Windling Woods 2017

International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts
Into the Woods

Author(s): Terri Windling
Source: Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts , 2017, Vol. 28, No. 1 (98) (2017), pp. 33-45
Published by: International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26390192
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Into the Woods: A Writer’s Journey
through Fairy Tales and Fantasy
Terri Windling
W HAT IS THE VERY FIRST FAIRY TALE THAT YOU REMEMBER? OR THE FIRST
to truly grab your heart? Which fairy tale particularly entranced you as a child,
or bewildered you, or frightened you? Each of us, I believe, is shaped by such
stories, formed by them just as we are formed by our genes, our family upbrin
ging, and the culture and times we live in.
Jane Yolen, one of our great modern fairy tale writers, says this in her essay
collection, Touch Magic:
Just as a child is born with a literal hole in his head, where the bones slowly
close underneath the fragile shield of skin, so the child is born with a figu
rative hole in his heart. What slips in before it anneals shapes the man or
woman into which that child will grow. Story is one of the most serious
intruders into the heart. (25)
Like Jane, I believe we’re influenced—often more than we know—by the

stories we heard in our earliest years. Go back to the story that you loved the
most—or that affected you the most —in your childhood, and you’re likely to
find its themes echoing throughout your whole life’s journey.
For many years this curious phenomena has puzzled and intrigued me.
What is it about these early stories—the fairy tales and hero tales so beloved
by children around the world—that causes them to reverberate so deeply in
our psyches long after? What is it that keeps certain stories alive to be passed
from generation to generation? Why, in our modern and rational world, do
some of us still hunger for magic and marvels long beyond our childhood
years —while others reject the fantastic with an absolutism bordering on fear?
What do fairy tales told to our great-great-grandparents still speak to us, and
our children, today? Unlike my distinguished co-speakers, I’m not a fairy-tale
Vol. 28, No. 1, Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts

