Pocket Worlds & Portals: A Carnival of the Soul

Pocket Worlds & Portals: A Carnival of the Soul

Bells of New Orleans

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This week, I pack my portals.

I wrap them carefully in old fabric and stories, tuck them into bins and boxes, and carry them out into the world - ready to be unfolded like pop-up books for the curious and the kind-hearted. Ready to be discovered.

You see, I don’t just sell art. I build pocket worlds.

Each image I make - stitched together from antique ghosts, flickers of dreams, and the strange beauty of our human ache - is a little door. A window into a place that exists somewhere between this world and the next. I don’t always know where these places lead. Sometimes they feel like fairy tale kingdoms. Sometimes like haunted parlors. Sometimes like the last quiet moment before a revolution.

But always, they are their own little universes.

Complete. Self-contained. Secretly alive.

This weekend, I’ll be at Festival International, and I’ll build one of those worlds from scratch - my tent, my table, my walls of dreamy collage. A tiny outpost in the great teeming city of color and music and laughter. A quiet spell nestled inside the riot of the festival.

And on Thursday, I’ll step into a different kind of portal—onto the stage for my student showcase. That’s its own world too. A fleeting one. The lights rise, the words are spoken, and then - like mist - it’s gone. But for those few minutes, it’s a universe made of breath and bravery and the trembling thrum of being seen.

And Tongue of the Serpent continues to unfold this week, another strange portal opening out into the dark and myth-soaked story we’re telling together. That world is deeper, older. A forest full of secrets and impossible doors. It feels less like something I’m writing and more like something I’m remembering.

All of these are temporary.

All of them are real.

That’s the strange joy of living this way - traveling between worlds, building them, watching them shimmer into being and then dissolve. A kind of magic carnival, moving from town to town, soul to soul. You never know who will step inside. Who will peer into your world and recognize something of their own reflection. Who will walk away with a story seed tucked in their pocket, ready to bloom when the time is right.

There’s a quiet holiness in that.

So if you find yourself at the festival this weekend, look for the little world with antique birds and masked women and doorways that lead somewhere slightly sideways. If you hear me speak on stage, know it’s just another threshold - step through if you like. And if you listen to the new episode of Tongue of the Serpent, let it carry you.

Because the world is full of doors, and some of them are waiting just for you.

This week, one of them creaks open in The Hungry Bells, the newest episode of Tongue of the Serpent. It’s a story about music, madness, and the terrible cost of choosing your art - no matter the cost. In it, a man named Silas stands at the threshold of something ancient and hungry.

Some portals sing.

Some scream.

And some echo forever.

If you're curious, come listen. And if you’re wandering Festival International, follow the strange birds and starless skies to my little world - I’ll be there, waiting with the keys.