Theodora Goss's Blog, page 18

Writing Lesson: Observation

I thought it might be interesting to put down some of the things I’ve learned from teaching writing.  From writing too, of course, but I find that when I teach writing, I tend to make certain points over and over.  Because these are the sorts of things that many writing students need to work on.  So I thought they might be interesting to point out here as well, for those of you who are writers, or who simply want to improve your writing . . .

The first one I want to talk about has to do with observation.  If you want to be a writer, you need to also be an observer . . . someone who is curious about the physical world around you. I don’t know about you, but I find it harder to write about the physical world than about mental states. It’s easy enough to describe what someone is thinking, but try to describe someone walking down stairs. I mean, in a way that makes it interesting.

(Ironically, writing students often think the way to keep a narrative interesting is to include action scenes. But action scenes can get very boring, very quickly. It’s often less interesting to watch a character act than to hear her think. Physical actions are usually interesting to the extent that they illuminate something else: the character herself, the world in which she is acting, etc.)

When describing the physical world, it’s very easy to fall into clichés. And the best way to avoid clichés is to observe closely, to see things as they are instead of as people say they are. To see what actually is.

So here is an exercise for any writers among you: go and observe. I do it sometimes sitting on the metro, where I can see so many faces, all different. I think about what makes them different, what distinguishes them from one another. I try to remind myself to observe, because it’s so easy not to see, isn’t it? To go through our days, particularly when we’re busy, and simply miss what is around us. The colors of leaves on the sidewalk. The different kinds of stone in the buildings. And the world is hard to describe anyway, because it’s so specific, each part of it different from every other part, and yet the words we have are “gray stone” and “autumn trees,” and it’s hard for writing to get at that specificity. But we have to try.

I was thinking about this recently as I read a description of a character in Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark. The description comes right at the beginning of the book, two paragraphs in:

“Dr. Archie was barely thirty. He was tall, with massive shoulders which he held stiffly, and a large, well-shaped head. He was a distinguished-looking man, for that part of the world, at least. There was something individual in the way in which his reddish-brown hair, parted cleanly at the side, brushed over his high forehead. His nose was straight and thick, and his eyes were intelligent. He wore a curly, reddish mustache and an imperial, cut trimly, which made him look a little like the picture of Napoleon III. His hands were large and well kept, but ruggedly formed, and the backs were shaded with crinkly red hair. He wore a blue suit of wooly, wide-waled serge; the traveling men had known at a glance that it was made by a Denver tailor. The doctor was always well-dressed.”

This, by the way, is what Napoleon III looked like:

But I can imagine Dr. Archie without that image. He’s stuck in a small town in Colorado, but I know he will be a strong character, simply from the way he’s described. It’s a long description — you probably would not find one as long in a modern novel, since novels now are expected to move at a faster pace. But Cather avoids any clichés. She includes generalizations (“always well-dressed”), but also backs them up with specifics (the Denver tailor). And notice the information she does not give us: we don’t know the color of his eyes. It’s standard in student writing to find a description that focuses primarily on hair and eye color. Here Cather gives us hair color, but not just on Dr. Archie’s head. We also learn about his mustache and the hair on the back of his hands. We do learn that his eyes were intelligent, which is actually what we most need to know about him.

Do you see what she’s doing? She’s describing what we would probably notice if we actually met Dr. Archie. These are the things about him that stand out, that make him different from other people. That are specific to him.

So when you’re observing, you really have to observe two things at once: what is in front of you, and yourself noticing. You have to see how you’re seeing. And not just what is static, but also gestures.  Here Cather gets gesture in a bit with the stiff shoulders; it’s a static description, but we get a sense for how he holds them, for how Dr. Archie moves.  When you’re observing, think about how people move, how they walk down stairs, or put their hand on the railing, or look back up when they reach the landing. How do they turn back their heads? What do their gestures look like?

It occurred to me, writing this post, that writing handbooks often tell you how to write, focusing on the craft of writing itself. But they don’t often tell you how to be a writer: how to prepare yourself to write. How to go through the world as a writer, finding and absorbing the material you will need. Because writing doesn’t come out of your head. Oh, if only it were so easy! No, writing comes out of other writing, and out of your lived experiences. If it comes only out of other writing, it’s merely imitative. If it comes only out of lived experiences, it’s often unformed, uninformed. Like a long diary entry, uninteresting to read. Good writing happens when you’ve absorbed a great many things, both from books and from life, and they’ve mixed pretty thoroughly in you, as though you were a cocktail shaker. And then you pour it out, into whatever form you’ve chosen or it’s chosen for itself (whether a poem, or short story, or novel).

So if you want to be a writer, give yourself homework: go out and observe.

This, by the way, is my copy of The Song of the Lark, from 1924.

Small Details

Details matter.

Once upon a time, a long time ago (specifically, while I was in college), I took a poetry class. It was my introduction to the fact that taking a class with a Famous Poet doesn’t mean it’s going to be any good (it wasn’t). And that’s where I first heard the phrase “God is in the details.” I’m not sure where I heard “The Devil is in the details,” which I suppose is a sort of companion phrase. They both essentially mean the same thing, which is that details matter. (In my poetry class, the professor meant that the poem is in the details, which is both true and not true. He was referring to the small descriptive details that are at the heart of modern free verse. But the poem is also in the details of rhythm and rhyme.)

I was thinking of this last night, because it was the first night in about two weeks when I haven’t been working (frantically trying to finish the tasks of the semester). And instead of going straight to sleep, which is of course what I should have done, I stayed up to sew cherry red bobbles on my lampshade. Because decorating is also in the details — if the details aren’t there, aren’t right, you haven’t decorated at all. You’re just arranged furniture.

There is a sort of rule that I’ve been hearing about, mostly from business people: since 20% of your effort goes into achieving 80% of a task, and the remaining 80% goes into achieving the final 20%, you should focus on achieving that first 80%. As for the rest, “the perfect is the enemy of the good,” right? I suppose there’s nothing wrong with thinking that way, or acting on it, in certain industries. But there are places where the difference between 80% and 100%, or even 90% if you can’t get all the way there, is huge. Is everything.

One of those places is the arts. The difference between an artist giving 80% and 100% is the work of art itself. You can tell a painting, a novel, that isn’t at 100%. Where the artist or writer said, “that’s good enough.” What makes an artist great is knowing where 100% is, and doing his or her best to get there. Maybe not achieving it — probably not achieving it, because who are we kidding, art is hard. But trying anyway.

