It was sometime around 2012 that I first got tapped on the shoulder by the ghost of this young girl born into a sort of forest utopia. Catastrophe falls on her people—in the form of the downstream effects of toxic agriculture—and she has to fight her way back to the source to fix the problem. 

This felt like familiar ground to me. I’m a fantasy writer; I’ve venerated the Hero’s Journey ever since I first read Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces in my early 20s. I can spot a Hero’s Journey a mile away on a foggy day. I knew where this was going.  

Seventy years ago, the literature professor Joseph Campbell’s personal charisma and power as a teacher broke the idea of a heroic quest monomyth free from academia and turned it loose onto the world.