I've been told that we have time for a couple of questions,
a couple of minutes of questions, five minutes
of questions before the buzzer.
Does anybody have any questions for anybody
who read tonight about the fairy tale they
worked from or about fairy tales generally
or just any questions?
Yes?
I have a sort of comment.
When I was a little kid, my favorite book of fairy tales
was The Happy Prince by Oscar Wilde.
That's a great collection.
Do you reread it now--
The Happy Prince?
Yeah?
[INAUDIBLE]
That's an excellent collection.
Other favorite fairy tale collections
from your childhood?
We could hear some of those instead of taking questions.
Yeah.
Yes?
Classic Faerie Tale Theatre.
Shelley Duvall-- Faerie Tale Theatre.
Yeah, I know.
Do you have a favorite episode?
I actually liked the [INAUDIBLE]..
That's great.
You had a favorite one too?
I actually just had a question for one of the writers here.
I just wanted-- what was the most surprising thing that you
encountered in your writing?
[INAUDIBLE]
Can you hear me now?
(SINGING) How do you solve a problem like Maria?
How do you-- um.
I had been having a very, very hard time with a novel
and, having been asked to write a fairy tale, resisted
and resisted because I was struggling with this novel
that I have now since abandoned entirely and took,
for the very first time, the advice
I would so eagerly give to my students.
If you're stuck with something, put it aside
and do something different.
And the writing of the fairy tale
just completely opened the door to the book
I'm working on in a way that I never anticipated would happen.
So, I mean, it was not just--
it was not just surprising.
It was like my life got saved.
There you go.
Fine, my dear.
No.
And I go for Peter Rabbit.
[INAUDIBLE]
That's great.
Peter Rabbit.
Peter Rabbit?
I love Peter Rabbit too.
That's my answer.
Any more questions?
We can probably take one more, or we can just
call it a fairy tale night.
I've got one.
OK.
When you're editing these books, how do you--
where do you draw the line on what's a fairy tale
and what's not?
The question was, when I'm gathering
a collection like this or editing Fairy Tale Review,
where do I draw the line on what's a fairy tale or not.
And I guess the corollary question
to that would just be, well, what is a fairy tale, right?
And the wonderful thing about fairy tales
is there really is no single definition.
A fairy tale is a story with an element of wonder in it.
Some would argue, and I would agree,
Nabokov said, all great novels are great fairy tales.
I would say the same about so many different forms
of writing.
But I think you can find certain technical elements
across the board in a fairy tale poem, story, novel, film,
piece of drama.
But you can find them in almost any two--
but you can find them and their elements like abstraction,
depthlessness, everyday magic, and a sort of a logical illogic
or an intuitive logic.
However, you don't always see them very clearly.
They're sometimes very, very thinly there or faintly there,
almost like a shadow.
What I think identifies a fair-- what I do
is, if something has a fairy tale feel to it, then
I know it's a fairy tale.
So I think that when you go to a movie
and it's sort of like maybe the curtains are drawn
and it says, "once upon a time," you feel
like you're in a fairy tale.
There might be just some little breadcrumb
on the path that tells you you're in a fairy tale.
But if you think, oh, this feels like a fairy tale,
it probably is one.
But when I was editing the book, writers
would often ask me, well, I don't know if this counts.
I want to write about X, Y, or Z,
and I don't know if it counts.
And I just always said, yes.
I mean, I always just say yes to the story.
That's kind of the way I do it.
But I think that we are so weaned on fairy tales,
whether we know it or whether we love them or not,
that they just become part of the way we tell things and say
them.
And I could probably, if you gave me any story,
I could probably find the fairy tale in it.
I'm sort of that dedicated to the art form.
So I like that challenge too when somebody says,
well, this doesn't have anything to do with it.
And I'll say, well here are 73 instances
in this 10-page story that are directly hewn from fairy tales.
I think it's all there and it's because it's just
hundreds of years of narratives from really when books
were starting to be read to children.
And it's fascinating history.
But, usually, if you think you're in a fairy tale,
you are.
So I just trust that.
Thanks for coming, everybody.