JELENA DUNATO is an art historian, curator, speculative fiction writer and lover of all things ancient. She grew up in Croatia on a steady diet of adventure novels and then wandered the world for a decade, building a career in the arts.
Jelena’s stories have been published in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, The Dark, Future SF and Mermaids Monthly, among others. She is a member of SFWA and Codex.
Jelena lives on an island in the Adriatic with her husband, daughter and cat. Her novel, Dark Woods, Deep Water, was published by Ghost Orchid Press in September 2023 and her novella Ghost Apparent will be published in September 2024. Jelena is also the co-editor of Beyond the Veil (2022).
WHAT INSPIRED GHOST APPARENT?
JELENA: My stories are like mind maps, spreading outwards from certain key points – or more precisely, since I write character-driven stories – from certain key characters. Orsiana is one such character: deceptively discreet in Dark Woods, Deep Water, but ultimately a major player in this world I’ve dreamed up.
Ghost Apparent tells the story of Orsiana’s rise to power through her tenacity and her ability to speak with the gods – which I see more as a curse than a blessing. Having a Destiny makes one’s life interesting in many unpleasant ways, and the only heroes I’m interested in writing about are the ones who see their talents as dangerous gifts best left alone.
Ghost Apparent is also a story about Abia, the city which is a complex organism growing on the rich soil of Southern Slavic fantasy. Abia is purely Adriatic, all sunlit stone, blue sea and temperaments running high. It’s a love letter to every island and coastal town that bears the glorious heritage of the proud medieval communes, ruled by neither the king nor the feudal nobility, but by their own patrician class.
As a standalone prequel to Dark Woods, Deep Water, Ghost Apparent doesn’t require any previous knowledge of the world and the characters. However, the readers who read the novel (and hopefully liked Orsiana) are in for a treat.
TELL US A BIT ABOUT DARK WOODS, DEEP WATER.
JELENA: Dark Woods, Deep Water started as an image and a feeling. The image was a desolate castle in a snowy forest, the feeling was a deep, hollow yearning, an inevitable sense of loss. I wanted to write a story about mistakes, about bad choices made in good faith, about people brought together by misfortune. It had three narrators from the beginning, an elaborate structure that brought three stories together, and Death at its core.
You can find Jelena at jelenadunato.com and on Twitter @jelenawrites.
