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Welcome! I’m glad you’re here. I write personal essays from an adopted person’s perspective, touching on identity, heritage, memory, and belonging.

Roots & Branches is home to those essays.

This newsletter has grown into something larger than I first imagined. In 2025, I stepped into fiction for the first time, adopting the pen name Islay Corwin. The result is the Silverton Estate duology, two published novellas rooted in adoption, botanical knowledge, and Celtic tradition.

I invite you to explore:

Behind the Hedge
Craft essays on the making of the duology. The adoption themes, the botanical gothic world, and the thinking behind the fiction.

The Garden and the Gate
Essays on botanical traditions, Welsh healing practices, Celtic mythology, and adoption themes that ground the Silverton Estate duology. The Recovery and Preservation essay series lives here. Some essays are available to paid subscribers.

Seasons
Image poetry inspired by Japanese haiga, haiku, haibun prose poems, and vignettes of gardens, nature, nostalgia, and impermanence.

Join me on this journey between myth and memory.

Islay Corwin is the pen name of Mary Ellen Gambutti, writing lyrical fiction that honors the complexity of adoption and identity formation through the magic and myth of both the worlds we inherit and the worlds we choose. Her debut novella, Through the Yew Hedge: A Tale of Identity Magic, draws from her experience as an adoptee, weaving botanical knowledge with fae mythology to explore the search for wholeness. Through the Iron Gate: The Rosemere Records deepens the world of Silverton Estate in a gentle, gothic academia tone.

The Duology is widely available in e-book:

Through the Yew Hedge: A Tale of Identity Magic
Through the Iron Gate: The Rosemere Records
Amazon

Thanks for supporting indie authors.
I’m also the author of Permanent Home: A Memory Collection, Stroke Story, Fortitude’s Footing, Neither Here Nor There: A Memoir in Essays, and I Must Have Wandered: An Adopted Air Force Daughter Recalls. All available widely in e-book format.