When Christian Tomboys Grow Up

When Christian Tomboys
Grow Up

by Abby D. Jones and Alana K. Asby

Alana: How to express the “yes-but” of the question of tomboys – and of flower boys, too? I ran into an acknowledgment of the existence of such people in Chesterton, in his book The Club of Queer Trades, in his first chapter, ‘The Tremendous Adventures of Major Brown.’ Twice in the tale of Major Brown, Chesterton describes the major as “feminine” – and then at the end the Major marries a woman who chooses him because “she had met scores of men who acted splendidly in the charades… she had only met one man who went down into a coal-cellar when he really thought it contained a murderer.” There’s the “yes-but” – yes, the major is somehow feminine, but he is also a warrior who performs the heroic acts required of men. I think Chesterton had fun playing those two things off each other. The feminine man plays the hero and gets the girl. It kind of reminds me of you, Abby. I wouldn’t go so far as to call you mannish. But you have these two sides – the side that adores warriors and battle-stories, and the side that fiercely promotes the glories of homemaking. It makes me wonder what you were like as a little girl. Were you a tomboy? What did you read and watch?

Abby: Picture this, a long-haired girl in love with horses, but aware she’ll probably never have one. A girl raised on John Wayne who knows she’ll never get to be a cowboy. A girl who feels sadness in her bones and visceral emotions in her heart. A girl with a heart for warriors—though she doesn’t have those words yet—but knows she’ll never be a warrior. At the same time, this little homeschooled girl wanted nothing more from life than her own home, her own family, and her own plants and animals.

Dichotomy. I have always felt the pull within myself between intensity and coziness. I’m always rediscovering the golden mean between my deep love of nurturing and home and my deep love of warriors standing between the innocent and things that go bump in the night.

Was I a tomboy? Most assuredly, as was my mother before me.

I enjoyed things most often associated with boys: guns, adventures, and physical activity. I enjoyed things most often associated with girls: cross-stitch, flowers, and fairy tales. I was attracted to the more violent times in history. There is something about the struggle, the battle, for life, for home, for friends, for family, that captured me. I was also attracted to cabins, small animals, and piles of books. There is something about Hobbit-type comfort that beckoned me in closer. This was all laced through with melancholy, not discontent. Thank the good Lord I grew up in the 80s, with wise, homeschooling parents, so I never faced any sort of idea of lesbianism or transitioning. I simply had this bent towards sadness and this deep desire for grit that took some time to find the right feminine expression.

In my mid-twenties, my internal dichotomy found its most satisfactory expression in warriors and in war stories. In my late thirties, I rediscovered my love of being a homemaker. These two things rest comfortably in me now, no longer sparing for supremacy, but woven together.

The stories I cherished as a child were often male-centric. Willow and The Never-Ending Story were probably the most impactful. Willow was the first movie where I made the correlation between previews and something I would later be able to watch. I love the story, the filming, the music, and the characters. This is where I first experienced the beauty of a man who had wasted his life, finally making the choice to stand up for something. The Never-Ending Story became my battle cry for daydreaming and fantasy. Early on, Sebastian is told to keep his feet on the ground. The rest of the movie is him doing the opposite to save Fantasia. This resonated with me as an imaginative child and a book lover. I decided at a young age never to keep my feet on the ground and always have my head in the clouds. (I’ve said I have a sadness bent, well, I was one of those kids who was traumatized by Artax’s death in the swamp of despair.)

Healthy amounts of John Wayne, The Magnificent Seven, The Great Escape, Princess Bride, Zorro, Robin Hood, Star Trek: The Next Generation, and The Dark Crystal got mixed in there, too. We were in the first generation of homeschool families, and my dad took our social education quite seriously. He wanted us to understand and be exposed to the culture we were part of from a position of safety, where we could discuss theology and philosophy and ethics. We watched, read, and listened to a wide variety of things.

My parents were big believers in reading aloud. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is one of my earliest memories of my mom reading to us. I read the whole series multiple times as a child. Dad read The Hobbit to us when I was around six. He would smoke a pipe and blow smoke rings. When we were a bit older, Mom read The Lord of the Rings to us. It took her a year to complete it. The Fellowship became our daily companions. I have never actually left Middle-Earth.

I read Lloyd Alexander’s The Chronicles of Prydain, all the Hardy Boys I could get my hands on, and most of my father's Louis L’Amour books. I also loved Anne of Green Gables (a woman I related strongly with), The Wizard of Oz, (a girl on an adventure who doesn’t have to be a man to be on an adventure), and anything by E. Nesbit and Marguerite Henry. King of the Wind was my favorite book of Henry’s. I was absolutely captivated by The D’Aulaires’ Book of Norse Myths by Ingri and Edgar Parin d’Aulaire. I found the Norse myths far more compelling than the Greek myths. My dad also read a lot of the original Grimm’s Fairy Tales to us growing up.

Tolkien and Lewis were where I eventually found harmony with my melancholy, the sense of joy and sorrow that haunted me. Tolkien especially helped me understand myself and see that these strange emotions inside me were inside others.

“... giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy; Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.” - J. R. R. Tolkien

As I grew up, I became more and more disappointed with books and movies featuring female protagonists. Not only were they not as much fun as the ones with male protagonists, they became all about having a boyfriend. Not becoming a strong wife and mother like the women in Louis L’Amour books, but about abandoning home and sleeping around. They got whiny and oversexed. The female protagonists became more and more manly in a bad way.

Men I could relate to. Men in “boob suits”, if I’m allowed to be crude, I couldn’t. Except for Sarah Conner, but she was always a mother protecting her son. As I grew older, the women became men, not mannish, not tomboys.

I didn’t want to be a man; I wanted to stand by a man.

In my late teens and early twenties, especially when my older brother joined the military, I did wrestle with some discontentment about my gender, but I also started dating my future husband at eighteen. That brought out an overwhelming desire to be a woman.

Always a dichotomy with me, isn’t it?

What were your early influences?

