Our Powers That Be

It's Christmas Eve, and all is not well.

It's been a strained but beautiful holiday season at our house, er, condo. I'm teaching online theatre classes with oscillating degrees of joy while watching our bank account dip continuously toward zero. I'm working on three middle grade manuscripts while querying Jaren Silverwing and the Forbidden Spell, and they don't call it the "querying trenches" for nothing.

The worst thing that happened in the last few months was the election, and the fear, tears, and dread the results of that evoked. My concern for my friends, neighbors, students, community, country, and the world is a non-abstract, five-alarm-fire concern. The best thing that happened, around the same time, was my daughter was cast in a remarkable, pared-down production of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol with Santa Cruz Shakespeare, and we found ourselves in the embrace of the best of humanity: committed people with passion, integrity, vision, and the desire to make something truthful and bright to counter the darkness.

What a gift in a time of anxiety and hopelessness.

We also had the pleasure of watching Wicked the movie (twice), which served as a motivator and balm. (I'm a theatre professional but somehow missed this bold narrative the first time around.)

A story about a miser and three spirits. A story about a witch against the world. Of course I'm pulled in: fantasy is my favorite thing to write. In my last ten years of writing, I don't think I've written a single word that isn't speculative. And yet, I'm deeply concerned about the real world. Some equate fantasy with Good vs. Evil, and there's something to that (ahem, Marvel), but I feel that true fantasy breaks down that trope with nuance and purpose. There is darkness and light in this world, but it's the way we layer it in our stories that makes it applicable to real life. For we contain both, in varying amounts, and it is our actions that matter most in the end.

I have been asked by several people why I am drawn to write fantasy, for children and otherwise. This is an interesting question, because I think many people equate fantasy with swords and dragons. (Some of my stories do involve characters who wield swords, but I doubt I will ever name those weapons, and I would be stunned if I ever wrote a story involving dragons. They're just not my cup of tea.) For me, it comes down to symbolism, which excites me. The best fantasy uses magical elements as symbols representing aspects of the human experience. Even the word power, as in a person having a magical power, or gift, translates into what we all have: our powers, our gifts, and what we carry with us as we face the world.

In the musical Hadestown, written by Anais Mitchell, we are told the protagonist Orpheus, the son of a Muse, has a gift: "a way with words, and a rhythm and a rhyme, and he sang just like a bird out on a line." I adore Hadestown, and it part that's because I can relate to Orpheus, who doubts his own gifts to his destruction (and Eurydice's.). How many of us are our own worst enemy and fail to believe in ourselves in the end? How many of us trash our own skills, crumple our own artwork, and allow "imposter's syndrome" to plague us to the point of almost giving up?

Fantasy reminds us we all have powers. It is our relationship to those powers, how they define us, how we choose to use them, that alters the course of the journey.

I was struck recently by a JRR Tolkien quote that popped up in my feed. It dates back to 1956, when Tolkien was receiving letters about his protagonist Frodo and how this character "failed" by succumbing to the darkness within the ring. The ring, of course, is a symbol for the power many humans desire: the power to control, dominate, and destroy. (Take a look around our world and observe the many examples in 2024.) Many people imagine they can use this magical weapon for good despite the murderous tendencies it inspires. While reading these books, one might question: Why was the atomic bomb invented? Can a supposed "good" person with a gun save the day by killing a supposed "bad" person with a gun and all is well?

Meanwhile, others are perfectly happy to wield this weapon violently, with glee and fervor.

But JRR Tolkien wants to remind readers that whatever our cause, few of us can do it alone:

"By chance, I have just had another letter regarding the failure of Frodo. Very few seem even to have observed it. But following the logic of the plot, it was clearly inevitable, as an event. And surely it is a more significant and real event than a mere 'fairy-story' ending in which the hero is indomitable? It is possible for the good, even the saintly, to be subjected to a power of evil which is too great for them to overcome – in themselves. In this case the cause (not the 'hero') was triumphant, because by the exercise of pity, mercy, and forgiveness of injury, a situation was produced in which all was redressed and disaster averted. Gandalf certainly foresaw this. Of course, he did not mean to say that one must be merciful, for it may prove useful later – it would not then be mercy or pity, which are only truly present when contrary to prudence. Not ours to plan! But we are assured that we must be ourselves extravagantly generous, if we are to hope for the extravagant generosity which the slightest easing of, or escape from, the consequences of our own follies and errors represents. And that mercy does sometimes occur in this life.

Frodo deserved all honour because he spent every drop of his power of will and body, and that was just sufficient to bring him to the destined point, and no further. Few others, possibly no others of his time, would have got so far."

