When I was a kid, I thought I was pretty darn special. At age six, I began writing a newspaper by myself called “Stuper News,” and I kept a historical log of the battles when I played with my action figures. I wrote short stories as well. In one of the earliest stories, I open a book and begin to read it, thereby unleashing a dragon into our world that then swiftly flies towards our second-floor apartment in Jackson Heights, Queens, New York. I never find out what the dragon was going to do because I am so terrified that I close the book and the dragon disappears.
By age twelve I became so disenchanted with the “real” world of adults that I told myself I had learned all there was to learn from them. It is strange how random things from our childhood stay with us forever and this was one of them. From then on I would rely on myself to provide what was worth knowing in life. I loved stories and video games because they were a natural way of escaping this god-awful world I never felt at home in. Even more than reading stories, I loved writing them. During junior high school, I prided myself in writing the longest stories in my English teacher’s creative writing workshop.
Then I became sidetracked with fitting in and being cool and girls while keeping my grades up as we moved practically every year of high school. When I was nineteen I found the Holy Grail of fantasy tales: The Silmarillion. Immediately I knew I wanted to write something equal in scale and significance. I had discovered my calling. Unfortunately this is where two women and two men derailed me and I entered the darkness. I went deeper and deeper into this darkness until I literally locked myself up in my room with my computer. I even convinced myself to stop writing. This didn’t last long. When I tried to write again, it came out gibberish and fragments. Then suddenly I emerged out of it and wrote a short story entitled “The Sword named Angolas.” I was in Southern California wanting to be a filmmaker but doing nothing about it. I kept reading. I read “The Man Who Died” by D.H. Lawrence. I had developed a fascination with wanting to die and this seemed appropriate. It didn’t matter that the lead character was Jesus. That’s not what interested me. I read it because D.H. Lawrence was the man! The story left a deep impression on me and I thought I knew why but I didn’t.
It was during this time as well that I came across the magic word that forms the core of my personal belief: Amarantus. Amarantus is Latin for “flower that never fades.” I suppose what attracted me to it in the beginning was the symbol of the flower and the concept of it never dying—something beautiful that can never die. This to me became the new word for “home.” My home is not Earth; it is a beautiful place called Amarantus that lives on and on. My ultimate purpose is to get there. This idea appealed to me immensely. And now that I’m older I can appreciate the fact that this feeling is really where Tolkien and I meet.
I made several failed attempts at writing my great story. The best ones were always too derivative of Tolkien. I had to get away from him. But now I realize I actually had nothing to say. I hadn’t bothered to work on my own personal development enough to have anything to say. I was rather angry and had plenty to say about that. So I did. The best that came out of this was a manuscript for a novella entitled The Whore that Cost a Nation, in which I used an event out of the Book of Judges to say everything I had to say about why I was angry at religion, at politics, at sexual power play, and at the exploitation of the youth by our elders. But that wasn’t enough. I wanted to write an allegory about my experiences that truly painted how awful America had become. But I couldn’t just write it. No way. I had to do it in emulation of another great literary work, Dante Alighieri’s Inferno. Thus I wrote and re-wrote, typeset and self-published White Man’s Inferno. Immediately I was afraid of the controversial ideas in it and did nothing to promote it, which is just as well. It was a deeply personal, get-it-off-your-chest thing.
At this time I was in Ohio, having returned miserable from Southern California to be miserable in my parents’ home in New York and convincing my father to find work out West that combined a higher salary with a lower cost of living. Who could have guessed the series of unfortunate and sinister events that would leave my entire family out on the street two and a half years later? It was this event and the consequences thereof that forced me down a narrow path in which I would have to define the meaning of Amarantus and flesh out the legends that would take me there. It started out as an escape from my everyday reality and the responsibilities suddenly thrust upon me by circumstance. I indulged in it partly out of desperation and partly out of a hunger to create. But, once again, I was shooting aimlessly in the dark.
If I had to pinpoint the moment that turned it all around for me, it would have to be a greeting card I received containing the most gnomic bit of poetry, written by a Wiccan witch in trance. Coming from a woman with no formal education in the writer’s craft and little depth of the imagination, the poetry was both commanding and insightful. It analyzed me in the most sincere and compassionate terms. Most striking of all, it was written in the voice of a past lover who addressed me as “pearlfisher-bard,” a term I had never used myself, nor had it come up in conversation with the witch prior. Something or someone had channeled this message through her because it desperately wanted to get my attention, and it wanted me to change. Almost instantly I decided this someone’s identity was the Lady of the Lake and called Her after the name given to me in a dream: Knyygis, which I now write Nyykys in my mythopoetic orthography, and have always closely associated with the Moon. Although this in itself did not change me overnight, it planted the seeds of something that I’m still helping along to bloom.
