Caroline Shea

@therealcshea

She/her. Freelance writer and editor living in New York. Author of Lambflesh (Kelsay Books, 2019). Open to editorial clients now:

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Caroline Shea@therealcshea· 13d

New newsletter! I emerge from my revisions cave with some thoughts on writing and finishing a novel, some other exciting publishing news & new writing, and a new series for paid subscribers. Free link here: www.patreon.com/carolineshea...

The first few pages came out in a rush, like they’d been waiting for me. Possibly they had—the novel is inspired by Antigone, and the play has lived in my mind since I first read it at fourteen, an enduring obsession. Over five years and many drafts, much has changed about the novel, but those first few pages remain practically the same.

I filled twelve notebooks, more word docs than I can count (I’m not really joking—I tried and had to give up because I kept finding more), and wrote and rewrote hundreds of thousands of words. I fell in love with handwriting again, and learned how to sustain a longer project than I’d ever written, how to hold a whole world in my head as I remade it again and again.

Caroline Shea@therealcshea· Jul 7

brb gonna go levitate for a sec

Where are you headed?” I ask him.
“I don’t know,” he admits cheerfully. “I want to see everything.”
The ferry starts to move, cutting through the water. I clutch the carving in my pocket. You were wrong, Nic, I think. There is so much left for us. The world is still out there, the wreck we’ve made of it. Some of it beyond saving. But so what? That was always true, was true before I ever washed ashore. I cannot save it, but I cannot leave it either. I can only salvage what I can. If there is any reason for my making, any duty I owe Archangel, I think, perhaps, it is only that. To salvage what I can. The wind whips through my hair as the boat picks up speed. It smells of meadowsweet and broom, of salt and the sea. It smells of home. It always will, but I fix my gaze on the horizon as the ferry churns the still, green water to frothing wake.

THE END

word count on a word doc of 142,157 words

Caroline Shea@therealcshea· Jul 2

I’m already planning to check out some of @gavingrant.bsky.social’s recs from There Will Be Spoilers but I’m excited to dive into to this whole issue. Grateful to be included!

Janice Leadingham
Tammy Komoff
Those of Us That Created Them
Clearance Items at the

Underground Dark Magic Night Market
Matthew Bean
Like Paralda
10
Ash Huang
How to Fill a House
15
Alice St. Stirling
Anorgasmia
21
Santiago Wilson Heredia
Tompkins & Snail
30
Sophie Wereley
Bone Harp Hair
36
Rhian Waller
Mordant
45
Caroline Shea
The Long Way Home
54
Iscream, you scream, we all read LsCReamW 52
Fiction
4
6
Nonfiction
Nicole Kimberling
All Yours
Joanna Buoniconti
Gavin J. Grant
About the Authors of the Unofficial Burn It All Down Handbook
Art
Guilherme Nunes
Dawn Kimberling
"Cactus"
Photos
Cover
13,14
Neither Gavin J. Grant nor Kelly Link have never worked at Art Institute of Pittsburgh, CUNY: John Tav.

13
The Path of Most Resistance
42
There Will Be Spoilers
43

Caroline Shea@therealcshea· Jul 2

My copy got here today and it’s so pretty! If you’ve been thinking of picking up an issue or trying a subscription I definitely recommend it. (It’s the only magazine I know that comes with an option to include chocolate).

The black and white hard copy cover of issue 52 of LCRW

A page of my short story “The Long Way Home” laid out in columns.

Caroline Shea@therealcshea· Jun 25

Very excited to share that I have a new story in Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet. It's a loose retelling of "The Dream of Óengus" but its heart is in Central PA and Vermont. I can't wait to read the rest of the issue. I hope you'll pick up a copy: smallbeerpress.com/lcrw/2026/06...

The cover of issue 52 of LCRW. Two figures stand against a tan background. One is a capybara-esque figure with cacti sprouting from its back and neck. The other is a more humanoid figure with a skull-like face and cacti antlers.