When I’m decorating, I add the bobbles. (Which I love in part because they’re slightly ridiculous, as though my lampshades belonged at a circus. This morning, I added bobbles to the other lampshade. Now I have two lampshades with red bobbles, like circus clowns.) When I’m writing, I sweat over the commas and semicolons. The novel I’m writing — I’ve read the entire manuscript out loud to myself, to hear what the sentences sound like. Over the next few days, I need to go over it one more time before sending it to Important People. Just to make sure there aren’t any stupid mistakes.

As I said, I suppose there are places where 80% is enough, and you can let the other 20% go. But not the spaces I work in: not in teaching, not in writing. And it’s not a way that I particularly want to live, because I care about the details, about getting to 100%. And there’s another saying that I’ve always remembered: “The way you do one thing is the way you do everything.” I think that’s often true: people who are conscientious in one area tend to be conscientious in other areas as well. I know it’s true for me: the better I get at one thing, the better I get at others. It’s as though each thing I do is a learning process. Putting red bobbles on my lampshades provides a lesson about writing, about teaching. About living.

Because in the end it’s about how we live, isn’t it? In the end, everything is. And everything can provide lessons. Even time spent sewing on red bobbles . . .

The photo above is from this morning: some of my sewing supplies scattered on the daybed in the living room, where I was working. The cigarette tin holds needles, the tea tin holds buttons, and the old Altoids tin holds my pins. The photo below is one of my lampshades, the one next to the Christmas tree, with red bobbles.

Tidying Up

I read the most charming book, recently. It’s called The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing, by Marie Kondo. The author is a television star in Japan, where she has a show in which she . . . you guessed it, goes to people’s houses and helps them organize their possessions. Helps them tidy up. After reading the book, I watched clips from several episodes on YouTube, in Japanese of course. A lot of what she does is talk to people, and I’m guessing that she’s asking them what they love, which of their possessions are truly important to them. Because Kondo has a different approach to tidying up, one I found interesting and valuable.

The book is charming in part because Kondo is so obsessive, much more than I could ever be. But I’m going to describe what I found valuable in her book, the ideas that stood out to me. Because I need order to work well — I need my environment to be tidy.

I know there have been articles on writers and how messy they can be. Some of them need mess, need disorder — they say within that disorder, they know where everything is. They get angry if anyone tries to tidy up. I’m not like that: I need my environment to be organized. I think it has to do with the way I think. My mind is itself a tidy place, or wants to be. It doesn’t like to be untidy, with important things tucked into the wrong places and forgotten. I do so much, have so many projects at once, that it’s really the only way I can operate. And one of the best ways to tidy my mind is to keep my physical environment clean, clearly organized. I don’t like inner or outer mess.

There are two other reasons I don’t like mess. One is that I need to live efficiently. I have so much to do that it’s frustrating when I have to spend time searching for a set of notes I knew I put somewhere. Or keys. Or change. If I’m working on a research project, I need to know which books I have relevant to that project, and where to find them. And second, I want to live in a beautiful space. Mess can be beautiful, but have you noticed that a beautiful mess is almost always intentional and intensely curated? Edward Gorey’s house was a beautiful mess, but he was an artist. It’s actually much more difficult to create a beautiful mess than simple neatness. So I try to keep things neat.

But I do fall into messiness sometimes, particularly when I don’t have time to clean. When I’m simply too busy.

So here are the central concepts from Kondo’s book that are particularly important to me:

1. You should only have things that bring you joy. This was a revelation, actually. What Kondo does, and I did not do this, is have people bring out all their possessions and put them on the floor. Then, she tells them to hold each one in their hands and decide whether that item brings them joy. If it doesn’t, it goes.

I thought I was being very practical by keeping things I had not worn for a long time, because I might need them again someday. But Kondo would say, while those things were useful to you once, they have outlived their usefulness. They are now ready to go away, wherever they’re supposed to go next. In a way, by keeping them, you’re impeding the flow of both your and their lives. Someone else could potentially use that coat. And then there are things that have outlived their usefulness entirely, and simply need to be thrown away. Old receipts don’t necessarily want to stay with you, to clutter up your drawers. They know when it’s time for them to move on, and so should you.

Did I mention that Kondo talks a fair amount about Shinto? It’s very clear that she believes all your things have spirit. If they’re no longer giving you joy, not only should they move on, they actually want to move on.

This prompted me to go through my closets and bookshelves. I try not to keep things I don’t love, but even I found things I was keeping that didn’t give me joy: some books I had bought because I felt as though I should read them, some clothes that were such a bargain at the time. I took several large bags to Goodwill.

2. Once you have discarded everything that doesn’t give you joy, make sure everything you’re keeping has its proper place. You should have a designated place for everything.

3. And you should make a habit of putting everything in its place. Now, this is difficult for me at the moment. Although I moved into this apartment six months ago, I’m still decorating. So there are paint cans on the kitchen counter, which is clearly not a place to store paint cans. (I just painted three lamps, and next come the shelves in what I glamorously call the walk-in closet, because you can walk into it, but is really a tiny room under the stairs, with a rod and drawers.) But I do try to make sure that whenever I take anything out of its place, I put it back. I notice that if it’s sitting out of place after I used it, I start to feel uncomfortable. This is partly Kondo’s fault: she makes me feel as though everything I own is sentient! As though my socks have feelings. (And how do I know they don’t?) Things like to be in their proper places, she says. And I know mine do.

There is a final concept in her book that I really like. She says that every day, when you enter your home, you should bow to it and thank it, and all the things in it, for taking care of you. For sheltering you, supporting you. Because after all, that’s what your things do, from socks to frying pans. I don’t actually bow down to my apartment (or at least not often!), but I like the idea of gratitude toward your things. That’s where the impulse to keep them neat, to take care of them back, ultimately comes from.

Heroine’s Journey: The Dark Forest

I don’t want to leave the Fairytale Heroine’s Journey for too long, because I don’t want to forget what I was writing. And anyway, I particularly want to talk about the dark forest. If you’re not sure what I’m talking about, take a look at my blog post “The Heroine’s Journey II“: it will explain what I’m doing.

And I have some good news! I’ve been asked to write an article about this idea of mine, about the Fairytale Heroine’s Journey. I won’t tell you where yet, until the article is written, submitted, and accepted. Then, of course, I’ll make an official announcement. But writing the article will help me develop my ideas.

