Theodora Goss's Blog, page 43

The Poetry Notebooks

Tonight, I'm organizing the poetry notebooks.

There are three of them: Childhood-1995, 1996-2005, and 2006-Present. They're woefully disorganized. The first one is filled with handwritten scraps of paper, some of them torn out of spiral notebooks. There are some typed poems toward the end. It may seem silly to type them all up – after all, most of them will never see the light of day (if I can help it). But who knows, perhaps Ophelia will want to read them someday, and I do want to keep a record of what I've written, even if it's early, early work. (Meaning, from when I was a teenager. I think the first poems in the notebook are from high school.) The middle one is all right, although I just created new dividers, and I will probably reprint a number of the poems. There are a least a few from those years that have been published and that are worth including in a collection. The last one has to be created. I thought I'd kept better track of what I'd written, but evidently not. And that's where the bulk of the poetry I've published has come from.

I've told you that I'm cleaning up the mess, right? This is part of that process. Today I bought a cork board to go over my desk, so I can stop putting yellow stickies on the wall. And I bought my day-planner for next year. (I always get the day-planner of all day-planners, the one that lets you fill in daily, weekly, and monthly schedules.) At the moment I'm in the middle of dealing with the poetry notebooks, because if I'm going to put a poetry collection together, I may as well clean up my notebooks as well.

So today you won't get much of a blog post from me. I'm cleaning and organizing.

But I did write a poem today, and I thought I would share it. Here it is:

What Would You Think

What would you think

if I told you that I was beautiful?

That I walked through the orchards in a white cotton dress,

wearing shoes of bark.

In early morning, when mist lingered over the grass,

and the apples, red and gold, were furred with dew,

I picked one, biting into its crisp, moist flesh,

then spread my arms and looked up at the clouds,

floating high above, and the clouds looked back at me.

By the edge of a pasture I opened milkweed pods,

watching the white fluff float away on the wind.

I held up my dress and danced among the chickory

under the horses' mild, incurious gaze

and followed the stream along its meandering ways.

What would you think

if I told you that I was magical?

That I had russet hair down to the backs of my knees

and the birds stole it for their nests

because it was stronger than horsehair and softer than down.

That when the storm winds roiled,

I could still them with a word.

That when I called, the gray geese would call back

come with us, sister, and I considered rising

on my own wings and following them south.

But if not me, who would make the winter come?

Who would breathe on the windows, creating landscapes of frost,

and hang icicles from the gutters?

What would you think, daughter, if I told you

that in a dress of white wool and deerhide boots

I danced the winter in? And that in spring

dressed in white cotton lawn, wearing birchbark shoes,

I wandered among the deer and marked their fawns

with my fingertips? That I slept among the ferns?

Would you say, she is old, her mind is wandering?

Or would you say, I am beautiful, I am magical,

and go yourself to dance the seasons in?

(Look in my closet. You will find my shoes of bark.)

Right now this is just an experiment, one I'm still working on. But that's what I did today – organize, write a poem.

Oh, and you should have an illustration for it. She's not wearing birchbark shoes, but here you go: Windflowers by John William Waterhouse.

A Quiet Christmas

Perhaps I'm getting more selfish, but I decided some time ago that on holidays, I wasn't going to do anything I didn't want to. That means no long trips to see relatives. No elaborate decorating, because I don't really see the point. A Christmas tree with silver and red glass balls, ornaments of painted wood, white lace snowflakes (many of which I made myself), strings of popcorn and cranberries, with a white lace angel on top. Among the branches, small white lights twinkling like stars. Hanging from the mantle, the stockings I made. And Christmas cards on the mantle and bookshelves. Add presents under the tree, and I'm not sure what else you need. No enormous meals, just some of the treats one rarely gets during the year. Christmas morning is the one morning of the year when one can legitimately eat a chocolate Santa for breakfast, for example. (As Ophelia did this morning. Although I believe part of his torso may still be left.)

So what does one do? Read. Get some rest. It makes for a very quiet holiday.

