I’ve been thinking a lot about what fairy tale characters go through.

When I was little, my favorite tales were about a quest. I loved the adventure and excitement of it all. I think my favorite part was the coziness of going on a long journey (on horseback, please—I loved horses!), getting wet and cold and possibly wounded, and then taking refuge at an inn or friendly castle where my companions and I would be given hot baths and food and new clothes and warm fires and soft beds.

I think it was the safety after the danger that appealed so much, though I only thought about the danger abstractly then. It was only a story, after all. And yet, when I think about it now, fairy tale characters deal with some serious trauma. Cinderella is abused by her family. Hansel and Gretel are purposefully abandoned by theirs, then kidnapped, imprisoned, and nearly eaten. Little Red Riding Hood IS eaten, in some versions at least. There is betrayal and murder, dismemberment and blinding, and that’s just for the protagonists. It’s heavy stuff.

And yet, for the most part, those protagonists keep going, somehow. They sometimes make unwise choices—they use that key they’re warned not to, they stray from the path or make a bad bargain. But in the end, they fight off the witches, make their way through the wood, escape parents who want to kill them, or worse, marry them. And at last, they arrive at a well-deserved Happy Ever After.

That makes for a satisfying story, but when you think about it, how can it be? How can these characters go through what they do and come out unscathed? My guess is only because fairy tale characters are fairly one-dimensional, and the stories are very simple. But if these characters and their stories were fleshed out, surely there would be some long-term consequences from all those grim experiences.

It’s an idea that’s long been working in my subconscious. Not being able to admit to (let alone know how to process or even articulate) some of my own experiences, I began exploring them in the context of fairy tales. For quite a while, I only knew I was writing things I needed to write and that writing provided relief from something I couldn’t name.

When I began writing about a Cinderella whose glass slippers no longer fit her, I knew I was digging into my past experiences of searching for a purpose and a place to belong. But I later realized there was far more going on. I was examining the consequences of trauma. In the case of the narrator of my book, Glass and Feathers, these consequences are things like anxiety, withdrawal, and making choices that harm not only her, but also the person she loves most. Writing a journey of healing for my girl in the glass slippers provided me a map for how I might face these consequences in my own life.

In the last couple of years prior to my own book coming out, I’ve been excited to discover other authors exploring the effects of trauma in their fairy tale writing. While more fairy tale adjacent, Wendy, Darling continues Peter Pan from the point of view of an adult Wendy who has been in denial of the harm done to her by the eternal boy. Weep, Woman, Weep examines the tale of La Llorona through the lens of intergenerational trauma passed from mother to daughter and tells the story of a woman determined to break the cycle. After the Forest asks what internal scars Hansel and Gretel would truly bear after escaping the witch.

It seems to me fairy tales are perfectly suited to explore the consequences of real-world trauma. Because their protagonists aren’t elves, fairies, or shape-shifters. They’re very often ordinary mortals, and not terribly powerful ones at that. Perhaps they are wealthy or even royal, but they are just as likely to be despised youngest children, dispossessed soldiers, or babies traded away for a handful of greens. And yet, when they or their loved ones are in trouble, they possess and wield an instinctual power. The princes in Sleeping Beauty and Snow White awaken (or even resurrect) their princesses with a kiss, Rapunzel cures her love’s blindness with her tears, the Handless Maiden even spontaneously grows her hands back—not because she wants to have hands again, but so she can save her child from drowning. This power comes from their very human emotions like love, grief, and compassion.

It is a very hopeful idea. Because if these characters are able to heal their own and others’ hurts by virtue of their very humanity, perhaps we can too.

Guest Contributor Bio

Lissa Sloan is the author of Glass and Feathers, a dark continuation of the traditional Cinderella tale. Her fairy tale poems and short stories have appeared in The Fairy Tale Magazine, Niteblade Magazine, Corvid Queen, and anthologies from World Weaver Press. Visit Lissa online at lissasloan.com, or connect on Facebook, Instagram, @lissa_sloan, or Twitter, @LissaSloan.

*Glass and Feathers* serial cover is by Amanda Bergloff.

