formerly Sebastienne Holt
Age: Late twenties to early thirties
Race: Human
Pronouns: She/Her
Profession: Poet, artisan, spoken word performer
Known For: Haunting poetry on memory and motherlines, stitched or sculpted into handmade chapbooks and mixed-media installations. She often performs under soft lighting with ink-stained palms and a voice that cuts like silk.
Profile:
From the rooftop flat of an ageing Lindral townhouse, Sestine Varrow writes late into the night. Her rooms are mismatched and sun-faded — a trailing vine in every window, threadbare cushions, and fabric scraps hung as makeshift curtains that shift the colour of the flat as the sun sets. Clay dust clings to the floorboards, paint pots crowd the corners, and shelves bow under the weight of old books and jars of found objects. A place patched together from remnants. Just like her.
Sestine is known in Lindral’s livelier arts quarters — where paint-stained fingers tap rhythms on café tabletops and verse is traded for wine. In open mics lit by candle chandeliers, in courtyards strung with bunting and song, her voice is known. Her work carries the weight of things left unsaid, of bloodlines she refuses to name. She sculpts, binds, and weaves language into the physical, creating zines that hum with intimacy and rage.
Few know she was once Sebastienne Holt, daughter of Merevine Holt — Lindral’s so-called Voice of Decency. That name is spoken like a wound behind closed doors. Sestine doesn’t speak of her past, except through her work. The truth of her escape — the suffocating rituals, the tidy lies, the mother who valued appearance over affection — is threaded into every line she pens. She left, married young, divorced quickly, and kept the name Varrow as a shield.
Despite the distance, her ache for Calbrae lingers. They exchange rare letters, always unsigned. Sestine wishes her other mother had fought for her, but part of her understands. It’s this contradiction — the softness inside fury — that gives her work its power.
She now lives with a rescued lurcher named Parch, who is afraid of sudden sounds and wears a coat stitched from one of her old dresses.
Notable Work:
- My Mother’s Mouth is a Locked Door — a zine stitched with red thread on grey felt, displayed briefly at The Tide & Thistle gallery.
- Hinge — a spoken word piece performed beside the Hollow Library ruins, where she once carved “SESTINE LIVES” into a crumbled column.
Rumours:
- That she’s been invited to contribute to The Lindral Observer under a pseudonym.
- That one of her siblings found her last performance by accident — and left before the final line.
