"An Insider's Guide to Jailhouse Cuisine"-Sean Rowe

This essay first appeared in The Oxford American Best of the South Issue 2008 (#61).

I like to get in fights. I like to drink and drive. I like to kick the windows out of cop cars and talk shit to humorless magistrates. In my spare time I enjoy harpsichord music, quiet walks in the woods, and fine dining. Lately, though, I have been dining in, at the Wake County Public Safety Center, also known as: jail.
The Wake County Public Safety Center is a big, ugly building in downtown Raleigh, North Carolina. On the ninth floor, where I spent a month in solitary confinement, the windows are painted black so that you, the law-abiding citizen, don't have to see what is going on inside. Good for you! But this means that if you're inside, which you aren't, we are, you can't see outside. You cannot see the sky. You cannot see grass or trees or hot women. You can see the marquee news crawl on the Channel 11 building across the street, if you squint through a slit my friend Jamaica scraped in the paint with a contraband razor blade.
Outside, you are safe, more or less. Again, good for you; or, as we say in the big house, Fuck you, motherfucker. Inside, well...let's just say one is also more or less safe, but the emphasis is on less. Look at your life-insurance policy. There in the fine print on page nine, the part I bet you haven't read, you will see that your coverage evaporates the moment you step inside the pokey. But isn't safety a relative concept?
Jail is a great place to score drugs, get gang-raped, or plot a revenge killing. It's a great place to catch up on your reading or watch a Dolphins game, assuming you're willing to throw a dictionary at the three-hundred-pound mongoloid who decides it would be better to watch the Cartoon Network. Donnie Harrison, the Wake County Sheriff, says there are about thirteen hundred inmates in his jail on any given day. This is teensy, even weensy, compared to L.A. County, where I have also spent time, but that is another story. A small portion of the Wake County prisoner population consists of actual, dangerous criminals. Another portion is made up of people who are psychotic. Not psychotic in some cutesy, figurative sense, but in the literal, DSM-IV, eat-your-own-vomit sense; in the let's-shiv-a-guard, let's-scream-all-night sense. Mostly, though, jail is full of people just like you and me—scratch that, like you—who have run afoul of America's goofy dope laws or stolen their pedophile stepfather's credit card and tried to split to Costa Rica or bounced a check at Wal-Mart and then gotten pulled over for running a stop sign three months later and busted on a bench warrant they didn't even know they had. These people are different from you in only one key respect: they are young, black, and poor.
But I am not here to whine about the criminal "justice" system or regale you with tall tales of life in stir. Let us dwell on a lighter subject: jailhouse cuisine. During my latest incarceration, I had the pleasure of sharing Thanksgiving dinner with Mack (trafficking), Nate (counterfeiting), Outlaw (parole violation), and J.C. (conspiracy). By then I was out of solitary and had taken up lodgings at the jail annex on the edge of town. Imagine a sparkling-new airport terminal where your plane never lands or departs.
There we are, sitting at a stainless-steel picnic table bolted to the cement floor, playing dominoes, and awaiting our Thanksgiving feast, each of us wearing an orange-and-white-striped Tigger suit and matching plastic flip-flops, except for Mack, our diplomatic liaison to the black and Mexican prisoner population, who had taught himself near-fluent Spanish and ordered a do-rag ($4.10) and a pair of hipsterish high-top tennis shoes ($12.25) from the weekly commissary. J.C., whose own parents turned him in for growing a marijuana plant in his closet, is so young he has only recently started shaving. Nate is young, too, just twenty-five, but he's a hard-bitten entrepreneur who operates an auto-detailing business with his mom when he isn't printing up fake hundred-dollar bills. Mack and Outlaw, like me, are in their early forties and repeat offenders. They've been here for months awaiting trial and prison. I've already been convicted and am serving a soft jolt for drunk driving.