She missed her hands the most. The weight of them
at the ends of her wrists-
gripping, grasping
stroking, clawing, pointing, poking. One hand
trailing over the edge of the dented peddle boat, the
lake a cool ripple beneath her sweaty palm. She'd
always wished (secretly, guiltily) for the water to
close over wrist, then elbow, then shoulder-neck-
head, pulling her under, swallowing her up. The
lake was the first and best thing she ever loved. She
couldn't love something without wanting to become
it. Or be consumed by it. It wasn't her fault, Morgan
said once. It was fate. A genetic flaw.
"Which one?" Caer had asked.
Morgan's smile turned bitter.
"What's the
difference?" she said
It was the oldest story in the world, after all
Caer wanted to be something else, something other.
Then she was, and she wanted her beginning back
again, unchanged.

Caroline Shea@therealcshea· Jun 13

To borrow publishing’s favorite phrase—I have some news: Hope Springs Creative, a new SFF/spec fic press, is opening for submissions later this summer. hopespringscreative.com If you have a manuscript you think would be a good fit, I hope you’ll send it our way.

Work with us
Have a story you believe in? We want to read it.

We are a progressive, author-centered publishing collective committed to reshaping the way stories are shared. At our heart, we're looking to champion diverse voices and stories across the speculative fiction spectrum.

Text is followed my headshots of the Hope Springs Team

Caroline Shea@therealcshea· Jun 12

decided the cloisters are my office now

A picture of a book, laptop and notebook spread on a table with the Met’s Trie Cloister in the background

One of the cloister gardens. The photo is of a sort of diagonal trellis over a brick walkway

A little room off the gardens with shelves and jars of plants, herbs etc.

A picture of me smiling slightly. I’m wearing a black shirt and glasses and a leather backpack. My hair is brown and is clipped up except for my bangs which are curling onto my face.

Caroline Shea@therealcshea· Jun 6

cont.

He's a detective because he's seen death and murder become the work of a day-men cut down in trenches, men buried alive, men bombed to so much pulp. He served his country and though he cannot say if that's a noble cause, if any war is a noble one, someone still had to serve it. He would not trade on the power of his name to leave his men to die alone in the mud. Part of him must have planned to die with them, the ones who were lost, for it was a surprise when he didn't, and he never quite got over the shock.

And then the war was over. But he cannot unlearn what he has learned of men and murder, and though there are not charnel pits in Piccadilly, people are still robbed of their lives by violence. They are cut down, the unique counterpoint they added to the song cut off for good, so much horrid silence after the shelling. Someone must serve these victims too, and why not him?
Why else did he survive when so many better men died? And if, sometimes, the role of detective makes a murderer of him just as the role of soldier did, if his work does nothing but breed death from death, well, that is his guilt to bear, it it can save one single life.

But in the dark, at night, when the walls look a little like a trench, he is not sure it is right that we hang our murderers, that we deprive so many of any recourse to the law as they are harassed and battered and brutalized until they are driven to desperate measures.
But he knows a life is a thing that matters. A Jerry's life or a Brit's; a thief's or a Duke's.
Even a murderer's. So he will wear his kills on his conscience and hope it means something: if the dead cannot speak, he will speak for them. Otherwise they should never have dug him out of that goddamn hole.

Caroline Shea@therealcshea· Jun 6

thinking about peter wimsey & roderick alleyn again.

The gentleman detective is both popular mythic figure and reincarnating literary archetype; he's usually a genius loci of his particular London or Britain and the interwar answer to the Byronic or Romantic hero.

He comes from aristocratic wealth—from status and “good stock”—but he has spent most of his life running away from or attempting to atone for this privilege. He knew early on that this holy aspiration was a lost cause and has pursued it anyway, as doggedly and uselessly as Lancelot. A version of this detective—the myth ripping at the seams now—is reincarnated in modern U.S. myths like Law and Order: SVU, where brute force is redeemed by the victims it serves. Where the fantasy is—like in certain versions of the gentleman detective—that the good cop can transform the institution from within. But the original

gentleman detectives of the British golden era of mystery have more conflicted relationships to their own power. Though undoubtably in a position of privilege, the old gentlemen detective is immensely aware of his inherited and positional power, and brings that weight to bear carefully, regretfully, often only when his hand has been forced. But if his position can be used for some good, he won’t hesitate to use it, even if it bloodies his conscience and muddies his battered but still unflagging sense of honor.

