Thoughts on Mulberry Down
Author: Gwen
Background
A few days ago Nicole Kornher-Stace tweeted that she had written and made freely available a story. She did this as a result of a long twitter thread she had posted months prior, in which she vehemently criticized the fantasy tropes of portaling to a fantasy realm (an “Elsewhere”), only to return back to the real world at the end as part of “growing up” or because it was all a dream or because it was a metaphor or because it was all due to mental illness — it’s a deeply unsatisfying, yet incredibly pervasive, resolution to a common story.
So, she wrote mulberry down!!, which tackles these feelings of dissatisfaction with an adult character.
It’s powerful, it draws on a lot of portal fantasy tropes, it captures a lot of feelings that portal fantasy fiction typically glosses over, and moreover, it taps into something very real and visceral within my own thoughts and feelings. So visceral that I feel compelled to process it in writing. So that’s what I’m doing here — this is not a review, though I will say that mulberry down!! is very good, it’s free, and you should read it.
What and Why
Mulberry Down explores in painful relief the experience of being an adult who has been to an Elsewhere via their dreams (and perhaps other ways as well, locked in distant childhood memories), who has an emotional connection to a person in that Elsewhere so deep that it’s seemingly braided through the strands of their soul, but has for reasons unknowable to them been trapped in the mundane world. This results in grief, anger, derealization, listlessness, melancholy, self-destructiveness.
For me, this captures perfectly my feelings when reading portal fantasy, when characters return to the real world at the end of an adventure in Elsewhere. The traditional narratives in this genre invariably describe a return-to-normal and integration with mundane reality that flies in total defiance of a believable emotional reaction to such a tragedy. In this way mulberry is cathartic — it addresses those feelings head on. It says, “no, you’re not crazy, it would really suck to experience an Elsewhere and be ejected from it.” It presents a story that is explicitly not a metaphor, it is not a parable for personal growth and coming-of-age. It is presented at face-value, and it cuts deep.
I have seen one other adult-targetted deconstruction of the portal fantasy trope, in Lev Grossman’s The Magicians. A book that left me morose for days (perhaps weeks?) after reading it. The Magicians asks — what if Elsewhere is real, but isn’t what you thought it was, and ultimately carries the same disappointments and ennui which pervade the rest of life. Honestly, I think it’s a good book, but it also kind of wounded me; it twisted a knife. Mulberry Down is similar superficially — it approaches the concept of portal fantasy from an adult perspective, and lays bare the very real pain intrinsic to them. But Mulberry Down knows that it doesn’t need to go out of its way to make it hurt; it doesn’t need to corrupt the Elsewhere or extend the ennui of the mundane to it — it is an honest portrayal that hurts in a way that feels right because the hurt is genuine, not contrived. In The Magicians, the characters are constantly seeking that sense of belonging, but never truly find it, even in their Elsewhere. Compared to Mulberry, it feels dishonest, like an excuse; it’s sour grapes: the fantasy realm isn’t that good either, and you don’t feel belonging not because you’re not there but instead because you’re broken as a human.
Mulberry says, you are broken as a human because you are stuck in a place where you can’t belong, after having had a taste of the place where you do.
This story means a lot to me, and I need to talk about why.
Dreams
Talking about my own dreams always feels self-indulgent, but my experience of dreams is necessary context in order for me to convey where I’m coming from.
I have always had exceptionally vivid dreams. I have them now, and I had them as far back as I can remember, which is when I was around two or three. They are in full color, they often involve senses and sensation that most people do not experience in dreams, and while there are ways to distinguish them from my waking experiences, I wasn’t particular good at it until I started intentionally lucid dreaming in my mid teens.
Sometimes these dreams are what I think of as “normal” — dreams that take place in real-life settings with real-life people, playing out my daily anxieties or aspirations. These are not the dreams that make me feel things when I read Mulberry Down, though they do sometimes make me mistake events that happened in a dream for true memories in real life (though I’ve gotten better about it — I’m past the days of being a 10-year-old convinced I could fly if I tried really hard, because I thought I remembered doing it).
It is the other dreams that pull at me. The vivid fantasy settings I return to in dream after dream. The dreams themselves do not recur, not exactly. I come back to the same places, see the same characters, and continue a persistent narrative. Sometimes a significant event occurs, and I move on from a place, and visit an adjacent one instead. Sometimes I return much later. They places are connected, but the topology of the larger landscape is impossible to grasp. Certain paths lead certain places. The places all have a distinct feel to them that is never replicated anywhere in the waking world, though like in Mulberry Down, sometimes small things will be remniscent of them.
