Between Sea and Sky

Women Find Strength Where the World Forgets to Look

When I came home after a couple of weeks away the other night, I was greeted by a small package at the front door. I couldn’t recall ordering anything. I was tired. It was late. So it took a minute for my heart to leap a little as I realized that the package was Advanced Reader Copies of my forthcoming short story collection, Between Sea and Sky (Vine Leaves Press, February24, 2026). It’s always a delight to, at last, hold a new book in your hands. This one, though, has been a little different from the others. Unlike my novels, which I worked on consistently over a stretch of time, these stories have been gathered over a period of twenty-five-ish years.

“These are tales of outsiders, of survivors connecting deeply with the natural world—with seas and skies and what lies between. As they battle fear, abuse, mental illness and oppressive societal norms, each of their tales offers us hope and a guide to ways of claiming our fullness even in the most challenging circumstances.”

As I read through the stories on the journey from manuscript to book, each of them cast me back to a different time and place, not just to the times and places in each story, but in my life as I wrote. They brought me to who I was and what I was experiencing when I was sitting at my various desks—early-thirty-something Heather huddled in the corner of a partly finished basement; a decade later at the built-in desk in the tiny loft I reached with alternating-tread stairs in the wee hours, writing by candlelight while my children slept; at the skinny desk in my bedroom at the house I moved myself and my children to when my marriage ended; and the broader desk by the window in what had been the room of one of my children before I’d entered the empty-nest years.

As I read and returned to each of the places and times I was writing, I was brought back to all I’d uncovered about my hidden past—my adoption and ancestral people and story—and all that it had lead me to explore (and clear) along the way, and to the intersection of who we (authors) are, what’s happening on the surface of our lives as well as deep within, and what we write.

When the first of these stories was published, thirty-something-year-old Heather was just beginning her own deep excavation, both internal and external, of many of the themes in this book, and the stories are, of course, a reflection of them.

Fifty-eight-year old Heather is still deeply connected to the themes in these stories, but she’s at a point where she’s stood in the mine of her life and spirit for a long time now, digging and clearing, occasionally taking a breather to stand, dirty hands on the muck-encrusted shovel, so to speak—still connected to, and believing in, the healing power of nature; still in thrall to older women. Less about ‘look what happened’; more about ‘how do we live now’.

These stories offer both those vantages: the woman attempting to free a friend from the wounds of growing up with an abusive father; the woman finding the courage to flee; and those who have taken the next steps into building or rebuilding their lives in ways that allow them the full expression of themselves—metaphorically, and sometimes literally, building their own boats and sailing them on wider, wilder seas.

As this collection makes its way into the world, I’ll be writing more here about the themes within it, through the lens of connecting deeply with our core Self and our innate capacities for Agency and Belonging, which guide us through moving beyond mere survival into our deep connection with the wild world and with life itself.

In the meantime, here’s a reading of an excerpt of one of the stories, “Celestial Navigation”.

If you’d like more and are a reviewer, you can grab an Advanced Reader Copy at BookSirens. You don’t have to be a professional reviewer to do this—just an avid reader willing to post a review.

You can preorder from Vine Leaves Press, Bookshop.org and all the other usual places.

I’ll be launching Between Sea and Sky in person on February 24 at M. Judson Books in Greenville, SC—more details as the date gets closer, and I’ll be at Byway Books in Brattleboro, VT in March. More details and other dates to come.