In those ancient days when there were no electronic media, any individual could TELL A VISON to friends and family, tribe or clan, right in the live action of daily life. Some such stories were so striking and memorable that they were told and retold, and passed down through the generations.

Sometimes it was just a matter of good storytelling, but often the vision itself is what made the difference. If the teller was convinced that the vision was real, and had far-reaching implications, the certainty and intensity would transmit itself to the hearers, and the vision might be accepted as a true account of something that really happened to the person in another realm.

In modern times visions were disbelieved, along with everything outside the material realm. People who told their visions were often ridiculed, and sometimes even branded as crazy. But some visionaries found a clever way to tell their stories anyway: they pretended that they weren’t true. This may well have been the origin of FICTION as a literary form.

The very concept of fiction did not exist at any time or in any place before, or outside of, the culture that began in Europe with the Renaissance, and later enveloped the globe under the generic identity of “modern civilization”. In all other cultures, there was (and is) no such clean-cut, dualistic line between the truth and falsehood of stories that were (and are) told as narrative, written as literature, or enacted as drama.

Myths and legends especially were always held to convey the highest forms of truth. In an effort to reinvoke this primal sensibility, a modern chronicler has correctly said that myth is TRUER THAN TRUTH. Yet in the larger profane context of pop culture, the word “myth” still bears the incorrect valence of “falsity”. This is why I find it necessary to preface my neomythical tales with this disclaimer, and to coin a new word to characterize them:

Metafiction

(1) A literary form in which modern science fiction crosses the line into postmodern myth and miraculous encounters, where fact is often stranger than the wildest flights of fancy

(2) Spiritual, occult, or metaphysical fiction.

Even the most amazing visionary experiences are usually partial and specific ~ and thus a person would have to undergo innumerable such experiences before they could attain a comprehensive picture of all and everything, a final realization of what it all means. But in the wonderful world of myth ~ or its pale postmodern vestige called “fiction” ~ a single hero can combine a thousand journeys into one, and deliver the goods about the length and breadth and height of the multi-omni-universe in one swell foop, one deftly-rendered story. In this spirit, I hope that my stories may open a portal to a realm that is more real than real, in a mythopoetic mode that is truer than truth.

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Happy reading!

~ Joseph Rex Kerrick