I bought myself a Christmas present: I went to the local crafts store and had three pictures framed (a Ruth Sanderson engraving I bought at the World Fantasy Convention, a painting by Janet Chui that I bought long ago, and a limited-edition print by an artist whose name I no longer remember – I can't make out the signature – that I bought in a small gallery). And I got a present in my stocking: a certificate to get the antique slipper chair I bought reupholstered. (And some perfume and chocolate.) But at a certain point in life, you have everything you need, and you find yourself wondering how to get rid of things, rather than how to acquire more. (Of course Ophelia received many presents. But then, she's still in the process of acquiring, and can one really have too many fossils and origami kits?)

What did I do? I rested, but I also made a list for myself of the stories I'd like to write this year. The list looks like this:

Elena's Egg

England under the White Witch

A Green Thought in a Green Shade

From the Journal of Imaginary Anthropology: Cimmeria

To Merlin, with Love

Red as Blood and White as Bone

Dresses White and Shoes of Bark

Song of the South

The Music Lover

The Blue Women of Ubar/Ulan

How to Dress for the Firing Squad (Wild Rose)

Blanchefleur

I'm not sure when I'll have time to write all these stories, but today I started on "Blanchefleur," which I've been meaning to write for a long time. Next semester is going to be very, very busy, but I do want to make sure that I focus on the writing. After all, this is why I did the dissertation – so I could get to a point where I can write steadily.

I think there is a kind of selfishness inherent in the creative life. You make sure that you have time to work on your own projects, that your creative work is a priority – as much as possible. So you carve out time and resources for it. In a sense, it teaches you a valuable lesson – that it's possible to choose a quiet Christmas, that peace and comfort and joy are not only what the holiday is about, but things you can actually have. And, as important as all those, you can also have meaningful work.

Next week, I will take Ophelia to museums and parks. And I will prepare for the next semester, and try to finish one of those stories. I'm very glad this holiday was restful.

The Lion's Roar

You'd think that on Christmas Eve I would have some words of wisdom, but I don't. Except that for the first time I had Christmas pudding, and the experience was positively Dickensian. I understand why the Victorians would have loved that dense ball of fruit and sweetness, in the middle of winter when sugar and even dried fruit were probably hard to come by, but it put me to sleep for hours and hours. My stomach is still grumbling in protest.

(I'm telling it that we all have to sacrifice for historical research.)

What I really did today, when I wasn't eating Christmas pudding or putting packages (including a contract for a story I'll tell you about soon) in the mail, was think about what I want to write in the coming year. I made a list of all the stories I have ideas for, the novels I want to work on. I think I know what I want to do for the next six months. I just I hope get, or can make, the time to do it.

Several days ago, a commenter left me a link to a song on YouTube. It was "The Lion's Roar" by First Aid Kit. I thought you might like it as much as I do, and for some reason, I think it's perfect for Christmas:

And while I was on YouTube, I found another song by First Aid Kit that I particularly liked, called "I Met Up With the King":

I love how strange and oblique these songs are, how I don't understand exactly what they mean but they suggest so much. What I want in the next year is a genuine creative life, the sort of life I've been struggling to have because there was always a dissertation to write. Now, there's no dissertation to write. There's still a lot of work to get done – teaching to do, just ordinary life to live. But I'm looking forward to working on some of the projects I've put off for so long.

I think I'm hearing the lion's roar . . .

Three Sentences

This is a post about writing news. I thought you might like to know that my story "Pug," which was originally published in Asimov's, is going to be in Rich Horton's Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy anthology for 2012. Here's the cover and the table of contents.

