What is a Wizard?

~~~~Creative

What is a wizard?

A wizard is a mage, wonder maker, a person who injects a jolt of the marvelous into the everyday. There are wizards everywhere, though these days they've traded in their magic shops and their spell books for libraries and storybooks. Today's wizards wield paintbrushes or pens or typewriters or computers instead of wands. Some may have long white beards, but most do not. Today's wizards come in all ages, all genders, all colors, and shapes. They are the authors and artists who work with stories of the fantastic. What they have is vision, and, most importantly, they can share that vision with others. They enable us all to see a little farther, to see a little deeper. It is no small gift. Some people, recognizing the power of these everyday mages, try to limit magic. They try to keep magic out of their lives. So they rail against the "malicious" influence of certain kinds of literature. They denigrate it, remove it from their libraries. In other words, they ban it. Fantasy stories could all be labeled "escapist literature", but fantasy is rarely as much of an escape as it's detractors would have us believe. In fantasy stories we learn to understand compassion for those things we cannot fathom, we learn the importance of keeping our sense of wonder. The strange worlds that exist only in The pages of fantastic literature teach us a tolerance of other people and places and engender an openness toward new experience. Fantasy books put the world into perspective in a way that "realistic" literature rarely does. It is not so much of an escape from the here and now as an expansion of each reader's horizons. Most importantly, these tales can open us up to the pleasure and delight of the imagination. Mage-image-imagination. There is magic enough for any wizard.

~By Michael Stearns (A Wizard's Dozen)