Out Now! New Release: Wolves and Witches, a fairy tale collection

New York, NY (February 19, 2013)  — World Weaver Press is excited to announce the trade paperback and digital release of Wolves and Witches, a short story collection by sisters Amanda C. Davis and Megan Engelhardt today, Tuesday, February 19, 2013.

Wolves and Witches is available in trade paperback from Amazon and other retailers, as well as in ebook via Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and other online retailers. You can also find Wolves and Witches on Goodreads.

It only takes seconds to order your copy, but as Megan Engelhardt writes:  In some ways, Wolves and Witches has been thirty years in the making.

I can’t remember a time when my sister and I were not making up stories together. That’s what playing pretend is, after all — making up stories that others can participate in. Our stories weren’t very good, but what could you expect from a four- and two-year-old? They were fun, though, and we were doing them together, and that was all that mattered.

As we grew older — and invariably grew apart, as siblings do — we started making our own stories, scribbling private things in our own notebooks that we were reluctant to share with anyone else. There were still collaborative efforts, though, even as we sought to find our own voices. Long car trips were spent, at least in part, passing stories back and forth, weaving two often very disparate imaginations into a cohesive whole. We rarely succeeded. There was one particular failure, titled “Stick and Branch,” that remains perhaps the worst thing we have ever written, collaboratively OR as individuals.

But our days of family car trips dwindled, and soon we were both in college and then the real world. Our paths diverged, and while we always kept in close contact, we didn’t try to collaborate on anything much for a long time. We were too busy establishing ourselves as writers, trying on genres, forming writing habits, making connections. But we were always up for a last-minute beta read, always available to talk each other down from (or onto!) a literary ledge or brainstorm prompts late at night. We made NaNoWriMo progress charts together and hid funny asides in stories just to see if the other one was paying attention and wrote notes to each other in the margins.

And now here we are, grown women with different lives, different interests, different goals and methods, often working in completely different genres and venues. And yet, thirty years of telling stories to and with each other has affected us more than we might have expected. We know each other, even in print, sometimes as clearly as if our names were stamped all over the piece. Hide our stories among a dozen anonymous others and nine times out of ten we will be able to figure out which the other wrote. She knows me by my punctuation affectations and common themes. I know her by the feel of her prose and the lilt of her dialogue. We are separate and individual, but the same in many ways.

Wolves and Witches reflects that. I could never have written her stories and poems — she could never have written mine — but put them together and you have a collection that could have flowed from one pen.

We are so very proud of this collection, more proud than I think we would ever admit to each other, and it is a thrill to see it released into the wild. We hope others enjoy it as well, of course, but what it really comes down to is that it was fun, and we did it together, and that’s all that matters.

Read the digital edition for $4.49 from these ebook retailers:
Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Kobo | OmniLit

Read the trade paperback edition for $7.95 from these and other online retailers:
Amazon

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Megan Engelhardt is a lapsed librarian who lives in a crooked little house in northeast Ohio. She loves shows about Bigfoot. Her work has appeared in Daily Science Fiction, The Drabblecast, and others. You can follow her on Twitter @MadMerryMeg or visit her website at megengelhardt.com.