white snails

The past few days have been pleasant. While I am still working long hours at both university and at the hotel, the weather has made all of the difference. An individual can only take so much grey and I find the sunshine and blue skies that we've had recently has been lifting my spirits.

There is something about a blue sky that makes you pop some ear-buds and listen to some new music. I recently re-discovered the White Stripes and I find myself singing and crooning along with Jack & Meg. 

Reading Jane Yolen's 12 Impossible Things Before Breakfast a collection I find myself smiling in wonder. My only other experience of Jane Yolen was in a class I took two years ago: Feminist Rewritings of Fairy Tales. I read Briar Rose a rewriting of the Sleep Beauty fairy tale blended with a story of the holocaust. While you might raise your brows and think, "That seems a rather odd combination to put together.", it somehow works. Jane Yolen has a way of taking common stories, fairy-tales, myths, and transforming them. 

While many of her novels and short stories focus on young women protagonists, I find her more concerned with the ways in which we tell stories to children and young adults. Examining "traditional" fairy-tales is the perfect place to begin. Impossible Things is a great place to start if you're thinking of reading her work, a collection of short stories that take famous novels and works by other authors and transforms them into something new. What I most enjoy is how she takes a character that people are familiar with: Wendy from Peter Pan, Alice from Wonderland, or Sleeping Beauty and removes that sappy fog that surrounds those texts and creates a character that would react more naturally. It could be suggested that in making these texts more "real" that sense of fantasy and wonder are lost, but I disagree with that sentiment.

Cheers.