Birth of The Styx
It all started with a single word: psychopomp.
About ten years ago, I was in my writing group talking about wanting to create something that held all the personal growth I’d been moving through in ayahuasca medicine ceremonies. I was trying to capture generational trauma, and that strange sense that the veil between the physical world and something… other… is thinner than we like to admit.
The conversation drifted toward ancestors, death doulas, and then someone said it: psychopomp.
I’d never heard the word before. When she explained it—basically a guide or liaison for the dead—something in me lit up. Not metaphorically. It felt immediate. Like a door opening.
There’s a passage in Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic where she describes ideas as living things that move through the world looking for someone willing to carry them. That’s what this felt like. Not like I invented something, but like something found me and decided I was the nearest available writer.
The moment I heard psychopomp, the image of Charon—planted years earlier in a high school mythology class—rose up fully formed. And I just knew: I was going to write about his modern-day descendants.
The details took time. Days, months, years. The world didn’t arrive all at once so much as it kept knocking, politely at first, then with increasing insistence.
I originally wrote it as a television pilot, but the format was too small for what it wanted to become. The characters needed more room. The world needed more breath.
So I came back to it as a novel.
And then, about three months into that version, the pandemic hit. And not writing was no longer an option.
In the end, I don’t think I was ever just writing about death. I was writing about inheritance—what we carry forward, what we try to break, and what keeps repeating until someone finally decides to stop the cycle. The Styx became the place where all of it collides: myth and modern life, humor and grief, love and dysfunction, the sacred and the absurd. At its core, it’s about a family trying to survive what came before them—and figuring out whether survival is enough, or if something better is possible.