Roshani Chokshi – Write on the World

In A Dark and Wild Wood, women survive by making themselves smaller for men who were never as powerful as they seemed in the first place. Inspired by the Bluebeard fairy tale, A Dark and Wild Wood is a lush, gothic historical fantasy drenched in ghostly visions, dark magic, and decaying beauty. The novel follows Salomé, a young woman cursed—or perhaps gifted—with the ability to see spirits. After witnessing her foster mother burned as a witch, she and her beloved sister Rochelle are sent to live in a convent, where silence, obedience, and repression become the conditions of survival. But the convent is only the first prison Salomé inhabits.

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When Rochelle vanishes, Salomé eventually escapes and spends five years working in a brothel, surviving at the whims of the men around her while continuing to hide her supernatural abilities for fear of suffering the same fate as her foster mother. The novel smartly presents the convent and the brothel as two versions of the same confinement. One is built around religious authority, the other around male desire, but both demand submission and self-erasure from women in exchange for survival.

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Stories don’t always begin with a lifelong dream of being a writer—sometimes they start with a reader who wants a book badly enough to create it themselves. In this interview, Nichelle Giraldes talks about finding her way to writing through that quiet, persistent pull of story; the power of small, precise details to carry enormous emotion; and why her work keeps circling back to the complicated ways women love, protect, and measure one another. We also discuss gothic horror, visual art as inspiration, cutting beloved scenes, and what it really means to keep showing up to the page long after the traditional markers of “success” have been reached.

Nichelle Giraldes’ latest novel, *The Forest of Missing Girls*, released November 11, 2025.

Q: What’s a memory of a story or book that made you realize you wanted to be a writer?
A: I was a reader long before I ever thought about being a writer. I was a total library kid growing up! The kind of child who had to have their books taken away at bedtime so I’d actually go to sleep instead of reading under the covers. Even then, I never had any aspirations or even interest in writing those stories myself.

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