About

Elisabeth Eilir Rowan spent her first sixteen years moving from place to place at the whim of the U.S. Air Force. That, coupled with a missing twin and exposure to a cancer-causing drug while in the womb has convinced her friends that she is been part of an alien experiment or at the very least an X-Files episode. She, of course, denies everything.

Still, as is obvious from the stories included in this collection, she has an interest in the strange or mysterious, whether it's spontaneous human combustion, serial killer profiling, or how the Republican party manages to keep hold of the U.S. Congress. She has more normal interests, too. She loves gardening, reading, especially science fiction, mysteries, and children's literature, and singing in a local women's chorus. Unlike many of her classmates, she was alive before man walked on the moon and remembers how atrocious disco and bell-bottoms were the first time around. She is not an English major at all, but has degrees in history, sociology, classics, and soon will add linguistics to the pile. She has a master's in library science and is a medical librarian. She hopes to finish her master's in history this May, with a thesis which has become a small epic on Agrippa of Nettesheim's On the Nobility and Preeminence of Women.

Despite occasional attempts to leave school, she continues to give in to her addiction and plans to eventually pursue a doctorate, which seems to be the only thing that can bring her studies together. Her academic interests are ancient Mediterranean religious practices, religious and intellectual history of the ancient and mediaeval world, women's studies, history of the occult, Jewish studies, Aegyptology, and obscure languages. In fact, she hopes one day to be able to read all the Indo-European languages (realising that she will never be able to speak them, because of the sounds in Sanskrit and French) and whatever others she may be able to get, like Ugarit or Aramaic. It's on her list of things to do, along with visiting all of the states of the U.S. (She's about half-way there on both projects.) Her encyclopaedic interests carry over into her writing--as she puts it, the art of the short story has always eluded her in its ability to impart a great deal in a very limited format. She has always enjoyed reading several-book series in which the characters come alive and in which the reader invests time and emotional effort. Notable favourites are mysteries such solved by Ellis Peters' Brother Cadfael and Elizabeth Peters' Amelia Peabody and a whole slew of fantasy works by such authors as Susan Cooper, David Eddings, Guy Gavriel Kay, Stephen R. Donaldson, Lloyd Alexander, Robert Jordan, Anne MacCaffrey, Katherine Kurtz, and Mercedes Lackey, to name a few. She prefers to see her contributions to this site as first chapters or snippets of larger works, and hope the reader will keep that in mind. She admires a statement of David Eddings' in his recent work, The Rivan Codex, in which he teases his readers by saying that it takes a hundred words just to clear his throat. Elisabeth promises to work on tightening up her writing before inflicting monumental epics of her own onto the world, and hopes you enjoy these, her first real attempts at putting all the stories in her head down on paper.

She has unfortunately found no way to make the above profitable or even remotely materially satisfying. If you have any suggestions or job offers, please contact her at: eilir@earthling.net