About
This is the blog of Erzebet YellowBoy Carr: artist, author, editor, bookbinder. The name erzaveria comes from the conjunction of my name and the name of my first small press, Papaveria. This is because at one time my press and I were inseparable. I call this blog I saw the angel after something Michelangelo said about his sculptures: “I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.” A difficult childhood inspired me to combat tragedy with beauty, so I spend my time making beautiful things. This is the work of all artists and creative persons — to set the angel free.
My studio in France.
Fairy tales are my prima materia, specifically those collected by the brothers Grimm. It’s almost unfashionable now to be so enamored of two dead white dudes and their work, but if you saw the way I dress, you’d know I don’t pay much attention to fashion. I love tracing those tales back to other tellings, seeing how they morphed from culture to culture, but at the end of the day, the strange slant the Grimms gave those stories — “…the stories were didactic in nature at a time when discipline relied on fear…” — perfectly match the way I was raised and allow me to laugh about it now. Plus, my grandfather was a German immigrant. This stuff is in my blood.
I was born in the year 1967, in the city of Philadelphia on the eastern side of the USA. I was raised by my maternal grandparents, and was fortunate enough to be surrounded by books and had access to a wonderful, large garden. Higher education and I did not get along, so while I’ve attended three different colleges/universities in varying capacities, I have graduated from none. I moved from place to place in the US, had three beautiful daughters, loved and lost love, wrote stories and made art, but was never able to feel settled for very long. Of all the places I lived in America, it is South Dakota I miss the most.
In 2006 I answered a call that took me to England, where I met and married a lovely man. We lived in a little town in the north, where we battled the ogre of immigration and won. I am now British as well as American. In England my husband and I founded another small press so we would have a project to develop together. And then, tired of the mad rush, the confinements of society, and the waste of the modern world, we moved to a tumbledown cottage in rural France where we intend to live happily ever after and be as self-sustaining as we can.
Our house in France.
My written work has appeared Fantasy Magazine, Not One of Us, Electric Velocipede, Behind the Wainscott, and in the anthologies Running with the Pack and Haunted Legends. My novel, Sleeping Helena, was released by Prime Books in 2010. You can read my full bibliography here. I am the co-creator and long-time editor of Cabinet des Fées, an online journal of fairy tales, and previously of Jabberwocky, an online magazine celebrating lyrical fiction. My book and bone art can be found in my online portfolio at erzebet.com, or you can see samples here. You can browse the titles I’ve published at Papaveria Press, or at Hadean Press, the press my husband I and founded together back in England. We manage these entities through a small publishing company called Circle Six.
“Creativity is contagious. Pass it on.” — Albert Einstein