My Heart is The Tempest Q&A Session 10

Why did you choose fantasy as the main genre for your story?

I deliberately chose fantasy as the genre for my story because the world Sycorax originally comes from in Shakespeare’s The Tempest is both a fantastical and a fantasy-like world, so it was the closest I could get to the play’s atmosphere. Besides, choosing fantasy would allow me to freely explore magic not simply as a literary trope but also as a form of empowerment and connection to the secret voice of world, its most creative form of energy constantly flowing but often constrained by rules, bias and bitterness clogging the flow. Ultimately, magic being concerned with spells and thus with the very nature of communication as a form of spiritual/inner connection, I used the genre to turn novella into a hymn to the musicality of words and to the transformational power writing can become, itself a magical spell honoring energy pouring in and out of our lives.