Tracy Eire grew up far to the north in a place called St John's, Newfoundland. She has spent most of her life with one foot in the real world and the other somewhere else—maybe on Mercury, maybe in the realm of myth, or ... somewhere near Hobbiton. It’s a place where stories breathe, where the old gods whisper, and where women step out of the fog wearing their strength and brilliance plainly. That is the space her art comes from.

An oil and charcoal artist with a deep love for narrative painting, Tracy focuses on portraits of women who feel ancient and modern all at once. These are figures who carry storms behind their eyes, but choose the light anyway. She often paints the things she sought—or witnessed—in her youth: courage, grace, grit, and the quiet power of women who refused to disappear, even when maligned. It’s no wonder her harpies wear couture.

Tracy honed her skills through the Milan Art Mastery Program, but she’s been creating art even longer than she’s been reading comic books and novels. She is also a longtime writer of NobleBright fantasy, science fiction, and paranormal tales, and those worlds bleed into her canvases in the form of ghost hunters, fairies, sirens, and banshees like you’ve never seen before. Every piece she makes becomes a conversation between the storyteller and the painter in her. Sometimes those two voices argue, but ... mostly they cooperate. In every part, she’s busy becoming an accomplished storyteller.

What Tracy wants when she paints (and hopes for when she writes) is that her work makes people feel something strong and true. Maybe it’s a spark of recognition. Maybe it’s the sudden sense that someone out there sees your resilience, your mythos, your story. Her work is tied to the belief that compassion is just as legitimate a curveball as cruelty, and that good can prevail over despair. Perhaps that’s because her art is built on legends, imagination, and memory—on women who didn’t give up, and the enduring truth that courage still matters.

Whether you meet Tracy’s work on paper, on canvas, or in a book, the promise inside it is the same: she will always try to make something that speaks to you, and something that lights your way onward. Dorothy de Kok skims author bios with mild suspicion—aware they matter, but quietly convinced they are proof that even the greatest writers have writer’s block when they have to write about themselves … and here we are.

Her own storytelling journey began at twelve, when she attempted her first novel: an earnest and spectacularly terrible fan fiction of Enid Blyton’s Magic Faraway Tree series. She finished it, reread it proudly, then lost it, which is just as well, as it was a threat to great literature.

Since then, Dorothy has collected an unusually broad résumé: high school English teacher, academic editor, safe-house director, real estate agent, and hopeful but horrendous gardener. She has spent years listening to people’s stories—students, clients, and survivors—and those voices sometimes find their way into her fiction.

She now lives in the small Karoo village of Bedford, South Africa, where the power supply is erratic and the potholes are legislated, and where inspiration tends to wander in before the first morning screech of the hadeda. She is also, by her own admission, unofficially blacklisted from owning a library card in several provinces due to her unfortunate habit of becoming emotionally attached to borrowed books and “forgetting” to return them.

“Thickly,” her Writers of the Future entry, explores what happens when the desire to be seen becomes literal—a body horror tale about enhancement, erasure, and the price of visibility in a world that demands women transform United Public Radio & UFO Paranormal Radio www.uprntalkradio.com