I write fantasy because I’m a biologist. Those things might not seem connected, but let me explain.

I have worked as a biologist for 12 years. I have two degrees in the field, a bachelor’s and a master’s degree.

I got into this work because I love the world.

I love wilderness, nature, and especially wildlife. I have a reverence for the creatures that share this planet with us, and the wild places they depend on. There’s a divinity in them that I can feel.

But being in this work, in this world, comes with a heavy burden of grief. As biologists, we are often the sole witnesses to a death only we can see. And when your eye is trained for it, you cannot help but see the tragedy of it everywhere. We are watching a world vanish that most people never knew was there.

I was born and raised in remote rural Alaska. I know what sacred, pristine wilderness tastes like. The way it feels when the air moves through your lungs. How cold and clean the water is. The sound of harsh ocean storms making landfall. The sublime eeriness of knowing you share the woods with so many other creatures, many of them larger, stronger, more effective predators than you.

And I know the devastation - the horror - of the loss of these places.

A few years ago, I spent a season working in northern Alberta in the oil sands. The tragedy of that place has never been scrubbed from my skin.

I would be dropped in pristine patterned fen wetlands by helicopter. The kinds of wetlands that formed after the last ice age, created by the unique circulation of water through thousands of years of plant growth, forming peatlands.

The trees that grow there are tiny, gnarled black spruce - one of my favorite species. They always look damaged or almost sick to the unfamiliar eye. They’re dwarfed and warped by the harsh conditions they inhabit, many no larger than a sapling. But count the rings of these little trees and you’ll find a being 200 years old, far older than their small size betrays.

In these places I’d watch river otters play, spot owl species I had never seen before, see frog egg masses by the thousands, watch sandhill cranes stalk through the bog.

Yet every natural wonder I witnessed was immediately followed by the crushing realization that this would all be lost. In a year or two, all those magical habitats were slated to be drained, dredged, and ripped open into a 300-foot deep, 8 km wide open bit bitumen mine.

The sundering of a unique ecosystem many thousands of years in the making for the temporary profit of a wealthy few.

And it was in these places, in the depths of that grief, that my stories started taking hold. I could not save these worlds on my own. I could not stop of the mining, or the pollution, or the widespread habitat loss. I had made myself a witness of it, but that was the extent of my power in most situations.

And like many in the depths of a grief too heavy to bear, that pain became art.

I started writing dark fantasy because I spent too many years watching the world go sick, desperately dreaming of some way to save it.

If I couldn’t save this real world, I could write a heroine who could save another one. Maybe she could teach me how.

And maybe, just maybe, her story, her strength, and her values could help others in our world fight back. Could remind us all who we are as human beings, and that we need the natural world around us to be whole, because without it we ourselves are fractured.

Perhaps I could write this new world into being. Because through stories we find our way home.

If you’re interested in reading the fantasy series that was born from these experiences, you can find it here, or on my website.

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