Copyright © 2017, International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts.
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34 · Terri Windling
scholar—rather I’m a writer, a fiction editor, and an artist who works with
folkloric and fairy tale themes—and so I have no scholarly answer to these
questions. I can only do what women have done in fields, forests, and firesides
all throughout human history. I will tell you a story—a story about stories—
and it begins: Once Upon a Time....
Once upon a time there was a girl who was forced to flee her childhood
home. Why? Let’s never mind that now. Perhaps her parents were too poor
to keep her. Perhaps her mother was an ogre or a witch. Perhaps her father
had promised her to a troll, a tyrant, or a beast. She left home with the
clothes on her back, and soon she was tired, hungry, and cold. As night fell,
she took shelter in a desolate graveyard thick with nettles and briars. Beyond
the graves was a humpbacked hill and in the side of the hill was a door. The
girl walked towards the door and saw a golden key standing in its lock. She
turned the key, opened the door, and crossed over the threshold…
I can still remember that moonlit night, but I don’t remember how old I
was—only that I was past the age when a girl should still believe in magic.
Cold and quietly miserable in a childhood that seemed never-ending, I sat
hunkered down in the grass among the gravestones of the neighborhood
church, trying to conjure a portal to a magic realm by sheer force of will. Like
many children, I longed to discover a door to Faerie, a road to Oz, a wardrobe
leading to Narnia, and I wanted to believe that if I wished with all my strength
and all my will then surely a door would open for me. Surely they would let
me in.
I wanted to flee unhappiness, yes, but there was more to my desire than
this – more than just escape from the intolerability of Here and Now. My desire
was also a spiritual one—for we often forget that spiritual quest is a common
and natural part of childhood, as young people struggle to understand how
they fit into the world around them. That night, my solemn conviction was
that I did not fit into the world I knew, and so I sought to cross into some
other world, through the power of imagination. Did I really think it might be
possible? To tell the truth, I no longer know. But my longing for that door was
real, and my sharp, physical, painful desire for the things I imagined lay just
beyond: vast, unmapped, unspoiled forests. Rivers that were clean and safe to
drink. Wolves and bears who would guide my way once I’d learned the power
of their speech. My childhood in the ordinary world was a transient, uprooted
one, but beyond the door I’d find my place, my power, and my true home.
Like many children hungry for intimate connection with the spirit-filled
unknown, what I failed to manifest that night I found in my favorite children’s
books—in fairy tales, myths, and other tales of border-crossing and enchant
ment. I read these stories over and over. I devoured them and I needed them.
JOURNAL OF THE FANTASTIC IN THE ARTS
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Into the Woods · 35
But there came a time when I understood that I was growing too old for
fairy tales, and I slipped them to the back of the shelves, embarrassed by my
attachment to them. I was dutiful. I read “realistic” books about teen detec
tives, inventors, and spies; I read teen romances and girl-with-horse novels.
I watched the wholesome Brady Bunch and the Partridge Family on televi
sion…and nowhere in the popular culture of the ‘60s did I see a life and a fam
ily that was remotely like mine. Secretly, I still preferred those fairy stories that
I was meant to out-grow. I found a strange kind of comfort in them, though I
couldn’t have told you why.
I would have been reassured had I known that back then what all of us
gathered here know now: that fairy tales have a long, distinguished, and fasci
nating history—and that in centuries past such stories weren’t strictly labeled
For Children Only. I wish I’d known that these tales had been loved by adults
for hundreds, maybe thousands of years, and that in Europe the oldest known
fairy tale collections had been published in adult editions. Thanks to the work
of modern fairy-tale scholars we now know that early renditions of tales like
“Red Riding Hood” and “Rapunzel” were darker, more sensual and morally
complex than the children’s versions that we know best today—reflecting the
concerns of life as it was lived by each generation, each culture, each teller or
writer that the tales passed through. I wish I’d known, back then, about old
versions of “Sleeping Beauty” where the princess is awakened not by a chaste,
respectful kiss, but by the birth of her twins once the prince has come and gone
again; or variants of the Bluebeard, such as Italy’s “Silvernose” and Germany’s
“Fitcher’s Bird,” where the heroine outwits her captor, kills him, and restores
the lives of her murdered predecessors. I wish I’d never encountered Walt
Disney’s Cinderella, weeping in the cinders while bluebirds flutter around
her—and had known her instead as the clever, feisty, angry girl who seeks her
own salvation—with the help of advice from her dead mother’s ghost, not the
twinkle of fairy magic.
I am not, I confess, a Disney fan—for those blasted films, popular and
charming as they are, have gone a long way to foster the misconception that
fairy tales are children’s stories, and have always and only been children’s stor
ies. But as J. R. R. Tolkien pointed out in his famous on lecture “On Fairy-stor
ies,” these tales have no particular historical association with children; they’ve
been pushed into the nursery like furniture the adults no longer want, and thus
no longer care if its misused. “Fairy–stories banished in this way,” he said, “cut
off from a full adult art, would in the end be ruined; indeed, in so far as they
have been so banished, they have been ruined” (51).
Tolkien himself, of course, deserves a great deal credit for bringing magi
cal stories back to adult audiences—through the international success of his
own epic fairy story, The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien’s books surprised critics
by striking a chord with readers of all ages and from all walks of life, directly
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challenging the assumption that magical tales have no place on adult book
shelves. Today, a generation of readers who have grown up with Bilbo and
Frodo Baggins—not to mention Sparrowhawk, Harry Potter, Lyra Belacqua,
and the whole modern fantasy publishing genre—may not fully comprehend
the boundary-busting nature of Professor Tolkien’s achievement.
In the place and time where I grew up, for example—north-eastern
America in the 1960s—there were only a very few fantasy books available in
our local library (the Narnia books, the Oz books, The Wind in the Willows, a
handful of others), strictly confined to the children’s section—and somewhat
suspect even there. Fairy tales and fantasy, I understood, were like the training
wheels on a child’s first two-wheel bike: a forgivable crutch at the outset, but
one we are meant to progress beyond needing. I hadn’t progressed. I still cra
ved such tales, though they stood on shelves meant for much younger kids. A
worried librarian actually took The Blue Fairy Book out of my check-out stack,
replacing it with a more “age appropriate” story about a perky camp counsellor
who solved crimes. The message was clear: fairy tales belonged to the children
who still played with dress-up dolls, and my craving for them led me to think
there was something wrong with me. It was only later that I learned that other
adolescent readers shared this craving—and, wonder of wonders, some adults
