From New Orleans With Magic: A Creator’s Reflection on Winter Work

From New Orleans With Magic: A Creator’s Reflection on Winter Work

There’s a particular quality to winter light in New Orleans, softened, slanted, almost secretive. It feels like a season that leans in close to whisper, Keep going. There are stories here.I’ve been feeling that a lot lately, moving between my studio table, my microphone, and the chilly outdoor markets where I set up my booth before sunrise. December stretches itself across so many corners of my life that sometimes it feels like I’m living in several small enchanted worlds at once.

And honestly? I love it.

✧ Art in the Winter Markets

The winter markets this year have been a lesson in evolution. I’ve watched how people move through my booth, what they linger on, what they skip, what they trace gently with their fingertips as if touching a memory.

The canvas prints have slowed, but the framed Victorian pieces and the velvet bags have become small magnets, drawing people in with texture and story. Forty oval frames gone in a single season, proof that this new direction is alive, breathing, and growing.

Behind the scenes, I’m experimenting with mixed media: pieces that feel like relics from an unreal history, tactile story fragments you could imagine discovering in an attic trunk. I’m letting myself be curious again. Letting myself play. Winter is good for that.

✧ Stories for Sleeping and Stories for Surviving

My storytelling work has shapeshifted this year in ways I never expected but somehow always needed.

Loveday Meditations is becoming a sleep-story channel, a place for ghost cats and quiet houses, for gentle hauntings and soft landings. It feels right. It feels like home.

There is something tender about writing stories meant to ease someone into rest, like placing a lantern along their nighttime path. I’m finding a new rhythm: shorter tales, longer tales, something soothing for whatever kind of night my listeners are having.

Every time Noiraine the ghost cat steps into a new house, I feel like I’m stepping into a new part of myself too.

✧ Tongue of the Serpent: Building a Season of Secrets

And then there is Tongue of the Serpent, the great serpent-twined heart of my creative world.

Season 3 is deep in development, with plots unfurling in spirals and characters finding their way toward truths they’ve been avoiding for far too long. Writing this season has felt like walking through a house that keeps growing new rooms.

Some rooms are lit by warm lamps.

Some echo.

Some doors shouldn’t be opened… but are.

I’m learning how to write for the ear, not the eye, how to make sound carry emotion, how to carve atmosphere out of silence. It’s a challenge I’m grateful for, and one that’s shaping me into a stronger storyteller.

✧ Performing, Learning, Living

My performing life ebbs and flows around everything else, but it’s still its own pulse beneath the surface. Improv, especially long form, lights up the parts of my brain that hunger for spontaneity and structure at the same time. There’s something about it that feels like alchemy: a whole world created out of nothing but breath, timing, and trust.

Balancing all these projects, art, sleep stories, podcasts, performance, feels impossible in theory and inevitable in practice. They feed one another. Each one teaches me how to breathe deeper into the next.

✧ A Winter Wish

As I pack bags for early markets and edit episodes late into the night, I keep thinking about the strange, beautiful privilege of being a maker. December asks me to slow down, but it also reminds me of all the small lights I get to tend: a story here, a collage there, a voice recording waiting patiently for polish.

To everyone who follows my work, supports my stories, listens, reads, or stops by my booth on a windy morning, thank you. You are part of this constellation I’m building, one glowing point at a time.

Winter is a season for magic, for reflection, for quiet bravery.

My wish for you is simple:

May you find a soft place to land.

May you meet yourself gently.

And may your own stories lead you somewhere luminous.