232. What If You Fought a Forest that Cursed Your Family? | The Burning Tree with Helen Dent

Fantastical Truth

Many fantasy worlds have people groups that don’t like each other. And many people in fairy-tale lands warn you never to go in the forest. But in Ellie Castor’s community of Bishop’s Gap, the feud between her family and the Levy family is getting worse. And the root of it lies at the heart of the forest where she must never go—unless it’s to fight the curse. Today we’re tramping into the dead leaves in Helen Dent’s new fantasy The Burning Tree.

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Introducing guest Helen Dent

Helen Dent’s career as a writer began at age nine, when her grandfather paid her a dollar a page for what turned into quite a lengthy story. She studied monster theory (among other things) in graduate school, taught English at a Chinese university, and toured the Scottish Hebrides in a car with a needy radiator. Now she lives in Texas with her husband, kids, a cat, and a hamster. She belongs to the DFW Writers Workshop, the Fort Worth Poetry Society, and Art House Dallas.

• HelenDentWrites.com
• Helen Dent on Facebook
• @‌helendentwrites on Instagram

1. How did you find biblical faith and fantastic imagination?

2. What ideas and images led to The Burning Tree?

• Genre differences: portal fantasy or high fantasy versus magical realism
• Yet this novel isn’t urban fantasy but a rare example of rural fantasy.
• There’s also a dash of mythology from another tradition entirely.

3. What’s next for your creative worlds?

Com station

Top question for listeners

• Which places in nature have filled you with wonder or dread?

Jasmine commented on episode 221 with Jerry Jenkins:

All really interesting. Now if I were writing the series today (and it could as well be, since no one knows the day or the hour anyways), there are some changes I could possibly make:

1. Carpathia gains control of android and apple and all the streaming sevices (Netflix, Hulu, Paraomount, Disney+)
2. The bugging system could be more advanced, with possibly a hidden camera and a microphone that’s more like a little chip
3. The Seal of God would not only have a cross but also calculation of 777 (as opposed to the 666) for each believer from different regions
4. Akbar could use a smart phone as he’s interrogating the workers at the palace in searching for the mole
5. The three demons (Baal, Ashtorath, and Cankerworm) could be artificial intelligence until Carpathia and Fortunato exhaled three frogs from their mouths and bring those three to life.
6. Tsion Ben-Judah could have a underground streaming service
7. There could be a underground online news (most people get their news online nowadays)

Those are just some random ideas for what the series could be like if it was written today.

Next on Fantastical Truth

“Judge not” gets twisted to shut down God’s Law. The phrase “money is the root of all evil” gets twisted to shut down biblical ambition. And “no eye has see, no ear has heard” often gets twisted to shut down a longing for Heaven. But what twisted Scripture most often gets used to reject Christ-exalting fantastical imagination? This top text may be 1 Thessalonians 5:22: “Avoid the appearance of evil.” But does that text actually say to avoid not just actual evil, but anything that appears evil in the eyes of … someone?