Category: magical realism

Portals Made of Language: Why Fantasy Still Matters

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Before I ever believed in magic, I believed in words. Not the easy kind—abracadabra, or once upon a time—but the harder ones that carried grief and wonder in equal measure. The kind of words that didn’t promise escape, but understanding. Fantasy, for me, has never been about running away from reality; it has always been about walking toward it through a different door.

That door is language itself. Every metaphor is a threshold, every poem a small, shimmering key. And if you listen closely enough—between syllables, between breaths—you’ll hear the hinge creak open.

1. The Work of Wonder

When I began writing Dreamcatcher, I wasn’t trying to build another world. I was trying to make sense of the one I already lived in—the one that didn’t always make space for silence, for Indigenous belief, for the shimmer between dream and waking. Baumwelt, the world my protagonist Dash steps into through her grandmother’s dreamcatcher, grew from the ache of that absence.

In the beginning, I thought Baumwelt was a fantasy realm. But the longer I wrote, the more I realized: it was a reflection. Every root in that world grew from real soil—the Dakota stories, the wind through Minnesota pines, the ache of losing and finding yourself again.

Fantasy has a way of returning us to what’s most real. It asks us to look at our world through the mirror of the impossible, and in doing so, to see what we’ve overlooked. When Dash touches the dreamcatcher and slips between worlds, she isn’t escaping. She’s being invited to look deeper—to face the dark, to understand grief as something that can be walked through, not avoided.

Fantasy matters because it teaches us the work of wonder: that curiosity is not naiveté, and awe is not ignorance. It is an act of radical attention.

2. Language as Portal

In Ink & Ivy, language becomes a literal form of creation. Marisol, a young lady who runs a magical bookshop, discovers that what she writes can change the world around her. Her stories don’t just describe—they summon. But with every word comes responsibility; every metaphor has consequences.

This, too, is the work of writers: to understand that words are not harmless. They shape what we see. They summon possibility—or erase it.

In Ink & Ivy, the girls’ language becomes a living thing, something that resists control. The “pale man,” a figure who feeds on imitation and distortion, thrives on empty words—stories written without care, without truth. The girls learn that creation, to be sacred, must be done with reverence.

Fantasy, at its best, reminds us of the power of language. We speak worlds into being. We dream communities into possibility. We write our own maps through darkness. The portal isn’t the wardrobe or the dreamcatcher or the bookshop door. It’s the sentence itself—the turning of one word into another.

3. The Sacred Ordinary

Many people think fantasy is escapist because it contains dragons, spells, or portals. But what if those things are simply metaphors for what already lives within us? The dragon, in Dreamcatcher, isn’t just a beast—it’s fear, grief, the inheritance of pain. When Dash confronts it, she’s really confronting the trauma of generations, the unspoken stories that haunt her family.

And when Marisol in Ink & Ivy writes her way through grief, her pen becomes both wand and weapon—an instrument of creation that heals by revealing.

Fantasy is the literature of the sacred ordinary. It allows us to approach heavy truths with the gentleness of myth. It helps us say what cannot otherwise be said.

I think of Indigenous storytelling—how coyote and wind, willow and raven are not just symbols, but relatives. Fantasy, in its truest sense, carries that same heartbeat: it teaches us that the world is alive, responsive, and holy in its strangeness.

When readers step into Dreamcatcher or Ink & Ivy, I don’t want them to find an escape hatch. I want them to find a mirror. I want them to feel what it means to hold grief and beauty in the same breath, to remember that imagination is not a luxury—it’s an inheritance.

4. Why We Still Need Fantasy

In an age of data and disconnection, we need stories that remind us what it feels like to be human. Fantasy does that. It re-enchants the world. The modern world is noisy with explanation. We want everything to be understood, categorized, proven. But what if the point of wonder is not to be solved, but to be stayed with? Fantasy slows us down. It asks us to listen. It gives us permission to imagine again—a radical act in a culture of cynicism.

When I visit workshops, I often tell young writers that fantasy is not an escape from truth; it’s a different route to it. The language of magic lets us speak about mental illness, loss, and love in ways realism sometimes can’t. A dragon can hold more honesty than a diary entry. A spell can say what a scream cannot.

In Dreamcatcher, the dream world exists because Dash’s waking life is too painful to face directly. In Ink & Ivy, the written world becomes a refuge from grief—but also a reminder that creation without integrity can destroy as easily as it heals. Both stories are, at their heart, about the power of imagination to rebuild us.

We still need fantasy because the world is still breaking—and fantasy shows us how to mend.

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5. The Door Within the Reader

Every time a reader opens a book, they cross a threshold. They leave behind their certainty and step into language. That act—quiet, solitary, miraculous—is the closest thing we have to magic. When I write, I try to make that doorway visible. Sometimes it’s a dreamcatcher. Sometimes it’s a bookshop in a forgotten town. But always, it’s a passage between the seen and the unseen, the possible and the impossible.

