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    Around ten years ago, I believe, I became familiar with a term called "Magic Realism". Through much of my adult writing life I had been writing in a mode called, for lack of a better term at the time, "Surrealism". The term never felt quite right because in much of my work, the fantastic co-exists with reality and is simply accepted as a part of that reality; sometimes an obnoxious part, but nonetheless a part of it. I had always equated "surrealism" with the bizarre or the incomprehensible or, at best equated with the painter Salvador Dali. But somehow, that form of "surrealism" didn't seem to me even close to what I was writing and publishing. Now, perhaps it was ignorance on my part, but it seemed something strange happened in U. S. publishing in the mid-1980's- the blossoming of the alternative "small press" and its coming into co-existence with the literary/academic presses. The small press took a keen interest in what I was doing and many of the stories that I wrote in the late seventies and early eighties- most of which had never been published, although lord knows how many editors had seen them, and, while certainly respecting them, didn't know what to do with them- suddenly, these stories were hot and many were published and are being published now. And as this was happening, I picked up the book, Eye of the Heart edited by Barbara Howes. It was during the summer of 1987 or 1988, I believe; upon reading it, I was astounded. These writers were writing, or had been writing what I was writing. And so many of these stories-mine and those in the book-had that unmistakable common thread: the fantastic or the strange being accepted as reality or equally co-existing with (consensual) reality.

    It was also about this time that I began to hear not only people talking about Magic Realism, but that I had been identified by several editors as one of the top writers of it. I also began to see references in the small press about Magic Realism and before I knew it, I was on panels at science fiction conventions talking about the subject. At these gatherings, I was struck by how few people know about the history of Magic Realism-including me-much to my embarrassment; in my defense, I will say that after the first panel dealing with magic Realism that I appeared at, I headed off to one of the local libraries to find more information. I found two references to it, and one reference was a style of painting.

    -In his excellent essay on Magic Realism ("Magic realism: Definitions", Magic Realism, vol. 5.1 Winter 1995/96), Brian Evenson says:

    "Magic Realism first appeared as a term for the visual arts, introduced in the 1920's by Frans Roh, a German art critic. It identified a kind of art that claimed to be a return to realism, but which nonetheless tried to approach objects in new ways, as if seeing them for the first time. It was an attempt to uncover a magic found in ordinary objects but hidden by too long a familiarity with these objects.

    "When Roh's book was translated into Spanish in the late 1920's, the term magic realism began to be bandied about in South America, soon becoming a way of speaking not only about art but about literature, usually European literature."-