The Bruja Professor, a witchy take on literature, the occult & pop culture, is the scholarly sister to Enchantment Learning & Living, an inspirational blog celebrating life’s simple pleasures, everyday mysticism, and delectable recipes that are guaranteed to stir the kitchen witch in you.

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Last month, I had the wonderful honor of participating in The Carterhaugh School of Folklore and the Fantastic’s wonderful panel on Folkore and Resistance, along with an incredible lineup of scholars, folklorists, and creators, including Dr. Jean Jorgensen, Dr. Margaret Yocom, Daisy Ahlstone, and Terri Windling. It was a celebration of community, storytelling, and more than a little magic!

To keep the magic of this event going, I’m posting the full transcript of my talk below and the full recording, which is so worth the watch—my fellow panelists had so much joy and wisdom to share. Enjoy!

Joy as a form of Resistance: Conjuring Change by Rewriting Trauma Narratives to be Narratives of Hope

Storytelling has always been one of the most profound acts of magic-making, the most beautiful and healing of spells, the thing I turn to when I need to conjure a new way of being in this complicated, fraught world. As a New Mexican mestiza, a woman of mixed raced heritage, so many stories about people like me are ones of trauma, be it ancestral, generational, or rooted in systemic oppression. And, let’s be real, sometimes we go through things in life that can make us feel closed off, perpetually trying to protect the self from further injury—but that’s no way to live. So when I put pen to paper, I conjure change, a shift away from these trauma narratives towards narratives of joy and hope. And this can be especially important when perpetuating trauma narratives can be a way to reinforce systemic oppression.

As I explain the spell work of writing in the short prose poem “My Joy is My Resistance,” in my first book Everyday Enchantments, “I let my hands relish the feel of my dreams being coaxed to life between my fingers like the red clay of my beloved desert. I mold the clay and I love the earth and shape it into stories they do not want me to tell: the ones of hope. The ones of healing. The ones that remind us of the moon's power and our own capacity for abundance and possibility.”

In fact, all of Everyday Enchantments was written because I was trying to figure out what happiness looks like and what FEELS like day-to-day and to do that, I had to reimagine my life as a sort of fairytale, a place where the mystic could be found in the mundane, where synchronicities and archetypal messages were as common as fairy-godmothers and enchanted objects. In essence, I started focusing on life as a form of lived folklore. Like the fairytales and stories I grew up reading, I was on my own journey of discovery, only instead of saving Middle Earth, traveling to Narnia, or making friends will all the animals of the forest, I was relearned the magic of everyday life.

So folklore and the imagination became a lifeline for me, a way to imagine happiness and fulfillment in a world that doesn’t want people like me to have it. One of the ways I conjured this sense of joy in a fraught world was by examining my relationship to pleasure. It can teach us so much about ourselves. Think about.

In a world that always feeds the negative, which our own fears can magnify, we have to remember that pleasure is a valuable healing tool. It’s something we have to actively nourish and celebrate, like 12 dancing princesses sneaking off each night to dance in a magical kingdom (although I’m simplifying that tale quite a bit). It’s also something we can feel disconnected from when we go on autopilot in a effort to cope with the world around us or our own inner turmoils. Healing our relationship to pleasure can help us process difficult emotions and get real about what we want in life: abundance, meaningful relationships…you name it.

You see this play out in my gothic fairytales, too, like Weep, Woman, Weep, based on the Legend of La Llorona. For those of you who don’t know, La Llorona, or the Weeping Woman is an urban legend that terrifies most Hispanic communities…she is the spirit of a woman who drowned her children in a fit of rage and now sends all eternity roaming the Rio Grande trying to get them back…she just might take you. I have my own spin on this tale in Weep, Woman, Weep, where La Llorona only drowns girls so that they come back and live lives as sorrowful as her own. La Llorona wants to perpetuate the trauma she had to live through in her own life.