Alana: I grew up in the countryside, went to a country church where I found all my friends, and was homeschooled. We had tons of animals, both indoors and out, and lots of books. I was an outdoor girl, but so were all the girls and boys I knew. It was normal to climb trees, tramp and bike around the countryside, and run about screaming our heads off, playing cops and robbers, hide and seek, and Pretend. I was also bookish. A lot of the classic kids’ book I actually read as an adult, including Narnia, but I read adult books as a kid. I loved the dog novels of Albert Payson Terhune. I loved Penrod, by Booth Tarkington. My mom had a book of Shakespeare tales rewritten for children, and I got a wonderful sense of entering strange worlds from that. I made myself sick laughing at Peck’s Bad Boy, by George Wilbur Peck. I loved Francis Hodgsin Burnett and King of the Wind. Of course I loved the Anne of Green Gables books, and I was told I was Anne. How cool that you identified with her, too. My dad read the Laura Ingalls Wilder books to us. My aunt helped us collect Redwall books. My mom just collected old books, and I read whatever I wanted to. And unforgettably, at family camp, a boy told me to read P. G. Wodehouse books. I went to the library and began to gobble these books up. Wodehouse is still one of my favorite authors.

I loved nursery rhymes and old hymns, and as a teen I memorized dozens of them so I could always have something to sing as I worked. I started reading serious poetry as a teenager and fell in love. I especially adored Lepanto by Chesterton (that was the first I knew of him) as well as The Haystack in the Floods by William Morris, and The Hound of Heaven by Francis Thompson. These are longish poems with rich vocabularies, dense syntax, and old-fashioned language. They also do fantastic things with rhyme and rhythm, and I learned I could do those things, too. I didn’t have a teacher to tell me not to bother trying to rhyme, that I’d just do it badly. I wrote some very respectable classic poems as a teen.

As a child I was crazy about heroes. My parents allowed us to watch film only from before 1960 or so, so my favorite TV shows were the 1952-1958 George Reeves Superman, and the 1957-1959 black and white Zorro series. As a family we missed out on Princess Bride but we enjoyed Davy Crockett and the like. As a teen I loved romantic comedies and I watched everything I could find with Jane Powell or Deanna Durbin. Lordy, could those gals sing! I got a sense of feminine glamour and vive la difference from those films.

I think I was profoundly influenced by the fact that our parents didn’t allow us girls to wear slacks. We could wear skirts, dresses, or loosely-made culottes. The distinction between the sexes was thus firmly formalized. I couldn't help being profoundly aware of myself as female from early on. I definitely suffered some humiliation about girls not being allowed to be Pastors, and I wanted to champion girls being respected. At the same time, I absorbed that distinction in a positive way as well. As a teen I learned to sew my own ankle-length split skirts out of cheap cotton print and cheerfully endured my younger siblings’ mockery at how weird I looked. I think if I was known for anything, it was weirdness. I was precocious, logical, enthusiastically counter-cultural, and socially a bit prickly.

When I went to college and it was suddenly okay to talk to young men, I found what I had been missing as a teenager. I had difficulty engaging in conversation with other girls because I simply wasn’t interested in what they were interested in. And as a teen in Courtship churches, a girl talking to boys was looked at with suspicion. I was accused of being a Jezebel for asking a boy where to buy good classical music CD’s. But at Christian college, one could always engage the opposite sex in unlimited intellectual conversation. I found that boys could tolerate levels of intellectual rivalry and debate that would completely shut down other girls socially. I was in my element.

Of course, this had unintended consequences. I was never asked out. When Josh, now my husband, started dating me, his friends tried to warn him off. “You know she’s some kind of genius, right?” they said. “How are you going to handle her?” Josh didn’t tell anyone this, but he’d kind of been holding back on his own intellectual level so he felt just fine with me. (And though I was intellectually inclined, I wasn’t actually a genius.)

Okay, so now you’re grown up and you have Hearthkeepers, where you encourage women in their calling to tend others and make an art and science of keeping the home. How did a tomboy grow up to have such a feminine calling?

Abby: I want to circle back to something you said, because the way you described it helped me figure out what I was trying to pull free from the overgrown garden of my mind. I don’t have a mind palace, all organized and beautiful. I have a mind garden, something akin to Tasha Tudor. Trying to find anything in here is a constant digging in the dirt and pulling of the weeds. I also struggled with relating to other women. I could talk guns, cars, war, and action flicks with men, but romantic comedies, soap operas, and romance novels baffled me. (They still do.)

As I got older, I found myself feeling a bit disconnected. I struggled a lot with feeling lost in the crowd. I struggled with feeling like I belonged someplace else or some time else. Where were the Laura Ingalls Wilders, Annes, and Dorothys? When we lived for a few years in Yellville, out in the Ozarks, all my friends were boys. That was an idyllic time. Romances were innocent and most of my days were taken up with nature, milking goats, chickens, and hanging out with our friends. We discussed politics, Shakespeare, Lord of the Rings, and more. There were no girls my age in our circle. My closest sister was two years younger than me. The difference between 10 and 12 is much wider than 12 and 14. As puberty did its work, I had a growing intuition that my presence as a girl ruined the brotherhood I so desperately wanted.

We moved from the country to the city so my dad could find work. We moved from a small church to a massive church. I went from being the oldest girl to being the oddest girl. At the same time, I now had other girls around me. I started having long conversations on the phone and hanging out with a certain group of girls. I have never had a problem with having a wide range of acquaintances. The struggle was, I knew one of the popular girls, but wasn’t a popular girl myself. I was a country bumpkin who still loved horses and guns. I related to so few of the girls and so few of the boys. It was a lonely time.

We moved again, and while we were still in the city, we were in a smaller church in Texas where the prettiest women have grit and often guns. I felt at home in my new state, but not as at home in my new church. Again, I was the older girl surrounded by boys, but no longer with the pre-puberty innocence, and no longer all homeschooled. I made friends of older-than-me, married women in our church.

I often found myself thinking I talked more easily with men. I enjoyed, and still enjoy, male conversation.

My first real job was in the office of a sheet metal factory. I quickly learned I did not want to be treated like one of the guys, and that there was a crude side to men that I’d been largely protected from. Unfortunately, I also didn’t relate to the women. My deepest desire was still to be a wife and mother. That wasn’t a popular desire in the ‘90s. All the women around me in my work and education looked at you weird if you said you wanted to be a wife and mother. My family and church were still places I could say that and be honored, but not anywhere else.

My few girlfriends left the faith or left home. I went a long time without a close girlfriend who I wasn’t related to. Most women wanted a career, complained about their children and husband, or overly shared about their sex life. I just couldn’t relate. This started to manifest in my mental garden with the weeds of pride and constant rebellious defiance. Not against my parents, but just as a hallmark of myself. I was loud and brash and intense.