So, let’s talk about dark forests!

This is one of the steps I described in the Fairytale Heroine’s Journey: “The heroine enters the dark forest.” There is a subset of fairy tales that is about the progress of a woman’s life. “Cinderella” belongs to it, as do “Snow White,” “Sleeping Beauty,” and “Vasilisa the Beautiful.” These are tales that show the heroine going on a journey, and that journey has certain steps. The steps are not always present, but they usually are. They do not always happen in the same order, and there are of course variations. As I wrote, I think of this as a meta-tale type, a structure that fits a number of the traditional Aarne-Thompson tale types. And one of those steps is entering the dark forest.

We see this in “Snow White” when she flees the huntsman: she must run though the forest. In “Sleeping Beauty,” as I pointed out, the forest grows up around her. We do not see the dark forest in Perrault’s “Cinderella,” but the forest actually comes to Cinderella in the Grimms’ version: she asks her father for the branch of a hazel tree, which she plants on her mother’s grave, and it showers gold and silver down on her in the form of the three dresses and dancing shoes. Most fairytales involving journeys have dark forests in them, for both a practical and a metaphorical reason. Practically, journeys used to involve dark forests: the tales I’m looking at are generally European, and there were dark forests between the villages, towns, and castles, the places of civilization. Going anywhere, even to grandmother’s house, meant going through the forest. And in the forest lurked dangers, such as wolves and wicked dwarves. But there is a metaphorical reason as well. The dark forest is an intuitive image for when we are lost, or possibly lost. It’s the place where we can lose our way and even ourselves.

For us, reading the fairy tales today, the dark forest functions as a metaphor for all the ways we get lost: anxiety, grief, depression. It’s where we can’t see ahead of us, where the trees are too dense. Where it’s too dark under the canopy. We look around and think, “Where am I going?” Or even, “Where is there to go? Is there a way out of here? Is there anything other than dark forest?”

There is, of course. There are kindly dwarves’ cottages, and huts on chicken legs, and castles ruled by white cats. You can get to those places, as long as you keep going. One thing fairy tales teach us is that there’s always a way out of the dark forest. Indeed, the dark forest often comes rather early in the tales. It’s an initial state of being lost. When you’re in the dark forest, most of the story is still to come.

There’s another thing I realized about the dark forest, when I was going through a small patch of it myself. (It was the forest of having a great deal of work to do, and too many deadlines, and not getting enough sleep.) At the time it came as such a revelation that I tweeted it, and so many people retweeted it that I realized it was something people needed to hear. It was this:



The heroine never dies in the dark forest.

Seriously, never. When you’re in the dark forest, you’re afraid. You feel as though it might be the end of the story: you might be lost forever. But it’s never the end of the story, and that’s another thing that fairy tales teach us. The dark forest is where you’re lost and afraid, but it’s not where you die. It’s only a part of the journey, not the whole of it. The dark forest has one power over you, which is the power to frighten you. But that’s it. And that realization can help you keep going.

I should say here that the heroine does die later, but in a fairy tale, death is a precursor to rebirth. Death is actually necessary for the heroine to become who she is. Sort of like the caterpillar becoming a butterfly.

So if you’re in a dark forest right now, and I bet some of you are, because patches of them can appear around any bend of the road, here’s what I want you to keep in mind:

1. You are a heroine.

2. You are on a journey, and on that journey, a number of things can happen.

3. One of those things is entering the dark forest. But other heroines have been on this journey before you, and they have something to teach you about the dark forest. Think of their journeys as maps that you can use for your own.

4. The heroine never dies in the dark forest.

5. The dark forest only has one power: to make you afraid. It’s all right to be afraid. But keep going, keep going.

6. On the other side of the dark forest are all sorts of adventures. You will have to share your loaf of bread with the birds. You will find a tree with golden apples. A talking snake will tell you what you need to know. You don’t know yet what those adventures will be. Keep going and find out.

(This is an illustration for “Cinderella” by Viktor P. Mohn.)

Daily Rituals

This morning, I read a blog post by the author Steven Barnes, who was a teacher of mine at Clarion, many years ago. Steve is also a personal coach, spiritual teacher, and martial artist: the sort of person who is always working on becoming a better version of himself, and teaching others how to become better as well. Here’s the post: “Your Life Is Not a ‘Lemon.'” And here’s the part of it that really struck me:

“You need to have a daily ritual of thought, movement, and emotion. Tell me your daily rituals, and I’ll tell you your life. Exercise daily and keep a food journal? That’s one body. No exercise and food unconsciousness? Another. Daily meditation and journaling? One psyche. Allowing the cess-river of daily news, political debate, human negativity and existential angst to flow over you unchallenged? That’s another. Daily checking your Mint.com account to see your finances and net worth? That’s one financial path. Inability to balance your check book? That’s another. Re-writing your goals daily and being crystal clear on what a perfect ‘today’ would be to implement them? That’s one life. Vague or no goals, and hoping for ‘luck’ to bring your dreams to you? That’s another. Daily focus on goals, actions, faith and gratitude? That’s one life. Rooting in the trough of our unfulfilled dreams, betrayals, failures, fears, guilt, blame and shame? That’s another.

“It isn’t fair that we have to take control. It isn’t un-fair. It just ‘is.’ Stand on the beach and scream at the waves that it is ‘unfair’ your shoes are getting wet. Or . . . back away. Or . . . take off your shoes and wiggle your toes in the wet sand.”

Basically, what Steve is getting at is that we can largely determine what our lives are like. Our lives are our daily lives: our experience of them is determined by the daily choices we make. And so we can make our lives good ones, healthy and happy and productive. Or we can make bad choices, and end up with unhealthy, unhappy, unproductive lives. It all depends on the small choices we make on a daily basis. Whether to exercise or not. Whether to eat the whole wheat turkey sandwich or the doughnut. Oh, not every choice has to be perfect! Not every choice can be. But our lives are better if most of our choices are good ones. And that happens if good choices are ingrained, and actually chosen automatically. If they are habits or rituals.

Steve talks about this as a way to deal with problems like depression, and I can speak to that, because I’ve been there. As readers of this blog know, I went through a period of serious depression when I was trying to finish my PhD dissertation. It was very difficult, but I eventually got out of it, with therapy and by building good habits. Now I try to maintain those habits, because I know that without them, I won’t be as healthy, either physically or mentally.

