Monthly Archives: July 2025

2 posts

The Magic Between Us: Vali

Characters The Magic Between Us

This post is part of The Magic Between Us series, an exploration and analysis of characters in the Stories of the Eleriannan series.

Vali Dawe is the kind of person who is easy to befriend and even understand, but knowing her? There are depths to Vali. She’s got a complicated and traumatic past and carries a lot of pain, which she’s worked hard to turn into lessons she can use to help others. If there’s one word I’d use to describe Vali, it’s compassionate. She’s the conscience of the Eleriannan: always looking for the kindest and most helpful options for her Fae family to choose from. Together with Lucee Fearney, who I would call the heart of the Eleriannan, she’s worked hard to create a culture of acceptance, cooperation, and good works using the power of the Fae.

It’s no wonder that the Heart of the City chose her to be their representative. Vali is a living embodiment of what community can and should look like. Because of her past, she’s uniquely positioned in the Eleriannan to relate to injustice and need in Baltimore from a place of deep empathy and understanding.

Vali grew up in the foster system, and her experience of it was either benign neglect or active abuse. She acknowledges that not everyone has a bad fostering experience, but hers reflected some of the worse outcomes and that she was viewed as an inconvenience at best and a punching bag and cheap labor at worst. Her mother abandoned her and her father is unknown to her, which is probably where her Fae blood comes from, but that’s unverified. She was completely unaware of her powers before she met Sousa, thinking that she was just extraordinarily lucky at not being seen when she didn’t want to be. Little did she know!

After foster care Vali lost any of the support systems she’d been able to access, and found herself unhoused and on her own. That’s when she built up her street connections, befriending other homeless folk and learning their stories. Some of them gave her tips for staying safe and finding suitable places to camp, as well as ways to make her life run more smoothly. That’s what led her to return that assistance once she had some security, like setting up the ability for her pal Jimmy to have an address where he could receive his disability checks.

When I started writing about Vali’s life, this wasn’t something I just pulled out of thin air because I wanted a character with this background, though she does add a grounding element to all the magic happening in the story. Vali’s experiences are rooted in some of my own; I’ve been unhoused several times in my life, with various different experiences of being houseless to draw from. I’ve slept on the street, and I’ve bounced from couch to couch, and even camped in my office. All of those were different aspects of the same thing, with shared and differing challenges and advantages. They all share the same feelings, though: worrying about being a burden, shame, anxiety, frustration, hopelessness. Like Vali, I worked hard to not let them take over my usually sunny personality, believing that this too shall pass and at least I could try to make things as positive as I could.

It was important to me to humanize and present a relatable face to being unhoused, and Vali gives voice to many of the things she learned in her time of being homeless, including relating to others in the community of unhoused folk. She’s often pointing out why things don’t work the way that the general public assumes–like assistance programs or even why people end up unhoused–and how meaningful changes won’t happen until those in charge actually work with that population, not just for them.

Vali’s also the advocate for taking action over just talking about how to fix problems, and is often volunteering on neighborhood clean up crews, waterway trash removal parties, and free feeding events like Food Not Bombs. She’s managed to rope some of the other Eleriannan into helping, too, with Sousa being one of the most enthusiastic participants. She can be counted on to have a nuanced take on most any community-action-oriented project, offering balanced praise and criticism as warranted.

Her most valuable skill at The Maithe isn’t her ability to work graffiti magic, although she’s used it plenty of times to help. [See: the locking tags for the front door and on the Gates, Camlin’s “tattoos”] It’s the way she sees through to the root of a situation, and how readily she gives people the space to make the right decisions. Even when Camlin, the man who had tried to seize The Maithe from Sousa, had held her hostage, and who almost killed Merrick showed up at her door, she didn’t immediately turn him away. She didn’t react from her emotions. She took a moment to assess the situation and then acted in the way that made the most sense, even while knowing others wouldn’t agree. She also insisted that Sousa re-examine his feelings about Camlin and how he wanted to proceed, knowing that doing so risked hurting her own relationship with Souz. Her calm advocacy for being kind and doing what needs to be done to help in times of crisis, aside from any personal feelings, is a hallmark of who she is as a person.

Having gone through terrible, challenging times doesn’t have to harden a person. That’s what Vali represents. She’s used her trials to motivate her, to make sure that she does the best she can to help others who have been put into impossible situations in whatever way is best for them and is of their choosing.

In this current time, when the US is moving to once again criminalize homelessness as part of our descent into a fascistic hellscape, it’s important to do our best to speak up and show up for those who will be affected by this shift. Most people are one paycheck away from becoming unhoused. ONE. Even if you don’t think this could ever be you [it could! it was me!] Vali would tell you that how we treat those with less than us reflects on all of us. Also: it takes nothing to be kind.

Links you may find helpful:

Let’s Talk Existential Crisis Management: Volunteering

Essays

The general advice given to people talking on the Internet, especially people with any kind of platform, is to keep personal posts to a minimum, or at least keep details deeply obscured.

Well, fuck that, my friends.

