The Inclusion of the Magical in the Mundane
Welcome guest blogger Laura Jones, MFA student at Pine Manor College's Solstice in Creative Writing Program. Laura is currently combining her talents for writing and art in a graphic novel. The fascination for me in a lot of writing lies within the balance between the artist and the artistry than in any certainty of what really happened. It delights me more to guess which aspects of the story are invented and which are mined from the writer’s daily life than to know it’s all factual or to assume it’s all fake. It’s a game I like playing, and Neil Gaiman lets me do it. Gaiman takes easily to this, writing “The Price” in first person, using the voice of his narrator to pull you in, promising that, yes, it really happened. Of stray cats, he writes, “We pay for them to get their shots, and, indignity upon indignity, we have them neutered or spayed” (51). The narrator names the cats, describes them. “We never seem to have more than eight,” Gaiman writes, “rarely have less tha...