"The Silver Wind" by Nina Allan

"Martian Heart" by John Barnes

"East of Furious" by Jonathan Carroll

"Late Bloomer" by Suzy McKee Charnas

"The Last Sophia" by C.S.E. Cooney

"Walking Stick Fires" by Alan DeNiro

"The Adakian Eagle" by Bradley Denton

"Rampion" by Alexandra Duncan

"And Weep Like Alexander" by Neil Gaiman

"Pug" by Theodora Goss

"Widows in the World" by Gavin Grant

"Ghostweight" by Yoon Ha Lee

"Choose Your Own Adventure" by Kat Howard

"Younger Women" by Karen Joy Fowler

"The Man Who Bridged the Mist" by Kij Johnson

"The Sighted Watchmaker" by Vylar Kaftan

"Mulberry Boys" by Margo Lanagan

"Canterbury Hollow" by Chris Lawson

"Some of Them Closer" by Marissa Lingen

"The Summer People" by Kelly Link

"The Choice" by Paul McAuley

"A Small Price to Pay for Birdsong" by K.J. Parker

"Woman Leaves Room" by Robert Reed

"My Chivalric Fiasco" by George Saunders

"Fields of Gold" by Rachel Swirsky

"The Smell of Orange Groves" by Lavie Tidhar

"The Girl Who Ruled Fairyland, for a Little While" by Catherynne M. Valente

"The Sandal-Bride" by Genevieve Valentine

"The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees" by E. Lily Yu

I'm also going to have at least two new short stories coming out in 2012, as well as at least two reprints. I'll tell you about those once I know when they'll be coming out!

I was thinking about my writing today. When I teach writing, I tell my students to think about the central themes of their papers. I often ask them to make a list of words that capture those central themes. I don't have a list of words for my stories – but I do have a few sentences that seem, to me, to capture what at least some of my stories are about. The stories that are, perhaps, most me – most the stories that come directly out of my understanding of the world. Here are the sentences:

There is a ground under your feet, even thought you feel as though you're walking on air.

There is a meaning to it all, even though you don't know what that meaning is.

Life is dangerous, but it can also be magical.

Now that I read over them again, it seems to me that they are fairy-tale sentences. Fairy tales, after all, teach lessons like those. And maybe that's what I'm really writing: fairy tales, told as though they were stories. Pretending to be stories. I don't know, but it's at least an interesting provisional thought. (Someone, in a review I think, once said that I write fantasy as though it were realism. And I think that's essentially right.)

Solstice Night

Last night was the longest night of the year.

Today I've been sitting at my desk and working, working, working. Which is actually not all that good for me. I need to get out into the world, or at least take a break and read. And I haven't been doing much of that. But the work needs to get done.

Today, on the Tor blog, there was a post called Picturing Winter: A Solstice Celebration. Tor asked fantasy artists to send their favorite images of winter, and it's a wonderful collection. I'm going to include a few of my favorites here, but go and look at them all. Here you go, my favorites:

Last night was the longest night of the year, and I have a strange feeling, as though I'm stuck in a sort of trench, a dip in the year, a time when nothing much happens. Or at least when nothing much seems to be happening, but things are happening underneath, secretly, where I can't see them. And I'll see the results of them later, maybe not for months. It's a strange feeling, and like all intuitions, I question it – I wonder if I'm simply making it up. But my intuition has generally led me right before.

I think the only thing to do, when you're in a trench, a dip, a time when nothing seems to be happening, is wait. I think it's the time of darkness, when nothing seems clear, when the way doesn't seem to be there. And you just wait, and look at pictures of winter, and do the work you have to, and trust that somehow, somewhere, things are coming right.

Early Poetry

The new issue of Stone Telling has a very interesting article called "The Poetry of Joanna Russ, Part I: An Introduction," by Brit Mandelo. It's on the poetry that Joanna Russ wrote when she was young, just in college actually. It starts like this:

"Joanna Russ (1937-2011) is well-known for her incisive, transformative work in science fiction, feminist theory, and literary criticism—often, all three at once—but her early works, which include a considerable amount of poetry, are rarely discussed. While her first publication in the SF field was a short story, "Nor Custom Stale," in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1959, it was not her first magazine appearance by far: she had already been published several times as a poet, from the age of seventeen onwards, and much of that poetry was what we would now deem speculative in that it dealt with apparitions, fantasies, and myths."

Joanna Russ wrote poetry: who knew? I certainly didn't. But it makes sense. So many of us do start writing poetry, and so many of us give it up. The article speculates as to why she would have given it up, and then makes a case for paying attention to that early work. What it doesn't do, and I wish it did, is reprint any of the poems. For that, I think we need to wait for Part II. Mandelo writes, "In the second installment of this study, I will discuss the actual poems that are the subject of the preceding histories and speculations, the poems that are so generally invisible in the critical conversation about Russ-the-artist." I assume that means she will at least be quoting from them. I'd love to see them – evidently they're not actually available anywhere, and a Google search yields nothing. This is where scholars become important. They preserve and bring to our attention what would have been lost otherwise.

