People don’t plan trips to Radiant. It doesn’t even earn a bold font on a map of Virginia—if it’s marked at all. It’s the kind of place Google Maps skips over—not quite big enough to matter, not quite small enough to disappear.
But folks find their way to it, detouring off the interstate to get gas or a bite to eat. And once they arrive on main street, lined with buildings more than a century old, they often stay for a spell—enjoying a cup of coffee or a local beer at that cute little pub on Beverly Street. There’s something about those old buildings, brick fronts soft with age and paint ghosts from long-gone businesses, that reminds visitors of old friends. Of home.
There’s a feed store that became a café, a courthouse clock that’s always a little slow, and a narrow creek that runs behind the hardware store before slipping out of sight again. The mountains crowd close, but the air feels open here—like a pause between places.
Radiant is a place kids dream of escaping, then miss like a piece of themselves once they’re gone. A place where time slows down just a little, as it filters through the mountains.
Radiant is also completely fictional. It’s a place I made up.
Why does it seem so real to me?
Why does it consume so much of my creative energy?
Why Radiant?
Like most places with magic, it’s because of the people.
They’re not a fancy group: mothers, grandmothers, sisters, uncles. A check-out lady at the local grocery store. A manager at the gas station. A social worker. A little girl readying herself for the first day of kindergarten. They’re ordinary people who navigate the things I see and experience every day.
The ones who stay too long at the diner talking about weather and the price of gas. The ones who show up at funerals even when they weren’t close, because it feels wrong not to. The ones who make mistakes big enough to break a family, and then spend years trying to put the pieces back together.
I think I write about Radiant because it lets me hold all of them—the broken, the kind, the ones who keep showing up. It reminds me that even small lives matter. That the quiet corners of the map are worth saving. Worth visiting.
Radiant is a place where grace and grief coexist, often in the same breath. Not peacefully, but in a way that feels possible. A place where I can offer redemption to my characters when the real world feels too sharp.
I think some places we invent because we need them to exist.
That’s Radiant for me.
Why Radiant? Because I need it.
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