J.C. is giving me a crash course in Orange Cush, Skunk #7, and Great White Shark because I have decided to solve my financial problems by becoming a big-time doper when I get out of jail. Mack and Outlaw are reminiscing about chickenheads they have known. (You learn strange new words in jail, many related to sex; a "fifi," for example, is any device used as a masturbation aid behind bars; a "chickenhead" is a prostitute who services crack addicts.) Conversations in jail are not like conversations on the outside. They can go on for days, interrupted by Maury and Oprah and Jerry and Friday Night SmackDown and then resuming again, fluid, free-floating, labyrinthine. Is Rambo real? Is there really iceberg water? If not, how would you melt an iceberg and bottle it? What would you do if you won the Powerball? These sorts of questions occupy the dead hours of an inmate's life, which is to say every spare minute in between meals.
An army marches on its stomach, Napoleon wrote. So do jailbirds, though of course jailbirds don't literally march anywhere, except for Petro Sandulyak, a guy whom prosecutors described as the "godfather" of Raleigh's underground Ukrainian community. Petro ran a multimillion-dollar cleaning service that by night employed hundreds of his undocumented countrymen. His company was the principal janitorial contractor for Kmart and Kroger on the East Coast. Petro was a fat slob when I met him, but while he waited around to get convicted and pay half a million dollars in fines, serve a year in prison, and be deported, he lost sixty pounds marching in disciplined circles around the cell block. It wasn't just exercise that made Petro svelte. Diet played a big part.
Breakfast in jail is something like this: scrambled reconstituted eggs. Grits. Two slices of Wonder Bread. A half-pint of orange juice or milk. If you are like me and think breakfast is incomplete without a cigarette and a good cup of coffee, you're fucked. There isn't any coffee in jail these days and there aren't any cigarettes. That's the big difference between jail and prison; in prison—the place you go after you've been convicted of a crime or received a sentence of more than a year—tobacco and coffee, like sex, are commonly available. (In jail—the more crowded, chaotic, dangerous prelude to prison—you can buy little packets of Sanka from the Tuesday commissary, but by the time you mix instant-coffee crystals with warm sink water in an empty orange-juice container you will realize it's not worth the effort. You're much better off spending your money on salt and pepper and ketchup and hot sauce, because jail food in its undoctored form is wholly unseasoned and hideously bland.) A typical lunch: spaghetti with tomato sauce. A slice each of American cheese-product and cartilaginous bologna with two more pieces of Wonder Bread. A packet of cut-rate mayonnaise. Chopped iceberg lettuce and a section of unripe tomato. Iced tea (decaf). Try eating iceberg lettuce or spaghetti with a flimsy plastic spoon. For annoyance, it's right up there with showering in handcuffs.
Who assembles this slop? And where is the kitchen, anyway? When I ask Mack and Outlaw, they shake their heads at my naïveté. They know what I know now and what you're about to: that the villain of this story is LeCount Catering Services. LeCount's cost-per-inmate meal in Raleigh is $1.28. Prisoners in Raleigh don't hate the sheriff or the cops or the shaved-head, mace-toting, black-clad guards so much as they hate LeCount Catering. They fantasize about catching LeCount prep cooks in dark alleys.
You stop pooping three or four days after you're incarcerated. This is alarming until you realize that you simply aren't getting enough nutrition to create much in the way of waste. You aren't quite starving, but in the long hours of the night you think you are. The jail's operations manual states that there "shall not be more than fourteen hours between the evening meal and breakfast," and there usually isn't, but it feels like eternity. One night, Nate's snoring woke me up and I glanced over at his bunk. He wasn't snoring; his stomach was growling louder than I thought was possible for a man's stomach to growl. Some of the kindly older guards who tuck you in at night recite the following adage: "Sleep late, lose weight!" In other words: Don't under any circumstances miss breakfast.