So what are my daily rituals? I have a healthy breakfast. Every day, I do twenty minutes of pilates, plus I walk a lot. Healthy lunch (cheese sandwich on whole wheat bread, apple), healthy snack (nuts, fruit, dark chocolate), healthy dinner (whole wheat pasta or brown rice with vegetables). Every day, time to rest and relax. All right, that last one I’m not as good at as I should be, and I definitely haven’t had enough sleep lately! I need to work on that. Also meditation. But the point is, the way you live on a daily basis affects the larger aspects of your life. The daily rituals are what keep me healthy. They are what allow me to be productive.

Some people say that when you’re depressed, you can’t do those things. That’s what depression is all about. But as someone who’s been there, I say that you can try, and you can start, and they will make you feel better. And for people who aren’t depressed, this is the way to have a good life: develop good daily rituals. These are the things that help me in particular:

1. Eat healthily.

2. Exercise daily.

3. At least once a day, do something that clears my head, that allows me to relax.

4. Keep my space neat and organized. Make my bed, do the dishes; if there is a mess, organize it.

5. Write, so the ideas don’t start clamoring around in my head.

6. Put a list of the larger things I want to accomplish up where I can see it. You know, the life things. Make sure that every day, I work on that list. That I’m accomplishing the larger things as well as the smaller ones.

7. Get some sleep. All right, no, I’m not as good at this one as I should be! But I’m working on it . . .

What are your daily rituals? It seems to me that most people don’t have good daily rituals; they live haphazardly. But you who read this blog — I bet you have them . . .

This is a picture of my Christmas tree. Just because it’s so pretty! It’s a yearly rather than a daily ritual, of course. But it ties me to the year, to time. I think our daily rituals do the same thing, actually. They make life more real for us . . .

Doing It All

I miss blogging.

I used to blog every day. And then I went to several times a week, and then recently I’ve barely blogged at all. It’s because I’ve been so busy. The problem with getting to do all the things you want to, is that you’re doing all the things. And there are still things I want to do that I don’t have time for.

So what am I doing? I have two wonderful academic positions, both of which I love: teaching writing to undergraduates at Boston University and in the Stonecoast MFA Program. This year, I finished a novel, so I am writing, even though it’s been a while since I’ve had a short story come out. I have almost enough short stories for the next short story collection; I mean, I have enough, but I want to write one more. And then I want to write the second novel, the sequel to the one I just finished.

I’m already into describing what I want to do, aren’t I? Instead of focusing on what I’m doing. The problem is that there doesn’t seem to be enough time. In these last few weeks in particular, finishing the academic semester, I’ve been exhausted, not sleeping enough and not eating very well. (I mean, I eat very healthily, or I wouldn’t be able to do what I do. But when I’m up past midnight, I get hungry again, and then I’m eating five meals a day. Like a Hobbit . . .)

So what is the problem exactly? I think it’s the sense that I’m doing so much for other people, and not doing all that much for myself. Not getting enough time to write, but also not getting to connect in the way I want to. In a way that blogging allows me to.

A friend of mine who is a writer once asked me why I do it, because it seemed to her as though it was taking time that I could be doing other work, like writing short stories. But blogging is easy for me, in a way writing short stories isn’t. It doesn’t take as much energy. And it allows me to get ideas out there, talk to people directly. I think I need that. I spend so much time talking as an authority on things. You know, I walk into a classroom and I’m the Professor. Or I’m advising a student on how to revise a story, a novel. Blogging is really the only place where I get to say, Here’s what confuses me. Here’s what my day is like. Here’s what I’m afraid of. (Failure and irrelevance, at the moment. Those are my particular fears.)

It’s the place where I get to speak without an editor.

I don’t know how much I can get back to it. There’s so much else I need to do. But I think that if I don’t get my ideas out, they get stuck in my head, and then it’s as though they’re all backed up, and they get snarled. I think I need a place to speak, and I think it needs to be public, because that’s who I am. It’s not enough for me to talk to friends. I’m a storyteller. Blogging is my way of telling the story of myself, and it allows me to get myself out of the way, so I can tell other stories as well.

Conclusion: I need a way to make sure that I’m writing. Otherwise, I get sick. I start to feel all wrong . . . And it’s important for me to write fiction, but when I can’t, blogging can fill that gap. It can keep me writing regularly, so I don’t feel as though I’ve somehow lost it . . . or lost myself. I need it the way I need to work out in the morning, or take a hot bath at the end of the day — because it keeps me healthy. I suppose the lesson here is that if you want to do it all, people will eventually let you. And then you will be doing it all, and you will go, all right, but I still need time for myself. Even if it’s writing a silly blog post!

This is me, on my way to class, on the last week of classes. With the first snowflakes of the season on my hat . . .

Making Clafoutis

I posted a picture of my Peach Clafoutis on Facebook, and people asked me to share the recipe, so here it is! I’m interrupting my series of blog posts on fairy tale heroines and their journeys to bring you a little snack . . .

First you should know that I don’t use white flour or sugar, because I’m trying to eat more healthily, even when eating desserts! If you want a standard clafoutis recipe, there are many available on the internet. This is a slightly healthier version. I’ve found that you can use whole wheat pastry flour to substitute for white flour, but it is more absorbent, so you typically need less of it. I also use the brownish sugar that is usually labeled “organic sugar” and is a little less processed than the white variety. It can be used just like white sugar, but it has a flavor of its own, a bit more caramely than white sugar. So the flavor of whatever you make will be a bit stronger.

This is a good time to preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

Clafoutis, the way I make it, is basically a thickened custard over fruit. I’ve seen some recipes in which American cooks describe it as a baked pancake, but I think that means they’re using way too much four. It should taste like a custard.

Here are my ingredients for the clafoutis:

1/3 cut flour

3 tbsp. sugar

2 eggs

1 cup milk (I use 2%)

1/2 tsp. vanilla

For the fruit, cherries are traditional. I like peaches. You can also use strawberries, blackberries, and probably raspberries, although I’ve never tried the raspberries myself. In winter especially, when fruit are so expensive, I use frozen fruit, thawed and drained. (The juice will change the consistency of the clafoutis, so drain as much as possible.) When I’m using frozen fruit, I add a tablespoon of sugar to the fruit, because otherwise it tends not to be sweet enough.

Take a baking dish, preferably a pretty one (like the glass pie dish I used here) because you may serve the clafoutis in it. Butter it and then put the fruit on the bottom, arranged however you wish, but in a thin layer.

