Make Reading a Hobbit

With the sad demise of Realms of Fantasy, I keep thinking about an experience I had several years ago. I was invited to lead a book discussion on The Hobbit down at the local library for one of the those national get-kids-to-read campaigns. (The event was called “Make Reading a Hobbit.” Hey, don’t blame me. I didn’t come up with it.) I figured I’d be pretty well prepared for this event, seeing as I’m a fantasy writer, I’ve read The Hobbit maybe ten times, read The Lord of the Rings, watched all 7,000 hours of special features on the Peter Jackson extended edition Lord of the Rings DVDs, read Tolkien: Author of the Century and The Inklings, etc. Well, there were these two middle school girls in the audience, and I quickly got the sinking feeling that I was in over my head. These girls had read The Silmarillion. They’d read all ten (?) volumes of The History of Middle-Earth. They were writing their own Tolkien fan poetry … in Elvish. I managed to hold my own, and we had a really stellar discussion about free will / good and evil / race and class in Tolkien. Afterward, people wanted to know who I was, so I showed off some copies of Realms of Fantasy in which I appeared (and which I just happened to have brought with me). One of the parents asked, “What kind of magazine is this?” and I said, “It’s a fantasy magazine. You know, they publish fantasy short stories, and they have reviews of fantasy books and movies, and fantasy art, and articles about folklore, and stuff like that.” These two girls perused the pages, their eyes wide, and one of them exclaimed, “Wow! I never knew there were magazines like this! Mom, can we get this? Please?” That was really cool to see, and now I wish that somehow over the past fifteen years more readers like that could have come across copies of Realms of Fantasy, but unfortunately various factors have conspired to make it very difficult for young readers to discover that short fiction magazines even exist, which is really a shame.