Whenever I’m asked what I write, I have to pause for a moment.
How do I say that I write my own fairy tales without the instant assumption that I write for children? That instant dismissal that what I write isn’t something to be considered serious.
How do I convey that fairy tales are so much more than what people perceive them to be?
Fairy tales have been around for a long, long time. They were passed down from mother to child generation after generation, well before many people could read or write.
And with each telling, something would change. Small things. A new element would be added, or removed, day may turn to night, the cat becomes a dog, the humble hearth witch a hideous thing of nightmares. But always, the message, the lesson, the moral… remains the same.
Folklore has been an integral part of human civilization since the very beginning. A blending of the oral and written traditions and a merging of various renditions of the same narrative. For instance, the Cinderella tale can be traced back to ancient China and Egypt, with variations emerging based on the cultural background of the storyteller.
Even though fairy tales are often associated with children, they were originally something for both adults and children to enjoy.
While they can be cautionary tales for children, with important life lessons to be learnt (this is a whole other topic that I may just write about all on its own) most are quite dark, gruesome, and violent and if you have read many of the original Brother’s Grimm tales, you will know exactly what I’m talking about.
Fairy tales have always played such an integral part in our lives and these old tales that have been so carefully collected and preserved so that we can still enjoy them today, contain so much wisdom.
They speak to us of the mystery of this world and beyond. Of nature, of birth, of life and death. They are ruthless, they are brutal, they contain something in them which we cannot let go of. We are drawn to these old tales. Something about them compels us to continue telling them, to continue reading them, to twist them and put our own spin on them, whatever that may be. To try to recreate, to try to learn and above all, I believe it is to try to understand.
And they can still teach us so much if we only let them.
This is what I write. Tales to make readers think. To make them feel. To make them face hard truths and realities with hidden depths and layer after layer of meaning and thought and symbolism. I write with the intention of recreating the way old storytelling was once told. I like to think that A Stranger’s Tale would have been one of those tales that could fit so seamlessly inside a volume of a Brother’s Grimm collection.
My story, Old Mother, another tale that could seamlessly slip from the lips of one person to another, travelling through the winds of this world and told and retold by so many, something changing ever so with each new telling.
This is what I write. This is where my heart lies. With the tales of old, brought into the present to remind us of the importance of the oral and written words and the power that they contain.
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