Assembling the clafoutis is incredibly easy. Just mix all the ingredients except the fruit, starting with the solids and then adding liquids while mixing so it’s not lumpy. I use a hand-held electric mixer.

Then you just pour the clafoutis mixture over the fruit.

Bake in a 350 degree oven until it’s done, which depends on your oven, so I won’t try to give you an exact time. If you’re used to baking, you know there’s a moment when it smells so good, and that’s just before it’s time to take the clafoutis out. Then there’s a moment when you think, I can’t smell it anymore, and that’s it, that’s usually the time. The clafoutis is done when the top is golden brown.

It’s best to let it cool a little bit, but warm clatoutis is a wonderful treat, and it’s just as good cold the next day. Some people sprinkle powdered sugar on top, but I think it’s quite sweet enough as is, so I would only do that if serving it at a party. And here you go, a bowl of Peach Clafoutis!

The Heroine’s Journey II

Almost a month ago now, I wrote a blog post called “The Heroine’s Journey,” in which I started mapping the journey I saw heroines going on, in the fairy tales I was teaching. Since then, I’ve gone through three fairy tales, “Snow White,” “Sleeping Beauty,” and “The Goose-Girl,” to see where my theory was right, and where it was wrong — or incomplete. I think that’s important, because I want my theory to use useful, to reflect what is actually there in the tales I’m talking about.

You see, I really care about good scholarship. And so much of what is written about the hero’s or heroine’s journey is not good scholarship.

So what am I actually claiming? That there is a certain set of fairy tales that have heroines, and a subset in which the heroine goes on a journey. And those journeys take a particular shape: they are metaphors for women’s lives. Not necessarily for women’s lives in general, at all times and everywhere. But at least in the societies in which the tales I’m looking at were told, which were generally European, from the 16th through the 19th centuries. So the Fairytale Heroine’s Journey is like a meta-tale type. (If you don’t know, the concept of a tale type was created by the Finnish folklorist Antti Aarne. Folktales are assigned to tale types by their narrative elements: for example, “Snow White” belongs to tale type 709, along with other tales that have similar plots, even if many of their details are different. The tale type is like the trunk of the tale, the details like its branches and leaves. Cinderella can have shoes of gold, or silver, or glass, but the important element will be the shoe that only fits one woman.) There are a number of different tale types that fit into this meta-type, The Fairytale Heroine’s Journey.

I also want to make another claim, one that isn’t meant to be scholarly: that this journey can teach us things about our own journeys, because our society isn’t as different as we sometimes think from the societies in which fairy tales were told or  written. And women’s lives aren’t as different, either. The Fairytale Heroine’s Journey is not inherently conservative or liberating. It can be either, depending on how it’s handled: the Grimms give us a more liberating “Cinderella” than does Perrault, I think. And the women writers of the salons, like Madame d’Aulnoy, use this structure over and over again, in part for social critique. The Fairytale Heroine’s Journey is, however, always illuminating: it teaches us things about women’s lives, how they were lived and perceived. And it can teach us something about our own lives . . .

Here’s what I’m not claiming. That this particular Heroine’s Journey is a timeless mythic structure. I don’t think it is — I think it’s very much a product of particular cultures and time periods. (As I think Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey is as well. I adore and respect Campbell, but those sorts of claims ignore the extent to which stories are products of their particular societies. They focus on similarities and ignore differences. And the differences are very, very important.) I also don’t claim that what I’m describing is a psychological structure, embedded deep in the human mind. For one thing, I have no evidence for such a claim, and for another, I’m not particularly interested in it. What I do claim is that the Fairytale Heroine’s Journey is a narrative structure we return to over and over again, that we seem to find particularly useful or satisfying. It would be interesting, actually, to see where else I could find it — is there a way, for example, in which heroines in literary fiction go through a fairytale heroine’s journey? Does Tess of the d’Urbervilles? But that is so far beyond what I’m trying to do right now. Now, I’m just trying to understand it. And this post is about consolidating what I’ve learned from looking at three tales. (I told you, I’m trying to do careful scholarship, and that takes time. My goal is to go through twelve tales — and then, hopefully, I’ll have learned something.)

So, based on the stories I’ve read so far, and my general knowledge of fairy tales, here are the steps in the Fairytale Heroine’s Journey. Notice that I’ve refined this list from the one I started with, in my original post.

1. The heroine receives gifts. Sleeping Beauty receives gifts from the fairies. Donkeyskin receives three dresses from her father and a ring from her mother. Cinderella receives three dresses and magical shoes from the hazel tree.

2. The heroine leaves or loses her home. Donkeyskin leaves home to escape her father. The Goose-girl leaves home to be married. Cinderella loses her home when she is forced to live in the kitchen and sleep on the hearth.

3. The heroine enters the dark forest. Snow White runs away from the huntsman, though the dark forest. The dark forest grows up around Sleeping Beauty.

4. The heroine finds a temporary home. Snow White lives with the dwarves. Donkeyskin lives in the castle kitchen. Vasilisa lives in Baba Yaga’s hut.

5. The heroine finds friends and helpers. Snow White’s dwarves, Cinderella’s doves. The head of a dead horse, three old women by the roadside, the winds themselves — all sorts of people and things can be friends and helpers.

6. The heroine learns to work. Donkeyskin cooks, Snow White and Cinderella keep house. The Goose-girl tends geese. Vasilisa works for Baba Yaga.

7. The heroine endures temptations and trials. Snow White is tempted with lace, a comb, and an apple. Sleeping Beauty is tempted by the spinning wheel. The heroine of “East o’ the Sun and West o’ the Moon” must travel far to find her husband.  In some stories, the trials involve climbing glass mountains or wearing through iron shoes.

8. The heroine dies or loses herself. Snow White dies, Sleeping Beauty falls into a death-like sleep. The Goose-girl is not recognized as a princess. Cinderella is not recognizes as herself (despite having danced with the prince for hours).

9. The heroine finds her true partner. Sometimes this is an entire subplot, in which the heroine must first lose and then find her true partner. I’m still working on this one, but in some stories the finding just happens (“Snow White,” “Sleeping Beauty”), while in others it involves losing and a long search (“East o’ the Sun” being one example).

10. The heroine is revived or recognized. Dead heroines are revived (Snow White, Sleeping Beauty), lost heroines are recognized (Donkeyskin, Cinderella).

