charlottesville told through 20 stickers, or this feral animal voice to access and engage with the kaleidoscopic chaos of L.A. These approaches feel less authoritative, and more truthful to my limitations, which I strive to embrace.

As someone whose time in Los Angeles overlapped with P-22’s heyday, how did you experience that phenomenon, and did you have him in mind as a protagonist even then? 

I always felt a kinship with the big cat, because we moved to L.A. around the same time—me coming south from my suburban grad school, him crossing the 405 freeway from the Western mountain ranges—and spent the better part of that decade roaming in parallel. I first became fixated on P-22 when he was found living under a house in my neighborhood. I thought how remarkable it is to have this apex predator chilling quietly, undiscovered, right on the fringes of L.A.’s wild urbanity.

Though this is an L.A.-focused book, the themes are universal: parental estrangement and chosen families, human destructiveness and despair, environmental disasters and climate collapse, and even the what-could-have-been of old crushes. Were these intentional or did they emerge along the way?

The lens of the lion really allowed all the environmental, societal themes to emerge organically, so I didn’t set out to thread those, just trusted they’d be present. And, of course, some larger story beats were based on P-22’s real-life journey (even the attack on a koala at the L.A. zoo). The family history, queer desire, and particular arc of vengeance were what I brought to the table and ran with, so those were the core for me as creator.

There’s also an undercurrent of exploring the tension between needs and wants when it comes to survival, personally but also from community and global perspectives. Why was it important for you to empower the lion to ultimately give in to desires? 

My lion’s internal journey becomes one of accepting that, by prolonged exposure to people—our language and our encroachment on the natural world—they’re becoming a bit of a human themselves in regards to their own agency, accessing deeper desires, behaving against their own survival instincts. To quote heckit: “this is not about need / no this is want / it’s a terrible choice but I’m making it / just like a person.” It was fascinating to get inside the mind of a powerful hunter of an animal, who is still deeply out of control when it comes to their own circumstances, confused and isolated. There’s something deeply human about that struggle in this global moment. I think we all feel our impact on the world, but have no idea how to shift the destructive trajectory, to right past wrongs.

Thinking about the lion’s vocabulary that’s been gleaned from passing hikers, how do you think about oral tradition as a narrative device but also as a degraded aspect of life in the Anthropocene?

That’s a big, haunting question. Assembling meaning from fleeting, concentrated bursts of language emerges as my lion’s key mission, and curse. I felt, and feel, similarly in our era of full informational deluge, of attention spans slipping. This book is my first monologue, where I inhabit an uninterrupted first-person-singular voice throughout. In that way—and especially listening to the beautiful audiobook performance of my reader Pete Cross—I thought very much about carrying on a direct, oral storytelling tradition. A natural voice bearing witness, cataloging, and roaring out to whoever will listen and remember.

You mentioned in another interview that your editor encouraged you to add asides and digressions—like a reverie about when “all the people were gone”—as a way to add texture to the text. These are also some of the most hope-filled moments in the book, where the lion imagines a life less defined by isolation and “scare city.”  What’s an unexpected wisdom that you’ve learned through writing this book?

That breathing room, gracefully allowed and encouraged by my editor Jackson Howard, was key in letting Open Throat’s potential bloom. The narrative intensity, the nonstop, was important in getting me through my drafts and getting it out there, but on the other side of the sale, it was such a gift to work with someone who prompted me to allow more air into the equation, to weave, to imagine even more. I learned that even in a succinct book like this one, there’s never a moment where it can’t sharpen or explode with focused revision. 

Finally, what’s it like to have one of the most talked-about books of the summer, with an official T-shirt no less? 

It’s been overwhelming! I’m attuned to and holding onto all the surreal moments of being known: Mia Farrow tweeting about The Washington Post review. Taking a Lyft home with the windows down and witnessing a group of people outside a closed Brooklyn bookstore pointing inside at my lion’s face. My U.K. publicist wore the T-shirt on the day of our London event, and a stranger approached him on the Tube to say how excited he was for Open Throat. Later that day, in a completely different neighborhood, we ran into the same stranger and I got to shake his hand. I may get burned out, but I’ll always be grateful for the booksellers and readers who’ve championed this wild story, and all the new friends I’ve made. 

