Kimber is awesome. He lives in Portland and works for Planned Parenthood, and he’s going to become a nurse. He’s also fluent in Chinese and full of fascinating stories about his travels there.

I sent him a copy of the Oct 2008 Realms of Fantasy with “The Luckiest Street in Georgia.” He wrote back and said this, and I liked it so much I asked if I could share it:

Thanks so much for sending me ‘The Luckiest Street in Georgia.’ It is quite a good story, and there were some other fun bits in the magazine as well. I think you hit on one of the things I like best about fantasy literature – making ordinary or normal things seem more real, more potent through adding an element that is fantastical. We become so accustomed to our surroundings that we often fail to recognize the power and interest and connections that really are there. There is more to our world than we let ourselves see. Fantasy seems a great tool to renew our awareness of what is around us. In some stories, the natural world’s life force is made more apparent through animals talking, or plants having awareness. Other times the power of history to shape our lives is made more obvious through the device of characters who live thousands of years (say, elves). In your story the very ordinary stereotype of the old person watching over their neighborhood is raised from what could be a pathetic habit of snooping for lack of a ‘real’ life, to a powerful intervention, an extra-temporal angel guiding the lives of those in her care. Lest one forget that in real life having someone watch out for you, especially an older, wiser person, can be quite helpful. Lest one forget that wishes and intentions can be transformative. Anyway, those are a few of the thoughts it brought up for me.