Welcome to Selkie Grove

Thoughtful reflections on creative life from a writer living in Scotland. For kindred souls who savour the gentle shift of seasons and find meaning in the dregs of a teacup

Follow a secretive path through a tangle of nettles. Follow it up beyond the trees, through a curtain of roots, and over tree limbs felled by spring storms. Follow it to where a pair of mossy, fractured graves lie forgotten in the sprawling ivy.

Nestled between chipped stone and a honeyed slant of sunlight lies a story seed.

Scoop it up, hold it gently in your mind’s eye; a hazy image of a broken grave and a broken knight.

Now, forget about it.

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Months later, the story seed that had been planted in my mind and duly forgotten, unexpectedly blossomed into life.

It took the form of a short story called The Raven Knight. You’ll be able to read it soon in Fireside Magic.

It’s about a fictional woman whose fictional troubles are worsened by a (possibly) fictional witch queen, but the place that birthed the story is real.

Last Sunday I felt my muse whispering for me to return there.

My sister accompanied me. We ducked under root and hopped over branch. Our trainers crunched over hundreds of tiny brown ‘pixie hats’. She examined the inscriptions on the lichen-spotted headstones while I balanced on a rock, stretching a pair of nylon tights over my camera lens.

She encouraged me to take off my walking boots and socks, then snapped a few portraits. I pressed my foot into the cool leaf mulch. Spiders tickled across my toes.

The results are the photos you see in this post. Hazy manifestations of my creativity waking from a doubt-drugged slumber.

For a second time, this place of death birthed inspiration. My mind whirred with ideas and the blood tingled in my veins. Yet part of me seemed to glide on a deep, calm river.

That feeling of creative certainty has eluded me for a while, and I feel giddy as a child on Christmas Eve to have discovered it again. As usual, the answer appeared once I stepped back from the comparison trap of social media and worked with what I already had.

But wait!

Who is this person blethering on to you? If you don’t know me from Instagram or my blog, then a wee introduction is in order.

My name’s Kate. I’m an author and daydreamer from Scotland.

I wrote Fireside Fairy Tales, a collection of short fantasy stories inspired by the myth and folklore of my native Scotland. I’m currently editing the follow-up, Fireside Magic, a collection inspired by witchcraft, primitive belief, and the black arts in Scotland.

Selkie Grove is my secluded spot in a noisy, online world. A place to share creative experiments and the stories that don’t belong in a book but need to be written out of my heart nevertheless.

Stories like this one, where fleeting moments of creative life are captured and preserved so that I can savour their magic again.

Think of it as an ‘online diary with extras’.

One of the aspects of Selkie Grove I’m most excited about is the opportunity to connect with like-minded souls without an algorithm getting in the way.

Feel free to say hello below, it’d feel great to get to know each other!

Kate xx