“You can’t eat ’em if you don’t find ’em. And you can’t find ’em if you’re not outside. I know that’s where I’ll be,” writes Frank Hyman in his latest book, How to Forage for Mushrooms Without Dying: An Absolute Beginner’s Guide to Identifying 29 Wild, Edible Mushrooms. 

An avid outdoors enthusiast, Hyman has foraged for mushrooms since 2004, exploring regions around the world, and is certified to sell wild mushrooms in three U.S. states. Combining that appreciation and expertise with his enduring curiosity and wit, How to Forage for Mushrooms Without Dying is an easy-to-use, visually compelling, fun-to-read book for beginners. 

Hyman’s interest in the outdoors can be traced to growing up in the 1960s. He lived in Charlottesville with his family, attending second through fourth grades here, and recalls being one of a group of “boys on bikes who played kickball in the street … dammed up creeks … built forts in the woods, explored the local railroad tracks, and only had to come home when the streetlights came on.” He adds, “Like most people, I woke up each day hungry for breakfast and vitamin D!”

Hyman, a self-taught mushroom forager, now lives in the Piedmont Region of North Carolina, and has worked as a stonemason, woodworker, sculptor, and shrimper. He earned a degree in horticulture and has been an organic farmer, taught foraging classes, and written books on chickens as well as mushrooms. All told, Hyman counts nine avocations that have shaped his life’s work, intentionally foregoing what many would consider a traditional career. A self-proclaimed polymath, Hyman says, “all Homo sapiens are natural polymaths, but in the modern world too many people succumb to the notion that they only have the bandwidth to learn one or two professions in their life.”

“My success in all those activities stems from a commitment I made to myself as a teenager,” he says. “I found most kids kind of uninteresting and promised myself that I would give myself the freedom to go anywhere and do anything that inspired my curiosity. [I] kept that up as an adult and gave myself permission to buy any book, take any class, join any group that revolved around the things I felt enthusiastic about. When you make the choice to follow your curiosity and enthusiasm, you will find it is supremely easy to learn new things.” 

In How to Forage for Mushrooms Without Dying, Hyman emphasizes how foraging can be done safely by anyone who spends time orienting themselves to the basics. “You don’t have to know the names of every part of a mushroom or every phase of its growth to be a successful mushroom hunter,” he says. Small enough to fit in a fanny pack, the hike-ready guide is arranged around information that a novice will probably be able to visually identify with relative ease. 

The mushroom identification section of the book is sorted according to easy-to-discern aspects of mushroom species, including whether they grow on trees or in the ground, and whether they have gills or not. The 29 profiles of specific mushrooms share information about each specimen’s common names, comparable species and look-alikes, and tips for eating, preserving, and farming. Notes about where and when each type of mushroom is most likely to be found are also included, alongside Hyman’s thoughts about strengths and eccentricities of the species. His humorous anecdotes and unorthodox descriptions—he says a Lion’s Mane mushroom “Looks like Santa. Tastes like crab meat.”—punctuate the guide. 

Hyman also shares the popular wisdom that, “There are old mushroom hunters. There are bold mushroom hunters. But there are no old and bold mushroom hunters.” While urging caution and providing tips and tricks to aid in safe foraging, Hyman writes that, “in contrast to the many North Americans who are afraid of mushrooms, millions of foragers all over the world eat wild mushrooms throughout their lives without a problem.” He shares a closer look at the cultural norms that have led to this divide, also offering achievable precautions that any forager should take, for their own safety, that of friends and family who might share in the foraged bounty, and the mushrooms themselves. Indeed, while recommending moderation in foraging, Hyman also stresses that the main threat to mushroom species is not foragers, but rather climate disruption and the development of wild lands.

Filled with colorful images, the book is imbued with Hyman’s appreciation of mushrooms’ power to bring people together and create memorable experiences and meals. Travel stories from Hyman’s own life support this, reflecting the meaning and community that mushroom foraging can cultivate in life. 

“One of the great things about foraging anywhere is that the interest in being outdoors and in eating great, fresh food is that those two inclinations seem to screen out 99 percent of the assholes in the world,” he says. “Serious foragers tend to be kind and generous people.”

