📙Fantastic Essays and Where to Find Them

"We like to think we live in daylight, but half the world is always dark; and fantasy, like poetry, speaks the language of the night." - Ursula K. Le Guin

James Hanlon

Dec 02, 2023

💚 I write 📗Sci-Fi and post free content on Thursdays 💚

📗 Strange Harvest: Part I

🧡 Sometimes I write 📙Non-Fi like this too sorry plug over 🧡

📙Fantastic Essays and Where to Find Them

Writing fiction has been my dream pretty much since I can remember. I still have a day job that isn’t writing, but I finally wrote my first complete book! Getting there took a lot of nonfiction reading and writing, too. Essays about writing from great authors are one of my favorite ways to find inspiration, so I’m starting this series of nonfiction posts called 📙Fantastic Essays and Where to Find Them.

I won’t be adding these posts to the Content Calendar since they aren’t scheduled and I don’t want to overload myself by promising too much. But you can always find them with the Personal Essays tag from my homepage. You can ⭐Bookmark any of these links to more easily find my work on Substack. It’s a bit weird navigating around here.

In this series, and probably most of my 📙Non-Fiction, I’m going to use A LOT of links. I hate ads, which is why I love Substack, but when venturing out into the wild wild web you won’t be so lucky. To prevent ad-itis, try these all-natural remedies:

🦊 Firefox - privacy-focused web browser
- 🚫 uBlock Origin - extension to uBlock shitty ads (except YouTube grrrr)
- 👻 Ghostery - extension to make you a ghost, but in a good way

😵 If you don’t know where to start, tag me in a comment 👍

📙A Fledgling Flight of the Mind

A Substack Personal Essay by James Hanlon - 12/18/23

“For fantasy is true, of course. It isn’t factual, but it is true … its truth challenges, even threatens, all that is false, all that is phony, unnecessary, and trivial—it is by such beautiful non-facts that we fantastic human beings may arrive, in our peculiar fashion, at the truth.”

Why Are Americans Afraid of Dragons? by Ursula K. Le Guin
Language of the Night: Essays on Science Fiction and Fantasy

“For Flight of the Mind.”

Googling that took me down an Ursula K. Le Guin wormhole including an Oregon writers’ workshop, a soul-piercing obituary for a wonderful human being, and a word I never quite understood being imbued with new significance due to its origins.

Something that compels me about Ursula Le Guin is her quiet, logical confidence. She’s so good at explaining her distilled thoughts. I’m interested in a particular concept she explores called “the death of the author.”

The concept goes like this: after any author’s words are written and published, it’s up to the audience to make their own interpretations of the words. Maybe you intended a certain meaning that goes unnoticed or even misinterpreted by the reader. Maybe you meant absolutely nothing by particular details that readers make their own associations with.

Either way, it’s not like the author is going to be standing over the shoulder of every reader to make sure they’re extracting the correct meaning from every word.

“As a child I paid very little attention to authors’ names; they were irrelevant; I did not believe in authors. To be perfectly candid, this is still true. I do not believe in authors. A book exists, it’s there. The author isn’t there—some grown-up you never met—may even be dead. The book is what is real. [The] book of course participates in the creation of you, your thoughts and feelings, the size and temper of your soul. Where, in all this, does the author come in? ... The author’s work is done, complete; the ongoing work, the present act of creation, is a collaboration by the words that stand on the page and the eyes that read them.”

from “An Interview with Ursula Le Guin: Creating Realistic Utopias”
by Win McCormack and Ann Mendel (April 11, 1977)
Language of the Night: Essays on Science Fiction and Fantasy

I learned about this for the first time in high school from an English teacher named Mrs. Bloom. She forever cemented my understanding of certain literary concepts with fiendishly difficult written-response tests and striking examples that have always stuck in my brain.

In this case, she demonstrated the idea of the death of the author by providing a passage to the class including an offhand description of a background character wearing a yellow shirt with blue parrots.

“What do these colors mean?” Mrs. Bloom asked the class. She used a wheelchair, so the classroom had been arranged with two sets of desks facing each other from opposite walls of the room. In between, she had room to wheel back and forth as she taught, scanning the room at eye level with her seated students. “Anyone?”

After a brief silence, Mrs. Bloom gave a chuckle like a coiled whip. Then she struck ruthlessly, calling on people by name. One by one, students ventured their best guesses, some more convoluted than others. After a point, we could tell by the amused look on her face and her refusal to give the correct answer that this was a game.

Finally, Mrs. Bloom smiled sweetly at us and revealed a quote from the author discussing their work in which the author clarified that they meant absolutely nothing. It truly was just a random choice to include those particular colors and the little parrots. They were just details.

But some students came up with really compelling and thoughtful answers. They dug deep and scraped meaning from the words even though we now knew for a fact they meant nothing, straight from the author’s mouth.

Then what’s really twisted is you have something like The Yellow Wallpaper, which is like the textbook example for intentional use of color as a major theme, and obviously authors love to use colors to represent things, so… what does it all mean? How do we do any sort of analysis with confidence?

Uh, honestly, I usually don’t. This little paradox of interpretation can be paralyzing. It’s almost never going to be explicitly clear what the author means. Every interpretation is going to vary by degrees anyway depending on lived experiences.

The best we can do is read widely, try to understand each other, and as writers—strive for clarity in meaning. Don’t over-write, unless it works. If it works, anything goes.

And so we arrive, in such “peculiar fashion,” at the truth:

I barely passed Mrs. Bloom’s class. 😐

And I haven’t read any Le Guin books!! 😑