Leslie Clements works as the Director of Education, Programs, and Volunteers at the Old Coast Guard Station in Virginia Beach where she tells stories about shipwrecks, surfmen, witches, and ghosts to anyone who will listen. Currently, she’s researching oral and digital storytelling pathways in addition to local history for future projects at the Station. In her writing life, she earned her MFA in Creative Writing at Old Dominion University, where she studied fiction. Specializing in genre fiction, she focuses on fantasy, science fiction, and historical narrative. She writes book reviews for Fiction Writers Review and teaches fiction writing at The Muse Writer’s Center. Currently, she is working on her first novel manuscript and a co-authored children’s book, and is cheating on both with a smattering of short stories.
“While each novel can stand on its own and conclude satisfactorily, Grossman has built a few essential worlds that help us understand fantasy and our relationship to it through through a progression of novels about people like us faced with the spectacular.”
Little jaunt to the underworld? Don’t forget your passport. The second installment in Lev Grossman’s Fillory series, The Magician King, continues to play with realist fantasy and the right amount of irony to meld the two. Quentin and his pals provide a sly and subversive fairy tale for grown-ups, with a caution: be careful what you wish for. You might get it.
In the tradition of Southern storytelling, Mary Helen Stefaniak’s novel The Cailiffs of Baghdad, Georgia offers a window on the power of myth to transform one small town during the Depression. Leslie Clements explores how that tension between progress and tradition free the inhabitants of Baghdad, Georgia, for radical reinvention.
At the heart of Lev Grossman’s latest novel, The Magicians, lies the idea that a fantasy world exists, but one far more complex, and at times limiting, than Quentin Coldwater, the unlikely hero, might wish. Drawing on the rich fantasy traditions of Tolkien, Plover, and Rowling, Grossman subverts genre expectations in wholly original ways.
