 Modern Approaches to the Fairy TalebyGillian PolackFairy tales are the new black or the new vampire, or perhaps they are the start of it all and have never left us. However I try to package it, there are quite a few writers who are currently using fairytales and folktales in their work. I mentioned Jane Yolen recently, but she’s very far from alone. Three of my favourite writers who incorporate this sensibility into their work are (alphabetically by first name) Juliet Marillier, Kate Forsyth, and Sophie Masson. All three are award-winning speculative fiction writers with international reputations. All three have new work out. Even though they often draw on similar material, the work of each of these writers is entirely different. I wanted to know why… Gillian Polack: Tell me about your interest in using fairy and folktales in your fiction. Sophie Masson: I have always had a great love of fairytales and folktales, and my imagination’s been thoroughly steeped, marinated, in their pungent, tasty and beautiful mixture as far back as I can remember. I heard lots of those kinds of stories from my grandmother when I was very small, and my father too (her son) told us lots of fairytales and folktales, those his tended more to the scary type, like Bluebeard (which I loved as much as was scared by!). And the first book I ever read in English, for instance, when I was five or six or so, (I read in French first) was a Little Golden Book which had three fairy tales in it: Rapunzel, Toads and Diamonds, and Sleeping Beauty. I still remember the look of those pictures; in fact I found an edition of the book a few years ago in a garage sale and bought it on the spot! Growing older, I still kept reading more and more folk and fairy tales, anonymous collections and also those by Perrault, Grimm, HC Andersen, Madame d’Aulnoy (who wrote such wonderful stories as The White Cat, The Yellow Dwarf, etc), Madame Leprince de Beaumont (who wrote my top favourite, Beauty and the Beast) and the Comtesse de Segur (a classic French author who’s never been out of print and who as well as writing wonderful family novels—some now published in Australia—also wrote a great collection called New Fairy Tales. ) I also used to love those Hamish Hamilton collections of stories, themed around such things as ‘giants’ ‘mermaids’ etc which retold lots of traditional stories and I also used to read lots of ‘Tales from China’, ‘Tales from Ireland’, ‘Tales from Russia’ and so on. I could never get enough of their wonderful magic, sly wit, dramatic happenings, satisfactory endings, and extraordinary worlds! They are ever-fresh, ever-green, simple yet complex, deep yet light. Reading fairytales felt to me like going on holiday: refreshing, relaxing, and yet utterly stimulating. You were away from ordinary life, in an enchanted, timeless space and yet one in which you saw more and noticed more because your senses weren’t cluttered with humdrum, dull routine. That fascination and love has never left me and it’s not surprising it continues to greatly influence my work—even those novels of mine which haven’t been strictly speaking ‘fairytale’ novels owe a good deal to those traditional stories. I think those stories provide a wonderful airy space for writers to exercise their imagination in, certainly they do for me! I’ve written several novels directly based on fairy tales, starting from Carabas in 1999, based of course on Puss in Boots—and the glancing mention of the ‘Nephilim’ in the Genesis book of the Bible! (I love to combine seemingly disparate, certainly surprising, elements!) Many others followed—Clementine, Cold Iron, The Green Prince, The Firebird, and my brand new YA fairytale novel, Moonlight and Ashes. My most recent novel for younger readers, The Boggle Hunters, also is massively inspired by folk and fairy tales. I’ve updated lots of traditional motifs in it, like the granting of three wishes! And my six-book Thomas Trew series, also for younger readers is also directly set in that wonderful enchanted world, in a modern re-invention of it. And I’m writing a new YA fairytale novel, Scarlet in the Snow, as we speak! I can never get enough of this wonderful source of inspiration. Juliet Marillier: I’ve loved folklore and fairy tales since I was a small child, and that passion has continued throughout my life (it’s been enchanting to share my most beloved stories with my children and my grandchildren in turn). Those old tales have so much to teach us about life and how best to live it, even if their wisdom is often concealed by trappings of the uncanny, the wondrous, the downright ridiculous. From stories told around the fire, people learned how to find their inner courage. They learned that the despised youngest brother or sister can become an unlikely hero; that a plain-looking young man may win an unattainable woman; that friends can be found in the unlikeliest form; that kindness and compassion bring their own rewards. Some people might