Folklore, Fae, and Falling in Love: The Heart of Holly & Oak

I often get asked where the idea for Holly & Oak came from. The honest answer is that it is a story best told in parts. At its core, though, the book grew from the coming together of fragments: a place, a feeling, and a kind of love that felt inevitable.

Scotland and the Story

In January 2022, I spent a week in Scotland and a week in Ireland, at the tail end of a much longer period living in Europe. From the moment I arrived in Edinburgh, there was something about the place that felt familiar in a way I could not quite explain. Walking its streets, and later standing in the Highlands and along the shores of the Isle of Skye, I understood where the stories of fairies, selkies, and fae I had grown up with had come from.

One morning, somewhere in the Highlands between Loch Ness and the Isle of Skye, we stopped early and walked up a hill in the cold. When we reached the top and turned back, the sun was just beginning to rise in the narrow gap between two mountains. The light spilled through slowly, deliberate and quiet, and for a moment everything felt held in place. It was breathtaking. It felt like standing at the edge of a story, waiting for it to speak.

There was magic in the landscape, but not in a polished or performative way. It was old and watchful and steeped in memory. That was when the question took hold: what if the reason we have these stories is because they were once true? What if the fae had been part of this world, but had learned to hide themselves away?

Answering the question of why they were hidden became the foundation of the world I would go on to build.

Folklore and the Fae

I grew up on fantasy, and when it came time to create my own world, I had decades of stories to draw from. What mattered to me was that the fae of Holly & Oak reflected the breadth and diversity of folklore itself. I did not want a single, sanitised version of fairy mythology. I wanted a world shaped by many traditions, many rules, and many ways of being.

My travels through Europe and Asia influenced the creation of characters like the Alp and the Kitsune who appear in the novels. But it was also a Canadian television series, Lost Girl, that demonstrated just how much colour and possibility emerges when myths from across cultures are allowed to exist side by side. That sense of multiplicity became central to the world of Holly & Oak.

In this world, magic always demands something in return. Power is never free, bargains are binding, and choices leave marks. That rule applies as much to the fae as it does to the humans who cross their paths.

Falling in Love

At the same time, I never wanted this to be a story about fantasy alone. I wanted it to echo what Lost Girl did so well, not just in its diversity of myth, but in its openness to different kinds of love.

After a lifetime of rarely seeing myself reflected in the pages I read, Holly & Oak became an opportunity to bring that part of me into the light. To write a story where queer love was not incidental or hidden, but central and transformative. A story where falling in love mattered, where it reshaped the world around it and carried consequences of its own.

In Holly & Oak, love is not safe. It binds, it changes rules, and it asks things of the people who choose it. But it is also the most powerful force in the story, and the one worth risking everything for.

The Heart of Holly & Oak

Holly & Oak exists at the intersection of all of these things. A landscape that feels alive with memory. Folklore that insists on rules, bargains, and consequences. And a love story that refuses to be small or hidden. It grew from fragments gathered across years and places, shaped by the stories I loved and the ones I could never quite find.

At its heart, it is a book about choosing love in a world that makes that choice complicated, and believing that even when it costs something, it is still worth making.