On Writing Epiphany

Written by J.G. Gachs

As it turns out, writing about Epiphany is way harder than writing Epiphany. I suspected as much when Off Limits Press EIC Waylon Jordan first asked me if I’d be willing to write a short article about the book before its release. But it wasn’t until I tried, and tried, and tried, yet failed every time, that I truly understood how hard.

I’ve gone through several instances of this article already, because Epiphany is a very personal story, a nightmarish landscape where my own monsters thrive. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve defeated most of them, in part thanks to telling this story. But to tell you about the inception of this book and how its magical forest came to life, I’d have to crack my ribcage open and show you the blackened bits of my heart, the rotting chunks of flesh around it, and that’s something I’m not enthused about right now. I’ll let Coral and Estela, Epiphany’s main characters, walk you through the dark side of the woods in my place for the majority of these revelations.

However, there are a few things I’d love to share about this book. I’ve already mentioned some of the wounds that inspired me to write it. Many of these center on the journey toward accepting my struggles with motherhood as a forty-year-old cis woman. I’ve dealt with infertility since I was twenty-one. Now, that I’ve made peace with it (only took twenty years), I wholeheartedly believe it’s important that we talk about these issues out loud, and don’t push them down, hiding them inside our empty wombs as shameful secrets.

Not being able to conceive children is a battle against oneself, society’s expectations, and your own body. It’s a constant parade of people with big smiles and good intentions, asking, “When are you going to be a mom?” It’s a feeling of failure stuck in your throat when period cramps hit. It’s the immense urge to cry when you try to imagine the face of the baby you’ll never have.

Some days you win the battle, somedays you write a book about it.

But Epiphany is not a book about motherhood. Not only. It’s also a book about sacrifice, about longing and broken hearts. About the birth of desire. About the magic that could be and the monsters that we find in its place. I didn’t write Coral or Estela as “likeable characters,” but I do hope readers will understand them, their fears, their desires, and what moves them to act, even if it is sometimes in a way we might find wicked. People may wonder if any of these characters are inspired by me, especially after reading this piece, and I don’t think they are. Not directly at least. Every character in the book is infected by the idea that we are all human, and nothing human is alien to us, not even the awful things we try to hide from ourselves.

There’s a much lighter topic I’d also like to tackle here. Epiphany is a special book because English is not my first language and the way I approached this story is different than my usual method. Even though I’m an English as a Second Language writer, despite what people seem to believe, I write my stories in English first. I’ve done so since I decided to find good homes for my stories that were being neglected and mistreated in the Spanish market. I tried to do so with Epiphany, but it didn’t work. I ended up giving up and writing it in Spanish first and then translating it. I honestly thought it would be easier than it was. Funny enough, trying to save myself the trouble with my second novella, I wrote Spooky Lovers (Interstellar Flight Press, 2024) in English only to find myself immersed in translating it back into my mother tongue for its Spanish release with Dimensiones Ocultas Paperback next Halloween. And you know what? That’s even harder!

 When using English to express myself, I find there’s a separation, a distance from the topic that I usually don’t mind. If anything, it helps the ideas flow in a more orderly way, because they must pass through a filter that forces them to emerge as clear as possible. But when crafting these monsters, they were tamed when pressed against that filter, and they lacked a soul as a result. For the book to have a voice, I needed the words to come straight from my heart, as raw as they could be.

And my heart speaks Spanish.

Epiphany is not my first attempt at writing a novel. As often happens, it is my debut novel because it is the one where I let my guard down and allowed myself to look in the dark corners, to find the monsters instead of hiding from them.

I hope you enjoy meeting them as well.