Writing Portfolio

Dearest Reader,
I’m a lover, not a writer.

Unfortunately, the more one loves, the more they are inclined to write. At least, that’s how I found myself here, stitching together an English portfolio, piecing together an anthology, hoping my ideas are good enough to share and my writing is good enough to publish.

I love stories, but I would not say I love writing. Writing is a compulsion. In the way people are compelled to eat or breath, I am compelled to write. My mind never stops turning, never stops asking questions, and never stops molding stories. Characters live in my head, yelling and screaming and begging to be let out. To be shared. Solidified. They occupy space, even when I try to kick them out. They throw tantrums to get my attention— scream until their voices rasp. Maybe I write to shut them up. Though, that can't be right, because if I think about where their novel ends, then I think about happens after the book closes, the curtains fall, the credits roll. The things a reader would never know and never Lind out.

I write because it feels right. Even if the story doesn't feel right, or the words don't feel right, or the characters don't feel right—writing does. In the way that I can’t seem to stop talking in awkward situations, I can’t stop writing. I can walk away, for a bit, but I come back, eventually. Always eventually.

And I love being right, unfortunately. My brand of narcissism (or insecurity, depending on how you look at it) is needing to be the smartest person in the room. My Achilles’ Heel, if you will, is needing to know, understand, and do right by that knowledge. I simultaneously believe that urge is impossible. My drive to know is stopped by an unknowable world. Yet, I think, therefore I am. And I am, so I must share. What good is knowing if others are still in the dark? So, I share, desperately. Every thought is so crucial, and I need other people to see the importance, too. I tend to do that through art, and in this portfolio, through writing.

I believe the love of reading leads to an attempt at writing. Attempts at writing force one to investigate what they read, then think about what they want to write, and Linally write with a purpose in mind. And at the end of it all, pray that it can lead to a future. I arranged this portfolio as such. The items in this portfolio are arranged in chapters, rather than sections, to show the relationship between reading, thinking, writing, and understanding. Each step falls to the next as each chapter turns its pages. I understand things best in narratives, so I aim to show my literary skill in the same way. I think, therefore, I am. I read, therefore, I write.

My literary analysis of Homer’s The Odyssey shows my love of reading. I’m no stranger to classics. In fact, I almost prefer traditional narratives. Stories that have been around for centuries have so many layers, so much mystique, to unravel. On one level, there might be an illustration of that day’s society, but on another, it might be a critique of that society. There are layers upon layers of possible readings with a slight shift of the lens. But at their core, classics are good stories. One of my earliest loves was Greek mythology. I distinctly remember a children’s science book series I had growing up. Between explanations of the solar system, seasons, and hydration systems, there would be illustrated mythological stories. I pored over the two-page spread (two whole pages!) that told the story of Hades and Persephone. A child-friendly version of the tale, but Greek mythology, nonetheless. I scrounged for any literature about Greek mythology. The more I read, the more I appreciated. I love mythos in general, but Greek mythology has my heart. Having said that, I hate Odysseus. The Odyssey is a phenomenal epic made better by Emily Wilson’s lyricism, but Odysseus? King of Ithaca? Nobody, himself? One of my least favorite literary characters. His mix of self-righteousness and constant deception is a personality I can’t stand. In my dislike, though, I can recognize an interesting character. The essay included in this portfolio is an exploration into Odysseus’s emotions: his real emotions, and how they are expressed through tears.

The step after loving to read is learning to write. Instinctually, writers tend to the autobiographical. It’s a natural starting point for any writer. What does one know best, but their own experience. My second piece is a written dramatization of a personal experience called “Curiosity Didn’t Kill the Cat.” It’s a ten-minute play about my now-deceased cat. At the time, I was dealing with a lot of complicated emotions. I wrote to work through those emotions. My cat was sick for a very long time, and I struggled with that. I loved her so much that I couldn’t bear to see her hurting, and yet, I loved her so much I couldn’t imagine letting her die. For months, I spent as little time as possible at home because I couldn’t bear to see her. I was grieving, and she wasn’t even dead yet. There’s a reason grief is a common subject in literature. It’s a profound, complex, over-bearing emotion. I prefer writing fiction, but when I was dealing with Kitty’s death, I knew I needed to write from experience. However, even as I’m proud of this piece, it’s not totally fulfilling. It’s not something I would choose to read. Grief is important, but it’s not the type of narrative I gravitate towards. I gravitate towards the dreary, the dark, the horrifying.

I find the horror genre a fascinating microcosm of intense emotions and intentionality. Horror allows for a total flaying of the human condition, pushing characters past their breaking points. Personally, I tend towards the fantastic, preferring werewolves to zombies, but supernatural horror exists at an odd crossroads. I believe in the supernatural, demons and spirits and the like, so horror of that kind feels a little more personal. But as I forged a new story that sat heartily in the horror genre, I wondered if demons might be an effective antagonist. I was curious and I was invested. Sometimes you have to follow the rabbit trails. The result is “Demonic Interference as a Narrative Tool.”

At some point, though, a writer must decide. Exploration is great, but it’s turning a wheel unattached to a vehicle. I looked at my literary preferences and I decided to jump headLirst into emulating the fairy tale tradition, but with an edge of modern ideas and horror influence. The essay in Chapter Four: As Fate Has It: A Critical Introduction, lays the groundwork for my goals with my short story collection As Fate Would Have It. It’s a conversation on fairy tales, but as I wrote it, I Lind myself leaning more and more into the topic of the sublime. I realized the stories I love, the traditions I love, the stories I try to write, all of them have this element of dread and awe. I aimed to cultivate that feeling, that sublime terror, while keeping my stories whimsical and enjoyable. The Forest is one such result. Of the thirteen short stories I wrote, this is the one quintessentially fantastic and dark. It’s about the woods and what happens in the woods. Most importantly, it’s about the fact that we, people, are nothing but who we are together. Stories bind us. Conversations bind us. Tradition binds us.

