Fire Carriers: A Manual for Women Who Refuse to Be Extinguished

Fire Carriers: A Manual for Women Who Refuse to Be Extinguished is a bold, interactive guide for women reclaiming their power. Donna Lois explores twelve archetypes—Witch, Madwoman, Whore, Bitch, Crone, and more—that history tried to demonize but that hold truth, wisdom, and strength. The book blends storytelling, ritual, and reader participation, encouraging women to write, tear, burn, and transform its pages. It is a work of healing and rebellion for women who are tired of shrinking and ready to rise.

INTRODUCTION: THE SPARK

You picked up this book because something in you is burning.

Maybe it's rage at a world that demands you shrink yourself to fit through doors designed for smaller dreams. Maybe it's grief for the parts of yourself you've murdered to seem acceptable. Maybe it's the friction between who you are and who you're allowed to be, generating heat that has nowhere to go but inward, charring your edges, smoking out your truth.

Whatever it is, you've been told to put it out. To calm down. To be reasonable. To consider others' comfort. To find healthier outlets. To process your feelings appropriately. To stop being so much.

This book is not about putting out your fire. This book is about becoming flame.

In these pages, you'll meet twelve archetypes of women who have been demonized, pathologized, and punished for existing in their full power. The Witch who knows without permission. The Madwoman who refuses composure. The Whore who owns her desire. The Bitch who sets boundaries. Each one holds medicine we need, power they tried to burn out of us, truth that terrifies systems built on our silence.

These aren't costumes to try on or personalities to adopt. They're aspects of your own wholeness that have been split off, shamed, and shadowbanned from your life. They're the parts of you that know things, feel things, want things, and refuse things in ways that make others uncomfortable. They're your fire, separated into different flames so we can examine each one without being consumed.

This book is interactive because transformation isn't a spectator sport. You'll find rituals that require participation, margins that beg for your thoughts, and pages designed to be destroyed in service of your becoming. This isn't precious. This isn't meant to be preserved. This is meant to be used, marked up, torn apart, and set on fire if necessary.

I wrote this book in my own blood and tears and 3 AM revelations, but it becomes yours the moment you read it. Your marginalia matters more than my text. Your experience trumps my theories. Your fire burns hotter than any match I could strike with words.

A warning: This book will not make you more likable. It might make you unemployable in certain contexts, unmarriageable to certain people, unwelcome in certain spaces. It will definitely make you less willing to swallow poison and call it wine. Less able to smile while drowning. Less interested in making yourself digestible for those who would devour you anyway.

But here's what it will do: It will remind you that you were never meant to be lukewarm. That your fire isn't the problem—the problem is a world that profits from women's coldness. That every part of you they tried to extinguish was the part that could have lit the way forward.

The world is burning anyway. Might as well burn on purpose, with purpose, as the woman you were meant to be before they handed you water and called it salvation.

Welcome to the fire. Welcome to yourself.

Let's burn.