Creativity Quote by Terri Windling

Windling’s line carries the quiet urgency of someone who knows myth doesn’t survive on prestige; it survives on circulation. The repetition of “very, very hard” isn’t ornamental. It signals a labor that’s both creative and infrastructural: writing, editing, illustrating, publishing, curating, advocating. Myth doesn’t “return” to culture by magic; it has to be smuggled back in through the channels people actually use, and Windling names those channels plainly: “fantasy literature and other media.” That phrase is doing strategic work, collapsing the old hierarchy that treats myth as museum material and genre as disposable entertainment. She’s arguing, without grandstanding, that the popular pipeline is now the canon’s bloodstream.

The modesty of “public consciousness” is revealing too. She’s not claiming to restore some pure, ancient tradition. She’s aiming for recognition, a shared literacy of symbols and story-shapes that can be felt in the collective imagination, not just in classrooms. Her closing hope - “succeeding in some small way” - reads less like humility than like a protective charm against a culture that routinely trivializes the mythic as escapism. It’s also a nod to how change actually happens: not as a single breakthrough, but as accretion, as many makers pushing in the same direction until a genre becomes a commons.

Context matters: Windling comes from the late-20th-century fantasy world where women, folklore, and the domestic uncanny were often sidelined. Her intent is cultural re-enchantment, but with clear eyes about the grind required to make it stick.