tori grant welhouse

Death is final, right? A door closes. The light’s go out. Done. Finis.

That’s what Rork “The Fergus” Ferguson thinks until, grieving his gran, he meets a fantastical being and learns that death is not always so absolute.

Seventeen-year-old Rork is dealing (badly) with the loss of his beloved gran while navigating the shoals of young adulthood as a computer-obsessed misfit. One bleak morning Rork wakes up and can hear voices of the dead. Disorganized and insistent the voices lead him to a banshee. Not just any banshee. A banshee-in-training with her own family dynamic to contend with and a hereafter curriculum to complete in order to earn her all-important hood.

The banshee enlists Rork’s help by promising to reconnect him with his gran. He is accompanied by Deirdre, another enlistee, with special abilities, who is haunted by a hidden past.

Helping the banshee pitches Rork and Deirdre into a whole otherworld of before-death, after-death and in-between-death.

Complete at 69,000 words, HERALD THE FERGUS is a stand-alone YA fantasy with series potential. The story will appeal to fans of parallel universes and life-not-being-how-it-always-seems as in the worlds created by Laini Taylor or  Melissa Marr.

Parts of THE FERGUS earned honorable mention at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Writers’ Institute. An MFA graduate of Antioch International in London, I have published articles, reviews and poetry in many regional and literary magazines.

A chapbook of poems inspired by a Book of Dreams, a gift from a deceased sister, and the thinning veil between awake and not. The poems are surreal, an amalgam of conscious thought, dream images and longing.

From the Preface:

My sister gave me a Book of Dreams.

I was present for the parade,
        two by two, like bookends.

My grief grows old.

My sister didn’t always behave.
      Dreams, too, can be recalcitrant,

      showy, or taciturn.

Individual poems from dreamed have been published, but the chapbook as a whole is unpublished.

What does it mean to belong to the kingdom of women? To travel the life cycle of female? What does the womb know? 

The poetry collected in Wombdom attempts to capture the gradations of female, the female response to a changing/not-changing-fast-enough world.

Individual poems have been published from Wombdom, but the collection as a whole is unpublished.