Weis: After Tracy and I left TSR to write novels set in our own worlds, the company continued to publish DL novels. The editorial department was focused on the books and getting them out on the market and didn’t spend much time worrying about canon. To give them credit, no one at the time really thought consistency in the setting would matter much to the readers. Authors were given free reign to do what they wanted in the early days, so long as they remained true to the D&D setting.
That changed later, which meant that those of us who returned to the world had to try to decide what was canon and what wasn’t. I’ve always felt that writing tie-in novels requires a lot more creativity than working in an author’s own world, simply because you have to perform creative gymnastics in order to remain true to the world and true to yourself as an author.
Rockwell: I’ve been lucky in that I’ve been given a lot of free rein in writing my tie-in stories, from creating my own characters to fleshing out areas that haven’t seen a lot of use in other books. In a shared world, you have to make sure what you write doesn’t contradict what has gone before or what the editors may have planned for the future, and while you can play with certain iconic characters and places, you have to return them to the shelf unchanged when you’re done, which can be challenging. But on the other hand, you also have a vast array of resources at your fingertips, from source books to other authors to fans of the setting (who always know more about it than you ever will). I personally think the sheer joy of getting to contribute to a property you love far outweighs any editorial or bureaucratic constraints.
This issue focuses specifically on women in fantasy, so let’s talk about gender for a bit. There are a lot of great conversations happening about the ways in which being a woman in the industry has changed throughout time, but there’s another correlating factor that I’m interested in—the experience of being a woman as it relates to success. What are the ways that gender did (or didn’t) matter at the beginning of your career, and has that changed now that you are more established in your field?
Evans: Less my gender, but my character’s: When I started, there was a lot of pressure to shy away from feminine things, lest you scare the boys off. But I really didn’t want to—my main characters, Farideh and Havilar, start out as teenaged girls, and even if they’re screaming badasses in a sword & sorcery epic, they’re still living the experiences of young women. That’s what I wanted to write about, alongside all the battle and magic and monsters. As the series has gone on, those kinds of concerns—romance, body image, trying to grab at some sort of agency—inevitably become more pronounced. But contrary to the fears that the boys would run from it, the Brimstone Angels series has done really well with the existing Forgotten Realms audience, as well as pulling in readers who feel like it speaks to them better. And my publisher has seen that and let me tell the story the way I want to.
Weis: To be honest, gender simply never occurred to me. I majored in creative writing and literature in college in the ‘60s. I wrote because I love to write. It never occurred to me that I couldn’t because I was a woman.
In my experience, the RPG industry was extremely opening and accepting of women. The problem the industry faced was that according to a survey done at the time, ninety percent of RPG players were male. One of our objectives in writing Dragonlance was to provide strong female characters in the novels to encourage women to try the game.
Rockwell: I sold my first short story to Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Fantasy Magazine back in 1994, and I always thought that my gender was probably a plus in that case, but generally, I haven’t felt like it’s been too much of a factor in my writing career.
I do remember when Wizards of the Coast was first marketing Legacy of Wolves, some of the copy I saw talked about me being the only woman writing in the Eberron setting, and I didn’t really know what to make of that. Why should it matter what my gender was, as long as I was telling a good story? But I never felt like I was “the token female” or anything like that.
When we look at the gender numbers—from awards to publication credits to sales—it’s easy to say that there’s a long way to go in terms of gender equality in the fantasy field. However, it seems to me that the numbers don’t always tell the whole tale. What’s happening under the radar that’s making a difference?
Evans: I think most game companies have started to realize that women and girls are their audience, that we’re not some alien force that’s going to ruin the experience of their base. For Wizards of the Coast in particular, with the Sundering project we were encouraged to think about the makeup of our casts—gender expression, race, sexual orientation. There’s an awareness there that I don’t think you would have seen five years ago.
Now, that said, I’m the only female author writing for them, and Farideh is the only female main character. So I do think there’s still a long way to go. But the intention is there.