11. The heroine enters her true home. Usually, the true home is a castle.

12. The heroine’s tormentor is punished. She is made to dance in red-hot iron shoes, or her eyes are pecked out. Or she is turned into a living statue. Or rolled down the hill in a barrel filled with nails.  The punishment is usually, actually or metaphorically, created by the tormentor herself.

That’s what it looks like right now, but I’m going to keep working through stories, trying to figure this out. It’s like a tale type: there are all sorts of variations, and yet you can see — or at least I can see — an underlying pattern in these tales. And that pattern is of a woman’s life.

The illustration is by Arthur Rackham.

Heroine’s Journey: The Goose-Girl

The next step on our fairytale heroine’s journey is “The Goose-Girl,” from the Brothers Grimm (as translated by Margaret Hunt, 1884). You remember the steps, right?

1. The heroine receives gifts.

2. The heroine leaves or loses her home.

3. The heroine enters the dark forest.

4. The heroine finds a temporary home.

5. The heroine finds friends and helpers.

6. The heroine learns to work.

7. The heroine endures temptations and trials.

8. The heroine dies or visits the dead.

9. The heroine finds her true partner.

10. The heroine is revived or revives another.

11. The heroine enters her true home.

12. The heroine’s tormentor is punished.

Something like that. So what happens to our heroine, the goose-girl?



There was once upon a time an old Queen whose husband had been dead for many years, and she had a beautiful daughter. When the princess grew up she was betrothed to a prince who lived at a great distance. When the time came for her to be married, and she had to journey forth into the distant kingdom, the aged Queen packed up for her many costly vessels of silver and gold, and trinkets also of gold and silver; and cups and jewels, in short, everything which appertained to a royal dowry, for she loved her child with all her heart. She likewise sent her maid in waiting, who was to ride with her, and hand her over to the bridegroom, and each had a horse for the journey, but the horse of the King’s daughter was called Falada, and could speak. So when the hour of parting had come, the aged mother went into her bedroom, took a small knife and cut her finger with it until it bled, then she held a white handkerchief to it into which she let three drops of blood fall, gave it to her daughter and said, “Dear child, preserve this carefully, it will be of service to you on your way.”

And there are Steps 1 and 2: the heroine receives gifts, and she leaves her home. The gifts are the talking horse Falada and the handkerchief with her mother’s blood. If your mother gives you a handkerchief with drops of her blood on it, don’t lose it. Just don’t.

So they took a sorrowful leave of each other; the princess put the piece of cloth in her bosom, mounted her horse, and then went away to her bridegroom. After she had ridden for a while she felt a burning thirst, and said to her waiting-maid, “Dismount, and take my cup which thou hast brought with thee for me, and get me some water from the stream, for I should like to drink.” “If you are thirsty,” said the waiting-maid, “get off your horse yourself, and lie down and drink out of the water, I don’t choose to be your servant.” So in her great thirst the princess alighted, bent down over the water in the stream and drank, and was not allowed to drink out of the golden cup. Then she said, “Ah, Heaven!” and the three drops of blood answered, “If thy mother knew, her heart would break.” But the King’s daughter was humble, said nothing, and mounted her horse again.

This happens a second time, with the maid refusing to serve the princess and the drops of blood opining that her mother’s heart would break.

And as she was thus drinking and leaning right over the stream, the handkerchief with the three drops of blood fell out of her bosom, and floated away with the water without her observing it, so great was her trouble. The waiting-maid, however, had seen it, and she rejoiced to think that she had now power over the bride, for since the princess had lost the drops of blood, she had become weak and powerless.

And there you go: I told you not to lose the handkerchief with the drops of blood, didn’t I? Without the drops of blood, the princess has lost a source of possible help, and is now in the maid’s power. Notice that we are in the middle of Step 3: we have been riding through the dark forest. The dark forest is where the princess loses her power, and more than that.

So now when she wanted to mount her horse again, the one that was called Falada, the waiting-maid said, “Falada is more suitable for me, and my nag will do for thee” and the princess had to be content with that. Then the waiting-maid, with many hard words, bade the princess exchange her royal apparel for her own shabby clothes; and at length she was compelled to swear by the clear sky above her, that she would not say one word of this to any one at the royal court, and if she had not taken this oath she would have been killed on the spot. But Falada saw all this, and observed it well.

She also loses her identity. The dark forest is where you lose who you are: Snow White loses her identity as princess when she runs away into the forest. Instead, she becomes the dwarves’ housekeeper. The other day, I had a revelation which I’ll write about more later. I thought about friends of mine who were going through metaphorical dark forests of their own, and suddenly it came to me: the heroine never dies in the dark forest. Seriously, never. The dark forest may be where she feels most alone and afraid. But she doesn’t die until later in the story. The dark forest is where she loses herself in a process of transformation. The princess is no longer herself, which is confusing and scary.

Here, the maid pretends to be the princess, and the princess has to act as maid. They come to the royal palace, and the maid is greeted as the prince’s bride.

Then the old King looked out of the window and saw her standing in the courtyard, and how dainty and delicate and beautiful she was, and instantly went to the royal apartment, and asked the bride about the girl she had with her who was standing down below in the courtyard, and who she was? “I picked her up on my way for a companion; give the girl something to work at, that she may not stand idle.” But the old King had no work for her, and knew of none, so he said, “I have a little boy who tends the geese, she may help him.”

So the princess becomes the goose-girl. And here we are at Steps 4 and 6: the heroine finds a temporary home, and she learns to work. The princess lives in the castle, but not in the right way, not in the way she should. The temporary home sometimes takes that form: it’s the true home, but not inhabited in the right way. And the princess learns to tend geese. Learning to work often involves menial work. I think this is an important step in the heroin’s journey, but one I could not see until I started this project. I did not realize how important it was, how many heroines have to clean (Cinderella), cook (Donkeyskin), tend geese. I think there’s something quite positive about it. We have a sense that princesses sit around waiting for princes to rescue them, but that’s not what happens in fairytales. No, princesses sit around tending geese. In other words, they get jobs.

The maid realizes that Falada poses a danger to her, so she orders the horse killed. Perhaps I should have called Falada a friend and helper? Yes, I think that’s what we see here: Step 5, the heroine finds friends and helpers. That’s where Falada fits. And she has to work for him, too: the princess promises the knacker a piece of gold if he will do her a favor.