In The Good Ones, Polly Stewart’s new novel of literary suspense, a woman’s family and friends struggle to find answers about her disappearance in a small Blue Ridge town. Set almost two decades after Lauren disappeared, leaving behind a bloodied washcloth and little more, the novel centers on her old friend, Nicola, the protagonist, who remains haunted by the loss and continues to try to make sense of what happened. 

“I’ve always been most interested in unsolved disappearances,” Stewart says, “and I think it’s because of what the brain does when faced with a story without an ending—you try to work out a resolution for yourself, the same way we’re always trying to predict the ending of the story we’re reading before we get to it.”

After spending many years away, Nicola reluctantly returns to her small-town home to manage her own family matters, and long-hidden truths around Lauren’s unsolved case—and her problematic past—seem like they might finally be revealed. The Good Ones is a story of mothers and daughters, girlfriends and wives, and what it means to be “good” in any of those roles—and what the consequences may be for failing to do so. 

“Writing ‘bad’ women, and in particular bad mothers, is always difficult for me, but I also think it’s really important,” Stewart says. “We hear so much now about whether women in literature need to be likable. … I love reading about women pushing the boundaries of what’s seen as acceptable, and in my own work, I try to let the women in my books take full advantage of their agency, even if that means making choices that some people might think of as negative or destructive.”

Growing up in Radford, Virginia, and attending Hollins University before venturing elsewhere to eventually earn her Ph.D. in British literature in St. Louis, Missouri, Stewart now teaches creative writing at Virginia Military Institute and hosts The Craft of Crime Fiction interview series. Her debut novel, Wild Girls—written under her legal name, Mary Stewart Atwell—also explored themes of female friendship and the longing to escape small-town life, both of which are aspects of her own life that she grapples with in her fiction. 

“When I was growing up, I couldn’t wait to get out of the small town I grew up in,” says Stewart. “I was truly shocked by how much I missed the Blue Ridge when I moved away. I felt an almost physical longing for the landscape here, the feel of the air, the particular rhythm of the seasons. I’ve known people who grew up in beautiful places who don’t feel this at all, so it’s definitely not a universal phenomenon, but I’ve had to accept that I wouldn’t be happy living anywhere else.”

For Virginia readers, the connection jumps off the page, with descriptions of tubing on the river, watching local news, attending the big football game, and exploring abandoned houses, among other aspects of the day-to-day, that perfectly conjure regional small-town life. Still, it’s not all rose-colored nostalgia, as Stewart says, “At the same time, there are problematic aspects of Southern culture that I wanted to explore here, particularly white Southern masculinity.”

This particular form of masculinity shows up in a number of ways throughout the novel, and is not without psychological and physical violence. Through these interactions and dynamics, Stewart explores questions of power, gender, and sexual control while maintaining a focus on agency and empathy for survivors.    

Further, she reflects, “As I got to know the characters, I realized that their private and public selves diverged quite a bit, and I was interested in exploring that as a theme. It probably comes back to that question of what is and isn’t seen as socially acceptable for women: so many of us still internalize taboos when it comes to talking about sex and voicing desire, and I found that those questions played themselves out over the course of the novel.”

Though typically a planning-oriented writer—“I have the book I’m working on right now outlined on note cards on a giant bulletin board in my office”—Stewart found that that method did not work for these characters and the questions they explore in The Good Ones. She recalls, “I had Nicola’s voice from the beginning, and I knew the basic facts of Lauren’s disappearance, but nearly everything else came together through a process of writing, failing, and writing again.”

In line with that process, the novel’s most interesting theme is perhaps its exploration of how our past selves may influence who we become and whether it is possible to change, or to write our own ending. “For me, the realization that the possibilities for changing my life are pretty limited has come with a commensurate longing to live different lives and be different people,” says Stewart. “Luckily, because I’m a writer, I get to explore that longing through fiction rather than through a midlife crisis.”

