Since childhood I have always been drawn to fairytales. Yes to the princess stories, but also to Robin Hood, King Arthur, Rip Van Winkle, and The Headless Horseman. I loved anything in the realm of real-life with a fantastical twist. As a kid I used to create houses for the fairies to live in, and made jam out of the berries in my backyard to feed them. Having this history I thought the best topic for me would be fairytales.
I started off thinking I would re-write tales I enjoyed that were either common or unknown to the general public. And then I thought, how can I make this more interesting? Why would anyone choose to read my story, when the classic tale is so renown. I thought that maybe looking a little deeper into the situations that occur in fairytales might help. What would a young girl lightly dressed in the woods all alone feel? I know how I would feel. As a fan of Gothic literature I drew from their heroines, how they reacted and mixed that with my own feelings, to create a story that was more true to the feelings of the main character. That is how my first story was born.
Little Red allowed me to look into my feelings of walking home late at night, of being cat-called or followed a little too closely. I felt that Red Riding Hood would have felt similarly. I realized that it had all the trappings of a great horror story. So that is how I wrote it. I then needed illustrations to match. I started out in a traditional pen and ink style, highly influenced by Edward Gorey. This was taking too much time and not unique enough. I then thought about melding past and present by using collage and that stuck. Every collage I made for this story told of events in the book. The illustrations were gritty and Gothic, oozing distress. I thought this was how I would keep creating stories for the rest of the year.
Alas, burnout hit. I was pushed to find a more contemporary context for my stories and it cause me to break completely from my Gothic inspired fairytales to a happily ever after instead. I played with colours and shorter, more direct writing. After creating this book I was confused on what my thesis was still about. It still held true to fairytale themes and ideas. But was not a known fairytale, or really following the pattern of the genre at all. Then I realized that was what it was.
So, for my last book I gave myself the ability to write what I wanted, as long as it fit within those parameters. I wrote stories dealing with death, mysterious people, and the overall fragility of life. I structured the stories so they felt like snapshots into larger tales of other worlds. Kind of like my own folklore. I had the slow realization that the telling of tales about people you could have known in situations that could have happened, was folklore. This may all still sound quite vague, and it is. But it also does not need to be anything else. I am proud I got the chance to explore this genre and add to it. So I hope you enjoy the stories and art I created with the goal of not letting down my heroes of the fairytale genre.