Along the way, I met my husband, a man who wanted me around and who could have intellectual conversations. He had long hair and introduced me to heavy metal. My mother was simply thrilled with this new development.

We dated for four years and got married in our early 20s. We bought the consignment boutique I’d been managing for several years. The country girl who had a hard time relating to women and only wanted to stay home helped her husband buy a business in the fashion industry. We took in high-end clothing and sold it on consignment. Talk about a major shift! From this, I learned about my own sex. I learned to love clothing for its artistic value. I learned to love the women who loved fashion. I learned that a lot of the girls I didn’t get along with in my teens were now mature women in their twenties and thirties. I spent all my days with women and found them to be a joy and delight and not nearly as shallow as I had thought they were in my teens. I met women who loved Lord of the Rings, married soldiers, raised soldiers, had their fingers in the dirt. I found my first real best friend during this time, started writing, and re-found warrior stories as an adult.

The boutiques (we had two) got us through our first ten years of marriage. For lots of reasons, we sold them, and I came home. The woman who always and only wanted to be a wife and mother, suddenly found herself struggling with telling people she was a homemaker. No children came. While we tried to tell ourselves that the boutiques were an extension of our home and that I was a homemaker and not a career woman, I was never home. I was used to my significance being tied to co-owning a business that was doing well. I found myself back in my teen years when women look at you like you’re crazy if you tell them you want to be a wife and mother.

It was during this time that I first admitted, in a moment of sheer panic, that I wrote warrior stories to another woman. This woman was a Godsend. She loved warrior stories and had two sons in the military. We started corresponding via email. She poured so much into me. She made me see my love of military history and warriors as a gift to grow and not an oddity to bury in some vain attempt to be “normal.”

“My darling girl, when are you going to realize that being normal is not necessarily a virtue? It rather denotes a lack of courage!” (Practical Magic, the movie.)

Through lots of struggles wrestling with significance and writing and lots of messed up theology and philosophy in my mental garden, I had a click moment in 2017. I had a fatalistic view of my homemaking. I never considered it to be something I could grow in. I’d gotten my dream life and found I didn’t like it and I wasn’t good at it. Click. You could try to do better? You could try to grow? You could practice and train? What!? I took my unending need to write and started to write about homemaking, just journaling for myself. In the meantime, I started looking for homemaking groups to plug into. There were none. Or what I found at the time was a lot of homeschooling and complaining. What I wanted was encouragement and instruction. I didn’t want child rearing. I didn’t want a homeschool plan. I wanted the art and science of homemaking. It was nowhere to be found. (This is before the homesteader movement took off.) My husband suggested I create a group that was what I was looking for: homemaking with philosophy and grit. Homemaking as an art. Homemaking explained. No complaining. I wanted to understand the domestic arts as I loved and understood the value of stories.

That was how this tomboy moved into the world of fashion and basically back to being a tomboy, but with a better love of women and herself as a woman. We close every episode on our podcast with Hang Tough (Major Dick Winter’s catch phrase) and Keep Your Powder Dry. HearthKeepers leans into a sense of the woman on the prairie with her rifle, planting flowers. It has this earthy element to it, very much barefoot Tasha Tudor. I’m not a homesteader. I still live in the city. But the women in our group are not only beautiful and interested in beauty, but they’re also the tenders of the home fires, which takes courage and fortitude.

What took you from college to Vulgaris Media?

Alana: After college, Josh and I spent a lot of time on a blog called Remonstrans, now archived but still readable. There and other places, my penchant for theological debate transferred from in-person to online encounters. Remonstrans was written by a man who called himself Dissidens. In reality he was a professor. His thesis was that Christian books, music, theology, sermons, and worship had become low-quality and insubstantial. He believed that in order to have high quality in these areas, you needed a culture that formed people well through faithful and deeply-rooted institutions. He believed that Christian culture in our time, especially evangelical culture, was in shocking disrepair, and that it might take a thousand years to rebuild.

From there, it didn’t take much for Eastern Orthodoxy to tempt us away with its ancient theology and worship – though given where we came from, we retained a strong sense of Christianity extending beyond the borders of the Orthodox Church.

The thing is, in Orthodoxy there was a sense of theological questions being largely settled, and at the same time the spirituality emphasized humility. So it wasn’t valorized to debate people. That side of my personality quietly went to sleep, and I turned back to my original interests – poetry, storytelling.

Meanwhile, I’d given birth to my firstborn. That put me in touch with my femininity in a shocking and overwhelming way that I wasn’t ready for. I nearly died in childbirth, so it was a very violent and bloody experience.

But it was more than that. I was suddenly swamped with feeling. I remember sitting in the rocking chair in my living room, holding my baby while he slept, and listening to the radio. A syrupy jingle played during an ad, and I burst into sentimental tears. This was not the me I was used to!

Holding my baby, knowing viscerally where he came from, I had a strong sense of everyone being someone’s son or daughter. I became sympathetic to everyone in a new way, and found I wanted to be a lot more quiet and gentle with them. All of this forced a personality change – well, to some extent. For a number of years my intellectual life contracted to reading and blogging – I received a compliment from a blogging priest about the kindness I practiced on my blog. After a while I did fall into debating politics online for a while, which brought out my harsher side, so eventually I quit most social media.

Ultimately, I’ve found that the self-sacrifice involved in raising children has saved me, through God’s grace, from self-indulgence that would have kept me a much smaller person.

One really wonderful activity that kept my creativity alive during the hard years was poetry challenges on my blog. I wanted to keep up my poetry-writing skills, and I invited other poets to join my challenges. We would set a theme, give ourselves two weeks, and then post our poems on the blog and critique them. Some really beautiful and innovative poems came into existence in this way. You can still read them at Slow Literature.

I also self-published a book of short stories, entitled Her Ratty Hair, Her Wayward Brain.

However, I was chronically ill – this had started almost immediately after the wedding – so servicing that bogged me down and took up a lot of my energy and intelligence. I homeschooled my son, and eventually my daughter, which was demanding. I became infertile, which was hard because we wanted another child. I put my smarts into researching herbalism, Weston-Price, and other health pathways.

Then one day I experienced what felt like a miraculous healing, while I stood at prayer. Soon after, I became pregnant with my third child. And with the baby-building going on inside me, I felt a returning surge in creativity. Suddenly I had an idea for a new literary journal, one that would embrace Christian readers and writers, as well as other religious, conservative, and traditional people.