The protagonist, Mercy begins her story by telling us, “I am built for tears. It’s in my blood. The women in my life don’t know how to have a life without sorrows.” In the story, she survives an encounter with the Weeping Woman. Mercy survives but doesn’t come back quite right—her tears now have the power to hurt or, she later finds, to heal. She starts in a dark place. She’s dealing with generational trauma, ancestral hauntings, and history of colonization and enforced cultural assimilation written in her blood.

But she chooses to define herself outside of those things. Through her focus on pleasure, the things that make her happy, the things that define and shape her outside of these traumas, she comes into her own—and, eventually, finds a love so strong that not even La Llorona can break it.

Mercy’s pleasures are small, like trashy novels and pretty rocks, really really good turnips and old records. And they’re big pleasures, too, like building a thriving farm from the ground up and nurturing her magical ability with plants. They’re unexpected, like the sweet lemon balm soap made for her by a man who is half-Angel, half-wildcrafter. And sometimes, her pleasures allow her to process her pain as she reconciles herself to the fact that La Llorona has irrevocably changed her life but that she still has a life to live. Through these experiences of pleasure, she learns that she is not just some weed but a seed. By the end of the tale, she is no longer a victim of La Llorona or the often whispered about reviled figure in her small town of Sueno, NM, but Miracle Mercy, the woman who can change fates, the woman who has turned her grief into joy.

This transformation sneaks up on her. She’s been working toward it every day, but she’s never quite able to see the big picture until after she’s developed some magical relationships. There’s a moment, near the end of her story, where she sees this wonderful abundant life she’s created for herself—Mercy’s been so focused on the small little pleasures and the small acts of moving forward from her family’s history of trauma, that she hasn’t quite seen all she’s accomplished, the big picture, until now.

As Mercy says near the end of the story, reflecting on what it’s taken for her to find her joy:

“[La Llorona] was the Weeping Woman, sure. But I was the woman who made rainwater out of tears. I would use them to water my crops through this drought. When people bought my fat turnips and sharp radishes and long, thick carrots, they would taste of freshly turned earth and freshly turned futures, hope, and the bittersweet taste of things past, and the salty tang of possibility. This I would do to remind others that we are the seeds we plant, not the histories forced upon us. This I would do to wash away the sorrow from my soul.

Was I scared? You bet.

But nothing makes a woman brave except living.”

So here we have at the end of this gothic fairytale, another transformation. A girl turned weeping woman turned miracle worker through the simple act of turning away from feeding and perpetuating trauma and learning, one small step at a time, what it means to embody joy and abundance.

In fact, the joy of folklore is that it can be a form of resistance, of changing the kind of stories we tell about ourselves and our communities. It helps us choose magic and possibility over stifling conventions that would regulate our bodies and our minds.

So in closing, I want to leave you with a meditation or ritual to help you when things get difficult, to remind you that you are the author of your own story and nobody can talk that from you. Or, as Mercy puts it, “that we are the seeds we plant, not the histories forced upon us.”

This exercise is fairly simple, but it helps me a lot when I get too in my head and need to ground myself. Think about something that brings you joy, specifically a simple pleasure. It can be anything. For Mercy—okay, and me!—it’s listening to old records and reading trashy novels.

Now visualize that simple pleasure as sacred. It’s not just something you do for fun. It’s not a bonus. It’s a necessity. Resist the temptation to trivialize it! There is no room for guilty pleasures here. You can either visualize this or write down details about it, depending on what works best for you. As you do, imagine the story it tells about you. How does it soothe? Heal? Transform? What emotions emerge as you meditate on this pleasure? They don’t always have to be pleasurable, either. Sometimes enjoyment can give us a safe space or relax enough to process difficult emotions.

Lastly, imagine yourself as your favorite fairytale character—I’m personally very fond of thinking of myself as a hobbit—or who you would be as a folklore protagonist. Imagine it down to the last detail, including how your sacred simple pleasure fits into your quest. What magic does it offer you? What wisdom or insights to help you conquer your foes or inner dragons? How does it help you transform your tears into rainwater?

In closing, always remember to reword Mercy a bit, “nothing makes a person brave, except living.”

And, to add to that, miracles don’t happen unless you show up, every day, ready to work magic.

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