“I regard theatre as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another what it means to be a human being.”
- Oscar Wilde, Playwright
"To act is to live truthfully under imaginary circumstances."
- Sanford Meisner, Actor and Teacher
"A little magic can take you a long way."
- Roald Dahl, James and the Giant Peach
I cannot remember a time before my introduction to fantasy.
In fact, I cannot even remember such an introduction. In a sense, it feels as if my conception of the fantastical has existed in perpetuity since the moment of birth. And perhaps, in another sense, there is a hint of truth to this hyperbole: to a newborn baby, what within the new world can ever be considered mundane?
But in a far more literal--or perhaps "literary" would make for a finer term--I must, at some point, have been explicitly introduced to the fantasy genre. And I have a strong hunch as to how that introduction came about.
I grew up in a home filled with books. My mother was an elementary school teacher, and her passion has always been children's literature. She read to me constantly: stories of Franklin the Turtle at bedtime (ask me the author and illustrator; that was my part of the recitation, and I can still nail it twenty-five years later) and Harry Potter read-alouds on long car rides to visit family are key memories that I hold most dear.
