The Big Idea: Sarah Prineas
Posted on September 15, 2015 Posted by John Scalzi 12 Comments
Happily Ever After… but why? And to ultimately what end? Author Sarah Prineas considers this in Ash & Bramble, and she’s not the only one who asks.
SARAH PRINEAS:
The story of Ash & Bramble, which is more an exploded fairytale than a retelling, arose out of two Big Idea questions.
The first question came out of this experience I had back in grad school when I was reading a lot of Marxist theory and joined a student group that staged a sit-in to protest that the university basically relied on sweatshop labor to produce school-mascot t-shirts and hats and backpacks. What I learned was that our stuff comes from somewhere. We don’t have fairy godmothers who wave their wands and new t-shirts appear, wallah!—even though shopping online can be like that. But no, an underpaid, overworked laborer somewhere far away from where you live probably made the clothes you are wearing right now. She made the clothes I am wearing right now, too (pajamas from Target).
That led me to wonder: there’s all this stuff in fairytales: a dancing slipper made of glass. A poisoned apple. A sharpened spindle. A glass coffin. And of course, the gorgeous, glittering ball gowns.
So where do all of those story elements come from? Who makes it? I mean, there’s no amazon.com in Fairytalandia, and the stuff has to come from somewhere, right?
The logical conclusion is that the Godmother has a kind of fairytale version of a sweatshop, full of shoemakers, bakers-of-gingerbread, lace-makers, Jacks-of-all-trades, seamstresses…
My stitches march on, inevitable, a straggling, wandering line of foot soldiers, with here and there a casualty where I accidentally prick my finger on the needle and the tiny bead of blood is blotted by the cloth. My fingertips ache; my hands grow stiff.
The seamstress of Ash & Bramble is the one person who dares look up from her work and ask, “what is all this stuff for?”
The answer is, it’s for Story. And this Story gains power every time it gets another Happily-Ever-After. It’s the Godmother’s job to set stories up, to get the wheel turning by forcing people to play their designated roles, to provide the spindles, the glass slippers, the etcetera.
And our seamstress—her name is Pin, as far as she knows—to stop her from asking dangerous questions, the Godmother decides to put her into one of Story’s most powerful stories, Cinderella. According to Story, Pin is supposed to want the gorgeous gown, the prince, the insta-love, the marriage. Except for Pin, the glass slipper doesn’t quite fit, and she refuses to settle for one of Story’s pernicious happily-ever-afters.
She asks the second big question:
What if the Stories tell us?
And if they do, how can we escape?
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Ash & Bramble: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s|Signed copies from Prairie Lights
Read an excerpt. Visit the author’s site. Follow her on Twitter.
Please forgive the pedantry, but the exclamation of magical appearance you’re looking for is voilà. A “wallah” is a counter clerk, more or less. A chai-wallah would be someone selling chai, for example.
Yeah, I know it’s voilà. It’s a funny. Jokey thing. Wallah! Ta da!
I’ve seen a lot of people using “wallah” who didn’t actually know the correct spelling, so it was my first thought, too; it’s not so obviously beyond the pale that you might think that as to be clearly a joke.
The summary is giving me a lot of resonances with Pratchett’s “Witches Abroad”, which I liked very much.
Interesting idea. Does she still wear pajamas?
Sent from my iPad
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Love the idea- and that cover. I wish my fairy godmother would build me more bookshelves.
Wowza! This sounds like my kind of thought-provoking fun.
Thanks for running this series, by the way. Most of them are interesting enough that I pull the sample version from iBooks to give them a try.
Dagnabbit. I created a separate folder for Big Ideas email. I vowed not to read them to keep my reading list manageable given my average life expectancy.
And then I read one. This one. *sigh* Onto the ‘to read’ list it goes.
On a tangential note, NPR’s Planet Money did a series on the manufacture and life cycle of a t-shirt a while back. Very interesting stuff.
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Regards,
Dann
This sounds right up my alley. Darn it, I was trying not to add to Mount TBR!
I assumed it was a deliberate misspelling of voilà, but now I am, er, enchanted, by the idea of the Godmother waving a wand and shouting “Wallah”– and the t-shirt wallah comes with new clothes.
On a tangential note, NPR’s Planet Money did a series on the manufacture and life cycle of a t-shirt a while back. Very interesting stuff.
Even better – http://www.amazon.com/Where-Underpants-Come-From-Checkout/dp/1590202287
Yes, that to-be-read pile is not getting any smaller. Perhaps I need some magical sweatshop workers too, to help me deal with the Story backlog.