Weis: We are seeing so many more women involved in the RPG industry these days. In my case, I own my own company. My lead designer and project manager is a woman. In addition, we hire women artists and writers. Mind you, we don’t hire because they are women, but because they do damn good work!
Rockwell: I have the sense that there are more female creators in the gaming field especially, and that they are starting to receive more recognition for their work as individuals, not just as names in a list of credits. And in terms of both gaming and publishing, I think there is definitely more of an interest in hearing from diverse voices. Like anything else, though, there’s a supply-and-demand dynamic; we’re seeing more diverse voices, especially in publishing, because the reading public is demanding them. And if we want to see even more, readers have to show publishers that by supporting the voices that are out there now, so they’ll be more willing to take chances on new ones in the future.
© 2014 by Shanna Germain.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Shanna Germain claims the title of leximaven, Schrödinger’s brat, vorpal blonde, and Midas’s touch. Her stories, essays, articles, and novellas have found their forever homes in hundreds of magazines, newspapers, books, and websites. Her most recent publications include the horror-fantasy short story collection The Lure of Dangerous Women and the erotic novel Leather Bound. She is the co-owner of Monte Cook Games, LLC, and the lead editor of Numenera and The Strange.
The Frog Sister
Sofia Samatar
Now, as mentioned earlier, the vizier, who put the girls to death, had an older daughter called Shahrazad and a younger one called Dinarzad. The older daughter, Shahrazad, had read the books of literature, philosophy, and medicine. She knew poetry by heart, had studied historical reports, and was acquainted with the sayings of men and the maxims of sages and kings. She was intelligent, knowledgeable, wise, and refined. She had read and learned. One day she said to her father . . . “I would like you to marry me to King Shahrayar, so that I may either succeed in saving the people or perish and die like the rest.”
With these words, the world’s most famous storyteller makes her appearance. Shahrazad (sometimes spelled Scheherazade), heroine of that fabulous compendium of poetry and fantasy, A Thousand and One Nights, has been a powerful catalyst for discussions of women and storytelling, of rhetoric and political strategy, of feminism, of narrative structure, and of fantasy. I love Shahrazad. In one of my poems about her, she can’t even spoil the coffee without creating a tiny and furious drama. If she were a writer, she’d never get writer’s block (partly, of course, because the stakes are too high). But Shahrazad isn’t a writer, which is one of the things I find interesting about her. She’s a reader, but in a culture that privileges speech and memory. She reads, remembers, and speaks. I believe that we can, without detaching Shahrazad from the context in which she arose, see her as a figure for women fantasists all over the world, whether they write their stories or tell them.
In 1967, Nongenile Masithathu Zenani, an artist of iintsomi, the Xhosa genre of oral fantasy stories, told a story abou
t a girl and a frog. The girl and the frog were twins, but the mother, horrified at having given birth to a frog, sent it away to be buried in ashes. As for the girl, she couldn’t work. She was just that round thing. She lay on the floor, inert, until one day, when her mother was away in the fields, a frog knocked at the door. When the frog was with her, the girl could get up and work. Oh, Child of my mother, you’ve helped me! But the frog, frightened of their mother, ran away before she came home, leaving the girl as helpless as before.
The drama of the story springs from the community’s confusion and efforts to solve the mystery. They know the girl can’t work; who, then, is cooking and sweeping the yard? The girl refuses to tell. Eventually, though, the truth comes out: I was born with this frog. My mother gave birth to both of us. The girl reveals that her secret power is in fact her rejected sibling. This is the one that was taken and put in the ashes. The small, the inadequately human, the scorned, the repulsive, the trash: this is the source of productivity.
She is my sister. We were born on the same day.