The article made me think of the poetry I wrote when I was younger. I don't have time to write a real blog post tonight, because I'm still finishing some work from the semester. So I thought I would include a few of those poems. They're from 1993-1995, when I was just graduating from law school and starting to work as a lawyer. I knew that I wanted to be a writer – I'd written part of a first novel, The Queen of Myr, during law school, when I should have been studying. (I'm sure it's still somewhere, although I have no idea which of the boxes it's in.) But I didn't know how to get there. I would sit in my office on the 42nd floor of the MetLife building, during my lunch hour, and write poetry. I was pretty desperate, back then. And I'm not sure I could have imagined where I am now – in a place where I can write whatever I want to, where I'm not exactly financially free (because you know, stockings and fans), but where I don't have the crushing burden of debt I did then. Anyway, because I have work to get back to, I'll just give you these poems. The first one has been published (and I may have posted it here before). The others haven't.

Beauty to the Beast

When I dare walk in fields, barefoot and tender,

trace thorns with my finger, swallow amber,

crawl into the badger's chamber, comb

lightning's loose hair in a crashing storm,

walk in a wolf's eye, lie

naked on granite, ignore the curse

on the castle door, drive a tooth into the boar's hide,

ride adders, tangle the horned horse,

when I dare watch the east

with unprotected eyes,

then I dare love you, Beast.

I Knew a Woman

I knew a woman kind as any star.

She wrapped the night wind warm about her neck.

She sang like crickets chirping in a jar.

She called the violet twilight her true home

and dusted constellations. For her sake

the moon swept out its pewter-powdered dome.

Black clouds would scorn to sail on common ponds

and light upon the liquid of her mind.

They flared and ruffed their fluted wings like swans.

And when she spoke the poplars strove to hear,

and when sometimes she cried out in the wind,

her voice was more than all the stars could bear.

The Genius

If you have met him shining among the cobbles,

that genius whose yowl will frighten the moon,

that werewolf-man, if you have witnessed him at noon

whistling, walking tattered with the natty rabbles,

if you have seen him among bankers and bakers, ragged and shining,

and thought him lucky: every night the night devours him.

(I may have posted that last one here before as well, I don't remember.) So that's what you get today, my early poetry. Back to work:

(Almost. I found one more I want to post. And if they bother you as well, you will immediately know what this poem is about.)

The Goblins

I have frequented the ways, even the byways of men,

I have gone forth silently, still-countenanced and cold;

they have not noticed clustered at my hem

the tattered-earned smirking little goblins bold.

I have bowed and seemed to smile and seemed to converse with them,

while my face remained pale and my words retained their chill,

and the little goblins chattered and clattered at my hem

in voices triumphant and shrill.

True Vocation

I didn't post anything last night because I was at a performance. It was called Gloria: A Renaissance Christmas Pageant, and it was in one of the churches near Harvard Square. There's nothing quite like going out at night, into the cold, then walking into a beautiful space, sitting quietly – then hearing glorious music and singing, and seeing beautiful dance to accompany it.

The music and singing were by a group called Cappella Clausura. The dancing was by a company called Creationdance.

I found a video of the performance that seems to be from two years ago. But looks just like the performance I watched last night. (Well, thirty seconds of it.)

I went because my ballet teacher told me about it. She's Helena Froehlich, the director of Creationdance. In the video, she's the dancer on the left, with red hair. In person, she's tall and French, and she looks like a dancer, meaning that although she's my age, if you just saw her walking down a street, you might assume she's a teenager. That's how she moves. (That's how all professional dancers move, no matter their age. I wish I could move like that!)

So imagine the darkness of a church, and Renaissance music played on old instruments, and voices raised in song. And dancing.

I mention all this not only because it was glorious, but also because seeing it made me think about true vocation. It's obvious when you see someone who has found theirs. They're joyful – you can see it on their faces. (Look at Helena's as she dances.)