Fantasy matters because it reminds us that those borders are permeable. It whispers that the ordinary world is threaded with portals if only we know how to look. And maybe that’s the point—not to lose ourselves in the unreal, but to find our way back to the real with our eyes open wider, our hearts more attuned to wonder.

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6. Closing the Circle

In Dreamcatcher, Dash returns home after her journey through Baumwelt, carrying both loss and wisdom. In Ink & Ivy, Marisol learns that creation is not about control—it’s about connection. Both stories close with the same truth: that every world we build through language eventually leads us back to ourselves.

When I walk along the lake near my home in Minnesota, I often think about the way water mirrors sky—the way two worlds touch without truly merging. That thin line of reflection is where my stories live: the between-place where reality brushes against dream. Fantasy still matters because it keeps that shimmer alive.

In the end, every book is a portal. Every reader, a traveler. Every word, a small act of faith that the invisible still matters—that imagination, like water, can still cleanse, connect, and carry us home.

The Art of Liminality: Writing the Spaces Between Worlds

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“Between waking and dream, girlhood and grief, there is a place that language almost reaches—and that’s where I write from.”

Some stories do not belong entirely to one world.
They hover in the threshold—that delicate, dangerous space between what we know and what we believe. The in-between has always been my country. It’s where I’ve found the most honest versions of myself, and where my characters seem to find me first—half-shadow, half-light, whispering: write the crossing.

To live in the liminal is to refuse the false choice between realism and magic, sanity and madness, childhood and adulthood. It is to see both—and to find the trembling beauty in the blur.

Whimsy and Bliss: Growing Up Inside Wonder

In Whimsy and Bliss, I wanted to write about that final summer before the horizon changes—the cusp between friendship and farewell, between the girls they were and the women they’re about to become.

Abigail Whimsy and Lainey Bliss live inside this threshold. Their adventures—climbing water towers at midnight, mapping “thin places,” chasing the remnants of childhood magic—are less about fantasy and more about memory. Each act of wonder becomes an act of grief for the selves they’re outgrowing.

To write them was to remember the ache of adolescence: that strange ache of realizing that magic was never lost, only waiting for you to look differently.

Ink & Ivy: Creation as Refuge

When I began Ink & Ivy, I was thinking about art as survival—about how creation can become a sanctuary when the world fractures. The story’s young booksellers and illustrators discover that their drawings begin to breathe, that the ink itself can resist darkness.

But underneath the fantastical premise lies a human truth: we build worlds not to escape the real, but to understand it. Ink becomes rebellion. Story becomes shelter. For Marisol and her circle, creation is both resistance and refuge—the liminal act of turning despair into design, shadow into shape.

That’s what writing feels like for me, too—a quiet act of defiance against silence.

Shadows We Carry: The Weight of Inheritance

Then came Shadows We Carry, a book born from the tension between remembering and release. It lives in the psychological dusk—between grief and growth, silence and confession. Its characters inherit what isn’t visible: generational trauma, unspoken histories, ghosts of choices that still breathe through bloodlines.

Writing it taught me that the liminal isn’t always mystical; sometimes it’s painfully human. The space between who we were raised to be and who we are becoming can feel like a haunting—and yet, it’s also where healing begins. The shadows we carry are not just burdens; they are thresholds. Step through them, and you find yourself rewritten.

Déjà vu: The Echo Between Memory and Madness

In Déjà vu, the line between dream and waking frays entirely. Ivy Lancaster’s visions, her looping déjà vu, and her haunting sense of repetition are not supernatural tricks—they’re metaphors for what trauma does to time.

To live with memory is to live in a loop: to relive, re-see, re-feel what logic insists is over. Writing this book meant surrendering to that repetition—finding beauty in the recursion, empathy in the confusion.

The story asks: what if madness isn’t madness at all, but a language the world has forgotten how to read?

Why We Need the In-Between

Liminality terrifies because it resists certainty. It’s a door that never entirely shuts, a sky that never chooses day or night. But within that uncertainty is grace. It’s where imagination lives, where empathy begins.

The young and the haunted, the dreamers and the doubters—they all live here, straddling worlds, speaking in metaphors because plain speech fails. To write the liminal is to honor the unseen bridges: between sanity and sensitivity, between what was and what will be.

When I write, I try not to choose a side. I let both worlds breathe.

For the Reader Between Worlds

If you’ve ever felt too much, or too early, or too in-between—this space is for you. Hold the blur. Let your contradictions coexist. The liminal is not indecision; it’s artistry.

And maybe, somewhere between dusk and dawn, story and silence, you’ll find yourself not trapped between worlds—but finally belonging to both.“To write the crossing is to remember: thresholds are not barriers, but invitations.”