It’s that time in my daughter’s life where we’re visiting colleges in hopes of eventually picking one that fits. Now when I was her age, I already knew where I was going, so I never felt the need to visit other campuses. Likewise, I picked a large public university because I wanted to escape my small high school and lose myself in something bigger. My daughter is similar but different in wanting to escape her large high school and find her place in something smaller, which also means a private college. We have different tastes, but I see where she’s coming from.
What strikes me about the small college campus, especially the small private college, is the architecture. The campus grounds and the buildings are both a reflection of the community around it, yet also have an identity all their own. McAllister in St. Paul, Minnesota, features crimson-bricked buildings and billowing maple trees that call back to the late 1800s. Case Western Reserve University in uptown Cleveland has no single architectural style; each building is a product of its time where neoclassical, gothic, art deco, and modern glass structures sit next to each other and create a unity through their diversity. Washington University in St. Louis feels like a midwestern version of Oxford, with crenelated rooflines and arched passageways between green spaces.
The Magic
As the tour guides ramble on about the history of the buildings, the classes taught inside, and general campus life I’m thinking about those little details in each building that tickle my curiosity. Statues, bell towers, office windows filled with esoteric devices, stone embellishments like quoins, finials, and gargoyles, and the zodiac sigils carved into archways leading to the chemistry building’s subbasement. It’s all so strange, yet everyone walking the grounds takes it for granted, this little patch of preserved and perpetuated antiquity in the middle of a modern city. The writer looks at this situation and asks, “Why? What if…?”
There’s a Word for That
I can hear some of you shouting “It’s called urban fantasy, Wade!” and you’re right. It’s one of the more popular fantasy genres both in literature and television. It’s very accessible and doesn’t always require as much world building as high fantasy or science fiction. It also allows for those time-honored tropes of finding magic in the modern world, ancient conspiracies, swords versus guns, and the guy who denies the existence of monsters getting eaten by one at the end of the first act. We all love it when that happens.
So while the tuition’s sticker shock is twisting my guts in a knot, at least my writer brain is eager to go exploring. There has to be a dragon sleeping on a tuition hoard somewhere on campus, and I’m going to find it.
