Today we share a post by Sarah So, who was a student in our Summer 2023 Introduction to the Fairy Tale course. My name is Sarah So, and I am a student at UCSB studying Psychology and Brain Sciences. My early memories involve my mom reading fairy tale stories to me, so they hold a special place in my heart. Many Korean fairy tale books include unfortunate elements such as those found in the Grimms' or Andersen's tales, so I wasn’t shielded from the "dark side" of fairy tales growing up. A core memory I have is being deeply sorrowful over the ending of the Little Mermaid tale as the mermaid dis ..read more

Today we share a post by Arya Nasikkar who was a student in our Spring 2023 Introduction to the Fairy Tale course. Hello! My name is Arya Nasikkar. I am a current undergraduate student studying Design and Media Arts at Santa Monica College. I have been interested in Design and Filmmaking for quite some time, writing screenplays and making films whenever I have the time and motivation. I enjoy creating animation referencing older stories from various cultures. When I was a kid, my grandma used to share a lot of Indian folktales, which I find myself connecting to in my current work. It's intere ..read more

Daniel A. Rabuzzi (he / his) has had two novels, five short stories, 25 poems, and nearly 50 essays / articles published. He lived eight years in Norway, Germany and France. He earned degrees in the study of folklore & mythology and European history. He lives in New York City with his artistic partner & spouse, the woodcarver Deborah A. Mills, and the requisite cat. Poets around the world are reframing and repurposing fairy tales and tropes from folk traditions to produce some of the most inventive and dynamic English-language poetry today. Their poetry matters, speaking and listening ..read more

Today we share the second of a two-part post by Danielle Sahm, who was a student in our Fall 2022 Introduction to the Fairy Tale course. Danielle Sahm has a bachelor’s degree in English literature. She enjoys reading fairy tales, myths, and poetry, and finding the connections between them. The Grimms’ tale “Iron Hans” begins with a king whose huntsmen keep disappearing into an ominous forest, never to be seen again. One brave huntsman volunteers to investigate and discovers a deep pool. There, a hand snatches his dog and pulls it under. He determinedly drains the pool, one bucket at a time, u ..read more

Today we share the first of a two-part post by Danielle Sahm, who was a student in our Fall 2022 Introduction to the Fairy Tale course. Danielle Sahm has a bachelor’s degree in English literature. She enjoys reading fairy tales, myths, and poetry, and finding the connections between them. Recently, I read Anne Sexton’s poem “Iron Hans,” based on the Grimm tale of the same name. This short animation by Xun Wang is a beautiful introduction to the beginning of the tale and captures the mysterious nature of the Wild Man, or Iron Hans, which persists despite the quick and neat way the tale conclud ..read more

In “The Importance of Being Scared: Polish Nobel Laureate Wisława Szymborska on Fairy Tales and the Necessity of Fear,” writer Maria Popova celebrates “the proper kind” of fairy tales she experienced as a child in Eastern Europe for “affirm[ing] what children intuitively know to be true but are gradually taught to forget, then to dread: that the terrible and the terrific spring from the same source, and that what grants life its beauty and magic is not the absence of terror and tumult but the grace and elegance with which we navigate the gauntlet.” Popova believes Polish poet and Noble Laurea ..read more

Today, we share a post ,by a student in our Fall 2020 Introduction to the Fairy Tale course. My name is ,Evelyn Alva Hidalgo. I have a B.A. in Anthropology, and I am a new mom who became a stay-at-home mom. I have a ,love-hate relationship with fairy tale and mythology, which I write about in my blogs (linked here in my bio). Snow White is a young girl who is pursued and almost killed by a jealous woman. In different versions, the antagonist is represented by a mother figure who is an evil queen, an aunt, an older woman, or a witch who resents Snow White’s youth and beauty. As ,Maria Tatar ex ..read more

Today, we share a response ,by author and computer engineer Derek T. Jones to a selection of Max Lüthi's work that is included in Maria Tatar's The Classic Fairy Tales. I had to check the date. When was this written? 1982? Okay. But he’s writing about creations that are hundreds of years older? Wait a minute, this isn’t a computer graphics journal? What’s going on here? This is Max Lüthi’s essay “Abstract Style,” and he’s not talking about computational constraints at all (though he could be)—he's talking about fairy tales. During the 1990s and 2000s, anyone playing a game on a personal compu ..read more

As Marilyn Berg Callander writes in Willa Cather and the Fairy Tale, “Cather’s imaginings were shaped by myth: her childhood reading was steeped in myth and she read Grimm’s Fairy Tales, The Arabian Nights, and Germanic-Norse folklore.” Cather’s love of the fairy tale is evident in the many allusions she employs throughout her work, and they co-exist with her many other references to “American and European literature, the classics, Shakespeare, the Bible, and works of music, painting, and sculpture” (Callander). She names Hans Christian Andersen a few times in her novel O Pioneers! and the “F ..read more

Today we share a post by a student in our Spring 2022 Introduction to the Fairy Tale course. Sabrina Wichner received her bachelor's degree from San Francisco State University in Sculpture and Art History. After ten years in the entertainment industry making props, she decided to refocus her creativity on making her own stories come alive. Tales that incorporate magical realism, and journeys to other worlds are particular favorites of hers. While I was growing up, my education incorporated both Biblical stories and progressive reading lists. To me, Scheherazad from The Thousand and One Nights ..read more