When I was a kid, I was fascinated by books that took place in ancient places. The hyperlexic kid that I was, I devoured fantasy stories and stories with old haunted castles. Anything I could get my hands on that speculated about possible magical explanations for ancient structures. Honestly, not much has changed as far as my interests go. I’m still constantly on the search for new stories to take me to wonderous worlds that look startlingly like our own.

But I remember being really troubled by the fact that there were no stories about places that looked like where I grew up. For a long time, I believed that there was no “history” to be found in Minnesota because no one ever talked about it and there weren’t any books with heroes fighting magical battles here.

Of course, there’s a lot that can be said here about colonialism and the attempted genocide of the native peoples of this land and all those other things we Americans don’t like to talk about (and I could go on. At length. But that’s not what this blog post is about). But mostly, I was just a kid that wanted to be able to see myself in the stories I read. And it would be a long time before I fully understood the extent of why I couldn’t see myself in the heroes of the stories I read.

As I got older, I got into dystopian and post-apocalyptic stories (as it seems we all did), and one of the big draws for this was that so many of them looked like the world I knew. A warped, pessimistic (but not inaccurate) world, for sure, but still my world. As an adult now, I’ve spent a lot of time learning about the actual history of this land, and I’ve read tons of really good books by indigenous authors that explore the magical history of this land in ways I always wanted when I was a kid.

But those will never be my stories, so I had to find another avenue for telling stories that utilized my connection to this land. Which is how I ended up getting into writing dystopian/post-apocalyptic stories myself. I’ve also become quite taken with the idea of a cyclical nature to society similar to what is found in nature. Stories that seem set in the past but are actually set in a future that has been “reset” by some cataclysmic event (I still posit Adventure Time as being a huge influence on this particular interest).

All of that is how I got to my current project. A story, set in a place that resembles southeastern Minnesota with a society unlike anything we know today. A mixture of magic and lost ancient tech. And still, many of the themes that I find are inescapable in our hyper-capitalist world. How much longer can we live the way we are before the Earth gets rid of us like so many unwanted fleas? What would our world look like is Nature fought back? And how would humans live if they were tossed back to the bottom of the food chain?

When I go hiking out on the prairie and find the remnants of old homesteads now, I still wonder about the people who might have lived there and what older histories might have happened there that didn’t leave their marks behind. But now I also think, what will the remnants of our lives look like in a hundred years? Or a thousand years? And to those who find the scars our lives leave behind, what will they think about us and the lives we lived? What stories would they write to explain our peculiarities?