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| painting by Valerie Black |
"What I really love about fairy tales is that they get us talking about matters that are just so vital to us. I think about the story of Little Red Riding Hood and how originally it was about the predator-prey relationship, and then it becomes a story about innocence and seduction for us. We use that story again and again to work out these very tough issues that we have to face.
photo by Cristina Carra Caso
"Milan Kundera has this quote in 'The Unbearable Lightness of Being' about painting that goes something like: Painting is an intelligible lie on the surface, but underneath is the unintelligible truth. Folktales are lies, they misrepresent things, and they seem so straightforward and so deceptively simple in a way. It’s the unintelligible truth beneath that’s so powerful, and that’s why we keep talking about them. They’re so complicated. We have a cultural compulsion about folklore. We keep retelling the stories because we can never get them right."
~Maria Tatar on The Turnip Princess and Other Newly Discovered Fairy Tales (Penguin Classics)
Read the full interview HERE.
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