Guest Post: Kathy L. Brown on Miss Lutra's Squirrel Stew from "Water of Life"

Fairy tales have been around in one form or another for centuries, even if they weren’t written down and compiled into collections like Grimm’s Fairy Tales. They’ve changed over the centuries as well, shifting from folk stories to morality tales to more sanitized or “Disney-fied” versions of what they once were. In the process of this sanitization, oftentimes the messages the fairy tales purported to dictate have changed. Gone is the Little Mermaid who watched her beloved marry someone else, at which point she cast herself back into the ocean and drowned, showing us that you shouldn’t change for someone you love. Instead, we get the version where the mermaid and prince live happily ever after, flipping the moral to be that you can (and should?) change in order to make someone love you.

“Original” versions of fairy tales can be a loaded term, in that most of the fairy tales we know today existed in an oral format prior to being written down. When the stories were written down, they were not always faithful to the original tellings. Charles Perrault’s versions of fairy tales were reworked so they would be popular amongst the seventeenth-century French aristocracy. In the nineteenth century, the Grimm brothers, in the first versions of their compilations of fairy tales, acted primarily as transcriptionists, interested in recording the stories as they were commonly told among the German populace. In later versions of the Grimm brothers’ collections, however, they began the sanitization process, making the tales more family friendly.

There is no denying that many of the “original” fairy tales were violent, sexist, and gruesome. They’re filled with death, abuse, self-mutilation, and more. Some of these tales were likely used by the tellers to imbue the listeners (or readers) with specific moral values or lessons or warn them against things like going into the woods alone at night or engaging in other dangerous activities. Perrault and the Grimm brothers also added to these moral lessons but shaped them to their own times and audiences. For example, stories that originally included birth mothers often were changed to instead include stepmothers, who were invariably vain, evil, and not interested in the welfare of their young charges. That the “original” stories ascribed these same motives to birth mothers is a fascinating bit of historical curiosity, but that stepmothers were so much more readily demonized might be even more intriguing as an avenue of study.

Beyond even the changes that Perrault and the Grimm brothers made to the “original” fairy tales, modern sensibilities have again shifted the telling of these stories, cleaned them up further, and completely rewritten them into things that barely resembles the “originals”. Like the Little Mermaid example above, the retelling of fairy tales as children’s movies, often animated and turned into musicals, can obliterate the original meaning, though not always for the worse. The “original” Beauty and the Beast story from seventeenth-century France was written to prepare young girls for arranged marriages, and had an emphasis on learning to love someone you didn’t know, whereas the Disney version of Beauty and the Beast involves character growth for both Belle and the Beast, who learn to love each other, rather than simply expecting the woman to do all the work. This example, in particular, also reflects the time in which it was turned into a movie, considerably different from earlier Disney films in which the female protagonists sometimes were denied the agency that Belle is permitted. Other retellings of fairy tales have stripped away the morality entirely, or occasionally taken a story that was more about avoiding dangerous activities, in a way that did not really require a moral, and added a moral in for good measure (like various versions of Little Red Riding Hood).
Though the origins of many fairy tales are lost to history, the ability to compare various versions of tales as they have been told over the centuries is a fascinating endeavor, both for what they tell us about broadly defined history and what they tell us about storytelling and writing in various times.

About the author: Dawn Vogel’s academic background is in history, so it’s not surprising that much of her fiction is set in earlier times. By day, she edits reports for historians and archaeologists. In her alleged spare time, she runs a craft business, co-edits Mad Scientist Journal, and tries to find time for writing. She is a member of Broad Universe, SFWA, and Codex Writers. She lives in Seattle with her husband, author Jeremy Zimmerman, and their herd of cats. Visit her at http://historythatneverwas.com or follow her on Twitter @historyneverwas. Dawn’s latest book is The Cask of Cranglimmering, Book One of Brass and Glass.

Thomas Wolfe claimed “you can’t go home again,” but the place you sprang from is never going to go away from you, that’s for sure. It’s down there in the isotopes layered into your bones and teeth. It’s there in the way your accent shifts when you go home for a visit, no matter how long away nor what education’s done to change you.

My new book, To the Bones, takes me back to the West Virginia I knew, a place both beloved for its “wild, wonderful” hills and source of despair for its history of exploitation. It also brings me home to genre fiction, after a long time wandering (mostly) in the paths of literary and mainstream writing.

