Meet Our Contributing Authors
Welcome to the cozy coven of scribes, scholars, stitchers, and story-spinners who keep Spinsters Row humming. These are the humans behind the words. Part literary gremlins, part neighborhood historians, part professional experts and all chaos goblins with excellent penmanship. Some write under pen names, while others boldly attach their real-life credentials to their musings.
Whether they’re researching folklore at 2 a.m., debating embroidery techniques, or arguing about which tea pairs best with existential dread, our contributors are the heartbeat of this peculiar little community.
Pull up a chair, pour yourself something warm, and meet the minds who make the magic.
Matron Ursula Brassline
Matron Ursula Brassline is a healer, researcher, and resident guardian for Spinsters Row. Known for blending ancient folk remedies with practical science, she writes about herbal lore, wellness, and the curious intersection of body and spirit.
Drawing from her travels Ursula brings warmth, courage, and a touch of wild intuition to every piece. When she’s not tending patients, she’s brewing nettle tinctures or offering unsolicited but excellent health advice.
Dr. Theodosia Marigold Hartwell and Percy Underleaf
Dr. Theodosia Marigold Hartwell is a scholar and a practitioner of heart-centered healing on Spinsters Row. After years of study, Dot now writes about emotional well-being, gentle magic, and the human gears that keep us turning.
With her assistant, Percy Underleaf, she brings a blend of academic insight and empathetic artistry to her work. When she’s not guiding patients, she’s designing empathy devices or coaxing troubled hearts back into alignment.
Harriet Jernigan
Harriet Jernigan, known as the Fencing Bard, is a writer, storyteller, and educator whose work spans lived experience, cultural rhetoric, and the joyful chaos of performance. A Moth StorySLAM winner and founder of First Person, she champions underrepresented voices through storytelling workshops and live shows.
Harriet writes for Spinsters Row with the same energy she brings to the stage — warmth, craft, and a fierce belief in community. She is also a Lecturer in Writing and Rhetoric at Stanford University and an advocate for inclusive, accessible storytelling spaces.
At Spinsters Row, our contributors aren’t just authors. They’re experts, artists, lifelong learners, and lovingly opinionated weirdos who bring depth to every sentence. Their backgrounds span crafting, history, literature, feminist studies, handmade culture, healthcare, education, small-business life, and even the fine art of knowing which mythical creature would steal your socks.
Their work is rooted in real research, lived experience, and the kind of niche knowledge you only get from people who read footnotes for fun.
Some of our authors write under pen names — a long-standing tradition among writers, rabble-rousers, queer theorists, revolutionaries, and anyone who values privacy or creative play. For some, it’s protection; for others, it’s a persona that lets them write with even more spark.
Whether using their legal name or a delightfully mysterious moniker, every contributor brings authenticity, expertise, and imagination to Spinsters Row.
This eclectic collective is what gives us our signature voice: informed, imaginative, and anchored in trust. When our authors speak, they’re drawing from hands-on experience, academic knowledge, lived journeys, craft tables, travel journals, community activism, and probably a few very dramatic library overdue notices.
In short:
They know their stuff.
They love their stuff.
They write about it with honesty, humor, and just enough mischief to keep you turning the page.