He is a detective because someone has to be. Because (shamefully) the crimes intrigue him-both the puzzle and the danger, the only two vices he's never been able to kick. He's a detective because he's the second son, and he would have no purpose otherwise, and he cannot bear a purposeless life. He must make a mark on the world beyond the fact of his birth and a name in Debrett's.

Caroline Shea@therealcshea· May 27

I’m fond of this short story about fairytale archetypes and resurrection that I had in @cold-signal.com. cold-signal.com/argent-carol...

Whatever version of the story you start with, the girl’s gotten a raw deal: a life of looking over her shoulder, the devil a few steps behind. Her voice stoppered to save her brothers or her hands lopped off for her father’s sins.

Caroline Shea@therealcshea· May 21

This is tonight!! Six SFF & Horror writers, eight minutes each. Come join us at 7:30: www.eventbrite.com/o/strong-wom... #SWSWQR

A graphic with six author photos centered on a galaxy background. Text reads: Strong Women, Strange Worlds presents Third Thursday QuickReads of SciFi, Fantasy, and Horror by Renee Coloman, Tara Campbell, Larissa N.N. Davila, E.A. Noble, Jacquelyn Stolos, and Caroline Shea. May 21st, 7:30 PM EDT. Free on Zoom. Preregister now at StrongWomenStrangeWorlds.weebly.com

Caroline Shea@therealcshea· May 19

I talked to Jacquelyn Stolos about writing middle grade fiction in an era of censorship, setting as a tool to grapple with climate crisis, and the many roads to publication. You can hear us both read from new work @swsworlds.bsky.social this Thursday. Interview & reading sign-up linked below.

White text on a green background reads:

Writing darkness isn't daunting for me. I'm a writer because I'm fascinated by and in love with every aspect of the human experience. The darker moments are a part of all that.

In the steps after the writing--the publishing, the publicity--I've definitely noticed some adult discomfort with darkness in children's literature. Not from everyone! But the discomfort is unfortunate. Middle grade readers, like adults, deserve access to art that reflects the nuance of human experience

Caroline Shea@therealcshea· May 18

I interviewed @taracampbell.bsky.social, author of All the Wayward Angels & Fiction co-editor @barrelhouse.bsky.social. We talked about writing across genre and form & what draws her to hybrid work. You can hear us both read from new work this Thursday @swsworlds.bsky.social. Interview linked below.

A blue background with yellow outline with yellow outlines of flowers. A quote reads: "I love stories that start out a bit quirky, or “off,” but not madcap, and then build from there. Sometimes the silliness ramps up, or veers into serious territory, and either approach can work. But if it starts out trying to shock just to shock, where is there to go from there? Sly, dry, subtle—that’s my kind of humor. [...] Particularly today, the ability to do that without descending into complete nihilism is refreshing."

Caroline Shea@therealcshea· Apr 27

Last week I caught up with @caseyscieszka.bsky.social to talk about her incredible new novel The Fountain & the many hats she wears as Head Innkeeper of Spruceton Inn. Our conversation is linked here: www.patreon.com/posts/interv...

Overtop a mirrored image of a mountain range text reads: "The house, the valley, the mountains, the weather, the wet, all those textures are just in my body, and it was so fun to bring that out onto a page and through a different character's perspective."

Caroline Shea@therealcshea· Apr 23

are we damned? are we saved? do we get a say?

