pagesofjulia

I really loved The Crescent Moon Tearoom earlier this year, so imagine my delight to find that its author had also compiled and edited this collection of fairy tales from my adopted home region. The two books are of course very different. But I can hear the echo that the same author/editor was involved with each.

Sivinski opens with twenty-plus pages of introduction in which she details how this book came to be, and this was my favorite part of the book. She begins with her childhood, which was rich with oral storytelling, via her family and community and a unique elementary school that emphasized oral history. An early interest in oral history, and the experience of folktales as living, breathing, changing, current beings, took her through college and graduate school. It was as a graduate student that she found a shortage of “books that portrayed Appalachian folklore as a living genre.” Those she did find felt dated, in their illustrations and in their text, and often felt patronizing or stereotyped, as in their use of ‘eye dialect.’ A new term for me, this is the “transcription process that deliberately misspells words to make them seem more ‘authentic.'” In her graduate research, Sivinski was delighted by the recordings she found of Appalachians telling stories that often featured strong women and girls as central characters, and that played in curious ways on the familiar fairy tales and folktales of Scotch-Irish and German (Grimm) traditions. She quickly began thinking about how to offer those stories in a more modern and ‘living’ book than the ones she found available. And, wouldn’t you know, her sister Jamie Sivinski was already working as a photographer “who specializes in fairy-tale shoots.” So here is this book, a family affair.

There is more to the introduction, about fairy tale traditions, about research and transcription processes and Sivinski’s decision making there, about storytellers and collectors who’ve come before, and about the definitions of fairy tales, folktakes, and wonder tales. I found all of it fascinating, but I liked Sivinski’s personal history and story of this book’s birth the best.

Fairy Tales of Appalachia focuses intentionally (although not exclusively) on stories that center girls and women, with a bit of a corrective aim in response to a story-collecting tradition that has tended to center men. Stories are short – eight or ten pages or just two or three. Each is preceded by Sivinski’s brief notes placing the story in a larger context, for example, of fairy tale traditions: some play on Cinderella or Beauty and the Beast, some combine known elements, and some subvert them. Each contains a reference to the recording (or, in a few cases, transcription) where Sivinski found it. “The Hare Bride” comes from a transcription, with two credited storytellers – Sivinski interprets that one was the teller and the other the transcriber – and one of them hailed from Upshur County, West Virginia, where I live now.

The stories themselves are short, simple, often formulaic, and were not the part of the book that interested me most. (I found the same thing with the Foxfire book, Oral Tradition in Southern Appalachia.) To be fair, Sivinski points out that these stories are best read aloud and shared that way. I did read one aloud and agree that it improves the experience; haven’t tried it with friends yet. I liked the academic work and personal background at least as much as the stories themselves. I’m so grateful they’re collected here.

Jamie Sivinski’s accompanying photographs are certainly beautiful. Some are in black and white and some in color, all matte rather than glossy. I didn’t find that they especially correspond with or illustrate any stories in particular, but rather felt that they just set the tone. While I appreciate the effort, I actually found their inclusion a little distracting, in part because I was looking for connections I didn’t find. I worry that the effort to update the dated illustrations of past collections will only be dated in turn. And… there wasn’t a ton of diversity in the characters / models depicted. I know we think of Appalachia as overwhelmingly white (and my little town here certainly is), but that’s less true throughout than the reputation asserts. The characters in these pictures are almost all girls and women, almost all white, and all stunningly beautiful – rather than looking like ‘real’ people. Maybe that’s the fairy-tale aspect of it. It didn’t work all that well for this reader, although the photos are undeniably lovely in themselves.

I’m glad this scholarship exists and glad the stories are collected in this way, and I’m just trying to figure out which of several friends I’ll pass this one on to.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: academic, Appalachia, fairy tales, photography | Leave a comment »