Derek Newman-Stille and Nathan Fréchette discuss the upcoming fairy tale revision book Whispers Between Fairies and the unique nature of fairy tales and their possibilities for change and transformation. They talk about inclusion, queer writing, disabled writing, the power of fairy tales, ideas of tradition, found family, and the horror that can be embodied in fairy tales.
Whispers Between Fairies will be published by Presses Renaissance Press and you can check them out at
A Pinocchio Tale That Isn’t Wooden
A review of Charlie Petch’s Daughter of Geppetto.
By Derek Newman-Stille
In their performance “Daughter of Geppetto”, Charlie Petch takes the fundamental idea of Pinocchio – “I want to be a real boy” – and turns it into a Trans tale, asking questions about what “real boy” means and the questions this poses about gender and performance.
Petch performs a one-person play, using multiple media including a sound board that lets them echo sounds and play with soundscapes to provide context for their act of storytelling, music performed by Petch, and shadow puppetry to invite the audience to think about ideas of echoed voices, overlapping waves of sound and the idea of puppetry itself (since Pinocchio is, ultimately, a puppet). Petch brings attention to the ways that theatre is made and the theatricality of theatre, breaking down the boundaries between audience and stage. They invite their audience to think about performance itself and the ways that we perform our identities off stage, pointing to the scripted way that we express gender in our society.
Like much of Petch’s work, “Daughter of Geppetto” defies simple categorization, encompassing theatrical performance, puppetry, musical performance, spoken word poetry, and fairy tale.
“Daughter of Geppetto” illustrates the craving and need for fairy tales in the Trans community and the power that fairy tales have to shift and change and adapt to new voices. For a community that is constantly being told about tradition and that we don’t fit into tradition, the idea of adapting fairy tale traditions for the Trans community is important because we need these stories. We need to play with our fairy tales and see ourselves in and through them.
“Daughter of Geppetto” is a powerful, evocative, and, yes, transformative tale. It is beautifully dark while also delightfully light and playful. It is new and innovative while also playing with and illustrating the magic of traditional tales.
To find out more about Charlie Petch, visit their website at http://www.charliecpetch.com
Check out a trailer for “Daughter of Geppetto” here https://youtu.be/YYt5NHfYB_U
A review of Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (Pandora Press, 1985).
By Derek Newman-Stille
In Oranges are Not the Only Fruit, Jeanette Winterson creates a complicated tale of intersecting narratives, mixing elements of fairy tale, legend, and biblical verse into autobiographic elements from her own life. As much as this is a tale about Winterson’s own upbringing in a Pentecostal evangelical household and discovery of her lesbian identity, it is also a narrative about the way that our lives are shaped by stories. Autobiography and fiction interweave in a conversation that at times is contradictory, but always revelatory.
Winterson’s abrupt switches to fairy tale narrative in the middle of scenes of her own life shape the intrusive and yet complementary power of stories to inform us and shape our lives. She reveals the way that her own tale has been shaped by stories, largely those from her mother, who begins by telling her that she is special and has a significant role in the world to shape the lives and beliefs of others, and those of her church, which tells her that she needs to sell religion to others the same way as one would sell a used car, and later tells her that her attraction to women comes from demonic possession. Narratives from evangelical voices seek to shape who she is to become, trying to mould her and her identity into the narratives they want to tell. WInterson acknowledges this narrative influence through her focus on their stories about her life, weaving them into her autobiographical elements, but also by titling her chapters after the books of the Christian Bible, frequently paralleling her life narrative with the biblical titles. She begins with Genesis, telling her own origins and early memories, moves on to Exodus and her experience of seeing the world differently once she is able to attend school, and continues through Leviticus, Numbers, Dueteronomy, Joshua, Judges, and concluding with Ruth.
Yet, throughout the autobiographic elements of her tale, up pop fairy tales to open new insights into her experiences, converting them from biography (an individual experience) into fairy tale (an archetypal quality defined by its relateability). Tales provide moments of insight, intruding like a spell into her life with the words “Once upon a time…”. Her tales vary, telling stories of princesses who learn from old hunchbacks the secrets of magic, but frequently don’t end in the typical fairy tale ending and instead resolve themselves in princesses living simple lives away from the complications of royalty and the expectations and controls that come with being special. These tales help to elucidate Winterson’s own exploration of selfhood and the narrative of exclusion and exultation that was applied to her early in her life. Fairy tales occur at transformative moments in her narrative, offering counterpoints to a singular narrative and pointing out the polyphony in any story. Rather than creating a sense of the heroic and transcendent, these tales evoke the power of resisting the sense of being special.
The complexity of fiction storytelling works as a counterpoint to Winterson’s mother’s simple binarisms of good/evil introducing the idea that story presents a complicated morality, that one needs the context of story to explore moral systems that can’t be easily dualistic. She uses fairy tales to disrupt ideas of a singular perfection, situating a prince’s search for the perfect, flawless bride into a philosophical discourse about whether perfection and flawlessness are mutually dependent.
Winterston complicates the assumed easy divide between fairy tale and real life, illustrating that our real lives are made up of tales told by us and about us. She complicates ideas of history, pointing out that history is also constructed as a truth narrative, but is changeable, shifting, and uncertain. She invites questions about her own life through Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, pointing out the narratological slipperiness of our lives and the shifting, unstable, and transformative aspects of identity. Like the fairy tales she includes in her narrative, life itself is able to contain a spark of transformative magic and the stories we tell ourselves about who we are constantly move and change.
Winterson resists calling her book autobiography, listing it as fiction despite its close parallel to the events of her life to disrupt the easy binarism and duality of truth/fiction, real/fairy tale, history/story. Her personal narrative has already been shaped by simple dualities that others have tried to impose on her, attempting to fit her into simple boxes of saint/sinner, saviour/demon, good/evil, inside/outside of the church she grew up in.
To discover more about Janette WInterson, visit http://www.jeanettewinterson.com
To read more about Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, visit http://www.jeanettewinterson.com/book/oranges-are-not-the-only-fruit/
Through The Twisted Woods 