Welcome to the Dollhouse

Every house holds stories, but not every house is built to show them.

Mine happens to be small enough to fit on a table. At first glance, it looks like a dollhouse—miniature rooms, paper wallpaper, furniture I’ve carved by hand. But the more time you spend with it, the more it stops behaving like a toy. The walls carry memory. The rooms insist on telling you something.

I began building it in 2020, when the world felt suspended. At the time I thought it was just a way to keep my hands moving, but it quickly revealed itself as something else. The house became a vessel for folklore, grief, family histories, and fragments of memory—some my own, some drawn from books, many entrusted to me by strangers online. What surprised me most was how quickly others saw themselves inside it. They sent me stories of their grandparents, local legends, fragments of songs. The dollhouse began to feel less like an object and more like a conversation.

Southern Gothic is the language I work in.

It’s a tradition that resists clean definition, but you know it when you feel it: beauty and rot pressed close together, joy braided with sorrow, the uncanny slipping in where you least expect it. That’s what I try to build here. A parlor that feels like it might eat you alive, a chandelier made entirely of baby teeth and gold, a hallway that doesn’t quite end where it should—all while nature slowly reclaims its bones in the surrounding, ghost-thick waters of the swamp.

After a while something unexpected happened: the house started giving me a story. As I built, I began writing. A novel is emerging, and now the two projects move in tandem. I build a room, the book finds a scene. I write a scene, the house demands a new detail. They haunt each other, feed each other. The dollhouse is no longer just art—it’s become a manuscript in miniature, a way of drafting a story through wood and glue as much as words.

In the vein of stories, the South doesn’t easily let go of its own.

They surface in music, in food, in ghost tales, in the ways people carry memory through daily life. But just as often, those same stories are distorted, buried, or turned into something easier to consume. What I’m attempting here—through the dollhouse and the novel growing beside it—is to make space for the South’s complexity. To hold beauty and horror together, tenderness and violence, the past and the present, without simplifying them. The deeper I dig into histories that weren’t taught to me in my own Southern schools, the more the house reveals its true nature. If the swamp is the heart that still beats, the house is the wound that never closes.

Part of why this feels urgent now is that younger generations are already searching for ways to connect with the places they come from—or with the places they’ve been told to forget.

My hope is for this project to serve as a meeting point, where folklore, family memory, and imagination can live side by side. A way to listen more closely, to notice what’s been overlooked, and to keep stories alive in forms that feel both intimate and a little uncanny.

It also matters who gets to see themselves in these stories.

Too often, Southern Gothic has been told through a narrow lens, erasing the voices of Black, Indigenous, and immigrant communities who shaped the South as much as anyone. What I’m attempting with The Honey House is to make space for those presences—so that young readers, especially girls and kids of color, can recognize their histories, their power, and their imaginations in a genre that has long left them out.

The dollhouse and the novel grow together as a way of honoring those stories, and of showing that Southern memory isn’t just something to inherit—it’s something to reimagine and carry forward.

What comes next is still unfolding. The book is taking shape. The house keeps growing. Maybe one day it will be hidden away, waiting to be discovered by someone who doesn’t yet know they’re looking for it. For now, it’s alive in both forms—unfinished, insistent, and very much still speaking.