There was a great dark-looking gateway in the town, through which morning and evening she had to pass with the geese: would he be so good as to nail up Falada’s head on it, so that she might see him again, more than once. The knacker’s man promised to do that, and cut off the head, and nailed it fast beneath the dark gateway.

Notice that she has her own money: did she earn it herself?  The maid took everything she had, so there’s a chance that it’s her own money, earned by her own work.  Which is also important, the possibility that she is saving herself through her own labor.

Early in the morning, when she and Conrad drove out their flock beneath this gateway, she said in passing,

“Alas, Falada, hanging there!”

Then the head answered,

“Alas, young Queen, how ill you fare!

If this your tender mother knew,

Her heart would surely break in two.”

So you see, Falada sounds a lot like the drops of blood. The princess made a mistake: she lost the handkerchief, which was a gift. But she can rectify that loss: she gave the gold coin for Falada’s head, and it will help her, speaking with the voice of the gift, speaking for her mother. Now the princess is about to endure Step 7, the temptations and trials. The greatest trial is having to be goose-girl. The lesser trial is having to deal with Conrad.



Then they went still further out of the town, and drove their geese into the country. And when they had come to the meadow, she sat down and unbound her hair which was like pure gold, and Conrad saw it and delighted in its brightness, and wanted to pluck out a few hairs. Then she said,

“Blow, blow, thou gentle wind, I say,

Blow Conrad’s little hat away,

And make him chase it here and there,

Until I have braided all my hair,

And bound it up again.”

The wind blows Conrad’s hat away, so that he has to run after it. I’m not sure why this is such an important part of the narrative? I think it reveals a sort of danger to the princess: the danger that a rough servant boy, like Conrad, could become enamored of her. Could perhaps insult or assault her? The golden hair is also important: it signifies her value, her purity. Conrad is attracted to it, but it has to be preserved for someone else, for the true partner, which Conrad most definitely is not. This scene happens again the next day, and Conrad starts to complain.

But in the evening after they had got home, Conrad went to the old King, and said, “I won’t tend the geese with that girl any longer!” “Why not?” inquired the aged King. “Oh, because she vexes me the whole day long.” Then the aged King commanded him to relate what it was that she did to him. And Conrad said, “In the morning when we pass beneath the dark gateway with the flock, there is a sorry horse’s head on the wall, and she says to it,

“Alas, Falada, hanging there!”

And the head replies,

“Alas, young Queen how ill you fare!

If this your tender mother knew,

Her heart would surely break in two.”

And Conrad went on to relate what happened on the goose pasture, and how when there he had to chase his hat.

Hearing this, the king decides to spy on the goose-girl. He sees everything that happens, and in the evening, he calls the goose-girl to him, asking her why she speaks to Falada in that way.

“I may not tell you that, and I dare not lament my sorrows to any human being, for I have sworn not to do so by the heaven which is above me; if I had not done that, I should have lost my life.” He urged her and left her no peace, but he could draw nothing from her. Then said he, “If thou wilt not tell me anything, tell thy sorrows to the iron-stove there,” and he went away. Then she crept into the iron-stove, and began to weep and lament, and emptied her whole heart, and said, “Here am I deserted by the whole world, and yet I am a King’s daughter, and a false waiting-maid has by force brought me to such a pass that I have been compelled to put off my royal apparel, and she has taken my place with my bridegroom, and I have to perform menial service as a goose-girl. If my mother did but know that, her heart would break.”

This is a step I’m not quite sure about: Step 8, in which the heroine dies. You see, the goose-girl does not die, in any ordinary sense. Snow White dies, and Sleeping Beauty sleeps for a hundred years, which is the next best (or worst) thing  to death. But the goose-girl just crawls into the iron-stove. Isn’t that strange? It reminds me of Cinderella sleeping on the hearth, among the ashes. And that, for me, is an image of death, because we associate ashes with the dead. So perhaps there is a whisper of death here: a whisper of crawling into a small space, a space like a tomb or womb, like the belly of the wolf in “Little Red Riding Hood.” This is the only space in which the princess can whisper her secret, reveal her true identity. Over and over again, in fairy tale journeys, we see this crawling into or lying in a small space: a coffin, a tower room. The heroine has to go in, and when she comes out, it’s to transform into her true self.  Like a caterpillar becoming a chrysalis becoming a butterfly.



The aged King, however, was standing outside by the pipe of the stove, and was listening to what she said, and heard it. Then he came back again, and bade her come out of the stove. And royal garments were placed on her, and it was marvellous how beautiful she was!

So there she is: her true identity is revealed. Again we have two steps: Step 10, the heroine is revived, and Step 9, she finds her true partner.

The aged King summoned his son, and revealed to him that he had got the false bride who was only a waiting-maid, but that the true one was standing there, as the sometime goose-girl. The young King rejoiced with all his heart when he saw her beauty and youth, and a great feast was made ready to which all the people and all good friends were invited. At the head of the table sat the bridegroom with the King’s daughter at one side of him, and the waiting-maid on the other, but the waiting-maid was blinded, and did not recognize the princess in her dazzling array.

Step 11 is the heroine enters her true home, and here the princess has entered her true home, which is the same home, but she now enters it through a different door and as a different person. She is no longer in the kitchen but in the banquet-hall. And finally we see Step 12: the heroine’s tormentor is punished.



When they had eaten and drunk, and were merry, the aged King asked the waiting-maid as a riddle, what a person deserved who had behaved in such and such a way to her master, and at the same time related the whole story, and asked what sentence such an one merited? Then the false bride said, “She deserves no better fate than to be stripped entirely naked, and put in a barrel which is studded inside with pointed nails, and two white horses should be harnessed to it, which will drag her along through one street after another, till she is dead.” “It is thou,” said the aged King, “and thou hast pronounced thine own sentence, and thus shall it be done unto thee.” And when the sentence had been carried out, the young King married his true bride, and both of them reigned over their kingdom in peace and happiness.

We even have the words “true bride” here: the princess is the true bride, as the prince is her true partner.

What can we learn from “The Goose-Girl”? First, that you should not lose your gifts, but if you do, all is not lost. You may still have friends and helpers, and they will save you when your gifts cannot. Second, that even if you have to work as a goose-girl for a while, you are still a princess. You still retain your value, even if you have to hide it away from the Conrads of the world.  Third, that you must reveal your secret self in order to become it, even if it’s only to an iron-stove pipe. And then somehow, the secret will out. Your true self will be revealed. You can’t find your true home, your true partner, without revealing it.