It seems to me that the roots of fantasy are oral, while the roots of science fiction are written. (If this is true, then perhaps their meeting point is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: a novel born of evenings sharing ghost stories around the fire.) Writing, of course, is a mere blip in human history: As the critic Christopher Prendergast puts it, “if we think of history on the model of a calendar, writing emerges only on the last stroke of midnight, 31 December.” In addition, writing does not emerge equally everywhere. This is true of science fiction as well. Fantasy, on the other hand, in the form of fairy tales, ballads, ghost stories, nursery rhymes, and the epic poetry of bards and griots—fantasy is far older, and universal. Like the girl and the frog, fantasy and humanity were born on the same day.
That said, it’s true that some forms of fantastic narrative have been practiced more commonly by men, such as various epic poetry traditions, while others are more closely associated with women, such as fairy tales and iintsomi. Predictably, scholars inform us that men tell the long stories and women tell the short ones. This continues to be said even when it isn’t true, the implication being that men’s work is major and women’s minor—a pattern that gets repeated in all sorts of contexts. Our conversations, criticism, and media reinforce this untruth. Think about contemporary genre fantasy in English: despite the contributions of Ursula K. Le Guin, N. K. Jemisin, Robin Hobb, and others, the fantasy writer who leaps to mind for most people is male, and his middle initials are probably R. R.
It’s important to struggle against the marginalization of women (and others outside the dominant category of straight white men), in genre fantasy as elsewhere. It’s also important not to reduce women’s fantasy narratives to those that are written (even worse, to those that are written in English). Where would we be without fairy tales, without sad romances sung over a sink full of dishes, without stories told, and sometimes believed or half-believed, about angels, haints, and the evil eye? Like the girl in the iintsomi, we make our lives poorer, and our work impossible, if we ignore that part of our heritage the literary world tends to bury in ashes: the amazing richness of women’s oral culture.
This is not to say that only women are connected to this oral culture, but they have been, and are, more likely to be restricted to it, and for that reason they make particular contributions to it. In the light of this fact, it’s clear that women who write fantasy are not newcomers or fringe-dwellers, but inhabitants of multiple grand traditions of the fantastic. I want to see us celebrate these traditions, because oral culture is vaster and more diverse than written culture. Writing is such a small part of storytelling. You can tell a tale with a word, a gesture, a sigh. Storytellers know this. The body is poetry’s door.
Like the girl in the iintsomi, Shahrazad has a sibling: Dinarzad, or Dunyazad. She is the minor voice to Shahrazad’s major one, the frog sister. Her role is to lie underneath the bed and, after the king has had sex with Shahrazad, ask for the story that will save their lives. Sister, if you are not sleepy, tell us one of your lovely little tales to while away the night, before I bid you good-bye at daybreak. The younger sister is not a hero: Her voice is a whisper, her space as confined and domestic as possible. Yet Shahrazad couldn’t speak without her—without the intimate murmur that, to me, stands in for women’s community, shared history, and traditions of tale-telling and song.
I’ve always found it moving that the name Shahrazad, according to one interpretation, means “The One Who Frees the City,” while Dunyazad means “The One Who Frees the World.”
* * *
Sources
The Arabian Nights, translated by Husain Haddawy, 2008.
The World and the Word: Tales and Observations from the Xhosa Oral Tradition, by Nongenile Masithathu Zenani and Harold Scheub, 1992.
Debating World Literature, by Christopher Prendergast and Benedict Anderson, 2004.
The line “The body is poetry’s door” was said by a Zulu woman storyteller, unfortunately unnamed, quoted in The Tongue is Fire: South African Storytellers and Apartheid, by Harold Scheub, 1996.
© 2014 by Sofia Samatar.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sofia Samatar is the author of the novel A Stranger in Olondria, winner of the 2014 Crawford Award, as well as several short stories, essays, and poems. Her work has been nominated for multiple awards. She is a co-editor for Interfictions: A Journal of Interstitial Arts, and teaches literature and writing at California State University Channel Islands.