That joy is the sign – when you see it, when you feel it, that's when you know. And once you find it, you can't let go of it. You have to keep doing it, whatever it is – whether it's dance, or teaching, or medicine. I've been fortunate enough to know a number of people who have found their true vocations. They are all successful, but more than that – they are joyful people. They work very hard, harder than other people I know. But they love that work.

I was thinking about all this because that's what writing is for me. It's what writing has been since I was very young – even at the most difficult periods of my life, I could write stories, poems. It was always a source of joy. There's so much advice out there now about writing and publishing: how to boost your word count, how to epublish, why not to . . . That's why it's good to remember – at the heart of any true vocation is joy.

Find your true vocation. And then follow it. Everything else is just the details.

Why Fantasy? Part 2

Yesterday, I wrote about why I write fantasy, or fiction that is at least tinged with the fantastic. I wanted to write about that again today, because there were a couple of things I wanted to make clear. First, I don't think of fantasy as a genre. Fantasy is one pole of literature; the other pole is realism. Fantasy imagines, realism represents. All stories can be ranged somewhere along the continuum between these poles: they are more or less fantastic or realistic. Horror may be a genre, science fiction may be a genre, but fantasy is not. It's a way of writing, a way of thinking. Both horror and science fiction may be more or less fantastical.

Yesterday, I quoted from a blog post by Lev Grossman in which he argues that our interest in fantasy has to do with our desire for a more authentic connection to the world, which we see in many fantasy novels. And I think that's part of it. But there's another component to fantasy as well – it's the fantasy that we find in Kafka, Borges, in much of magic realism. It's the fantasy that represents how we actually live in the world, how the world itself breaks with the rules we associate with realism. So for example, in the real world, people aren't supposed to just disappear, but under certain regimes they do – that inexplicability is almost magical. It's as though a Dark Lord waved his hand and suddenly people go missing. And even parts of what we commonly accept as reality are magical. I've talked about our technology, but there is also, of course, our economic life: I would argue that much of what happens in the stock market is the product of magical thinking. (Invisible hand, anyone?)

Today I want to quote from a blog post by Michael Cisco about why he believes the realist novel is becoming increasingly irrelevant. Michal connects the realist novel to the rise and importance of the middle class:

"We know that the Western novel (as distinct from long prose narratives in general, and so not including The Tale of Genji or The Golden Ass) develops in parallel with the Western middle class, and that this parallelism is not a coincidence. The middle class strives to vindicate itself socially alongside the aristocracy by demonstrating a moral superiority predicated on the cultivation of an elaborate personality or interior life. The novel is the model of this kind of interior life and the obsessively general, all-surveying point of view it takes on the world and its society. Any people anywhere in the world, irrespective of class, may have elaborate Freudian inner lives; my point is that the middle class have turned the elaborate inner life into a fetish which serves as one of the fundamental components of class identity. In principle, every middle class person lives a novel. Middle class life is a novel. Not every novel is a middle class life."

But, he argues, the middle class is disappearing:

"The middle class has less clout in American society now than ever. Given current conditions, the status of the solid bourgeois citizen of two generations ago has disappeared. The US is now a society with two classes only: the filthy rich and the rest."

So the realist novel becomes less and less important, while the genre novel (in which he includes fantasy) retains its vitality. Why? He gives different answers for horror, science fiction, and fantasy. Here is his answer for fantasy:

"Fantasy fiction: because it reflects a desire for a connection between individuals in a greater scheme of things, particularly to fictionalized traditions, histories, and societies. Adopting, if only in fancy, a substitute history, which blocks out the reality. Trying to validate middle class values in the same way that aristocratic values are validated. Tolkien is replete with this: the hobbits are English 19th century middle class values incarnate. However, the appeal of fantasy is hard to understand without realizing that middle class life feels hollow, divorced in practice from the values it espouses in theory. This is especially true of its meritocratic rhetoric; in fantasy, individuals really do make a difference. In many cases, the fictional history is appealing not because it blocks the view of an uncomfortable true history, but because that true history is blocked out in any event, and this in turn creates a yearning for a history, even if it makes all history look like fiction. Fantasy also reflects a frequently fanciful nostalgia for a less alienated life, lived closer to the land and the tribe. For values that are not well realized or really meaningful in a middle class capitalist milieu, like compassion, wisdom, kindness, selflessness, courage, blessings and curses, justice."

