Jeremy Mallory

The easy part to say is that I am a lawyer and writer.

But I was also the kid who learned the zodiac in second grade and found every other Libra he could. The kid who got his first Tarot deck around the same time and learned to play Poker with them. The kid who grew up in a New Mexico bosque full of cottonwood trees so desperate for water that the trunks curved back to the ground instead of growing straight and tall.

Yes, I wrote stories from a young age, but also tried to make sense of a deep conviction I had that it’s all true—all of those things I read about in the fantasy and sci-fi books that went with me everywhere. Maybe not true in the here-and-now, but somehow, somewhere, importantly true.

The numinous and ineffable beguile me. I studied religion and philosophy in college while also debating competitively for Swarthmore College, and then received a doctorate in religious ethics from the University of Chicago Divinity School. I learned to talk about the things that fascinated me, and also to gesture wildly at that point where words failed. I also started telling collaborative stories online—nothing permanent, the joys of role-playing, but it kept me up late at night many times.

All of that, in turn, led me to law school at the University of Chicago, and—at long last—a “real job.”

I didn’t fit.

I made it four years at large firms before getting laid off. I tried to get a job as a professor, but the academic market was no more receptive.

And that is when I turned an idea into a novel for the first time. All of my old obsessions came back: magic and games, masks and odd beauty. Spells and sleight-of-hand, and avatars that stretch back to the origins of history. I felt like I had stumbled upon Dionysos in a clearing and now He was staring directly at me.

Over the time my husband and I moved from Chicago to Boston to Northern Virginia, I completed a new novel and rewrote my first. I began studying craft more intensively through workshops and the Iowa Summer Writing Festival.

I still know it’s all true. And rather than consign all of that to the status of a childish thing to be put away or an escapist fantasy, I want to make it as true as it can be—somehow, somewhen, importantly true.