say those kinds of lessons are no longer relevant in our frenetically-paced, high tech society. Most certainly, our society and culture have changed vastly since the time when fairy tales were told around the fire at night, a time when a crop failure or a major storm could make the difference between life and death for a family (not forgetting that in some parts of the world, this is still so.) But I don’t think learning about such qualities as courage, faith, loyalty, comradeship, and love of family can ever lose its relevance. And I think the tropes of fairy tale are lodged pretty deeply in us, so not only do the original stories keep their appeal, but the new stories writers build using those tropes have a special magic for readers. I’ve used fairy tales as the structural basis for three of my thirteen novels. My first novel, Daughter of the Forest, is a reworking of my childhood favourite, The Six Swans. I love that story because of the mystery of the swan transformation (several of my books include human/animal changes) and because it has a very strong young woman at its heart. I set the story in early medieval Ireland and explored what might happen in a real family if that particular calamity struck them. Who would meet the challenge? Who would be brave and who would fall apart? How would it feel for the protagonist to remain silent for three years while she wove the starwort shirts that would return her brothers to their true form? Writing that book was personal therapy for me at a time of immense change in my own life, and it probably shows in the writing! I’ve also written Wildwood Dancing, which is very loosely based on The Twelve Dancing Princesses, with a touch of Frog Prince, and Heart’s Blood, an adult novel whose framework is another favourite story of mine, Beauty and the Beast. I made all sorts of changes to the story, whose early written versions reflect very much their time and culture, the salons of sixteenth and seventeenth century France. So my Beauty character comes with her own set of flaws and weaknesses, and has her own journey to make, while my Beast character has both a physical disability (caused by a stroke at the age of thirteen) and severe depression—it’s a story in which there are no quick magical fixes, only hard challenges for real human beings. But, having said that, I used the tropes that appeal to me so strongly from the original fairytale: a forbidden garden, a rare flower (heart’s blood), magic mirrors, a desperate journey back to save a dying man . . . Look in any of my books, even the least fantastic, and the chances are you’ll find a fairy tale reference somewhere. Kate Forsyth: Bitter Greens is my first book that actually retells a fairy tale, being inspired by my fascination and puzzlement at the Rapunzel tale, which is, I think, one of the most mysterious of all the tales. I first read Rapunzel as a little girl in hospital, when I was given a red leather-bound copy of The Grimm’s Fairytales. The stories in that small volume have been my favourites ever since—Six Swans, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, The Goose Girl, The Frog Prince, and, of course, Rapunzel. I always wondered why the witch kept Rapunzel locked away in a tower, and why the prince did not help her to escape earlier. Puzzling over these questions led me to start imagining answers, and that of course leads to a story. I think one of the reasons why I was so emotionally captivated by these stories is because I was sick so much throughout my childhood, and spent so much time in hospital, and so the stories and the books I read were my only source of escape from fever, pain, and the physical immobilisation of illness. Many of my stories are about escape—from towers, dungeons, chains . . . and from emotional or psychological restraints as well—fear, guilt, shame. I think this is why fairy tale motifs are always creeping into my work. In The Cursed Tower, I have a witch who sleeps in a nest of her own hair in an old tower all overgrown with roses. In The Starthorn Tree, a young count lies in an enchanted sleep and his sister must try and solve the mystery of its causes, which ends up involving a poisonous apple. Towers appear again in The Wildkin’s Curse, with a wildkin princess kept prisoner because she has the power to enchant with words. I cannot explain why my work is so replete with fairy tale themes and motifs. I think it is because the haunting beauty of the tales enchanted my imagination when I was just a girl, and I wish to recapture that sense of beauty and peril and strangeness in my own stories. I also love the pure, wild adventure of the stories, the sense that all things may be possible. Gillian: How do you mesh your Australian and New Zealand backgrounds with your use of these tales? Those backgrounds, after all, include kangaroos and kiwis, and kangaroos and kiwis don’t often appear in European stories. Kate: I love living in Sydney, Australia, one of the loveliest