where else would we go?

#16

9 Feb 2025

Dear Elizabeth,

I’ve written you about growing up homeschooled under little league bleachers in a smoggy desert valley, running my hand along the spines of library books, longing for gravel roads. Now let me tell you about Dinotopia. I don’t get twenty minutes, just five.

I think I was 12 when I opened my Highlights magazine to an interview with author and illustrator James Gurney. My brothers clinked away outside in the batting cage, and the five-year-old twins romped across the carpet with the three-year-old. I hunched over my magazine, ignoring the world of my siblings, absorbed in A World Apart from Time. The construction-paper-textured pages were spread with colorful, lifelike pictures of dinosaurs and humans side by side. An oviraptor nanny carried two toddlers in saddle-holsters and clutched a bottle in her claw. A boy with a feather in his cap held his puppeted arm over a nest of eggs. A girl in a french braid cradled a kitten-sized maiasaur hatchling. Barefoot, kite-flying children pranced on the seashore alongside giant diplodocuses. Before my eyes, the familiar and the fantastic were overlaid.

Back then in the one-thousands, phones were attached to walls. I untangled the coils of phone cord as I spelled out Gurney’s name so my dad could find the books at the library on his way home from work. Set up as an explorer’s journal, the 60-page picture book tells the story of a shipwrecked father and son through maps, codes, machines, architecture, costumes, songs, and cursive annotations.

My youth group friends were into flag football and swing dancing. I was into, well, spaceships, dinosaurs, and poetry. Within the next year another new world descended: dial-up internet was installed in the back den. Once I’d gotten the hang of email and instant messenger, I began to explore the world wide web. I wondered what portals might open if I typed my favorite stories into the browser, like starwars.com? Interesting! What about dinotopia.com? Whisked to the threshold of a place called the Dinotopia Message Board, I pointed my cursor on those words and clicked.

Are lurking and longing really that different? It wasn’t long before I suited up in a username and posted my own replies. Characters named Azonthus and Bronty became friends. I learned about HTML and RPGs and inhaled topics on culture, art, and science. I don’t remember any debates, but we definitely discussed intelligent design. A few years later I got to meet James Gurney at the Smithsonian, and then go to a restaurant with his family and a bunch of DMBers. I still have my t-shirt.

Years later, as I floundered to integrate myself into a rural community, a new friend asked if I had heard of The Rabbit Room. Once again, I curiously typed in a web address, and a world opened up before me. A portal transported me into a room where strangers talked about all the things I already loved. It wasn’t loneliness that drew me, but a stab of joy. I’d never heard of this Andrew Peterson guy, but I owned every CD by Fernando Ortega, and there was his name on the screen right in front of me. Article by article, I got to know this new realm of writers and makers. I pored over the comments. Then I dipped my toe into a bookclub on Flannery O’Connor, and eventually The Habit came along.

How many times have you retraced the path that led us here? To this room, surrounded by these faces and voices? How often do you lay out all the things you’ve written thanks to them? Even richer: the beauty we’ve beheld beholding our fellow Habitues. Our scrapbooks bulge. How did we come here? Do you know? Was your path as accidental as mine? Whenever I travel back in time I’m waylaid by the glories that have befallen me along the way. These very letters. A liturgy grieving infertility. Hometown vampires and Lost Tales. A poem about a cloud. A podcast episode that was all your fault.

The blinking screen has drawn me time and time again. My click is reaching out, my eyes are scanning the blue light with a hunger that when satiated only whets my appetite for more. I wander the online rooms among familiar names. Their words nourish the neglected spaces in my soul amid the void and the chaos, where words are spoken. The speakers give form to the unseen, and draw a line between us. We link across the distance. We share loves. No matter how terrified I am to speak, no matter how appalled I am by my own words, I can’t shake off the ache to make. I am a moth drawn to the light. I will die seeking it. The nature of that beacon is luminescent, iridescent, kaliedoscopic, and I am obsessed, possessed, captivated. I’m a goner.

You know how you felt when you described the Rich Mullins session? How you wondered whether he knew how his work is beloved and adored by roomfuls of people. How it was a taste of heaven? Each letter is a taste to me. Each Hutchmoot session. Each Habit retreat. Each forum thread and message board. Every bite teaches us a better hunger. Every drink strengthens us for immortality. We become more solid, readied for the concentrated kingdom. For the twinkling of an eye. I don’t need to know if dinosaurs or libraries will be in New Creation, so long as all the storytellers of the ages are there to tell us lurkers about them.

Maybe these letters are about finding our place. The place we write from, and about. Half-imaginary, half-hope, wholly real. Whenever and wherever we find our place as writers, we must write from it as our guiding star. Dinotopia may not have anything to do with cultivating a place on the prairie, but message boards have everything to do with it for me. I was already looking with the eyes of imagination—I was looking all along—but first James Gurney and then Jonathan Rogers invited me to come look together, with you. And now we answer the question Why did you stay? with Where else would we go? We still don’t have the right frame of heart to see otters, but let’s keep trying, and maybe someday we’ll be shipwrecked on that shore.