did too. “I desired dragons with a profound desire,” wrote Tolkien of his own
adolescence. “Of course, I in my timid body did not wish to have them in the
neighborhood…. But the world that contained even the imagination of Fáfnir
was richer and more beautiful, at whatever the cost of peril” (55).
It wasn’t until I turned fourteen that I discovered Tolkien’s The Lord of
the Rings, although his books had been available in American editions for
some years before that. I began reading on the school bus on a grey winter
morning, breathless with pure amazement as the lands of Middle-earth opened
up before me. Here, in the language of fantasy, was a story that seemed more
real to me than any “realistic” story I knew—a story about danger, terror, and
courage; about the cost of heroism and the importance of moral choices. In
Middle-earth, as in my parents’ house, an epic battle between good and evil
was waging, and even a humble, seemingly-powerless creature like a hobbit
could affect its outcome. I read Tolkien’s great trilogy in one gulp and was
profoundly and forever changed by it ... but not, I have to add, because those
books ever truly satisfied me. What they did was to reawaken my taste for
magic, my old desire for dragons ... but even then, in the years before I quite
understood what feminism was, I saw that there was no place for me, a girl, on
Frodo’s quest.
Some months after The Lord of the Rings, I discovered Tolkien’s slim
volume Leaf by Niggle—containing his lecture “On Fairy-stories”—which was,
for me, a more influential text than all the good professor’s celebrated fiction.
It was here I first learned that fairy tales had an old and a noble lineage—and
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that they’d once been more, so much more, than the Disney versions we know
today. I dug out my favorite fairy tale books, read my beloved old tales with
new eyes—and this time I understood why I’d clung to the stories for so many
years. Like Tolkien’s books, fairy tales address large subjects: good and evil,
cowardice and courage, hope and despair, peril and salvation—all subjects not
unfamiliar to children raised in embattled households. Fairy tales speak ... in
language both poetic and plain ... of danger, struggle, calamity. And also of
healing journeys, self-transformation, deliverance, and grace.
The fairy tales that I loved best were variations on one archetypal theme:
a young person beset by grave difficulties sets off, alone, through the deep,
dark woods. Armed with quick wits, clear site, persistence, courage, compas
sion, and a dollop of luck, they meet every challenge, solve every riddle, and
transform themselves and their fate. This was my story, my myth, the central
text and theme of my young life’s journey. This was the story I needed to hear
again and again and again.
It wasn’t long after I read Tolkien’s lecture, and renewed my acquaintance
with fairy tales, that my own life reached the inevitable crisis of one of these
archetypal stories: the calamity that propels the young hero from home, into
the dark woods, and onward to self-transformation. The precise nature of my
family calamity doesn’t matter; what’s important here is that it put me on the
road, propelled me onto the fairy-tale quest, forced me into the role of the
plucky young hero travelling towards adulthood. My woods were the streets of
a distant city, my wordly possessions fit snugly in one small sack: one change
of clothes, a sleeping bag, a sketchbook and diary, and my favorite collection
of fairy tales—a volume I’ve carried with me through all the years since. Like
the heroes of those tales, I learned to be brave, and clever, and to trust my
moral compass. I shared bread with birds and beggars....and learned that no
kindness goes unrewarded. I learned to distinguish friend from foe, and met
helpers along the way: animal guides and fairies cloaked in the most unlikely
disguises.
Some time later, by magic as strange and powerful as any elfin enchant
ment, I found myself in the safe harbor of a small liberal arts University.
My parents, my sibling, had never even finished high school—so to me, the
nondescript college hall where I lived was a just as grand as a palace. This
was my version of living happily ever after: safety, opportunity, education. To
live ‘happily ever after,’ however, doesn’t mean achieving a life free of pain,
or sorrow, or struggle—but one that partakes of the qualities that Tolkien
required in a fairy-story’s ending, the consolation of joy and what he called “a
miraculous grace.”
It was there, as a student of English, that I began to explore the history
of fairy tales, of folklore, and literature fashioned from them. Even better, I
discovered a whole new genre of fantasy fiction for adult readers—which was
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still quite a fledgling field then, nothing like the huge, diverse genre it is today.
In 1979, I moved to New York and began to work in the publishing industry
myself, as an editor specializing in fantasy fiction for children, teenagers, and
adults. I was thrilled to discover myself surrounded by colleagues who loved
myth, fairy tales, and folklore too ... most of them women: young, idealistic,
unabashedly feminist ... and as determined as I was to provide magical tales for
those girls Frodo Baggins had left behind.
Now, the fantasy field, in those early days, was still largely the preserve
of men, writing warrior sagas and heir-to-crown novels rooted in heroic myth
cycles and epic romances—not in the smaller, more domestic, more intimate
narratives of the fairy tale and folklore traditions. For inspiration, we looked
beyond the proscribed boundaries of genre fiction to books like Anne Sexton’s
Transformations, and Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber—which proved just
how relevant fairy tales could still be in our lives, and our work. Both Sexton
and Carter were groundbreaking authors for us, despite any intention on their
part to be so, and widely reckoned as “Fairy Godmothers,” if you will, of the
modern fairy-tale literature revival.
More than thirty years after the publication of The Bloody Chamber, fairy
tale literature thrives on both sides of the Atlantic—though as a category, or
a field, or publishing label, it tends to baffle certain critics and literary scholars
because of its refusal to confine itself tidily to one section of the bookstore.
Fairy-tale fiction by Margaret Atwood, A. S. Byatt, Robert Coover, Emma
Donaghue, and Alice Hoffman, for example, sits squarely on the mainstream
shelves, while works by Pamela Dean, Neil Gaiman, Tanith Lee, Patricia
McKillip, and Delia Sherman hide out on the fantasy shelves; and the novels
of Franny Billingsley, Gregory Maguire, Robin McKinley, Donna Napoli, and
Jane Yolen are way over here, in the children’s book shelves. In the poetry
corner, you’ll find fairy-tale works by Olga Broumas, Carol Ann Duffy, Liz
Lochhead, Lisel Mueller, and Gwen Straus; and you’ll even find fairy-tale
infused memoirs by the likes of Francis Spufford, Sarah Maitland, and Rebecca
Solnit buried somewhere in the nonfiction section. Rarely are any of these
books labelled or reviewed as belonging to a common field—but in fact, all
these works, taken as an entirety, form a great and complex conversation—
conversing not only with each other, but with all the centuries of literary fairy
tales that have gone before them.
Why are so many writers, with diverse intent, re-telling fairy tales or
spinning them anew? The reasons, of course, are as individual as the writers
themselves. P. L. Travers, the creator of Mary Poppins, once said,
I shall never know which good fairy it was who, at my own christening, gave
me the everlasting gift, spotless amid all spotted joys, of love for the fairy tale.
It began in me quite early, before there was any separation between myself

