Tag: fantasy

573: Little Red Riding Hood

                Today I was talking with a student about Charles Perrault’s “Little Red Riding Hood” (1697) and Jacob Wilhelm Grimm’s “Little Red Cap” (1812) and all the other versions of Little Red that we’ve met in books, TV shows, games, conversations, and our own or shared imaginations. This student didn’t like that the parents never tell Little Red why the forest can be dangerous, or go with her to teach her how to navigate its dangers. Now that my student mentioned it, I don’t like that, either. I started wondering about a version of the story where the parents and the child listen to each other, learn from each other. Help each other. I started imagining a version of the story that started with a different family and a different Little Red.
                One of my favorite things about folk tales is the way they invite us to ask what if, what else, what if we turned another way, or learned together, or met each other anew. So sitting together, while my student wrote her version, I wrote (and I’m just going to give you the beginning!)

                There once was a wolf called Little Red Patch because she’d been hit in the side by a hunter’s bullet when she was only a pup, and ever since, the fur there had grown red. Despite the wound and maybe a little in response to it Little Red had also grown curious. She was curious about the birds in the sky, and sometimes got dizzy from staring up for so long as she listened to their singing. She was curious about the glistening stones in the river and sometimes she dove into the water to touch them. She was curious about the woodcutter nearby and sometimes followed her nose toward the cooking smells that came from his cabin. Her mother told her to be careful.
                “Sometimes humans are scared of us, and they can attack the people they’re scared of,” said mother wolf. “Sometimes they just don’t want to share the food of the forest so they kill us. You can’t go to the woodcutter’s house!”
                Little Red listened to her mother, and for three days she swam in the river looking at the stones and watching how quick the fish were. But…

                In this version of the story Little Red is still curious. But what if Little Red tries to listen to her mother while still feeling her curiosity? What if her mother sees her curiosity, and decides, not to teach her a lesson, but to help her learn how to move safely? What—we might wonder—then. Or maybe your wonder goes off in another direction?

by Azlan

570: “King Arthur Ct” (Street Sign)

“King Arthur Ct”
-street sign in Santa Rosa, CA

                Last week my partner and I took our two niblings for a walk. Or maybe our niblings took us: they wanted to scooter to a playground, and we adults went along for the swings and the giggles, the careful faces at crosswalks and the delighted sounds at little free libraries. (We brought back a book of ciphers, but we haven’t started decoding it). Along the way we stopped at a house that had 14 dragons out front, as far as we could count. We talked about witch’s brews. We talked about anime demons and the songs that can become magic.
                For a block, we also turned down King Arthur Ct. It’s a little connecting road between Horseshoe Drive and Rainier Avenue. Sitting here, now, it also seems like a delightful (and fraught) reminder of all the ways our myths and fairytales give us characters and motifs and relationships and pieces of meaning to arrange into concepts of courage and family, loss and hope, friendship and power. Perhaps because in two weeks I’ll be teaching a course in all that. I didn’t know King Arthur Ct was there until I saw it on my phone’s map, and announced that’s where we’re turning. Of course I did it playfully. Of course my niblings teased back: “No we’re not!” “There’s no such place!” “You’re teasing!” And then we turned the corner, talking about dragons and witches, groaning at what a fool I was. Walking near Camelot. Or near the places we reimagine as Camelot. Or, passed Camelot, toward the transformed place we make for our witches on their way home.

by Azlan

563: “No Single Thing” (Christopher Huang & Nghi Vo)

                “Surely a man like Colonel Russell couldn’t be the casualty of someone else’s story?” -Christopher Huang, A Pretender’s Murder, p. 116

                “I am a thousand stories of Northern Bell Pass, and an illustrious career in the capital, of a northern tribunal tricked. I am a father and a grandfather as well as a cleric, because no single thing takes away from the rest.” -Nghi Vo, Mammoths At The Gates, p. 112

                One of my least favorite things that fictions do is act like there’s a main character. A someone who all this swirls around. A someone who will necessarily make the key decision at the decisive moment. A hero. A villain. I think A Pretender’s Murder is commenting exactly on that: on the strange patterns some cultures have of reading themselves as the most important protagonist.
                One of my favorite things that fictions do is notice how so many threads weave together here, with no single thinking taking away from the rest. Mammoths At The Gates ends with a series of stories: connected and almost contradictory visions of who someone is, of who we are in gathering to hear about them, of who we all are together as we go on. Maybe I’m thinking about that modern phrase, main character energy, and about how wonderful it is to be another thread weaving through so many stories. I go for a walk and folks walking or sitting nearby wave at me. I wave back. Some of us are friends and some of us aquaintances and some of us strangers who live near one another. I love the stories that feel like that.

by Azlan

562: “Only One Script” (Olivia Atwater)

                “Sir Albus flailed at this, flustered out of his rhythm. He had only one script, Dora observed idly, and absolutely no imagination with which to deviate from it. ‘I…I could not possibly answer such an absurd question!’ he managed.”
-Olivia Atwater, Half a Soul, p. 8