I remember describing this landscape to my grandmother when I was four (she was a good audience, as an extremely imaginative and mysticism-prone person herself). The names I gave places then were in accordances to what a four-year-old would name things; I only remember one of the names now: the “muk muk” — a seemingly endless swamp filled with enormous trees that reached unfathomably high. This is the first recurring place that I can remember. I know there was also a desert canyon, and I know there were other locations that have since passed from my memory.
Over time, I tend to visit new dream locations, and gradually the old ones stop getting visited. I don’t have the sense that they are gone or totally disconnected from the new ones; rather, the narrative has moved on, and the older places aren’t often relevant. I’ve wandered through fungal forests filled with enormous toadstools, rolling grass plains encapsulated by forested mountains, rivers cast in eternal shadow winding through dark rainforests, vibrant towns on twilight islands, forested mountains full of hostile wildlife, rivers which wind through a myriad of shifting landscapes, hedge mazes full of fireflies on the outskirts of medieval castles, cities with airships floating overhead. I’ve had deep sea adventures on groaning submarines, and I’ve traversed border worlds that link other realms with innumerable portals.
I need to be clear — unlike in mulberry down, I am confident that these dreams are, in fact, just dreams. It is a fantasy landscape constructed from my own mind. But despite that, I will catch myself in the waking world having a moment of remniscence, of yearning for something that I can’t quite place, only to realize in a moment of clarity that I’m being wistful for a place or a feeling that I’ve experienced only in dreams.
My dreams, I assume like most people’s, involve an extremely distorted sense of time. I can spend hours asleep, but have dreams that span weeks, months, years, or even decades. And sometimes I will meet people in them, whose names and faces are now indistinct, but who I have spent lifetimes with, sometimes fallen in love with. Unlike in mulberry, there is not a singular character who persists throughout my dream narratives. But I have, on more than one occasion, had the experience of waking from a dream and crying with loss upon realizing the person I just spent an unfathomable amount of subjective time with is a fiction, and I may never meet them again.
My ventures into fantasy realms in my dreams are not happy-go-lucky escapism. Like in mulberry, they often involve pain and loss. I have fallen in love, lost people, and grieved within dreams. I have died countless times in innumerable ways. I have fought, I have won, I have lost. And even so, like in mulberry, that doesn’t make the dream places less desirable; it just makes them more real. It gives them more emotional weight.
Unsurprisingly, at times when real life becomes unbearable, the allure of dreams becomes proportionally stronger. At a particularly dark time in my high school years, I frequently wished I could dream forever; this sentiment is captured in mulberry in the phrase “all you want for your birthday is a medically induced coma”.
As I mentioned, when I was a kid, the line between dreams and reality was blurrier. I’d visit new places in real life, and find myself reminded of places I’d visited in dreams. I could do magic; sometimes it’d work and sometimes it wouldn’t, without any apparent rhyme or reason. In retrospect I know that I was doing magic in my dreams that didn’t work while I was awake, but my memories weren’t that well-separated, so at the time it just seemed like I could attempt magical feats and occasionally they would work. At many times, real life felt like a veneer over a deeper reality that I could explore while asleep.
I was constantly looking for portals to other worlds. Sometimes I thought I’d found them, but I was always slightly to big to fit, or I couldn’t get the activating conditions quite right, or maybe I wasn’t believing hard enough.. I’d read The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe along with every Magic Treehouse book I could get my hands on, plus who knows how many miscellaneous fantasy novels I’ve now half-forgotten. So many afternoons spent trying magic spells and potions and rituals to free me from the mundane. I know I spent a lot of time looking through doors in dreams — the sequence in mulberry opening door after door to no avail is something that I have done.
Honestly, I’m pretty sure I got into software when I was 12 because computer programming felt closer to real-life magic than anything else I could do.
Trauma and Progress
I’m sure some of this is just being a highly imaginative kid. But I think a lot of it comes from trauma. As a kid, as a teen, even as a young adult, I didn’t recognize my childhood as being particularly traumatic. Partly because I was just remembering the good parts and glossing over certain events, but also because I just didn’t have the emotional vocabulary to recognize what I just took for granted. This creates a fun situation where I felt like I was carrying trauma, but didn’t consciously think I had any, which tracks very well with the experience of the protagonist in mulberry, who has a pervasive sense of unreality and wrongness without the traditional traumatic events that would normally be expected to evoke that.
But of course, my own past does happen to contain much more emotional difficulty than I recognized until much later. It feels like almost a betrayal to mention it — the whole point of mulberry is that there is no hidden trauma — the trauma is having to cope with being stuck with a mundane existence. But my personal story does involve trauma, and almost paradoxically, that is a substantial part of the reason mulberry cuts so deep for me.
