May’s Flower Moon takes its name from what can no longer be contained. After months of restraint, petals bloom and the land remembers how to speak in colour again.
This is the point in the season when buried secrets root themselves. What was once hidden begins to shape the present, influencing where we step and what we allow to grow.
There’s a particular intimacy to May. The world feels alive in a way that’s both inviting and unsettling. Growth is everywhere, but not everything that returns is welcome. Not every bloom is benign.
Flowers aren’t gentle things. They push through compacted soil, blooming in once-barren places.
Much like women.
Not in the sentimental way some stories suggest, but in a deeper, more feral sense. Women remember in their bodies, in their scars and instincts, and in the inherited knowledge that passes quietly from one generation to the next.
The women who inhabit my novels tend to live in this terrain. The protagonists of The Cabin in Whispering Woods, Cribbins, The Shadow of a Shadow, and The Muse are not passive witnesses to what has happened to them. They’re shaped by memory, yes, but also by how they choose to carry it. Grief, obsession, creativity, guilt, desire – these are not tidy forces, and neither are the women who navigate them.
Antagonism in my work is also female sometimes. In Emergence, the demon is not a simple embodiment of evil, but a formidable presence driven by hunger, intelligence and intent. She’s memory weaponised. A reminder that what women carry can be as dangerous as it is transformative.
During tonight’s Flower Moon, spend time somewhere untamed. Let your attention wander. Notice what draws your eye and what you instinctively turn away from.
The wilderness doesn’t judge what grows. It allows it, then adapts.
May’s Flower Moon teaches us that memory is not a thing to be conquered or controlled. It’s a living landscape. And women, like the land itself, carry histories that continue to shape what comes next.
Some secrets don’t rot when buried.
They bloom.
R. H. DIXON 