On the first day of this year’s AWP conference, I went to a panel about fairy tales. Even before I knew I wanted to be a writer, I adored fairy tales, of all sorts, and read and admired the fairy tale scholar Maria Tatar, who has written extensively about the symbolism and context of the classic fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, as well as ancient Greek and Roman mythology. (And so much more. If you like fairy tales, please buy her books). My love of fairy tales is obvious from the stories I’ve written, too, including a retelling of what might be the oldest fairy tale, which I titled “The Devil in the Pear Tree,” my pro-choice story, “Now We Are Things,” and one that is forthcoming from All Existing Magazine, which is a retelling of Aesop’s ant and grasshopper fable.
The panel was held in a big room, and most of the chairs were taken. I attributed this to the fact that it was one of the first panels of the conference, when we all still had energy for what is exhausting for even the most extroverted writer or poet (and you know there aren’t many of them), but one of the panelists looked out into the audience and said, “If we’d held this panel a few years ago, this room would be half-empty.” This is a paraphrase, but her point was that interest in the fairy tale form — simple sentences and familiar imagery (forests, witches, animals), the “three times” method of delivering the characters to the end — was experiencing a renaissance, that more writers and poets wanted to use them to say something about the present.
At the time, I happened to be reading Chinua Achebe’s THINGS FALL APART, which was published in 1959. This book follows Okonkwo, a proud, sometimes arrogant, man living in rural Nigeria. The story follows him as he disciplines his children, makes his living, fights with friends and strangers, and struggles to adapt to a rapidly changing world. The book drew me in with the power of a fairy tale. Not only does the story include descriptions of many traditional beliefs and practices in the village, the simple way in which Achebe describes these characters gives them a vibrancy that a lot of excessive description or literary tricks would fail to do. As an example, take this first sentence: “Okonkwo was well known throughout the nine villages and even beyond.” Not quite “Once upon a time,” but the feeling is there, that delicious second when we watch Hansel and Gretel walk towards the forest, or see the girl sweeping up ashes in her stepmother’s kitchen and imagine the magic and evil that will come her way.
I don’t know if it’s true, that suddenly writers want to play with the fairy tale form. I do know that Achebe was modernizing the fairy tale back in the late 50s, and like the classic fairy tale, it will never grow stale.
1959 (republished by Penguin, 2017)