In 2009, novelist Raven Leilani left her Seventh Day Adventist church. A year later, she attended the New York Comic-Con — and she found faith again.  As she wrote for Esquire last month:

When fandom is good, it is earnest, generative. I felt it then, how the event had been loved into existence, how it was particular and communal. But for women, it is complicated. By the time I was in college, my fandom had quieted. The decision to go to Comic Con was a hail Mary of sorts

The convention became an “accidental manifestation” to her and a testimony to the power people put into their fictions, “proof that the fantastic can be made real.”

Leilani’s new book Luster debuts this month.