Although yesterday was Lewis Carroll's real birthday, I thought it would be more appropriate to wait until today to celebrate this amazing writer! After all, today is his un-birthday, a term coined by Carroll himself in Through the Looking Glass. Looking back, Disney's Alice in Wonderland is probably my favorite film from childhood. I used to watch it at my grandma's every time I was sick and am just as enthralled with Wonderland today as I was all those years ago.
I think it is Carroll's world, among others, that taught me it was okay to have an imagination, to dream, to create a world of my own, which, I now have done with my writing. I still think about the beautiful, mysterious, and dangerous world Lewis Carroll created and keep that as one of my touchstones as I write fiction, and especially while I write the Falling series. Despite any controversy that surrounds this story and its creator, I think it's fair to say that he deserves a shout out on his un-birthday for everything his books have given to me. I agree with Einstein who said, "if you want your children to be intelligent read them fairytales." It seems today that so many people are afraid that fairytales and fantasy will rot children's brains, or worse turn them into practitioners of black magic. And so, they ban these books, they hide them in locked cabinets, and instead, hand their children biographies and non-fiction books that may never hold their interest. But what these people seem to have forgotten is that the heroes in fiction mirror our real life heroes, and so too do the villains.
Before I get too far off on my quest to end book banning, let me just say happy un-birthday to Lewis Carroll and to all you invisible readers out there who are also celebrating your unbirthdays today!
xoxo
K.K.