places on earth. However, there are no kangaroos or kiwis living there! Besides, I spent most of my childhood with my nose in a book so a giant kangaroo could have hopped right past me and I’d not have noticed. I tell the stories that choose me. I know this sounds very airy-fairy and rather odd, but it is the way I feel. An idea, a spark, a flash of inspiration, grips me, and then I am in thrall to it. I don’t know why it is one type of story and not another that animates my imagination, though I suspect it has a lot to do with the books I read and the stories I was told as a child. I just know I want with all my heart to be able to tell the sort of stories I have always loved reading—tales of enchantment and history, romance and mystery. I have always been drawn to old magical places . . . and so I write stories set in those places. Sophie: I think mostly for me it’s a particular way of looking at things which is ‘Australian,’ rather than the obvious things: maybe more boldness in taking a risk with the story, less burden of history so a willingness to reinvent, perhaps even a more direct, fresh style. Of course I’m French too so I’m sort of in an in-between stage, and that certainly informs how I write and how I look at things. Sometimes I think that’s why I’m drawn to the journey element and the moving between two worlds, because that’s exactly how I’ve loved my life since childhood. Juliet: I was brought up in a part of New Zealand that is the most Scottish place outside Scotland itself. My childhood was full of Celtic influences, not only from the strong cultural traditions in Dunedin but from my parents who were readers and musicians and who loved Scottish and Irish music. That has given me a lifelong affinity with the traditions of the Celtic countries, which are the homelands of my ancestors. Otago, where I grew up, is a place of islands, mountains and forests and is physically very like Scotland—as a child I met far more hedgehogs than kiwis—so it’s really no wonder I ended up writing books set in Scotland and Ireland. I’ve now lived in Australia longer than I lived in NZ but the early influences are still the strongest. Celtic culture is the true wellspring of inspiration for me. It brings out stories of the heart and spirit. When I’m writing mainstream stories rather than historical fantasy—I’ve written short fiction for various publications including women’s magazines—I usually set them in Australia or New Zealand. I’m sure I bring Kiwi qualities to all my writing. Some of the obvious ones are lack of pretension, openness to the weird and quirky and preparedness to be a bit silly. I should probably mention that in my new book, Shadowfell, which came out in July, there’s a big cast of uncanny characters who all speak Scots, some very broadly. I was thrilled that my editors allowed me to do this! Gillian: What mechanics do you use to translate these tales into your fiction? That is, how do you handle the folkstuff in your work? For instance, do you use the structures of folktales and marchen (imagine there's an umlaut on that ‘a’, please) and fairy stories; do you add bit of contemporary or historical folklife to enrich a story? Kate: With every book, the process is different. Let me talk about Bitter Greens which is my first true retelling. In began by wanting to retell Rapunzel, a fairytale which has haunted me since my own childhood. It is a fairytale that is full of unanswered questions, which may be why it took hold of my imagination. I wanted to tell the tale as living history, as if it had really happened, which meant I could not rely on magic to supply all the answers—unless it was magic which was fervently believed in at the time of the setting of the story, the magic of superstition and folk belief. I was also troubled by the difficulty of writing a story full of suspense and surprise when everyone already knows what happens at the end. So I began to toy with writing a frame story around the fairy tale—a common device in literary fairy tales. I began to wonder who had first told the tale and this is what led me to stumble on the extraordinary life story of Charlotte-Rose de la Force, who wrote the version of the tale that we know best. So I had a true life story—a biographical novel, if you like—interwoven with my imagined retelling of an old, old tale. My aim was always to make the story come to life, to feel like truth, and so it was important to me to be as true to the known facts as possible. They were the pegs around which I wove my fancy. In the retelling of Rapunzel, I tried to be as true as possible to the earliest versions of the tale. Charlotte-Rose de la Fore rewrote an earlier maiden in the Tower tale called ‘Petrosinella’ by the Neapolitan writer Giambattista Basile, and so I incorporated the key elements of his tale as well—primarily the use of three magical obstacles to aid the heroine in her flight. Basile also appears as a character in one scene in the book—he