Fairy Tales: W is for Woodbury, Kate

My first experiments with storytelling were playing around with fairy tales when I was a kid. My favorite fairy tale as a child was Andersen's "The Wild Swans," in which a young girl saves her 11 enchanted brothers by sewing them jackets made from thorns. 

I likely thought I had 11 brothers (I have 4); I did spend most of my youth around them. But in truth, I was attracted to the tale because the princess lives in a tree. About the same time, my mother read me My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George, plus our family visited the Redwood National Park on one of our cross-country trips. I was enthralled by the idea of living in a tree!

I went beyond the Wild Swans, of course. I not only retold and acted out fairy tales, I would change the characters: all the male characters to female; all the female characters to male; all the wicked characters as good...and so on. 

For a long time, I contemplated going into the theater since those one-woman "plays" that I enacted while wandering around the house were all about action and dialog. I took playwriting courses in high school and college--and participated in drama clubs in both places. 

But I didn't have the drive or the willing vulnerability. Just about everyone I knew in those courses and clubs who did want to go on to the big-time (and some did), were both incredibly fragile and incredibly competitive, which isn't the best combination for a happy life. 

So I went the English major route instead, which turned out to be the best choice for me.  

And I went the writing-stuff-down route, which was also a good choice. 

Many of my first short stories were deliberate retellings or, rather, deliberate "what ifs." My first published story, "The Birthright" is based on the old story of a mermaid who extracts a promise from a fisherman and then curses his descendants: a son will be taken in each generation by a mermaid. My "what if?" was "what if one of those descendants actually wanted to go?" I still remember planning the story in a room in my grandmother's house in Pasadena over Thanksgiving while I was in college.

The next published story was a take-off on Rumpelstiltskin. It annoyed me how many renderings of the tale painted the money-hungry king as purely greedy. What if he needed the money? What if his troops didn't have shoes? Or his peasants didn't have horses and plows or, for that matter, seeds? What if his tradesmen couldn't afford materials to make stuff? So I wrote a story where the king wants money and has to make an ethical choice in a situation where there are absolutely no winners. It's a horror story, which I always swore I wouldn't write, but eh--the "what if" led to a natural conclusion.

That tale shows up alongside a few others in Tales of the Quest, published through Peaks Island Press.

The third published story was a contemporary tale in which fairy tale characters roam a college. I was working at the Maine School of Law as a secretary by then, and the setting is where the school of law used to be but is no longer, one of those 1970s freaky buildings with bad heating and cooling.

I later published a story based on the Trojan War, which background I recently used for my retelling of Herland. I then turned to the Old Testament for a story about the fall of Jericho followed by a story about Ezekiel and Jezebel in modern Portland and a sci-fi story using Ruth. (One of the first "plays" I acted out AND wrote down was based on Joseph of Egypt; I then encountered Joseph and His Brothers by Thomas Mann and decided I was in over my head--but hey, for years, I could recite all of Andrew Lloyd Webber's Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat's lyrics.)

I haven't quite reached the point where, like C.S. Lewis and Tolkien, I am so-steeped in folklore, Bible stories, and mythology that I draw on the tropes and images unconsciously--or maybe I am to a degree and don't realize it! The inspiration of lore has become in some ways both more deliberate and more off-the-cuff. I mostly write novellas these days in two series. The Myths Endure in Maine series is far more upfront and deliberately satiric. My skateboard god of love, for instance, makes references to "the problem of Pygmalion, who decided to mourn his latest breakup by setting up statues of his girlfriend all over the city."

The Myths Endure on Mars series is usually more indirect but my upcoming book, The Serpentine History of the Saint, involved research into tales associated with various parts of the British Isles, including the home of my ancestors: the Isle of Man. 

I have written more about that extremely enjoyable research here:

• Laidly Wyrm and King Arthur
• Kopakonan and Other Mermaids
• Isle of Man Folklore 
• Urban Legends