Michael Eging's Blog: The Silver Horn Echoes and Assorted Other Tales - Posts Tagged "father"

I was recently talking with my daughter who related to me some of my own stories created and written when she was a young child. She has since graduated from college and is now living and working far from home. The time she recalls occurred when my wife and I were still in college. During that time, I was excited by the worlds opened to me through my study of medieval history and English. As a writer, it was one of the most productive periods of my life, writing short stories and poetry that filled late 1980's era hard drives. We traveled from Utah to attend graduate school at the University of Maryland, College Park to study with a preeminent scholar of Byzantine and early Russian history. And all the while, I wrote.

In the evening, I would spin tales for her and her brother of worlds far from our own, populated by lost kings, intrepid elves and paladin knights. Many of those stories sprung from my imagination, others from the pages of Tolkien, Lewis and Alexander. Each character had unique voices and I tried to find those voices, often to their delight. Giants with craggly deep voices, brave heroes with stolid, confident voices, etc. Usually my feeble efforts dissolved into laughter, yet we discovered worlds beyond our own within those pages.

Last night, my son wrestled with an assignment focused on Quixote where the author of an article postulated that changing the author (Cervantes) altered the depth and perspective of the work, even if the words remained exactly the same. I asked him, if you didn't know the author had changed - does it even matter - for the story remains. I postulated that possibly the reader has greater power over the written page by bringing imagination to the effort. The power to speak in different voices, imagine faces and identify unique ticks and place characters in fully developed lands even more fantastical than what the page conveys.

My children still remember stories told to them with my very rudimentary acting abilities. But what I thought to be just a father's attempts had became magical memories to them. They remind me of them as I wrestle with rewrites of rewrites. To them, the hard work was already done. They have imagined the worlds already. It's now upon dad to share them with all of you. Lessons I've learned from my children.