I asked them to write about what they thought about the word princess. I was curious to see if they had the same complicated relationship I had with this word. Some found it easy to identify with fairy tales; some, like me, couldn’t bring themselves to believe in fairy tales based on the harsh realities they had experienced. We tried an experiment. I asked them to invent their own princess and kingdom. We used our pens to describe what our version of a princess would be like, what the rules of our kingdom would be, how we would treat the people who lived there.
