I think, at the end of the day, that’s the effect any creative—cook, writer, painter, singer—desires from their work.  To see the effect it has, to know it connects, that the sympathetic drive that leads us to share our unique perspectives on the world is not in vain but is, in fact, appreciated and understood is an endlessly rewarding blessing. 

Sometimes the best heroes are the ones in stories, and their importance isn’t whether or not they are or were real, but that we believe in the things they do.

For many years, she was the sun of our family—the light around which we rotated, and danced, and laughed, and cried, and flew.

They’ve had moments, or they themselves created moments in my life that have changed it, arguably for the better, but sometimes just for the deeper. 

…a happy swirl acknowledging the want of greatness and its temperance in the small things that keep it afloat.

The conceit of A Desolation Called Peace is communication and miscommunication—how we as people handle concepts we sometimes do not have words for and can therefore only approximate. 

At the end of the day, there is more than a little smile of my face knowing that, as I hold this story of a witch and her struggles with nature, prejudice, grief, and fantasy, that I screamed into the void and received an answer. 

…the culmination of our pasts taking us to a moment where we can look back, remember, and sit with our progress and our loved ones. 

Woolf manages to capture the minute moments of powerful emotion we all experience through all stages of our lives and present them for us in honest, introspective ways that make our own lot in life all the easier to understand.

Freedom and Control is a deeply personal series to me still, and one which I cannot ignore even as more immediately tantalizing or literary projects seek attention.