They say the woman cursed her husband’s killer, that she damned his whole rotten house. That she spoke that family’s doom into being when she drank her dead love’s blood. They say that of the murderer’s bloodline, she spared only her sister, the killer’s wife. She knew, after all, what it meant to be wedded to death.
I don’t blame her. Or her sister. I have killed and cursed and lapped at what remains; I have loved what would destroy me.
Here’s what I can never quite stomach: she damned the children, too. Her nieces and nephews. Her great-great grands, starved out by empire or fled for kinder shores or rooted stubborn in the earth from which they came.
So what happens to them, the children born in a troubled country? The troubling, troubled children branded neither invader nor invaded; the children cast out or killed, or forced to pick a side? What happens to the children born when the story is already halfway through, the tapestry unraveling, the dark slowly descending on the woods?

Are we damned? Are we saved? Do we get a say?

Caroline Shea@therealcshea· Apr 14

So excited to be part of @swsworlds.bsky.social's stellar line-up of SFF and horror authors next month. Preregister for the virtual reading on May 21st to join us for the reading, Q&A, and special giveaways. #SWSWQR www.eventbrite.com/o/strong-wom...

Several author photos are set against a purple-tinged galaxy background. Text in white and light purple reads: Strong Women Strange Worlds presents Third Thursday QuickReads of Sci Fi, Fantasy, and Horror by Renee Coloman, Tara Campbell, Larissa N.N. Davila, E.A. Noble, Jacquelyn Stolos, Caroline Shea. May 21, 7:30 PM EDT Free on Zoom. Preregister now at StrongWomenStrangeWorlds.weebly.com.

Caroline Shea@therealcshea· Mar 30

A Little Gaelic Kingdom, Tim Robinson (in his intro, Brian Gardiner writes: "To map is to name; to name is to mark possession. Robinson’s life work may be seen as a cartographical and cultural return to the pre-1846 [British ordinance survey] Irish land.")

“It is persistently said by local people that the St Georges, who had the lodge at the time, planted the latter copse to spare themselves the sight of the Catholic church being built a little further off in Camas. I have checked: the lodge, the trees and the church are not in a line; the belief is founded on prejudice, that is, faith. As to the picturesque pines on the islet, what I have heard is disillusioning and therefore probably true: far from their being an aesthetic intervention, thew St Georges planted them so all the vermin (i.e. crows and suchlike) would nest there and could be more conveniently killed off.”

“The halfway stone, like the Halfway House, the shebeen in the middle of Roundstone Bog, is as far from one place as it is from the other; it is the embodiment of distance. On a difficult journey one cannot reach the halfway point without some feeling of satisfaction at the part completed, or of disquiet at the distance still to be covered. When I write my treatise on the new science of distemics, the study of topographical sensations, or the phenomenology of fare-off things, I shall have Cloch Leathbealaigh as a frontispiece. But now it is hidden in ranks of Sitka spruce. A huge wedge of forestry has split Criathrach Choirill in two, and not just Criathrach Choirill, which is the heart of it, but the entire extent of more-or-less intact bog stretching uninterruptedly for eight miles westwards from the Scríb-Maam Cross road.
What is lost? The forest walk has its interest and in places its charm, but it lacks the profundity, the vastitude, the awesome silences, of the untrammelled bog. When trees were planted in 1985 the then-Taoiseach Garret FitzGerald came down to unveil a plaque by the main road near the northern end of the forestry track, according to which the forest commemorates Irish emigrants who contributed to the welfare of the USA and of Boston in particular. The planting was partially financed through the Irish American Cultural Foundation by generous individuals, who of course were not responsible for its location. Whether there is even a purely economic justification is doubtful; a local forestry official told me at the time that he took no responsibility for it, because of the difficulties he foresaw in extracting the timber in such difficult terrain. The idea that forestry might be the saving of Connemara in terms of employment has been a commonplace of local politicians since Independence, but fortunately Coillte, the Forestry Board, has realized the fallacy in this and no longer plants on lowland blanket bog; private forestry too is much restricted …

Caroline Shea@therealcshea· Mar 19

The first chapter of my novel is up on my Patreon for subscribers. If you've liked any of the writing and research I've been sharing about fairytales, the gothic, or Antigone you might like this, too. You can read it here: www.patreon.com/posts/excerp...

