While not may people “get” my love of fantasy, a few blessed souls do. It has everything to do with my childhood, and with C.S. Lewis, mostly. I never believed in anything as surely as I believed in Narnia, when I was a little girl. It was a certainty in my life, a palpable force, a knowledge that magic was real, and that some day–even though I expected it at every turn–I would get myself to Narnia.
Sure, when you’re a kid, there’s a lot of things you don’t know. But I think too many people grow up too fast. They disregard fantasy stories and fairy tales because they don’t believe they’re applicable. But this is as far from the truth as can be: fairy tales are the truest tales we tell, in some sense, because they themselves are spun out of the truest stories of our kind. We, as paltry human beings, have never been able to fully explain the word around us, and fairy tails help us do that, and will brilliance, too.
The thing is, as a child, you feel more. You haven’t been bruised or ruined, disappointed or embarrassed, disregarded or degraded–at least, on the whole, not as much as later on in life. You are new; the world is full of possibilities. Every toadstool is a fairy cove, every cave a dragon’s den.
But we lose it; we leave it. Bit by bit, it falls away. Imagination gives way to reason, and fancy fails when faced with reality.
Yet, some of us can’t give it up. Every book we pick up brings us back again, every word we write in some way is connected to that golden moment of our childhood when it was all possible. I’ve been listening to what I write, lately, concentrating on what it is I’m saying–what my own self is saying about magic, and science, reason and fancy. And it’s rather fascinating. There’s a great deal more tension than I think I expected… I am wary, I am jaded. It’s never as easy as Abracadabra… yet I keep writing it.
I suppose as odd as it sounds, it’s because a part of me simply refused to believe that this is all there is, and recognizes the magic power of words. Magic doesn’t have to be hurling balls of fire or raising the dead. Sometimes, it can be much quieter. It can be hope; it can be love. It can be sharing stories across times, cultures, borders. It can be, in every way concievable, the most basic of human powers…
The Aldersgate Cycle 
November 18, 2008 at 8:18 pm
So well said. I’m with you, in dragon seeking, fairy hunting, day dreaming of what is going on in the world that parallels our own…I can’t give it up either!
Good company!
November 18, 2008 at 8:25 pm
They say that ignorance is bliss, and when it comes to growing up and having to face reality, I wholeheartedly believe it. As children, our ignorance of how the world really is causes us to create our own realities, and those realities can be wonders to behold.
We’re getting close to the holiday season, and every year I tell myself that I am going to somehow recapture that mystical sense I had when I was younger. However, every year the weight of reality seeps in and turns it into drudgery. Yet when I look at my 3 year old daughter, I can already see the quiver of excitement, the sense of wonder in her eyes at what the next several weeks will bring.
It’s this reason that I dread the day when I will have to tell her the “truth” about Santa Clause. It’s also the reason that, like you, I write and draw fantasy. There is a fundamental part of me that doesn’t want to let it go and wants to keep it alive in some small part for others as well.