Giving Fairy Tales a Kick

        Continuing my series of posts about Beyond Pomegranate & Thorns, (my upcoming collection of short stories, poetry, and art) today I’m focussing on fairy tales.  Unlike the Greek and Roman mythology I wrote about in the last post, I have loved fairy tales since childhood.  I’ve been writing my own fairy tales since at least age the age of 7 (see one at my post Staples and Crayons), but it was when I was 9 years old that I really started to go crazy with fairy tales.  I read every single fairy tale book in the relatively small library I had access to in Galway, Ireland, and then the following year I continued to read all the fairy tale anthologies in the much larger and better-stocked library in my home town of Cleveland Heights, Ohio.  It’s true that fairy tales can be dark, full of violence, sexism, stereotypes, and often unsatisfactory characterization and motivations, so why do I love fairy tales while disliking classical mythology?  Well, I’ll start by stating the perhaps-obvious point that I don’t like every fairy tale, but on the whole fairy tales hold up visions of agency and initiative, justice (if not always mercy), virtue rewarded, and Happy Endings.  (Compare that with classical mythology’s inexorable fate, arbitrary and selfish gods acting with impunity, and an awful lot of ever-compounding tragedy.)

        In my voracious reading of fairy tales throughout my childhood (and to this day) I was consuming stories collected from all around the world, but for this section of my own book I’m specifically looking at the traditional European fairy tales, and here’s what I’ve got in the draft of the book so far:

The Princess and the Pea (art)

Snow White (short story, artwork just sketched)

Sleeping Beauty (2 poems, a series of 13 poems, short story, art)

Rumpelstiltskin (short story, art just sketched)

Rapunzel (poem, art)

Jack and the Beanstalk (short story)

Jorinde and Joringel (poem - forthcoming in Strange Horizons!)

Baba Yaga (art)

        The really fun thing about taking inspiration from these classic tales is that I get to catch hold of the sparks that enchant me even in the midst of story elements that may be unreasonable or objectionable.  Do you have any favorite songs that you love even though the lyrics are problematic?  You love the music, the voice, the vibe, even though logically you can’t agree with the message in the words?  There are fairy tales like that for me.  “Sleeping Beauty” has always been one of my favorites not for the plot, but for the strange and beautiful setting of the enchanted castle falling asleep behind its mysterious hedge of thorns.  The descriptions in the Grimms’ version are wonderfully evocative in their specificity.  I love the music of the tale.  So I’ve found four different sparks within the fairy tale "Sleeping Beauty," and blown on them until they caught fire, and let them lead me in four different directions, all inspired by the magic of the traditional tale, but all unrelated to each other.  So much fun!

        While I’m on the topic of fairy tales, I’ll go on a bit of a tangent to note that they’re generally not taken very seriously as literature, and are often assumed to be children’s fare, which is actually quite absurd.  I have a theory that in the entire history of humankind there has been a period of only about one hundred years in which fantasy was treated as the province of children (and perhaps even worse, women!)  Tales of fantasy were told by and for adults through all the millennia of Gilgamesh and the Odyssey, Beowulf and King Arthur, the Thousand and One Nights and wicked stepmothers.  These stories were shared with children, but they were not thought childish.  Then the Enlightenment turned sensible adult (manly) thoughts toward logic and science, and Victorians invented the modern concept of childhood as a time of innocence before rationality took over, and bingo - the idea of fantasy was assigned to the realm of childhood.  We’re working our way back out of that attitude again now, and authors, critics, and readers are all starting to take speculative fiction much more seriously.  Within that very broad field, fairy tales are just one small corner, but they were probably my first introduction to fantasy and they retain an enduring resonance for me.  I hope my explorations and re-imaginings will find a resonance in you, too.

        The Kickstarter campaign to bring this book to life was fully funded in just one week, which means I can spend the rest of the campaign (it runs until Sept. 29) with all the excitement and none of the stress!  I’m enormously grateful to the fans who have believed in this project and backed it.  THANK YOU!  If you haven’t backed Beyond Pomegranate & Thorns yet, but think it might be of interest, by all means head over to Kickstarter and peruse all the details about the book and other fun rewards I’ve got planned.  I’d love to have you join the team that’s making it possible to bring this project to life.

        As for fairy tales, which are your favorites?  Do you have favorite motifs that reappear in many tales?  I’d love to hear which fairy tale sparks are most magical to you!

[Images: Sleeping Beauty teaser, details of poem and rubber block print, 2017;

Illustration for Jorinde Remembers, collage from two rubber block prints (including the castle from Castle on a Bay, which you can see at NydamPrints.com).]