Monday, February 6, 2012

#GrimmLegacies: Live Tweets from the Grimm Legacies Symposium














I had no way of attending Grimm Legacies but I was still very interested in what was presented and discussed so have been itching to hear reports. 

Heidi Anne Heiner (of the SurLaLune blog & site) was both an attendee and presenter and is generously summarizing some of the conference in installments on her blog. She mentioned there was a Twitter hashtag (#GrimmLegacies) we could check and, since tweets tend to disappear very quickly into the ether, if not saved, I thought I would grab them all and put them here so they can always be referred to.






To catch you up on what was being discussed, I've started with a shortened version of the schedule, under which are the tweets. I've reordered the tweets so they read in normal reading order (ie. first tweet is at the top, last tweet is at the bottom) and included the times so you can check the tweet comments against whichever topic is being presented, in case it's not self-explanatory.

By the way, HERE are the names and faces of some fairy tale people you should be aware of/familiar with, who participated in the conference.







FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 3RD

 Heidi Anne Heiner of Sur La Lune Fairy Tales
“Fairy Tales in a Digital Age - 4:00 – 5:00 pm 

The world has changed considerably since Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm first published their märchen 200 years ago. The past twenty years have especially seen a significant change in how fairy tales are disseminated to a worldwide audience. Come hear the history of SurLaLune Fairy Tales as well as the plans for its future as we strive to understand and share our rich folkloric past with current and future generations. From statistics to art to trolls, we'll also discuss the changing perceptions and visibility of beloved tales.

Jack Zipes, Keynote Speaker

 “Two Hundred Years after Once Upon a Time: The Legacy of the Brothers Grimm and their Tales in Germany” - 5:30 – 7:00 pm

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 4TH

Welcome by Maria Tatar
“Magical and Mythical: 200 Years of the Brothers Grimm” - 9:00 - 9:15 am

INTO THE WOODS - 9:15 - 11:15 am

Cara Zimmerman
“Henry Darger, Adolf Wolfli, and Tales of Violence in Outsider Art”

David Rice
“When the Forest Becomes the Woods: The Horror Effect in the Grimms; Hansel and Gretel and Beyond”

Megan Leroy
“Domestic Adaptations: Anne Sexton’s Transformations and the Grimms’ Tales”

UNDER THE KNIFE - 11:30 - 1:00 pm

Valerie Gribben
“Medicine and Märchen”

Ariane Mandell
“Empowered by Tears: Weeping in Grimm’s Fairy Tales”

Perri Klass
“Grimm and the Experts:  Psychiatrists, Pediatricians, and Pundits”

AMONG THE BEASTS - 2:15 - 3:45 pm

Ruth Lingford
“Animating the Grimms”

David Elmer
“The Metamorphosis of a Folktale: 'Beauty and the Beast' in Apuleius' Metamorphoses."

Jerry Griswold
“The Many Conclusions of ‘Beauty and the Beast’”

THROUGH THE MAGIC MIRROR - 4:00 - 5:45 pm

John Cech
“The Grimms, Sendak, and the Zeitgeist”

Michael Hearn
"Increasing the Happiness of Children:  George Cruikshank Illustrates the Brothers Grimm" 

Kate Bernheimer
"The Grimm Art of Fairy-Tale Editorship"

Claudia Schwabe
“Between Socialism and Snow White: GDR Fairy Tales”

WRAP UP

Here's the theme and premise for the presentations:

Live Tweets from the Grimm Legacies Conference 
(A huge thank you to Linda J. Lee from all of us who couldn't attend for these!)



Interesting stuff! I wish I had been there just to take my own notes/tweet for you but I'm very grateful to Linda J. Lee in particular who made the effort through the conference to share with us all. Apparently Ms. Lee mentioned she was going to also put a summary on her Facebook page but I don't know which one that is. 
Hope the transcript is helpful to those interested! 
And one day maybe I'll make it to a conference myself - one of these years... :)
* All illustrations are from the illustration resource pages for the conference and most (if not all) can be found on SurLaLune.
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The Snow Child - Eowyn Ivey (book trailer)

Heidi over at the SurLaLune Blog posted a lovely review of The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey not long ago and included the book trailer but I wanted to post on it anyway for three reasons:

1) it draws on a Russian snow child tale I've always loved
2) the book trailer is beautifully animated and a joy to watch
3) it's being highly recommended by Ali Shaw, author of The Girl With Glass Feet

