The Familiars: Pack Magic
About this audiobook
The Book as a Collection (of fun short stories): The house smelled like dog and cat and pig, no matter how much she cleaned. Her furniture was destroyed. Her yard was a minefield of holes and toys and pig wallows. Her bank account was perpetually drained by vet bills and food costs.
And she wouldn't change a single thing.
These were her familiars, her companions, her teachers. Each one had chosen her, or she had chosen them, and in that choosing, they had become family. Not the family she'd been born into—though she loved JJ, Mike and Ashley and her parents fiercely….but the family she'd built, creature by creature, connection by connection.
The Book as Spell: In magical thinking, a spell is a concentrated act of attention and intention that reorganizes reality. Stories, when crafted from genuine experience and genuine need, can function this way. The Familiars reads as a spell I cast against my own grief. Specifically, the grief of losing her father, Duane, which is the silent engine driving the entire anthology.
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About the author
Tiffany Solter, PhD is a mental health professional, educator, advocate, and lifelong seeker of magic whose writing explores the boundaries between life, death, justice, and the profound connections that define us. Born into a family of mountain people spanning Wyoming and Colorado, she grew up shaped, largely, by two grandmothers who taught her, one through train journeys across the West, the other chasing shooting stars across the plains, that anything is possible.
A survivor of a near-death experience in 1996, Solter spent decades integrating what she encountered in that "warm place where light is everything" into a life of healing work, academic achievement, and fierce advocacy. She holds a doctorate with a dissertation on grace and recovery, and has worked alongside peer counselors, nurses, and mental health teams she considers among the most transformative teachers of her life.
Her advocacy voice is unflinching and deeply personal. In "Be a Man": The Violence Society Ignores, Solter turns her clinical expertise and lived experience toward a crisis our culture has long refused to see: domestic violence against men. Drawing on research, survivor accounts, and her own family history, she challenges the archetypal and institutional blind spots that leave male victims invisible, unbelieved, and without adequate resources. The book is equal parts gripping fiction, Jungian psychological analysis, and practical call to action. It is complete with resource guides for survivors, supporters, military families, and children. It is the work of someone who has sat in clinical rooms with these men, loved them as family, and refused to stay silent.
She lives in what she calls Camelot, a home she and her husband Jeff manifested in childhood whispers, surrounded by family, familiars, motorcycles, and what she simply calls the magic.
“Between Worlds” is her memoir. "Be a Man" is her battle cry.
