At the beginning of his Divine Comedy Dante announces that he is “midway through the course my life” when the “dark wood,” the complexities of adulthood overtake. Sometimes there is joy or discovery, other times terrible sadness and destruction.
As child I read books almost entirely of the magical or imagined historical sort. The Oz books by L. Frank Baum were a mainstay as was a wonderfully old copy of Bullfinch’s Mythology. Narnia, Middle Earth, Pern, Gethen, Anarres, Earthsea . . . all came much later. For me the universe of imagination was filled with early 20th-century and ancient classic mythologies.
A critical moment for me was when I was 10 years old. In the space of 12 months 4 things happened that literally restructured my imagination. I asked an older sibling for something “new and different” to read. They handed me a collection of short stories by Ray Bradbury titled R is for Rocket. I saw Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. The original series of Star Trek premiered; my first episode was “The Menagerie.” And in 1967 astronauts Virgil Grissom, Roger Chaffee, and Ed White were killed in the Apollo 1 launchpad fire.
These books and stories, these images, and the sense that space travel and space colonization were deadly and wondrous endeavors rooted my storyteller’s mind in science fiction and magical realism.
WRITING PROJECTS IN PROCESS
FICTION
A speculative science fiction novel (with mystery and archival elements) about competing factions of socio-anthropologists facing permanent isolation and the necessity of co-existence following an interplanetary system calamity. The cast of characters includes queer and ASD persons and two interdependent, non-human sentient species.
A collection of short stories, poems, and illustrations on the nature of the Muse.
A magical realism illustrated book about a synesthesic young person who meets a one-eyed peer with rather unusual abilities.
NONFICTION
Two research articles on material culture and design in utopian fiction and speculative world building.
CREATIVE & MAGICAL PLAY
The notion of creative play deeply informs and enhances all of my writing. I typically make props or costumes to accompany my writing and other imagination projects. Below are some past projects. Going forward I will blog about new makery here (with supplementing images on Instagram) or on my art blog, Dante’s Wardrobe.
As part of a one-day LARP “wizarding event” I played three different characters.
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- In-person Postal Delivery Person (left).
- The pre-event author/editor of the monthly newspaper (center).
- A Potteresque moving portrait character (right).
An extensive set of posts on the event can be found on my art blog, Dante’s Wardrobe via this link.
I went as The Red Death to the Gods and Monsters: Fire Ball Masquerade VI (2014). The details of how I made the costume can be found in this post on my art blog, Dante’s Wardrobe: “The Red Death Comes to the Midwest.”
Everyone has their favorite books. The Dispossessed by American author Ursula K. Le Guin is one of mine. I asked my 2 brothers and sister to create a globe of the planet Anarres for me. A description of their processes as well as photos can be found in this post on my art blog, Dante’s Wardrobe: “Versions of Things Beloved, Part 1.”
Here are two player sets of tiles for a Scrabble-like game invented by a friend and I as we played at world building. Each set contains the same number of alphbetical Scrabble tiles along with symbols representing other letters and sounds.
One set is of plastic art clay, the other of leather. Each player has a cloth bag for their tile set as well as shell or stone playing pieces and embroidered blue velveteen playing cloths. A description of their processes as well as photos can be found in this post on my art blog, Dante’s Wardrobe: “Making a Fictional World Real, Piece by Piece.”