is told the tale by the prince and Margherita, my Rapunzel figure, and discusses how he would retell the tale if given the chance. I also incorporate motifs from various Rapunzel variants, including the biting off of the tip of Rapunzel's finger, which appears in a Sicilian version. Juliet: I think I half-answered that in my previous response, but I do everything from structuring a novel around a fairy tale (Daughter of the Forest, based on The Six Swans) to using a single telling element from traditional folklore in what is otherwise a straight historical novel (Wolfskin, based on the first Norse voyage to Orkney, incorporates the idea of a harp made from the bones of a murdered man, which reveals in its song the truth about who killed him.) My stories are set in real world history and geography, rather than invented worlds, and I build in uncanny or fantastic elements based on the folklore of the time and culture. My early medieval Irish characters exist side by side with the ancient races of Irish mythology, plus a clurichaun or two. My sixteenth century Transylvanian characters (the human ones) participate in traditional festivities for marriages and funerals, based on historical sources, and have both respect for, and fear of, the non-human folk who live out in the shadowy forest. The young berserker, Eyvind, in Wolfskin believes whole-heartedly in the Norse gods, and his shamanic experience at initiation owes quite a bit to that unshakeable belief (not to mention those unusual mushrooms his comrades gave him to eat.) But it may equally well be a real man vs wolf experience. I try not to impose fantastic elements, but let them develop naturally from the story. Sophie: What I do is use the fairytale/folktale element not only as the architecture—at least the basic skeleton—of my novel, and then build around it, adding all kinds of decorations, diversions, new ways of looking at it, reinventing and refreshing whilst also staying true to the heart of the story. That’s important, I think: but you have a huge amount of freedom within it. For my new fairytale novel, for instance, Moonlight and Ashes the fairytale of Aschenputtel became the springboard for a romantic thriller as well as an exploration of the grief and anger of a neglected, abused child (which is so much at the heart of the Cinderella story in all its forms.) I often like to set my novels in a real unreal world—a sideways world if you like, as that’s so much the world of fairytale—so Moonlight and Ashes is based on an alternate-world version of the nineteenth century Austro-Hungarian Empire, and specifically Prague and later Vienna. So the Cinderella story and magic exist side by side with trains, telegraphs, department stores—and werewolves, spells and a fearsome order of magicians. I love mixing in all those things! But the classic inspiration remains strong: and interestingly, with Moonlight and Ashes, I had the idea for the first chapter—the central image of it—but had difficulty actually starting the first line until I wrote ‘Once upon a time’! Then it just took off! And yet it was not the classic ‘once upon a time there was . . .’ but ‘once upon a time, I would have walked in through the beautiful carved doors.’ Straight away, Selena, my main character, lived and breathed. Pure magic! Gillian: An aspect of your writing that strikes me is your sense of time and place. Juliet, you always have a sense of othertime in your work. Sophie and Kate, you seem to move between othertime and a more normal time sense, depending on what you’re writing. Can you tell me something about this? Is it intentional? If it is, how do you construct it? Juliet: My novels divide into two groups: those that are set fairly precisely in ‘real world’ history and backed up by a lot of research (Wolfskin, the Bridei Chronicles and Heart’s Blood, all of which have historical notes at the back of the book) and those in which the history is more nebulous (the Sevenwaters series and the Wildwood series.) It’s no secret that with the first three Sevenwaters books I made an error with my history. At the time of writing Daughter of the Forest I knew zero about fantasy as a genre, and never really considered that readers would expect accurate historical detail in a story where they were accepting sorcery, mythological characters and animal transformations! So I gave the British characters Norman names while what was going on with the Irish characters suggested a period several hundred years earlier. If I were rewriting those earlier books now, the first thing I would fix is those names. It came back to haunt me again when I was pressed to continue the series after eight years away from it, and that’s why I limited the action to Ireland in those later books. I am a more experienced storyteller now and where I use historical settings I work on getting the broad details right. I’m happy to create a world that owes something to history and something to mythology, and something