The Beginning of My Endless Quest

Or how a box of books changed my life...

Or, really, how my third grade teacher, Mrs. Shaw, changed my life. She was the one who filled that box with treasures and let us pick our destiny…

I don’t know exactly when I started loving fantasy. Like most children, I was told fairy tales, and given make-believe stories to read, and I’m sure both 1939’s Wizard of Oz movie and the Candyland board game played a role (I distinctly remember imagining my grandparent’s front yard was the Peppermint Forest). But how exactly did I start loving fantasy literature, the kind with elves and dwarves and dragons in it?

I’m sure a lot had to do with the poster on my elementary school librarian’s door. I can’t remember whether it was the Brothers Hildebrandt or Angus McBride, but it was one of the two, and it was a full-color image depicting something from The Lord of the Rings (maybe Pippin, Merry, and Treebeard?). I remember being mesmerized by it, and slightly afraid to ask the librarian what it was from, but eventually I did ask, and that sent me on a journey to find The Hobbit and attempt to read it.

I say “attempt” because I’m fairly sure I found it hard to understand. This was probably in third grade, though possibly earlier. Anyway, I must have read and understood enough of it, because from that moment on, I was obsessed with Middle-Earth, and by extension, all fantasy worlds that grew from it. I remember sitting in the library on the floor and just gazing at Thorin’s map, studying every inch of it, and the map of the Wilderlands, and dreaming of going on adventures in such wild places.

Little did I know that soon I would be delving into a deep and forgotten underground realm where my father once ruled as king…

Mrs. Shaw, my third grade teacher, set up a reading challenge for us, and while I can’t remember the specifics (books read? pages read? something like that), I do remember the box of books which served as the prize box. After completing the number of books/pages/whatever, we got a chance to pick a book from the book box. Each time we reached a milestone, we earned another dip into the box, another free book.

When I, at long last, had reached such a milestone, I remember peeking over the edge of the huge box to see what lay within. Amidst the usual Babysitter’s Club and sundry paperbacks, I saw it like a gleaming emerald: the book that would take me on an adventure, that would usher me into the wilds and wilderlands of a place like Middle-Earth.

“Endless Quest,” it said. “Pick-a-Path to Adventure,” it proclaimed. Return to Brookmere. Dungeons and Dragons.

I had to have it. I was as greedy as Gollum as I reached into the cardboard box and took my prize.

I remember reading it in secret at my grandma’s house. While everyone else in my family was socializing and cooking and eating and watching sports on TV and playing basketball in the driveway — all the usual activities for a Sunday afternoon family dinner — I was secreted away in an upstairs bedroom reading my new book. It felt dangerous. I’ve written before about how Dungeons and Dragons, because it was forbidden by my parents, had the air of mystery and danger that made it both enticing and a little scary. I remember reading that Endless Quest book and thinking I was doing something subversive (though I wouldn’t have put it in those terms back then). I remember hiding the book when someone would peek their heads into that empty bedroom.

Of course there was nothing dangerous or subversive in that book. It was written for kids, after all. But at the time, I felt like I’d been given permission to enter a darker world, a world that I had to visit in secret.

It’s been more than thirty years since I read Return to Brookmere, but for nostalgia’s sake, I found a used copy online and bought it a few months ago. I wanted to hold it in my hands again, to remember the thrill of holding it for the first time, back in third grade, in Mrs. Shaw’s class, in a place where I was free to be myself and love fantasy with all my heart.

That’s what Mrs. Shaw gave me. Not just a book with an elf and a rat king on the cover, but an invitation to be myself. To revel in fantasy and Dungeons and Dragons and adventure without self-consciousness.

Reading Return to Brookmere as a grown-up is almost entirely an exercise in nostalgia, but I’m cool with that. I’m not one to speak of nostalgia with derision. Nostalgia is an important emotional and human response to the world. It’s not a bad thing.

