Excerpt
THE WORLDS WITHIN
Sheree Renée Thomas
Reading fiction is an act of discovery, a full-bodied, sensual, interactive experience in which the words on the page create and stimulate our inner curiosity. It unlocks hidden worlds in our minds and releases the journeyer inside each of us—our desire to know, to connect, to think and feel, to witness.
With Sorghum & Spear: Way of Silk & Stone, comics maverick, multitalented creator, and technological waymaker Dedren Snead has imagined a vivid, rich world of women warriors and goddesses, mothers, wives, sisters, aunts and daughters, oracles, demons, and goblins inspired by cultures that feel rooted in African and Asian lore, geography, and history.
Medievalists have studied the accounts of women warriors amongst the Almoravids of North Africa, in Western Sudan and Ghana just to name a few places. With the success of Ryan Coogler's Black Panther films, that helped expand the Dora Milaje's mythos, the popular "I Am" episode 7 of Lovecraft Country starring Aunjanue Ellis as Hippolyta, and Viola Davis's epic, The Woman King, there has been a widening audience of those interested in exploring the lives of warrior women. Though the new stories here are set in the Eternal Realm during "The Forever War," the tales gathered offer more than warriors training and fighting battles but delves into the magic and power of the world of Orun Aye, and An'Fre psychology and relationships, and the ties that hold lovers and families, whole communities together.
First imagined in full color in the comics panels of his early published works, Snead returns to the world he made with a gathering of gifted writers who each have chosen to take their pens to add their voices and their deep imaginations, expanding the Sorghum & Spear world in action-packed prose.
This imaginative collection of original short stories contains not only the symbolic story seeds of sorghum, atambo, that helps fuel and sustain the magic, seinompo, of the Sorghum & Spear: Way of Silk & Stone World, but an exciting new language guide and dictionary for ambitious readers who enjoy a full, immersive reading experience.
It is clear from acclaimed poet Linda D. Addison's opening poem, "The Messengers," these fine stories, and the beautiful design of the volume, that a great deal of love went into the book's creation and in the Sorghum & Spear world. For these are stories you enter in the blue hours of the morning, in the solitude of night, fourteen thrilling tales that spark the inner wanderer in you. And it is my hope that you will lose yourself in the worlds within.