Pamela Weis

Sometime in the late ’90s, I had a delightful part-time job at Shakespeare & Co. booksellers in Manhattan. No relation to the famous Parisian left bank store, though I suspect the New York owners did not choose that name by coincidence. I loved working there. I started at the Upper East Side location, helping Hunter students find their semester course books, but soon moved to the Village location on Broadway across from NYU’s Tisch building. It paid okay for a retail gig. Plus, I got lots of free books and plenty of down time to read on the job. I even had time to write poems while sitting at bag check. It was fantastic and I learned so much more about contemporary literature than I’d known before. Authors I’d not heard of, like Ursula Hegi, Barbara Kingsolver, and Louise Erdrich, had their works prominently displayed on tables, inviting me to pick them up and discover their secrets.

My tenure at the bookstore lasted about a year and a half, but in that time I absorbed a great deal…and acquired a lot books. One of my favorites continues to be a complete collection of Grimm’s Fairy Tales. It is a trade paperback, and as you might imagine, quite hefty. The cover is a silvery gray and has an illustration on the cover of a prince and princess surrounded by a border of magical filigree. I was enchanted by this book, and having grown up with Disney versions of Grimm’s tales, I was eager to read it. I knew they were more violent than Disney would have us believe.

And read it, I did. The whole thing. But there was one tale that stood out – about a girl whose hands were chopped off by her own father. It was disturbing, but more than that, it was a story that did not completely make sense to me. Like reading the Bible, I felt there were too many holes, leaving the story open to interpretation. In retrospect, I realize that all of the tales are like that, but for whatever reason, the inconsistencies in this tale bothered me most.

At some point along the way, I discovered the reimagined tales of Gregory Maguire and fell in love with his creative visions. I long thought I would like to read more reimaginings of Grimm’s tales, and while some of them have been done to death, so to speak (Hansel and Gretel, Snow White), others have never been touched, including the one that haunted me.

Now that I am becoming more comfortable with my own fiction writing, I decided to try my hand at taking this particular Grimm’s tale and giving it new life. I gave the girl a name and a personality. She’s clever and just a wee bit sassy. The basic plot arc is the same as the original, but I changed a lot of details and filled in some of those bothersome gaps. I also took out a bunch of nonsense about purity, among other things. Initially, I thought…short story. But it turned into a somewhat longer short story than intended…maybe a novella.

The first draft is done. It’s not quite happily ever after, but we’ll see what the second draft brings. The experience of writing a story based on a story was exciting. Making changes to certain plot devices felt rebellious. Now and then, I would internally look to my left and right and think, is anyone looking? I’m about to do something radical. Teehee!

Fairy tales are meant to convey lessons. I suppose my version does this too, but it’s richer, more complex. The people have more layers than in a typical bedtime story. And it doesn’t end the same way. The girl has much more agency than in the original. Hey, I’m a feminist. I can’t write about a girl who just happens to live a happy life because she’s pure and kind and so nice things happen to her. No, she ultimately lives a good life because of the choices she makes. Besides, her life is not all that happy, I mean she does have her hands chopped off early on, but it has moments of happiness, and that’s all any of us can ask for, right?

In the late ’90s, I had no real ambition to write fiction. I loved it, and I kind of wished I could do it, but I was a musician and a poet. I was in my 20s and focused on my social life. I was not thinking about my career or what life would be like 5, 10, or 20 years down the road. I was not thinking, hey, it would be great to be a writer for a living; maybe I should try writing fiction! But that bookstore job expanded my literary horizons and provided me with a foundation that would affect me in unforeseen ways far into my future. So who knows, if I work very hard, and have a little bit of luck, maybe I will make my living as a writer. There is no shortage of fairy tales to reimagine.