Love binds us.

One thing to the next, falling like dominoes. Like plot points in a well-constructed novel. Like Odysseus’ lies, the cues in a stage play, the critique of a critique of a critique of literary history, the cycle of life and death and life that comes next.

With love,
Theo

King of Deceit; Slave of Emotion

Odysseus is a liar. In Emily Wilson’s The Odyssey, he is often called “The King of Deceit,”
and he certainly lives up to that name. The world is a nasty place, and with the gods’ help, Odysseus can scheme his way to victory. Most triumphantly, the gift of the Trojan horse was Odysseus’ idea. Yet, even in his day-to-day, Odysseus lies and lies. Nearly everyone he meets— strangers, gods, or even loved ones—gets spun a fanciful tale. Odysseus does not like to introduce himself with the truth. Rather, he finds out what he needs and plays with what is offered to him in conversation. With his words, Odysseus makes his way. Yet, Odysseus has an Achilles’ Heel: as much as Odysseus may lie with his words, his emotions and his tears reveal the truth.
Odysseus’ base state is trickery. Even when trying to communicate something simple, such as, say, the fact that he, Odysseus, is alive, he lies. With Penelope especially, he uses this tactic. When he is back in Ithaca, but has yet to test Penelope, he tells her a false story that convinces her that her husband is alive. Odysseus is standing in front of Penelope, the northern star of his journey, and he lies to her rather than reveal himself. Whenever Odysseus meets someone new (or, someone he knows but does not recognize), he weaves a new history for himself. The plot moves forward because of Odysseus’ trickery, lies, and manipulations. Part of the reason he is such a successful liar is because he knows his tell: his tears. Crying is a mark of authenticity for Odysseus. When he cries, he is being genuine. And genuine doesn’t get you far in the cutthroat world of The Odyssey.

Odysseus cries. A lot. Arguably, his tears are mentioned most, second only to Penelope, whose every appearance is marked by grief for her husband. Odysseus, the pillar of masculinity and bravado, is incredibly in tune with his emotions. He lets himself grieve, despair, and be sad. On Calypso’s shore, he grieves for the life he cannot seem to get back to. Throughout his journey, he weeps for the friends he has lost along the way. When he is confronted by mistakes and by death, he cries and cries and cries. His weeping is an extension of his self; his tears are a marker of his emotional authenticity.

Readers are told about Odysseus plenty throughout The Odyssey. He is a warrior; he is missing. He is a good man who helped the Greeks win the Trojan War. He is the protagonist of this story; his name is basically the title of the epic. Yet, he is not introduced until Book 5. Lines 151-158 inform readers of Odysseus’ general state of being:
[Odysseus]’s eyes were always tearful; he wept sweet life away, in longing to go back home, since [Calypso] no longer pleased him. He had no choice. He spent the nights with her inside her hollow cave, not wanting her though she still wanted him. By day he sat out on the rocky beach, in tears and grief, staring in heartbreak at the fruitless sea.
Odysseus’ truth is his grief, and he must hide that to keep Calypso happy. Note how it begins: “Odysseus’ eyes were always tearful.” This man cries constantly, and readers are told that directly and immediately. He is a constant well of emotion; the smallest push will drive him into weeping. This passage is also narrated by an outsider; thus readers are inclined to take it at face value. Odysseus desperately wants to go home. His grief is in his desire to return, but inability to find or make a way. At this point in Odysseus’ mental journey, he is broken. It has been twenty years since he left Ithaca. He has tried and failed, gone to the edge of the world and back, only to end up stuck, staring into the endless ocean. Odysseus’ bone-deep sorrow is his homesickness. At one point, Odysseus was able to take comfort from Calypso, but that time is long past. He spends the night with her, lying in her cave and to her face. He feels the need to keep up the act of a loyal lover, but that is not his truth. His truth is that he is broken. He is depressed. He is consumed with his despair and spends his days, in the harsh rays of Helios’ light, staring at the ocean. Staring for the possibility of escape. He is sad and crying and without the energy or will to do anything about his situation. I find this behavior pathetic. Odysseus has created his own misery: choosing to sleep with Calypso and choosing to wallow in his unhappiness. Odysseus is an incredibly powerful, influential character. He can do many things. He chooses to wallow. Yet, in his wallowing, we see him. In Odysseus’ tearful silence, he is true. When he lacks the words, he cannot lie. His most inner self is flayed open for readers to see and interpret. Would it be a reach, then, to say his depression is exploited for Poseidon to see? Odysseus does not want the reader’s pity but could use Poseidon’s.
Odysseus makes it out of Calypso’s grasp, thanks to the gods’ intervention, and eventually finds himself at the banquet of King Alcinous. He is with the Phaeacians and he is confronted with stories of himself Book 8, lines 84-97:

Odysseus with his strong hands picked up his heavy cloak of purple, and he covered up his face. He was ashamed to let them see him cry. Each time the singer [Demodocus] paused, Odysseus wiped tears, drew down the cloak and poured a splash of wine out of his goblet, for the gods. But each time, the Phaeacian nobles urged the bard to sing again—they loved his songs. So he would start again; Odysseus would moan and hide his head beneath his cloak. Only Alcinous could see his tears, since he was sitting next to him, and heard his sobbing.