A deeply researched book, The House Is on Fire is Richmond-based author Rachel Beanland’s gorgeous new historical novel, constructed out of the archives and her own narrative license. Set in Richmond, Virginia, in 1811, the book traces four characters and their communities as they struggle in the aftermath of the historic fire that destroyed the Richmond Theater and resulted in the deaths of more than 70 people, including the governor. At the time, it was the largest disaster that had occurred in the United States, drawing national attention for the significant loss of life and far-reaching impact.   

“I learned about the Richmond Theater fire on the very first day I arrived in Richmond, way back in 2007,” Beanland says. “I had flown in for a job interview and spent an afternoon driving around town with a realtor. As we were passing Monumental Church, the realtor pointed and said, ‘There used to be a theater there.’ He relayed the basic facts of the fire, and I remember being immediately taken with the story.” 

But it wasn’t until 2020 when Beanland decided to write about it. “I had been in the early stages of writing another novel, which was going to require a lot of travel to get right, and when all air travel ceased, I started to get nervous,” she says. “I began thinking about novels I could set in my own backyard.”

This interest ultimately led Beanland to conduct research around the fire—through the Library of Virginia and the Virginia Museum of History and Culture, among other sources—which she incorporates throughout the story in large and small ways, carefully balanced with intimately human stories of tragedy and resilience. 

“People’s race, gender, and class had much to do with whether they lived or died that night,” she says. “So, as I thought about how I’d structure the novel, I knew I wanted to write characters whose stories encompassed these different points of view.” 

The characters whose lives and struggles the author braids together are also drawn from and inspired by recorded history. Beanland says she decided to follow a 14-year-old stagehand, who played a role in setting the fire; a middle-aged widow of means, who is in the expensive (and hard-to-escape) box seats; a young, enslaved maid, who is sitting in the gallery, against her will; and a middle-aged, enslaved blacksmith, who runs to the building to help. ”For me, it is both a challenge and a treat to weave what I really did know about them into the larger, fictional narrative.”

In addition to these protagonists, the novel features a strong supporting cast of characters who are richly embodied by the author’s writing, as well as expert scene-setting in historic Richmond and surrounding areas that locals familiar with the area now will find especially interesting. 

Embracing the language of the historical record and exploring the power of the pen, Beanland notes that she “played with syntax [and] … excerpted paragraphs from real inquest reports, newspaper articles, and fliers, so that readers have some sense of what the written word really sounded like two centuries ago.” 

The novel interrogates a number of the power structures at work in Richmond at this time, teasing out some of the structural oppressions and horrors faced by enslaved Black men, women, and children, as well as women, generally, who lacked agency and were utterly reliant on husbands and fathers to make legal and medical decisions for them.

“It should be noted that I was also writing this book during the Black Lives Matter protests, and watching them play out in Richmond was not just an emotional experience but an educational one,” says Beanland.  “Here I was, doing research on the lives of enslaved people living in the city in 1811, and at times, it felt like I could draw a straight line between what was happening in the city in the early 19th century and what was happening in the summer of 2020.” 

In the four storylines that intermingle across the book, the author goes to great lengths to empower her main characters—each of whom is oppressed because of their race or gender—by celebrating their values and ethics, in the cases of Gilbert and Jack, or by filling gaps in the historical record with their speculative heroic actions, in the cases of Sally and Cecily. 

Combining the historic record with empathetic characters whose traumas feel painfully contemporary at times, Beanland has crafted a novel that is a fast-paced and enthralling prompt to consider how we act in the face of tragedy. 

 “Life, in general, felt very fragile [in 2020], and I couldn’t help but channel a lot of my fears and anxieties into these characters, who are living through their own terrible ordeal,” she says. “Calamities—of all kinds—have a way of stripping us bare, of showing us what is essential, and of bringing out the very best and the very worst in us.”

A crackling cat-and-mouse thriller set against the verdant backdrop of small-town Virginia, Meagan Jennett’s You Know Her is a savage Southern Gothic about a fledgling murderer and the cop hell-bent on catching her. Jennett drew upon her bartending experiences at Crozet Pizza and The Rooftop when writing her debut novel, which probes the boundaries of female friendship and the deadly consequences when frustration ferments into rage. Jennett will discuss her work, answer questions, and sign copies at this release party.

