Hello, and welcome to DJB Studios – the home of Deborah J. Brannon, author of the speculative and the fantastic. Here you will find information on my published works, along with a number of freebies – be sure to check out the Free tab above!
You’ll also find my blog, which you can read just below, and pages to explore containing interstitial projects, articles and reviews on the SFF genre, amateur photography, and more!
If you have any comments, please feel free to send an email.
Terri Windling, Faerie Godmother of the Mythic Arts, needs our help.
Here are some things you likely already know about Terri Windling: she’s a fantastic artist, creating captivating sketches, paintings, and collages of tree-people and rabbit-people and fairy tales and faerie creatures and more. She’s a distinguished editor, responsible for co-creating Bordertown, co-editing The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror (with Ellen Datlow), and a great other fairy tale anthologies and novels besides. She’s the author of The Wood Wife and more, the mother of Endicott Studio, and a gracious, generous woman.
Here is something you don’t know: Terri Windling’s work helped save my life.
Terri Windling has been through some shit in her time, and she’s turned those experiences around into both overt and embedded outreach in her work. An especially potent example is an anthology entitled The Armless Maiden and Other Tales for Childhood’s Survivors. Reading that collection gave me the wherewithal to break down some walls, battle the monsters that plagued me beyond them, and emerge from my inner-labyrinth a stronger, more capable person. Terri Windling is one of those amazing creators, women and men I have never met, who have built this sword in my hands through stories of strength, grace, and survival.
I’m not the only one. She’s helped people professionally, of course, but I’ve also heard from no few others about how she’s helped them personally through her creative works and endeavors.
Now it’s our turn. To quote The Color of Angels, a fundraiser to benefit Terri Windling:
Terri Windling and her family have been coping with health and legal issues that have drained her financial resources at a critical time. Due to the serious nature of these issues, and privacy concerns for individual family members, we can’t be more specific than that, but Terri is in need of our support. As a friend, a colleague and an inspiration, Terri has touched many, many lives over the years. She has been supremely generous in donating her own work and art to support friends and colleagues in crisis. Now, Terri is in need of some serious help from her community. Who better than her colleagues and fans to rise up to make some magick for her?
A truly staggering number of Terri’s friends, colleagues, and fans have gotten together and…
Human Tales, edited by Jennifer Brozek, is an anthology of stories revolving around a simple, yet provocative concept: what are the cautionary tales that the supernatural tell their children to warn them against humans? So many of our fairy tales illuminate how dangerous dealing with the fair folk and others of their ilk can be – how they diabolically bargain for children when a person is in dire straits, how they do not lie but neither do their words add up to the complete truth, how they’ll lead you astray or drown you in deep waters. Of course, these are all from the human perspective.
Human Tales are, to quote the back jacket of the anthology, “[t]ales of warning and terror… of those who break their vows and kill for no reason other than malice. Tales of saving the lovely princess from a prince that is much less than charming… and what it takes to bring her home, of rescuing babes from parents not fit to raise them, and the reason no supernatural can truly win a bargain with such vile creatures.”
I have a story in this anthology – “A Tithe for Homecoming,” being the life and times of a woman named Laura Jane and a grove of elm dryads. It’s set in 1950′s rural Alabama, with all the kudzu-choked highways, ingrained spirituality, and folk songs that suggests. It’s about changelings and paying for things taken and finding comfort where we may.
