But in the last few months, this constancy and reassurance has been penetrated by one small, very large, question: why? That same daughter, who devours Lewis and has heard the words of so many tales at bedtime for years and consistently pursues stories beyond her age, has posed it several times and under different colors. Some are standard daddy-fare, and can be worked through with direct help from the books: are there really elves? If there are elves, then why aren’t they more angry that people live where they did? I think dragons are fierce and scary, but they are all old king dragons - why are there no dragon princesses? Others stretch into realms of literary criticism and philosophy, and leave the world of omniscient-appearing fathers far, far away: why aren’t all the faeries magical, or what else makes them faeries? Why did Boromir have to die? Why does Aslan let the White Witch be there so long if he can fix anything? These, though, are welcome questions that open the books to us and let us, as a family, dive into what we think about how worlds work. Book geek discussions with a precocious third grader are salve for the soul.
Yet the last “why” questions are ones that touch on the basis of the original Fantasy Matters conference, and now very much this site. My daughter’s reading and discussion and appreciation for fantasy as amazing stuff runs full force, each day, into general third grade devotion to Disney, and many of her peers belief that all “that stuff” is for little kids, and is all silly fairy tales, or worse. Her response to her friends, in perfect tone, has almost always been that she likes it and that is enough for her. But her response to herself has not been so strong, and her question to me has been the inescapable why: why do these stories and books matter if they aren’t about real things and are just old stories? In the moment she asked it, turning to gesture at the books around her, or talk about what the stories meant, seemed heavy handed, and I did not have the grace to quote about fantasy allowing us to fight dragons or triumph over evil (or, I suppose, indulge in being evil rather than our good selves). That playground comment inspired “why” hung in the air.
Then, the answer arrived in full, as we talked about what that meant. What makes fantasy matter for my daughter, at least for right now in answer to her classmates’ questions, is the writers, and how they imagine and craft and write stories that are their own, and our own, from whatever fairy tale “stuff” was before. For her, right now, fantasy doesn’t so much provide a vehicle for slaying dragons of her own, or a glass for viewing a world that is better or worse than our own, or even a stage to cast whatever arch-enemy she may have in real life as the nemesis in the tale. Right now, fantasy matters because it is where good writers make good stories. And in many ways, all those fantasy books that fill our house matter for exactly the same reason.