97: ENCORE: Sylvia Linsteadt, Ariadne and the Minotaur & thoughts on creativity and body

Memoir Body, Healing Story with Janelle Hardy

In this encore episode I'm sharing a conversation with Sylvia V. Linsteadt, a writer whose work—both fiction and non-fiction—is rooted in myth, ecology, feminism & bioregionalism, and is devoted to broadening our human stories to include the voices of the living land.

She lives in the bishop pine forest on a peninsula called Point Reyes, which has at various times been an island in the Pacific, but which is currently attached to North America along a volatile fault line called the San Andreas, and on the Greek island of Crete, another land prone to earthquake and mystery.

The story of how I came across Sylvia is one I share in our conversation, but it involved a series of synchronicities via facebook, delightful ones, that ended up with me signing up for a course she was teaching.

We had an incredibly wide-ranging and lovely conversation, talking about living inside the questions, feeling stretched, the mind/body split, cerebral anxiety, the importance of grounding, the indigenous foodways, music ways and stories of Cretan people, metaphoric dismemberment, labyrinths, going into the underworld, descent and return, and being in the middle of writing a novel.

Sylvia is the author of the middle grade ecological fantasy duology, The Stargold Chronicles (The Wild Folk and The Wild Folk Rising), published by Usborne in June 2018 and May 2019, the novel Tatterdemalion (Unbound, Spring 2017) with artist Rima Staines, and the short-story collection Our Lady of the Dark Country.

She is also a certified animal tracker.

Her work currently finds itself knee-deep in the mythologies of a pre-Hellenic Mediterranean world, in the form of a historical novel set in Minoan Crete, currently in progress. For more about the creation of this novel you can follow along on her Patreon page.