Ina ene, inan ene – The feminine in me salutes the feminine in you.

Qwenaterra

Everywoman’s Place

Exploring Risks, Dangers, and Triumph in a Nation of Woman

Feminist Fiction for the 21st Century

A VOYAGE OF DISCOVERY

You’ve made a long and dangerous journey. Now you’re in a country of Woman — a growing community of refugees from masculine society seeking to create and inhabit a world that recognizes, grows, and thrives on the feminine.

Curious about these cwenas and how they live, you anticipate a warm reception, compassionate attention, harmony, even some nurturing. So does our hero. But things don’t go as planned. As she embarks on her own journey to become a cwena, she must find her place in a community still discovering both itself and the feminine it aims to embody.

In Qwenaterra, she — and you — embark on a journey into the unknown!

STORY

Fleeing a traumatic past, Urmya arrives in Qwenaterra, an experimental society in a farflung mountain valley. Urmya hopes she has finally found safety and belonging in this non-patriarchal world. Instead, she is attacked within hours of arrival.

In a society with few laws and shifting expectations, cwena behaviour is unpredictable and Urmya’s acceptance uncertain. Fearing the cwenas’ embrace of witchery, alarmed by pressure to behave in “non-masculine” ways, and uneasy with the widespread goddess worship practiced in the community, Urmya questions what living in a feminine society actually means.

After surviving a life-threatening kidnapping Urmya agrees to undertake a dangerous mission to rescue someone from her past. She must navigate possible betrayal by her once-close friend, abandonment by her guides, pursuit by hostile agents, and a community fearing for its existence.

Is living in Qwenaterra worth it?

The Saga Sanctuary

Qwenaterra’s beating heart is the Saga Sanctuary – the mountainside repository of cwenas’ sagas. Your saga is your own story of overcoming adversity in a masculine world — and not just surviving but thriving.

Together, the cwenas’ sagas add up to womanknowledge: the deep understanding of life that guides and informs the feminine and makes cwenas the resilient and effective human beings they aspire to be.

Are all the Cwenas Witches?

Cwenas join covens to practice witchery in ways that seem best to them. Some covens are dedicated to flowering plants, some watch over the river, some cultivate healing plants and medicines, some care for the Goddess Caves.

Some covens have leaders, many not. Some practice magic, others not. Witches invoke deities and divinities to bring the feminine to life, transforming what the masculine calls monsters — Sibyl, Lilith, Echidna, La Muerte, Medusa — into feminine assets.

REALM

Beyond an impenetrable ring of high mountains in the valley of the river Ubomi — which means Life — cwenas live in communities of simple wooden lodges. They grow food in hillside fields with a few basic tools, rely on an exchange economy where no money changes hands, and limit technology to cwena protection and security.

In Qwenaterra, there are homegroups instead of families, healing instead of health care, learning instead of education, and the Femsorium — absolutely not a brothel.

Cwenas rely on various forms of female divinity, but their community is dedicated to the great goddess Kali, who oversees birth and death. Whether angry and vengeful or nurturing and protecting, cwenas believe that such power is the power of the feminine they are discovering.

Qwenaterra is threatened both by outside entities seeking to infiltrate and take over as well as by internal struggles among cwenas holding different beliefs. For newcomers, navigating Qwenaterra is both risky and confusing.

Living the feminine is no picnic!

(A FEW)
CHARACTERS & DIVINITIES

Urmya

Our Hero

The newcomer through whose eyes we witness what’s good and bad in the realm of queens. Ignorant of the complexities of living the feminine, she badly wants to belong.

Druh

High Priestess

A mysterious and powerful cwena whose coven includes a band of passionate followers. She befriends Urmya – but is she Urmya’s protector, or her adversary?

Onatah

Wisewoman

A respected coven priestess who comes to Urmya’s rescue more than once. She keeps a low profile, stepping forward only when needed by the threatened cwena community.

Kali

Goddess of life and death

The cwenas’ inspiration and protection, adjudicator of all things feminine. Above the valley, in secluded mountain caves, is the home of Kali, where strange things happen.

Author

Jayce Vischer

Jayce considers the question of the feminine to be paramount for all sexes and genders. Masculine societies, since the dawn of civilization, have evolved definitions of the female and the feminine to suit themselves and leave little room for a new feminine.

Freud famously asked, What do women want? To which Jayce answers, how can we know what we want until we know who we are …

In suppressing the feminine and keeping it secondary, masculine societies have messed up our world. Jayce says it’s time to take the feminine into our own hands and give it a chance to thrive. The cwenas she has created have settled far away in an isolated place where they can build their own society and call it Qwenaterra. In doing this, they must discover what a feminine society is and what it feels like. This novel is a chance for us to join them.

We will find that it’s complicated to build something bold and new — it’s conflicted and vulnerable and mysterious. But it needs to be done.