I write under the name Tamzin J Ritchie. I am a painter and a writer. I was born on Dartmoor.
The earth of my birth and the myths and legends were my bedtime stories. The Wild Hunt was a thing told to me before sleep. The kistvaens — the Bronze Age stone chambers that gave this novel its name — were the rocks I walked past on the way to wherever I was going. I learned the moor with my body before I learned it with my mind. As an adult I lived in London for many years and would take the train down to my parents and walk for hours alone on the moor, listening to music in the dark, running for miles toward the moon. I could breathe.
I now live in Oswego, Illinois — a small town in the American Midwest that, until 1894, was called Lodi. The town that almost was something else. It is a quiet, generous place to live, and it is a long way from Dartmoor, and the distance has shaped this novel as much as the moor itself has.
I trained as a psychologist. I went into psychology because I wanted to write horror, and I thought it would give me the right tools — what mental imagery is, how memory works, why minds construct meaning across incomplete information. I did not stay in clinical psychology. I went into research, eventually into interprofessional healthcare education, eventually into a research role I still hold at Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science, where my work on collaborative cognition — how teams of people think together across disciplines — has continued to teach me, indirectly, how to write a novel about voices recovering a story across centuries.
The Kistvean has been with me for many years. I drafted versions of it when I was much younger and put them aside. I gathered research, folklore, photographs, paintings. I learned what I needed to learn. I came back to it. The novel is, among other things, about what we bury and what eventually returns. I have come to think of it as also a novel about what we set aside in ourselves and what eventually returns when we are old enough to do it justice.
It is being published now — for the first time, in fragments — because the form it has wanted to take is the form it took for the writers I grew up reading: serialised, slow, with images. Dickens, Doyle, Stoker. Susan Cooper, whose Dark is Rising sequence has been on my shelves since I was a child. The contemporary serialised novelists of East Asia, whose webnovels carry on the tradition without apology. The graphic novel tradition. None of these are smaller forms than the bound book. They are older forms, and in many ways more honest ones.
Thank you for being here. The archive opens slowly. There is no hurry. Mind the stones.