Pyrrha’s Journey – A Baha’i-Inspired Fantasy YA Novel

Rehema Marie finds joy in daily meditation, chasing waterfalls, and playing with languages. Whether in her writing or her teaching, she is dedicated to making safe havens for nerdy creatives to thrive. Formerly, she was a high school principal in bustling Beijing. Now she lives in rural Michigan where she runs the Keweenaw Learning Center.

Most excitingly and most recently, she’s the author of the Baha’i-inspired fantasy young adult novel Pyrrha’s Journey. In this post, she shares with us how her book came to be, what she hopes readers will carry with them long after reading the last page, and a special writer’s endeavour that was born of prayer and action. Here’s our conversation!

Can you please tell us a little bit about Pyrrha’s Journey?

Pyrrha’s Journey is a Baha’i-inspired tale of battling a dragon, navigating fate, and growing up.

As a child, Pyrrha Tock killed a tiger in self-defence, yet instead of being seen as a survivor, at the age of fifteen, she is sentenced to death for this crime. Her fate seems sealed, until Duke Yuddha, the young charismatic leader of Copperton, steps in and commutes her punishment. However, this reprieve comes at a cost. Pyrrha must complete three Herculean tasks, the first being to free Mount Omega from the ferocious dragon, Eruliaf.

This is a fantasy adventure story about the power of spirituality in overcoming challenges as a teenager grows out of childhood into adulthood. Meditation and prayer are used as superpowers to overcome anxiety and uncertainty while navigating the way between fate and free will. Baha’í prayers are used within the text as they would be in real life to move through tests and trials.

What inspired you to write it? 

Growing up in a Baha’i family in the 80s and 90s, there were not many Baha’i children’s books and young adult novels to read. There were only a few historical biographies of the great heroes and heroines of the Faith, which were written with adult audiences in mind. 

As a kid, I read books like The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis that explored spiritual ideas from a Christian perspective. Later, I realized that I had never read stories like this from Baha’i authors tapping into the wisdom of the Baha’i Revelation. It made me curious: How would a young protagonist in a mythical land solve problems using Baha’i principles?

Thus, I decided to write the books that I wanted to read when I was young. It is my hope that many other Baha’i authors take up this charge and write novels with complicated, conflicted characters who are trying to grow and change with the assistance from wisdom in the Baha’i Teachings. The best of these stories will become rich resources of examples of how to behave in challenging times. 

Who is its audience?

Pyrrha’s Journey is a young-adult fantasy novel, so it will appeal to teenagers who enjoy reading adventure stories through mythical worlds with tigers and dragons. Parents might also enjoy reading along with their child, so they can discuss questions about some of the themes such as injustice and fate. 

The book is written for a general audience; I intentionally did not use the word Baha’i in the text of the novel. Though, there are about a dozen prayers and meditations taken directly from the Central Figures of the Faith and are clearly cited in the footnotes. My intention was for Pyrrha to naturally be a Baha’i because it was what she knew from how she was raised.

What do you hope readers will take away with them?

Pyrrha’s Journey is an entertaining tale of finding one’s path through complicated situations. It is the Herculean tale of overcoming the tests and trials that are assigned to us by fate. These challenges are not necessarily just or fair, but they are what make us into heroes. 

I hope this book inspires more people to tell their stories. As a writing instructor, I believe everyone has something important to say. Creative expression is part of making sense of the human experience. The world needs more memoirs and novels that showcase what it means to be a Baha’i in different times and places real or imagined. With encouragement,  more authors will be enabled to write, edit, publish, and distribute their work.

Can you tell us a little bit about the virtual writing group you host?

After publishing Pyrrha’s Journey, I felt very lonely. I wanted to find a community of writers to commiserate with about the ups and downs of writing. I was looking for accountability in my writing goals and colleagues to encourage and support me, so I prayed for guidance. In particular, Ruth Moffet’s pilgrim’s note from the words of the Guardian about the five steps of prayer has continually been very effective for receiving guidance and moving from a wish in my heart to a plan of action.

This combination of wishing for my heart’s desire and meditating on possible solutions, led me to the idea to create an online writing group that started with prayerful meditations to inspire the creative process of composition. My first name for the group was literally a call to prayer: “Dear God! Help me Write!” Now that the group is firmly established, it is called “Inspiration to Write.” 

How did it begin? With prayer and action! I created a Zoom link, which I emailed to a few friends. I designed a little announcement and posted the message on social media. The first session had three attendees, and now there is a list of nearly 20 who want to attend and half a dozen who participate each week. 

The format is simple: each Thursday, I send out a meeting link, and we meet on Friday morning for thirty minutes. After a brief introduction, I share a YouTube video of a prayer or meditation. Often these are Baha’i songs, but I also sometimes include other spiritual selections as well such as Gregorian Chants or Somatic meditations. We all quietly listen for the inspiration—to be filled with the creative spirit. When the videos end, we individually write for the next twenty-five minutes. Most of us have our microphones muted and some turn off their cameras too. For the last two minutes, we may share what we worked on before going our different directions. 

This simple structure has two benefits. First, the prayerful meditation before writing has helped nip writer’s block in the bud. It quickly aligns us with our higher motivations for creating, which allows the word to flow almost effortlessly. In addition, it has inspired a budding writing community that keeps us all accountable to our own writing goals and to each other. 

Thus from prayer to action, we moved from the nascent wish for community, to a solid plan, which was quickly implemented, and joyfully attended. Creating a supportive online writing community might no be your aim, but the five steps of prayer to action will help all of us regularly and consistently make progress on our path of service. 

Thank you so much for sharing this with us, Rehema!

You can purchase Pyrrha’s Journey on Amazon.

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Sonjel Vreeland

In her innermost heart, Sonjel is a stay-at-home parent and a bookworm with a maxed out library card but professionally she is a museologist with a background in English Literature. She currently lives on Prince Edward Island, an isle in the shape of a smile on the eastern Canadian coast. Sonjel is a writer who loves to listen to jazz when she's driving at night.