Creating theAppalachian Fantastic, Part 1: An Introduction to Vernacular Fantasy
Photo Credit: Garrett Robinson
I once heard it proposed that children’s fantasy written by Americans would never match what has been and will be written by the British. The author of the article claimed that the fabric of British history and culture was more given to mythologization, that the long span of sedentary habitation, the waves of conquest, and the echoes of past civilizations lying in various states of ruin and repair made the United Kingdom the ideal spawning ground for authors of fantasy. I take issue with the conclusions drawn, if not directly with the reasoning. I do believe that a place whose culture is so rooted in its stones is likely to produce more good works of fantasy literature than a place whose dominant culture sprang into being roughly four hundred years ago. However, the view of fantasy as being exclusively derived from mythohistorical potential seems to me too narrow to be taken as inerrant gospel.
It’s true that American children’s literature is plagued with some persistent problems. As a child who grew up reading books collected over decades by his parents, I was exposed to older children’s literature long before I had any contact with what was being produced for my own cohort of American kids, Generation Z. When I did leave the safe confines of George MacDonald, C.S. Lewis, Tolkien, Susan Cooper, and Patricia McKillip, I found myself confronted with… Jeff Kinney and Dav Pilkey (Diary of a Wimpy Kid and Captain Underpants, respectively). There was something wrong, in my mind, with the way that American authors wrote to children. While I no longer bear quite the same snobbish perspective that I did at the time, it set me on a path whose outcome I don’t regret.
I didn’t consciously avoid American authors, but in retrospect, my tastes turned toward the Old World over and over. Even when I read something by an author from outside Europe, it was set in Europe or in the UK, mythologized or not. I read the YA pulp thrillers of John Flanagan’s Ranger’s Apprentice series, and Stephen Lawhead’s poetically epic Song of Albion trilogy. But it wasn’t until much later that I found fantasy that didn’t try to be European in one way or another, that took itself seriously and loved its genre without poisoning itself on irony.
Patricia C. Wrede, one of those fantasy authors who’s written enough books to warrant her own shelving unit, was the first to introduce me to an American fantasy I could fall in love with. It was around the time, I believe, that the first Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them movie premiered. My chronology of my teen years is slightly scrambled, but in hindsight, the disparity between Rowling’s (fumbling, ill-fated, and frankly offensive) attempt to make Americana fantasy work and Wrede’s total and unmitigated success is striking.
When she did her cursory work attempting to create a compellingly American version of her deeply British setting, Rowling believed that all it took to make American fantasy was to build a facade of history and plug her own magic system into it. She did it even more haphazardly with other countries, but the American version was, predictably, the one that prompted the most backlash. She appropriated an Encyclopedia Britannica version of some Indigenous mythology, clattered together a deeply naive version of American colonial history and Irish immigration, and grandly presented it to an unimpressed public.
Wrede, by contrast, wrote her book Thirteenth Child with an understanding of the cultural cachet surrounding her subjects. She created a version of the United States that was magical, but which did not attempt to speak to traditions that she herself didn’t understand. The world in which her characters exist has a uniquely American perspective, drawing the literature that American children read (books like Pollyanna and the works of Louisa May Alcott and Laura Ingalls Wilder) onto her distaff. She spun a world where traditions of magic came to the New World with the various waves of immigration – forced and voluntary alike. She did not lean into the iconophilic, nationalistic angle that she might have. She didn’t rely on the big names of Wild West mythology like Annie Oakley and Buffalo Bill. Instead, she wrote an America that grew up in a world shaped by magic. She gave herself room to breathe by eschewing the historical spec-fic urge to incorporate well-known real-world events, and simply wrote a story that understood the genres it sprang from. Thirteenth Child was the book that set me on my path toward my current concept of the American fantastic.
I’ve written about how literature built my relationship with the land I’m from, but I know that not everyone will be as compelled by nature writing as I was. So I’ve begun to wonder if there might be a way I can help kids who don’t share my interest in the sciences engage with their homeland and heritage. In that pursuit, the idea of Appalachian Fantasy has taken shape. It’s still nascent, in part because the Appalachian Literature movement is only just beginning to gain recognition outside our own universities, but I’ve begun to determine what it means to me. The tenets of it are not rules, of course – no convention of a genre really is a rule, so much as a talking point for the conversation the genre is having. But in my own practice, I follow a few key lines of thought.
Appalachian fantasy (and sci-fi, for that matter) is about the same things every other Appalachian literary genre is about. It’s about the social and economic consequences of extraction. It’s about what it means to be descended from people pushed to the edge of the world, first in their homeland and then in the land they fled to for an escape from internal colonization and exploitation. It’s about a place where immigration brought in waves of outcasts with a very particular set of skills. It’s about learning from land that echoes with the memory of ancient life, primeval and human alike.
Maybe some Appalachian Fantasy incorporates mountain music, ghost stories, and mining, but it doesn’t have to. All it has to do is be Appalachian in its perspective, viewing the world it creates through our unique regional lens. I know that my own concept of this field is limited by my experience; I write West Virginian fantasy more than the broader Appalachian. But I hope that the tools I help develop will serve to empower other writers to create magic that feels grounded in this land.
Much as it would pain me to become obsolete, I acknowledge that if I succeed in promoting this market space, I’ll eventually be considered old hat. As Appalachian-ness develops and stretches its legs, the hypothetical critics will say that Robinson’s work is naive to the broader dynamics of the genre, that he was a product of his time, that his theoretical background was too limited to create enduring classics. Hopefully, I’m dead before I’m too thoroughly panned. But I want to help stretch the market a little. I want to till the ground.
My views on this topic will change as I grow and work, but I believe I’ll be pursuing it for a long time. I don’t pretend to know the end point of my investigation and development, but I hope to document my progress as I add my two cents to the new conversation. I don’t even know how long this series will run, or if I’ll ever truly finish it. I hope other writers will join me, though, and add their own voices and ideas and characters to the soup. I want to build connections.
