First posted April 2023.

Author's Note

This essay accompanied a re-release of my novellas Gleam and Crown of Ivy, and references ways to purchase my books that are no longer possible. I've unfortunately had to pull my books from my distributor, as they were considering licensing works distributed through them to LLM training. My books are now exclusively available through my Ko-fi shop.

Any writer will tell you there’s the story, and then there’s what the story is about. Dracula is the story of a group of people defeating an ancient evil through wit, camaraderie, and hyperfocus on train schedules, but what it’s about is xenophobia, queer desire, and social class (among other things). Everything Everywhere All At Once is the story of a woman doing her taxes, but it’s about acknowledging that though the world is full of terrible things, the answer is not giving into despair, but rather finding joy and hope in the good that surrounds us even in the depths of the horrors.

Fairytales in the folkloric tradition have endured for so long and existed in so many different versions in part because of what they’re about. The stories themselves are, on the whole, simple and on the face of them, not always very interesting. What the stories are about encompasses so many facets of the human experience that there’s always something new to tease out, always some new interpretation to be made. They are ancient and yet always relevant. They stay with us, not because stories about knights and peasants and princesses are so relatable to modern audiences, but because what the stories are about is.

Cinderella has hundreds of variants and hundreds of modern retellings. It’s one of the most popular stories in history and has been told in nearly every country in some version or another, in every time period you can think of and some we’ll never know. Broadly speaking, it’s the story of a young girl mistreated by her cruel stepmother and/or stepsisters, who remains kind and generous in the face of misfortune, is aided by a magical spirit who rewards her good behaviour, and eventually marries into royalty.

So what is Cinderella about?

Your answer to this question shapes how you retell it. Names redacted to protect the guilty, but one person answered this with, “It’s about changing yourself to get a man,” and that interpretation guided them to a retelling focusing on physical beauty as gauge of morality. Another answered this with, “It’s about the necessity of marriage to transcending unwanted circumstances,” which led them to tell a story about the harm of patriarchal institutions and of women being treated as objects.

I’m not here to say other people’s interpretations aren’t valid — of course they are. People interpreting fairytales differently is the whole reason they survive, that they continue to exist in a fluid state, changing with each person who breathes new life into them. Both of those and many other interpretations focus on the end of the story, saying that what the story is about is the prince, in one way or another. I can’t say that I agree.

To me, Cinderella is a story about the endurance of hope and the difficult battle to remain kind when circumstances are not kind to you. It’s a story of suffering, of trying, of staying true to what you believe in even and especially when it’s hard to do so.

My retelling of Cinderella, Gleam, doesn’t have a prince in it. There’s also no ball, no glass slipper. To some people, those aspects of the story are the whole point. Honestly, to me, they don’t matter at all. Rather than the prince, I think Cinderella’s pivotal connection is the fairy godmother, or the ghost of her mother, or whoever fills that space in whichever variant you’re using as a source. Cinderella survives on her own for so long, and it isn’t until she reaches out to someone else for help that things change. On her own, she is capable, but there’s only so far that capability and resiliency take you. To endure is one thing; to thrive is another. Cinderella’s journey is one of learning to travel from the former to the latter.

Both Gleam and Crown of Ivy are re-released to wider distribution tomorrow, and the latter is a retelling, too. The myth of Ariadne and Dionysus is the story of a smart and generous woman being betrayed and finding a happy ending she didn’t expect, but it’s about breaking free of expectations and finding different ways to become the person you want to be. Myths, like fairytales, are stories that have endured for centuries because what people see in these stories is the truth of their own beliefs and experiences. To me, this myth is a story of failing and not being destroyed, of taking a risk and losing everything, of seeing the light in the depths of the dark, of love not as a redemptive or transformative force but a supportive and freeing one.

When we as humans, as a society, as a culture retell a story, we’re saying so much more than the bare facts of the plot. Taking a story with enduring familiarity and changing it, as a process, inherently draws attentions to the changes made. When you retell something, you’re making choices about what you keep and what you discard, and in doing so saying what matters to you and what doesn’t. Retellings are stories about our values, our hopes, our beliefs, and our wildest dreams. It means something to invoke an older story and everything it’s about, rather than simply tell an original story.

Gleam and Crown of Ivy are now available via Apple, Barnes and Noble, Smashwords, and more; check out their Books2Read pages linked below to see all the platforms you can find them on. Both books remain available through my Ko-fi shop if you’d like to buy directly from me (and Patreon/Ko-fi members can pick up Gleam for free), and the paperback of Crown of Ivy through Blurb, but there are many more options now! I love both these stories dearly, and I hope they speak to you, too. If there’s one thing these stories have in common, I think that in the end, they’re both about hope. Reminders that there is beauty in the world that’s worth all the difficulty, all the pain and suffering —that even if they aren’t what we expected, happy endings exist, and they are worth the effort it takes to win them.