“We Like To Be Moved. We Like To Feel Connected To What It Means To Be Human. To Be Reminded Of Our Inextricable Connection To One Another - Brene Brown.
Meet Jo Cora
I was twenty-two when a drunk driver turned his car at speed into the vehicle I was travelling in. The impact broke my spine.
It was 1 a.m. I was on my way home that evening from working in a bar, and in those days nobody wore a seat belt in the back. I was leaning forward, talking to the guys up front, and the sudden impact shattered a bone in my lower vertebrae. I was a few millimetres from paralysis.
Luckily on that night the stars must have been in my favour, or the universe had other plans for me, because I survived. Of course, I spent a month in hospital, and I couldn’t work for the next two years, but I was alive. During my convalescence I spent many days propped up on pillows, and it was here from the bed clothes and blankets that I found my love for words. Poetry, song-writing and stories.
My friends were all into music, both making it, listening to it and dancing to it, and eventually I followed suit, studying popular music and song-writing at college. When that time ended, as coming of age stories tend to do, I started working in the field of psychology. It almost hurt to be creative, because I wanted it so much that I had to put it away.
It was years later, after careers and relationships came and went, and my daughter was young and a keen reader, that I started thinking about writing again. I missed being creative. There was something bland and flat about my life. I wanted the magic. I wanted to create.
I started to write fables and short stories in literary and speculative fiction, and I tended to write about human relationships. My first short story collection, Wild Love: Stories of Connection, is centred around the themes of transformation, healing and love. You can listen to a sample further down this page as I narrate a three-minute story called ‘Wait For The Night’.
Now I share my home with my teenage daughter, two cats and two house-rabbits. I read contemporary and literary fiction. I love art, spirituality, happy endings and chai lattes. I still prop myself up on endless cushions, but this time it’s my writing place, and it’s my favourite place to be.
Jo Cora has been published three times in the Starlight Emporium Magazine and was shortlisted in the Ovacome Short Story award.
Wild Love: Stories of Connection
Human lives are complex. We live a life of polarity, of ups and downs. It is a curse of youth that when times are good we don’t appreciate it, and when times are bad, pain will be our teacher. Beauty and sadness, laughter and tears. Life never stands still, but love is the one constant that we cannot live without.
At the centre of all this is our connectedness with other humans. Friendships that take us on a journey to self. Love that takes us to the edge of madness. Our connections with others are raw, magical, devastating and curious. Our literature should reflect this.
Nest of Lies
A bird is building a nest of lies. How many lies can she stack into her nest before the whole thing falls apart? She’s about to learn an uncomfortable truth, can her friend help her, before it's too late?
Stories wouldn't quite add up, excuses piled up like yesterday's trash, littering the water with broken promises and old baggage. Just when she thought she was getting somewhere the nest would slam up against a truth, and the bird had to start over again.
I am fascinated by humans who are habitual liars and the way in which they construct their whole outer world based on manipulation of the truth. The story raises the question of what lies beneath the surface of a perfectly curated lie.
Wild Love is a collection of stories and words and about human connection.
Jo Cora’s stories create a simple narrative to make sense of what is too sacred to be ignored. What is too raw to be spoken. Using fables and short speculative fiction she explores what it is to be human.
Wild Love: Stories of Connection is due out in 2024, along with three fully sound designed audiobooks.
Maya-i: Rebirth of the Virtual Gods
Jo Cora is co-writer, with legendary visual artist Jai Sol, on Maya-i: Rebirth of the Virtual Gods, a three part sci-fi meets mythology series for TV. The themes are A.I, consciousness, spirituality and psychology. To learn more, join the mailing list.
They prayed to their Gods, until they looked in the mirror, and God answered back.
Bio
Jo Cora is a creative writer living in Cheshire, UK.
She has a background in psychology and is a transformational therapist.
She is currently editing her first story collection and three fully sound designed audio books, Wild Love: Stories of Connection.
She is also co-writer on a three series 'sci-fi meets mythology' narrative Maya-i: Rebirth of the Virtual Gods, which goes into production in 2024.
Jo Cora has been published three times in the US mag Starlight Emporium magazine. Her story Soulshell was short listed for the Ovacome short story award 2020. She was a finalist in the Olga Sinclar short story award 2022 with Nest of Lies and the story was published in an anthology in March 2023.
She is a finalist in the Women on Writing Award 2023 with A Dark and Moonless Night.
Wait for the Night
Written by Jo Cora
Sound design by Sean Mbaya
Recorded at Moloto Studio
Coming Soon
Wild Love is a collection of stories, fables, prose, poems and affirmations about human connection and
self-love.
A boy is collecting pebbles on the beach. Alongside the boy walks another, his name is Sadness. What happens when the boy finds the lost things, and who is Sadness?
A mother leaves her baby sleeping in a crib to go walking in the forest, as it starts to snow will she ever find her way back home, and who is the mysterious woman in the kingfisher-blue cloak?
Somewhere deep within a well lives The Scream, forgotten by politeness and manners. One day Love gets hurt and the Scream must try and help.
Right now a narcissistic swan is looking at his reflection in the twelve-mile lake. He knows himself to be magnificent, but what has happened to Adora and Echo?
Love your story..
Would you like Jo Cora to write your origin story? A story which is significant to your life, maybe the origin of your business, or the story of how you met your one true love? Perhaps you have stories from your childhood that you would like to pass on to your grandchildren.
You can book Jo Cora to write your origin story for your website or a create a simple story book with photographs to cherish forever. Send Jo Cora an email to enquire at [email protected]
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