Bring your Imagination: Alice in Wonderland

I was reading "Rabbit Redux," the Ramin Setoodeh piece in this week's Newsweek.

He was talking about the imagination—those who use it splendidly well—and I was remembering my friend, Cuileann, who is one of the most imaginative people I know (we met in San Francisco, late last summer). Oh, what she does with words and photographs. What she does with heart.

So I was thinking about her, and then I kept reading, and I was thinking about my own book about the imagination (Seeing Past Z: Nurturing the Imagination in a Fast-Forward World) and then I thought, I wonder what my blogger friends would say about these thoughts Mr. Setoodeh is expressing? So I put them out there, for your comments:

"The only way to understand Alice is to use your imagination. Do you even remember how to do that? In our society of Web links, Wikipedia, Facebook, and reality TV, everything and everybody comes with a label and an exhaustive definition. There's scant room for ambiguity and interpretation. The genius of the 145-year-old Wonderland is that it forces you to bring your own creative juices to the tea party....

"Compare Wonderland with the great children's stories of our time: the Harry Potter series. As inventive as J.K. Rowling's seven books are, they're meticulously detailed (the intricate rules of Quidditch, the class rituals at Hogwarts, all the wizard paraphernalia) to the point of being encyclopedic, which is why the movies work as well as they do—they're road maps of the plot."

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Zenobia: The Curious Book of Business

I sometimes talk about Zenobia: The Curious Book of Business, the corporate fable I co-authored with Matt Emmens, who is now the CEO of Vertex and chairman of the board of Shire. I explain the book to those who ask as an Alice in Wonderland-esque fable about the power of the imagination in corporate America. The story features a character named Moira, who wears read shoes and fine, striped socks as she winds her way through a sclerotic bureaucracy in search of a way to make a difference. In the process, she inspires those she meets—a character named Hedger, for example, characters named Nod and Bolt and Snort—to help revitalize a corporate giant called Zenobia.

Published by Berrett-Koehler in 2008, the book has gone to live and breathe in many countries, sometimes adapting the original illustrations (which were created by my husband) and sometimes unveiling entirely new graphic universes. I thought of this book last week, during the readergirlz chat, when Hipwritermama and Maya Ganesan and others asked if I'd ever consider writing fantasy.

Zenobia is the closest I've yet come.

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