Sakura of DOOM

Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/05/07/the-big-idea-jill-rosenberg/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=60615

While it may seem like fantasy is as far from the real world as possible, author Jill Rosenberg suggests that indulging in fantasies and fiction actually connects people instead of isolating them from reality. Dive in to the Big Idea for her newest release, Now I’m Photogenic and Other Stories I Tell Myself, and see if our desires are really just human nature.

JILL ROSENBERG:

People often think of fantasy and the imagination as ways to escape reality, but I think there’s a more complicated and fraught relationship between the two. What we long for, the ways we wish to escape—this grows out of our real experiences of the world. But the reverse is true as well: our “real” experiences are colored by our fantasies. 

We might, for example, wish to be an Olympic-level athlete, as one of my characters does, but this wish highlights the absence of her athletic talent, which may not have shown up as an absence if she’d never longed to be an elite athlete. That feeling of absence and desire drives her behavior, which changes her reality, and the resulting experience changes her understanding of herself and what she really wants.

Our imagination can’t free us from the world because our imagination is made from the world.  But it can alter the way we see things and what feels possible. The first story in my collection is called “The Logic of Imaginary Friends.” This is where I present this big idea most directly. A single mother is left lonely and longing when her eleven-year-old daughter goes to sleepaway camp for the first time, so she reunites with her imaginary friend from childhood.

It’s great at first, until one imaginary friend is not enough, no matter how she morphs him in her mind to meet her shifting needs and desires. The fantasies are fun, but not satisfying, and she begins to feel that she’s choosing this fantasy life over her life with her daughter, but does she have to choose between the two?

As a child, I used my imagination to revise reality. Every Thanksgiving I’d feel so excited for my cousins to visit. I’d imagine myself gregarious, irresistible, rehearsing all of the interactions I’d have, writing their dialogue and mine. But when they arrived, I could never be that person or get the response from them I wanted.

Later that night, however, I could rewrite the dialogue to be more plausible but equally thrilling, given what actually happened. That was always my favorite part of the holiday, alone in my room, taking what happened and transforming it into the holiday I longed for. But the bigger the gulf between my fantasies and reality, the less I was able to enjoy the fantasies or the reality.

It’s this competing desire that compelled me to write these stories: the desire to be known, seen, recognized and special, to connect with those around us, and the desire to hide what makes us unique, to pretend we’re no different from everyone else.

On the one hand, my characters are often reminding themselves of their freedom. Maybe they really can be anything they want to be, but when they try to do it, out in the world, it’s not so easy. They can’t control reality or other people’s responses the way they can control their fantasies. But the more they shy away and hide from the real world, the more that fear of reality infects their fantasies, or, in the surreal stories, the events of their fantastical lives. As a result, their fantasies and their lives get weirder and worse. 

Of course, my strange characters and the unusual things that happen to my characters all stem from my own strangeness and my unusual thoughts and experiences. In my real life, I do not always feel like showcasing the ways in which I deviate from the norm, but I am happy and proud to put my strange and unusual characters out into the world because I do think that fiction shows us new and different ways of being. 

The role of fiction, even surreal fiction, is to bring us closer to the experience of being a human in the real world. That marriage between—and tension between—dream and reality is what I find most thrilling and ultimately satisfying in both my writing and my life.

Now I’m Photogenic and Other Stories I Tell Myself: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s|Watchung Booksellers

Author socials: Website|Instagram

Read an excerpt of one story from the collection: The Logic of Imaginary Friends

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/05/07/the-big-idea-jill-rosenberg/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=60615