Reading Local Seattle

Handmade Tales.

The Fairy Tale Factory is the work of Amy Leigh Morgan who abandoned her professional ambitions of writing “serious and depressing stories about my hometown,” which is probably a good thing, because as a writer of sometimes serious and depressing stories about my hometown I can tell you that it isn’t much of a profession. Instead Amy constructed The Fairy Tale Factory. Workers from the factory gathered this last Tuesday at Third Place Books in Ravenna.

Fairy tales have long been a kind of secret in contemporary fiction. Most contemporary fiction, or the kind of contemporary fiction that wins big awards and people seem to talk about a lot, seems to be naturalistic, involving real people in real world situations, such as say, the work of Philip Roth, Alice McDermott, or the post-modern work of of William Gass or David Foster Wallace. Some of the contemporaries of William Gass, people such as Robert Coover, Donald Barthelme (Snow White) and Angela Carter (a British writer who taught at Brown and elsewhere from time to time and wrote The Bloody Chamber) re-appropriated old fairy tales or wrote allegorical, completely non-realistic fiction in the fairy tale mode. Angela Carter in addition to writing and translating fairy tales, also anthologized a huge number of contemporary fairy tales. Fiction with an allegorical bent is currently finding an audience. Writers such as Lucy Corin, Kelly Link, and Shelley Jackson have recently publishing collections of stories that either borrow heavily from fairy tale structures or contain out-and-out fairy stories. Perhaps the most useful guide to this was the recent Tin House issue “Fantastic Women“. Locally, Rebecca Brown has often written and read stories that contain elements of fairy tales. Stacey Levine, the author of The Girl With Brown Fur, has written and taught classes on writing the fairy tale. Bret Fetzer though has written two collection of classic short stories such as Petals and Thorns. But with the construction of The Fairy Tale Factory perhaps Seattle will experience a fairy tale explosion, or maybe even the speculative fiction, experimental, and literary writers will begin going to each other’s readings?

Unable to attend The Fairy Tale Factory event, I was able to e-mail Amy about her work contributing to the manufacture, production, and distribution of fairy tales.

Reading Local: What does the factory look like?

Amy Morgan: The factory looks like a 1930s schoolroom. It smells like chalk and children, and your footsteps echo when you walk through the hallways. All the drinking fountains are short. It is a fun place to tap dance (or pretend to).  I love it.

RL: Do you like Angela Carter?

AM: I want to like Angela Carter. I know I’m supposed to. But the only thing of hers I’ve read is The Infernal Desire Machine of Doctor Hoffman. I was so annoyed by the end of it that I can’t even bring myself to read her translations of Perrault. I have not read The Bloody Chamber, either, because i am a petty grudge holder. Do you like Angela Carter? I need to read The Bloody Chamber. Maybe I’ll like her more after I do.

RL: Who are some contemporary fairy tale writers?

AM: Jane Yolen comes pretty close. The fairy tale, as a form, has pretty much been supplanted by the fantasy short story. We don’t tell stories to one another the way we used to. We write them down on paper or on our computers and send them to one another. We have become readers instead of listeners. That’s not a judgment, just an observation. So it’s really hard to write modern fairy tales. They’re pinned down by intellectual property law and they don’t get polished by being handled by lots of different people.

That’s one of the things I’m playing with at the factory: is it possible to write new fairy tales that have the strength, resonance, and staying power of the old tales? I feel like we’re breeding endangered animals and releasing them into the wild. I’ve been talking to John Wasko over at the Seattle Storytellers’ Guild about maybe collaborating on a project between writing students and storytelling students. I haven’t hit on the right format yet, but it’ll come.

RL: Do you know of Bret Fetzer’s work?

AM: I recently found out about him by reading the artist trust award recipients site. I had not, until ten minutes ago, read any of his work. But i just right now went and read “Two Charlottes”, and thought it very fine, even though the ending was sad. I like Bret Fetzer better than I like Angela Carter.

Author: Matt Briggs

Matt Briggs is the author of five books, including Shoot the Buffalo, a novel published by Clear Cut Press and winner of a 2006 American Book Award. His second novel, The Strong Man, will be released on March 1st 2010. Recent work has appeared in Spork, First Intensity, Seattle Magazine, and The Clackamas Literary Review.

Matt Briggs has written 78 articles for us.