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Did I once say something interesting in these little white boxes? Was I once Alice, Yuri, Persephone? Biography is for the dead. But I can play the balalaika like the back of my hand.

These days, I'm pretty sure I'm Catherynne M. Valente. Like Errour a-dripping in her cave, I vomit books--but don't let that put you off. The publishers make sure they're soaped up shined to a high gloss before they go out. I'm just a little old lady curled up in my house on chicken legs down in northern Ohio, near a waterfall named after shame, chained to the church wall, pulling carrots out of the dirt for the village kids and gods in deer-clothing, drinking monk-grown wine out of the bottle and scrawling poems on the birch trees. Except for the part where I'm a 28 year old black-haired siren (you know, half-bird, half-woman, one hell of a baritone) re-patriated from Scotland and Japan, escaped from the South, scribing it godridden through the beautifully decaying streets of Cleveland with occasional jaunts in my pestle-ship to force unsuspecting young maidens to read my books. But I always end up back at the izbushka sooner or later. After all, the heart of my heart is there, currently wearing a handsome human boy-shape and calling himself justbeast. Those magic horses don't feed themselves, you know, and the red one gets cranky if she doesn't have her apples.

I wrote a few little books, and then I wrote some more, and then a mouse tried to get them to write themselves and they ended up flooding my basement. I'm boiling up more by the day in my big iron pot, and mouse stew besides. I'm an awfully quick young crone, so pull up your paisley socks and try to keep up. I never stay in one place long and I leave a waste-land when I go, with wounded thighs and ironclad alibis to keep me safe from harm.