Teaching and Fantasy Literature: Whatever Became of That Kid?
About half of the students brought their awesomeness with them into the creative writing class. This is not to say they were all necessarily awesome at writing, just that they allowed whatever was delightful in them to show at a time when I happened to be there to see.
The other half of the students had registered in the mistaken belief that creative writing must be an easy A because there’s no right or wrong in creativity, and they tended to get angry when they discovered their error. Of those, only the plagiarist who handed in the lyrics to I’m My Own Grandpa for a poetry assignment stands out in memory.
Years later, it’s the awesome kids I still think about. I wonder what happened to the girl with the stutter who spoke clearly only in verse, who could recite long stretches of Shakespeare from memory. She wrote the most astonishing sonnets. Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the boy whose work I keep watching for, who was too nervous for eye contact when he asked whether he could connect all his pieces for the course to a comic book project he was working on outside of class.
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No one assignment he did was stellar. In part this was a result of the weird framework of the course that had been handed down by the mighty powers of the department — we had four weeks for fiction, four weeks for poetry, four weeks for drama — and I was not at liberty to turn this student loose to write in his own genre. In part, it was because he was thinking of himself as a writer, and thinking like a writer, for the first time, so he got to make his beginner mistakes on my watch. Fine with me, fine with him.
Here’s why I think he’s still out there writing comics somewhere: he was completely content to write about his superheroes in verse, in script format, in prose, because stretching himself that way allowed him to see new things about his characters. When I gave him feedback about his drafts, I took his work seriously enough to tell him what wasn’t working.
Unlike the students who were after easy A’s, this guy never complained about comments or grades. He took my suggestions and assessments under advisement, and got back to work. He had the personality and habits of a lifelong creator, and he had articulated to himself and others that he intended to be in it for the long haul.
The Internet hasn’t turned him up for me. His name is common, but I would think there can’t be so many African-American comic book artists creating African-American superheroes that he’d stay hard to find. Now that I’m writing occasional posts here about books I assigned in that old creative writing class, I wish I could ask him if anything from that semester was of long-term use to his work in comics–regardless of whether that work ever appeared in print.
Sarah Avery’s short story “The War of the Wheat Berry Year” appeared in the last print issue of Black Gate. A related novella, “The Imlen Bastard,” is slated to appear in BG‘s new online incarnation. Her contemporary fantasy novella collection, Tales from Rugosa Coven, follows the adventures of some very modern Pagans in a supernatural version of New Jersey even weirder than the one you think you know. You can keep up with her at her website, sarahavery.com, and follow her on Twitter.
I didn’t know it at the time, but back when I was ten and surfing through horrendous Tarzan movies on rainy Saturday afternoons, The Horseman On the Roof (Le Hussard Sure le Toit, 1995) was the film I was actually hoping to see. Not that I would have understood much of what was going on, but the kinetic energy of it –– the film’s unswerving certainty that these events matter –– would have transported me right out of my seat.
Once upon a time, I had the crazy idea that if a book was good, it would stay in print. I also figured that a “best-of” volume would probably have all the good stories from an author, and I was actually naive enough to think that if a work by a favorite author was out of print, it probably wasn’t as good as the work that was still on shelves.
There’s an amazing Kickstarter running at the moment. If you’re a fan of world-building, if you want to check out a world that’s been built over more than 40 years of group endeavour, with deep myths, histories, and cultures, one of the most compelling worlds in fantasy and certainly in fantasy roleplaying, you may want to 
Glorantha owes a lot to Joseph Campbell, too. The “hero path” is an integral part of the world – how its inhabitants relate to the very real (and often mercurial) gods which surround them, and how heroes can penetrate the timeless realms of the gods and return with treasures physical and mystical. If, like me, you’re interested in the transcendent aspects of the stories we tell one another, Glorantha is a compelling world.
Over the past few years, Jeff Richard has been working on a book which looks like it will set a new standard in RPG supplements – a guide to the whole world of Glorantha itself. It’s a massive undertaking – an encyclopaedic opus detailing the places and cultures of a whole fantasy world, in exquisite detail. It’s been attempted twice before – once in the 1980s and once a decade ago – but in relatively abbreviated form. The new Guide to Glorantha is anything but abbreviated: it comes in at a whopping 400 pages of 10″ x 12″ book, detailing the geography, history, and cosmology of Glorantha, its cultures and races, as well as two continents, two subcontinents, and multiple archipelagos, plus a massive atlas filled with highly detailed and gorgeous maps – over 64 pages worth at the last count. The Guide to Glorantha is system agnostic – it doesn’t contain any games mechanics content, it’s pure setting detail, so you can use it with any game ruleset, or just read it for the pure pleasure of it. The Kickstarter has been running for a little over a week, and already has blown through its initial target. As a result, the initial scope of the project has expanded hugely, so that we’re now getting more regions detailed, more maps added, and an entire new “Companion” to the guide detailing things like the geography of the mythic regions of Glorantha, plus monographs by key industry writers. For those of us who’ve been playing quests into the realms of myth, this is nothing short of breathtaking in its ambition.