For one, I grew up as a closeted trans girl. Being in the closet as a trans person is inherently traumatic. You are constantly faced with your body not being quite right, with struggling and eternally failing to fit into the social roles you’re forced into. It makes the world feel fake — both because constant pain results in emotional distance as an automatic defense mechanism, but also because there genuinely is something subtley wrong with the waking world that you can never quite put your finger on. In dreams, I got to be truly myself, whatever that might have meant at the time. I wasn’t necessarily aware of myself as a girl in my dreams (though I sometimes was), but I definitely wasn’t being coerced into male social roles that didn’t fit. So in a very real way, my dreams were more real than reality, for a very long time, because they were the only place where I could be real.
Pair this with early childhood neglect (my little sibling had severe medical needs from infancy, which resulted in me spending many days alone at around 3-4 years old), stress from a protacted messy divorce between my parents, certain caretakers I won’t mention by name that were emotionally duplicitous, and repeated failure to fit in and establish friendships that would last longer than a couple years at a time (being trans and neurodiverse will do that). I had a profound sense of not belonging in the waking world — I didn’t fit in, I didn’t feel real, and my divorced parents moved through so many different houses in such a short time that I didn’t have a physical place that felt like home, and hadn’t since I was ten.
So I spent the bulk of my free waking hours playing make-believe by myself or reading fantasy novels, and at night, I dreamed. And often, the dreams and fantasies felt as real or more real than real life, which I was dissociated and derealized from with varying degrees of severity for most of my life.
Which to say: real life didn’t feel particularly real, dreams and fantasies did feel real, and I constantly fantasized about bridging the gap and getting to actually live in an Elsewhere, where presumably I would actually feel real and actually find belonging. Mulberry talks about feeling like a magnet stuck against the edge of reality, fixed to another magnet in another world; what an incredibly relatable feeling.
For me, things got a little better in college — I found real belonging for a while in a group of friends (who were queerer than most of us knew at the time). After college things slipped a bit into the doldrums of professional life (and codependency, but that’s another story). I more or less came to terms with dreams being impossible; I still felt sad about them, but I had found a steady state of numbness with which to soldier through.
And then I discovered that a crucial component of my dreams was not made-up, and was not an impossible fantasy either. I discovered that I was trans, that I could transition. Suddenly, a piece of my dreams became real.
That I had ever convinced myself otherwise felt like a self-betrayal analogous to the experiences of the POV in mulberry, where they realize they’d lost precious memories in trying to cope with mundane existence. I’d done much the same when I told myself I could never be a girl, when I backed off from that dream and buried the memory of it. Which is a think I did not just once, but multiple times; I’m not sure how many, but it was at least once each when I was 10, 12, 15, 18, and 21.
As I’ve transitioned, the layer of unreal has started to crumble. The film over life which has made it less-than has peeled away, and I now feel more real than I’d previously felt in my entire life. I fit in more naturally, I am more comfortable with myself, things feel more “right”. Accordingly, my experience of fantasy, especially portal fantasy, has lost some of the sting that it previously had.
At the same time, I think I’ll always carry those feelings and memories with me. The trope of growing up and becoming an adult who fits in and therefore is uninterested in fantasy is still nonsense to me. And even having finally dissolved my day-to-day dissociation and derealization, I still spend some time fantasizing about escape; there’s so much broken in the world, and there is such a wide chasm between what the world is and what I can imagine. If I was presented the chance to enter an Elsewhere, I wouldn’t look back. Why would anyone?
Now
All that out there, where does that leave me now, after reading mulberry down!!?
I feel the ennui and trapped anger and regret inherent to that story. Not as viscerally as I would have felt in the past, but it is a powerful remembered empathy. And, there is still regret — I may have found myself now, but I sure spent a long time lost, and that’s time I’ll never get back. And I feel slightly unmoored; that was exactly the kind of fantasy story that can unhook my anchors to reality, and leave me in a slightly surreal place after. That in and of itself isn’t uncommon for me; I often feel a bit derealized after burying my nose in a book. But the very meta nature of this particular story leaves a distinctive emotional flavor that’s difficult to describe; some loss, some regret, but also some renewed wonder and reflection. When I transitioned I started frequently asking myself — what other dreams have I given up on, that I shouldn’t have? What else should I dredge up from my past fantasies and try to work towards, rather than writing off as impossible? This story captures that feeling in a very literal way.
And of course, all that is taking mulberry down!!, to some degree at least, metaphorically, which is somewhat counter to the point. So accordingly, I also feel the literal feelings portrayed by the story as written — the loss, the regret, the yearning for an Elsewhere that can never be reached. And I find myself thinking much more deeply than I usually do on my fantasy dreamscapes.
So where am I? Pensive. Slightly melancholy, slightly motivated, reflective. Perusing once again the corners of my mind for what threads I may have dropped.
I’m happy to have read this story. It captured something important, that I haven’t seen adequately captured anywhere else.