I think there’s a final lesson here, which has to do with the violent ending of some of these tales. The maid dies a horrible death, and yet she created it herself. It reminds me of Madame de Beaumont’s “Beauty and the Beast,” in which the selfish sisters are turned to stone statues. They have the power to save themselves: all they have to do is become unselfish. Their final state is a literalization of what they were all along: statutes, cold and lifeless. In “Snow White,” the wicked queen dances to death in red-hot iron shoes, but she has been burning up all along. Her jealously is what ultimately kills her. So perhaps there’s a reason that the violent ends of the antagonists are often determined by their own words, or described as though they were acts of Fate even though someone had to heat up the iron shoes. There’s a sense in which the ends are always created by the antagonists themselves.

What shall I talk about next? Probably the need to leave home and venture into the dark forest . . .

This image is “The Goose-Girl” by Jessie Wilcox Smith.

Heroine’s Journey: Receiving Gifts

As you know, I’m taking a sort of journey: that is, I’m following along the heroine’s journey in fairy tales and trying to map its steps or stages. I call this project Mapping the Fairytale Heroine’s Journey. I started by trying to define the journey I saw in many popular fairy tales focused on heroines, and then I tested my theory by looking at two fairy tales specifically: “Snow White” and “Sleeping Beauty.” I want to keep going through fairy tales, until I’ve done twelve (which is a magical number), to document the steps. But in the meantime, I also want to look at the steps individually. So today, I’m going to write about “The heroine receives gifts.”

This seems to happen in almost all the tales I’m looking at, and the gifts seem to take two forms: attributes or physical objects. The attributes determine how the heroine lives her life and how people respond to her. The physical gifts help on her journey — as long as she keeps hold of them and uses them correctly.

Fairy tales in which the heroines are given gifts that are also attributes include “Snow White” and “Sleeping Beauty.” “Sleeping Beauty” is the best example of this sort of gift: in the Perrault version, the fairies literally come to her christening and give her beauty, wit, grace, the ability to dance and sing, even the ability to play musical instruments. Basically, everything that the perfect aristocratic girl would need at the court of Louis XIV. (Remember that literary fairy tales always reflect the time in which they were written. They may retain the common elements that make a “tale type,” but the details will differ. And details are important.) We see these sorts of gifts in a simpler form in “Snow White” as well: before she is born, her mother wishes to have a child with skin as white as snow, lips as red as blood, hair as black as ebony wood. Snow’s beauty is created by magic, by wishing: it is her mother’s gift. (How ironic, then, that her mother later wishes to kill her for that beauty — the Grimms substituted a stepmother, but in their first edition, it was Snow’s own mother who wanted her dead.)

Fairy tales in which the heroines are given physical gifts are perhaps more common. In “The Goose Girl,” the princess is given two gifts: the handkerchief with her mother’s blood on it, and the talking horse Falada. She loses the first gift, and so can’t rely on her mother’s help or protection — which is often deadly in fairy tales. If you go on a journey without your mother’s blessing, watch out! But in the end, Falada saves her. In “East o’the Sun and West o’the Moon,” the heroine is given a golden apple, a golden carding comb, and a golden spindle. She later gives these items to the troll princess in exchange for spending three nights with her lover. On the third night, he hears the story she is trying to tell him, and they can act together to save themselves as well as the other prisoners in the trolls’ castle. In “Cinderella,” the heroine receives dresses to go to the ball from, depending on the version, either her fairy godmother (Perrault) or the spirit of her dead mother in a hazel tree (Grimm). In an ancient Chinese Cinderella story, the dress and shoes come from a magical fish. “Donkeyskin” has an interesting and important variation on the gifts: in that story, the queen dies and the king decides to marry his daughter, since she’s the only one as beautiful as his dead wife. In order to put him off, she asks for three dresses: the colors of the sun, moon, and stars (although again the details — sometimes one of the dresses is the color of the sky). When he manages to provide those dresses, she asks for the skin of a magical donkey, or the fur of a hundred cats, or the skin of a hundred different animals. He provides that as well. Since he can’t be put off any longer, she disguises herself in the ugly skins and runs away, with the dresses. She later wears those dresses, in some versions to a ball like Cinderella. The prince sees her and falls in love with her. So she uses gifts gotten under terrible circumstances to save herself. Even terrible gifts can save you, if you use them correctly, the fairy tale tells us. The fairy tale heroine can use trauma in a positive way.

At the center of my theory is the idea that this structure, the fairytale heroine’s journey, is a deep narrative structure — and that it comes in part from women’s actual lives. So, let’s think about this: how does the idea of receiving gifts apply to a woman’s life? I don’t know about you, but I feel as though I’ve received a lot of gifts. Some of them are attributes: intelligence, talent, grace (although dance classes helped). Even beauty, although it took about forty years for me to feel that! Health, certainly. I have to cultivate and work on those gifts: my writing talent doesn’t do me any good unless I actually sit down and write. And don’t we also receive gifts that are objects? Maybe not golden apples, but for me, the gift of a college education. From friends, the gift of books. From my family, the gift of my grandmother’s jewelry, which came to me and connects me to the past.

What do fairy tales tell us about these kinds of gifts? First, do not lose them. Fairy tales tell us that all gifts, including attributes like beauty, can be lost. Second, use them wisely, and that means use them on your journey. Sometimes you have to give them away, to get something more valuable. Your gifts can help you. Often they are given to you by the friends and helpers that constitute another step of the journey (The heroine finds friends and helpers). You never know who these friends and helpers may be, so be kind to animals and old women who just happen to be spinning by the roadside. Third, even when you are in serious trouble, you may receive gifts that will eventually help you, as Donkeyskin does. Sometimes, they may not look like gifts–who wants a bunch of catskins? And yet the heroine uses them to save herself. Fourth and finally, even a curse may turn out to be a gift. I don’t think it’s coincidental that Sleeping Beauty is cursed at the same christening where she receives her gifts: it makes deep narrative sense that the curse would turn out to be what sets the princess on her journey, and what eventually gets her to the right place. The curse turns out to be what gives her the happy ending. So curses may be gifts in disguise . . .

(The illustration, by Arthur Rackham, is from a version of “Catskin.”)

Here are the previous blog posts I’ve written on the Fairytale Heroine’s Journey. If you want to follow along, go take a look!

The Heroine’s Journey

Heroine’s Journey: Snow White

Heroine’s Journey: Sleeping Beauty