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and the world. Eve’s apple had not yet been eaten; every bird had an emperor
to sing to and any passing beetle or ant might be a prince in disguise [...].
Perhaps we are born knowing the tales, for our grandmothers and all their
ancestral kin continually run about in our blood repeating them endlessly, and
the shock they give us when we first hear them is not of surprise but of reco
gnition. Things long unknowingly known have suddenly been remembered.
Later, like streams, they run underground. For a while they disappear and we
lose them. We are busy, instead, with our personal myth in which the real is
turned to dream and the dream becomes the real. Sifting this is a long process.
It may perhaps take a lifetime and the few who come around to the tales again
are those who are in luck. (47, 50).
“Do people choose the art that inspires them,” asks the American novelist
Alice Hoffman; “Do they think it over, decide they might prefer the fabulous
to the real? For me, it was those early readings of fairy tales that made me who
I was as a reader and, later on, as a storyteller.”
“Fairy stories are related to dreams,” mused A. S. Byatt, whose novels and
stories are often infused with them,
which are maybe most people’s first experience of unreal narrative, and to
myths. Realism is related to explanations and orderings—the tale of the man
in the bar who tells you the story of his life, the historian who explains the
decisions of generals and the decline of economies. Great novels, I believe,
always draw on both ways of telling, both ways of seeing. But because realism
is agnostic and sceptical, human and reasonable, I have always felt it was
what I ought to do. And yet my impulse to write came, and I know it, from
years of reading myths and fairytales under the bedclothes, from the delights
and freedoms and terrors of worlds and creatures that never existed.
“Raised as I was on the darkest, grimmest of Grimm’s fairy tales,” says