Black text on a white background. Above a picture of a hand stained with blackberries, text reads: "The night they killed each other, I looked at my brothers and thought: I’ve been here before."
Below the picture, it reads: "Too late, I remembered it all."

Caroline Shea@therealcshea· Mar 19

They killed it all off. Well, Jo said, it came back.

It was thought extinct, you know, Creon said to her, sometime in the small gray
hours of the night. They had thrown the doors of the great hall open so a cool breeze
whistled through the gaps in the stone. High up in the rafters, Jo could hear a sparrow
chattering, darting between the smoke-blackened beams. Nic and Isme were passed out on
the rug before the hearth, Isme's head on Nic's chest, her dark hair glinting red in the light of the fire. Nearby Teo tinkered with the dissected radio, a screwdriver in his hand and an absent smile on his face. What was? Jo had asked. Liverwort, he told her, with a twitch of his lips. They killed it all off. Well, Jo said, it came back. And Creon laughed, eyes bright and shining, his pleasure contagious, a palpable warmth Jo wanted to hoard.
If her mouth tasted briefly of chalk and blood, the sensation passed. This is our
work, she reminded herself. She did not think of the way the water had closed over the
surveyor's head, small ripples smoothing into stillness; she did not see the silvered mirror o the clay pit's surface reflected in Creon's pale blue eyes. This was their work, and their
work was good.

“They should be grateful," Creon said tight-lipped, later on. "They may not realize it
now, but we do our work for their own good."
"They'll understand in time," Teo said. "You'll show them."
Creon had nodded, appeased for the moment, but Jo wasn't so sure. She walked out
by the old mine most mornings, liking to be awake before everyone else. She needed the quiet to piece herself back together; to hear the hum of her own mind uninterrupted by any other. There she watched the plovers rise and fall and rise and fall again, plunging down the sheer cliffs to the churning waves. The pumphouse stood crookedly near the cliff's edge, the roof caved in and one wall already swallowed by the sea, the turf crumbling beneath its foundations. One morning she found a new message graffitied in lurid red across the stone, the paint the color of human blood in the horror movies she and Isme watched in secret. It
read:
Kilmouth lads are fishermen and Kilmouth lads are miners too.
But when the fish and tin are gone, what are the Kilmouth lads to do?
Our work has stolen their own, she thought. But the idea was disloyal and quickly
smothered. How could what served a land not serve its people, too?

Caroline Shea@therealcshea· Feb 28

lithub.com/history-of-g...

While we waited we were visited by the ghosts of the girls who had already died.
Those who were closest to the explosion, in the kitchen sneaking butter and bread when the gas ignited, the ones who died immediately, in a sense without injury, the girls who died explosively.

Caroline Shea@therealcshea· Feb 13

I wrote about nation, nationalism and the agency of nature in fantasy by Ursula K. Le Guin, Susanna Clarke, Hope Mirrlees, and T.H. White: patreon.com/posts/150679...

Magic, in Clarke’s world, is synonymous or inseparable from the living force of the natural world. It doesn’t seek to refuse reality or deny history. Instead magic functions as a radical rejection of stasis and separateness, a dissolving of borders not just on the level of nations but on the level of individual consciousness. When Drawlight is swallowed up by the enchanted wood, Clarke writes: “The trees, the stones and the earth had taken him inside themselves, but in their shape it was possible still to discern something of the man he had once been.” This is the darker side of Clarke’s vision of interlinkedness, an eco-consciousness that is all-consuming, vengeful even, rather than benevolent. But even this ambiguous force carries with it a kind of hope: Drawlight’s devouring represents a world where humans function as part of nature rather than stand outside of it. He is able to live “inside” the world while still retaining “something of the man he had once been.” In her depiction of magic, Clarke reintegrates the human into the natural.