again to my weird imagination. I don’t like clunky anachronism; I believe in good research; I also believe in making dialogue and character interactions both reasonably real for the period and relevant to a contemporary readership. As a writer, sometimes you tip too much one way or the other. I tend to go for good storytelling first, period accuracy second. But I aim for both. With the Wildwood series I made a deliberate decision not to pin the story to a particular time. There was a lot of research for that series, mostly Romanian and Turkish culture of the merchant trading period in Transylvania, but if I’d made Wildwood Dancing too precise in its history the ethnic upheavals of the period might have swamped the story with complications. What I wanted with that book was a pair of journeys, one extremely magical, one rooted in the real world, for the family of girls at its centre. So there was lots of Otherworld action and interaction, plus just enough specific details about Transylvanian culture. A historical setting is often most effectively created through small details—the endless diet of mamaliga (similar to polenta) in winter, the drinking of potent plum brandy, the ritual of giving away a dead person’s possessions to the poor after his death, the warm stove which is the heart of the house. The village in Wildwood Dancing is physically very like one I visited on my trip to Transylvania. My new series, Shadowfell, is the first in which the setting is not historical. I guess that counts as my first fantasy world. But it’s really ‘Scotland that might have been.’ Kate: I think a strong and vivid sense of time and place is one of the things I love most about novels, and so I always try and create the same in my own writing. I have a very visual imagination—I ‘see’ things when I'm reading and I cannot write unless I ‘see’ the scene in my mind’s eye. So I’m always looking at photographs and paintings and other visual mediums for inspiration. Some of my books are set in a distinct historical period, and so I am always searching to be as true to that period as possible. My heroic fantasy novels, although set in an imaginary otherworld, are also rooted quite firmly into a real time. For example, the world of Eileanan is kin to the world of seventeenth century Scotland, and so they have glass and spinning wheels and early firearms, but no flushing toilets. I think it’s very important to create a sense of the imaginary world being ‘real’ for the reader—otherwise the machinery of the story grates and squeals, and jerks the reader out of the spell that you’ve cast upon them. Sophie: Time and othertime—I think that with anything where there’s actual magic involved of one kind or the other, there is always going to be this interplay between time flowing in an everyday sense, and the suspension of time that is created either by a spell in this world, or by being in a different world—fairies for instance seem to exist in a kind of eternal present. But even in novels that aren’t strictly speaking fantasy (and indeed in life itself!), time can operate in a kind of magical sense too: a major event or earth-shaking feeling can make time seem to stop, and memory can make the past live again. Dreams are another kind of othertime. And writing itself is a magic that creates its own time—I’m always surprised when I look up and see that it’s now six o’clock when I was sure only a few minutes had passed since I sat down at ten o’clock! It’s always been the way I see the world, I guess, so it’s natural that should go into my books, whether they are fantastical or not. Juliet (revisitng ‘othertime’ from a different direction): I read so many fairy tales as a child (and as an adult) that I have a well-developed idea about the way time passes in the Otherworld as opposed to the human world. Fey time is wayward; it can be manipulated. That means surprises for humans who visit the other realm—for instance, you may step inside a mushroom circle and end up dancing with the fairies until dawn. When you get home you find a hundred years have passed and all your loved ones are long dead. But it’s not always like that; it can work the other way around, or there might be no difference. That’s the element of magic Sophie mentioned, playing games with us, often mischievous and unpleasant ones. Not all my stories involve human characters moving physically into an Otherworld, but some do, and I have made use of the quirks of time. They came in rather handy in Raven Flight, which I’ve been working on, when I needed to move some characters an implausible distance in a short time. Dangerous—using magic to solve plot problems is weak storytelling. Fortunately I’d prepared for it within the story, so I may get away with it. Gillian: Tell me about some of the books that have inspired this side of your writing. (Not just names—what you liked about them, what you took out of them, where they led you to.) Kate: This is such a difficult question