I like ambiguity because you may be the villain in someone else's story and the hero in your own, and I think very often, African-American characters are either one thing or the other. You shouldn't have to be perfectly good or perfectly bad. You don't even have to be magical.
There was a singer-songwriter who slept on our couch for a year when I was about 7 or 8. She used to sing these songs for us, and I loved it. It was magical to watch her.
Junk bonds prove there's nothing magical in a Aaa bond rating.
Art gives us an opportunity to not have to leave or go somewhere or do something to experience the magic in our lives. It actually gets us to sit back and be where we are and recognize we're already magical.
Success begins at that magical moment when you declare to yourself, your friends, and the universe that you believe you can do something different.
The magical and fantastical isn't something I'm uncomfortable with in books, and I chafe slightly at the idea that a purely realist novel somehow has more value.
By the 1950s The Novel had become a nationwide tournament. There was a magical assumption that the end of World War II in 1945 was the dawn of a new golden age of the American Novel, like the Hemingway-Dos Passos-Fitzgerald era after World War I.
I think movies have much more magic than the theater. Theater can be a magical experience, but movies thrust their subjectivity on you in a more profound way.
The things shamans deal with are extremely practical. They break down parameters of normal historical reality. Magical passes are just one aspect of that.
