Delighted that my latest piece of creative nonfiction titled “Journeys to HYRULE_” has found the perfect home with Newfound, a nonprofit publisher and publication that explores how place shapes, identity, imagination, and understanding:

“We believe that a richer experience of place—spaces human-made, natural, conceptual, or otherwise—is requisite in understanding ourselves and our world. Newfound is passionate about positively transforming how we relate to our habitats and bringing about better stewardship of our homes, neighborhoods, communities, cities, nations, and the globalized world at large.”

—Why is Newfound important?

Inspired by Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda videogame series (both of which I have written about here on Ekostories), “Journeys” is a rumination on the lifelong bonds I’ve forged with a certain virtual world. I was particularly interested in exploring the notion of attachment to a digital realm that is constantly reimagined with each iteration, along with the feeling of returning to a familiar place I have never been:

“…This is not my story but I know its shape. I am not the boy yet I share that joy. Once transmitted, the initial world encompassing that cave and those woods at the outskirts of a Japanese village named SONOBE with a boy named MIYAMOTO changes form from mind to mind, crossing the gulf between the real and unreal, expanding, imparting, shifting. Even now that place does not hold still, slipping away from the old creator contemplating retirement, is turned over to his successor named AONUMA striving to translate and transmute, to retain and refresh, himself having been shaped by a previous HYRULE already described in this essay, this LINK TO THE PAST. Yet this place exists before and endures beyond names and namers, resists attempts to be reduced to myth, even though we try, must always, can only—”

Read the Piece Here

Featured image titled “Link and the Temple Forest” by Jeremy Fenske.