for me to answer, as I have read and loved so many thousands of books! I will do my best to answer. The first fairytale retelling I ever read was The Glass Slipper by Eleanor Farjeon, which is based on a play she wrote about Cinderella. I read it while walking home from primary school one day and was so entranced I walked straight past the turnoff to my street. I might have kept walking for hours if a neighbour hadn’t driven past and honked me back to reality. It was always one of those books I wish I had kept, and I was so excited to find it years later in a second-hand book. The Glass Slipper is full of charm and whimsy and humour, and is very innocent—the Prince does no more than kiss the heroine Ella’s hand. I also read and loved The Stone Cage by Nicholas Stuart Gray, which is a lovely retelling of the Rapunzel fairytale, told from the point of view of the witch’s cat. Reading this as a child is what first made me think of writing my own Rapunzel tale. I wanted to make my heroine a little feistier than Nicholas Stuart Gray’s sweet and loving Rapunzel. I really love this book, though, as I love all books by this wonderful children’s author. The first adult book I ever read, at about the age of twelve, was Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold by C.S. Lewis. I had adored C.S. Lewis’s Narnia series as a child and so one day, while staying with my great-aunts, I found this book on a bookshelf and sat down on the floor to look at it. The first line reads: ‘I am old now and have not much to fear from the anger of gods.’ Entranced, I read on to the end, devouring the book in a single sitting. Till We Have Faces is a retelling of the Cupid and Psyche myth, which is not properly a fairytale, except in its obvious similarity to Animal Bridegroom tales such as ‘Beauty and the Beast’. It is, however, still one of my all-time favourite retellings. Deerskin by Robin McKinley is a heart-rending retelling of ‘All-Kinds’-of-Fur’, the Grimm tale about a king who falls in love with his daughter and seeks to marry her. In some versions of the tale, the princess manages to outwit and escape her lustful father, before hiding herself in the skin of a wild beast and working in the kitchen of the king of a neighbouring country. In time, the second king comes to recognise the princess hidden beneath the filthy furs, and marries her. In Robin McKinley’s novel, the daughter does not escape until she has been raped by her father, making this one of the most powerful, and ultimately redemptive, novels ever written about incest. I love all of Robin McKinley’s fairy retellings, in particular Beauty and Rose Daughter (both retellings of ‘Beauty and the Beast’) and Spindle’s End (a retelling of Sleeping Beauty), but I think Deerskin is her most powerful and compelling. I also have to say that I have read everything that both Juliet and Sophie have ever written, and love them all! Sophie: The Little Golden Book of Fairy Tales—three fairytales in a lovely illustrated Little Golden Book: Rapunzel, Beauty and the Beast, and Toads and Diamonds. This book was the very first real book I read in English at the age of about six, a proper storybook instead of the boring Dick and Dora readers we had to actually learn to read. I loved the book and adored the pictures, felt as though I was plunging into a strange magical world. What was even more magical was that they were stories I knew already in French and to read them in English and know that enchantment was still there but transformed subtly was amazing. Also, what has been perennially important to me are collections of fairy tales in general, from all different cultures, as well as books of legends and myths—one very much loved book in that genre was Roger Lancelyn Green’s Tales of the Greek Heroes. Like Kate, I was also inspired by Nicholas Stuart Gray’s The Stone Cage—such a beautiful combination of humour, romance, magic and romance all packaged up in lyrical, light writing that has the breath of spring about it. And such an interesting way to think about the characters—it was my first intimation you could take fairytale characters and really expand them, enrich the setting, add your own characters—Brilliant! Why isn’t this book reprinted? It has inspired countless fantasy writers all over the world. The Moomin books, by Tove Jannsson—oddball, eccentric, gorgeous stories, they inspired me to think laterally, to find drama in small moments as well as the big ones and never to forget about the warmly intimate within the framework of a magical world. Recently, too, Northern Lights by Philip Pullman. I love the blend of magic and steampunk, the strong characters and rich setting. I did not like the other two in the trilogy as much, The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass, but Northern Lights is a real marvel, and gave me renewed inspiration to look at alternative nineteenth centuries, I suppose, which has really come to fruition in Moonlight and