The book began because I couldn’t get started. I was completing a novel-in-verse that had been long in the gestation, and was ready for the next project, but a couple of false starts had left me cranky. I complained to a writer friend about how poorly things were going. The conversation rolled around to a discussion of how to dispose of a body, and I commented, “When I was back in West Virginia, I always said that if I murdered someone, I’d throw them down a mine crack.” He challenged me to do so, and to make it a horror novel.

I was off and running, with a book that would bring together Appalachian legends, zombie movies, quest literature, ecojustice, Celtic lore, and a bit of romance. To the Bones is a satirical look at the legacy of coal mining in West Virginia through a splintered genre lens.

My years as a farmer and newspaper reporter in the northern coalfields provided both setting and substance for the novel. I’d struggled with the lack of water after mining cut off the springs and wells at my hill farm. You generally own only the “surface rights” when you buy land in coal country, which meant that subterranean water was not guaranteed, nor did I stand to profit from the capped gas well in the back field. (That property is likely fracked by now.) My land rested above part of the Farmington No. 9 mine, where an explosion 50 years ago left 78 men dead””the bodies of 19 of them left entombed because it was too dangerous to reach them. A mine crack extended over a corner of the back pasture; another marred a neighbor’s field.

As a reporter, I’d covered mine accidents, train derailments, murders, wildcat strikes, mine subsidence, town meetings and camp meetings. Those memories came back, including the lethal orange color of acid mine drainage that painted the destroyed streams.

The very shape of the land found its way into fictional Carbon County, as it did in my first novel, Neena Gathering, published in 1988 and resurrected by Permuted Press a couple of years ago as a classic post-apocalyptic story. There are many ties between my first book and this most recent outing, including a number of settings loosely based on places where I went to school, farmed, fished, and worked at newspapers. Characters end up below ground, in pits and abandoned mines and that aforementioned mine crack, because that’s just what I do””Fred Chappell remarked once that my interests were chthonic, and from Neena onward, what lies hidden or buried has served to wind taut the warp of story.

To the Bones came quickly, and I’m a slow writer, so I have the feeling I’d already been on the road “home” for a while. I published a crime drama in 2012 that’s set in tobacco country, but the protagonist is from northern Appalachia. My latest poetry collection, Leopard Lady: A Life in Verse, begins in Kentucky and follows a mid-century carnival sideshow traveling the region from Pennsylvania to South Carolina.

I’d left the mountains, but they hadn’t left me. While most people think of “Take Me Home, Country Roads” as the West Virginia state song, which it’s been since 2014, I always think that “Green Rolling Hills” addresses the Mountaineer’s pain of leaving more directly””check out the lyrics here.

In terms of genre, I’d gone away like the speaker in Utah Phillips’ song, but the joys of writing spec fiction “never let me go” and were right there waiting to welcome me back when I found that returning road.

Here’s an old-time peach cobbler recipe from among those I’ve collected over the years. In my family, the fruit went in first and some kind of dough went on top, though I’ve known some will put the dough down and pour the fruit over. I don’t know what recipe Darrick uses, but the traditional dessert plays a small role in To the Bones. Just the thing to welcome home a weary wanderer.

Peach Cobbler

6 cups peaches, sliced
1 TBSP lemon juice
1/4 C packed brown sugar
1 and 1/2 TBSP cornstarch
1/2 C water
1/2 C sugar (white)
1/2 C flour
1/2 TSP baking powder
1/4 TSP salt
2 TBSP butter, softened
1 large egg

Grease two-quart casserole.
Put peaches in, stir in lemon juice.
Stir brown sugar and cornstarch, gradually add water. Cook about 5 minutes.
Pour over peaches.
Set aside 1 TSP sugar.
Stir together sugar, flour, baking powder and salt. Stir in butter and egg until soft dough forms. Drop over peaches. Sprinkle over 1 TSP sugar.
Bake 40-45 minutes at 400 degrees F

Valerie Nieman is a poet and novelist whose first West Virginia novel, Neena Gathering, was returned to print in 2013 as a classic in post-apocalyptic literature. She’s also the author of Leopard Lady: A Life In Verse; Blood Clay, a crime drama set in North Carolina; and a collection of short stories and two additional poetry collections. To the Bones drops on June 1 from West Virginia University Press.

News and excerpts from her work can be found at:
Facebook @valerienieman1 – https://www.facebook.com/valerienieman1/
Twitter @valnieman – https://twitter.com/valnieman
Instagram @valnieman – https://www.instagram.com/valnieman/
Website valnieman.com

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