When a children's author Kate DiCamillo As a girl, she listened again and again to a recording of the Brothers Grimm story “The Juniper,” in which, among other horrors, a child is beheaded. “I wasn’t a kid who liked to be scared,” DiCamillo said recently. But, she added, stories like those of the Brothers Grimm taught her “how to be brave in the face of this terror – which we all feel, not just children. And that is, here I am, at sixty-one years old, returning to these stories and finding more comfort, more horror and even more meaning.” DiCamillo, who has two books coming out this fall…Lost Evangeline“, as well as the twenty-fifth anniversary edition of her bestsellerBecause of Winn-Dixie“- recently joined us to recommend some of her favorite fairy tale books. Her commentary – a mix of written remarks and conversations – has been edited and condensed.
The Juniper and Other Tales of the Brothers Grimm
Brothers Grimm, translated from German by Laura Segal and Randall Jarrell
These funny, scary stories (and the funny, scary illustrations by Maurice Sendak that accompany them in this edition) are a direct way to the collective subconscious. Each one is completely familiar and completely strange.
Something wonderful about Grimm is that their stories are a kind of door between the fantastic and the facts of what it means to be human in the world. They are the link between historical truth and, on the other hand, the truth about the human condition—the way things are, have been, and always will be.
Fairy tales
Hans Christian Andersen, translated from Danish by Tiina Nunnally
I grew up with Hans Christian Andersen. I can't even express how much of an impact his sensitivity had on my sensitivity. In his work, everything is animated, everything has a soul, everything has a story. God, this caught me at a very young age. His work convinced me that all things (matches and toy soldiers, flowers and Christmas trees) are sentient, that every creature has a heart, and that every heart can be broken.
Like the stories of the Brothers Grimm, Andersen's stories in a sense belong to the collective imagination – they are told and retold. But one thing that makes it different from others is that they are more personality oriented. In Grimm, adults just throw children out into the world, and the world is a terrible place. But Andersen's stories about man's journey say much more. Like in The Ugly Duckling, where you feel so deeply that the main character's sadness never fits.
Winter Tales
Isak Dinesen
I came to Dinesen thanks to the film “Out of Africa”. Then I read biography about her Judith Thurman, whom I love. Dinesen's first collection of stories is as follows: “Seven Gothic Tales” Thurman quotes a passage from one of these stories, “The Old Cavalier,” which I think may help explain why she wrote it:
My favorite story in Winter's Tales is the heartbreaking “Woe Acres,” a retelling of a folk story. It's about a mother who threshes an entire field alone, doing the impossible to save her son's life. It destroys me every time and also makes me feel like you can do something heroic even if you don't think you can. Dinesen only began writing when she was much older. She relied on life experience, and this gives these fairy tales the right to say: “I did it.” You can get through this.
Myth Makers
John Hendricks
This is a graphic novel about the friendship between C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, who met while they were lecturers at Oxford and subsequently formed a writing group, the Inklings, whose members read their works aloud to each other. I was never a big Tolkien reader, but I really liked “Chronicles of Narnia“as a child – they were so magical to me that I never dared return to them as an adult, for fear that the magic would not be there.
I found this book fascinating and moving. Much of the story is about how Lewis and Tolkien's friendship gave birth to their works and how those works reflect their times. Both men were in the trenches of World War I, and Hendricks really shows how their need to create stories was shaped by the turmoil and great horror they experienced. Graphic novels aren't my favorite way to read because I'm so drawn to the written word, but it's very powerful when the wasteland of the trenches is laid out in front of you. You see it, you feel it, and then you feel the stories that come out of it. Like, how do I figure this out? How can I console myself in the midst of all this loneliness and horror? You tell a story that can then comfort someone else in their loneliness and terror.
