PHOTO: Author Helena Sorensen reflects on light and darkness, photographed on her Nashville porch where many of her lyrical stories take shape.
Exploring Myth Mystery Music And The Unseen
Helena Sorensen shares how childhood in wild Florida, music, myth, and mystical themes shape her stories, weaving beauty and darkness in prose that sings and searches for hidden light.
Helena Sorensen grew up with the dark pressing against the windows, in a place where night truly meant night and the boundaries between the known and the imagined seemed thin as a screen. Her childhood in Fort Lonesome, Florida, laid the groundwork for a literary voice attuned to mystery, wonder, and quiet unease. It’s this deeply rooted awareness of the world’s hidden edges—the way darkness hums just beneath the everyday—that permeates her work.
Her writing feels both ancient and startlingly present, a blend of folklore, music, and emotion forged through a life of artful listening. Whether shaped by the echo of a song, the fog-laced cliffs of western Ireland, or the teachings of science and faith, her stories unfold like mythic prayers—raw, lyrical, and seeking. With each novel, she invites readers into spaces where beauty and terror are inseparable, and where the unseen world is not only near, but essential.
The Door on Half-Bald Hill exemplifies Sorensen’s ability to navigate both light and shadow with grace. It’s a book shaped by deep questions: of belief, of grief, of whether what is lost can be reclaimed. Yet for all its weight, her work never loses sight of hope—not as a gloss over pain, but as something earned through confronting it.
In her view, fiction is less an escape and more a mirror. To write is to look steadily into the dark until it looks away. And in that act, something extraordinary happens: a way opens forward.
Growing up in a place called Fort Lonesome sounds like the start of a novel—how has your childhood environment influenced your storytelling?
Not many people know anymore what it is to live in a place where night time brings full dark. There weren’t outdoor lights or street lamps surrounding the house where I grew up in Central Florida. At night, the darkness outside my bedroom window was complete. It throbbed. We lived among sixty acres of citrus trees. There was a perennial dusk beneath the old grapefruit trees, and in the summer the air was sharpened by the too-sweet tang of rotting fruit. Our house had been built in the 20s. It was wooden, with no insulation, raised on concrete blocks. We heard armadillos scuffling under the floors, and once my mother opened a kitchen cabinet to retrieve peanut butter, and an indigo snake slithered out. The windows were screened and often open, ostensibly to let the cool air in, but what mostly came in was humidity and the unrelenting heat of Florida days. There were panthers about, and dangerous people. My childhood in Fort Lonesome, in other words, impressed me with a sense that my world was penetrable, that there was nothing keeping the darkness from slipping in through the cracks.
You’ve explored music, performance, poetry, and travel—how do these different experiences find their way into your fiction?
My experience with music and love for music show up in the way I write my prose. For me, it’s vital that phrases and sentences sing. I hear the words in my head and consistently say them aloud to determine the rhythms that hit my ear just right. I studied voice performance in college, and I believe the first time I performed in public was when I was six years old, singing a duet with my mother at a church event. I’ve performed countless times on many kinds of stages, and each time I am struck by the nakedness of opening my heart, my mouth, and flinging my voice into empty space. All art is similarly vulnerable, so in that way, music prepared me for the writing journey.
Regarding travel, I’ve been twice to the west coast of Ireland. My visits influenced the landscape and atmosphere of The Door on Half-Bald Hill. Standing on the cliffs of the Aran Islands and roaming over the barren beauty of the Burren, I had a sense of the age of the land and its history. It affected me in a way nothing has in the U.S., even in stunning natural settings like Zion National Park, Puget Sound, and the Smoky Mountains. The mossy stones of Ireland seemed to whisper their stories. The hazel groves were haunted. I still can’t shake the magic of that place.
What first drew you to write about themes like shadow, prophecy, and hidden light?
Because of my background in Christianity, I have always been comfortable with the language of symbol and with the presence of an unseen world all around us. But even having moved away from that faith tradition, I am no less mystical. The way I see it, honest theologians and honest scientists who earnestly seek truth eventually bump up against a great unnameable mystery. Those who are humble enough to acknowledge what they encounter are awed, changed; they surrender to the unknowing.
In Shiloh, Amos faces a powerful fear after the loss of his father—how do you approach writing such emotionally intense moments?
