Fairy Tales as Survival Stories: A Personal Tale

During the spring of my 10th year, a kid nicknamed Bad Bobby Becker stalked me every day walking home from school. Bad Bobby had been held back twice, a thickset beefy 13-year-old with a set of front dentures which he grossly displayed on his tongue to scare us gaggle of girls. That April he hulked and huffed behind me down the elm-shaded streets, through backyard shortcuts where newly budded gardens of tulips and forsythia bloomed, the sweet-scented April afternoons pierced by dread.

(Why I Wrote My Memoir in Verse.)

Those days parents neither hovered nor helicoptered, and us kids were left to sort out our playground difficulties by ourselves, but when nightmares of Bad Bobby ruptured my sleep, my mother issued stern advice: Come straight home without delay. Do not turn around, do not speak to Robert Becker, do not look him in the eye. This might have been my good fairy godmother giving a warning. Wait! Hadn’t I heard these words before? Hello, Red Riding Hood!

We are dreamers, mythmakers, storytellers. We create sequentially coherent narratives that link disparate recollections and episodic memories to make meaning of our lives. We understand ourselves through story.

At night in bed, I fabricated revenge on my predator. With a handmade slingshot, I would knock out Bad Bobby with a single stone between the eyes. Teeth barred, I would bite a fleshy chunk out of his stupid arm. Fantasies of victory filled my head. Nearby birds and bees would come to my aid, dive-bombing his head. Squirrels would laugh into their tiny paws at his demise. I was clever as Gretel who tricked a witch into an oven and baked her to a crisp. I was Vasilisa the Beautiful who fooled the Baba Yaga through pretend compliance and real cunning. Fear and imagination linked arms in my heart and generated my first experience of creating a personal myth, my very own fairy tale.

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Who will rescue us? How will we survive? These are soto voce cries of children caught in war, famine, displacement, and all the other forms of suffering children endure. It is the wail of the abandoned, the rejected, the marginalized, the bartered and sold, the outcast and powerless across time and place. It is also a core question at the heart of many fairy tales, which in their original pre-Grimm’s, pre-Disney versions were cautionary tales about the ever-present dangers of rape, incest, starvation, mutilation, abandonment, and the dark arts of bewitchment.

Today’s headlines affirm that brutal behavior is alive and well in our so-called civilized world and at our peril do we dismiss or displace this reality onto our forebears or history’s far distant past. Anyone reading the news, if they are honest with themselves, must conclude that greed, power, domination and cruelty continue to be active forces fueling our actions. Our personal engagement with greed, loneliness, bereavement, jealousy, sorrow, and the emotional burdens we carry has neither lessened nor ceased. In fairy tales, as in life, terror and beauty walk hand in hand, as do joy and grief.

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Fairy tales enthrall, terrify, and compel us because they bear witness to these archetypal patterns of human interaction and present a fantastic yet plausible irreal real world that mirrors our unspoken fears, lusts, and repressed longings in symbolic form.

Once upon time in the middle of a forest medicine women, shamans, or visionaries sat around a bonfire and provided wisdom stories that enabled their people to survive. Their existential questions are our existential questions: How do we respond to evil? (Bluebeard). A narcissistic mother? (Snow White, Cinderella). A corrupt and greedy sibling? (Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves). Physical or mental mutilation. (The Handless Maiden).

Also, there is magic, and magic equals hope. The introduction of magic into a fairy tale presents the possibility of happiness and fulfillment hidden within uncertainty and despair. This seems to me a reality and profound spiritual truth: When all appears lost and a dismal ending certain, intervention by magical helper—a judicious fish, a wish-granting feather, a friendly jinn—opens new possibilities in the closed field of awareness. (Don’t some of us disbelievers wish upon a star, throw a coin into a fountain, carry a lucky totem?)

Something in us longs to see and understand life as part of a miraculous and mysterious cosmos in which the inexplicable rather than signaling a cruel arbitrariness against which we are helpless points to boundless emerging revelations. Rarely do fairy tales end in tragedy, but the formulaic “happily ever after” of tales suggests not the static contentment of forever and ever but an alternative outcome to doomed inevitability.

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In childhood, fairy tales seeded my imagination with vivid imagery and magical thinking. I never thought I’d write one, but the indelible power of fairy tales is that they inhabit our collective memory and shape our dreams and creative work. So it was with me.

I fell under the spell of writing an original fairy tale when I had been broken open by a crisis, and in that liminal space referred to as the dark night of the soul, a raw vulnerable place in which preconceived ideas are shed, a state necessary for writers and artists, I discovered a way to tell a story that held all the complexities of my reality without naming names. Sometimes we need to be broken open for rebirth and repair to occur.

Literary scholar Jack Zipes has written extensively about fairy tales as offering strategies for responding to danger and oppression and offer models of cunning, cleverness, compassion, resilience, and resistance. Many fairy tales begin with a description of a ruinous situation—the king has died and the kingdom is in chaos, or the benevolent mother is ill and leaves her daughter in the hands of a conniving stepmother. A hapless husband makes a deal with the devil and must pay up.

At the time of writing “The Littlest Princes,” I was a published poet with an MFA and considerable publications in literary magazines. I had not planned to write a fairy tale. I had no idea a fairy tale was incubating in me. The demons I needed to confront were internal, not external, but at that time, I was blind to them. However, my unconscious and imagination generated images that translated into a narrative that became a fairy tale.

How to say this?: What I had been keeping hidden from myself, what had caused me psychological distress became available to my conscious mind. A powerful wind was at my back: I wrote and wrote, happier each day as the story took form. By taking the images seriously, in honoring the spontaneously arising unconscious material, I was welcoming the fairy tale that wrote itself through me.

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Two things happened that were life changing: I discovered the strategies of writing longform fiction. Each day I awoke to the characters dictating their stories. Each night I fell asleep wondering, in E.M. Forster’s description of story: What will happen next? Little did I know the experience of writing a fairy tale would catapult me into being reborn as a novelist.

The other important consequence, in retrospect, is that the fairy tale offered a blueprint for the core issues I would encounter in my process of becoming self-aware. The writing and honoring, the excitement and trepidation of allowing myself the wild freedom to say whatever felt true was an act of restorative justice for my soul.

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