It is currently believed that most of the fairytales and folklore we utilize to educate our children, and to entertain one another, can be traced back thousands of years to long-since-departed voices. There’s something comforting to me when I imagine the faces of the people sitting around those rippling campfires, listening to the most esteemed of their communities make sense of what lay just beyond the reach of the circle. In defiance of time, space, language, race, sex, age, and land, we are connected to them still. Rather than falling prey to the unknown, they wove tales that shielded the heart and cast the listeners as heroes. Their fears mirror our own just as their hopes do, for humans have rarely changed in the time it has taken us to conquer space. We still look to the wisest of us to make sense of what waits across the boundary lines of our understanding.
When I gave birth to my son last year, a piece of my heart was reawakened to the power of the fantastical to breathe confidence and wonder into a person. I sing him songs from my youth, tell him the fairytales my parents recited to me at night, and have done my best to introduce him to art and engage his senses. I see in him someone I can’t possibly guard from all evils, but I can arm him with that age-old wisdom and hope he’ll face the shadows with my voice in his head.
Fantasy, in its most distilled form, is a manifestation of hope. This publication was born from my own motherly sense of hope to reconnect anyone who picks up our work with their own creative potential. I hope you will read these stories and find your truth between the lines, because I think it’s in Fantasy that we can find our truest selves, whether in film, on the page, or in the colors artists meld together.
The Seelie Crow was brought to life through the group alchemy of the writers and interviewees of this inaugural issue. We have explored what we hope for, what roots us in ourselves, and how we navigate a world where the fantastical can take shape if we are willing to break away from what boundaries impede us. There are interviews with artists, a model and business owner, a founder of a community, and essays detailing the ways Fantasy has become a foundation for our own blossoming.
In reading each piece I have discovered that the cornerstone of Fantasy, and the people working and living within this space, is the urge to defy all that separates us from one another. It’s what those storytellers did as they wove tales of monsters and worlds just out of sight. They found us through space and time to bind us together forever. May we never let each other go.
With love,
LaKase Cousino
