Two and Twenty Dark Tales
Edited By: Georgia McBride & Michelle Zink
Pub. Date: October 16, 2012
Publisher: Month9Books
Pages: 340
In this anthology, 20 authors explore the dark and hidden meanings behind some of the most beloved Mother Goose nursery rhymes through short story retellings. The dark twists on classic tales range from exploring whether Jack truly fell or if Jill pushed him instead to why Humpty Dumpty, fragile and alone, sat atop so high of a wall. The authors include Nina Berry, Sarwat Chadda, Leigh Fallon, Gretchen McNeil, and Suzanne Young.
Today I am hosting, Sayantani DasGupta, one of the co-authors of Two and Twenty Dark Tales.
Revisiting the
Classics: Mother Goose, and the Marks that Stories Leave
There seems to be a cultural moment happening right now –
when all sorts of children’s and YA books are revisiting the classics.
There are Greek mythology take-offs like Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series, Joan Holub and Suzanne Williams’ Goddess Girls
series, and Charlotte Bennardo
and Natalie Zaman’s Sirenz series. There are Grimm’s brothers
take-offs like Michael Buckley’s The
Sisters Grimm series.
There are Shakespearean take-offs like Michelle Ray’s Falling
for Hamlet, and Jacqueline
Woodson’s If You Come
Softly (which I recently wrote about in an essay called “Shakespeare
in Black and White.”). And don’t even get me started on the endless Austen
take-offs. From Mandy Hubbard’s
Prada and Prejudice to
Jennifer Ziegler’s Sass and
Serendipity to … well, there are a whole lot of them is my point.
But what purpose do classic revisitations serve in the popular
imagination? Clearly, there is a hunger for them, and the popularly accepted
idea that being introduced to take-offs will make young readers more interested
in the original stories from which they originated.
And I guess I can believe that, if it comes to stories we
want young people to be reading in their original, stories whose evergreen
relevance we want to celebrate – like those of Shakespeare or Austen. But what
about all those mythological and fairy-tale take-offs? Are those being
published because we, as a culture, are really interested in our children
re-reading Ovid’s myths or the original Brothers Grimm Tales? I’m not so sure.
Instead, I think, such re-tellings actually reflect how ingrained those old
stories already are into our individual and collective psyches.
Take the Mother Goose retellings in Two and Twenty Dark Tales: Dark Retellings of Mother Goose Rhymes, a
collection edited by Georgia McBride and Michelle Zink and released in October
2012 from Month 9 Books. Earlier this
year, I had the opportunity to enter a contest on YAlitchat.org to be the one “wild card”
contributor to this volume. Unlike the other authors in the book, like Sarwat Chadda or Leigh Fallon, who were asked to
contribute and therefore could choose the Mother Goose rhyme they wanted to
revisit, I, as the contest winner, was given my task: to write a dark retelling
of Little Boy Blue.
And so, I had to ask myself:
why are childhood rhymes so important to us? How do they invoke so much memory
and emotion, rising to the surface of our consciousness the moment they are
mentioned? As I asked myself these questions, I kept mulling over the word
"Blue" and suddenly thought of the Joni Mitchell Song Blue (which I listened to over and over again my first year of
college on an old tape player I had, but I’m dating myself here):
Blue,
songs are like tattoos/.../Ink on a pin/Underneath the skin/An empty space to
fill in
----Joni Mitchell, “Blue”
And so I started thinking about
tattoos, ink, and if stories are one way we human beings mark ourselves. In my
day job, I'm a professor of Narrative
Medicine at Columbia University, so I think a lot about the power of
stories and how stories work for human beings, for communities, and for
societies.
I came to realize that Mother
Goose Rhymes are so powerful, and they stay with us, because they seem to have
seeped into the very air we breathe and the atmosphere we live in. It was then
that I remembered this line from Shakespeare’s As You Like It (I had just seen the Royal
Shakespeare Company perform it in NYC that past summer):
And
this our life, exempt from public haunt/ Finds tongues in trees, books in the
running brooks, /Sermons in
stones
---Act II, Scene 1
And then I was off and running with Blue, my retelling of the Mother Goose rhyme - a retelling that
begins with a she-creature whose job it is to invisibly inscribe human beings'
bodies with our fables, folktales, and nursery rhymes - our old stories that
seem sewn into our very skin, right into our bones. And I wondered what would
happen if one day, this otherworldly being was mistakenly seen by a human boy,
a shepherd, who would then follow her into the woods, calling for her in a
voice as loud and pure as a shepherd’s horn.
Would she relinquish her story-needle to the force of her
desire for a human being? Would she allow herself to be marked, to become a
part of the human story and not just its teller?
I am also lucky enough to be giving away an ecopy of Francisco X. Stork's Irises! Just fill out the form below to enter.
a Rafflecopter giveaway
No comments:
Post a Comment
Thank you so much for stopping by and taking the time to read my post! I would love to know what you think, so please leave a comment below!