Renée C. Martine writings explore grief, intuition,
and the deeper patterns shaping our lives.
Where the quiet things are said out loud
We all carry a story. Some are spoken, some painted, others whispered quietly between the pages. If we don’t allow those stories to move through us — through words, through art, through whatever language the soul understands — they linger unfinished.
Writing, for me, became another way to make sense of life’s weight and wonder. It’s the thread that ties together my art, my photography, and the questions that never seem to stop asking themselves. Each sentence feels a bit like a brushstroke — another attempt to capture what can’t always be spoken aloud.
These writings are fragments of that journey: pieces of thought, emotion, and faith woven together into something that feels, at times, like belonging.
THE SHALING
My First Novel
In 2013, in the wake of my brother and his family’s deaths, grief hollowed out a space inside me that nothing could reach — not logic, not time, not even my stubborn willpower.
So I did the only thing that still felt alive: I wrote. Canvas art came five years later, but this story—The Shaling—poured out of me like it had a mission of its own.
Twenty-three-year-old Ancient DNA student Talia Minor has always been fascinated by what endures after death. But when her roommate introduces her to a guided journey session, Talia unexpectedly discovers sensory fragments embedded in skeletal DNA—unlocking a phenomenon both astonishing and deeply human: the past is not gone at all, but encoded. These dormant genetic imprints form a visceral pathway into prior lives—their emotions, their pain, and their unfinished stories.
At first, Talia questions her sanity. But as the phenomenon intensifies, she discovers it is not hers alone: friends, strangers, and adversaries all carry echoes of identities they once were. She names this conduit “The Shaling”—a fusion of memory and matter that challenges everything she believes about life, death, and who we become.
When her mentor, Professor Jillian Avery, steals her research and attempts The Shaling procedure herself, it goes catastrophically wrong. Avery collapses into a coma with no medical explanation. Through her visions, Talia sees the truth: Avery has fallen into a brutal rural witch-hunt in a former lifetime, already condemned and moments from execution. If she dies there, she dies here.
To save her, Talia must navigate fractured timelines, confront devastating revelations about her own origins, and decide how much of herself she’s willing to sacrifice for someone who betrayed her. What begins as an academic breakthrough becomes a psychological unraveling and reckoning with inherited trauma, unfinished histories, and the biology of memory itself—and the clock is ticking.
(Cover artwork not original.)
A WALK BACK TO GOD
A Spiritual Memoir Inspired by True Events
After completing the memoir, I realized it carried a profound healing element—especially in how it reshaped my understanding of God.
My father, a Catholic, often used religion as a weapon. Before I was born, he had been a soldier for the White Fence gang in Boyle Heights, tied to La Eme, the Mexican Mafia in 1950. In time he escaped that life and found refuge among Jehovah’s Witnesses, using the religion like is own witness protection program for the man he once was—with family in tow.
But the violence remained.
He succeeded in removing himself from the brutality of his position in the gang, but he could not escape the physical and emotional scarring, and when I was five years old, one of his violent outbursts struck me in the face, causing a ruptured artery that led to my near-death experience.
The memoir reflects the disconnect from God at a very young age, that never loosened its grip. Sixty years later, shaped by secrecy, suppression, and the conditioning created by the man my biological father was and the lie we all led—never fully understanding what I was missing in the eyes of my spiritual Father.
Writing the story forced me to confront not only my past, but also the complicated relationship with God that I had long rejected.
Interestingly, two months after completing my 60,000 word story, A Walk Back To God, I left my home to run errands and found white scrap paper with a hand written message in blue ink. It read, John 1:1 “In the beginning the Word was God, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. Incredible coincidence, or something more divine.