I knew that the way I write poetry isn’t acceptable to contemporary poets and publishers. The vast majority of poetry published now is supposedly free verse, but without the natural rhythms that come from nature and music, which true free verse employs. My skills with rhyme and meter were largely unwanted.

But even contemporary formal poets do things differently to me. They use conversational English instead of poetic diction. They downplay their rhyme and rhythm to make sure it isn’t too noticeable – this is considered a kind of sophistication and good taste. The glorious, vigorous and unashamed sound-effects and word-romp of Lepanto are simply impossible in today’s insipid formal poetry.

So, thinking there must be people like me out there somewhere, I decided to build a literary journal and associated community that would welcome old-fashioned poetry.

At the same time I had to start thinking about publishing stories, what made them good, and what the analogue was to old-fashioned poetry. I found that contemporary literary publishers were publishing a lot of what Michael Chabon calls ‘plotless, moment-of-revelation stories’, where nothing really happens. To my mind, that’s simply misanthropic. What’s even worse is an education that teaches you to “appreciate” such stories – because no one can really enjoy them. I intended my journal would publish old-fashioned, exciting, vivid stories made the way people like them – built out of ekphrastic events, not mental events - but still written beautifully, at a literary level.

In art as in theology, I dug into the past to find what was missing in contemporary experience.

I spent years on The Author’s Journal of Inventive Literature and its related community, and I was only partly successful in my aims. Several foundered relationships retarded my progress. But in the end I published four issues of the journal – a real accomplishment since I did everything myself, including layout and design, printing and binding, mailing and publicity. I even ended up writing a lot of the poetry and stories under pen names because I struggled to find people who could write poetry and stories the way I wanted.

Still, I found there are people out there who love fine things, who love substantive things, and who love the truly common things – common in the best sense, in the sense of the core values that normal human beings hold together, rooted in human nature, and that contribute to human flourishing.

I don’t remember exactly what I was reading when I had the idea to expand to Vulgaris Media, but it started with the name. Whatever I was reading contained a Frederick Pohl quote, though – I remember that – and he was talking about the best sci-fi stories having a kind of vulgarity. He said this: "Vulgarity is the willingness to sacrifice style and polish to a purpose, that purpose being the conveying of a kind of wonder and excitement that could not be made to exist in any other way." Of course ‘vulgarity’ is a well-chosen word because it goes back to the Latin ‘vulgaris’, which means common – but it also pinpoints the fact that what is now considered to be sophisticated and in good taste is in reality perverted – in the sense that normal people can’t enjoy it. If it’s not a story with darkened appetites served up, as in contemporary genre fiction, then it’s a story with the story taken out, as in literary fiction.

It takes a special education to enjoy this stuff – which is why those highly educated folks who “appreciate” literary fiction value it so much. It’s a mark of their sophistication and belonging to the in-crowd. In-crowd politics also dominates genre publishing, which privileges postmodern liberation ideology, not storytelling chops. (C. S. Lewis talks about the in-crowd phenomenon, and absolutely nails the psychology of it, in That Hideous Strength.)

So with Vulgaris Media, as with The Author’s Journal of Inventive Literature, I was going to take my stand with stories normal people could enjoy – the vulgar excitement, the common values, the uncynical desire for adventure, for other worlds, for truth, for hope, for good and admirable characters and destinies, for happy endings, and for wonder. And of course, my version of “vulgarity” also harks back to moral standards of the past that are now considered passe, but which were held in common back when normalcy was still celebrated in society. In fact, my whole sense of normalcy is formed by what was normal in the past. I believe that what was normal in the past is still normal now – it’s just less pervasive.

My first attempt to publish a book with Vulgaris Media foundered. I edited an entire poetry book with a woman who was a very talented poet but an indifferent visual artist. She told me I was a good editor and had edited her work sensitively - but after all the work was done she pulled her book because I wouldn’t allow her to design her own cover – traditionally the publisher’s job.

I made several attempts to find undiscovered authors, of short stories or books. I thought I might need to become a golden-age editor – someone whose word was law when it came to the story, and who bought copyrights. The reaction of authors to this idea was such universal horror that I knew I had run up against a postmodern cause – authors had been “liberated” from autocratic editors, and I was proposing something regressive.

Geez, guys. There’s a reason it’s called the golden age of magazine fiction. Lots of storytellers got their storytelling education precisely by watching editors rewrite their stories based on what the readership wanted. There’s that vulgarity again – that humanity, let’s call it – that respect for normal appetites. Certainly the old way of doing things did not privilege the self-indulgent, reader-alienating primacy of authorly “self-expression” that is held so sacred now!

In the end, though, I didn’t need to buy any copyrights. I found you - an author who had written a 10,000-word story that was already very good – that had a pro-life theme without preaching, that was exciting and vivid and beautifully-written, and that had a good sense of structure – and I knew I wanted to publish it. Little did I know you would one day be helping me edit my own stories!

I had a vision for the story’s development, and I got your permission to do my editorial thing. At first I thought the story was bound for The Author’s Journal of Inventive Literature, but as I let you into the rewriting process the story grew longer and longer. I began to see the potential for Vulgaris Media. You and I ended up working on the story document at the same time – sometimes we could see each other’s active cursors - and that was when things really exploded. We discovered, Abby, that you and I are sympatico co-authors. Stoneheart ended up a more-than 100,000-word novel co-written by us both, with you as the lead author.

So Vulgaris Media published its first book. It’s my biggest accomplishment, and I love Stoneheart so much.

I still think the premise, which is all yours, is so brilliant. A bounty-hunter with a magical stone instead of a heart, dead to emotion, ruthless and efficient – yet he commits this one act of mercy that changes everything. It’s great storytelling.

I also feel so blessed to have you as a friend. You’ve increased my appreciation for warriors and the necessity to do battle with evil in our stories. You accept my sincerity for what it is, and offer me the kind of straightforward, no-games friendship I have found so rare.

Abby: Stoneheart was such a unique experience. It came at a point in my life when I had set aside my dream of ever being published. Meeting you and working on Stoneheart was like an oasis. My dichotomy was accepted and even developed. You took both my love of home and warriors in stride. You asked questions that challenged me and made me think without making me ever feel bad or not up to the task.

