Verity Vox and the Curse of Foxfire: A Guest Post by Don Martin

The woods of Foxfire are full of magic and mystery…but don’t forget to follow the rules. A brave young witch-in-training must harness her power to break a dangerous curse and save her town from a lurking monster in this exhilarating adventure. Read on for an exclusive essay from Don Martin on writing Verity Vox and the Curse of Foxfire.

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When you grow up in a small town, you spend a lot of time thinking of faraway places and how impossible they seem. Athens, Greece, is where gods and heroes and democracy were born. Athens, Texas, is where I would occasionally go for speech tournaments. (And also, according to local lore, where the hamburger was invented. So, really, who had the greater impact on culture?) Growing up in a small town and being a lover of fantasy novels didn’t help the facade of impossibility covering those locales, as almost everything I read took place in Europe or a place that looked and sounded a lot like Europe but wasn’t called Europe on the page. Magic was something that existed across the ocean. It wasn’t here. At least, that’s what I thought until I heard the story of Vulcan, West Virginia.

Vulcan was a coal town that sprung up like a lot of other industry towns through a combination of need and want. In this case, it was a company that needed workers and those workers wanting a place to live. But, Vulcan was unique in that the only legal road into or out of it was a bridge, and one day—long after the company and its financial resources abandoned the town—the bridge washed away down the river after a storm flooded the area. Suddenly, the people were trapped. They tried to get help via the local, state, and federal government, but were denied each time. So, they made a deal with the devil. Or, rather, the Soviet Union, who sought to get one over on the United States by helping people forgotten by their own government. The gamble paid off, and West Virginia ended up finding some bridge money in a couch somewhere.

The story stayed with me for years as a strange but true nugget from my birthplace. However, the more I explored my own connections to the region and the violent, deadly legacy of the coal industry in Appalachia, the more I realized there’s a story there, and it’s one young people should read.

A lot of people have opinions about the kinds of subjects that should or shouldn’t be covered in young adult books, but those people often forget that no matter what is happening in the world it is happening to young people, too. Where there is genocide, bigotry, poverty, hunger, or inequity, there are young people experiencing it, and they need a place to process it. Or, to paraphrase GK Chesterton, to not simply know that evil exists—they know it; they’re living through it—but that it can be defeated. 

The Verity Vox series is a love letter to home, and whatever that means to you. Finding it, protecting it, and choosing to believe we can make it better. It is also a big hearted adventure fantasy filled with witches and monsters and cats-who-aren't-cats. Set right here in hopes that young people will believe magic can be found in their own backyard.