Take a look:

Official book blurb:
Alaska, 1920: a brutal place to homestead, and especially tough for recent arrivals Jack and Mabel. Childless, they are drifting apart--he breaking under the weight of the work of the farm; she crumbling from loneliness and despair. In a moment of levity during the season's first snowfall, they build a child out of snow. The next morning the snow child is gone--but they glimpse a young, blonde-haired girl running through the trees. 
This little girl, who calls herself Faina, seems to be a child of the woods. She hunts with a red fox at her side, skims lightly across the snow, and somehow survives alone in the Alaskan wilderness. As Jack and Mabel struggle to understand this child who could have stepped from the pages of a fairy tale, they come to love her as their own daughter. But in this beautiful, violent place things are rarely as they appear, and what they eventually learn about Faina will transform all of them.
The text begins like this:

THE SNOW CHILD EXCERPT

Excerpt from CHAPTER 1

Wolverine River, Alaska, 1920 
Mabel had known there would be silence. That was the point, after all. No infants cooing or wailing. No neighbor children playfully hollering down the lane. No pad of small feet on wooden stairs worn smooth by generations, or clackety-clack of toys along the kitchen floor. All those sounds of her failure and regret would be left behind, and in their place there would be silence.
She had imagined that in the Alaska wilderness silence would be peaceful, like snow falling at night, air filled with promise but no sound, but that was not what she found. Instead, when she swept the plank floor, the broom bristles scritched like some sharp-toothed shrew nibbling at her heart. When she washed the dishes, plates and bowls clattered as if they were breaking to pieces. The only sound not of her making was a sudden “caw, cawww” from outside. Mabel wrung dishwater from a rag and looked out the kitchen window in time to see a raven flapping its way from one leafless birch tree to another. No children chasing each other through autumn leaves, calling each other’s names. Not even a solitary child on a swing. 
                                                                                    ***** 
Norwegian cover
Italian cover
You can continue reading the excerpt HERE, which, if I wasn't sold on this book before, would have sealed the deal. It's just beautiful.
The images posted are variations on the cover, of which I'm glad there are so many (Heidi already posted some of the others). This is one tale I'm, again, mystified by the lack of illustrators tackling the subject. The visuals and the emotions in the story are so poignant. It's almost begging to be given form! (Kind of like the snow child herself.)
Ms. Ivey's website is HERE and you can now purchase the book HERE (it was released February 1st).

Relatedly, there's a Welsh theatrical production of a version of The Snow Child, which is where I found the above image. You can read more information and see more production images HERE.
EXTREMELY LATE UPDATE!
The designs were created by artist/illustrator Fiona Woodcock and the trailer was animated by Verdant Films - something which seemed difficult to pin down when this book was getting so much attention. Such beautiful work needs to be acknowledged! Thankfully, book trailers are now eligible for Moby Awards so hopefully a) people will be more aware of those artists behind the scenes who are doing beautiful work to promote writers b) more effort will go into the quality of book trailers in general. Congratulations to Fiona Woodcock & Verdant Films! This is beautiful and unforgettable work.
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Advice For Young Girls From A Cartoon Princess



We're in that time of the pendulum swinging from one extreme to the other. For years fairy tales in popular culture have been mostly on the saccharine side. Now, we're being inundated by the opposite, in which every tale has a sordid and gruesome side and fairy tales are quickly being "rediscovered" as dark, dark, DARK.


Personally I've always favored a little darkness in my stories and fairy tales. I'm one of those girls who will happily watch thrillers, doesn't tolerate "soap", loves Halloween above all other holidays and for whom Buffy is a hero.


BUT, as fantastic and wonderful as it is to see incarnations of fairy tales springing up everywhere, it's already clear that the entertainment machine has broken things down to grind out a formula: ie. take known fairy tale, add angst/violence/darkness, use PG+ visuals and make sure the happy ending at least includes blood smears - rather than consider the original tales and find new ways (or old ways) to tell them. While I've always preferred the girls in my stories to have some gumption (and many fairy tale women do, even if it's subtle) they didn't all need to be wearing leather and able to wield a sword (though that is awesome). Unless some of the fairy tale treatments in production show a lighter side people can turn to for balance (thank goodness for Mirror Mirror, as campy as it appears it will be) it won't be long before people start demanding their happily ever afters back.
Goth Snow White Laptop Decal - is this where we're headed before we go back to Glitter Land?
Before you nod your head too vigorously in agreement, I wanted to remind you of the extreme we've come from, if for no other reason than to say we would best be served by something in between. (I don't mean in each film or series, I mean in the overall offerings available, after all, every one likes something a little different, and I believe there is an important and valid place for Disney offerings, as long as this isn't the sum total representation of our fairy tales).