This is very much what Grossman was saying, and again I would extend the definition of fantasy further, to include writers that Cisco might discuss under other categories. But what strikes me about both of their posts is that they discuss fantasy as a way to create alternatives. Fantasy is about imagining ways of being that do not currently exist – alternatives to the world we live in. Realism explores and seeks to understand the world we live in – or think we live in. Fantasy tells us several things: (a) that world may not in fact be real, (b) there may be a better, even realer, world, and (c) we can make it come into being.

Fantasy is dangerous because it is inherently subversive. To depart from reality is to question it as reality – to imagine alternatives. And that's why I write it. Because it seems to me that much of what passes for reality is in fact an illusion, which often functions to maintain certain hierarchies and structures of power. I don't think of these things when I write a story. Then, all I think about is story. But the underlying ideas and motives are there.

(Just one final note. Cisco says, "the hobbits are English 19th century middle class values incarnate." This is certainly true, and it has been pointed out before to argue for a fundamental conservatism in Tolkien. Cisco isn't making that argument – nevertheless, I want to point out that the hobbits are living an illusion. They are living in a world that is larger and more dangerous than they will ever understand. So in that respect, Tolkien is saying something about 19th century middle class values that is not particularly conservative – and it is not those values that save Middle Earth, but values the hobbits don't understand or live by.)

Why Fantasy? Part 1

The political news has been making me feel particularly sick lately. So tonight I'm going to talk about why I write fantasy, as opposed to more realistic fiction. Why I write about women who marry bears or cities invaded by sorrow or how all the mad scientists' daughters get together and form a club.

This won't be a long post, because I'm still very, very tired. This morning I woke up and went to dance class, where I realized once again just how much I lose if I don't go to class for a couple of weeks. It's not the steps – I remember all of those. What I lose is the way it's supposed to feel, the way the parts of your body separate, move independently. I lose balance. And of course flexibility: from working for weeks at the computer, I'm terribly stiff. But it felt wonderful to be dancing again. And then I came home and fell sleep, then woke up and ate lunch and read an academic article written by a friend that I want to respond to, then fell asleep again. And since then I've been grading. But I keep falling into hours of deep, deep sleep, as though my mind and body desperately need it. Which I think they do.

Where was I? Oh yes, fantasy.

Let's start with a blog post on this subject recently written by Lev Grossman. He says,

"Something is up with fantasy – I feel like the zeitgeist is taking an interest in it. Like the Great Lidless Eye of Sauron, the zeitgeist has turned away from the big science fiction franchises of the 1990s (Star Wars, Star Trek, The Matrix, The X-Files) and swung towards big fantasy franchises instead (Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings, Twilight, True Blood, Game of Thrones). [ . . . ]

"But what is the Great Eye seeking? What questions does it have that fantasy answers? Or at least asks? Like I said, I get asked this periodically, in public, and it's a hard question to answer. Probably impossible.

"Though one place to start is with longing. It's something fantasy does especially well. Lewis and Tolkien were virtuosos of longing. They had, after all, lost a world, the world of their Victorian childhoods, which had been erased by the calamities of the 20th century: automobiles, the electrification of cities, the rise of mass media, psychoanalysis, mechanized warfare. They lived through, if not a singularity, then a pretty serious historical inflection point, and they longed for that pre-inflected world."

I think that's a good place to start. Fantasy did have to do with longing for me, when I was a child. I longed for so many things – for a place that felt like home, for a life that felt significant. Middle Earth, Narnia, Hogwarts are all about that sense of longing. The experiences you have in those places are difficult and dangerous, but they're with friends, and they're meaningful – you get to save the world, and it's worth saving. Meaning, friendship – aren't those the things we're always longing for? Even as adults? And of course, a home to go back to once the adventures are over. In the sort of world where you want to live your life.

