My aunt left me a universe.
My aunt Geanora was a writer.
And an artist, a teacher, and a spiritual guide.
She created a world large enough to hold multiple novels. One made it into print. The rest remained unpublished when she died in 2017.
And then they sat.
The books still existed. The characters still existed. The world she had imagined was still there.
Eventually, I realized I couldn't leave it there forever.
The Books
Curiosity is where Geanora's fictional universe begins.
Curiosity follows Lisa Anderson, a thirty-one-year-old Black librarian who has built a deliberately ordinary life in the fictional California city of San Noe. Then she walks into the foyer of her apartment building and finds a murdered man, a mysterious teenage girl, and something impossible rising from the body. What begins as curiosity about a murder draws Lisa into a supernatural world that has been around her all along, and toward truths about her family, her own abilities, and who she really is.
The Curiosity Project
I am revisiting the work, beginning with Curiosity.
That means reading things closely, making careful revisions where the work needs them, and figuring out how to bring this universe to readers who never had the chance to find it the first time.
I'm also reading the work aloud.
Curiosity will unfold chapter by chapter, with ways to read and listen as the project develops.
This is an act of stewardship, collaboration across time, and, inevitably, interpretation. Even though I was her first reader and helped build this world, I can't ask her what she meant, though we talked about this work often. I can't hand her an edit and wait for the argument, even though we passed drafts back and fourth for years before she passed. I have to make choices while remembering that the reason there is anything here to choose from is because she made it first.
Originally self-published by Geanora under the name G. D. Bonner in May 2009, Curiosity was the first book in a planned series.
Beyond the published novel are additional manuscripts, drafts, and outlines that continue the story.
I inherited all of it.
Not only the files and books and journals and notes, but the question of what, if anything, should happen to them now.
Read & Listen
Curiosity is being released serially.
There is another story inside this project: what it means to inherit someone's unfinished creative life.
I'm writing about that too.
About Mimi. About the books. About grief and time and family. About what survives us. About the strange responsibility of realizing that something may disappear unless you decide to carry it.
That story begins in Freedom & Desire with My Aunt Left Me a Universe.
This page will grow as more of the universe returns.