I’m Theo L., an English major with certificates in Computer Science and Linguistics. When I was a child, some of my favorite books were Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, Norton Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth, Phillip Pullman’s The Golden Compass, and Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series. I've always loved the more strange and fantastical elements of children’s stories, and I was captivated by the worlds these authors created: they drew imaginative connections, often mixing the ordinary right in with fantastical elements, yielding results that are sometimes funny, sometimes surreal, and sometimes profoundly touching.
In my research, I traced the history of the fairy tale genre back to George MacDonald, considered by many the first fantasy writer. I never read his 1867 story “The Golden Key” as a child, but when I did as an adult I felt like I was meeting an old friend. It has everything I most love about the genre — he drew on fairy tale symbolism, Christian mysticism, and tales from various mythologies to create a strange and wonderful universe all of his own, in which floating fish cook themselves for dinner every night and come alive again every day, ageless beings in faraway caves control the motions of the cosmos with balls of colored yarn, and two brave children gifted a key by fairies travel between worlds on a rainbow bridge in search of the door it unlocks.
My story, “The Witchfinders,” was inspired by all of these influences. I wanted to create a world equally enchanting and frightening, strange and familiar. I wanted it to have the shifting, dreamlike qualities of a fairy tale, where anything is possible and a talking cat is taken in stride. However, even in a fanciful world apart from reality, the emotional core of a story has to ring true: MacDonald, L’Engle, Juster, Pullman, and Pratchett all speak frankly about difficult themes of fairness, injustice, loss, death, and growing up. I believe that even though children may have limited life experience with which to predict or make sense of the world, they are still emotionally complex individuals who appreciate these kinds of stories. I hope that “The Witchfinders” is able to live up to its inspirations, with nuanced themes and accessible but challenging vocabulary, wrapped up in an imaginary world that will delight and intrigue young readers.