How to tell a fairytale
An acrylic painting by Lena Hunsicker (2018) that shows an arm holding up a cell phone in selfie mode, where you can see the screen crack around an eye with a corona of gold light surrounding it, on a background of roses, as a commentary on the Snow Queen.
Last week, I put my spin on an old story. I held a SoulCollage® workshop incorporating Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen, and because that fairytale is anywhere from 40-80 pages long depending on the format of the book you read it in, and I had at most 15 minutes to speak if participants were still to make cards, I needed to cut. A lot.
Honestly, I was stumped on how to cut it. For days.
I’ve loved The Snow Queen for years. To me, it is the ultimate fictional meditation on the dangers and horrors of the tech industry, of algorithms that promise we can create super-humans or transcend humanity entirely. One of the first fairytale inspired paintings I ever made, way back in 2018, was a meditation on this very theme (see above).
But in creativity work like SoulCollage®, I don’t want to bring my personal agenda. Creativity workshops are about unlocking the participants’ work, not a way for a facilitator to rant. Good workshops are a place for people to dig within themselves, awaken their creativity and intuition, and create something new. They’re places to let your inner voice speak, compile that wisdom in images, and draw upon them in the future to help you answer questions.
Suddenly this story-work I was so excited to do felt like a weighty responsibility—how could I do justice to this story? Yes, I had to shorten it for time concerns. But how could I retain its power while making significant cuts and stylistic changes?
I talked it out endlessly, explaining the character POVs I had considered (Kay, the boy kidnapped; Gerda, the heroine; and the crow, who acts as a guide).
A friend asked “what do you want to evoke in your participants?”
I replied “I can’t try to guide their experiences too much–they need to go on their own personal journey for this to work.” (to be fair, that’s not what she was asking, but that’s where my brain went anyway)
But this concept of hands-off storytelling idea also wouldn’t work. There is no such thing as a story without a viewpoint, without a stance. Sure, you don’t have to do propaganda or an extensive rant, but no writer, no matter what newspapers say, can be completely neutral. To be honest, the definition of neutrality in the West requires one to be a cis abled straight white man who hasn’t been personally touched by what he’s writing about. I couldn’t be that if I tried, and I wouldn’t much want to. One of my best qualities is how invested in everything I care about I am.
The Snow Queen is a disturbing tale, despite the successful quest at the heart of the plot. And that’s the source of so much of its power.
To quote one of my favorite folklorists, Dr. Maria Tatar
“The real magic of the fairy tale lies in its ability to extract pleasure from pain,” Tatar writes in the introduction to [her book] “The Annotated Classic Fairy Tales.” It’s this complex duality that fascinates her and, she says, that imbues fairy tales with powers therapeutic as well as entertaining [...]
What fairy tales don’t do, says Tatar, is provide tidy moral lessons for young learners.
“Our culture has this profound belief in literature as conveying lessons to children,” she says.
She is a vocal critic of this notion. Tatar notes that morals were often added or appended to fairy tales when they were rewritten for children. In many cases, they have nothing to do with the story. Little Red Riding Hood would have encountered the wolf en route to Grandma’s whether or not she dallied to pick flowers.
“Does keeping to the path really help you avoid wolves in the forest? Unlikely, I think,” says Tatar.
Interview with Maria Tatar, Beth Potier, The Harvard Gazette, 10 April 2003
So, I had ruled out ranting about my politics.
I had ruled out trying to send a specific message.
I had ruled out trying to be neutral.
What I needed was a frame for the story that had enough distance for the trials of the story to be a pleasure to hear about, but still emotionally connected.
And so I told the story from the perspective of the heroine, Gerda, now a grandmother herself. She would tell the story to her family, a story that she perhaps had not told before, with the hindsight she now had.
To tell a story with the benefit of far-hindsight allows the narrator to mix pride in their young self with rueful recollections of their mistakes. It allows for balance, because we’re talking about long-ago, so likely very few people will take it too personally, while also imparting wisdom not just about the events, but the different time they took place in.
The distance becomes a character in the story.
No one is going to get on Gerda about disappearing as a child to go haring off after her kidnapped friend (I imagine her around 7 from Andersen’s descriptions–this story could not be written in the 20th century, much less the 21st). No one is going to say to an old woman recounting a story “ohhhh but you should’ve known better about that witch and what if it had gone wrong with the robbers?! What were you thinking, young lady??” She can share it, and her audience will be awed or dismayed or grateful it all turned out in the end. Her lived pain will become their storytelling pleasure (and she’ll probably mostly feel that pleasure of spinning a delightful tale too).
With this temporal distance from the story’s lived events, she doesn’t need to care much for other people’s opinions. It won’t change who she was then or who she is now.
Likely I was also inspired to tell The Snow Queen as memoir by my yearly summer reread of Elizabeth Gilbert’s City of Girls. It’s a romp through the racy theater world of New York City in the 1940s, told by an old woman who takes both delight and horror at the things she got up to as a young woman. It’s fantastic—escapist in all the right ways, while also getting to some of the core truths about being a human being who makes mistakes, while still finding a lot of joy in living.
One of my favorite quotations in the book happens after the main character, Vivian, about 44 years old, bluntly describes a taboo part of her life, expecting to be judged (I don’t want to give too much away). Her new friend responds:
There’s something that I know about the world now, Vivian, that I didn’t know when I was young.
And what’s that?
The world ain’t straight. You grow up thinking things are a certain way. You think that there are rules. You think there’s a way that things have to be. You try to live straight. But the world doesn’t care about your rules, or what you believe…The world just happens to you sometimes, is what I think. And people just gotta keep moving through it, best they can.(428)
I think the crookedness, the lack of consistent rules that govern life, is a hard thing to understand when you’re young. And many adults who tell stories with overbearing morals try to mold children to their ideals take advantage of children’s innocence, to try to force them into the “right” way of being.
Then you grow up, you learn that the world doesn’t work by those rules, and you’re devastated. It can really rock you.
This, I would argue, à la Tatar’s quotation above, is the point of fairytales. Through stories, we make sense of the mess.
Life may not usually happen the way it does in a fairytale. On the one hand, it’s good that children are supervised enough that they can’t go on year-long quests where they get kidnapped multiple times! On the other, there is a disappointing lack of fairy godmothers, and hardly any magical talking animals. But stories like this let us dream. They open our worlds for a quest, and don’t judge us for plunging headfirst into it without considering the risks.
By telling The Snow Queen through now-old-enough to be a wise-woman Gerda, I got to the heart of the story, and really dug into its deep wisdom.
“Once upon a time” allows us to walk into a story no matter what age we are, make it a part of us, and hopefully create something new out of it.
What will you create?
Btw, the workshop was so fun. Sign up for my mailing list for event notifications!