A Map of Consciousness
When I was twenty years old, in 2007, I began translating my experiences into prose for a dual purpose. One—to glean their import so as to transcend my state of consciousness and rebirth myself, and two—because the novel has always been my refuge. I have not known how to define my movement in this life, but it seems it is almost invisible, below the world, of the underneath. Now I call myself a ‘traveler of the psyche,’ and in the novel I move as only an adept can move. In love and devotion have I committed my life to the form.
The novels, novellas, short stories, and narrative poems that make up the (at present) twelve volumes of “A Map of Consciousness,” written between 2007 and 2024, constitute a Life’s Work. In these volumes, I go by many names—Una, Alice, Cassandra, Maris, Rebecca, or my given name, Jessy, either narrating the work or appearing within it at some point. The books are being presented completely as the author intends through Imum Press, with select excerpts occasionally made available on substack.
Book One: “Diary of the Seduced” is a novella in diary-form that served as the skeleton for “The Eyries" but stands alone as an artifact of tragedy. Written between 2007—2008 and crafted in 2014, through my first, now defunct, imprint of Cypress. Now Available.
Book Two: “The Young Mother” is my first novel, written in 2011 when I was 24 years old. It marks the first appearance of ‘Una’ who, not caring to hold on to anything, embraces having a baby in the most untoward circumstances. Now Available.
Book Three: “Minor Key” marks the second appearance of Una, who is happy in the mothering of her little son, but has no visible path forward as an artist. She meets a busking musician, and abandons her possessions and her nascent home to follow him and his dream into the depths. Written in 2013. Now Available.
Book Four: “Black was the Underbelly, a Novella and Other Stories” are heavily autobiographical stories of the time I was twenty-one and twenty-two years old, in New York City, weaving patterns out of the dark netting of my deepest under psyche, which I was pressed to enter through heartbreak and a proclivity for endangerment. The last appearance of Una. Written in 2014. Now Available.
Book Five: “The Early Stories” is a grouping of stories written between the ages of 18 and 30 which fill in gaps in between the novels. Compiled in 2016. Release Date TBD.
Book Six: “The Eyries” is a novel of first love swallowed up by great fear of becoming an adult in the modern world, with heroin as compensation. Written between 2015 and 2017. Due out in early 2025.
Book Seven: “Stories of Isadora and Poems of the Priestess” is a combination of two short works which comprise concentrated periods, the former being the brief startling onset of my mother’s illness, and the latter an affair following her death which became the container for my grief. Written between 2016 and 2019. Release Date TBD.
Book Eight: “Meadowsweet by the Road” is a novel of the dissolving of an ill-matched marriage following the death of the author’s mother, and her subsequent walking of the erotic path. Written in 2019-2020. Release Date TBD.
Book Nine: “The Secret of Geraniums, an erotic novella” was published by Black Scat Books and can be purchased here. In erotic prose tells of a secret entanglement between a woman named Rebecca and an estranged couple, both of whom she is in love with. Written in 2020.
Book Ten: “Vignettes of California” is a novella of my childhood summers at my grandparents’ house in Bakersfield, California where the exploited, neutralized state of the land and deeply apathetic matriarchal whispers prefigured into the exploitation of my own body. Written in 2021. Now Available.
Book Eleven: “The Tree Planter” is a short novel about a single mother with a mysterious condition who gardens in the Catskill mountains for a living and meets a man of shadowy temperament who survives as she does. Written in 2022. Release Date TBD.
Book Twelve: “Light Locked Beneath the River” is a novel that is simultaneously autobiographical and of a re-imagined world post an apocalyptic event, which stands in as a metaphor for poverty. It interweaves the lives of three characters in and out of a communal camp, their love for one another, and strivings for autonomy in the wake of the restoration of primitive possibilities. Written in 2023-2024. Release Date TBD.
From Rain Taxi Review on “The Secret of Geraniums”: “Despite her traumatic past, Rebecca takes back power as she explores her sexuality through various intimate encounters. This exploration is raw and wanting, and it often veers into the erotic poetics of the earth, making The Secret of Geraniums a space for women to break free of social conditioning so as to reimagine and reclaim feminine sexuality.”
All the novels are meditations on the art form of autobiography in prose.