MAPS
explore the stories behind the story of
The Ash Girl
facts, truths, images, links, treasures, and juicy bits by chapter
Reader Map
where in the world is The Ash Girl on its quest?
MAPS: Chapter 0
The Ash Girl opens in the North African region now more commonly called The Horn of Africa. In 1886 modern day Eritrea and Northern Ethiopia were a part of the Abyssinian and Nubian Empires. Why would the Greek Goddess, Artemis, be hunting so far from home? We might say that gods and goddesses as storied forces of nature know no boundaries of place; we might also look to historic record.
MAPS: Chapter 1
When Amelia’s disappearance made itself known as the trigger that started the events of The Ash Girl, I began to dig a bit. The excerpt above inspired the character of Billy Courtright, a US Navy radio operator who receives her last transmission in morse code. Yes, this is a little fictionalized bit of a theory about a historic unsolved mystery!
MAPS: Chapter 2
A word on the theme of occupation in The Ash Girl. We have already seen Frieda occupied by some unseen force that paints the tarot cards with her hands. Now Artemis and Orion occupy humans (folks who have never uttered their names) and through them have children. Both acts are metaphoric (have I beat that drum enough yet?) and fraught with questions of personal agency, the nature of humans and beasts to stake out and claim new territory in the name of survival and expansion, and of course the topics the likes of colonialism, war, and genocide.
MAPS: Chapter 3
Doors between worlds are everywhere in The Ash Girl . . . door in the floor of an attic, the door to the goddesses’ cavern in your dreams, a god and goddess slipping into the body of a man and a woman to experience, briefly, the pleasures of flesh and bone.
MAPS: Chapter 4
Names are a ritual we are all familiar with. Names are little myths all in themselves . . . if you recall one of the 3 purposes of myth from Joseph Campbell - to give us a metaphoric way to refer to that which eludes explanation through our limited sense.
MAPS: Chapter 6
Asmeret was the one to show me how to lay the cards in this way. I was on a five day silent writing retreat on a beautiful snowy day in January, 2016 when this scene (you just read in Chapter 6) was written. As I wrote Asmeret laying the cards in the Wheel, I stopped, pushed back all of the furniture in my borrowed condo living room, and did as she did.
MAPS: Chapter XIII
ATU XIII DEATH deserves to be Re-storied for our times. The Thoth deck took this on explicitly. Harris and Crowly laid the groundwork for contemporary readers, mystics, and makers of Tarot decks not to fear the Death card, or instill fear in their clients, but to take the metaphor into one’s bones and face the grief and the glory of re-making one’s self out of light and dark and ash and heart.