It is the last thing we learn, / listening to the creature world…
Jane YolenHe unpacks his bag of tales
with fingers quick
as a weaver's
picking the weft threads
threading the warp.
Watch his fingers.
Watch his lips
speaking the old familiar words:
"Once there was
and there was not,
oh, best beloved,
when the world was filled with wishes
the way the sea is filled with fishes..."
All those threads
pulling us back
to another world, another time,
when goosegirls married well
and frogs could rhyme,
when maids spoke syllables of pearl
and stepmothers came to grief.
.... (from The Storyteller poem)
We are all monsters" Hannah said. "Because we are letting it happen." She said it not as if she believed it but as she were to repeat something she had heard before.
Jane YolenLove the writing, love the writing, love the writing... the rest will follow.
Jane YolenTags: love writing ambition creativity ambitions
As I thought about endings and – being a lover of fairy tales – I knew immediately that the deeply rooted last line in folk stories, ‘And they lived happily ever after’, is the core of what we think we know about endings. We hear it always in our hindbrain because it’s the last line most of us in the West have grown up with. That line stops the story at the point of greatest happiness. The wedding, the homecoming, the mystery unraveled, the villain disposed of, families reunited, babies born. If we went on in the story Cinderella, she might be whispered about in court: after all, her manners are not impeccable, she always has smudges of ash on her nose, and no one can trace her bloodline back enough generations. Perhaps she has grown fat eating all that rich food in the castle, and the prince’s eye has strayed.
If we went on in The Three Little Pigs, the brother who builds with bricks will have kicked the other two lay-abouts out of his house, or hired them to run his successful company and they – angry at their lower status – plot to kill him. But, having little imagination, do it the only way they know how, by trying to boil him in the pot that still holds the memory of the wolf’s demise, so of course the brick building pig finds them out.
But modern books pose a different problem. They present harder choices. It’s no longer fairy tale endings we are talking about, but the other stuff, more realistic, stronger, difficult, and maybe not happy-ever-after stuff.
It is winter now,
and the roses are blooming again,
their petals bright against the snow.
My father died last April;
my sisters no longer write,
except at the turning of the year,
content with their fine houses
and their grandchildren.
Beast and I
putter in the gardens
and walk slowly on the forest paths.
[from the poem, Beauty and the Beast: An Anniversary]
Tags: fairy-tales beauty-and-the-beast
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