Here you were, someone who loved stories and studied stories, but you had more reason and logic to explain why I felt the way I felt. As a visceral person, I’m always trying to understand the why behind what I’m feeling. You supplied that for me in rich and deep ways. I remember the first time I got on the Vulgaris Media website. Immediately, I felt like I’d come home, like I was meeting someone who not only spoke my language but spoke it better than me and in a way that would challenge and grow me which I crave.

And! You handled all the parts of publishing that I didn’t want to do.

It is so funny to me that I had despaired of finding a traditional publisher who would handle the business side, and you couldn’t find writers who wanted that. We are a match made in heaven.

Alana: Absolutely! Next question: I think we agree that it’s special and wonderful to be a woman and do women’s work. Has your experience and reading given you an insight into what makes men and their work special and wonderful?

Abby: Challenging question! And not because I don’t have an answer, but because I have too much of an answer. I’m faced with the Herculean task of translating all I feel into a cohesive thought. My recent reading of Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes and The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien —Vietnam veteran books still haunting my life—isn't helping. When I try to think of what makes men special, I keep thinking of all these boys who went to war and endured unendurable things. (Nothing makes me want to pour myself into my home and my femininity like men going to war. It drives me to want to be a calm and healing place and person.)

I’m going to speak in broad generalities. It would take hundreds of thousands of words to cover every nuance of what makes men amazing. Men are as diverse in their personalities and giftings as women. To try and say, “Here is a man,” is to invite a comment section of exceptions.

When I think of what makes men wonderful, the first thing that comes to mind is strength. Men are physically strong. All women find the physical strength of men attractive. Nothing is more beautiful than that strength laid at the hem of our dress to protect and provide for us and our children. If this weren’t still true despite the hard work of feminists to destroy it, we wouldn’t have bodybuilders in our movies or on the cover of romance novels. Men have a physical strength that women love, but our culture wants to ignore so that women can do everything. Even the ‘flower-boys,’ academics, artists, and scholars are generally stronger than most average women.

With this strength comes physical endurance. Men can generally go harder and longer than women. They can plod along for mile after mile after mile, enduring deprivation, dehydration, and dirt. I used to think I could keep up with the guys, right? At some point—probably when my chronic health issues bloomed into being—I realized that not only could I not keep up with them, I didn’t want to. I realized my constant attempt to prove I could be tough was pride and disrespect. I wasn’t respecting what men could bring to the table. Their stamina is a gift that should be honored.

Physical strength and fortitude demand self-control. This is where we vacillate between heroes and villains. A heroic man has his physical gifts under control and in the service of others. A villain is out of control and uses his physical gifts to tyrannize and dominate others. It takes a heroic man to put a villainous man down. We must have real warriors to defeat real despots and abusers.

The last thing I’m going to mention about men is my favorite male trope: enemies to brothers. Women are relational. We are the holders of homes and families and builders of community. It is difficult for us to face a problem without viewing it as facing a person who is the problem. We make all things personal. Men have this ability to get upset at one another, throw a few fists, and now they’re best friends. Their conflict resolution might be violent, but it generally ends in unity.

“Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned, nor hell a fury like a woman scorned.” - William Congreve

Men can shoot straight without getting offended. If women talked to each other the way men do, we’d all be crying, and we’d hate one another. This is a gift because it allows men to face horrible things and even do horrible things with a brotherhood at their back, often made up of men they started out in conflict with. How is that not beautiful? This often builds enduring loyalty. Being the ones who hunt the things that go bump in the night weaves friendships through blood, sweat, and tears. How is this not attractive? Men have the mental and physical fortitude to stand between children and monsters. They can go from rough and tough to gently comforting a dying comrade. They can be boys giving themselves head injuries, then running up with a fist full of dandelions.

This is an idyllic view of manhood, I know, but the idyllic is powerful because it points us to what we can be and what we can do.

Growing up in the era where I was told I could do anything a man can do but better, I had to come to the realization that no, I couldn’t, and no, I shouldn’t, and that my own strength, courage, fortitude, and gentleness as a woman were different and meant for different things. Men are to stand guard, go on the attack, defend, protect, and provide. Women nurture, grow, and nourish. These are different things. But they are beautiful, good, and both require fortitude, courage, and strength, just different kinds. When we work together, I think their strength makes us strong, and I think our nourishing makes them gentler. It’s almost like we were created to be two sides to the same coin.

Alana: That’s all so true. It reminds me of what I love in my husband. He works outside. In all weather – one hundred degrees or hailing – he’s out there to provide for us. When he comes in soaked to the skin or sunburned, I have a powerful sense that he’s genuinely standing between us and the world.

And what’s really amazing is that all he wants in return are things I can give as a woman. He wants me to do a good job taking care of his kids and educating them. He wants my love and respect – and he wants to feel he’s really earned them. He never demands respect like a tyrannical man – he just hopes and works for it. The engine within him – the thing that drives him to be worthy – is core to his manhood.

I think a lot of men who go wrong are wounded in that precise place. They’ve lost hope of being worthy or of having their worth recognized by someone they can trust to honor it and protect it. Because there’s such a point of vulnerability there, where men are trying, where they’re pouring their strength into the battle for their own souls, and they need to be known for the warriors they are. And if they aren’t honored for that warrior’s approach to the spiritual life or to the moral life - it constitutes a lack of protection.

So a woman who accepts a man’s protection in the physical world, but doesn’t protect that warrior core, is really faithless.

There’s this other thing that balances that engine out, though, and that’s a man’s playfulness. There’s that saying, “a boy and his toys,” and we all know that refers to grown men. My husband spends so much time playing games and fighting imaginary battles with his kids by his side. Men can be so silly and light-hearted, or just boyish in those down-time moments, and I love that about them. For whatever reason, we women tend to be so consumed with our practical concerns that this doesn’t come as naturally to most of us. Men can help us relax and lighten up.

So, to shift gears a bit. I’ve noticed that women, perhaps especially Christian women, seem to be looking for safety in their reading. It’s understandable because part of a woman’s instinct is to seek safety for herself and her children (and look to a man to provide that). I’m sure God built this into us as part of a plan to keep kids safe. And it’s also understandable that women who have resisted feminism, who retain their femininity, might feel this more strongly. I mean, there’s not a huge Christian female readership seeking out dark fiction, horror, etc. But sometimes that urge to safety can be valorized, even mistaken for a kind of purity – “let’s keep all the bad stuff out of the books and not examine why.” What are some of the benefits of putting aside this instinct to safety when it comes to reading, and allowing oneself to vicariously experience peril, hardship, tragedy, and the encounter with evil?

Abby: Hee-hee. I thought you’d never ask. I think when we mistake safety for purity, when we push all the danger out there, we become dull and just a bit too comfortable. Here are two good quotes:

"...we need this life of practical romance; the combination of something that is strange with something that is secure. We need so to view the world as to combine an idea of wonder and an idea of welcome. We need to be happy in this wonderland without once being merely comfortable.” - G.K. Chesterton

"Gandalf intercedes in the culture of the Shire because the hobbits had begun to forget their own stories of daring and danger and therefore their sense of the world's greatness. They needed to renew their memory of the high and perilous. The hobbits must be reminded of an element of danger in order to appreciate what they have. The good things that make hobbit society valuable, such as freedom and peace and pleasure in ordinary life, require a greater and more dangerous world outside their borders in order that they not grow stale. The richness and depth of our world come from this relationship between the ordinary pleasures, such as food, drink, and family on the one hand, and the longing for transcendent beauty, quests, and noble sacrifice on the other hand." - Tolkien Dogmatics by Austin M. Freeman

The benefit of gritty or even dark fiction is that it grows us.

That’s really what it comes down to for me.

Whether we like it or not, the design of this world is that we only grow through struggle and sacrifice. If stories let us practice being brave before we have to be, as my mom always said, and stories help us to love the truth, not just know it, as someone once put it, then our stories must have peril, hardship, tragedy, and encounter evil because this is real life. Real life requires grit and sturdiness. You, Alana, must have grit when your husband comes home wet from working outside all day, burdened by his responsibilities. You can’t be a weakling. I must have grit when my chicken gets an infected wound. I can’t just ignore it and hope it goes away. I must clean and bind it. That takes grit. It takes grit to realize how close danger has come to those you love and not overreact.

Unsafe stories grow us.

I think for a lot of women, safe actually means clean. It means that there is no offensive violence, sex, or language. I’ve read a few books that are clean and not safe, like The Lord of the Rings, Watership Down, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, The Chronicles of Narnia, and most of Louis L’Amour’s books. I can appreciate ‘clean’ fiction when it is well done because it is not actually that clean. The Lord of the Rings and Watership Down have a high level of horror. Louis L’Amour’s books are violent. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe has Aslan’s death. They’re just not indulgent. They’re not clean so much as they’re decent. (On the other end of my extreme, you can have The Exorcist when you can pry it from my cold, dead fingers.) Unfortunately, all too often, clean fiction is fiction without any teeth. It’s not decent, it’s boring. It refuses to wrestle with anything hard. It requires no growth or sacrifice. It is all Hallmark fluff. There is no cost, and thus, there is no growth on the part of the reader. We aren’t walking away fortified for the day ahead. We’re coddled.

When we view safety as a virtue, we’re not safe. We’re naive and ignorant. We’re complacent. That’s dangerous. Women who hold up safety like a badge of honor are creating dangerous environments because no one is ever on guard. Good books with grit help us to grow our own grit. They remind us that the safe bubbles of our homes, much like the Shire, aren’t the truth of the whole world, the condition of mankind, or the nature of mankind. They remind us that someone must sacrifice their safety for our safety. We don’t want to be heedless of the sacrifices made on our behalf or that we might be called to perform. When we never read war stories, we forget the price paid by warriors. We lose the ability to sympathize and empathize with those in modern, violent professions and the violence required of our forefathers and foremothers. How many of us could do what they did, endure what they endured?

“Despite the urge to avert your eyes from the suffering, the only way to really appreciate the nobility of courage is to familiarize yourself with its costs so that you will come to understand how rare a thing it really is.” – Why Courage Matters by John McCain

You can’t have truly good stories without conflict, danger, and evil. I never cease to be amazed at the number of women who want safe fiction but seem to be oblivious to the horror, danger, and gore of the Scriptures. We need to work through Paul's words, “whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things,” being in the same book with a chopped-up concubine, the slaughter of entire peoples, and the murder of children. The Bible isn’t just the Christmas Story and a nursery-acceptable Noah’s Ark. Paul isn’t calling us to excessively shelter ourselves from darkness. If that were true, there would be no crucifixion. He’s calling us to respond properly to the darkness. A good book will have horror and violence. It will have grit. It won’t be safe. But it will be good.

Now, there is a “know thyself” aspect to this. This isn’t a call for more True Crime—I've almost entirely divested myself of true crime because it’s gone from being a study of monsters who are raised by women, prey on women, and are defeated by men to gossip, gossip, gossip—or giving anyone permission to indulge in the goriest horror fest you can find—I can handle a pretty high level of gore in a war movie, but refuse to watch torture-porn. It makes me nauseous—it is a call to realize the value of gritty or even dark fiction. But we each must know what we can handle. What one person considers completely clean, someone else may be incapable of reading. That’s okay. We need to know our personal courage levels and our own temptations.

I’ve thought a lot about sex and violence in stories, and I’ve come to the conclusion that violence is public and sex is private. What that means is violence must be answered with violence by another person. The only way to stop someone with a gun is someone else with a gun. Sex isn’t to be shared with the world. We should not be filling our books and movies with explicit sex scenes. That is something intimate between two people only. Now, that doesn’t mean, again, that we can show as much violence as we want, and that doesn’t mean that we never address sexual situations. It means a G-rating isn’t the only standard by which to judge the value of a story. A constant diet of G-rated material isn’t any healthier than a diet of cake and ice cream. When we only ever read the Disney version of fairy tales, we forget that Faërie is the Perilous Realm. (I wonder sometimes if our culture’s lack of grit and overindulgence in safety in our stories is what happens when we stop reading the original fairy tales to our children, only imbibing the clean Disney versions. Compare the original Little Mermaid with the Disney version. They’re not even the same story, and they are having an entirely different conversation.)

Danger and ugliness serve a purpose. Seeing evil serves a purpose. It arms us mentally and emotionally. It grows us. It sweetens the appropriate safety of home and family. It reminds us of the truth that even though our backyards might hold gardens and chickens and children, the world is a dark and scary place. We forget that at our own risk. Just saying we know the world is a dark place and we know life is hard, giving lip service to that thought, doesn’t actually mean we’re sturdy and on guard. We need stories to help us emotionally connect with that truth. We need non-indulgent grit so we can grow. And we need happy endings to bring us back.