It seems worth noting, then, that White’s stalwart page in The Once and Future King, is named Thomas for Thomas Malory, the author of Le Morte D’Arthur, the medieval text which inspired White’s novel. It’s believed Malory wrote his epic while in prison. Like Arthur, he may have found himself grappling then with the lessons of his life and its inheritances. The closing passage of Le Morte is often quoted, rife as it is with its compelling allusions to the once and future king. Yet what’s not as often referenced is Malory’s own denial of that eventual resurrection. He writes: “…and men say that he shall com agayne, and he shall wynne the Holy Crosse. Yet I woll not say that hit shall be so, but rather I wolde say: here in thys worlde he chaunged hys lyff.”

Here in this world he changed his life. Arthur’s promised resurrection pales in the face of his existence. The king may not come again, but his dream will never die, not while there are those who keep the candle burning. As White turned to Malory in the wake of World War II, as Mirrlees imagined a mirror of London in the aftermath of World War I, I've turned to their work, and to the work of Le Guin and Clarke as the United States continues its descent into rightwing authoritarianism. Each novel reckons in a different way with what a “love of country” unbounded by borders and grounded in a recognition of nonhuman agency could look like.

Caroline Shea@therealcshea· Feb 8

“…nothing is lost out of nature, though everything is altered (Dryden) “There’s nothing new / under the sun, / but there are new suns.”(Butler) “There is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it.” (Stoppard)

"For mankind is ever the same and nothing is lost out of nature, though everything is altered."
-JOHN DRYDEN,
"On the Characters in the Canterbury Tales, In Preface to Fables, Ancient and Modern

epigraph from Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror

“The epigram she chose for Trickster captures this tension between optimism and pessimism, and the possibility of actually breaking through this psychic impasse into something new, quite wonderfully:
There's nothing new
under the sun,
but there are new suns.
Bow was a place where history wasn't the unhappy curse we were condemned to, a place where the tug-of-war between collective survival and collective insanity might play itself out in another way. On Bow, they can”

From Octavia Butler’s unpublished papers, quoted here: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/theres-nothing-new-sun-new-suns-recovering-octavia-e-butlers-lost-parables/

THOMASINA: But instead, the Egyptian noodle made carnal embrace with the enemy who burned the great library of Alexandria without so much as a fine for all that is overdue.
Oh, Septimus! - can you bear it? All the lost plays of the Athenians! Two hundred at least by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides - thousands of poems - Aristotle's own library brought to Egypt by the noodle's ancestors! How can we sleep for grief?
SEPTIMUS: By counting our stock. Seven plays from Aeschylus, seven from Sopocles, nineteen from Euripides, my lady! You should no more grieve for the rest than for a buckle lost from your first shoe, or for your lesson book which will be lost when you are old. We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again. You do”

Arcadia (1993), Tom Stoppard. Photo from here: https://www.tumblr.com/mundaneandmagicalcreature/795320025760268289/arcadia-1993-tom-stoppard

Caroline Shea@therealcshea· Jan 28

Very much cheating here but i never said i could count. From the novel WIP

She was drowning again, thinking not yet not yet you can take me
back but not yet—Then Teo was there, crouched beside her, the one fixed
point in the churning world, and he took the small knife from the sheathe
at his ankle and sliced across the vein pulsing in his wrist. He pressed the
wound to her mouth, said “Drink.”
And she did, the salt and copper of it a bright burning balm that
erased all else, drowning the dawning shock that after all these years and
deaths a part of her still wanted to live.

Caroline Shea@therealcshea· Jan 20

need a word for a book rec that’s like. mandatory. so I am hereby mandating that you all read IDLE GROUNDS, described (accurately) in the cover copy as a “warped Nancy Drew detective story” and feat. an eldritch woods, a burnt familial seat, and a disastrous birthday party.

A picture of the cover of Idle Grounds by Krystelle Bamford. The image of a forested landscape is overlaid in the shape of a pine tree on a photo of a group of children.

Frankie frowned.
"Beezy loved children. She had five!"
"But did she want five?" Aunt Maureen and Frankie had for-
gotten about us. To them, we had fed and vanished.
"Oh, Maureen." Frankie laughed, as if this were beside the point. In between bites of ants on a log, we considered for the first time that it was possible to have children you might not want. Anyway, I think that was the first time we considered it. I can concede that some of us may have considered it before.