Grossman goes on to say,

"Longing for what exactly? A different kind of world. A world that makes more sense – not logical sense, but psychological sense. We're surrounded by objects that we don't understand. Like iPods – they're typical. They're gorgeous, but they're also really alienating. You can't open them. You can't hack them. You don't even really know how they work, or how they're made, or who made them. Their form is abstractly beautiful, but it has nothing to do with their function. We really like them, but it's somehow not a liking that makes us feel especially good.

"The worlds that fantasy depicts are very different from that. They tend to be rural and low-tech. The people in a fantasy world tend to be connected to it – they understand it, they belong in it. People in Narnia don't long for some other world (except when they long for Aslan's Land, which I always found unsettling). They're in sync with it. (iPods and Macs kind of mock us, don't they, the way they're always sync-ing with each other but never with us.) [ . . . ]

"This longing for a world to which we're connected – and not connected Zuckerberg-style, but really connected, like a dryad with its tree – surfaces in a lot of places these days, not just in fantasy. You see it in the whole crafting movement – the Etsy/Makerfaire movement. You see it in the artisanal food movement. And you see it in fantasy."

I don't have an iPod or a Mac, so I can't say to what extent they're alienating. But I suspect that in some sense human beings have always been surrounded by what they didn't understand – once it was bacterial infections, invading armies. There's a reason witches are not a new phenomenon – people have always needed a way to explain the unexplainable. It's what we don't understand that changes.

I do think we have a longing for some sort of authentic connection to the world, for an understanding of it. I suspect we always did – there have always been legends of lost golden ages, fairy islands to the West. That connection has always been located in an inaccessible distance or past. But fantasy isn't always about that connection. It's also about alienation, about the destruction of the world, the ways we no longer fit into it. Frodo has to leave. Narnia is destroyed. Dumbledore dies. And that's just in what we might call consolatory fantasy. It doesn't even begin to address the work of fantasists such as Jorge Luis Borges or Angela Carter.

You could turn Grossman's argument around and say, fantasy is so popular nowadays because it is the air we breathe. We live in a fantasy world in which our technology works like magic. (What do you do when your computer isn't working? Turn it off and turn it back on again, hoping it will work. Right?) Fantasy isn't what we turn to because our tech is alienating. Our tech is fantasy.

Grossman does conclude by saying, "Other people's fantasy is probably about lots of other stuff, and I shouldn't go around theorizing about it, except that I occasionally get asked to and, weakly, I give in." But I'm glad he's theorizing about it, because it allows me to theorize about it as well. And what I want to say, through the tiredness, is that I do write fantasy in part because it allows me to speak about longing and connection. But I also write fantasy because it allows me to describe the world we actually live in – a world which can be profoundly alienating, which is at its core fantastical. And it allows me to imagine a world that is different from the one we live in – because imagining different worlds may be the only way we can actually understand and change our own.

Why Fantasy?

The political news has been making me feel particularly sick lately. So tonight I'm going to talk about why I write fantasy, as opposed to more realistic fiction. Why I write about women who marry bears or cities invaded by sorrow or how all the mad scientists' daughters get together and form a club.

This won't be a long post, because I'm still very, very tired. This morning I woke up and went to dance class, where I realized once again just how much I lose if I don't go to class for a couple of weeks. It's not the steps – I remember all of those. What I lose is the way it's supposed to feel, the way the parts of your body separate, move independently. I lose balance. And of course flexibility: from working for weeks at the computer, I'm terribly stiff. But it felt wonderful to be dancing again. And then I came home and fell sleep, then woke up and ate lunch and read an academic article written by a friend that I want to respond to, then fell asleep again. And since then I've been grading. But I keep falling into hours of deep, deep sleep, as though my mind and body desperately need it. Which I think they do.

Where was I? Oh yes, fantasy.

