Who's afraid of witches and dragons?

Sorry about the long gap between posts. I've been on vacation for a week.
I traded 30-degree weather and avalanches for 75 degrees and earthquakes. I sat on the beach and watched waves, smelled salt, read four books and started a fifth. I went to an aquarium and saw sharks and sea-horses. I ran barefoot in the sand. I got wet in sea-water. And now I'm ready to get back to my Utah spring and back to my writing.

Which reminds me of something:
Fantasy-writers can't write, somebody once told me. They don't care about quality. "And, by the way," she said, "Harry Potter's crap."

One guy I know snorted at the suggestion that Lord of the Rings books might be fine literature.

Me: "Have you ever read them?"

Him: "I can't remember."

Me: "Really?"

Him: "Um, probably not."

Another guy: "They're just fantasy. Fantasy is escapism. People should face life, not run off and pretend to fight dragons."

That's the intellectuals.

Personally, I think they're scared.

But poor Harry gets it from the other end, too. Sometimes Rowling's books get burned because they're evil. I didn't believe those rumors until the day some people came to my door, Bible in hand, preaching against fantasy fiction (see my post about it). I'm still shaking my head over that one.This is 21st-century America. Do we still need to burn our witches? Really?

Is everybody afraid of fantasy?

Ursula LeGuin has been fighting the stigma against fantasy for so many years she gets pretty annoyed. She says,

"I think that a great many American men have been taught... to repress their imagination, to reject it as something childish or effeminate, unprofitable, and probably sinful.
Now I doubt that imagination can be suppressed.  ... If it is rejected and despised, it will grow into wild and weedy shapes; it will be deformed.  At its best, it will be mere ego-centered daydreaming; at its worst, it will be wishful thinking, which is a very dangerous occupation when it is taken seriously.  ... Nowadays, with our secular Puritanism, the man who refuses to read novels because it's unmanly to do so, or because they aren't true, will most likely end up watching bloody detective thrillers on television, or reading hack westerns or sports stories, or going in for pornography...  It is his starved imagination, craving nourishment, that forces him to do so.  But he can rationalize such entertainment by saying that it is realistic--after all, sex exists, and there are criminals...and also by saying that it is virile, by which he means that it doesn't interest most women." (source: http://scilib.typepad.com/science_library_pad/2007/07/are-americans-s.html)

I've noticed that plenty of women are just as scared of imagination flights, too, but it's an interesting point, and true, I think, that if imagination is repressed, it's likely to morph into something less desirable.

LeGuin's own writing is beautiful, and about as hard-core fantasy as you get. Nobody could accuse her of not caring. Her language is artistic,poetic; stunning. And, like all fine literature, realistic or un-, it makes you think:

About who you are and what sort of person you want to be in real life.
About what to do when faced with hard things, enemies, and things that scare you.
About what to do with the ugliness that's sometimes inside your own head and heart.

That's fantasy. And fiction, for that matter. It's a way of learning how to be objective about real-life issues, of stepping back and seeing ourselves completely out of context--in somebody else's story--so we can step back into reality again, ready to face our own set of problems with courage.

Like the soldier that fantasy-author Tracy Hickman said he met at a book-signing, who told of how he'd had been lying face-down on the ground with a shattered back after a surprise enemy attack and suddenly remembered a character in one of Tracy's novels. Inspired by the memory, he managed to get to his feet and save his friends' lives by warning them of the danger.

Mocking fantasy because it's escapism is like mocking vacations.

Or recess.

Or time-outs.

Or sleep.

Everybody needs to escape sometimes. As long as you come back again, escape is a good thing.

As for quality, that's a personal thing. There's plenty of realistic crap floating around out there, too. Myself, I don't enjoy slogging through any book in any genre if the writing's poor, no matter what else it has going for it. 

But I'm not scared of witches or dragons. Are you?