The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing and Listening in 2025, pt. 20: Andrea Hairston

 

We have made it to December 2025!

Storytellers saved my life every day this year! Writers, musicians, and filmmakers too. Imagination sustained us all, as we cruised on this death-defying rollercoaster ride, plunging into janky ravines and scaling treacherous cliffs, hurtling into 2026.

Blessings on people of the good word; they conjured stories to ignite the imagination and fuel our spirits: Heather Cox Richardson, Robert Reich, Contraband Camp, Jess Craven, Rebecca Solnit, Jamelle Bouie, Strength in Numbers, Jasmin Crocket, Brian Tyler Cohen, and The Guardian. In the midst of narrative civil war, they asked important questions and offered clear analysis. They also proposed actions to get us where we want to go. Hope.

In 2007, I wrote an essay on Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth, “Stories Are More Important than Facts: Imagination as Resistance.” Numbers and facts never speak for themselves. Storytellers make truth with the data. Going against the dominant stories of one’s society is very difficult. To resist the prevailing master narratives, the magical Zeitgeist that is everywhere and nowhere, requires fierce imagination. Facing a fascist public and private world, Ofelia, the young heroine of Pan’s Labyrinth, is a marvel of imagination. Watching the film again was inspirational.

The third volume of Philip Pullman’s Book of Dust trilogy came out this fall. I waited for this final volume to be published to start reading the trilogy. Like Pan’s Labyrinth, Pullman offers a marvelous tale of resistance and resilience. In a parallel universe, fascists attempt to steal the world. They claim absolute moral and political authority. In a hallowed past century, power was supposedly delegated to the Magisterium to interpret reality for everyone. In the present moment, a wannabe dictator from the Magisterium stages religious wars and works to crush any dissenting voices. Imagination is being denigrated as inferior, irrational, the opposite of truth. There is also an assault on spirit and the very possibility of truth. Many declare the universe void of meaning, a dead place. Of course, if we reject/degrade/ban imagination, it becomes difficult to access truth. Lyra, one of the protagonists, finds herself falling prey to the meaningless-epidemic. She once believed that we, from rock to fire to breath, leaf, and blood, were embodiments of the universe’s spirit. Now Lyra inhabits a dead realm, inside and out. In addition to resisting the wannabe dictator, Lyra must find a way to recover her imagination.

As I read, I relished the image of people of all ages reading Pullman’s 1700 pages dedicated to imagination as resistance. I felt my heart beating with other readers, as in the audience of a great performance. An exhilarating feeling!

So much of what I enjoyed this year was about the quest for imagination.

In Lessons in Magic and Disaster, Charlie Jane Anders gets us lost in the murky Massachusetts woods, lost in the jumble of our hearts and spirits, in search of magic. Her characters face a tangle of joy, grief, despair, and hope. They long for a world that was, and also ache to create that world which will hold all of who we mean to be. The past ain’t gone and the present is unfinished, rich with loss and potential. Charlie Jane’s characters are touched by magic and so are the readers. She shows us that we actually have what we need to cast spells. She challenges us to study our magic and conjure the world we want.

I appreciate all of P. Djèlí Clark’s excellent work, but in preparation for a panel at Readercon (July 2025), I reread his novella, Ring Shout, which like Ryan Coogler’s Sinners (one of my favorite films of the year) is a Hoodoo tale. The book and the film are conjurations. The readers/audience find themselves caught in the spells of root workers and Blues musicians. Clark and Coogler know where your imagination done run off to and give you a way to other worlds, other possibilities. Sublime prose and stunning cinematography allow readers/audience to feel our creative power: We are the crossroads from the ancestors to the unborn.

One of my great joys this year was reading manuscripts that were about to be published. We could all drown in a deadly deluge of data, but Sunward (Sept 2025) by William Alexander is the book to take you to stars. Heroic bots, ethical assassins, jealous siblings, and renegade daughters risk everything to sustain truth and make family and meaning.

The People's Library by Veronica Henry (coming in February 2026) is also about a post-AI future. People enjoy Universal Basic Income and access to marvelous AI tech. At the People’s Library, everyone can access maker spaces and engage with digital historical figures. Yet as book libraries are closed down, there’s an undertow of discontent and resistance to the official narrative. A librarian who curates digital consciousness risks her life to save books, and also our spirited humanity, of course.

I have also read manuscripts on the way to final draft. Daniel José Older’s Last Laugh has machete sharp wit, wisdom, and insight. This in-progress novel is like the best episode of a favorite, long running epic that I somehow missed and am so glad I found. Good words, good questions, laugh out loud sustenance on the roller coaster ride. Pan Morigan’s Swallowing Moons (working title) is a praise song to the spirits in us all. Imagination and spirit might have been paved over—after years of struggle, disappointment, and despair. But as with Pullman, Del Toro, and all the artists that sustained me, Morigan writes a way out of no way to day light truth and celebrate the power of the imagination.  

Thanks to Daniel, Pan, and all these artists and word wizards, I am looking forward to 2026!

Andrea Hairston ran away from the physics lab to the theatre when she was a young thing and has been a scientist, artiste, and hoodoo conjurer ever since. She is a novelist, poet, playwright, and L. Wolff Kahn 1931 Professor Emerita of Theatre and Africana Studies at Smith College. Andrea is the author of Archangels of Funk, shortlisted for the 2025 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction; Mindscape, a Carl Brandon Award winner and finalist for the Phillip K. Dick and Otherwise Awards; Will Do Magic For Small Change, a New York Times Editor’s pick and finalist for the Mythopoeic, Lambda, and Otherwise Awards; Redwood and Wildfire, a Washington Post Best Book of 2022, Otherwise and Carl Brandon Award winner; and Master of Poisons on the Kirkus Review’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of 2020. Andrea bikes at night year-round, meeting bears, multi-legged creatures of light and breath, and the occasional shooting star. The Redemption Center is Closed on Sundays will be out in May, 2026.