Let's start with a blog post on this subject recently written by Lev Grossman. He says,

"Something is up with fantasy – I feel like the zeitgeist is taking an interest in it. Like the Great Lidless Eye of Sauron, the zeitgeist has turned away from the big science fiction franchises of the 1990s (Star Wars, Star Trek, The Matrix, The X-Files) and swung towards big fantasy franchises instead (Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings, Twilight, True Blood, Game of Thrones). [ . . . ]

"But what is the Great Eye seeking? What questions does it have that fantasy answers? Or at least asks? Like I said, I get asked this periodically, in public, and it's a hard question to answer. Probably impossible.

"Though one place to start is with longing. It's something fantasy does especially well. Lewis and Tolkien were virtuosos of longing. They had, after all, lost a world, the world of their Victorian childhoods, which had been erased by the calamities of the 20th century: automobiles, the electrification of cities, the rise of mass media, psychoanalysis, mechanized warfare. They lived through, if not a singularity, then a pretty serious historical inflection point, and they longed for that pre-inflected world."

I think that's a good place to start. Fantasy did have to do with longing for me, when I was a child. I longed for so many things – for a place that felt like home, for a life that felt significant. Middle Earth, Narnia, Hogwarts are all about that sense of longing. The experiences you have in those places are difficult and dangerous, but they're with friends, and they're meaningful – you get to save the world, and it's worth saving. Meaning, friendship – aren't those the things we're always longing for? Even as adults? And of course, a home to go back to once the adventures are over. In the sort of world where you want to live your life.

Grossman goes on to say,

"Longing for what exactly? A different kind of world. A world that makes more sense – not logical sense, but psychological sense. We're surrounded by objects that we don't understand. Like iPods – they're typical. They're gorgeous, but they're also really alienating. You can't open them. You can't hack them. You don't even really know how they work, or how they're made, or who made them. Their form is abstractly beautiful, but it has nothing to do with their function. We really like them, but it's somehow not a liking that makes us feel especially good.

"The worlds that fantasy depicts are very different from that. They tend to be rural and low-tech. The people in a fantasy world tend to be connected to it – they understand it, they belong in it. People in Narnia don't long for some other world (except when they long for Aslan's Land, which I always found unsettling). They're in sync with it. (iPods and Macs kind of mock us, don't they, the way they're always sync-ing with each other but never with us.) [ . . . ]

"This longing for a world to which we're connected – and not connected Zuckerberg-style, but really connected, like a dryad with its tree – surfaces in a lot of places these days, not just in fantasy. You see it in the whole crafting movement – the Etsy/Makerfaire movement. You see it in the artisanal food movement. And you see it in fantasy."

I don't have an iPod or a Mac, so I can't say to what extent they're alienating. But I suspect that in some sense human beings have always been surrounded by what they didn't understand – once it was bacterial infections, invading armies. There's a reason witches are not a new phenomenon – people have always needed a way to explain the unexplainable. It's what we don't understand that changes.

I do think we have a longing for some sort of authentic connection to the world, for an understanding of it. I suspect we always did – there have always been legends of lost golden ages, fairy islands to the West. That connection has always been located in an inaccessible distance or past. But fantasy isn't always about that connection. It's also about alienation, about the destruction of the world, the ways we no longer fit into it. Frodo has to leave. Narnia is destroyed. Dumbledore dies. And that's just in what we might call consolatory fantasy. It doesn't even begin to address the work of fantasists such as Jorge Luis Borges or Angela Carter.

You could turn Grossman's argument around and say, fantasy is so popular nowadays because it is the air we breathe. We live in a fantasy world in which our technology works like magic. (What do you do when your computer isn't working? Turn it off and turn it back on again, hoping it will work. Right?) Fantasy isn't what we turn to because our tech is alienating. Our tech is fantasy.

Grossman does conclude by saying, "Other people's fantasy is probably about lots of other stuff, and I shouldn't go around theorizing about it, except that I occasionally get asked to and, weakly, I give in." But I'm glad he's theorizing about it, because it allows me to theorize about it as well. And what I want to say, through the tiredness, is that I do write fantasy in part because it allows me to speak about longing and connection. But I also write fantasy because it allows me to describe the world we actually live in – a world which can be profoundly alienating, which is at its core fantastical. And it allows me to imagine a world that is different from the one we live in – because imagining different worlds may be the only way we can actually understand and change our own.