Fairytale Reflections (19) Midori Snyder at SMoST

Fairytale Reflections (19) Midori Snyder was last week's fairy tale post at SMoST from Katherine Langrish. Langrish does a wonderful job, as always, of introducing her featured author, this time Midori Snyder, whose books I enjoyed long before I met her through SurLaLune years ago.

Midori's part of the post is a reprint of her essay about The Monkey Girl, originally published on Endicott Studio. Here's the beginning:

When I was a girl reading fairy tales, I appreciated those courageous maidens tromping off in iron shoes or flying on the back of the west wind to find their future husbands where they, imprisoned by trolls or cannibal mothers, waited to be rescued. I admired those young women and their single–minded purpose. They were bold, resourceful, and spirited. And they were certainly a far cry from the “waiting–to–be–awakened” girls or the girls expecting to be fitted with a shoe, a Prince, and a future all at the same time.

Yet even in their plucky natures and heroic tales, there was still something about them that troubled me. Perhaps it was the assumption of happily–ever–after, or at least the seeming surrender of all that reckless adventure. Their rites of passage completed, the journey to find a husband over, there was an expectation that life for these young women would settle once again into neatly defined roles and an untroubled routine. This assumption didn't sit well with me at all. I knew from my own family that such happily–ever–afters were not true. I had parents who had met and married in a passion, and then just as passionately argued, accused, betrayed and divorced each other. The photographs of their early years depict the blissful expressions worn by most newly married couples, but the later years proved ugly, full of dark misadventures and contentious battles over money. Though I left home at seventeen, inspired I think by the example of those stalwart maidens, I roamed the world in iron shoes forged by my parent's issues and no other goal in my mind except to escape their battles. Eventually, my money dissolved, the shoes became as thin as paper, and I returned home.

And as always, here are some of the books by Midori Snyder: