“Something you’ve created” @fredhincanada
Photo by Alexander Mass
Some time in 2013 I woke up from a dream with tears in my eyes. I’d seen a girl in a field of wildflowers with a lone oak in the centre. Somehow, I just knew she was called Everlie. At the time, I was a creative writing student, and I was working on what I was calling ‘altered perspective’ stories - which were short stories with very unusual narrators. I decided to give the oak arboreal telepathy, and use Oak to tell her story.
I wrote Everlie’s Tree in a few days, beginning writing almost as soon as the dream ended. Everlie is young, independent, fierce and kind. She adores the natural world, and she escapes her troubled and abusive home life by spending time exchanging thoughts with Oak and saving animals in distress. Friendship is probably her highest value, but Oak is her only friend and their time together is ending…
It helped me pass my course, and it was very well-received. My cousin loved it so much, in 2017 she named her daughter Everlie. It still blows my mind that there’s an actual human walking around called Everlie because of a dream I had.
Everlie’s Tree stayed on my computer until 2023, when I decided to rewrite it after my grandfather’s death, and submit it to the Bridport Prize. I had never entered a competition before, so it was really exciting (I didn’t win.)
I have trouble being productive, so Everlie’s Tree, as a finished and much-loved work, means a lot to me. I have never published it on my blog (mirrorlakefiction.org) because I hope one day I’ll get a chance to either get it published, or compete with it again. If anyone wants to read it, that would be an honour - just DM me and I can send it by email.
My big project is a novel called Brightness In The Void, which is moving very slowly, but it has a lot of potential, and I hope one day I can say that’s finished too.
Photo by Juan Pablo Serrano