If the low-cal diet provided by LeCount Catering Services was all there were to eat in jail, riots might rule the day. In fact, LeCount won the million-dollar jail contract in the first place because the sheriff got nervous about an uprising. In 1995, the jail quit doing its own cooking and hired Aramark Correctional Services to run the kitchen. During the next two years, complaints about moldy orange juice, spoiled milk, raw chicken, and human hair in the Stroganoff went through the roof. The county commission booted Aramark and brought in LeCount Catering. Today, LeCount uses its own kitchen and trucks in the meals. No one can even remember where the old jail kitchen is located.
Jail food might be marginally better today than it was a decade ago, but thank God for the weekly commissary. Assuming you have money, and you damn sure better, you can order Cheetos and popcorn and humongous garlicky kosher dill pickles. You can order Honey Buns and MoonPies and tuna salad and peanut butter and jelly and oatmeal cookies and Pop-Tarts and chocolate pudding. You can order half a dozen kinds of candy bars, from Twix (least favorite, according to a poll I conducted) to Snickers, which outsells all other brands combined. What I haven't mentioned are Ramen noodles.
Ramen noodles are a phenomenon. Because of their low cost, tastiness, and high caloric value, inmates spend upwards of half their weekly food budget on Ramen noodles alone. Cajun chicken is the most popular flavor, followed by plain old chicken; beef; and chili. Last year in Houston, Texas, inmates consumed three million packages of Ramen noodles. Mexican inmates save up food, including Ramen noodles, and throw big late-night prayer-session picnics; black inmates trade Ramen noodles for other food at regular mealtimes; white guys use crushed-up Ramen noodles to make "state cakes," a sort of jailhouse pizza invented in the state prison system. Without Ramen noodles, life in jail would grind to a halt.
It did in Raleigh, two days before Thanksgiving, when a memo from the sheriff appeared on the wall: effective 11/28/07 the following items will no longer be available on the commissary menu: ramen noodles.
There was no explanation for this outrage. Rumors and then conspiracy theories began spreading like Malibu wildfire: the Ramen ban was an act of sadism disguised as a water-conservation measure (North Carolina this fall was in the midst of a record-setting drought); the Ramen ban was an outburst of racist paranoia aimed at Black Muslims and stemming from a lamebrain muddling of the words "Ramen" and "Ramadan." Finally, one night, a no-nonsense senior lieutenant of the guards appeared on the scene to clarify the situation. The Ramen ban, he said, was the result of too many sinks getting clogged up by noodle flotsam, a byproduct of noodle preparation, wherein hundreds of prisoners mix Ramen products with hot(ish) water from the jail's sinks.
This was the grim situation that obtained on the afternoon of Thursday, November 22nd, as J.C. paused in his horticulture lesson and Mack and Outlaw momentarily ran out of chickenhead reveries.
Now, I know what you're thinking. You're thinking I'm going to tell you about the ghastly meal that arrived masquerading as Thanksgiving dinner, and how we subsequently set our mattresses on fire and took the guards hostage. Or: You think I'm going to swipe some pampered adjectives from Bon Appétit or Food & Wine to describe the astonishing gourmet fare that LeCount Catering presented for our enjoyment—pan-seared sea scallops perhaps, with squid-ink polenta, rosemary-roasted Thumbelina carrots, and smoked salmon soubise.
Wrong.
Neither.
I'll cut to the chase, or, more accurately, the anticlimax. The trays arrived more than an hour early, at 3:45 p.m. This seemed wonderful until one sourpuss pointed out that it just meant more hours till breakfast.
What could be waiting beneath the lids of those heavy brown plastic trays? A hush fell over the cell block as a trusty lifted the first one.
Cranberry sauce, a good tablespoon or more. Sliced turkey—big, thick slices—with gravy and dressing. An actual dinner roll. Turnip greens with chopped onions. Enormous pieces of chocolate cake. Milk.
There was nothing to grouse about, and nobody did.

