My story is based on three different folktales I read as a teenager: The Six Swans, The Seven Ravens, and The Twelve Brothers. In each of these stories a sister has to save her brothers who were transformed into birds. The conditions set for her in each are slightly different, but one that is common to all stories is that she has to sew shirts for each of her siblings to wear. The Six Swans is probably most memorable of the versions because she doesn’t quite finish the shirt for her youngest brother and he spends the rest of his life with a huge wing for an arm. I always pictured the shirts as the white, button down variety–very clean and crisp and simple.

The bracelet is long enough to wrap around most wrists twice, some three times, and can even be worn as a choker.

K. Tempest Bradford

When I read a story intending to create jewelry from it, I take very careful note of color - both those mentioned in the story and those which occur to me as I read and after I lay the story aside. This was terrifically easy to do for K. Tempest Bradford’s “Black Feather,” because color is a central theme in this piece, from the red of a mother’s womb to the steel skyscrapers of Manhattan to the white of clean linen shirts to the ever shifting blue of sky. And then, of course, the ubiquitous black feathers of the title, which I have endeavored to represent with onyx.

“Black Feather” is a story, among other things, about accepting death and the soul-transformation that we go through when we stop fearing our mortality. For this reason (and to represent a plot point that is too beautiful to spoil for you here), I have created the necklace’s pendant from the memento mori of a skeleton, a glass egg and a red bead representing the living we who stand between both ends and beginnings.

This was one of the most challenging necklaces I have ever made, and one of my favorites. I hope that I have represented Tempest’s story accurately and skillfully.

JoSelle Vanderhooft

“Feathers are powerful messages and special gifts.”
“It’s nothing. You’re overtired.”
“Ravens are messengers from the otherworld. Someone there wants your attention.”
“You probably ate too many tacos before bed.”
“It’s not from a crow. Not a feather that big…”

“It’s a symbol. You have to find the meaning.”

I have been fascinated with shape-shifting for a good many years, and ravens even more. Like most writers, I am also fascinated with symbols. Back when my husband and I lived on opposite coasts, his letters and emails were riddled with symbols and it wasn’t long before they began to arrive in the mail: a leather notebook that he made himself, a wishing stone, captain’s bars. “I’m very talismanic,” he said. I took that as a good sign.

So if I’d been the one gifted with a feather and a vision at the top of Inwood Hill (a perfect place for both, by the by, though I must confess that living in Brooklyn, I don’t get here nearly enough), you’d better believe I’d be searching for clues. Not having any raven’s feathers, I wanted to make a piece that evoked their essence. A piece that reminded me of raven’s wings, but left plenty of room for meaning.

The basic design is not my own - it was taught me by the woman who introduced me to beading. I still have that first piece, made about 10 years ago. I’ve often found myself looking at it and thinking, “Hrm, I should make another one of those.” But just as symbols have their reasons, so do actions. I guess it wasn’t the right time ’til now!

The materials of the necklace are safe for someone with allergies. About half of the beads are from a vintage necklace I’d been saving (ie., also waiting for the right time).

Elizabeth Genco

The forest where my main character, Brenna, first encounters the ravens is an actual place in Manhattan. Inwood Hill is the last natural forest left on the island, located at the very top, right on the water between Manhattan and the Bronx. It’s one of my favorite places on the planet because it still retains its foresty feeling even though it’s surrounded by apartment buildings and traffic. You don’t have to walk far up the path before a pleasant coolness settles over you and the sounds of the city disappear. If you do it right, you can hide in there all day and forget yourself.

I wanted these earrings to convey the small chaos and beauty that is a forest like Inwood Hill. In order to achieve the depth I wanted, I used very light beads so that neither earring is too heavy (though they do have weight). One is fuller than the other — if you look closely, you can see the black feather hiding within.

K. Tempest Bradford

This story is inarguably interstitial: is it a re-imagined fairy tale? A dream story? Magical realism? I can’t say for sure. Yet it is most certainly a tale of the Wood, for all that therein the Wood exists only in dreams and one small wooded park in an obscure corner of Manhattan. In this wood is a hill and, at the top of this hill, is a cave. The Wood, the hill, the cave, the sky: compelling elemental presences evoking the Hanged Man, the lost girl, the ravens, and what redemption we can find. These were the threads that asked to be woven in wood and glass, semi-precious stone and gleaming metal. I like to believe that I gave Tempest’s story another method of flight.

Deborah J. Brannon: