| Emma Restall Orr (Bobcat) |
| Walter William Melnyk (Oak) |
| Co-Authors of The Apple and The Thorn |
| Walter William Melnyk was, for twenty-three years ending in March of 2005, a priest in The Episcopal Church in the United States, and a walker between the worlds of Anglican Christianity and Celtic Druidry. His part in creating The Apple and The Thorn emerges from his own journey out of one tradition into the other. Melnyk graduated from Washington & Lee University in 1969 with a BA in journalism. In 1981 he graduated from the University of the South with a Master of Divinity degree. He was ordained to the priesthood of The Episcopal Church in 1982. Over the ministry career that followed, he served churches in South Carolina, Tennessee, Michigan, Florida, New York, and Pennsylvania. He explored with growing interest the connections between early Celtic Christianity and pre-Christian Celtic Druidry, maintaining a passion for finding common ground between those traditions. His teaching in The Episcopal Church was grounded in the Celtic tradition, from which so much of Anglicanism has emerged. In July of 2003 Melnyk led a ritual at Stonehenge for Christians and Druids seeking interfaith understanding. That ritual was attended by Emma Restall Orr, head of The Druid Network and former joint Chief of the British Druid Order. In mid-2004 the two agreed to collaborate on a novel about the meeting of Druid and Christian spiritualities in the persons of the Lady of Avalon and Joseph of Arimathea in what is present day Glastonbury. Accused of heresy for his Druid connections, Melnyk regrettedly left the ministry of The Episcopal Church in March of 2005. He has been happily married for over twenty years, with three children and four grandchildren. He lives in an old farmhouse in Pennsylvania. |
| Emma Restall Orr began studying Druidry in 1984, under various teachers. In 1994 she became Joint Chief of the British Druid Order, a post she held until 2003. In that year she left the BDO to form The Druid Network, which she has headed since. Emma is regularly booked to give talks at major Pagan events in Britain. She teaches many workshops, including her nine-month Living Druidry course which is booked up three years in advance. She has presented workshops across the USA, Australia, and Europe for Pagan groups and at universities, including the London School of Economics, the University of Wales, and Pennsylvania State University. She is a founding member of Honouring the Ancient Dead (HAD), an organization negotiating with the British government and other relevant bodies about ancient Pagan human remains and associated artifacts. Apart from a wide variety of jobs in her late teens (concept writer, legal secretary, television model) as she traveled around the world, Emma has been a full-time student and then a priest with the Druid tradition all her adult life. She is still happily married after twenty years, and has a gifted teenaged son whom she home-educated until he went to school at age fourteen She is widely published around the world, including numerous books, essays and articles, and appears often on television and radio as a teacher and spokesperson from the Pagan community. |
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| It is interesting to note that the authors have only met face to face on three occasions: Once at the celebration at Stonehenge in 2003, once for the final editing of The Apple and the Thorn in Glastonbury in the spring of 2005, and finally for the release of the book, also in Glastonbury, in December of 2007. The project was a true transatlantic collaboration. |