I was born an animist on a Maine sandbar, fronted by the Atlantic and backed by a tidal marsh. I have an MFA from Warren Wilson College and teach medieval literature and CREATIVITY at Montreal’s Dawson College. I have published Rue Sainte Famille and a chapbook, The Head Will Continue to Sing. Completing a McGill University doctorate on the poet H.D. awakened my love of antiquity and led to my publication of Glossing the Spoils, a collection drawing on Western European mythologies that came out in the UK in a second edition in 2017. Ritona Press is publishing a third collection, And If I Go with Child: Reimagining the Mysteries of Tam Lin. My poems can be found in Garden Varieties: An Anthology of the Top Fifty Poems from the National Poetry Contest;150+ Canada’s History in Poetry; Soul of the Earth: the Awen Anthology of Eco-spiritual Poetry;Pagan Muse: Poems of Wisdom and Inspiration, and in The Deep Music: Offerings from the Awen. My work appears in literary magazine in Canada, the UK, and US. I am also a creativity coach and belly dance teacher.

And If I Go With Child?

Reimagining the Mysteries of Tam Lin

By Charlotte Hussey

His boneless fingers bend
to conjure newborn shapes
from perturbed clouds of matter,
a slippery, pink brood they fall
all around, or from me?
I wake, hands crossed
over my heart.’

Through twenty-seven poems, Charlotte Hussey explores the initiatory potential of the ancient Scottish faery story, “The Ballad of Tam Lin.”

The ballad tells the tale of a woman’s haunting encounter with a figure trapped by the Faerie Queen. In And If I Go With Child?, Charlotte Hussey becomes the story itself, and speaks beautifully in her poems of the power of redemptive love.