British novelist Joanne Harris,
I’ve always been very much aware of the dual nature of the world depicted
in folklore and story. For every happy ending, there is an equally tragic one;
children left to die in the woods; lovers parted forever; villains with their
eyes pecked out by crows, or burnt alive; or hanged. Fairytale is a world away
from the comfortable assurances of the Disney franchise – and surely that was
the purpose of those original fairy tales, devised as they were for an audience
comprising mostly of adults; often very poor; people whose lives were cruel
and harsh, and who would never – even in fiction - have accepted to believe
in a world in which the shadows did not at least occasionally rival the light.

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“Fairy Tales were the refuge of my troubled childhood,” the African

American writer and activist bell hooks reminisces. “Despite all the mes
sages contained in them about being a dutiful daughter, a good girl, which I
internalized to some extent, I was most obsessed with the idea of justice, the
insistence in most tales that the righteous would prevail.” (178)
“The great archetypal stories,” Jane Yolen notes,
provide a framework or model for an individual’s belief system. They are, in

Isak Dinesen’s marvelous expression, ‘a serious statement of our existence.’
The stories and tales handed down to us from the cultures that preceded us
were the most serious, succinct expressions of the accumulated wisdom of
those cultures. They were created in a symbolic, metaphoric story language
and then honed by centuries of tongue-polishing to a crystalline perfection.
[…] And if we deny our children their cultural, historic heritage, their bir
thright to these stories, what then? Instead of creating men and women who
have a grasp of literary allusion and symbolic language, and a metaphorical
tool for dealing with the problems of life, we will be forming stunted boys and
girls who speak only a barren language, a language that accurately reflects
their equally barren minds. Language helps develop life as surely as it reflects
life. It is the most important part of the human condition. (17-18)
Margaret Atwood ponders the fairy tales that obsessed her in her early years:
What was their appeal? It’s hard to be definite about that. The stories didn’t
have any direct application to our real lives. They weren’t much good from a
practical point of view. At this time, we were living half the year in the Cana
dian north woods, and we knew if we went for a walk there, we were unlikely
to come upon any castles, if we met any wolves or bears they wouldn’t be the
talking kind, if we kissed a frog it would most likely pee on us, and if we got
lost, we wouldn’t find any short-sighted, evil old women with patisserie cot
tages and child-sized ovens. Rescue, if any, would not be applied by princes.
So it wasn’t our outer lives that Grimms’ tales addressed: it was our inner
ones. These stories have survived as stories, over so many centuries and in
so many variations, because they do make such an appeal to the inner life —
you could say ‘the dreaming self’ and not be far wrong, because they are both
the stuff of nightmare and magical thinking. As Margaret Drabble says, there
is a mystery in such stories which is beyond the rational mind.”
“Like many others who turn into writers,” says the American memoirist and
essayist Rebecca Solnit,

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I disappeared into books when I was very young, disappeared into them like
someone running into the woods. What surprised and still surprises me is that
there was another side to the forest of stories and the solitude, that I came
out that other side and met people there. Writers are solitaries by vocation
and necessity. I sometimes think the test is not so much talent, which is not
as rare as people think, but purpose or vocation, which manifests in part as
the ability to endure a lot of solitude and keep working. Before writers are
writers they are readers, living in books, through books, in the lives of others
that are also the heads of others, in that act that is so intimate and yet so
alone. These vanishing acts are a staple of fairy tales and of children’s fantasy
books — where young people travel on various adventures between levels
and kinds of reality, and the crossing over is often an initiation into power
and into responsibility. They are in a sense allegories first for the act of read
ing, of entering an imaginary world, and then of the way that the world we
actually inhabit is made up of stories, images, collective beliefs, all the imma
terial appurtenances we call ideology and culture, the pictures we wander in
and out of all the time. (60-61)
Sara Maitland has explored fairy-tale themes extensively in both her fiction
and nonfiction: “‘Once upon a time,’ the stories would begin,” she writes:
Once upon a time [is] no particular time, fictional time, fairy-story time. This
is a doorway; if you are lucky, you go through it as a child, aurally, before you
can read, and if you are very lucky, you become a free citizen of an ancient
republic and can come and go as you please.
These stories are deeply embedded in my imagination. As I grew up and

became a writer, I found myself going back and using them, retelling them
ever since, working partly on the principle that a tale which has been around
for centuries is highly likely to be a better story than one I just made up
yesterday; and partly on the deep sense that they can tell more truth, more
economically, than slices of contemporary realism. The stories are so tough
and shrewd formally that I can use them for anything I want—feminist
revisioning, psychological exploration, malicious humour, magical realism,
nature writing. They are generous, true, and enchanted. (12)
Fairy tale historian and novelist Marina Warner notes:
The store of fairy tales, that blue chamber where stories lie waiting to be
rediscovered, holds out the promise of just those creative enchantments,
not only for its own characters caught in its own plotlines; it offers magical
metamorphoses to the one who opens the door, who passes on what was

