“As for fairy tales, he understood that they were reflections of the people who had spun them, and were flecked with little truths – intrusions of reality into fantasy, like toast crumbs on a wizard’s beard.”

― Laini Taylor⁠

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While this isn’t the first scene from Passages that I’ve shared, if you were to put the Passages story in chronological order, this would be the opening act. I wanted this particular scene to set the stage for Passages for several reasons:⁠⁠

When I was nine years old, my family moved to Meerbusch, Germany and it forever changed my life. And so I pulled inspiration from the German dirndl, because in many ways I feel that Germany was the beginning of my own story.⁠

When I was in high school, I read a quote in a book that talked about how life is like a weaving, where everyone who enters our life and every experience is a different colored thread that can be woven into our tapestry. I loved that this scene begins with the protagonist weaving her own fate, because it strongly reflected the reason I started the Passages series in the first place. ⁠

I truly believe that we are the weavers of our own tapestries. And we can either look at the enormous obstacle ahead of us (the spider web) and allow it to prevent us from moving further… or look at it as a beautiful weaving that we can create and share with others to bring beauty and light into the world.⁠

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