Guest Post: Caroline Carlson on Wicked Marigold
I smiled my way through Wicked Marigold, a middle grade novel by Caroline Carlson, author of funny and fantastical books for young readers and VCFA alum. In honor of Tell a Fairytale Day (February 26) I asked Caroline to tell me more about her experience writing this romp of a fractured fairytale. Here is her reply:
“For almost as long as humans have been telling fairy tales, we’ve been fracturing them, picking up the broken bits, and reshaping them into new stories that reflect our own societies’ current interests and needs.”
Old Narratives, New Worlds: Some thoughts on the long tradition of fracturing fairy tales
by Caroline Carlson
One of the most magical things about fairy tales, I think, is how well they lend themselves to retelling. Many of the fairy tales we’re familiar with from our childhoods have traveled to us across centuries, continents, and cultures, taking on new forms and themes each time they’re shared. Any tale you can think of might once have been a violent local legend, a stern lesson in moral behavior, a myth crafted to shape a nation’s identity, a sweet bedtime story for children, the fantastic platform for a new theme park ride—or all of the above. For almost as long as humans have been telling fairy tales, we’ve been fracturing them, picking up the broken bits, and reshaping them into new stories that reflect our own societies’ current interests and needs.
Breaking and reshaping old stories is a process that I have to confess I enjoy. When I wrote Wicked Marigold, my middle grade novel that plays around with fairy-tale themes, I knew that I wanted to borrow certain familiar elements from older tales: the dazzle of magic, the conflict between good and evil, the sense of adventure and promise of a happy ending. But I wanted to ask questions, too. Is a good-versus-evil story still relevant in our own time and place, or is there a more nuanced way of looking at the world that might feel useful or interesting to today’s readers? What would happen if the protagonist of a fairy tale wasn’t an impossibly good hero but a perfectly normal kid? I built a sparkling fairy-tale world full of princesses, wizards and magic; stuck my normal kid character in the middle of it all; and started writing.
Since working on Wicked Marigold, I’ve been tossing around a theory of fairy-tale fracturing, still pretty half-baked but maybe worth pondering if you’re planning to work on a fairy tale-inspired story of your own. It goes like this: We fracture a fairy tale whenever we bring that tale into our own world, either partway or fully. Bringing the story only partway into our world—infusing it with modern Western-style character development, for example, but leaving traditional tropes intact—can have a comedic effect, like the kind I worked to create in Wicked Marigold, and this is the type of story that often comes to mind when we think of fractured fairy tales. But there is another way to fracture a tale, bringing all its elements fully into our world and writing it almost as if it were a work of contemporary fiction. Retelling a tale in this way allows a writer to approach the source material from a more serious or even somber angle. One thing I can say for sure is that both of these fracturing strategies allow us to participate in a centuries-long tradition of tugging old narratives into new worlds, creating fresh magic to enchant the next generation of readers.
Tugging old narratives. I really like that, and it’s exactly how it feels. I’m playing with this in a current work in progress, using an 11th century frame story from India, with effects both comedic (I hope) and serious. So a theory of fairytale fracturing feels worthy of the writerly baking process. Thanks, Caroline!
