The Ravished Cannot Leave

As often happens here on "The Journey that Matters," I have forgotten things I have blogged about. So, my apologies, dear friends, if I am repeating myself.

For one of my term papers this semester, I am using one of my favorite books/series as a case study. (I love being in programs where studying something you love is OK and you don't have to pick a specific topic.) For those of you who don't know, Catherynne Valente's Fairyland series is my most recent favorite. Four of the five books have been published, and a prologue online. They are published as middle range children's books--although no stories are only applicable to a specific age range. I am looking at fairy tales and the construction of definitions of "woman." (This may or may not change in the next 8 weeks. We'll see.)

But, on a completely unrelated note, the reasons I love this series are numerous. Valente approaches storytelling in a very postmodern way--stories are embedded in stories; the narrator speaks to the reader; nothing is really as it seems; foreshadowing exists, but mostly in literary allusions; the hero and the villain are not opposites but very similar--the list goes on and on. Like all good stories, it is, like Shrek, an onion. Layers upon layers. Story within story. One that you can return to time and again and learn more and have more adventures. Like September, the reader is in Fairyland on a Persephone visa.

And that's just it. Stories occupy a special place in human culture, as I'm sure I've mentioned. We return to stories all the time. We cannot help it. Like Persephone, we are bound to return. We can spend time away, but eventually we return. We all want to be stories--to be the heroes we read about. To have adventures. Storytelling is central to humanity. Stories tell us who we are, who we want to be, who we can be. They tell us what waits in the woods, and what is in space, and how to slay the dragon, and what is in the wardrobe or down the rabbit hole.

As the Doctor says, "we're all stories, in the end. Just make it a good one, eh?"