Mighty Tor

(How honest can one be in a blog? I, for one, am unwilling to tell the truth, because I am afraid of being condemned. Here at The Night Kitchen, I avoid lying. But I hedge at sharing some ideas, trying to play the intellectual instead of talking about my day’s details and my personal, primal experiences. There’s a lot of vanity, greed, loneliness, self-pity, anger, and jealousy swirling inside me. I’m trying to bleed them out of my system. I’m worried though, because someone once told me that writers are necessarily monsters.)

We had our first session with Tor Seidler today. Awesome! We spent two hours with the man, and my brain is on fire. My hand and mind are one: I am roaring to write. Tor swept away the thickening cobwebs in my brain. Story and poem ideas came leaping out, and I had to jot them down in the middle of taking down class notes, so as to not let them dissipate into the world of irretrievable dreams.

Only, he praised his previous class so much that I am suddenly eager to please, to impress him. I am censoring myself at the get-go: my ideas seem to easy, not great enough for Tor. What if I am unable to write anything because I can’t produce anything that I thing will astound him? Or what if I manage to write something I deem pure genius and he deems mediocre and unsalvageable? Aaaaaaaah!

(Slap-slap-slap.)

Alright. So. Tor didn’t exactly share anything new, but he blew the dust off ideas I’ve shelved and forgotten. When he mentioned them, I felt rejuvenated. I felt exclamation points popping in my chest:

Children like stories about the lowly, the ostracized, the small, the meek, the weak, because children themselves are underdogs. Many tales for children deal with a child’s low/small physical perspective, such as stories about going underground and being in tight places, or, conversely, being in a land of giants. Many of children’s anxieties are expressed in fairy tales (Hansel and Gretel: lack of food, separation from parents, and eventual separation of brother and sister).

Fairy tales are worth a second look, definitely. I’ve been devouring a lot of fairy tales lately, but unfortunately, my blind, lazy self has not bothered asking why many of them are treasured by children. Tor’s interpretation of fairy tales were highly Bettelheim-ish, and I recall Zipes argument that the flaw of psychoanalytical studies of fairy tales is that it ignores the socio-historical setting that created the tales. Whatever – I’m madly in love with Zipes’s ideas, but I thought Tor’s thoughts plumbed the mysterious appeal of children’s literature, via a look at fairy tales. The man definitely made a lot of sense.

Chew on This:

Writers are liars.
Neil Gaiman
From Calliope