What are your thoughts on the benefits of gritty stories and how women interact with them? And maybe we should share what we mean by grit?

Alana: Grit specifically is something I’ve come to see and think about through working with you. Previously, I approached a related issue intellectually in articles I wrote for the Vulgaris Media website, where I didn’t address “grit” exactly, but tried to explore how exactly good fiction should interact with various kinds of evil. And of course, grit isn’t evil – but a lot of times it’s the narrative encounter with evil of some kind, even if it’s just natural evil like an accidental fall from a horse that breaks a leg.

And I was coming at the question from the other side. Rather than being concerned that readers weren’t gritty enough, I was concerned that writers were too eager to focus on evil and darkness and that this was damaging to readers in some way. At the same time, I needed to make room for the fact that in this world we cannot tell a good story unless the characters are facing evil in some way.

So I needed to explore the reason for that. I think it’s found in the very nature of storytelling. I believe that every good story is a microcosm of world history. Not personal history, not a chunk of history, but history as a whole. As such, that story, if told by Christians, must feature the triumph of good in the end, in some really explosive way – because that’s how we believe history will end. In other words, I believe that a Christian storyteller is echoing God’s work in her own.

Likewise, when an atheistic or unbelieving writer tells a story, it is not an accident that bleak, shapeless storytelling is endemic to his worldview. I was concerned that Christian writers not adopt this storytelling style because I believed that it imported an anti-theological philosophy. I think quite often in art forms, the conventions are not merely there. The forms wordlessly import philosophical content, and it is frustrating to me when people cannot see that. Another example is modern classical music. I love classical, but I listen to very little of it from the twentieth century. (Alan Hovhaness is one of my favorite exceptions to this rule!) This was when composers were experimenting with atonality and shapelessness and so forth. While on the surface some of it was presented as an attempt to bring in Eastern influences, I never believed that the composers imported the Eastern attitude successfully. I can listen to Eastern classical music, and though it never achieves that Western sense of “really getting somewhere in the end” at least it is built around a sense of order, cyclical as that order may be. Not so modern classical music. It very aggressively never gets anywhere, and it’s not built around any order. It’s just aural havoc. The twentieth century did this to all art forms, and I think it’s absolutely shocking when Christian artists can’t pull off a really distinct approach – orderly, harmonious, and odysseic.

As storytellers, we must be aware that we are echoing God’s work, and God has chosen to tell this story – the story of the world – in which evil plays a part. To atheists this is a great scandal, and to all of us this is a wound. But the storyteller has a pastoral role in predicting the healing of that wound and the justifying of that scandal, or at least its swallowing up in glory.

So I asked, how does the faithful storyteller depict evil? I came up with a whole rundown of what was permissible in my view, and what was not, but to sum it up I believe that every work of art provokes contemplation – which is a kind of union of the heart with the thing one is looking at – and that a faithful artist is aware of what his art provokes contemplation of. And it had better be something worthy of contemplation. Not evil.

When I read Stoneheart in its original form, I knew I could work with it because it had this kind of wild approach to good and evil that felt like home base to me. It was authentically traditional in its approach to what it means for good people to face evil, and for good to triumph in the end – without being stodgy and formulaic. Because, of course, there’s the opposite problem of people trying to write traditional good-beats-evil stories, and just making them incredibly tame and predictable. You, Abby, definitely don’t make it easy for your characters, and you face up to the fact that evil is not something that only approaches us in the form of aliens from outside the world. It grows like mold, or like cancer, on our good things and in our own guts. We did a ton of rewriting and editing, but we never had to alter that basic approach to good and evil. So even though you are promoting grit and I am cautioning against the contemplation of evil, it feels like we are standing on the same ground.

And because you are so bold in confronting evil in your stories, Stoneheart isn’t chick lit. At all. I think it’s for female readers, as well as for male, but it’s not that particular kind of safe, targeted-to-women story that people call chick lit.

Which brings me to my next question. It’s traditionally understood that men can write for both women and for men, but when women write, it’s only going to be suitable for other women. Despite the fact that DEI initiatives have turned over most publishing opportunities to women now, making it hard for a man to get a book published, there’s still that basic expectation that a woman’s book is for women. And in fact, a large portion of authoresses do, in fact, write Women’s Literature. Very few authoresses seem to get past this expectation – a few do, including Jane Austen, J. K. Rowling, and Susanna Clarke. And for sure there are lesser-known examples, like the Jason Fitger trilogy by Julie Schumaker (which I recommend to readers of both sexes.)

When we were writing Stoneheart, we really wanted to write for women and for men. Part of this was having a male main character alongside the female main character. I would even say that Sul, our male MC, experiences more change in the process of the book, in response to his narrative dilemma, than Psyche, our female MC. Though Psyche certainly has enough on her plate, what with the effects of her trauma from being gang-raped, her important job raising her magical child, and the fact of the danger that’s closing in on her from outside, Sul has trauma of his own from the war, plus he’s dealing with the effects of the fact he’s got a magical stone in his chest instead of a heart, and then he has to choose between his honor and his devotion to his job, on the one hand, and mercy and salvation on the other. So I think both MCs are equally important, and both are facing challenging circumstances, and both are taking responsibility for other people in different ways. What else makes Stoneheart suitable for men? How have male readers responded?

Abby: When we were writing Stoneheart, I had a male friend, a police officer, read it. Other than making a minor gun correction, he loved it. So far, it seems that if we can get a man to give it a try, he enjoys it.

I don’t think male readers expect to be treated well in stories written by women. They expect that they will either be portrayed as jerks, wimps, abusers, or emotional basket cases. I also don’t think they expect gun precision, which I’m kind of a stickler for. Stoneheart is suitable, dare I say safe, for male readers because the men in our book, MC and side characters, are respected. They’re not one-dimensional foils for the purpose of satisfying the desires and discontent of the women of the book. They’re their own people with their own strengths and weaknesses. I think male readers will enjoy the book because it does have a good amount of action, guns, and adventure. But mostly because we aren’t afraid to say to men through Sul and others that they’re good and necessary and welcome in our communities. That they are as much a part of the story, as broken and in need of healing, as women are.

I have been around men all my life. I have a solid relationship with my father and two brothers. I have been married for over twenty years. I’ve spent a good part of my life studying law enforcement and military history. I rarely, if ever, read chick-lit. (Shudder.) I have seen men stand up and man up, and I’ve seen men fail. I have profited greatly my whole life from the men in my life. I think this is what is missing in many books written by women in the publishing world today. The lack of respect, the men being treated as always toxic, boytoys, or tools.

