Why Fantasy Still Matters

At 12, I was not reading for escape. I was reading for expansion. The worlds I entered through my father’s shelves offered more than dragons and distant planets. They offered systems — moral, political, emotional — operating at scale. They allowed consequence to unfold visibly. They insisted that choices altered terrain.

I did not yet have the language for it, but I understood instinctively that these books were teaching structure.

Fantasy has always been mischaracterized as departure from reality. In truth, it is a method of examining it. By displacing conflict into imagined geographies, it clarifies stakes that might otherwise feel diffuse. It isolates forces — grief, ambition, loyalty, erasure — and renders them tangible.

In an era that increasingly flattens nuance into speed and reaction, fantasy restores proportion. It asks readers to inhabit complexity rather than scroll past it. It demands patience. It rewards attention.

When I began writing Wenna Fiddlebright and the Marshmallow Crown, I did not approach it as an experiment in genre. I approached it as a continuation of a conversation that began when I was twelve — a conversation about inheritance, responsibility, and the unseen frameworks that shape a community.

Middle grade fantasy carries a particular responsibility. Its readers are at the threshold of abstraction. They are old enough to perceive fracture, but young enough to believe in repair. The stories we give them help calibrate how they interpret consequence.

In Whimwillow, memory is not ornamental. It is structural. Joy is not decorative. It is kinetic. Forgetting is not neutral. It alters the land.

These are not metaphors layered onto spectacle. They are inquiries disguised as narrative.

Fantasy endures not because it distracts from the world, but because it reveals patterns within it. It allows young readers to witness restoration without denying fracture. It provides distance without diminishing seriousness.

At twelve, I stepped into imagined terrains and felt them.

Now, decades later, I write with the same expectation: that a world, however invented, must be coherent enough to stand.