What am I doing here anyway?

Welcome to my blog! As both an author of fantasy fiction and a literary academic I have a foot firmly planted in two worlds. This blog is where I will bring those worlds together.

The word phenomenology might sound a bit like gobbledygook if you’ve made the solid decision to not read Husserl, but actually talking about books “phenomenologically” is something most of us do quite naturally. When we talk about why we love a book we are usually describing what it made us think and feel—what it did to us when we read it. And that’s a sort of phenomenology! A way of examining reading as a phenomenon—an event happening to us.

Thus, when I think about a book through a phenomenological lens, I’m basically asking: what happens to us when we read these words? What arcane wizardry must unfold for these ink squiggles on a page to feel like seeing and smelling and living and loving? This question fascinates me endlessly when I’m studying classic fiction, and it is no less germane to fantasy and scifi novels. Indeed, speculative fiction authors face a special sort of phenomenological challenge! George Eliot makes me feel alive in her world, but her world is in essence a variation of my own. Fantasy writers, however, have to use words on a page to make a reader feel as though they are alive in a whole new world! How can authors like Tolkien, Brandon Sanderson, or Ada Palmer bring whole universes to life in our minds? In each post on this blog, I’ll tackle a bit-sized piece of that question—thinking about various techniques that authors use to suspend our disbelief, engage our imaginations, and make their fictions feel real.

And I would be very grateful for your participation! I’d love for this to be a conversation, so if you have thoughts to share please share them. If you have questions, I’d love to answer them. And if you have suggestions for particular works of speculative fiction that you’d like to see me analyze, let me know, and I might take a crack at it.