“You know everyone thought you meant p0rn.”
In the 1980s, fantasy was fringe. Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies hadn’t been made yet, so most critics didn’t think fantasy was worthy of attention. It was before Harry Potter created a generation of young people eager for more magical worlds. Game of Thrones had not yet exploded on television to utterly transformed how the mainstream viewed the genre of fantasy.
I was 13, and my sister and I were at a teen volunteer training where, during the getting-to-know-you session, they asked what our interests were. “I like to read fantasy,” I said when it was my turn. Narnia, Middle Earth, Prydain ,and Earthsea were just a few of the worlds I’d already discovered, and I was eager for more.
Later, as we were walking home, my sister, who is two years older than me, said, “You know, they all thought you were talking about porno.”
I was mortified. The idea that “fantasy” could be interpreted as “sexual fantasy” sunk into the recesses of my brain like poison, and I spent the next 15 years qualifying my interests by answering “science fiction and fantasy” whenever anyone asked me what I liked to read, even though I have never read all that much science fiction. But science fiction was cleaner. Science fiction was serious. Nobody ever got confused about what science fiction meant.
But I didn’t stop reading fantasy. At a time when fantasy fiction was still dismissed as escapist fluff for kids or weirdos, I invested more and more of myself into the genre, including choosing to major in Medieval Studies and later going to grad school for folklore and mythology — back then, no one was offering degrees in fantasy literature and that was the closest you could get.
Because I am an extremely self-reflective person, I also started thinking hard about why it is that I love fantasy so much, almost to the exclusion of all other kinds of literature. I thought and I read and I wrote, not in a scholarly way, because I’m not an academic. I just followed my heart as it lead me to the unshakeable belief that fantasy is the best genre because it is the hardest genre. It is harder to read, and it is harder to write, and everyone who dismisses it as fluff is simply not putting in the work to understand what is going on below the glamour of dragon wings and magic wands and enchanted swords.
Fantasy isn’t “kid stuff,” and it isn’t “adult” stuff, either. Fantasy is the deepest expression what it means to be human, even when the story isn’t about humans. It is the fractured mirror by which we see ourselves most clearly. Fantasy tells us the truth, but only if you’re willing to put in the work to find it. I knew that when I as 13, even I didn’t know how to say it yet.
Today, I feel privileged to help other writers who are passionate about fantasy do the hard work of writing their own stories. My 13-year-old self would be so proud and excited about all the great stories in her future! I’m so glad I never let her down.