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found there, and to those who hear what the storyteller brings. The faculty of
wonder, like curiosity can make things happen; it is time for wishful thinking
to have its due. (418)
“When you enter the woods of a fairy tale,” writes the American poet
Elizabeth Andrew,
it is night and trees tower on either side of the path. They loom large because
everything in the world of fairy tales is blown out of proportion. If the owl
shouts, the otherwise deathly silence magnifies its call. The tasks you are
given to do (by the witch, by the stepmother, by the wise old woman) are
insurmountable — pull a single hair from the crescent moon bear’s throat;
separate a bowl’s worth of poppy seeds from a pile of dirt. The forest seems
endless. But when you do reach the daylight, triumphantly carrying the par
ticular hair or having outwitted the wolf; when the owl is once again a shy
bird and the trees only a lush canopy filtering the sun, the world is forever
changed for your having seen it otherwise. From now on, when you come
upon darkness, you’ll know it has dimension. You’ll know how closely poppy
seeds and dirt resemble each other. The forest will be just another story that
has absorbed you, taken you through its paces, then cast you out and sent
you back home again. (84)
“There are certain children who are told they are too sensitive, “ says the
American comics writer Lynda Berry,
and there are certain adults who believe sensitivity is a problem that can
be fixed in the way that crooked teeth can be fixed and made straight.
And when these two come together you get a fairytale, a kind of story with
hopelessness in it. I believe there is something in these old stories that does
what singing does to words. They have transformational capabilities, in the
way melody can transform mood. They can’t transform your actual situation,
but they can transform your experience of it. We don’t create a fantasy world
to escape reality, we create it to be able to stay. I believe we have always
done this, used images to stand and understand what otherwise would be
intolerable. (39)
In a recent lecture, the novelist and comics author Neil Gaiman argued pas
sionately for encouraging children to read fiction, and for the value of fantasy
fiction in particular. “Fiction can show you a different world,” he said.
It can take you somewhere you’ve never been. Once you’ve visited other
worlds, like those who ate fairy fruit, you can never be entirely content with

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the world that you grew up in. Discontent is a good thing: discontented
people can modify and improve their worlds, leave them better, leave them
different.
And while we’re on the subject, I’d like to say a few words about escapism.
I hear the term bandied about as if it’s a bad thing. As if “escapist” fiction is
a cheap opiate used by the muddled and the foolish and the deluded, and the
only fiction that is worthy, for adults or for children, is mimetic fiction, mirro
ring the worst of the world the reader finds herself in.
If you were trapped in an impossible situation, in an unpleasant place, with
people who meant you ill, and someone offered you a temporary escape, why
wouldn’t you take it? And escapist fiction is just that: fiction that opens a door,
shows the sunlight outside, gives you a place to go where you are in control,
are with people you want to be with (and books are real places, make no mis
take about that); and more importantly, during your escape, books can also
give you knowledge about the world and your predicament, give you weapons,
give you armour: real things you can take back into your prison. Skills and
knowledge and tools you can use to escape for real.
As Tolkien reminds us, the only people who inveigh against escape are
jailors.
“[Fairy tales are] as ancient as the hills,” says the novelist Juliet Marillier,
but they never grow old. As society and culture change, as our world becomes
a place Apuleius and Mme Leprince de Beaumont could never have dreamed
possible, the wisdom of their tales remains relevant to our lives. Because, of
course, the stories change with us. We tell them and re-tell them, and they
morph and grow and stretch to fit the framework of our time and culture,
just as they did when they were told around the fire after dark in times long
past. In this high-speed technological age, an age in which 140 characters are
deemed sufficient to transmit a meaningful message, these stories still have
much to teach us. We would do well to listen.
So why, as I asked at the beginning of this talk, do these old, old tales
still have a hold on us? Why do we tell them over and over? Here’s what I
think. It’s because we’ve all encountered wicked wolves, faced trial by fire,
needed the blessing of fairy godmothers. We have all set off into the deep,
dark woods, at one point in life or another. The German-American poet Lisel
Mueller expresses it best in these lines from her beautiful poem, “Why We Tell
Stories”:

