I am a Gardener

...and other soft girl revelations

Messy, beautiful chaos planting seeds and starting a gardener’s journal with my love.

My great-grandmother, Nannie, was a master gardener. Curling vines clung to the rotting fence at the very back of her secret garden, sprouting green beans we’d snap each summer while strawberries hid like fairy snacks under their broad, feathered leaves.

My cousins and I would wander the garden endlessly during get-togethers, making witch’s brew in the birdbath with crushed herbs and bird’s eye chilis (though only one of us was foolish enough to rub said mixture in her eyes).

(It was me, and the pain was excruciating).

Visit after visit, I’d spend my time making up stories in the dirt, playing kidnapped princess or some variation of Annie-the-orphan with my sisters and cousins, slipping to freedom between the branches of a drooping tree.

Looking back, I wish I’d paid better attention. Asked Nannie to pull back the curtain, and show me how she’d coaxed a plain, southern garden into a place of such belonging. Her thumb seemed to be peridot green whereas mine remains a pasty, nondescript shade—but in spite of lost opportunity and the gap of memory and time, still we have something in common.

Nannie grew plants; I grow stories.

We are both gardeners to the ends of our days.

Me at age 8? 9? A tooth is missing so I have to assume, in my Nannie’s garden.

Recently, I attended a signing for my favorite author in the world: Libba Bray. Anyone who knows me knows that name, and anyone who reads my book will find her in the last line of the acknowledgements.

She is a self-professed gardener too.

But like me, she has no great talent for sculpting life out of dirt (at least not that I’m aware of). Instead, she tends to the souls, hearts, and minds of her readers, seeing it as her role to scatter seeds and provoke new ideas with her words—and she does.

Looking back on my life, I attribute my first, true, deep breath since childhood to her. The moment I checked out A Great and Terrible Beauty from the school library and read those first few pages, something in my mind cracked—a door creaking open like the proverbial wardrobe with a secret world forgotten inside. It was gentle and powerful, this awakening: a sapling turned heart tree that whispers words each time the wind ruffles the leaves.

(If you read the books, you’ll get the reference).

I walked up to the signing table that night prepared to tell her all of this, palms cold and tongue pressed to my teeth to keep it from stumbling, but I wasn’t prepared for another great, big breath. Another seed gently sown in a mind riddled by worry.

What if I’m not enough? What if nothing I do matters? What is the point of telling stories when the world is on fire and there are times I feel utterly devoid of hope?

I don’t think it’s particularly fair that we ask these questions of artists, or that they are the ones tasked with reflecting their answer back to the world. It probably wasn’t fair of me to ask Libba the question burning in my throat, expecting her to answer—but thank every star above she did.

I asked in the face of nihilism and catastrophe, how she’s able to cultivate hope. And she responded that for every fight, warriors are called forth, but we forget how vital healers are also. Cooks, spies, crafters, blacksmiths, record-keepers. There are many roles to be played, and being a gardener is one of them.

Naturally, I was a sobbing mess as she said this, because I felt that tree inside me shake. Felt a seismic crack in the ground I’d allowed to grow brittle with fear—earth I’d abandoned that suddenly sprouted wildflowers.

I felt alive again. Purposeful. Calm and fulfilled.

I felt like I did in Nannie’s secret garden.

My prized collection, first edition of Diviners, and writing journal.

I’ve long believed my purpose as a storyteller was to scatter wild seeds and hope someday, they’d bloom. Chaos gardening is my brand of choice, cultivating vibes and aesthetics first and slowly figuring out how to add structure along the way. It’s how I write—though somehow I forgot this part of my process in my first attempt to write book 2.

But I remember now.

I remember the stories that planted themselves deep in my veins (some of which are in a list at the back of Soulgazer: a play on the bookstagram challenge I started years ago: #5booksthatmademe). I remember how it felt to read a first kiss after three hundred pages of burning tension. The heartbreak of a boat sailing, uncertain where it might land. The giddy delight of a sword fight between lovers or a quiet revolution sown in the dark.

Art is resistance, revolution, revelation, and revulsion.

Art is trifling and essential.

Art fucking matters.

That’s the point.

So as I poke holes in the soil and drop milkweed seeds in, watering starter pods tucked on windowsills and crossing my fingers that something will sprout, I’m thinking about stories. The one I’m not quite finished with yet, and the ones still to come. Gardens take time—my Nannie knew that. I’m trying to learn it too.

For now though, the hellebores are blooming and a daffodil is fighting for its life in the crack of sunshine our townhouse allows to slip past, and I’m daydreaming of pirates and the power of staying soft.

“And that is how change happens. One gesture. One person. One moment at a time.”

Libba Bray, The Sweet Far Thing

My writing desk, complete with a struggling fern and a cup shaped like a shroom.

If you’d like to read more about my Adult Romantasy debut novel, Soulgazer, you can do so at this link, or preorder it from any major retailer below.

Thank you for reading!

Magpie