Thursday 4/13. Free (RSVP required), 6:30pm. The Annex at Bluebird & Co., 5792 Three Notched Rd., Crozet. bluebirdcrozet.com

Inspired by her own experiences with clinical depression and childhood grief, National Book Award finalist Amber McBride published We Are All So Good at Smiling, her second young adult novel in verse, earlier this year. 

Though heavy at times in its examination of the lasting impacts of trauma—and complete with content warnings for readers who might not be in a place to handle that heaviness—it’s a book that ultimately celebrates the power of friendship and family, as well as the beauty that is possible through community and healing.

The novel’s protagonist, Whimsy, and her friend Faerry are each magical in their own way, grappling with childhood traumas as well as societal stigmas around mental health, heightened by their experiences of white supremacy and racism as Black teens in contemporary America. The authenticity of their experience is vivid; McBride’s verse shifts nimbly between fantastical, fairy tale-inspired imagery, and rigorous realism, probing experiences of trauma, false narratives of self, and the work of trying to erase the past, which itself can feel like an attempt at magic.

In addition to her novels, McBride teaches English at the University of Virginia, and has two books of poetry—an adult poetry collection as well as a young adult poetry anthology that she is co-editing—due to arrive on shelves next year. The author is also completing a new middle-grade novel in verse that will be out later this year. The prolific writer and imaginative storyteller credits her students with helping inspire her work. “Something about writing for young people always makes me braver, and my students at UVA also really inspired me because they were so open about talking about their feelings during the height of the pandemic,” she says.

McBride reflects candidly on her own process. “During the height of COVID, I witnessed so many people struggling with their mental health, which really was the catalyst for me starting We Are All So Good at Smiling,” she says. “I don’t know that I knew I was ready to write the book—at the time I was in the middle of what turned out to be a three-year depressive episode—but it felt like the thing I needed to do. Perhaps I needed to travel through my own haunted garden along with Whimsy and Faerry.” 

Readers of McBride’s acclaimed debut, Me(Moth), will recognize many of the themes explored in We Are All So Good at Smiling. “Hoodoo and magic always show up in my books because it is fundamentally a part of my lived experience,” says McBride. “I am also interested in truth and what that means to different people. Is something true because that is how you remember it? Do we remember aspects of history or reality incorrectly because we can’t handle the truth and what conditions are necessary for us to face the truth? In my books the conditions necessary usually include a … need to feel safe before they can face their truths. I think that is often the case in life.”

Indeed, Hoodoo and magic are strong influences in how Whimsy understands and creates a (tenuous) feeling of safety, drawing on lessons learned from her grandmother and the conjuring skills she shares with her parents. Not to be confused with a religion, McBride describes Hoodoo as “an African American folk magic system that was created when Africans were stolen from their homes, enslaved in America, and told that they could no longer practice their own beliefs. The practice blends herbalism, offerings, and ancestral elevation to bring about good luck and healing.” As seen with Whimsy, Hoodoo is often shared across generations, passed down through families. This is also how McBride began her practice, though she has also continued to build on those foundations, incorporating “tea leaves, tarot, and plants to form connections with [her] ancestors and nature.” 

Drawing inspiration from this work, each chapter in We Are All So Good at Smiling is accompanied by a reading of tea leaves or information about one of the many plants used in Hoodoo practices. “I really wanted to use more herbs and plants in this book because they are such useful allies and protectors,” reflects McBride. “Each plant signals what is coming in the chapter [and] the same for the tea leaves—it all foreshadows.”

Fairy tales also play an integral role in shaping the story, influencing the imagery employed throughout, and supplying characters who play important roles in the Garden of Sorrow that Whimsy conjures as a way of working through her depression and grief. “When it came to writing about depression, I knew folklore and fairy tales had to be included because they all represent a universal truth at the core,” McBride says. 

“I also wanted to show that no one, not even Baba Yaga or Anansi the spider, is immune to depression. It is not something to be embarrassed about,” says McBride. “Mental health [is] a topic that I am extremely passionate about because of my own experiences, but also because of the continued lack of access to resources for those who need help. We don’t have time for taboo and stigma, we need to start talking more openly about depression and I hope this book facilitates some of these conversations.”