Demodocus, the Phaeacian singer, is entertaining the masses with stories of the “Great Odysseus’” victories. Odysseus is overrun with emotion. This is his return to the mortal realm, and not only are they praising him, but they are praising a version of him that he no longer sees himself as. He does not want them to know that he, the mighty Odysseus, has fallen, so he hides his tears. It takes effort. His strong hands lift his heavy cloak. It is not an easy task to mask his emotions. But Odysseus feels the need to hide his truth. He doesn’t have enough information on the Phaeacians yet, so he does not want them to have anything on him. But he is overcome, and his true self slips through. He knows if they see his tears, they will question (as King Alcinous does in the very next stanza). Odysseus is not ready to be honest, so he hides his weeping. Odysseus is very aware of his need to contain his emotions.
Odysseus’ next cry isn’t until much, much later in the epic, when he finally returns to Penelope. Yet, as per his norm, Odysseys has a ploy, and despite an epic of yearning for his wife, he lies to her. He knows, if he cries, she will understand. So, in Book 19, lines 209-215, Odysseus keeps himself from crying in front of his wife:

So were her lovely cheeks dissolved with tears. She wept for her own husband, who was right next to her. Odysseus pitied his grieving wife inside his heart, but kept his eyes quite still, without a flicker, like horn or iron, and he hid his tears with artifice. She cried a long, long time, then spoke again.

He cannot let her know just yet. His disguise must be kept. He wanted her to know that he was alive, but he couldn’t reveal himself. If he showed his tears to her, she would question and she would figure it out. Athena’s magical disguise is only so powerful. So, to keep his story intact, Odysseus steels his emotions. It is interesting to note that this, one of the only times he manages to contain himself, is near the end of The Odyssey. Has he begun to accept this part of himself? Has he learned to connect his deceit and his truth? Is he accepting the need for authenticity, even if that is not what the moment dictates? Or is his will regarding his wife stronger than his will for deception?
Odysseus is a sensitive man in nature. He is overrun by grief and longing, crying at the drop of a hat. When he returns to Ithaca, he cries upon seeing his old dog, who recognizes him. Odysseus knows how powerful his emotions are. He knows that his tears are his tell. For a man whose survival relies on deception, he must bury those tells. To survive, Odysseus hides his tears. He knows that they are the break in his mask, the cracks in his disguise. His words can weave treachery, but his visible tears show his true feelings. Odysseus is quick to cry but quicker to lie

Works Cited

Homer. The Odyssey. Trasnlated by Emily Wilson.1st Edition, W. W. Norton and Company,
2018.

Demonic Interference as a Narrative Tool

I was working at a Christian school, and, um, I walked into... I went to walk into my room, and out of the corner of my eye, down the hall, probably 20 feet away, I could see—I saw something move out of the corner of my eye and I felt a... I felt a, a darkness. And, I looked down the hall, and into the shadows and there was a light at the end of the hall, just a dim light, and in the light I could see a, um, a... a shape? a shadow, maybe? It wasn’t very big, it was maybe two feet tall. Um, but it slowly moved across the hall and I felt that I needed to... pray it away. I went into my room and I prayed and then came back out to look and I still felt the presence, but when I looked, I didn’t actually see anything that time.
Christa Hahn, 2023.

