How the Fort Defiance Gate Way became Storygate
A childhood playground, a librarian character, and the place where Prose & Cons found its ending.
There is a stone embedded in the Fort Defiance grounds marked:
Fort Defiance Gate Way
1794
To most people, gate way probably meant exactly what it appeared to mean: the entrance to the historic fort.
To me, it meant something else entirely.
When I was young, I lived within walking distance of the Defiance Public Library. The fort grounds beside it became my playground. I spent countless hours there pretending, inventing stories, and imagining things that existed just beyond what I could see.
In my mind, a gateway wasn’t simply an entrance. It was a magical portal.
And with a library only steps away—filled with countless other worlds—how could this particular gateway be anything ordinary?
That feeling stayed with me for decades.
When the Characters Changed the Destination
When I began writing Prose & Cons, I never intended for the characters to end up at Fort Defiance.
The novel began as a magical satire about writers, online culture, and the people and systems eager to profit from creative work. Hannah Johannesson is an author whose career suddenly becomes everything she thought she wanted—until the publishing machine begins rewriting not only her stories, but her identity.
Then there was Solveig.
Solveig is Hannah’s best friend, her anchor, and—perhaps most importantly—a librarian. The deeper I went into her character, the more clearly she began leading me somewhere familiar.
She led me back to the library of my childhood.
That was when the story became about more than people taking advantage of writers and creatives online. Beneath the satire, another question had begun to emerge:
Who protects stories when the world only values what can be optimized?
Algorithms reward what attracts attention. Trends flatten complicated ideas into something instantly recognizable. Creative work is shortened, repackaged, and stripped of the qualities that made it individual in the first place.
Solveig represented the opposite of that impulse.
She understood that stories have value even when they are quiet, inconvenient, forgotten, challenged, or unlikely to perform well. She believed they deserved to be preserved as they were—not reduced to whatever version might receive the most engagement.
Through her, the Fort Defiance Gate Way became Storygate.
A Fortress for Forgotten Stories
Storygate is my fictional fortress for banned books and forgotten stories: a place where stories can be protected when the rest of the world has decided they are unprofitable, undesirable, or too dangerous to keep.
It grew from that childhood belief that the stone in the fort grounds marked the entrance to somewhere magical.
Only now, I understand why the gateway felt magical to me.
It wasn’t simply because I had an active imagination. It was because the library was there.
The magic came from growing up beside a place where stories were kept safe. The library gave me access to worlds beyond my own and treated each of them as something worth preserving. Long before I had the words to describe literary stewardship, I understood the feeling of it.
Storygate had been waiting there all along.
Returning to the Gateway
When it was time to celebrate the launch of Prose & Cons, the fort grounds felt like the only possible place.
The weather, unfortunately, had its own ideas.
I genuinely thought the rain might cancel the entire event. Instead, my friends and family arrived early, carried tables, raised tents, protected the books and food, and did everything they could to make sure the celebration happened.
Then readers came through the rain to join us.
In Prose & Cons, the land where the rivers meet is protected.
Standing there on launch day, I realized it was protected in real life, too—not by magic, but by people who refused to let the weather wash the day away.
As a child, I imagined that the stone marked a portal into another world.
Decades later, I placed another world behind it.
Maybe some places hold our stories until we’re ready to return to them.
Prose & Cons is available now in paperback, hardco
ver, and ebook. It is also available to read through Kindle Unlimited.
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