Jenny Birch is a middle school teacher of English, French, and history, and serves as a youth theater director for students in grades 7-12. She lives in the suburbs of Pittsburgh, PA with her husband, two sons, and foster baby. Jenny holds a BA in French and an MEd in Instruction & Learning and as an adoptee herself, she is a passionate advocate for children, particularly those in the foster care and adoption communities. When she’s not in her classroom or on stage with her students, you can find her either dancing in the kitchen with her family or flexing her overactive imagination. You can find Jenny on Twitter @TheRealMrsBirch.

We need monsters. Monsters are safe.

We grow up fearing monsters—they hide in our closets and go bump in the night!—so I know this sounds counterintuitive. But hear me out. Because in my experience, literary monsters are the easiest, safest way human beings can grapple with all the very real and really terrifying aspects of our existence.

People often ask about my debut novel, Woven from Clay. “Why did you write about golems? What drew you to them?” The short answer is this: because they’re messy.

The long answer has to do with how I felt growing up. A lot loved, but a little out of place. A little disconnected. A little weird. Part of this was probably a side effect of being an adopted person, part was possibly related to having raging—but undiagnosed—ADHD. But even for non-adopted, neurotypical people, I think my protagonist, Terra Slater, and golems in general resonate with a deeper, essential, universal truth about life.

Life is messy!

Growing is messy. Learning is messy. Relationships are messy. We are messy.

Is it really any surprise, then, that I felt so drawn to golems in exploring how a girl navigates adolescence?

When I look through this lens at the books I have loved and read and reread in my life, when I think about the immense popularity of fantasy stories for children and adults, I realize all those mystical, magical monsters allow us to explore and confront—in a safe, remote way—other difficult aspects of our humanity.

For me, monsters become the vehicle through which I come to terms with things that are actually scary.

Like our terrifying and inescapable immortality.

Through vampires and Fae, those perennial favorites of books and film, we are able to experience the alternative to that omnipresent fear. A life—or something close enough to it—that lasts forever! What could be better?

Except, in my experience, it’s usually not better. Vampire and Fae narratives are riddled with characters—even heroes—with cold (but flawless!) skin and eternal (and rock-hard!) muscles who are forever atoning for some long-ago atrocity. Even when they save the day (again and again and again!), they are wracked by the guilt of past wrongs. Because with an eternity to fill, the number of mistakes one could make is truly endless.

In many of these stories, the human characters who witness this struggle come to value—even treasure—their mortality. Those given a choice reject immortality for themselves. Those who make the transition are often forced into it. These stories, these myths, these monsters of blood and fangs and magic serve as an important example, a counterbalance to our fear, a reminder of how precious life is.

A reminder that what makes life precious is, indeed, its brevity.

And it’s not just our (or at least my) fear of death that can be conquered by monsters.

Demon stories explore the possibility of forgiveness no matter how evil someone may seem—or even believe themselves to be. Time and time again, the warmth, love, and compassion of a human heart (especially, thrillingly, the heart of the demon’s One True Love) offers rescue, rehabilitation, and redemption to even these darkest, most twisted creatures. The darkest, most twisted parts of ourselves.

Shapeshifters represent the danger of trying to be something you’re not. They are, perhaps, a warning against wearing two faces, meant to help us realize that who we are is enough—more than enough! Trying (or having) to be someone else corrupts us into something uglier than we care to imagine.

Tales of witches depict the human desire for power and the consequences of harnessing that power. Having grappled with feelings of powerlessness—and sometimes its close cousin, hopelessness—I know how appealing a good witch story can be. And how meaningful it is to understand that tapping into the power we so desperately seek, the power we not only want but think we need, can come with complications or costs no one ever wants to pay.

And we can’t forget afterlife monsters! Ghost stories reassure us that our love, our memories, our souls persist beyond death. No moment of our life is ever wasted; that energy is carried on. And zombies and mummies can be understood as a warning of a fate worse than dying. Peace and rest are their own reward. After all, in those stories, coming back for a second shot at life isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

I have no rationale for clowns, though. Clowns truly are monsters, harbingers of despair, devoid of deeper meaning. They are terror for terror’s own sake. (I’m kidding! Kind of! I’m sure if I really pushed myself to think about it, I would perhaps see in them an allegory about how the trappings of childhood can be misused by adults, twisted and warped until they destroy joy rather than create it. Or something.)

Of course, these are all just my own armchair suppositions. They are possibly nothing more than the fever-dream of a mother of three who subsists on dangerously little sleep, root beer, and the pizza crusts her children refuse to eat. At the very least, they comprise here a hopefully halfway-decent sample essay to use with my students in class this year!

Even acknowledging these possibilities, I wrote these things because I do believe them. I do think there is a specific reason that mythology and fantasy literature (more recently: romantasy) are so popular and enduring. Everyone knows these stories aren’t real. They can’t be real! These creatures don’t exist in the world we inhabit.

But they do exist inside us. In our hearts. In our minds. In our darkest corners, where they are fed not by root beer and pizza scraps but by our insecurities and deepest fears. They exist inside of us specifically to consume those insecurities, to devour those fears. They explore the things we cannot—the things we must not. They make us confront our mortality; the meaning of life; the all-consuming nature of power; the search for forgiveness and redemption; the importance of authenticity; and the precious, fleeting innocence of childhood. Monsters gift us the understanding that there is peace, contentment, and even joy in the ordinary human lives we’ve all been consigned (or confined) to.

Perhaps this is why, to me, literature is so essential. This is why we need it. We need its monsters. Its monsters keep us safe.

Woven from Clay

Woven from Clay by Jenny Birch

Terra Slater is ready to make the most of her senior year. But when bounty hunter Thorne Wilder moves to town and reveals that Tessa is a golem, crafted by a fugitive warlock named Cyrus Quill, Terra’s plans fall by the wayside. Quill has been sentenced to death for his crimes, but if he dies, Terra and the other golems he’s created will perish too. With her life on the line, Terra strikes a precarious deal with Thorne: if she can master her innate magic, all golems will be saved. But this tenuous alliance becomes something more that will transform Terra’s view of herself, love, and humanity itself.

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