“The Fairy Tale Machine” by Gwendolyn Paradice appeared in Issue 35 and can be found here.
We’d love to hear more about this story.
This piece came about because over the past few years, I’ve had an increasing interest in exploring how the fairy tales I read (or were read to me) in my childhood unconsciously shaped how I process story and “apply” elements and themes and “messages” of fiction to real life. From disability, cultural, and gender perspectives, the Western fairy tales I used to love now feel a bit guileful in terms of how they worked together to create a worldview I took from childhood into adulthood. I feel like a lot of what I’m writing now is responding to this unconscious learning, and trying to get to a place where I can unlearn specific narrative expectations.
What was the most difficult part in writing this particular story?
For me, the most difficult part was the ending, because even as the author, it feels disturbingly open-ended. I’m the kind of writer/reader who is mostly happy to embrace the unresolved and/or ambiguous ending. That’s actually the kind of narrative I gravitate to most. But, with this story… I don’t know. I just feel so terrible for Kacey, and that’s a strange psychological space for me to be in because generally I don’t carry a lot of empathy or sympathy for my characters. I sat on this ending for a long time (and have a few different versions of it), because when I committed to an ending with clarity, I started to pull away from wanting to keep working on the story. Finally I just landed on the understanding that the story ends—and the story wants to end—with Kacey in a kind of Schrödinger’s box.
Recommend a book for us which was published within the last decade.
Only one book? That’s cruel. There are so many good books…. Well, right now, I would recommend The Grey House by Mariam Petrosyan (and translated into English by Yuri Machkasov, with the translation published in 2017). When I read it, the book felt completely fresh and new. It was something I’d never seen before. I became enamored with the characters and setting and the way the world functioned. It’s heart wrenching too. It is a tome, and complex, and requires a dedicated reader, but it’s one of those books that I kind of desperately wish I could convince more people to read so that I have more people to talk about it with. So far, I’ve only managed to get my partner to read it, but it’s now on his top ten book list, so, small victories.
If you could have a drink with any living author, who would it be? Why?
Huh. Well, I have to admit I might rather sit back and enjoy a craft talk or rant in some event setting, but I think it might be fun and enjoyable to have a drink with Helen Oyeyemi. I really respect and admire her narrative constructions, how there is always an element of story I can’t completely grasp and how that evasiveness runs up alongside political concerns and social commentary. I feel she’s able to envision and produce stories that surprise me, and reading stories that surprise me is a great joy. I don’t know what we’d talk about over a drink—I’m an awkward conversationalist—so for all I go on about adoring her work, I’d also be fine drinking in silence with her. Or not talking about writing at all.
What are you working on now? What’s next?
I’m always working on too many projects, but I also feel lucky that right now, there are two that want to dominate my mind and time. The first is a novel I’m co-writing with poet Kara Dorris. For a while, Kara and I were referring to the project as a “re-envisioning” of the Bluebeard Fairytale, but we realized recently it was more of a response to the themes of captivity and violence. The second is a TV script, adapted from a novella I found a few years back at the AWP bookfair. I’ve never studied script writing, and I may be very terrible at it, but I’m imbued with excitement because it’s a new narrative form for me to be working with, and it’s entertaining for me to work with unfamiliar mediums. Hopefully one of these projects will come to completion. Working on two lengthy projects instead of shorter ones (single stories, essays, etc.) is at times very overwhelming. The slowness of it is frustrating, and I’m trying to learn how to be a more patient writer.
Our thanks to Gwendolyn for taking the time to answer a few questions and share these poems. Read “The Fairy Tale Machine” here: https://www.sequestrum.org/fiction-the-fairy-tale-machine.
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Gwendolyn Paradice is queer, hard of hearing, and a citizen of the Cherokee Nation. They are the author of More Enduring for Having Been Broken (Black Lawrence Press) and co-author of Carnival Bound (or, please unwrap me) (The Cupboard Pamphlet). Their short stories and essays can be found in Tin House, Crab Orchard Review, Booth, Zone 3, and other journals. They currently reside and teach in Kentucky.