As I was brainstorming what powerful magical entity could act as an antagonist in my latest horror project, I quickly latched onto the idea of a demon. Demons are scary, powerful, loaded with historical idiosyncrasies to play with. I wanted my main character to reach for the wrong kind of help in his journey and a demon contract checked all the boxes—namely, magical and evil. But was a demon too easy of a choice? Is it expected? Overdone? God forbid, boring? The more I pondered, the more I was curious. Why do storytellers use demons? What do they offer a narrative that something else couldn’t? To make the best choice, one must understand their options. My questions drove the following essay, in which I explore demons as a narrative trope and whether I want to include them in my stories. Short answer: No. Long answer: Not like this.
In this essay, I need to clarify what I mean when I say demon. Which is, to say, what do you think of when I say demon? I fear whatever deLinition I offer, an audience can come up with an exception. All kinds of demons exist in all kinds of ways. In some cultures, a demon is just a spirit. In mine, a Judeo-Christian, American culture, demons are cruel, malicious agents of Satan. In this essay, a demon is any evil spirit that is called a demon in its material. If a movie labels its antagonist a demon, then it is a demon. If an urban legend claims demonic interference, then it’s a demon. After all, this essay isn’t about real demons. The question of a demon’s existence is superLluous. Whether or not demons are real, we have stories about demons. There is a Line line between actual demonology and narrative demons, but it is important to clarify that line. Narrative demons are informed by real demons, but they are separated by the veil of artistic interpretation. René Magritte famously told audiences “Ceci n’est oas une pipe.” This is not a pipe. That is the kind of difference that must be understood in this essay.
A demon’s primary purpose in Liction is to be scary. They embody all kinds of fear. The easiest of which to prey on is the fear of the unknown. Humans want to understand. When we don’t, we retaliate. The supernatural is, by deLinition, beyond our understanding. If our world is natural, scientiLic, and logical, the spirit world is anything but. People like knowing the rules of our reality, but the supernatural exists past our guidelines. Some might say the supernatural is phenomena we don’t understand yet, rather than things we’ll never understand. Regardless, right now, we don’t know. We don’t understand demons, and so they are scary. We can’t study demons—can’t dissect them, ask them questions, makerules for their abilities. They exist beyond our natural scope. And what people don’t understand, they fear. “Other” is scary to us.
Historically, demons have existed as manifestations of fear. Fear of nature, of God, of life, of death. Heta Bjö rklund explores the history of Hellenistic child-killing demons in a 2017 journal Acta Classica. She describes the demons as “personiLications of the fear of losing a child” in an attempt to “transform looming threats into something that can be tangibly fought” (Bjö rklund 22). Children would die in childbirth, and instead of accepting that, mothers would do whatever they could to ward away the demons that they blamed. Fear became manifest to control, blame, and Lix. Bjö rklund brieLly discusses the history of demons as bringers of disease or, sometimes, just demons as disease (Bjö rklund 39). Antaura was a migraine demon who, naturally, gave people migraines (Bjö rklund 32). The 2014 Lilm The Taking of Deborah Logan used a demon as a manifestation of Alzheimer’s. In their fear, people often create, name, and blame demons.
The fear of demons is almost akin to the cliché of Catholic guilt: even someone who isn’t religious still feels it. Logically, there isn’t a creature in the corner watching me sleep every night... But what if there is? What if the Ouija board someone brought to the party isn’t a trick? The “What if” is just as scary as anything else. Demons may or may not be real, and that lends itself to the horror. Whether people believe in demons or not, they’re vague enough to always have some sort of power over people. Alien and deep-sea horror are two other examples of not-real-but-could-be horror. Part of the scare is that we don’t know if demons are real or not. The book may feature a Lictional demon, but who says an equivalent doesn’t exist? They are a believable unknown. History shows how powerful superstitions can be. During the Salem witch trials, or, any historical witch trial, people died because of a town’s superstitions and paranoia. Oftentimes, human imagination makes issues bigger than they really are.
Demons are also scary because of what they can do. Possession and temptation are common demonic abilities, and they terrify for several reasons. Humans love independence and control. Demons takes that away. Free will means nothing when another being is puppeteering your every action. In European Religious Cultures, Susan Boynton writes a chapter on “Demonic intervention in the medieval monastic liturgy.” The chapter is a study on temptation as understood and feared by monks in the central and high Middle Ages. To quote Boynton, “Such anecdotes reify in narrative the longstanding belief in the constant threat of temptation and pride that was represented by the presence of evil inLluences in the monastery” (Boynton 90). She describes texts that convey monks’ fears of demons as distractions from duties, temptations of falling asleep, and even “disruption of choir” (Boynton 91, 96, 98). These issues might seem silly, but to a monastic community in the Middle Ages, they were all very serious. A monk’s duty is to serve and worship God. Any distraction could mean a hell of a punishment, or, worse, hell as punishment. Not to mention, in my culture, Western culture, independence and responsibility is integral to someone’s personhood. The fear of losing oneself, of losing control over one’s own actions, is terrifying in a society that values freedom.
Demons have power because stories of demons have existed for millennia. Almost every culture has a “demon” of some kind or another. Each of those demons have their own rich history of what it means to be a demon. This gives storytellers a massive amount of freedom. Any kind of demon you can imagine has existed in a story, somewhere. Terrifying? The Exorcist. Manipulative? The Screwtape Letters. Contractual help for a soul? Black Butler. Weird kooky dudes? Good Omens. Sympathetic? Paradise Lost. Demons go beyond any one religion, any one story. It’s a mythos that stacks upon itself with every new narrative that uses a demon as an antagonist. Ed Simon, who wrote Pandemonium: A Visual History of Demonology, explained that the demonic “is a network of metaphors, symbols, and images that deLine the diabolical; they shift and interact with each other in different ways across the centuries.” Demons are metaphors for any fear, symbols of any evil, images of any sin. This freedom of meaning throughout history lends itself to a digestible story just as much as a subversive one.
Storytellers use demons because demons are antagonizing forces. It’s that simple. At the basic levels of storytelling, demons Lit the template. An antagonist is, in its purest form, an obstacle to a protagonist. Historically, demons exist to get in people’s way. Or, as Jeffrey Burton Russel said in Mephistopheles: The Devil in the Modern World, the demonic is “the spirit that seeks to negate and destroy.” It’s the perfect Lit. Any story with a human protagonist—which is most stories—could logically have a demonic antagonist. Demons are a blank check that can be written into any story. The Hero’s Journey, as proposed by Joseph Campbell, is a story structure that starts and ends with the ordinary but has characters cycle through an “underworld” of challenges. Demons easily Lit in this sort of hell. Another theory of narrative conLlict, Arthur Quiller Couch’s seven types of conLlict, includes three kinds of conLlict that I would characterize demons under (Man vs. Man, Nature, and God). Different types of demons serve different roles, thus allowing for different narrative themes. They can act as an equal but opposing adversary, an apathetic and unemotional fact of life, and an omniscient cruel deity. Additionally, audiences like stories of good versus evil; demons are historically evil. People are used to narratives involving demons, so those plots are easy to digest. Storytellers use demons because they Lit the mold of a story like wet clay, perfectly malleable to an author’s intention.
But stories aren’t built from clay. A ton of things are scary and powerful and antagonistic. Why choose demons? To that I offer: human narcissism. People want to believe that we are the good guys. We desperately hold onto the idea that humans are good, despite thousands of years of history showing us differently. People don’t want to take accountability. This is why demons are such a popular choice. Demons manipulate, possess, and take control. They whisper in people’s ears and convince them to do wrong. “The devil made me do it” and “The demon on my shoulder” are common phrases when people try to shift away blame. Demon possession and inLluence enables storytellers to have a powerful antagonist work through human action while still protecting human goodness. It makes the demon the reason bad things happen, not because people do bad things. In all of humanity’s complexity, audiences usually want characters who make mistakes, but aren’t “bad.” To say you have demons is to claim that your issues aren’t your fault. Humans become victims of evil rather than doers. That is the most powerful part of a demon narrative: humans aren’t the ones in the wrong.
But humans are wrong. Often. Demonic narratives, simple yet powerful, come with consequences. The victimization of characters is the silent but deadly consequence. Fiction affects reality because people digest the ideas they encounter. If someone’s favorite books involve bad characters doing bad things because of demonic possession, they might start blaming demons for their own bad choices. Or, they might start blaming anything they don’t like on demonic intervention. Mental illness has commonly been misunderstood and branded as demonic interference. Time and time again, people struggling have been cast out instead of helped. Johanna Braun, in her book Performing Hysteria, describes “theatres of possession”, wherein the mentally ill would be paraded around as circus acts to paying audiences (Braun 213-214). In 19th century Paris, popular hysteric patients were even sent on tour (Braun 212). Genuine issues became fodder for entertainment. Braun also articulates the harm that has come to disabled people after the popularization of 1973’s The Exorcist. The Lilm started a sub-genre of possession Lilms which were ultimately “spectacles of hysterical girls’ performances” (Braun 217). The Lilms promoted harmful stereotypes of disabilities that led to genuine fear of disabled people (Braun 208, 218). Fictional stories become real issues, intentionally or not.
Do I want to include demons in my stories? Not like this. Not with a story where bad people get to blame someone else. Not with a story that might lead to the harm of real communities. If my bad guy is going to be a demon, I want to understand the philosophical underpinnings of that decision. And I didn’t like what I came up with. I don’t like narratives that paint humans as always being the good guys. I don’t believe in that reality, and I don’t want that kind of Liction. People can be good and bad, right and wrong. Most importantly, people must take accountability for all that they do. I want to write stories about people who do bad things, but who admit it, Lix it, and move beyond. I don’t want to include a demon if that means my characters won’t get their due blame. A demon is too easy. It covers too many bases. It shifts the blame and gloriLies the protagonists. I don’t want that. I want Llaws. I want a story where fear becomes tangible and must be dealt with. Where people can stand their ground against malicious entities. Where a demon is not a demon, but a manifestation of humanity’s fears and failures.