Then there is the action side. While I appreciate slice-of-life stories, I can’t write them any more than I can write non-fantastical stories. It just doesn’t work in my brain. I found my writer's voice when I started writing cheesy action flicks. While my voice has grown richer, that hasn’t changed. I find violent action sequences to be opportunities to showcase the courage and bravery of people in a highlighted and exaggerated way. These moments really test a character and they really empower a reader. I may never face a situation where I need to pick up a rifle and start blazing away, not overtly. But I will, and have, faced moments where I needed to take a stand. These exaggerated action scenes provide a reader with courage even in ordinary life. Take a war movie. If you want to see real love, look for it in real violence. The moment when the “killer” holds the hand of his dying buddy, talking softly, is more beautiful than any hand-holding moment in a Hallmark film because of the contrast. The contrast allows us to see the love more starkly.

There is something masculine about action scenes and intense adventure stories, something there that appeals to men and suits them. You said that stories contain world history. For most of world history, men have been the ones engaged in violent action. It speaks to them and suits them much like raising chickens or goats seems to speak to women. Much like flowers seem to speak to women. (If you think that’s a putdown, you probably don’t do those things, because they all require tenderness coupled with a lot of grit.)

Personally, something that makes my heart sing is a man trained in violence. I think that’s why I'm drawn to write them. And, I’m not saying violent men make my heart sing. I’m saying, a man trained in violence. That means he has his violence 100% under control at all times. He knows when and how to use violence. He knows when and how to use his strength. Only a man trained in violence can stop a violent man. There is a joy there in seeing him do his job, do it well, and do it for others. That’s the key. A virtuous violent man standing up for the weak is one of the most beautiful things in the world, and that is in Stoneheart. This is why I think men would enjoy this book and this is also why I think men avoid women writers.

This provokes the question, have we overcorrected and written a book only for men?

Alana: I hope not! I really hope Stoneheart will be recognized as universal. And as I said, we have both a male and a female MC. And the female MC, Psyche, has an interesting origin that will appeal to a lot of female readers, I think – though certainly one kind of male reader, the kind interested in folklore and fairy tale, will also find it appealing. And that is the question you started with when you wrote the first version of Stoneheart, which was called, if I remember, The Fighting Sullivans. That question was something about the mothers of fairy-tale heroines. We all know about Snow White – but what would Snow White’s mother be like? What would she go through? In the original tale, Snow White has a stepmother and so the mother is out of the picture, but you wrote her back in. So it’s not just a retelling of Snow White, but it’s an alternate history of her as well. Originally, we wanted to kind of keep this fact quiet and let readers discover it for themselves, but all our reviewers mentioned it, so, oh well. Anyhow, that original narrative question shines through the finished novel. Psyche’s motherhood is glorified.

The book also has a pro-life emphasis that reviewers haven’t picked up on, but I wish someone would because that’s one of the most important parts of Stoneheart to me. And I know that protecting babies is a central issue for a lot of women, and certainly for us. Again, these are things women will love, but which are also universal. There’s also a little romance in the story, though it’s squeaky-clean. Many women love how poetic the writing is – though I hasten to clarify that we didn’t write with flourishes. The poetry is baked in. I know some men will appreciate that as well.

There is also one theme that was written especially for women – and that was a certain idea about beauty – physical beauty, spiritual beauty, how this is important and how it isn’t, the role it plays between men and women. I don’t want to spell out the theme like a thesis – though good themes do function like theses in stories – because it’s meant to be explored narratively, not intellectually. But let’s just say our villain is obsessed with beauty and our heroine is not – in fact, she’s had to live with scars and make her peace with them. This is something that comes, of course, from the original fairy-tale, but also arises from our personal concerns as women living in the world we live in. And for Psyche, there’s this relationship that’s built between spiritual beauty and the act of nurturing. Once again, though, I’m forced to clarify that all this is great for men as well. I know from what my adult son tells me that it’s harder and harder to meet a woman who has her head straight about a lot of things – the way he puts it is that this world is failing women, which I think is the charitable way of saying it. So it’s important for men to see women in fiction that they can imagine relating to properly.

I know it’s time to wrap it up, but did I miss anything?

Abby: No, I think you hit the nail on the head. I tend to write male MC more easily than female MC, but one of the things I loved about writing Stoneheart was when I told you I dreamed of writing a book where the female MC didn’t leave home to go do something amazing, but stayed home, tended home. (I get so tired of women always being told the adventure is out there and what is here is humdrum.) You suggested we do that right away with Stoneheart. We had Psyche plant her feet in her home and defend her home and her people to the bitter end. That made my heart sing. Psyche ended up being the woman I wanted to read. That woman I’m always looking for in books and never finding. I hope that proves true for our readers as well. What I love, amongst many things, is that what we produced is strong and encouraging for both men and women.

Also, speaking of things readers haven’t picked up on yet that I’m barely containing is the use of St. George and the Dragon. I keep waiting for someone to mention that. Stoneheart ended up being thematically rich and with more than one “retelling” depending on what aspect you focus on, which was one of the delights of working together on it.

And here is the deal, dear reader, this thematic, fairy tale, myth, theology, philosophy, and form weaving that went into Stoneheart will be present in all our stories, long or short, because they are part of who we are. As long as the good Lord allows us to write, our stories will have hope, goodness, heroes, and grit. It will have men standing between darkness and those they love, women nurturing with courage and strength, and both working together. Even as we write this, we’re working on a new book: Wizard Prison. (And we’re having way too much fun!) Wizard Prison is about a technologically suppressed prison for criminal wizards. We have built a colorful and dangerous setting where our main characters—Parth, Kaizoku, Jael, and Ross—can have swashbuckling adventures as they explore the strange world they’ve been sentenced to. Also, there are chickens.

So, I’m going to go work on that now.

Alana: I agree with all of that. Amen. And I have to add, that our female MC in Wizard Prison is part of an executioner family – kind of the opposite of a crime family. This is an idea that comes from the Middle Ages. Whereas our prison idea comes more from the Victorian era, where prisons can have families in them. And of course magic makes everything bigger on the inside. Unlike many conceptions of prisons for magical people, where magic is suppressed, ours is a place where plenty of magic happens. So lots of adventure lies ahead. Thanks for chatting!