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"Sybil's elegant style transports the reader into a vibrant world of emotion and story, as evocative as it is provocative. Few playwrights successfully make the transition to prose, but Sybil's wordsmithy is only bolstered by her understanding of the dramatic nature of all storytelling."

-John Pinckard, literary critic, "on and off."

Sybil St. Claire Professor of Theatre Award Winning Director | Professor of the Year Internationally Produced and Published Playwright

Sybil's first novel, "Beneficial Flowers," is anticipated in 2003. Read the prologue here.

SEPTEMBER

Leaves. Heralding transformation and the powerful cycles of life and death. Leaves. They fell like rain in Ella's garden. Just as they had in the beginning...

In the beginning there was one, Ella, sipping green tea on a beige porch. Watching the storm of leaves. Watching death float down carried on the curved back of change. Autumn came, as death does, in its own time, early this year but just as beautiful and varied as all the other seasons. In the beginning there was no garden, only weeds. Yet just beneath lay fertile soil waiting to be tilled, wanting to be tended, coaxed into something more. In the beginning there were leaves, and there was one, with no garden.
      Ella pulled a hand through auburn hair as fine as dandelion fluff and with the other pulled the crazy quilt tighter round her shoulders. Beneath, blowzy and breezy, a white cotton shift enveloped her. She felt comforted, wrapped so. Remembrances of lingering mornings cocooned in Grandmother's sheets surfaced, stirred and yawned sweet. Hands in the earth, the smell of life ripe in her hair, barefoot days of laughter, skirts flying as she ran into the wind and it lifted her to a place where she could fly. Then the sadness of things that are forever lost, like Grandmothers and childhoods, pulled her down into itself.
     She lay her head in her hands and allowed herself to cry. These days every brush stroke, no matter how promising or vivid, seemed mixed with this primary color -- the color of a sigh, of tears gone dry. The color of sad. She was between the worlds. In the realm of void and darkness before the struggle to be born begins anew, and almost everything made her ache for something else, something just out of reach, something of a different color. She was beyond the fire of denial, far into deep blue acceptance, yet when she was still the color sad seeped. But there were dogs to feed and clothes to wash and an empty bed in which to sleep, and so she dried her tears and went on with the slow business of going.

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