Works Cited

Bjö rklund, Heta. “Metamorphosis, Mixanthropy and the Child-Killing Demon in Hellenistic
and Byzantine Periods.” Acta Classica, 2017, Vol. 60 (2017), pp. 22-49.
Boynton, Susan. “The Devil made me do it”: demonic intervention in the medieval monastic
liturgy. European Religious Cultures.
Braun, Johanna. “Hysterical Cure: Performing Disability in the Possession Film.”
Performing Hysteria. 4 Aug. 2023.

As Fate Has It: A Critical Introduction

Don’t look for answers here, not in this introduction and definitely not in this collection. Interpret as you may, and for the love of God, don’t ask me to do it for you. I have my answers, the truth I dug up, but they might differ from yours. I am nothing if not extremely opinionated, incredibly biased, and horribly stubborn. But, in my relentless search for the “truth,” I’m just as stuck on the idea that truth is often vapid, misleading, and altogether confusing. My thesis is that there is no thesis, merely an attempt at theorizing. There are questions, and there are answers, and there are conLlicting answers, and we must try our best regardless. It’s the terrifying ordeal of never quite knowing, but the glorious act of getting to ask anyway.
Don’t get it twisted, I know what I was trying to do with these stories. But, as soon as I relinquish control to a reader, my intentions are extraneous. Your interpretation is all that matters. For, life is seeing, trying to understand, and not knowing if you get it right. I propose situation and ask questions. Questions that pop up again and again, answered in different ways, answered in conLlicting ways, and answered in different stories with different outcomes. That ambiguity is why I’m a storyteller. I don’t know the right answers, but I try to ground my questions, and hopefully, make them interesting. But I Lind ambiguity interesting, so my articulation is rooted in misunderstanding. In that liminality, we start to understand the world. For the world is endless questioning and impossible understanding. We strive for answers that are impossible to achieve. We want truths in a world of shadows. But in accepting that unknowability, we learn to grow, and experiment, and find joy. Fairy tales are how I approach that impossibility, for fairy tales are quintessentially absurd and sublime, obvious and ambiguous.
In the following collection, I aimed to write thirteen original short stories in the tradition of fairy tales. The tradition of fairy tales, not fairy tales themselves, because it’s impossible to “write” a fairy tale. Fairy tales are a product of oral tradition. They are passed down through word of mouth, from generation to generation, remembered and changed and utterly Lluid. Every culture under the sun told stories of women in towers and men climbing beanstalks, and the more people heard, the more people shared. The more people shared, the more the stories changed. The more the stories changed, the more interesting they became! And then, after ebbing and Llowing, weaving and waning, molding themselves to each society’s wants, then they were written down. Writing is a technology, a tool created by humans, but storytelling is innate and as ancient as time. The simple fact that I am actively writing my stories excludes them from being a fairy tale. But the tradition, the emulation, is possible.
Through history, the same archetypes, structures, and motifs show up. The “woods,” for instance, is ubiquitous with fairy tales. Fairy tales happen in the woods, for the woods represent the world of trial and tribulation. Unfortunately, complicated things get simpliLied over time. Motifs become stereotypes, and stereotypes become negative, and eventually fairy tales were relegated to the sidelines as “children’s stories” and “nursery tales.” This sterilization is thanks to the authors who originally wrote the oral tales down. But the stereotypes, of stone castles, fairy magic, and squeaky-clean happily-ever-after weddings, are just the scratch on the surface of the fairy tale tradition. Fairy tales are dark, gritty, and vulgar. They were stories to entertain, and what is the most entertaining, but us? At their heart, fairy tales are about human wishes and fears. Emotions externalized via magic, turning curiosity into locked doors and dangerous people into cannibalistic ogres. To quote Maria Tatar, “these are the stories that stage worst-case scenarios and let us face down the terrors of the great ‘What If?’ “(Tatar xiv). Fairy tales are about exploring our sublime reality. As Roger Sale stated in Fairy Tales and After: From E. B. White to Snow White, fairy tales are “Neither nightmare nor daydream, but both, with the two facing each other.” (Sale 38). Dreams and terror, wishes and fear. Life in its mess, its naturalness, but exaggerated to the most absurd. Fairy tales are whimsical and dark in the same breath, offering fantastic situations with horrible risk and bountiful reward. There’s a freedom of exploration, as long as you go through the woods.
There is a structure to fairy tales, however. Tatar boils it down to the ideas of prohibition and violation, whether of parental rules, social structures, or the plain laws of reality. But it’s Joseph Campbell’s theory that gained notoriety. Campbell’s model of the Hero’s Journey has been critiqued for being Eurocentric, exclusionary, and yet irritatingly vague. However, for this project, for my purposes, his structure was a good place to begin. I grew up with European fairy tales and my knowledge is of the Western world, so The Hero with A Thousand Places was the best jumping off point. Fairy tales are global, but I am not, so I worked in the European tradition. Campbell spends approximately four hundred pages on his theory, he sums the structure up in one sentence: “a hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder; fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won; the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow icons on his fellow man” (Campbell 30). This is best understood (and used) as a skeletal structure on which to pack the meat of an interesting story. The most fascinating, compelling, and engaging fairy tales are the ones that articulate the darkness of the world, complicating readers’ understanding of good and evil. A good fairy tale is less about the happy ending and more about the conLlict within. For, Campbell notes, happy endings are but a shift of emphasis on life, pulling away from the fact of death. Happy endings, instead, are a “transcendence of the universal tragedy of man” (Campbell 28). This shift is what is compelling about fairy tales, for it exaggerates the ambiguous absurdity of the world. This shift, done right, is the Lirst step to the sublime.