Travis was too kind to say that if he knew, we wouldn't all be looking like this, like maniacs falling off and under things.
He pulled his lip. The X on his leg had smeared into a red triangle so you would have never known it had been a letter at all. In Travis's room at home there was a string of nautical flags that spelled "Travis Downe Macalaster" if you knew how to read them, which Travis did, explaining that the first flag in the string, up-to-down red, white, and blue stripes, stood for T but also meant keep clear so what I'm saying is that Travis was very comfortable with secret messages. The hair on his legs was weird and bushy because he was twelve, which was a chink in his armor for sure, but you can't love a hero without faults. He was limping slightly.

It had been coming all day, we'd heard it on the tracks. In some ways it had been traveling toward us from the moment we'd stepped out of our cars and now the trees had parted and it was here.
"What time is it, Autumn?" we called. "Time to buy a new watch!"
We started to laugh. The laughter started outside of us, I'm
sure of it, I would really like to say that that's true.
It was silvery and clean. It was polite and spiteful.
"Please," Autumn said aloud.
It was the laugh of people in shade looking at people in the baking sun. Our laughter grew outward and we started, of all things, to applaud.

Caroline Shea@therealcshea· Jan 13

"But where does the myth of Oedipus begin? How many generations does it include?" "In the household of a king, vengeance is a dynastic act." from "The Oedipus Complex, Antigone, and Electra: The Woman as Hero and Victim," by Dorothy Willner.

"But where does the myth of Oedipus begin? How many generations does it include?"

"The fate of a mythic hero was part of the fate of a 'house.'" / "Antigone meets death as a hero, not as a victim. (...) But the woman who is hero is not allowed to be wife and mother." / The woman who is wife and mother can be a hero only if she dies. (...) Alive and betrayed, she is no longer a hero." / "...a woman who kills yet (...) does not die. Put aside as a wife, Medea refuses to be a victim. She is not a hero, but she takes revenge..."

"In the household of a king, vengeance is a dynastic act."

Caroline Shea@therealcshea· Jan 10

am assuming if you follow me a book about a bunch of fucked up siblings bound by love and guilt and duty and their generations-long compact with an eldritch bog is naturally of interest to you. but in case you need more convincing, some favorite passages from THE BOG WIFE so far:

After that, for the rest of the night, everyone would be polite in a way that was like a membrane stretched thin across their an-ger, Percy resenting Charlie for not doing the custodian's work that was his firstborn obligation and Charlie resenting Percy for reminding him that he should have been the one doing it, and Eda resenting them both for upsetting their father, and Nora stuck at a silent dinner table, resenting no one, terrified by how fragile were the ties that held them.
With a furtive glance back at her brother, she reached out and grasped the trespassers in her fist and yanked them out by the stems. She felt a heart-hammering little slip of relief as she lifted her hand to her pocket and hid the trespassers there, thinking that the night was spared. Percy would remain in that calm and focused half-dreamy state. He would be able to tell their father he had cleared the swale enough to open the lock that held back the river and flood the bog's thirsty mouth without fear of contaminating it. Charlie would emptily but sincerely offer to help with the bog's flooding, and Percy would tell him it was all right, it wasn't his fault, and he would even mean it. Eda would make something edible for dinner.
But then Percy crouched behind her, and she saw him seeing the torn ends of the stems left in the ground, thin but conspicuous orange shoots that she realized now he could never have missed, and everything was worse than before, because now the trespassers were her fault.
"What is this?" he said.
"I don't know," said Nora blandly, her fingers squeezing around the waxy flesh of the trespassers in her pocket until her hand became a fist.

