Why Are Americans Afraid of Dragons?
 It's December 2008 and I'm in the video section of Target, Christmas shopping for my daughter. As I'm browsing through the movie racks, I overhear an older and younger woman discussing which DVD to buy a child on their list.
"What about Eragon?" the younger woman asks. "I hear it's good."
"Does it have magic in it? I don't want a movie with magic," the older one – her mother? – responds sternly.
They move out of earshot and I'm too stunned to follow.
Are we truly living in some version of The MoonQuest's mythical setting? This land where vision is outlawed and visionaries put to death, where myth and magic are forbidden, where "once upon a time" is a forbidden phrase, and where fact is the only legal tender was a creation of my imagination... Or was it?
What kind of culture have we created where children are denied magic, where fantasy is suspect and where dragons are relegated to dustbins?
 More than 30 years ago in an essay, author Ursula K. Le Guin asked, "Why are Americans afraid of dragons?" She concluded that most technological cultures dismiss works of the imagination because they lack measurable utility, an outlook only exacerbated in this country by its Puritan heritage.
If 30 years ago dragons were not fit for adults, are they now unfit for children, too?
Even as the Harry Potter books and movies broadened the reach of imaginative fiction for kids (and adults), it also expanded our hysterical suspicion and suppression of it.
 The fact is, imaginative fiction opens our hearts, expands our spirit and broadens our minds in ways that nonfiction never can, and that magical/fantastical fiction can carry more truth in its castles, dragons and trolls than many pieces of so-called literature.
That's why I called the original, pre-Q'ntana Trilogy edition of The MoonQuest a "true fantasy." There is nothing factual about it. But as those two women in Target have proven, it's decidedly true.
Look for The MoonQuest and its StarQuest and SunQuest sequels in paperback or ebook from your favorite online bookseller or signed by me to you from my website.
The Q'ntana Trilogy: Soon to be a Trio of Epic Motion Pictures!
|
|
|
|
The MoonQuest: The Birth of a Trilogy
In this excerpt from Acts of Surrender: A Writer's Memoir, I share the story of how The MoonQuest was born and became not only my first novel but the first installment in a trilogy I didn't yet know existed.
I rarely write during a workshop that I’m facilitating. Instead, I watch the participants, hold space for them and remain available to them. This March 1994 class would be different. Once the six women were engrossed in their writing, some inner imperative insisted that I also pick a card. I reached into The Celtic Tarot deck and pulled "The Chariot." Without full awareness of what I was doing, I then picked up my pen, pulled my yellow-paged notepad toward me and began to write. What emerged, after a rambling preamble, was the tale of an odd-looking man in an odd-looking coach. Pulling the coach were horses as oddly colored as those on the tarot card. That scene would become the opening of the first draft of a novel I knew nothing about.
Next morning, I picked up the story where I had left off and, most mornings for the next few months, I continued writing. It was a challenge to my controlling self, who bridled at the journey into the unknown that each word represented.
A year to the day after that Toronto workshop, I dropped the final period on the first draft of a novel now titled The MoonQuest. But I was no longer in Toronto. Five months earlier, I had sold or given away most everything I owned and moved 1,000 miles east to rural Nova Scotia. It was there, with no distractions and only my writing to fill my time, that I completed The MoonQuest's initial draft and would, in the months that followed, pen its subsequent draft.
It would be more than a decade before The MoonQuest would see print and a further six years before its sequels, The StarQuest and The SunQuest, would be completed and published. The MoonQuest has now won six literary awards and the full Q'ntana Trilogy is now on its way to theaters as a trio of epic motion pictures.
"Leaves you turning every page, hungry for more!"
– David Michael, author of The United Series
|
|
|
|
|
"In a land where fear rules and storytelling spells death, only one bard's imagination can end the tyranny. Once upon a time...The MoonQuest."
|
|
|
|
