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There were two things about this particular book (The Golden Book of Fairy Tales) that made it vital to the child I was. First, it contained a remarkable number of stories about courageous, active girls; and second, it portrayed the various evils they faced in unflinching terms. Just below their diamond surface, these were stories of great brutality and anguish, many of which had never been originally intended for children at all. (Although Ponsot included tales from the Brothers Grimm and Andersen, the majority of her selections were drawn from the French contes de fées tradition — stories created as part of the vogue for fairy tales in seventeenth century Paris, recounted in literary salons and published for adult readers.) I hungered for a narrative with which to make some sense of my life, but in schoolbooks and on television all I could find was the sugar water of Dick and Jane, Leave it to Beaver and the happy, wholesome Brady Bunch. Mine was not a Brady Bunch family; it was troubled, fractured, persistently violent, and I needed the stronger meat of wolves and witches, poisons and peril. In fairy tales, I had found a mirror held up to the world I knew — where adults were dangerous creatures, and Good and Evil were not abstract concepts. (…) There were in those days no shelves full of “self–help” books for people with pasts like mine. In retrospect, I’m glad it was myth and folklore I turned to instead. Too many books portray child abuse as though it’s an illness from which one must heal, like cancer . . .or malaria . . .or perhaps a broken leg. Eventually, this kind of book promises, the leg will be strong enough to use, despite a limp betraying deeper wounds that might never mend. Through fairy tales, however, I understood my past in different terms: not as an illness or weakness, but as a hero narrative. It was a story, my story, beginning with birth and ending only with death. Difficult challenges and trials, even those that come at a tender young age, can make us wiser, stronger, and braver; they can serve to transform us, rather than sending us limping into the future.


Terri Windling


#fairytales #age



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McKillip illustrated by Brian Froud
The Borderland Series New American Library Tor Books Harper Prism 1985 to present: a Young Adult shared-world series featuring the intersection between Elfland and human lands generally populated by teenagers runaways and exiles. She was a contributor to The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales edited by Jack Zipes. Works


Fiction
"The Green Children" The Armless Maiden Tor Books 1995
The Wood Wife Tor Books 1996 (winner of the Mythopoeic Award)
"The Color of Angels" The Horns of Elfland New American Library 1997
The Raven Queen with Ellen Steiber Random House 1999
The Changeling Random House 1995
The Old Oak Wood Series Simon & Schuster (illustrated by Wendy Froud):

A Midsummer Night's Faery Tale 1999
The Winter Child 2000
The Faeries of Spring Cottage 2001

"Red Rock" Century Magazine 2000
The Moon Wife Tor Books forthcoming 2012
Little Owl Viking forthcoming 2012


Nonfiction
"Surviving Childhood" The Armless Maiden Tor Books 1995
"Transformations" Mirror Mirror on the Wall: Women Writers Explore Their Favorite Fairy Tales (Expanded Edition) Anchor 1998
Co-writer and editor of Brian Froud's Good Faeries/Bad Faeries Simon & Schuster 2000
"On Tolkien and Fairy Stories" Meditations on Middle-Earth St.

As an artist Windling specializes in work inspired by myth folklore and fairy tales. She received the Solstice Award in 2010 which honors "individuals with a significant impact on the speculative fiction field. She was a contributor to The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales edited by Jack Zipes.

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