The Princess and the Witch
Kat Howard
Once upon a time, there was a woman who told stories. Stories of witches and of princesses and of choosing true love. Stories that began once upon a time, and ended in happily ever after. You think you know what these stories are, and oh, perhaps you do. But until this woman, until Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy, the stories were not yet called what they are now. But she wrote these stories, and she gave them their name—contes des fées. Fairy tales.
To name a thing is to have power over that thing. We learn that in fairy tales.
I grew up on fairy tales, like many of us do. Cinderella at the ball; Red Riding Hood trusting a wolf and walking too deep in the woods; Beauty, handed over to a Beast for the price of a rose. And then, midnight struck. I turned away from them. I was too grown up for such things, and I knew I would never be a princess.
Women and stories and power are deeply entwined with the literary fairy tale (and by literary, please know that I am not opining about quality, or where the collected volumes ought to be shelved, but rather borrowing a term of art from the scholar Jack Zipes, who uses the term to distinguish the written-down versions of fairy tales from their oral and folkloric roots). There is a power in taking a story and making it your own, whether by naming it, or by taking its elements and subverting them, turning them inside out so that the seams—and the seems—of the story show, and then putting them back together. Maybe the pieces don’t fit, not exactly. Maybe the princess is now a witch.
Maybe that’s exactly how things should be.
I can tell you how I came back to fairy tales. I read Jane Yolen’s retelling of Sleeping Beauty, Briar Rose, and it broke my heart, and it cracked open my head. There was a list, somewhere in the book, of other books I should read. And so I set about devouring the anthologies edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling. I wish I could remember which one I read first, but I suppose it doesn’t matter, because eventually I read them all. I am still reading them.
The literary fairy tale, which arose as a distinct genre in the salons of d’Aulnoy and her compatriots in France at the end of the seventeenth century, has always been part of the literature of subversion, a genre of protest. The writers of these stories were generally people on the edge of the court, who were writing as a way to seek social advancement—Cinderellas, each attempting to be their own fairy godmothers. The Comtesse de Murat was denounced by her family for unruly behavior and lesbianism, and was exiled b
y King Louis XIV for satirizing his relationship with his mistress, Madame de Maintenon. Madame d’Aulnoy was married by abduction (with the consent of her father, who sold her to her kidnapper), and then fled France due to scandal. She turned to writing (and possibly espionage) to support herself, and continued writing even after she was able to return to France. Even Marie-Jeanne L’Héritier, who was a salonierre by inheritance, was not in a privileged position. Like all these women who wrote and shared their fairy tales in the salons, she was watched by the court at Versailles, tabs kept on her activities and especially on her words. And the salon conversation itself—with its ideals of gender equality in conversation and intellect—was by its nature socially subversive.
Even the aspect of fairy tales that might now seem conventional, too heteronormative, and too problematic for women who have no desire to be saved by a prince and then set up in his castle—the happy ever after, the romantic ending of true love’s kiss and the subsequent marriage—was its own kind of subversion. Love freely chosen, rather than love decreed by a forced marriage.
When I was a little girl, I wanted to be the princess in the fairy tale. Not because I necessarily wanted the prince—he was secondary at best. Even then, I stopped being interested in the Beast when he turned from the gorgeous leonine roar of a beast into the pale, blond, ordinary prince. I wasn’t interested in ordinary. What I wanted was to be the foot that fit the glass slipper, the girl who would wake, still living, and rise out of her coffin of glass. The girl at the heart of the story.
Though men were active in this salon culture as well, the movement, and the genre, was led by women, and it was a movement that shared many of the ideals of modern feminism, including the idea that women’s writing was equal to men’s. Fairy tales were ways for women to write their own stories—to be the princess, yes. But to also be the fairy godmother, to be the witch, to be the old woman in the forest who would get you safely out of the story for the price of a kindness.
Fantasy Magazine Issue 58, Women Destroy Fantasy! Special Issue Page 26