-- The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, Letter # 192 (1956)

This speculation about compassion, and Frodo's failing power of will and body, and how much we need community in order to reach that end goal, leads me back to one of my favorite plays, Angels in America: Parts 1 and 2, by Tony Kushner -- a gay, Marxist, Jewish playwright who has much to say about politics, the state of the world, (he has eloquently stated his support of freedom for Palestinians), and he also has plenty to say about compassion vs. selfishness.

Kushner uses fantastical images - dream sequences / hallucinations in which Mormon housewives chat with drag queens, angels crashing through the ceiling, burning alephs, and giant tomes that pop out of the floor on pedestals - to compel us to consider America in the late 1980's. Written at a time when to speak of gay rights was strictly taboo, he entices us into the world of a young gay man with AIDS (Prior) and a ruthless, real-world, closeted gay man, lawyer, and mentor to Donald Trump (Roy Cohn). One could consider this a battle of Good versus Evil, but this would be an oversimplification of these two deeply-drawn characters.

While Cohn grasps and struggles to the last, clinging to his mantra of selfishness to the bitter, lonely end, Prior is the one who ascends, while still living, to Heaven, to argue with the terrified, bureaucratic angels who think humans should stop moving, stop progressing. Prior's powers are his belief in progress, his observation that humans want to live and love, and his commitment to those ideals. His is a compassionate view, full of wisdom and experience, and it is Prior who is still standing, alongside friends and loved ones, at the end of the play.

While I suspect A Christmas Carol has never been accused of being a fantasy, yet we have these three Spirits, and a moaning Jacob Marley showing up in unearthly chains, and no one can argue this is realism. This fantastical story, too, is about power. Scrooge observes that his late boss, the kindly Fezziwig, has "the power to render us happy or unhappy; to make our service light or burdensome: a pleasure or a toil." An aghast Ghost of Christmas Present chides him (and much of humanity) for willing the suffering to quickly die "and decrease the surplus population," a terrible power if he were to somehow have it. Whereas he begins the story convinced that his miserliness is his greatest power, he ends the tale with the realization that his power to help others, to feed and clothe the sick and hungry like his employee's son, Tiny Tim, is a much greater power and brings him greater joy than he never could have imagined.

As we face 2025, and a tyrannical, chaotic figure who has just been given a significant amount of power in our duped society, fantasy stories (on the page, silver screen, or on stage) have the ability to remind us of our own innate and developed gifts--the gifts we must not abandon when the cold wind blows. Most of all, we must recognize and call out our urges to DOUBT our powers, as tragic Orpheus does in Hadestown. We must try not to be our own worst villain.

And if we cannot to defeat the voice in our heads shouting "Imposter!", at the very least we must take the advice of choreographer Martha Graham to young dancer Agnes DeMille: "You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate YOU."

Just after the election, a friend of mine sent me this article. It discusses how we can be effective in the days ahead and how our proclivities, personalities, and skill sets will no doubt lead us in one direction or another. Though not explicitly, it speaks to our POWERS, those unique powers we all have, to make change happen, even in the most dire circumstances.

Article: https://wagingnonviolence.org/2024/11/10-things-to-do-if-trump-wins/

If our power is to write a story full of empathy, write or direct a play that reminds several hundred people to remember the most afflicted members of their community, help a friend or neighbor who is endangered by a heartless policy, bolster a civic institution we believe in, or commit time to a non-profit helping the most marginalized among us, then we must use those gifts and continue to, as civil rights icon John Lewis put it, "Speak up, speak out, get in the way. Get in good trouble, necessary trouble, and help redeem the soul of America.”

Like Frodo, we are not alone. Millions of others strive to walk these same paths and care more than we think they do. Even if we have but one supporter, friend, or family member who believes in our work, that may be enough to carry us to the next destination. If I didn't have a daughter who asked me to read my stories to her at night and creative friends who critique and encourage my work, like Orpheus, I may have thrown in the towel a long time ago.

My tendency is to read a comprehensive article like the one above, then return to my favorite fantasy story and the lessons I learned there. We, like these protagonists, are flawed, doubt ourselves, and require community, compassion, and mercy to reach the end points of our goals.

But love is a powerful motivator. Many seemingly impossible goals have been achieved, not just in fiction but in the real world, and progress, as Tony Kushner indicates, IS the way of humanity. The lesson fantasy teaches us is that we are more powerful than we realize.

In 2025, may we avail ourselves of all the narratives that remind us that we have the power to make change happen, with generosity, openness, trust, and community.