"Dad is dying," she said, and the pronouncement of the words wrenched something out of her. She rubbed her bleary eyes with her palm. "What if he's actually not." she said.
"He is," Eda said.
"But if we carry him down too early, what would happen?"
"We won't do that," said Eda. "We'll know when it's time."
Percy was nodding in agreement.
"Dad is dying," Nora conceded. She went on: "We need you for the buriel rites.
"
"It's burial, with an a," said Percy.
"It's not."
"It is," said Charlie, reluctantly.
Nora hated being corrected, but she held back her frustration because she knew if she complained they would leave her to write the letter alone. She scratched out the word buriel and then the entire sentence and began again. The flat of her left hand smudged the crossed-out words into a blur as she maneuvered painstakingly across the paper. "He says, please come as soon as you can," she finished. "Is that spelled right? Is that good enough:" She did not know how to plead with the Wenna that Wenna would have become in ten years. She did not know what that Wenna wanted or believed or loved. She wondered if Wenna still loved her best, or at all.
Eda looked at the ceiling. "She's not going to come because you convinced her, Nor," she said wearily. "She's going to come because she knows there won't be a bog-wife for Charlie if she doesn’t.

Percy stood in the flooded-out bog, feeling the ground dissolve beneath his feet. He twisted the trespassers in his pocket as if the punishment he inflicted on their limp bodies could do anything to rescue the bog from the trespassers' infinite laying-down of roots. Then he went back toward the house.
From their paddock, the goats fixed him with twin pitiless stares as he lit a match and burned the trespassers in the bald circle of land reserved for the purpose. He held his breath so their smoke would not enter him. His fingers black with ash and his clothes still soaked with river water, he went inside. Charlie sat at the table, fidgeting with a spoon and an empty bowl of oatmeal, and pretended not to have watched him.
"You need help out there?" he said emptily, not looking at
Percy.
"I handled it." Only for a moment, Percy thought, I could kill him.

Caroline Shea@therealcshea· Jan 9

Been thinking a lot lately about Veronica Schanoes' phenomenal story "Emma Goldman Takes Tea with the Baba Yaga," especially the two passages below, which have carved themselves into my brain as something like mantras or talismans. Or maybe just a necessary reminder: there is no end, only moments.

I am a Jew and a leftist and, I like to think, a decent human being with more than a shred of conscience, so I fear and abhor fascism, and I am horrified by what the United States is doing and what it has always done. But Marx also said that being determines consciousness, which is to say that my class matters far more than any good intentions or left politics I have. He was probably right, and I am pretty sure that in the event of revolution, Ill end up against the wall as the decadent, white, bourgeois parasite that I am. Razstrellyat.
I know one song, a hopeful song, and I've known it for a long time, that says we can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old. But I know another song, too, and I've known it for longer, and that song says ashes, ashes, we all fall down.
The revolution will not be kind. Revolutions rarely are. But the present regime is nothing if not cruel.
Where do those who walk away from Omelas go? There's nowhere to go, nowhere moral, nowhere safe, nowhere that does not depend on the suffering of some child. That means you have to stay and fight, and make the revolution as kind as possible.
In the final analysis, 1 probably am not an anarchist. I think one must have far more faith in people than 1 possess to be an anarchist. But I believe in this: you do not achieve freedom by abridging people's rights; you do not create joy by enforcing misery. The means do become the ends, because there is no end.
There are just ongoing moments.

Caroline Shea@therealcshea· Jan 2

My Best of 2025 lists are up feat. Susanna Clarke, Premee Mohamed, Natalia Theodoridou, Renee Gladman, and more. Read here: www.patreon.com/posts/best-o...

An image grid of book covers. On a white background over the images, text reads: The Best of 2025

Caroline Shea@therealcshea· Dec 16

Find the guide below feat. @harneyandsons.bsky.social @mythologiecandles.bsky.social @foliosociety.bsky.social @wolfandbadger.bsky.social and, of course, book recs. www.patreon.com/posts/2025-g...

A picture of a patreon post titled 2025 Gift Guide (Scholastic Book Fair Themed). A picture of a folding vanity mirror is in the background.

Caroline Shea@therealcshea· Dec 16

Were you a Twilight girl or a Spiderwick kid? A Secret Garden-head or a Dragonology fan? Either way, this year's most impractical gift guide has you covered: gifts for yourself or any other annoying millennials in your life based on what they got at the Scholastic Book Fair. Link below.