In fact, I think the nostaglic impulse is what drives many people to engage with fantasy in the first place. Fantasy is often pre-industial, and even when it’s not (say, in Urban Fantasy), the magic stuff is often connected to an “old way,” to an ancient culture that predates the mechanical modernities of humanity. If science fiction is looking to the future, fantasy is often looking to the past.

(There are without a doubt exceptions to this, and I’m not even saying that past-looking is intrinsic to fantasy as a genre, I’m just noticing a tendency. Or maybe it’s just a tendency in the fantasy I like to read. IDK.)

The atavistic fantasy — the “get back to the Garden” stuff — is there if we want to see it, and I think it’s good, actually. Whether the past really was “better” or not isn’t quite the point. (The past was both good and bad, just as right now is both good and bad.) The point is the longing. The deep desire for that ineffable something. We all feel the loss. Of innocence. Of dreams. Trying to catch a glimpse of those lost things means we’re still in touch with them. We haven’t hardened yet. We haven’t let cynicism or despair break through.

Is Return to Brookmere as good to me now as it was back in the day? No, but that’s the wrong benchmark. It was good, from a 1989 perspective, for a third grader who was just coming into her own as a fantasy reader. And the fact that I can remember that feeling now, in 2023, and cherish it, is in some ways even better than what it meant in 1989. The longing is still there. The hope. And even a little bit of the danger. I’m delving happily into the deep, in the guise of Brion the elven prince, and I can’t wait to turn to page 126 (the corridor to the right, if anyone’s curious) and see what happens next.

The quest continues. From the past, into the present, and onward into the future.

Thank you, Mrs. Shaw. You and your box of books made this quest possible.

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This newsletter is much overdue. It was supposed to be finished in September (to coincide with the start of the school year here in the U.S.), but September sagged with responsibilities, and I’m only now piecing together the time to work on my non-fiction, my blog, my newsletter, etc. The pieces are tiny and in disarray, but I’m muddling through.

What am I muddling through? Well, earlier this year I made the decision to return to teaching. It was a move made both out of necessity and a little bit of desire. I missed teaching. I missed the energy of the kids, and the fact that teaching lets me talk about writing and books as part of the job, which means I’m allowed to write stuff (as a way of modeling techniques and process to my students) and get paid for some of that time spent writing. And I get to read books, essays, poems, etc. in order to find material to share with the students, so I get paid for some of the time spent reading too. Not a bad gig.

And also, teenagers are fun to work with.

But I went back to teaching due to necessity too, because I felt the financial precariousness of being a freelancer was not good for my mental health. I’m not a risk-taker, it seems, when it comes to business and money. I’d like to think I’m a risk-taker in my art, but when it comes to money, I’m happy and sane when I know I’m getting a regular paycheck.

I wrote more about it HERE on my blog.

Because of my new/old teaching gig, I’m busier than I once was, which means I’ve had a tough time fitting my non-fiction newsletter and blog writing into my schedule. I’ve managed to mostly carve out time for my fiction, and for my writer’s notebook, but translating those notebook thoughts into blog posts and Substack newsletters has proved tricky. I’m hopeful that I’ll settle into my new/old life soon and get back to a regular posting scheduling, but I can’t promise anything.

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Blog Posts of Interest

Not much new stuff from me, but I did write a brief reflection on running my first public game of Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG. I was nervous as hell, but it turned out okay, I think. If you’ve never tried DCC RPG, see if you can join a session either in person or online because it’s an incredibly fun and free-spirited game that will make you feel like a kid again (especially if you were a fantasy-obsessed kid from the 1970s, 80s, or 90s, or a fan of Appendix N literature).

Around the Substack universe, I’m really enjoying the offerings from Rediscovered Realms, particularly this serendipitous interview with Rose Estes, author of Return to Brookmere and the other Endless Quest books. It’s a fabulous interview, and I had no idea of the twists and turns of Ms. Estes’s career and life. Do read it!

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That’s it for now! Thank you for reading! And please consider buying my books HERE, or my short stories HERE.

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Thanks for reading!

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