About the Author: Ashley Mayers
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Ashley Mayers graduated with Honors and Distinction from Stanford University with a BA in Music. Since then, she has used every opportunity to travel the world, from working on an archaeology dig in Sicily to working for Google as a regional trainer in Asia, based in India and Singapore. Throughout her travels she was inspired by the beautiful diversity of Southeast Asia, and she was happy to be able to combine many years of vivid cultural experiences with her humanities education and her love of fantasy literature to create her two epics, The Sita Chronicles (published 2015/2016 by Grass Roof Publishing) and The Glorious Victories of Eleanor MacLeod (published 2019 by Grass Roof Publishing). Taking her inspiration from Eleanor's unstoppable spirit, she currently lives in San Francisco, pursuing her Masters in Counseling Psychology, writing more books, organizing women's empowerment events through her role on the board of the Stanford Women's Club of San Francisco, and serving as a marketing executive for a tech startup in downtown.
Throughout her many journeys, Ashley has endeavored to celebrate the extraordinary of the ordinary. In her thirty-six years of human existence, she has traveled to forty countries, exploring a wide range of global spirituality through honest and enlightening discourse with fellow humans who were deeply committed to Hinduism, Sikhism, Jainism, Buddhism, Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Secularism, Agnosticism, and Atheism. Ashley then incorporated her global spiritual experiences into her own philosophy that celebrates the inherent divinity of existence. This inspiration, along with Ashley's passion for capturing underlying truths of the feminine experience in an accessible, non-threatening fantasy context, and giving a voice to a new generation of heroines, allowing them to break out of old, constraining paradigms, are the underlying motivations for her writing. When writing Eleanor's story, Ashley started at an unusual place. Eleanor, a minor character from The Sita Chronicles, only referenced in the context of her tragic martyrdom in childbirth in 1926, was a model of perfection that could only exist as a one-dimensional icon. Just like other dead mothers in fairy tales, like Cinderella's, Snow White's, and so many others, the only thing that mattered about Eleanor MacLeod in the first series was her womb that brought her daughter into the world. But, who really was she? What vibrancy and truth had been lost with her tragic death? What was her value beyond her ability to childbear? How much lost complexity could there be behind every other enshrined martyred mother – behind women whose deaths had turned their memories into an illusion of perfection, replacing their real voices and stories with the simplicity that so often comes from the surviving storytellers in their grief? Ashley set out to transform Eleanor's flat voice into a rich, real, wonderfully imperfect multi-dimensional one. She set out to give Eleanor life. What resulted surprised even Ashley, and as she wrote and edited the series over the course of 2017-2019, she learned as much about herself as she learned about Eleanor. It is Ashley's sincerest hope that readers will find as much inspiration and self-reflection in Eleanor's glorious victories as she did. |
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