37.6.0.18 on Fri, 05 Jan 2024 14:25:06 +00:00
2
We sat by the fire in our caves,
and because we were poor, we made up a tale
about a treasure mountain
that would open only for us
and because we were always defeated,

we invented impossible riddles
only we could solve,
monsters only we could kill,
women who could love no one else
and because we had survived
sisters and brothers, daughters and sons,
we discovered bones that rose
from the dark earth and sang
as white birds in the trees
3
Because the story of our life
becomes our life
Because each of us tells

the same story
but tells it differently
and none of us tells it

the same way twice (203)
That night, as a child, when I sat among the graves, longing for a magical
doorway to open, I didn’t yet know that I actually held the key to that door
in my hand. Fairy tales were the key—the old stories I loved, the new stories
that writers were weaving from them, the stories I would write myself one day,
in a fairy-tale land far across the ocean.
If I could have one Magic Wish today, I would like to travel back in time
and appear before my young self like a classic Good Fairy, draperies flapping in
the wind behind me. This is what I would like to tell her (and, indeed, every
other child just like her): “There are better worlds out there, my dear. And I
promise you, you’re going to find them.”

37.6.0.18 on Fri, 05 Jan 2024 14:25:06 +00:00
Works Cited
Andrew, Elizabeth. On the Threshold: Home, Hardwood, and Holiness. Boulder:
Westview, 2005.
Atwood, Margaret. “Of Souls as Birds.” Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Women Writers
Explore Their Favorite Fairy Tales. Ed. Kate Bernheimer. Expanded Edition. New
York: Anchor, 2003. 22-38.
Barry, Lynda. What It Is. Montreal: Drawn and Quarterly, 2008.
Byatt, A. S. “Fairy Stories: The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye.” The Djinn in the
Nightingale’s Eye: Five Fairy Stories. New York: Random, 1997. Online at http://
www.asbyatt.com/Onherself.aspx.
Gaiman, Neil. “Why our Future Depends on Libraries, Reading and Daydreaming.”
The Guardian. 15 October 2013. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/
oct/15/neil-gaiman-future-libraries-reading-daydreaming.
Harris, Joanne. “The Pied Piper of Hamelin.” Seven Miles of SteelThistles. 15 July
2011. http://steelthistles.blogspot.com/2011/07/fairytale-reflections-27-joanne
harris.html.
Hoffman, Alice. “Sharpening an Imagination with the Hard Flint of a Fairy Tale.”
Washington Post Book World. T07. 4 April 2004. http://www.lexisnexis.com.
libpublic3.library.isu.edu/hottopics/lnacademic/.
hooks, bell. “To Love Justice.” Mirror, Mirror on the Wall. 178–185.
Maitland, Sarah. From the Forest: A Search for the Hidden Roots of Our Fairy Tales.
Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2012.
Marillier, Juliet. “Beauty and the Beast.” Seven Miles of SteelThistles. 10 Dec 2010.
http://steelthistles.blogspot.com/2010/12/fairytale-reflections-13-juliet.html.
Mueller, Lisel. “Why We Tell Stories.” Poetry 132:4 (July 1978). 203.
Solnit, Rebecca. “Flight.” The Faraway Nearby. New York: Penguin, 2014. 55-75.
Tolkien, J. R. R. “On Fairy-stories.” 1947. Rpt. In Tolkien on Fairy-stories. Expanded
edition, with commentary and notes. Ed. Verlyn Flieger and Douglas A.
Anderson. London: HarperCollins, 2008. 27-84.
Travers, P. L. “Afterword.” About the Sleeping Beauty. New York: McGraw-Hill,
1975. 47-62.
Warner, Marina. From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers.
London: Vintage, 1994.
Yolen, Jane. Touch Magic: Fantasy, Faerie & Folklore in the Literature of Childhood.
Expanded edition. Little Rock: August House, 2000.

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Into the Woods

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Like Jane, I believe we’re influenced—often more than we know—by the

Vol. 28, No. 1, Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts

JOURNAL OF THE FANTASTIC IN THE ARTS

“Raised as I was on the darkest, grimmest of Grimm’s fairy tales,” says

JOURNAL OF THE FANTASTIC IN THE ARTS

“Fairy Tales were the refuge of my troubled childhood,” the African

provide a framework or model for an individual’s belief system. They are, in

JOURNAL OF THE FANTASTIC IN THE ARTS

These stories are deeply embedded in my imagination. As I grew up and

Fairy tale historian and novelist Marina Warner notes:

JOURNAL OF THE FANTASTIC IN THE ARTS

JOURNAL OF THE FANTASTIC IN THE ARTS

JOURNAL OF THE FANTASTIC IN THE ARTS

and because we were always defeated,

Because each of us tells

and none of us tells it

JOURNAL OF THE FANTASTIC IN THE ARTS

JOURNAL OF THE FANTASTIC IN THE ARTS

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