Writing was my doorway into processing emotions. When I began writing, I was not aware of the disconnect between my mind and body or the ways I’d suppressed emotion as a tool for survival and belonging. The darkness and heaviness of the stories that poured out of me came as a surprise. But that is the transformative power of creative expression, and, in my opinion, of fiction especially. You can sit down to write a piece of non-fiction and stick to an outline, maintaining some control over what you do and do not reveal to your reader. There is nowhere for writers of fiction to hide. Everything you didn’t know you believed shows up in your stories.
For that reason, I counsel writers to finish a first draft as quickly as possible, set it aside for a few months (until they’ve largely forgotten the details of what they’ve written), then go back and read the whole manuscript in a day or two. More often than not, they’re surprised at what they find. Sometimes, as an editor, it’s my task to mirror to the writer what they’ve put on the page. It’s deep therapeutic work, confronting yourself in this way. My stories have made it possible for me to work through grief, fear, rage, despair, and uncertainty and find my way home to compassion and hope.
The Door on Half-Bald Hill blends mythic elements with an apocalyptic setting—what inspired that particular blend of tone and theme?
You’d be surprised how much of the world of The Door on Half-Bald Hill is history and not myth, but yes, these are an unusual combination of elements. We think of apocalyptic stories as being set in the future, for the most part, and this story is set in something akin to ancient Ireland. It’s funny, I wrote the book in 2015 and 2016, and it was released in March of 2020. Not a great time in terms of sales and exposure, but significant. The book is about a plague, a dying people, a loss of hope. I’m always wrestling, in my stories, with despair and with the question of whether the things that have been lost can be recovered. I also tend to gravitate towards fantasy and mythology because I feel they offer enough space to depict the world as I feel it is—unspeakably terrible and impossibly beautiful.
Your stories often deal with courage and belief in unseen things—how do you balance hope and darkness in your narratives?
I was working with a writer recently who had just hit the 50-60% mark in her first manuscript. This part of the process is notorious among writers. They tend to flounder without any real understanding of why. What I’ve discovered is that this is the point in the writing process when we’re asked to go deeper, to test our willingness to let go and allow things to unravel. We’ve set up the characters and conflicts, and we have to be willing to lose everything we’ve worked to build. Interestingly, when we allow things to get as bad as they can get, we’re faced with the question of whether we believe the situation can be resolved. Do we really believe, in other words, that there’s a way out of this?
This is writing as spiritual practice. Writing asks us to face what we don’t want to face, feel what we don’t want to feel. But when we muster the courage to look darkness in the eye and hold its gaze, it is always the first to look away. In that moment, we realize we’re still alive, still breathing, and the world is full of light.
Which authors have most shaped your voice, and what have you learned from reading them?
Tolkien’s books have been influential in that I never tire of reading them aloud. There was a time when I taught three sections of the same literature class, and I could read long passages of The Hobbit in every section without losing my enthusiasm for the beauty and flow of language. Stylistically, I’ve been shaped by the work of Lois Lowry and Ursula K. Le Guin. Both writers have a gift for conveying a great deal in few words. Read A Wizard of Earthsea and ask yourself how, in 56k words, Le Guin creates a world so dense with history and lore that you cannot imagine it to be anything but a real world existing just parallel to ours. For writers like this, (Susanna Clark’s Piranesi is another great example), I think the trick is absolute conviction. Le Guin (and Clark and Lowry) know their fictional worlds are real. They don’t feel compelled to try to prove it to the reader, so they don’t waste words building elaborate infrastructures. What information they do give is so exact it’s like a spell cast, and the reader can’t help but believe.
What advice would you give to other authors who feel drawn to write stories that blur the lines between fantasy, myth, and faith?
I would say that there are no lines between fantasy, myth, and faith. Each is a way of trying to understand what is most real, which may, in fact, be more mythical and fantastical than we’ve come to admit. There was a time when the three blended together seamlessly in the minds of human beings, but the Enlightenment placed so much emphasis on the supremacy of rational thought that we lost our connection with stories, with the land, with our bodies, and with magic. Quantum physics is teaching us that the world is magic, that entangled particles can be connected across distances as vast as the cosmos, that time is not linear, that the universe is, in a very real way, what we expect it to be. I’d encourage authors to bow before the unknowing, to allow their understanding of reality to expand in every possible direction, then see what kinds of stories they’re inspired to tell.