These videos below have been around for a little while and are based on the Disney versions of the princesses so you probably already have an idea of where this might be going, especially with a title like: Advice For Young Girls From A Cartoon Princess.

Um, I'll just let you watch...

First, advice from Belle:
Then Ariel:
And finally Snow White:
You know what? After seeing these again, I'm ready to go and watch all the dark fairy tale versions available right now as long as it doesn't devolve into true horror. That's something I will never choose to watch.
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On Swans, "Snow White" and OUAT

Now that Once Upon A Time is headed to the UK, articles outside the US are starting to pop up to promote the series and explain the premise of the show for newbies. While there isn't much I haven't read before I though I'd post excerpts of a couple of things that caught my eye agin yesterday.
The first talks about swans in fairy tales and Emma's name, of which her surname is, very deliberately, "Swan".

From stuff.co.nz (New Zealand) February 6, 2012 (remember they're a day ahead of US folk):

Every detail of the plot has been carefully thought out, down to Emma's surname – which producers are quick to point out is no connection to Twilight's Bella Swan. 
"I didn't know that that was the last name of the woman in Twilight until two weeks ago," says executive-producer Edward Kitsis. 
Character Emma Swan in a key scene from the OUAT pilot
 "If we knew, I don't know if we would have named her Swan! But we loved the idea of what a swan is to fairy tales." 
"They're very meaningful creatures and especially with how they're establishing Emma in the story – she's the link between fairytale and reality," Morrison says. "Often in literature and in religious references, swans are the unity between divinity and humanity. So it seemed a great symbolic fit for her to have that name, not even realising that she might be the link."

Photographer & subject unknown. Source
I'm not going to add anything on the fascinating subject of swans in myth and fairy tale, as it's a thesis-worthy subject (and I don't have the room or the time!). Instead I'll focus on the Once-specific use to say that apart from the link Emma is supposed to be, I wonder what else the use of Swan might imply in her name? Although Emma is no ugly duck, she certainly fits the Andersen story in being misplaced from birth, being unable to find her home, being bullied about by various creatures and (we assume) eventually finding where she belongs. I guess we'll just have to wait and see...

(There's a nice detailed character bio of Emma Swan HERE with facts known and important story moments along with a nice family tree chart.)

The second thing is about why this premise (fairy tale characters losing - and trying to find - their "happily ever afters" in the real world) and why now, and I'm going to highlight the sentence that caught my eye the most here:
Magic and mythology aside, Kitsis says ultimately he hopes the show will convey an underlying message of hope in today's often-dark times. 
"I think we can all agree that right now, everyone's scared shitless at what's going on in the world. 
"We wanted to write about hope because it's the one thing that's really missing right now and that's why we're seeing so many fairytales and Snow White movies – there's a reason Snow White originally came out during The Depression. (Emphasis mine.)

"People like fairytales for the same reason they buy lottery tickets – so you can tell your boss to go to hell and retire to an apartment in Paris. 
"That's what a fairytale is; one day you're doing laundry for your evil stepsisters and the next your fairy godmother says, `Go to the ball,' and your happy ending comes. Our goal is for one hour a week to get people to sit back and be transported into a place that leaves them a little more hopeful about life than it was an hour before."
Snow White With Apple by Regina Alphonso 
For some reason I never before thought to link the popularity and success of Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs* in being released in The Depression, now 75 years ago, with the current fairy tale zeitgeist/demand happening in the all-too-present depression! 

(OK, for all those who are saying "Well, duh!" you can all stop rolling your eyes now.) 

More than Cinderella, which is a story capitalist America has loved and revered as "their fairy tale" for a few generations now, there is something about the Snow White story which speaks of hope in dark times. No matter if you think of the Disney version or the Grimm Brother's Little Snow White, something about being able to survive all life throws at you - even death - is very appealing.

*For all things Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Filmic Light: Snow White Sanctum is THE blog to go read. It's huge, extensive, well researched and has the best collection of Snow White facts, behind-the-scenes and development images as well as anything merchandise related. You name it, it's there!
**Swan fairy tale inspired image at head found HERE.
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