I humbly thank you for visiting the site, and welcome you to my blog. As a writer of fiction with a mythological or symbolic lens, I wanted to share some of my thoughts on literature and what it is to write. I want to share that lens with you, as it were.
I grew up in Orange, CA, with a book in each hand. I had wide and varied reading tastes while growing up (from Arthurian legends to Dickens), but at some point around the ripe, old age of 8 or 9, I remember stealing away a copy of The Sword of Shannara from behind the glass-doored bookcase in my family’s living room, and hiding away in the bathroom to read the obviously adult-sized tome. I read quickly, and in a week or two of prolonged bathroom visits that had my mother quite worried, I had finished the book, filled my head with fantastical images of good and evil and magical deeds that turned the ordinary into the extraordinary, and had equally determined that I was a fantasy fiction addict.
Being barred by my fairly fundamentalist Christian parents from reading books popular enough to rise to the level of their awareness, like Harry Potter, I bought obscure pulp fantasy at Walden Books and the local used bookstore, the Bookman. This presented a new challenge for preteen me: how was I to syncretize the flannel board Sunday school stories I was told with what sounded like similar cosmologies of imaginary dream-worlds? I mean, surely, reading about a protagonist worshipping some god named Deneir and definitely not named Jesus is going to going to get me in some big trouble upstairs, right? I remember my mother giving me quite…a lesson after misinterpreting my pre-speech therapy, mumbled “On guard,” during play as: “on God.” I rarely talked about what I was reading with my folks.
But my mind, in an attempt to rationalize—and perhaps justify—my new passion and reading list, built a new lens with which to read stories. My imagined realities became vibrantly relevant to my present reality. Beyond identifying myself with a fictional character, I identified my world with a fictional world. Correlation, meaning, and statement sprung organically from that lens.
This tailored my tastes and helped me find new books to read as I strove to identify fictional worlds that increasingly depicted what I perceived to be most core to reality, despite how distant the surface-level particulars appeared to be from reality. I found it suddenly quite easy to see how “true” a novel about fighting wizards or feeding gold to leprechauns could be, and how “false” a novel about summer college parties or a murder in New York often was.
So what? I’ve imagined arbitrary abstractions from fantasy stories that I read as a child?
After years of reading and hearing oral stories in a variety of contexts, I’ve found that storytelling—real storytelling—has its own language. It reaches into our deeper parts with its own context, and shares truth. And we’ve lost the ability in our modern, Western culture, to either accept a context that isn’t our own, or communicate truth. You see it in the breakdown of our ability to compromise, our lack of shared visions, and the loss of meaning behind those surface-level particulars. If we can’t see deeper truth and meaning behind the stories our modern storytellers craft, how can we hope to see deeper truth and meaning in the stories of our own lives?
My hope for this blog is that I can share some of that perspective with you as I continue to explore and learn more about meaning in works of fiction. I’ll also use this site to post samples of my work that I write through the mythological lens that we will be talking about through the blog. The blog will be updated sporadically, with only occasional content as I share new ideas and personal experiences, and research and write exploratory essays.
I hope that your time on this site is both enjoyable and enlightening. Thank you for the opportunity to share it with you.
In Lak’ech