The Author

IN MY OWN WORDS

I’ve always written to make sense of the world, and to make sense of myself. 

In my early twenties, I earned a Ph.D. in social and political sciences, specializing in Russian and Ukrainian politics. But I never pursued an academic career, nor published my thesis. Eventually, I re-trained as a therapist. My secret hobby of fiction writing endured quietly throughout all of it. I wrote in the margins of my official life, but I never wavered and at first, I persisted in the face of numerous rejections. From this time, three initial novels emerged. I consider them my training.

Then for a time I quit writing. After divorce, with financial pressure, I didn’t have the energy. It had been 15 years of effort, and so many rejections. I was tired.

Whilst I had a young family, I immersed myself in various forms of bodywork—shamanic de-armouring, myofascial release, craniosacral therapy, and biodynamic practice. I later qualified in hypnotherapy, mindfulness coaching, and energy medicine. I also hold a diploma in counselling and psychotherapy. For nearly fifteen years I’ve worked as an integrative and holistic therapist, drawing on Internal Family Systems, somatic inquiry, and bilateral processing methods.

Even though I had quit writing, the idea of IKONA was lodged in my heart. It was always a maybe. Maybe I’ll write again. Maybe this time ‘they’ will choose to publish me. This maybe was a small window through which IKONA emerged slowly over those years, almost shyly, in fits and starts. 

IKONA never demanded to be written. It arrived like something remembered. Often, I felt oh, I’ll just play with the story, and figure out how this structure works. The structure felt like sacred geometry. I became an architect long before the narrative arrived.

Of course, I had a sense of characters, a basic glimpse of a quest — but overall, initially it felt like a story constructed in a complex, nested configuration. Recursive, a loop. Then, the words arrived, the story, the feeling of it. As I wrote, it became something more: a quiet offering. A strange, heartfelt love letter to the human condition, and to this planet at a critical turning point in our shared history.

It reminded me of the feeling I once had during my doctoral work, researching the lived experience of genocide in a people who had chosen non-violence. There was the same subtle ache: a sense that I was documenting something already known, a crossroads of grief, resilience, and hidden potential. I felt like I was tracing the pathways of trauma, the shadows of memory, the way consciousness moves through time.

Timelines have always fascinated me. As has reincarnation. As has the quiet question:

How do choice and destiny weave us?

I don’t know if IKONA answers this.

But I do know it asks.

There were passages I don’t recall writing, and yet they moved me beyond logic, beyond authorship. At times, it felt like I was listening to something, not composing it. And I still don’t feel I can take full credit. I was present, but the story has its own breath.

My agent (who had tried and tried to sell my third novel, unsuccessfully, before it joined my drawer with the others) didn’t like IKONA. She dismissed it in one short paragraph, which meant I no longer had an agent. I spent a year searching for a new agent. Over two hundred rejections later, I gave up. No publishers would accept un-agented submissions, so there was no opportunity there. I had one contact – a friend’s agent. He told me that before he would read the first few pages, I needed to purchase a manuscript assessment from a specific editor that would cost me $4000, and he said it was still no guarantee he’d read it or represent me. I couldn’t afford it — it was the final straw. I put IKONA in a drawer for a year and had a breakdown.

I saw no way out. I didn’t want to consider self-publishing because I just wanted to be the writer, not the publisher, editor, graphic designer and publicist. Also, I wanted to be chosen as confirmation that both I and my novel were worthy.  I doubted myself, my writing, and my novel. I felt that I’d wasted my entire life, 25 years of writing and the time, love, and commitment it had taken to produce four novels, not to mention the years it took to find my agent, who now wasn’t interested.

However, my breakdown was eventually a breakthrough, since all that time I was working with a spiritual mentor, in a supportive group with a heartfelt, non-hierarchical, embodied non-dualist transmission. With this support and guidance, I allowed myself to collapse. I felt everything — including and beyond the specific trauma of writing — feeling and falling into deeper, vaster, personal, intergenerational and psychic pains.

Ultimately, I experienced a vast shedding of self followed by a kind of rebirth. From there, it felt unimportant what anyone else thought. I decided to publish IKONA for myself,  my family, my friends, and prayed it would find its audience. This was 3 years after I completed writing it.

I edited it from this new ground of being. I launched it from this new place. I was and am at peace with my path. I feel only peace, a deep okayness with my path, my novel, and my new venture. I have no feelings about the industry because I am only interested in IKONA and in this new iteration of self, in which I feel guided, supported, and part of larger plan that is uniquely my own, and okay no matter how it goes.

So, that’s my very honest account, and I hope you feel the truth of it in your bones. It’s all perfect and it’s working out perfectly.

Community

I never intended to go beyond the page, or build a field around the novel’s transmission. But what’s emerged – a living community, including the podcast and more to come—is a joy I didn’t expect. It allows me to bring together many of the threads that have shaped my life.

Thank you for reading.

For being here.

For feeling into the story.

You are the reason this transmission continues.