Because magic is real...

I’m a magical realist, like I alluded to on my homepage. And that’s my official business card up there to prove it. (Legit, right, in an old-timey, traveling circus way?)

Magical realism is a literary genre and artistic style that blends realistic settings, characters, and situations with fantastical or magical elements, presenting them as normal or commonplace. Salman Rushdie, in Haroun and the Sea of Stories, writes, “He knew what he knew: that the real world was full of magic, so magical worlds could easily be real.” Matthew Strecher, writing in the Journal of Japanese Studies (1999), defines the genre as, “what happens when a highly detailed, realistic setting is invaded by something too strange to believe.”

In my writing, for example, the view from above may appear normal, but somewhere below the surface of the narrative wriggle supernatural or otherworldly things, capable of disrupting the conventions of everyday life. Sure, the story and people may seem real and mundane enough until some unexpected event or force pops out of nowhere and sends the whole ordeal into a tailspin. 

The cool thing about magical realism, though, is that nobody in the story even acknowledges that the bizarre is out of place, like every community has a headless horseman trotting around the streets from dusk to dawn. This is called “matter-of-fact magic,” and it is one of the most unique aspects of the genre, creating a mood that’s almost surreal. The focus, however, is always on realistic characters contending with plausible problems in very normal settings. The weirdness underlying everything exists solely to keep things in perspective.

Life would be more interesting if elves operating behind the matrix were busy constructing and reconstructing our reality every tenth of a second like it was no bigs, while some of us were engaged in squabbles at drive-thru windows, and others were lazily leaving their carts in the middle of Walmart parking lots. Magical realism shows us that though conflicts and characters can be undeniably ordinary (I said no pickles, kid! Walk the extra ten feet to the cart return, lady!), the magic is the lens through which we might explore more deeply our human condition.

What a concept, huh?

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