Tag: writing fiction

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.

When Fiction Heals the Dreamer: Writing Trauma as Art

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There’s a quiet moment that comes after finishing a dark book—that first deep inhale, the feeling that the air has changed somehow. That’s what writing Long Since Buried felt like for me. I’d exhaled years of unspoken fear, and when the final chapter ended, the silence that followed wasn’t emptiness. It was relief.

But the story didn’t stop on the page. Healing never does.

What I learned in therapy—and later through mindfulness—is that creative survival isn’t about mastering pain; it’s about making room for it to transform. Long Since Buried gave the nightmare form. Bedridden & Gutted to Mindful taught me how to live beyond it.

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The Two Languages of Survival

In therapy, I discovered that trauma speaks two dialects: chaos and control. Fiction became my translation of chaos—the wild, cinematic projection of buried emotion. Mindfulness became my translation of control—the patient return to breath, to the present, to what is still possible.

Writing Long Since Buried was visceral. It bled from dreamscapes and flashbacks, the body remembering danger. Every paragraph was an adrenaline pulse, an echo of that twelve-year-old’s terror.

Writing Bedridden & Gutted to Mindful was slower—a reclamation of quiet. It was learning to listen to the world again, one heartbeat at a time. While the thriller roared, the memoir whispered. Both, however, were love letters to survival written in different tongues.

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The Mind–Body Bridge

Trauma divides us—the mind races ahead while the body stays trapped in old danger. Through therapy I learned how narrative and mindfulness work together to build a bridge back to wholeness.

Fiction let me remember safely. I could approach the pain through story, where characters held the fear for me. Mindfulness let me return safely. It anchored me to the now, reminding me that the threat was past.

I began to see that the very act of creating—forming sentences, describing light, naming sensation—was neurological repair. The brain’s storytelling instinct and the body’s breathing instinct are twin healers. Together they weave coherence from chaos.

When readers tell me Long Since Buried feels immersive, I know it’s because I wrote it with my entire nervous system. When they tell me Bedridden & Gutted to Mindful feels calming, it’s because I wrote it with the same system finally at rest.

Writing the Body Back Home

During therapy, my clinician once said, “The body keeps score, but it also keeps rhythm.” That sentence changed how I wrote. I started noticing rhythm everywhere—the pattern of my steps, the cadence of my sentences, the rise and fall of my breath.

In Bedridden & Gutted to Mindful, I intentionally explored this rhythm. The prose mirrors the inhale–exhale cycle: tension, release; grief, gratitude. It’s structured mindfulness, disguised as narrative.

In Long Since Buried, rhythm became heartbeat and gunshot—the percussive language of suspense that mirrors trauma’s pacing: freeze, run, breathe. The thriller was the storm; the mindfulness memoir was the still water after.

Together, they compose a symphony of the same theme: how the body returns to itself after being lost in fear.

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Why the Dark Still Matters

People sometimes ask why I continue to explore the dark—murder, secrets, obsession—after publishing a book devoted to calm and healing. I think it’s because darkness isn’t the opposite of peace; it’s the doorway to it.

Writing thrillers like Long Since Buried allows me to enter that darkness on my own terms. The fear that once hunted me now waits on the page, obedient to craft. Through fiction, I can orchestrate the chaos that once consumed me. Through mindfulness, I can sit beside it without flinching.

The two practices are not opposites—they are partners. One dives deep into the abyss; the other teaches how to resurface without drowning.

The Craft of Compassion

When I teach or speak about writing through trauma, I remind others that craft and compassion are inseparable. Good storytelling isn’t about dramatizing suffering; it’s about humanizing it. The line between a scene of violence and a scene of healing is empathy—for the characters, for the reader, for yourself.

While revising Long Since Buried, I played with quiet moments amid tension—the smell of coffee in a sheriff’s office, the tremor of a hand brushing against a windowpane—small reminders that even in fear, life insists on beauty.

In Bedridden & Gutted to Mindful, compassion showed up differently: as permission to rest, to not perform recovery as productivity. I wrote those pages with gentleness, the way you might speak to a frightened animal—softly, patiently, without sudden movement.

Both books required the same heartbeat of grace: You survived. Now, what will you make from the pieces?

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Creativity as Continuum

Looking back, I can trace a clear lineage between the two works—between the hunted girl of Long Since Buried and the healing woman of Bedridden & Gutted to Mindful.

  • One wrote from the wound.
  • The other wrote from the scar.

Together they tell a larger truth: healing is not an endpoint but a continuum of creation. We write the pain to understand it, and we write the peace to remember it.

If Long Since Buried was the exorcism, Bedridden & Gutted to Mindful was the benediction.

A Note to the Dreamers

If you’ve ever woken from a nightmare that feels too real, or carried a story inside you that no one believes—this is for you. You are not alone in the dark. The act of writing, painting, singing, or simply breathing through it is a radical declaration: I am still here.

Fiction may not heal the wound, but it can build a bridge to the part of you that wants to. Mindfulness may not erase memory, but it teaches you to hold it gently, without letting it consume you. Every story we tell from a place of survival becomes a lighthouse for someone still lost at sea. That’s why we keep creating. Not because we’ve conquered the dark—but because we’ve learned to live with its light inside us.

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In Closing, A Reflection…

When I look at my bookshelf now, I see not just titles but testaments. Long Since Buried stands as the girl’s scream turned into structure. Bedridden & Gutted to Mindful stands as the woman’s whisper turned into prayer.

Between them runs a thread of ink, breath, and bravery—proof that stories born of pain can become the architecture of peace.

And perhaps that’s the most honest definition of healing I know:
Not erasing the nightmare,
But rewriting it until it learns how to dream.

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Book review for Writing for Bliss: A 7-step Plan for Telling Your Story and Transforming Your Life by Diana Raab

“Bliss may be defined as a natural direction to take to maximize your sense of joy and sense of fulfillment and performance. It is more powerful than happiness.” Writing and Bliss is about writing for therapy, for healing, and for transformation. It is about journaling (documenting and getting in touch with your feelings) which is a cathartic and safe way to spill out your stress or pain by being a storyteller which helps us understand and make sense of our lived experiences, the lessons we learned and our dreams for the future to help us transform to becoming aware of, facing, and becoming responsible for one’s thoughts and feelings.

In preparation to write, the author tells of the necessity of a writer, which is voraciously reading by being a seeker on the path to self-discovery. The book explains how to set up a writing spot, grounding, feeling gratitude, the connection of mind, body, and spirit, calming your mind, being fearless and courageous, and nurturing creativity, inspiration, and flow. Also interesting was the part of cultivating awareness, recalling your dreams, setting intentions and creative visualizations. Finding your voice, reflective writing, memory, and imagination were a good precursor to examining your life which encompasses purposes and themes, the meaning of experiences, the patterns in our lives, writing about difficult times, and sharing stories to heal the inner child.

Finding your writing form was also explained well, whether it be journaling, stream-of-conscious writing, memoir writing, poetry, or fiction. I particularly liked how the author wrote about the courage to write poetry as well as the necessity in reading poems of all kinds, shapes, and sizes. I also made numerous sticky notes focusing on the handy table of writing prompts. It gives you a starting place to find your bliss. This book is a keeper. Get yours here and read it in its entirety.

Until my next post, why not check out my YA novels about mental illness, memoir writing, or even my Native American mystery series on Amazon, or follow me on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Goodreads, LinkedIn, Bookbub , BookSprout, or AllAuthor.