                Many of us might have met a Sir Albus. A someone who, presented with almost any social situation, will probably a) launch into their pet familiar script and/or b) refuse to engage with questions that twist their familiar script in unexpected directions. Atwater’s Half A Soul is a kind of Regency England romantic “season” mixed with fae magic mystery. Albus’—pardon, Sir Albus’—script is purebred horses. The “absurd” question is about a creature that is part horse and part dolphin. It’s a world of magical creatures and humans and inbetween-beings, including the question-asker herself, but Albus doesn’t want to imagine any of that.
                The more worrisome—and perhaps more useful to think about—moments are when I recognize a bit of Sir Albus in myself. The moments when, given half a chance, I set out along my script, sharing my pat observations, tending toward my certain conclusions. I think those moments are part of why I like reading new things. Reading new things from people whose work I’ve never encountered. Reading things from people whose lives are so different than mine. If I have the script, I want to have the imagination, too, ready to hear the question and not simply think it “absurd.”

by Azlan

551: Spells, Counterspells, and Selves (Maiga Doocy)

                “It hurt because my counterspell couldn’t distinguish between what was the curse and what was you.”
                -Maiga Doocy, Sorcery and Small Magics, pg. 268

                I love when fantasy and science fiction stories end up reckoning with core cultural concepts. For example: what does consciousness mean? Or in this book, what are the boundaries—and the blurred connections—between who I “am” and how I am being pressed to behave, day after day?
                One of my mentors, Melissa Littlefield, used to study “lie detectors.” As far as I understand, one of her starting points was turning to consider the theory of the world that is a foundation for “lie detectors.” If you believe some technology can sense, in someone’s physiology, that they’re lying, then doesn’t that mean you also believe that a “lie” is something physiological, like a brainwave, or a certain kind of brain wave? Years ago, Melissa and her colleagues did a bunch of brain scan experiments that indicate something wrong with that underlying theory. What “lie detectors” look for (they argued) is actually some kind of stress response, which someone might experience while trying to get away with a lie, and also might experience while telling a truth they expect to be received poorly. There are lots of reasons to be stressed. Hearing Melissa talk through this, I found myself wondering, why was I so ready (at 15, at 20) to believe that lies were a physical category, something like light that the right kind of telescope could pick up? What kind of cultural stories and values made that belief so appealing?
                Now I sit holding Sorcery and Small Magics, wondering at the difference between me and what I’ve learned. Or maybe what I’ve been taught: what’s been impressed into me. If there were curses and countercurses, and a curse could push my thinking onto a certain path day after day, what would the distinction be between that path of thinking and “me”? Would a countercurse be able to distinguish it? Of course I don’t know, but the wondering makes me think, how can I be careful with what I’m learning, and reflective about what I’ve learned. And maybe also: how wondrous it is to be always becoming.

by Azlan

505: “It’s Easier To Do This When You’re Here” (Travis Baldree)

                “No, it’s not that. […] It’s that it’s easier to do this when you’re here. And that makes me feel stupid. Have I been sitting on my tail all this time? Doing nothing because I was pretending I couldn’t? Am I so pathetic that I couldn’t muster the energy to do this without…without a chaperone?”
                -Travis Baldree, Bookshops and Bonedust, p. 73

                A few days ago, my friend (and found family) Fin and I went for a walk, pattering our feet to a nearby park and around beneath the branches. Then we came back as a storm blew in, and pulled up dandelions from a garden bed till big spring drops plopped over us. A week or two ago Fin and I learned about the fuse box in my new house, and turned off electricity so we could repair a light switch and an outlet. Both of those were tasks I’ve been meaning to do for weeks (or months). I was a little worried about doing them with Fin. “I don’t want to put this on you,” I Said, or something like that. Fin, wonderful human that they are, smiled and said, “It’s fun! And we’re learning stuff!”
                As Travis Baldree’s character is learning on page 73, I think it’s easier to do stuff when you’re here. But I’m moving to a place where that doesn’t make me feel stupid. Usually when I say “work” these days, I mean something somewhat ugly, tied up in capitalism and social structures that destroy too much. But work can also be what we do toward the world we want to share. Doing that kind of work with someone makes the effort—and the world we’re moving toward, whatever world that is; the well-lit room with a working light switch where we’ll sit and eat orange slices—feel closer. Taste sweeter. Stay shared.

by Azlan

493: The Fox Maidens (Robin Ha)

                “When I first conceived of this graphic novel about Gumiho, I thought it would be a fun, action-packed, fantastical thriller, full of cool scenes for me to draw. Now, I realize that what I’ve actually made is a book about generational trauma.” -Robin Ha, author’s note to The Fox Maidens

                bell hooks writes (in Teaching to Transgress) about going to education in the hopes of being healed. Sitting with that and with Robin Ha, I realize something similar is one of my favorite magics of fiction. We can set off writing, reading, imagining on our way to excitement: toward fantastical thrillers and wondrous adventures and cool scenes and clever lines. And carried along by the excitement of snows and wintry peaks, of magic and holding fire, we can find families, friends, loves. We can stumble openly into the hurts we are and heal, sometimes alone, sometimes together.
                There are so many stories that heal me. Lately I think I’ve slipped back toward thinking about stories largely as entertainment (which they can be), or about philosophical presentations of what the world is and should be (which they can be). Reading Robin Ha, I feel story as red skin, a burn, tender and regenerating. So much is burning, scorching so many of us. Here in The Fox Maidens is a healing breath we breathe together.

by Azlan