Where the wild ones wait — Anishinaabe Stories, Somerset Shadows, and the Monsters We Chose to Believe In
The land does not forget who has been unkind to it.
I learned that lesson long before I understood what it meant — sitting close to the stove-fire as a child, listening to stories that were never meant to comfort. They were meant to teach. Some nights the lesson was about hunger. Some nights it was about grief. Some nights it was the terrible shapes that grow inside people who take more than the world gives back.
Those stories came from my Anishinaabe heritage — passed down the way stories are, imperfectly, warmly, through relatives who half-remembered and half-imagined as they spoke. I do not claim to be a keeper of tradition, nor an authority on Ojibwe teaching. What I carry is smaller and more personal: fragments, echoes, the shape of stories rather than their sacred architecture. What I offer here — and in The Shadow Keeper: Gothic Haunting Tales from Somerset — are my own retellings. My interpretations. My inheritance, refracted through my own imagination.
This is not a record of ceremony. It is one person's act of remembering — and reimagining — in fiction.
The Premise That Started It All
In my stories, the monsters are not always the ones hiding in the dark. Baykok does not stalk the night because he is evil — he stalks it because something old and starving was made that way by human violence. The Bear Walkers shift their shape because the forest demanded a guardian, and guardianship always costs blood. Wiindigoo — perhaps the hungriest figure in all these tales — is less a villain than a mirror, showing exactly what happens when taking becomes the only appetite left.
Meanwhile, in Two Worlds of Jiibayaabooz, the line between the living and the dead blurs precisely where human certainty fails. The Great Fisher and Star Walker move through sky and season as forces older than property lines and profit margins. And in the story that finally drags all of this across the Atlantic, The Raven in the Stone Circle watches a very different landscape: the tide-flats and ancient stones of England.
Because in my imagination, these two worlds do not just coexist. They collide — and echo each other with uncomfortable clarity.
Where Somerset Comes In
I write these stories against the backdrop of Weston-super-Mare — the tide pulling back over Sand Bay until the mudflats gleam like old bone, the silhouette of Brean Island rising distant and watchful, and Weston Woods, where the trees seem to hold their breath the moment the light starts to fail.
The mist here does not behave the way mist should. The birds pause mid-call. The sand remembers footprints long after the tide should have erased them. It is the perfect landscape to ask an old and uncomfortable question: What if the true monsters were never the ones with claws or curses? What if the real threat wears a suit, signs contracts, and calls destruction "progress"?
In my stories, the beings forced into darkness — the shapeshifters, the hungry ghosts, the ravens, the fishers, the walkers-between-worlds — are reacting to something. They are consequences. The true monstrosity, again and again, is human greed: ambition without restraint, land treated as inventory instead of relation.
What You'll Find in This Blog
This space exists as a companion to The Shadow Keeper — not a retelling of it, but a window into its bones. Expect cultural reflection on the stories I was told and how I've reshaped them, moody sensory essays on landscape and myth, deeper looks at Baykok, the Bear Walkers, Wiindigoo, Jiibayaabooz, the Great Fisher, Star Walker, Season Turner, and the Raven in the Stone Circle — alongside Somerset landscape writing and behind-the-scenes anthology notes.
Recurring Themes
- Nature and animals reclaiming agency against human exploitation
- The blurred boundary between "monster" and "victim"
- Greed and ambition as the true horror
- Ancestral memory colliding with unfamiliar landscapes
- The thin veil between the living world and the ones watching from its edges
Follow me to the place where lake meets shore, where shore meets wood, where wood meets stone — and where memory refuses, stubbornly, to stay buried.
Read The Shadow Keeper: Gothic Haunting Tales from Somerset →