Why I Wrote The November Stranger

Standing at My Own Crossroads

I’ve lived my entire life in the foothills of the Virginia Blue Ridge. This land raised me, shaped me as a person, and taught me to see magic in the everyday. I’m talking about the kind of magic that lives in morning mist over the mountains, in the first green shoots of spring, in a pot of soup simmering on the stove.

For over twenty-five years, I’ve practiced kitchen herbalism, studying the old ways, and learning everything I could about my ancestors and the traditions of my people.

This all started when I was a student at U.Va. in the early 2000’s, where I had the privilege of studying with folklorists and ethnohistorians Chuck and Nancy Perdue. The Perdue’s academic work centered around the 1930’s New Deal cultural programs, and they also spent many years documenting the displacement of hundreds of families and mountain communities when the Commonwealth of Virginia purchased private tracts of land to establish the Shenandoah National Park. The New Deal Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) constructed the iconic Skyline Drive through the Park. It was during my time with the Perdue’s learning about the mountain communities that had been displaced, that I first became interested in understanding more about my own cultural and ancestral roots in the Virginia Blue Ridge.

All of these aspects of my life and interests—the folklore, the land, the people, the traditions—became part of my spiritual practice, a way of seeing the sacred in the ordinary.

But a few years ago, I found myself standing at a crossroads in my own life. Like so many women I know, I was asking hard questions. Am I living the life I actually want, or the life I think I should want? If I could see myself at the end of my days, what would that older, wiser version of me wish I had chosen? What am I denying myself that my soul is starving for?

The November Stranger emerged from that quest, my own journey toward purpose, authenticity, and a life fully lived. But I didn’t write it just for me. I wrote it for every woman I know who has ever asked similar questions, standing at their own crossroads, wondering which road to take.

Where Folklore Meets the Soul

As I was wrestling with these deeply personal questions, I was also reading about Appalachian folk traditions, particularly crossroads lore. In Orion Foxwood’s The Candle and the Crossroads: A Book of Appalachian Conjure and Southern Root-Work, I found the perfect metaphor for what I, and so many other women, were experiencing.

In traditional Blue Ridge folklore, the crossroads isn’t just a physical intersection. It’s a liminal space, a threshold “between the worlds” where the spirit of the crossroads opens roads into and out of the unseen realm. It’s a site for transformation, for making contact with guides, for initiating work that changes your life.

This resonated so deeply with my own experience. These major turning points in our lives, when we pause, reassess, and choose a new direction, they are crossroads. Sacred thresholds where we decide who we’re becoming.

Practical Magic and the Art of Feeding

Herbalism is a form of practical magic, using what the earth provides to heal and nourish. So is cooking for the people we love. There’s something profoundly magical about preparing food with intention, about the alchemy that happens when we feed not just bodies but souls as well.

In The November Stranger, I wove together this everyday magic with the deep soul work of claiming your own life. Nora feeds strangers at a crossroads, a ritual passed down through generations of women in her family, but she doesn’t understand what she’s really doing until she recognizes that the stranger has her own face.

The “stranger” is her future self, starving for the choices she hasn’t yet been brave enough to make.

For All the Women at the Crossroads

So many women carry a deep desire for personal agency and autonomy over our own lives. We want to claim ourselves fully. Not in defiance of the people we love or the responsibilities we hold, but alongside them. We want to be whole.

But claiming that wholeness requires choosing ourselves at the crossroads moments of our lives. It requires asking: What am I hungry for? What version of my future self is waiting for me to feed her? What do I need to choose today so I don’t arrive at the end of my life full of regret?

These are the questions that shaped The November Stranger.

I brought together my love of this land, my fascination with folklore and the old ways, my practice of everyday magic through herbs and cooking, and my own soul’s journey toward authenticity. The result is a story about transformation, choice, and what it means to become whole.

If you’re standing at your own crossroads, wondering which road to take, I hope Nora’s story gives you permission to choose yourself. Fully. Without apology.