snowflake challenge, day 6
In your own space, share a book/song/movie/tv show/fanwork/etc that changed your life. Something that impacted on your consciousness in a way that left its mark on your soul.
I abandoned the challenge, but this prompt grabbed me and wouldn't let me go. I feel kind of weird posting this because it's so personal, but I have things to say and nowhere else to say them.
(Aren't those the coolest, tackiest eighties covers? Isn't it a tragedy that the latest anthology came out in paperback with this monstrosity?)
I grew up on magic. I was a child of the Disney renaissance, raised on classic kid's fantasy novels and Arthurian mythology and Irish folk music. I lived in a vibrant immigrant community with deep colonial roots, shaped equally by Irish folktales and Puritan ghost stories. I knew Harry Potter before he was famous. There was basically zero chance that I wouldn't grow up to be a fantasy fan.
I got to the age of thirteen with a craving for fantasy that brought back that childhood magic, that took place in a world that felt like the cultures I'd grown up in. I wanted magic that could be real, not an escape to a totally alien fantasy land (shitty worldbuilding is still a major gripe I have with contemporary fantasy).
I found Waifs and Strays in my library's underwhelming Young Adult section. It was by an author I'd never heard of and had the obligatory dull, meaningless cover art by John Jude Palencar, but inside were all these stories about adolescence where the magic and the mundane were intrinsically tied, where the conflict was always between fitting in and standing out. My favorite story took place in a city between the human world and Faerie, with elvish motorcycle gangs and technology spliced with magic that didn't work either way and runaway kids of all species trying to claim the city for their own.
The first Bordertown anthology that I read (and the only one in print at the time) was The Essential Bordertown, which is written like a guidebook to the fictional city, with chapters on the music and the fashion and the turf wars in between each short story. It was the kind of gimmick I ate with a spoon, full of mumbo-jumbo about how the city existed outside of time and place and could only be found if the city let you find it.
I grew up on fantasy, but I also grew up on classic rock, and I'd loved the city of Boston longer than I'd had the words to express it. I had no desire to escape to glittering Rivendell, isolated from the messy, dirty, painful reality of being human. Add the stereotype of quiet, bookish people as anti-hedonists who lived beyond the mundane physical world, and you can see why this hybrid of old magic and the gritty city hit my teenage identity crisis where it hurt. I needed it to be real, and it kind of was--some of the bands that played there were real, and every author brought bits and pieces of different cities into Borderdown. It was 1980s New York and 1960s San Francisco and Minneapolis and Detroit and Los Angeles. It led me further into counterculture and rock music, and kept me chasing the cities I loved when sane people would've given up on them.
I've spent a lot of time wondering if I chased it all the way to NYU, and if my dissatisfaction with New York came from unrealistic fictional expectations. But I've come to the decision that it's impossible for New York to be a failed Bordertown, because Bordertown wasn't my first magical city. It's been there since I was old enough to crane my neck at the Boston skyline over route 93, since I first immersed myself in Chinatown, since I walked past noisy bars that should've been scary rather than enticing. It's in the alternative stations and the awful high school bands and the culture that weaves through everything. So yeah, The Essential Bordertown changed my life, but it really brought me back to a place I should never have left.