Dougherty's Bestiary and Where to Find It

Pushcart nominee, Jane Dougherty

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Dougherty's Bestiary and Where to Find It

By

Marian L Thorpe

Jane Dougherty

is a writer not limited to one form. Publishing both poetry and short fiction on Substack, her stories are frequently sourced from the myths and legends of the Celtic and Norse peoples, either directly or carrying echoes, although her inspirations go far beyond this and her range of written work is wide. Her stories have been published by Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, Prairie Fire, and Lucent Dreaming, among others Jane’s fiction isn’t often gentle; she writes of the points at which a life changes, loses innocence, loses faith or love, gives itself over to darkness:

Under stone

Not always: there is love and light, too, but she’s not predictable, and sometimes the love is of a sort that will break your heart:

Lola

Jane has books publishing this year: a historical fantasy series with Northodox, and a historical reconstruction of the Pasiphaë myth with Legend Press.

While I admire and look forward to Jane’s short stories, it’s her poems that produce awe in me:

will we sing this year alive
with violet and muscari blue, sky-swept,
play the damp tree bark green with unfurling,
shout with geese and cormorants
winding skeins above the river

Orfeo

Using images, echoes of myths, cadence and rhythm, all the ways words convey place and mood and meaning, her poetry touches me deeply.

Both in her prose and poetry, Jane’s writing speaks of a lifetime of reading, the influences of writers like Yeats and Joyce reflected in her work. Coming from a family of poets and artists, having spent a year learning Irish, self taught in Italian, delving into the Norse roots of Yorkshire dialect – language and its nuances, the words whose meanings are subtle, local, untranslatable – this all clearly matters to Jane, and that is reflected in her stories and poetry. So too are the deeper meanings of myths, and a sense of the turn of the seasons and the years, the moments and repeated rhythms that become our lives, captured and expressed.

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Jane’s three collections of poetry are: night horses, thicker than water, and birds and other feathers

— Marian L. Thorpe

My substack:

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Jane’s Bio:

Pushcart Prize nominee, Jane Dougherty's poetry has appeared in publications including Gleam, Ogham Stone, Black Bough Poetry, Ekphrastic Review and The Storms Journal. Her short stories have been published in Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, Prairie Fire, Lucent Dreaming among others, and her first adult novel will be published in July 2025 by Northodox Press.

Her retelling of the story of Pasiphaë will be published by Legend Press in winter 2025/2026.

She lives in southwest France and has published . three collections of poetry, thicker than water, birds and other feathers and night horses.

I was brought up in Yorkshire, in an Irish Catholic community. We were a bookish and artistic family, father and grandfather wrote poetry and mother painted, and I was always a reader, but developed a fascination with language in general. Yorkshire dialect, it turned out, was descended from Old Norse, which explained why it sounded like a foreign language, and why my Pseudo-Norwegian characters in The Darkest Tide sound like Yorkshire folk. I taught myself Italian because although I've never lived there, Rome that l've visited often since I was small, is the city that I feel most affection for. After university I bluffed my way into a job with a Paris wine merchant, took Irish lessons for a year at the Irish College, and never went back to the UK.

I started writing for my teenage children who, being good republicans, complained about the fantasy books in the library, all deposed princes, rightful thrones, and other royalist propaganda. I wrote them something different and never stopped. I had a few false starts with publishers. The first fantasy series that I took back from the publisher, and a second YA sff series that would have been okay if the publisher hadn't decided to go full-on romance, leaving my very unromantic series high and dry.

Although I've written a lot since then, mainly adult, spec-fic, historical fantasy, mash-ups of Norse and Irish myth, a Yorkshire Gothic novel, a double time-line mystery and a historical reconstruction of the Pasipha myth, I wasn't getting any agents interested. Then Northodox, a north of England publisher, accepted a historical fantasy series, and at more or less the same time, Legend Press accepted the Pasiphaë story. I'm hoping this might drum up some interest in the other stories. Meanwhile, I'm enjoying posting short fiction and poetry on Substack.

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