I said Campbell was a good place to begin for my purposes. I did not start with Campbell. I started with Henry David Thoreau. I’ve mentioned the woods twice now, as they are an integral motif to the fairy tale tradition, but they are also an integral part of the appeal. I adore stories that dwell on nature. I believe nature is one of the few things we can look at and truly perceive, for life without consciousness is the purest form of life. A plant grows because it’s supposed to. An animal hunts because of its instincts. There is no wrong, thus there is no right, there simply is. I may be a depressed nihilist, but in my heart, I am a Romantic. Nature is beautiful and dangerous, and more beautiful for its danger, and more dangerous for its beauty. Nature is sublime and I want my work to sit squarely in that energy. I hope my work expresses that Romanticism in the most Gothic way possible. Because yes, a tree is beautiful, but is not a dead one more interesting? I stare at the oddities of nature, for the beauty is in the mess and the rot and the degradation. I care about death because that is where we all go eventually.
I do not always agree with Thoreau, but I respect him. I respect his disdain for society, gloriLication of nature, and dismissal of the supernatural. But most of all, I respect his equating nature with the divine. To him, nature is not just divine, but what divine aspires to be: “Is not heaven made up of these cheap summer glories?” (Thoreau 37). What is paradise if not the grass, dandelions, and daisies we walk on every day? The Llower is a beauty of God’s creations, and yet it is a drop in the bucket of what the world has to offer. Thoreau Linds the beauty in every blade of grass, and he revels in that beauty. I seek to emulate that awe in my stories. However, my attention is less on nature as a whole, and more on the oddities of the world. A tree is beautiful, but in my mind, a dead tree is more interesting. The beauty of life, but also, not quite. My awe is of the particular, the odd, the seemingly unimportant. More than anything, I appreciate the sublime.
There are two concepts I hold to about this life: the absurd and the sublime. Everything I do is the conversation between. Living, as in the act of life, is absurd. But life as existence, as a world unfolding, is sublime. The philosopher Emmanuel Kant wrote extensively on the concept of the sublime. In “Critique of Aesthetic Judgement,” Kant writes “in what we are wont to call sublime in nature... it is rather in its chaos, or in its wildest and most irregular disorder and desolation, provided it gives signs of magnitude and power, that nature chieLly excites the idea of the sublime” (Cooper 119). Essentially, nothing is, in and of itself, sublime. Rather, it is the emotion evoked in us that is sublime. When we see something fearful, accept that it is fearful, but see ourselves as safe, that awe is the sublime. In a different essay, “The Dynamically Sublime in Nature,” Kant explains that “sublimity, therefore, does not reside in any things of nature, but only in our own mind” (Cooper 122). If the sublime resides purely in a person’s reaction, then the genre is cracked wide open. What is terrifyingly attractive is entirely up to an individual. My goal, then, is to share and convince you, the reader, of what I see as sublime.
Sublime is the horror that compels. It’s the death that captivates. The tragedy one can’t look away from. It’s questions without answers. The constant Llux of history, tradition, and storytelling. The unknowability. The hardships that make a person better, a story interesting, or a life worthwhile. The whimsy and darkness mingled together in fairy tales. The community that hurts as it protects. It’s nature as a gorgeous, ambivalent killer. The degradation of all things. The way minds break, and bodies fall apart. The artists that burn themselves out to create art. It’s monsters, terrifying and appealing, hideous and beautiful, othered and gorgeous, made and rejected. It’s when bad people get punished and we enjoy it. It’s rats.
Kant, and most theorists, are quick to differentiate the beautiful and the sublime. Beauty is an aesthetic value, and the sublime is the terriLied awe invoked in us by greater things. However, I see the sublime as beautiful and thus cross the hairs that theorists have valiantly pulled apart. For is not awe itself a thing of beauty? And if the sublime is awe— awe of the decrepit, disgusting, monstrous, and terrifying—is it not still awe? The sublime is not beauty, as a Llower or a mother, but it is beautiful. A rotting corpse is beautiful, not for how it looks, but for what it does in creating new life. So, I shall equate the sublime with beauty, for beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and I choose to look at death. And as death creates life, and life creates death, so it is sublime. What other way is there to experience the horrors, but to romanticize them?
Before you turn the next page, know that I am mentally ill. I deal with severe depression and suicidal ideation. But know, even as I romanticize my issues, I do not aim to glorify mental illness. I do not wish my pain on anyone. It is never an aspiration. But this collection is me dealing with my mental illness. I deal through conversation. Honest conversation. Brutal and bloody conversation. Because when you’re suicidal, death is fascinating. But my fascination with the macabre has been around much longer than my depression. They certainly help each other along, but they are not the same. I pull them apart, but it would be a disservice to not share this convergence with my audience. I want people to rethink death, to see it as sublime, but I also know that I come from an odd perspective. Imagining my death gives me a sense of peace. It’s a comfort blanket I will never use, but have, nonetheless. In a world of hurt, pain, and hysteria, I have an out. And that out will be with me for the rest of my life if the world ever gets too tough. But right now, there is so much of life to explore. My bucket list is far too long to kill myself and considering the rate I add to my bucket list, I’m going to need to be alive for centuries to get everything done. But the comfort I Lind in death is not the same as the beauty I see in death, and it’s the beauty I am seeking to share. For endings make things special. I seek to juxtapose the horrors of life with the beauty of death, and vice versa, or either/or, or none of the above, or all of the above. And isn’t that liberating? Letting life and death run their course? To reiterate Kant, the sublime is fearful, but we are not afraid. Death makes us feel small, our lives arbitrary, our existence unimportant. But that arbitrariness gives us the freedom to live. Death is the only real ending we have, but even that isn’t necessarily true, because death opens the doorway for the next stage of life.

