Joseph Worthington
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Writing is an interesting journey, for a part of us lives within each word, each person, each action we write. It enables us to better understand ourselves, even those parts we wish to pretend aren't there within us. Through this, we can better see the world around us, and contribute to making it perhaps just a little bit better than where we initially found it. That's the goal in the end, I think, for most of us: to tell a good story, take a great journey, and leave the world just a little bit better than where we found it.
My Story
One of my favorite memories as a child was being around 10 or so and going to the local big box bookstore. My dad would tell me I could get one book there. "Wow!" I'd think to myself, and bolt straight to the history aisle. We'd be there for an hour or so, and I was overwhelmed with all the portals to the past - to stories I had never known; that's what history books were to me, gateways to the past where stories were real... as much as they could be anyway. I loved the past and was always questioning the what-ifs in history. "What if the British won the American Revolution?" that's one of the first questions I remember being enamored with back in fifth grade as I was becoming more interested in history. I became fascinated with empires and the way they changed the world, with political and social ideologies and understanding why they spread to the places they did.
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As I got older, my love of history blossomed into a love of the unique nature of civilizations and their own mythologies. One of my favorite topics was the interaction between the Mesoamerican Peoples and the Spanish. So much had been destroyed about these Mesoamerican societies and I was eager to learn more about what they were like, and what they may have become had the past played out differently. This passion, and my curiosity about those key junctures in history - the interactions between peoples - ignited a spark in me that drove me all the way through grad school, until I earned my master's degree in history.
In grad school, my thesis focused on the interactions between the American Civil Rights Movement and African Independence efforts in the 1960s. I was lucky enough to travel on university trips to Ghana and China, learning so much more about the world around us. It was also around this time, that an idea had begun to foment within me. There was this place with these religions and cultures, but it was all still so abstract. I started to write about them, telling their story as a historical narrative. It ignited a fire within me. I was able to write about history, but it was my own world! Part of it felt scandalous somehow, but I couldn't stop. It's all a bit ironic, because I was a late bloomer to writing. My eighth grade English Teacher said I needed to be in remedial English in high school, and literature was never by big interest personally. That's probably why history has been my avenue to writing.
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This is my unique angle as a writer. My goal in writing is to tell the story of these societies in a changing world, but through the lens of those experiencing it, impacting it on a personal level. This is what the Rememberant Saga is at its core: it's the story of Valtiel at a critical moment in its history, told by the people making a great impact on it. In other words, it's fictitious history rather than historical fiction. Because of this, my writing hasn't emerged out of some of the more traditional avenues. My greatest influences aren't novels and literature, admittedly I'm not as prolific in these areas as one might expect a fiction writer to be. My influences come from nonfiction, studying history, sociology, and political theory. Furthermore, I am an avid film connoisseur. I love the medium and learning about the ways its grown over the past century. The lore in movies and video games served as a visual counterpart to the written worlds I'd read in nonfiction, and I loved it. These mediums felt like modern myths being made and presented in real time, and they greatly impacted me as I began to create my own world in Valtiel.
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My pathway to becoming a writer came from seeking answers to historical questions and experimenting with them in my own laboratory that is Valtiel. I hope you enjoy my works as much as I have enjoyed building them, but that is not what I wish for you to take from my writing. My goal is to ignite questions, maybe even some introspection, about ourselves and the world we live in. What does it mean to be a leader, what is good and bad? What makes a society believe what it does - and is that a "good" thing? These are such important questions to ask ourselves, and I hope my writing encourages that within you like it does for me.
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Whatever your passion is, pursue it relentlessly, cherish it greatly, and above all, question everything!
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Thank You,
Joe
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