Another fascination of mine is conspiracy theories. I always knew it was fairly obvious that nothing in politics and the economy happened by chance. And if that was the case, then some elitist group was slyly and effectively pulling the strings. I just didn’t have the evidence to back it up. The evidence would present itself later and from none other than former members of this secret society, but surprisingly the first man I came across who wrote it into his fiction was C.S. Lewis. He wrote a book entitled That Hideous Strength, which I read because it touched upon another fascination of mine, namely Merlin. I read the book hoping to learn more about that enigmatic figure and the manner in which he might return; and was certainly satisfied with Lewis’s depiction. However, I did not expect him to throw into the bargain the N.I.C.E., an institution secretly working to dominate and raze the world through a combination of science and magic. At last I had found a man who also believed in the truth of the world domination conspiracy and wrote about it in the forties! And, even better, he was a good friend of Tolkien!
As impacting as this was already, this would not prove to be Lewis’s most life-altering imprint on me. No, what really bothered me about this scholar was how he converted from atheism to Christianity. What sensible, educated person does that? Clearly he was no idiot. He explained the world domination conspiracy better than I ever could. So how does a remarkable man like that decide there is no God then embrace Jesus Christ of all people? Lewis made the choice clear. Jesus claimed to be God. So we cannot go halfway and accept him as a great moral teacher while disregarding his claim, because if he’s lying about that there’s no point in accepting anything he said. So either he’s a lunatic, so twisted-minded that he might very well be the Devil, or he’s speaking the truth. This made the issue so plain that before I knew what I had gotten into, I had crossed the threshold. I had accepted Christ. It was as shocking to me as it might appear to you. But it was an easy, natural decision.
Yet to take an action is not enough. To accept Christ is not enough. Action must be coupled with wisdom. Wisdom is a hard thing to describe. When taking an action, actually knowing whether it’s good or not, is not important. What is important is acknowledging the opposing forces wrestling within you when you take that action. Because only in your awareness of this internal struggle can you hope to achieve an understanding of yourself deep enough that you will emerge a stronger individual with a sense of purpose. Awareness is key; and is really the main thing to DO, because there are so many distractions constantly around us: our jobs, our commitments, our families, the social media, etc. To find a quiet place and focus on you requires effort. Once you do, however, there are several ways to express this struggle. That was the original intention of the Arts. Not just to entertain people, but for the creator of the art to express, explore and hopefully understand what he’s going through. What we have today passing for art is a perverse fixation with hatred, power and luxury. This isn’t and never can be art no matter how veiled the true intention. Art is meant to inspire, edify and hopefully coax you into doing some soul searching of your own.
For me, the manner in which to aim for my own wisdom has been writing. And a writer must read. The genres that suit me are fantasy and mythology, not only because they are the most ancient and therefore classical, but they force you to dare. When done right, a fantasy tale is about expressing a desire; a desire that either cannot or will not be fulfilled in our everyday world, but requires a vehicle for fulfillment nonetheless.
One day I was walking through a Borders at a mall when I saw this bizarre front cover art and in big bold letters the title Lilith. I was immediately intrigued to know who would make that mythological character (from the Bible, true, but still mythological) the centerpiece for a fantasy novel. I was doubtful of its merit. So I decided to wait and see if the next time I passed by it, I still felt the urge to read it; then I would buy it. Well, I did but it sat on my shelf for years. When I finally did read it (after my acquaintance with Lewis), I found myself at last fulfilling the journey that had begun with my reading of D.H. Lawrence’s short story “The Man Who Died.” I would finally enter through the gates of Death into Life.
Oddly enough, at the same time, I found that my ambitious legendarium that would reconcile myth, Scripture and to a lesser extent science, was now merging my central figure, King Arthur, with another I had previously sought to marginalize: namely Jesus Christ. The more I delved into how Christ fit into my legendarium and the implications thereof, the more I found that the story I wanted to tell, the story that held the entire legendarium together, that elucidated the past and informed the future, the story in which I could find myself at last, was the life of Jesus Christ. The power of this transformation and how unique it is to me is indescribable. Here I was embracing the one figure I was certain people had gotten it all wrong about. I suppose it was said best on the ABC TV show Lost by the character Benjamin Linus, when discussing how the apostle Thomas had to touch the wounds of Jesus to believe in the Resurrection: “Sooner or later, we’re all convinced.”
I share all this not to convert you, but to inform your reading of my works and to provide you with some background concerning the man who has felt the need to write them. For me it has been a truly miraculous journey within one of the darkest and most desperate periods of my whole life. Even throughout the countless times I wished I was dead, with the persistent encouragement of my family, it was this legendarium that provided me with a sense of hope, happiness and fulfillment that I have yet to achieve in my personal life. I would like to think that if I properly digest and apply the lessons therein, I will achieve it. But even if I never do, it is this legendarium that has provided me with the vehicle to see and experience things I would never have thought possible. Even if I manage to do for one other person what George McDonald and C.S. Lewis did for me through their writings, my purpose will be fulfilled beyond myself. Now I say to those who know me and love me, to forget what you think you know, to forget “religion” and all those other annoying words that disturb our thoughts, to think of this only as the story of your friend who would give his life for you, and, Follow me.
