The Archivist

Have you ever wondered how legends get created?

Alicia Cahalane Lewis's gorgeous new novella, The Archivist, imagines how the first feline goddess, the black panther, found her way into the stories and legends of ancient Mesopotamia, Greece, and Egypt.

Narrated in first person plural by a band of roaming nomads who are the first to worship the goddess, they are compelled to honor their black panther, who has dropped into their lives unexpectedly, by building the first feline sphinx.

When a Bedouin girl appears, claiming she was once the black panther the nomads worship, she is dismissed until decades pass, a generation of nomads die, and the girl remains a girl. In time, the next generation of nomads find their goddess in the young woman and begin immortalizing her as she digs from the rubble of their past ancient knowledge.

Once immortalized as the original sphinx, the goddess has been lost. She is asking to be found. Can we dig from the rubble the remnants of our past and honor her, thereby honoring ourselves?

A mesmerizing goddess tale of ancient wisdom and understanding, this is as much our story as it is hers.

Raised in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia by a closet physicist father and an eighth generation Valley Quaker mother, Alicia Cahalane Lewis is an inquisitive novelist and poet. In 2013, she graduated from Naropa University with an MFA in Creative Writing.Her full length prose poem nebulous beginnings and strings, a meditation on time and spirituality, featuring the work of Shenandoah Valley painter Winslow McCagg was published in August 2017 (Tattered Press). Alicia's chapbook of poetic essays entitled Birds Fly But a Long Time Ago They Swam, a meditation on evolution, was published by The Lune Chapbook Series Spring 2017. Her meditative memoir, The Intrepid Meditator, a Reiki-inspired guide for attaining balance and clear inner knowing, was published by Tattered Script Publishing, September, 2021.The novella Room Service Please, winner of both the gold for overall cover design and the silver for cover design (photography) with The Book Fest, tells the story of a young girl, mistaken for a famous Hollywood starlet, in this updated Cinderella story (Tattered Script Publishing, April 2022). Kirkus Reviews calls Alicia's poetic prose novella Restless, which takes place in Paris, 1903, "A brief but memorable tale that sings." This retelling of the classic My Fair Lady offers ingenuity and self-care (Tattered Script Publishing, April 2023).Aware of her tie to the Valley that goes back nine generations, Alicia recently returned after a twenty five year hiatus in Maine where she raised two daughters. As witness to the stories of the early settlers' perseverance and appreciation for the bounty and beauty of the Valley, it is a place where she continues to find inspiration for her creative work.