The Woman Who Would Not Leave

On Archetype, Staying, and Why Fiction Needs the Ones Who Refuse

26 April 2026 ~ 3 min read

I cut an article out of a newspaper more than twenty years ago. I still have it. The paper has yellowed. The creases are soft from being folded and unfolded. It looks, feels, and smells different from any version I could pull up online — more real, more visceral, more defiant. The way old things are. The way things made by hand are.

The article was about a Diné woman named Pauline. She lived on land in northern Arizona that the federal government had decided, for reasons that had nothing to do with her, she no longer had the right to live on. She was told to leave. She did not leave. She stood on the ground her family had stood on for generations and refused to step off it, and the force of her refusal reshaped what a government could and could not do to the people who live on land it wants.

I had never met her. I had never set foot on her land. But I cut the article out and kept it, and I have been carrying it, in one form or another, for twenty years.

Three Moons is not a novel about Pauline. The land is different. The culture is different. The history is different. What is the same is the stubbornness. The refusal. The relationship between a woman and the ground under her feet — the relationship the world calls impractical and the woman calls life.

Her name is Colleen. That is all. She has no last name. No one in the novel has one. The whiskey jack who follows her through the snow is called Little Jack. Nothing more. A reader can place this novel anywhere in the northern forests where people used to tap sugar maples by hand, and the placement will hold, because the people are not specimens of a region. They are archetypes. They could be anyone. That is the point.

This is the figure I have been carrying since I cut the article.

Antigone would not leave her brother’s body, even when the law of the king said she must. She buried him with her own hands and took the punishment because some refusals are not negotiable. The women of Greenham Common would not leave the fence around the air base. They stayed for nineteen years. The sean-bhean bhocht of Irish tradition — the poor old woman who is also the sovereignty of the land itself — does not leave, because she cannot leave. She is the land. The land is her. Homer’s Penelope would not leave Ithaca, even when every suitor in the Mediterranean arrived to offer her something easier. She stayed, and she waited, and she undid the shroud every night so that nothing would be finished before the thing she was waiting for came home.

The archetype runs through every culture where land has been taken from people. It runs through every culture because land has been taken from people everywhere.

A novel needs this figure. Not as politics. As presence. A story needs a person who has decided that the ground under her feet is not negotiable, because that kind of person forces the book — and forces the reader — to ask what they themselves are willing to stand on. Most of us have never had to answer that question. Most of us have never been asked to leave. But somewhere, on some morning, the question comes for all of us, in one form or another, and the only people who know how to answer it are the ones who have watched someone else do it first.

Colleen is her own Odysseus. Her own Pauline. Her own Antigone. She is not a copy of any of them. She is what happens when the archetype walks into a new landscape and keeps walking.

I have been carrying an article for twenty years because a woman I never met taught me something about staying. I wrote a novel about a woman who has no last name, in a place that could be any place, because the lesson was never about one woman or one place. The lesson was about all of us — about what we stand on, and what we refuse to leave, and what we are willing to lose before we step off the ground.

Her name is Colleen. She would not leave.

That is the novel.

~ Liam