Works Cited
Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Meridian Books, 1956.
Cooper, David Edward, et al. Aesthetics: The Classic Readings. Blackwell Publishers, 1997. Sale, Roger. Fairy Tales and after: From Snow White to E.B. White. Harvard University Press,
1979.
Tatar, Maria. The Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales: Expanded Edition. Princeton
University Press, 2019.
Thoreau, Henry David, et al. Excursions. Corinth Books, 1962.

The Forest

Once upon a time, four people died. They tangled with an idea deeper and darker
than they could ever be, and so they became fodder for it to survive. How could they know? How could they not? They walked into the forest.

Pacts of youth have a power beyond themselves; people who don’t know what life entails commit to each other, regardless. They bind their hands, pool their blood, agree to help each other. Often, the consequences are minimal, the ripples small. Others have bonds so bright the sun himself must shield his eyes. That’s what these four had. As kids, they ran from home. They left a life of poverty in search of something better. They were intercepted along the way but found a home in the Good Enough. They were adopted by a travelling circus. One became a strong man, another a fortune-teller, the third turned animals into performers, and the fourth kept the business running. In years, they grew into their titles: The Strong Man. The Fortune Teller. The Animal Trainer. The Manager. They started their own troupe, travelling in a makeshift wagon they painted green and blue and lined with plants that were only watered when God chose to drench the earth with rain. They bought a horse, the Animal Trainer taught him tricks, and they went on their merry way. They were poor, but they were together. Love like theirs bound and sizzled and tangled between, until one was not themselves without the others. They could not die alone. It was simply not possible. Fate could never tear their tapestry apart.
The group was travelling through a village, days behind on their route, when the Manager ventured to ask the locals for advice. The road led them around a forest, but the Manager thought that their wagon was small enough, their horse was strong enough, that they could push through. They could cut through the trees and halve their travel time. She was small, weak, prone to getting sunburnt, but her mind could solve any problem. She asked the Strong Man to ask around.
He was a large man with larger hands, and his sole purpose was protecting his family. He didn’t know what it meant when he followed her orders. He didn’t know when he found a village woman and asked if there was a forest path. He didn’t know when he pulled out his map and had her point to the spot. He didn’t know when he told his family, when he led them in, when he held the lantern that lit the way, when he cut through branches and vines to carve a path. He didn’t know. He couldn’t have. He should have. He’d die for it.

Nature doesn’t care. It exists and survives on its own merit. If someone deigns to enter her domain, their only rule is to respect and heed the signs. For the troupe, their sign was a blood red sky that grew brighter and redder as the sun set. Amidst the dense branches that stretched leagues above them, amidst a darkness that wrapped her fingers around their throats, they could see pinpricks of crimson light speckling the ground. The path itself was easy enough, shallow enough that the horse could pull their rickety wagon through with relative ease. The Animal Trainer kept his hand on the lead, pulling the animal this way and that around fallen stumps, flora, and fauna. Eyes blinked through branches, spooking the horse, so the Animal Trainer kept the reins tight and controlled. Ahead, the Strong Man used his blade to cut through vines and branches that intercepted their path. Every cut he made brought them further into the forest. Every hack, slash, and slice to the forest limbs brought them closer and closer to the forest’s awareness, to her knowing of their presence... to her being angry about their presence.
Animals, both dead and alive, scattered across the path the Strong Man carved. Unblinking eyes stared from above and below. Silence, but never absence. Birds watched. They sat on their perches; eyes trained on the quartet hacking their way through their home. They waited. The forest would eat, then the birds. The forest would provide. The forest always provided. She ate first.