Ashes. Juliet: I loved Andrew Lang’s Fairy Books (The Green Fairy Book, The Blue Fairy Book, etcetera) with their collections of fairy tales and folk tales from around the world, including countries that seemed quite exotic to me as a small child, such as India, Japan, Bulgaria and Finland. It’s tricky, looking back from an adult viewpoint, to be quite sure what was in the mind of that five year old girl who so adored traditional stories. Was it the sheer difference between the ordinary world I lived in and the world of wonders in those stories, a place where absolutely anything could happen? For me I think the most important thing about fairy tales and folklore was that the knowledge that I was in safe hands—good would prevail, the hero would be brave enough, and there would be a happy ending for those who deserved one. My real world didn’t always reflect that, but the stories provided a secure footing along with their unpredictable wonders. I loved Greek, Roman and Norse mythology too, along with the Welsh collection of the Mabinogion and the Irish mythical cycles, which I must have read first in simplified versions for younger readers. And legends like William Tell and Robin Hood, not to speak of King Arthur and the Round Table. I loved the heroism and pageantry of those stories, and the fairly straightforward morality. I guess they did for me what traditional storytelling usually does for its listeners—makes sense of the world they live in. Like Sophie, I truly adored Tove Jansson’s Moomin books and in later years enjoyed sharing them with my children and grandchildren. Moominland was alien and compelling even to a child reared in the chilly south of New Zealand—a realm of snow and birch trees, hibernation and deep Nordic angst (not to mention hobgoblins, rubies and volcanoes.) The books are full of truly memorable characters such as the Groke, who appears as monstrous but is also a terribly sad and lonely creature, and the very blunt Little My. Those books can be read on so many levels. I remember identifying closely with needy Moomintroll! C. S. Lewis’s Narnia books were a favourite a bit later. I missed the religious allusions entirely and simply enjoyed the stories for their beautifully created world, enhanced so well by Pauline Baynes’s line drawings, and the very real interactions between the four siblings. Later still came Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, to which I was devoted as a teenager. I remember doing a presentation, at around age fourteen, to my high school English class and covering the entire blackboard with an elaborate diagram of how all the races and characters related to each other. As an adult reader and as a writer, I can’t think of any specific books that have influenced the fairytale side of my writing other than traditional stories themselves. There have been some fairytale-based novels that I’ve greatly admired. For instance, Kate’s new novel, Bitter Greens, Margo Lanagan’s Tender Morsels, and Eowyn Ivey’s The Snow Child, a superbly crafted novel set in a frontier settlement in Alaska and based on a Russian fairytale, Snegurochka. One powerful influence on my writing is the non-fiction book Women who Run with the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estes, an examination of women’s roles in traditional stories. That’s a beloved book for me. It helped me be strong in difficult times, and I am sure it contributed much to the kind of protagonist who pops up in all my novels, a woman who finds her own individual strength when she really needs it. Books mentioned in this column:
Gillian Polack is based in Canberra, Australia. She is mainly a writer, editor and educator. Her most recent print publications are a novel (Ms Cellophane, Momentum, 2012 – shortlisted for a Ditmar award), an anthology (Baggage, Eneit Press, 2010 – also shortlisted for a Ditmar award), an historical cookbook (for Conflux, 2011), the occasional short story and a slew of articles. She won the Ditmar for Professional Achievement in 2010. One of her short stories won a Victorian Ministry of the Arts award a long time ago, and three have (more recently) been listed as recommended reading in international lists of world's best fantasy and science fiction short stories. She received a Macquarie Bank Fellowship and a Blue Mountains Fellowship to work on novels at Varuna, an Australian writers’ residence in the Blue Mountains, and grants from the ACT government. Gillian has a doctorate in Medieval history from the University of Sydney and is completing a second in creative writing at the University of Western Australia. She researches history, pulls the writing of others to pieces, is fascinated by almost everything, cooks and etc. Currently she explains ‘etc’ as including paying attention to science fiction and trying to avoid emotional cruelty to ants. She is the proud owner of some very pretty fans, a disarticulated skull named Perceval, and 6,000 books. Contact Gillian.
|