Today we’re here to talk about being a creative person in this crumbling empire that’s morphing into a New Dark Age and how it’s wreaking havoc on those of us who are the “sensitive artist” type – which is a term often used to besmirch and belittle us, because sensitive = emotions, don’cha know, and that means WEAK.

First off: artists, writers, musicians, and every other type of creative person are some of the strongest and most observant people out there. We have to be. You can’t be weak and keep going down a road that almost never pays off in any supportive or sustaining way. Art is drawn from observation and feeling things deeply, in a way that allows us to reflect those feelings back to others and touch their hearts in turn. Sensitivity is our superpower and although it can hinder us in other ways, the one that affects us the most is how some people weaponize it against us.

We feel deeply, and that’s dangerous to those who want to desensitize the world for their own purposes [aka fascism; if I have to explain this you’re not paying attention]. Fascist leaning governments always move to control the Arts first; if Art wasn’t powerful, why would they bother?

So because I can only speak authoritatively about my own experiences and feelings, I’m here to talk about my state of mind right now.

…it’s hard to create while my country takes a hard shift to the right. [There’s a whole conversation about how far to the right we were before this but that’s for another time; please recognize that I am simplifying things here for flow of conversation and yes I know things have been fucked up for quite a while, just with an obscuring bandaid on for some more privileged parts of the population] Other countries have been following suit in various ways; I know my woes are shared.

Having an existential crisis in the midst of an even bigger crisis seems…trite, inconsequential.

But it’s normal, friends. Existential crises are triggered by big life shifts, trauma, and other major life events. In this case one could argue that we’re going through a polycrisis – “a cluster of related global risks with compounding effects, such that the overall impact exceeds the sum of each part.” Of course that’s going to trigger deep introspection and personal feelings. I know that I feel helpless and powerless right now. It’s causing me to examine every part of my life and who I am, because that’s really all I feel like I can control right now. If I’m being honest… even that’s a challenge.

“Take your hand off what you cannot control, and get your hands on things you can change. […]
The only thing you can control is yourself.” – Min Yoongi

So, to the first part of this discussion: no, it’s not trivial or weak to focus on what you can change in yourself right now.

In my case, I feel like I don’t matter. If I disappeared right now, who would miss me? The list of names of those who would immediately feel an impact is very small. I have a decently sized network of people, but if I stopped posting, would they notice?

I pour my heart into my writing, and into connecting with other people to encourage their creativity. I often feel like I’m shouting into the void, and it’s demoralizing at best. I struggle with feeling worthy, and with anger from that struggle. Again, I think all of this is normal, based on plenty of commentary I’ve seen from much bigger and more well-known authors and artists.

What’s important is what I do with that energy.

Ironically, the only thing you can control is yourself, but you can often work on that through putting your efforts into organizations that help others. Want to feel like what you’re doing is important and useful and meaningful? Help other people.

For me, that’s volunteering, mentoring, and cheerleading.

I’m disabled, and I don’t have a lot of physical energy a lot of the time. As a disabled artist and writer, I’m also very poor, so it’s difficult for me to donate to a lot of causes. But even with my physical constraints, I can lend my brain and connections and time in ways that helps my causes of choice and at the same time, helps me feel less conflicted about who I am and where I’m going. Pick whatever causes make the most sense for you at this time, and do the most good you can with them.

Doing that kind of work helps others, but also it gets you out of your own head, which is part of the whole Existential Crisis problem. I know for me it’s like my brain starts swirling with anxiety and questions until they become a cyclone that drags me into the middle of it, with no route of escape to be seen. That’s a soul-crushing place to get caught, while every question you’ve ever had about your worth and purpose come up to slap you around incessantly.
This can break that pattern, and possibly give you new perspective for the questions you have about the direction and meaning of your life. By focusing outwards, we can get the answers we crave for our inner selves.

So what I’ve done lately is step up my mentoring role, and also increase the volunteering work I’m doing. Helping other people to grow keeps me from feeling useless and stagnant, and gives me examples that can assist me in examining my own path. That might not be the answer for you, and that’s okay! But it’s worth noting that it’s a lot harder to dwell on my issues when I’m focusing on helping others. And spending time during my days to find work that others are doing and championing that helps a lot too–and sometimes the favor gets returned, and everyone wins!

I’m not saying this is the answer for everyone. But it’s helped me, and in turn it’s helped others, and that’s a success as far as I’m concerned. You’ll note I haven’t told you where to volunteer, or for what causes. That’s deliberate. Mutual aid and causes that ease the suffering of people are high need options right now; teaching/mentoring/volunteering in your field, donating time or money to programs for BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, disabled folks or another demographic endangered by fascism, marching/protesting, and so many other ways to help are also important. You get to choose. Pick something you can sink your heart into.

I know. Life itself is really hard right now. Everything’s crushing us, including our own brains. It seems impossible to find time/money/energy/wherewithal to do this. Look, I believe in you. I know you can do the thing. Every bit you can do to help other people right now helps all of us. It’s our only ticket to a better everything.