The troupe were determined, ignoring the signs. They ignored a warning sky, skulls that littered the damp forest floor, animals that stared at them with drooling grins. They walked on. They must get through, must get to grandmother’s house, to the glass palace, to the adventure beyond the forest. They found a staircase, made of wood, but not natural. It was built, by a person, it had to have been. But it started nowhere, and it led nowhere, and when the Fortune Teller stood at the top, she found she couldn’t see anything at all. She was too frightened to tell the others, so she hurried them along, sparing it a backwards glance. Another warning sign, another warning ignored.
The horse was the only one to escape, because he had been dragged into this. He did not eat the grass that grew from the ground, nor did he eat the plants that the others ripped from the earth and tried to give him. His ears flattened against his skull; breath pushed harshly through flared nostrils. His connection to the tapestry was light, shallow. The forest could tear him away without tearing him apart. The horse would die, eventually, only not tonight. Not with the moon so high, the sky so red, the birds so quiet.
The Animal Trainer dropped the lead for a moment. He could have sworn he tied the horse to a tree, that the beast was chained to the wagon. But he turned around, he turned back, and the horse was gone. They began calling for it immediately, confused as they were. Their passage up had been so slow, the trees so thick, only a singular path they’d been able to carve, yet the horse was gone. When they stood still, they could hear nothing, nothing, nothing at all. Even the insects held their tongues.
Nothing to do but settle for the evening. They unpacked their blankets, dug out their pillowed. Eager for a moment to himself, a moment away from their anger, the Animal Trainer went to gather wood for the fire. There was plenty on the ground, so he found himself strolling along, picking up sticks left and right, until his mind cleared enough to come back to the group. Their frustration was palpable, but he knew it would dissipate. All their bouts did, eventually.
He found wood.
He went to give it to the Strong Man, but everyone was staring at his arms, at the pile. He looked down and dropped the pile. The bones fell to the floor, pale and smooth as a royal’s babe. Hands shaking, the animal trainer picked up a single piece of what had been, just a moment ago, wood. The bark had pulled at his skin as he walked, and he had to shift the wight around as he walked, for the logs were irregular, oddly shaped. But the pile at his feet was smooth, pale, each and every stick the rung of a body’s ribs.
Their first mistake was walking in. Their second was staying the night. Their third was starting a fire, feeding a flame with the children of the forest. Sticks, plants, anything within reach went into the wicked flame. The Manager had flint in her bag, and once they gathered wood, actual wood, cut from trees for assurance, she hit the bits of metal against each other and watched the warmth spark. They huddled around quickly, the walls of the forest offering no warmth. Even the sky, so red, even in the darkness, sent a chill through the air, wind cursing through branches.
The forest stole the Strong Man away like this: without a noise. Not a whisper, not a chill, not a breeze. The others looked up from their warming hands, and he was gone. He’d be back, they told themselves. Just off for a slash, a quick relief of the bladder, then back to the fire, the warmth, them. But the moment grew, the minutes spread like fungus, and he’d been gone for an hour. Hours. They grew restless, scared. They went to bed tossing and turning, waiting for him to come back. He wouldn’t. The forest would pick the rest of them off, bit by bit, quick enough. Their souls were so tied it could not take its time. It could not pull a thread out but had to break it entirely.
By morning, the Fortune Teller was missing. Did she go after him? Did she leave on her own? The Manager and the Animal Trainer were alone. They looked over the map, trying to figure out where they were, but to no avail. They’d walked a day through the forest, surely if they kept straight, faster now without the wagon, they could make it out before the sun set again. But as they gathered their supplies and locked up the caravan, they found they didn’t know which way they’d come, and they didn’t know which way to go. They split up, determined to stay within each other’s eyesight as they figured out what direction to go. Another mistake. With this choice, they helped the forest.
The Animal Trainer found the Manager’s map in the open belly of a dead bird. He never did well alone.
As he ran, his clothes tore, strips of fabric snagging on branches that reached for
him, reached oh so slowly, ever so slowly, as he ran as fast as he could. But the belly of a monster is not built for runners, and he tripped, and fell, and cried. He begged to be let out, to come out the other side. But every time he got up, the path in front of him would stretch and moan and move and he could not find his way. He ran, and he fell, and he did again, again, again, for God knows how long, for the forest to grab his legs and arms and pull him up. He cried as the hands of the forest wrapped around his failing body. Roots snaked up from the earth, forced him into submission, branches of the forest reached reached reached for him, circled his hands, ran up his arms, burrowed into his skin until his body was a blister of open wounds open wounds that the forest licked and drank and entered.
He was awake when the forest connected, when the tendrils inserted themselves into his body, growing into the holes in his skin and pulling him up into the trees. His body grew slack even as his mind raced, his screams cut off by a calm that pervaded only his limbs. He could not cry, but his mind sobbed. His mind broke. The forest drank.

The Fortune Teller claimed to see the future, and maybe sometimes she could. But she did not see the forest’s fingers holding her up, sapping her very life from her frame. She could not see the plants that stood up straighter, brighter, redder, as her blood, her very marrow, went from her body to theirs. No seer can see that until it’s too late. Other people’s lives are so much clearer than one’s own. But nothing can change a forest that is hungry, and these four happened to walk into its open maw. Teeth like leaves, its lolling tongue a carpet of moss. The deep breath of a hungry god sounds like wind whistling through branches.