Pippa and the Prince of Secrets by Grace Callaway
Author’s Note
For those of you who have been following the books, I’ve been waiting for Timothy Cullen to tell me his story, and the inspiration for Pippa and the Prince of Secrets came in an unexpected way. In the midst of the pandemic, when we were in a lockdown in my area and it was literally the darkest time of the year, something magical happened. Thousands—maybe millions—of starlings gathered at a town close to mine, and at dusk they flocked together in murmurations, performing aerial displays that were so awe-inspiring that they seemed not of this world. Or maybe they were simply the best of this world: beauty, togetherness, and wonder.
The starlings reminded me of the sacred in the everyday. Of how lucky I was to be alive in that moment, even when things were terrifying and dark. And so I shared that moment with Pippa and Cull, two wounded souls who deserved to find their joy with each other.
Speaking of joy, in the story Pippa quotes the first lines from Book I of John Keats’s, “Endymion,” a narrative poem published in 1818. While this poem was “famously savaged by critics”1 at the time of its publication, it nonetheless displays Keats’s technical genius and is a powerful meditation on the transcendent impact of beauty and how our encounters with it, no matter how fleeting, can change us for the better. For me personally, there is nothing more beautiful than love…which made writing Pippa and Cull’s story a gift. I hope you enjoyed it.