---

I like where liquor takes me. Usually. Selma, Alabama, might be an exception. I was minding my own business, whizzing east through the night on Route 80, halfway between my best friend's wedding in Port Gibson, Mississippi, and a nice warm bed in Savannah belonging to a beautiful witch I was dating at the time. She had promised to rub me with a secret lotion made from the blossoms of hallucinogenic flowers she grows in her tiny garden.
One part of me wished I was driving the ragtop '69 Pontiac Rick Bragg sold me in the mid-1990s, but I owned that monstrous, smoking, fireapple-red law-enforcement-magnet less than a year before my then-wife declared it was her or it. What I was actually driving was a nondescript Ford Escort with functional blinkers and taillights; and maybe just as well, since I was weaving subtly across the centerline. Good thing there's no one on the road but me, I thought, when all at once my rearview mirror erupted in flashing blue lights.
The drunk tank in Selma is downright medieval. It's a cube made out of cinder blocks with a single, billion-watt bulb in the ceiling that never goes off. Directly beneath the bulb is a hole in the floor the size of a coffee-can lid, and that's where you answer the call of nature, in front of your fellow incarcerees. There's no toilet paper or running water. There are no blankets and there's nothing to sleep on but the concrete bench running around three sides of the cell.
The thing you are never supposed to do in jail is ask another guy why he's there. Being who I am, it's the first thing I ask. "What are you in for?" I say to the guy straight across from me. After a moment of surprise he says: "Saltin'." I point to the next guy. "What about you?" He answers: "Saltin'." Twelve guys later I get to the last. "Saltin' on a officer," he says, and I finally understand what saltin' is. It's assault, and it's Saturday night in Selma.
When the sun comes up (theoretically, I mean; there aren't any windows, so I can't be sure), we hear a clanging at the big, steel dungeon-door. What happens next makes me think I'm still asleep, and dreaming. One by one the drunk-tank denizens get up and stagger toward the door and receive a tray through the food slot at the bottom. When I get mine, I am staring down at real, honest-to-God scrambled eggs, hot biscuits, strips of bacon, and grits pocked with chunks of melting butter. There is enough food on the tray for two men, and it is all mine. Later, at dinnertime, we get chicken sandwiches. I'm not talking about the kind of chicken sandwiches one finds at Bojangles'. I'm referring to a real Southern chicken sandwich such as you almost never see these days: two pieces of white bread with a gigantic baked chicken leg in between. A chicken leg with a goddamn bone in it. Should I describe supper? I won't. You get the idea. Next time you're arrested, do it in Selma.
When I had paid for my crimes against humanity and been released from jail in Raleigh, I walked up Hammond to Tryon and turned right, moving toward a vague recollection of a bus stop. Half a mile up the road my nose started twitching. Before me stood a faded building surrounded by cars: Larry's Southern Kitchen.
Soon I was inside noticing that the patrons divided along racial lines, half black and half white, none of them remotely skinny. The long buffet was freighted with macaroni and cheese and pinto beans and candied yams and fried trout and fried chicken and barbecued chicken and pigs' feet and gizzards-and-rice and roasted potatoes with onions; with chitlins and salmon cakes and black-eyed peas and cornbread and dinner rolls and hushpuppies and country ham and fatback and grilled beef liver with onions; with biscuits and gravy, the gravy made from old-fashioned sage sausage; with chicken pastry; with pork chops; and yes, with coconut pie and pecan pie and banana cream pie and strawberry shortcake and lemon chess pie and pineapple-orange cake. I felt like a blind dog in a smokehouse, and I would still be at Larry's if it weren't for the need to make a living and get on with things. As it was, I emerged an hour later (and $8 poorer) and made my way slowly toward home through the December chill carrying a Styrofoam to-go cup of delicious sweet tea. The caffeinated kind.
Larry's Southern Kitchen does a lot of catering. I've written to Sheriff Donnie Harrison, enclosing a small check for his re-election campaign and suggesting he fire LeCount Catering and let Larry's crew take over the food service at the Wake County Public Safety Center and its sparkling new annex. Harrison's a busy man, and so far he hasn't written back. 

"Happy Endings" -Margaret Atwood

John and Mary meet.

What happens next?
If you want a happy ending, try A.

A.

John and Mary fall in love and get married. They both have worthwhile and remunerative jobs which they find stimulating and challenging. They buy a charming house. Real estate values go up. Eventually, when they can afford live-in help, they have two children, to whom they are devoted. The children turn out well. John and Mary have a stimulating and challenging sex life and worthwhile friends. They go on fun vacations together. They retire. They both have hobbies which they find stimulating and challenging. Eventually they die. This is the end of the story.

B.

Mary falls in love with John but John doesn't fall in love with Mary. He merely uses her body for selfish pleasure and ego gratification of a tepid kind. He comes to her apartment twice a week and she cooks him dinner, you'll notice that he doesn't even consider her worth the price of a dinner out, and after he's eaten dinner he fucks her and after that he falls asleep, while she does the dishes so he won't think she's untidy, having all those dirty dishes lying around, and puts on fresh lipstick so she'll look good when he wakes up, but when he wakes up he doesn't even notice, he puts on his socks and his shorts and his pants and his shirt and his tie and his shoes, the reverse order from the one in which he took them off. He doesn't take off Mary's clothes, she takes them off herself, she acts as if she's dying for it every time, not because she likes sex exactly, she doesn't, but she wants John to think she does because if they do it often enough surely he'll get used to her, he'll come to depend on her and they will get married, but John goes out the door with hardly so much as a good-night and three days later he turns up at six o'clock and they do the whole thing over again.

Mary gets run-down. Crying is bad for your face, everyone knows that and so does Mary but she can't stop. People at work notice. Her friends tell her John is a rat, a pig, a dog, he isn't good enough for her, but she can't believe it. Inside John, she thinks, is another John, who is much nicer. This other John will emerge like a butterfly from a cocoon, a Jack from a box, a pit from a prune, if the first John is only squeezed enough.

One evening John complains about the food. He has never complained about her food before. Mary is hurt.

Her friends tell her they've seen him in a restaurant with another woman, whose name is Madge. It's not even Madge that finally gets to Mary: it's the restaurant. John has never taken Mary to a restaurant. Mary collects all the sleeping pills and aspirins she can find, and takes them and a half a bottle of sherry. You can see what kind of a woman she is by the fact that it's not even whiskey. She leaves a note for John. She hopes he'll discover her and get her to the hospital in time and repent and then they can get married, but this fails to happen and she dies.

John marries Madge and everything continues as in A.

C.

John, who is an older man, falls in love with Mary, and Mary, who is only twenty-two, feels sorry for him because he's worried about his hair falling out. She sleeps with him even though she's not in love with him. She met him at work. She's in love with someone called James, who is twenty-two also and not yet ready to settle down.

John on the contrary settled down long ago: this is what is bothering him. John has a steady, respectable job and is getting ahead in his field, but Mary isn't impressed by him, she's impressed by James, who has a motorcycle and a fabulous record collection. But James is often away on his motorcycle, being free. Freedom isn't the same for girls, so in the meantime Mary spends Thursday evenings with John. Thursdays are the only days John can get away.

John is married to a woman called Madge and they have two children, a charming house which they bought just before the real estate values went up, and hobbies which they find stimulating and challenging, when they have the time. John tells Mary how important she is to him, but of course he can't leave his wife because a commitment is a commitment. He goes on about this more than is necessary and Mary finds it boring, but older men can keep it up longer so on the whole she has a fairly good time.

One day James breezes in on his motorcycle with some top-grade California hybrid and James and Mary get higher than you'd believe possible and they climb into bed. Everything becomes very underwater, but along comes John, who has a key to Mary's apartment. He finds them stoned and entwined. He's hardly in any position to be jealous, considering Madge, but nevertheless he's overcome with despair. Finally he's middle-aged, in two years he'll be as bald as an egg and he can't stand it. He purchases a handgun, saying he needs it for target practice--this is the thin part of the plot, but it can be dealt with later--and shoots the two of them and himself.

Madge, after a suitable period of mourning, marries an understanding man called Fred and everything continues as in A, but under different names.

D.

Fred and Madge have no problems. They get along exceptionally well and are good at working out any little difficulties that may arise. But their charming house is by the seashore and one day a giant tidal wave approaches. Real estate values go down. The rest of the story is about what caused the tidal wave and how they escape from it. They do, though thousands drown, but Fred and Madge are virtuous and grateful, and continue as in A.

E.

Yes, but Fred has a bad heart. The rest of the story is about how kind and understanding they both are until Fred dies. Then Madge devotes herself to charity work until the end of A. If you like, it can be "Madge," "cancer," "guilty and confused," and "bird watching."

F.

If you think this is all too bourgeois, make John a revolutionary and Mary a counterespionage agent and see how far that gets you. Remember, this is Canada. You'll still end up with A, though in between you may get a lustful brawling saga of passionate involvement, a chronicle of our times, sort of.

You'll have to face it, the endings are the same however you slice it. Don't be deluded by any other endings, they're all fake, either deliberately fake, with malicious intent to deceive, or just motivated by excessive optimism if not by downright sentimentality.

The only authentic ending is the one provided here:
John and Mary die. John and Mary die. John and Mary die.

So much for endings. Beginnings are always more fun. True connoisseurs, however, are known to favor the stretch in between, since it's the hardest to do anything with.

That's about all that can be said for plots, which anyway are just one thing after another, a what and a what and a what.

Now try How and Why.

"Orientation" - Daniel Orozco

 I just discovered this amazing short story. Was thinking of examples to teach point of view, especially for second person, and Orozco was anthologized. Witty, sad, and Marxian...

Those are the offices and these are the cubicles. That’s my cubicle there, and this is your cubicle. This is your phone. Never answer your phone. Let the Voicemail System answer it. This is your Voicemail System Manual. There are no personal phone calls allowed. We do, however, allow for emergencies. If you must make an emergency phone call, ask your supervisor first. If you can’t find your supervisor, ask Phillip Spiers, who sits over there. He’ll check with Clarissa Nicks, who sits over there. If you make an emergency phone call without asking, you may be let go.These are your in- and out-boxes. All the forms in your inbox must be logged in by the date shown in the upper- left- hand corner, initialed by you in the upper-right-hand corner, and distributed to the Processing Analyst whose name is numerically coded in the lower-left-hand corner. The lower-right-hand corner is left blank. Here’s your Processing Analyst Numerical Code Index. And here’s your Forms Processing Procedures Manual.
You must pace your work. What do I mean? I’m glad you asked that. We pace our work according to the eight-hour workday. If you have twelve hours of work in your in-box, for example, you must compress that work into the eight-hour day. If you have one hour of work in your in-box, you must expand that work to fill the eight- hour day. That was a good question. Feel free to ask questions. Ask too many questions, however, and you may be let go.
That is our receptionist. She is a temp. We go through receptionists here. They quit with alarming frequency. Be polite and civil to the temps. Learn their names, and invite them to lunch occasionally. But don’t get close to them, as it only makes it more difficult when they leave. And they always leave. You can be sure of that.
The men’s room is over there. The women’s room is over there. John LaFountaine, who sits over there, uses the women’s room occasionally. He says it is accidental. We know better, but we let it pass. John LaFountaine is harmless, his forays into the forbidden territory of the women’s room simply a benign thrill, a faint blip on the dull, flat line of his life.
Russell Nash, who sits in the cubicle to your left, is in love with Amanda Pierce, who sits in the cubicle to your right. They ride the same bus together after work. For Amanda Pierce, it is just a tedious bus ride made less tedious by the idle nattering of Russell Nash. But for Russell Nash, it is the highlight of his day. It is the highlight of his life. Russell Nash has put on forty pounds and grows fatter with each passing month, nibbling on chips and cookies while peeking glumly over the partitions at Amanda Pierce and gorging himself at home on cold pizza and ice cream while watching adult videos on TV.
Amanda Pierce, in the cubicle to your right, has a six-year old son named Jamie, who is autistic. Her cubicle is plastered from top to bottom with the boy’s crayon artwork—sheet after sheet of precisely drawn concentric circles and ellipses, in black and yellow. She rotates them every other Friday. Be sure to comment on them. Amanda Pierce also has a husband, who is a lawyer. He subjects her to an escalating array of painful and humiliating sex games, to which Amanda Pierce reluctantly submits. She comes to work exhausted and freshly wounded each morning, wincing from the abrasions on her breasts, or the bruises on her abdomen, or the second- degree burns on the backs of her thighs.
But we’re not supposed to know any of this. Do not let on. If you let on, you may be let go.
Amanda Pierce, who tolerates Russell Nash, is in love with Albert Bosch, whose office is over there. Albert Bosch, who only dimly registers Amanda Pierce’s existence, has eyes only for Ellie Tapper, who sits over there. Ellie Tapper, who hates Albert Bosch, would walk through fire for Curtis Lance. But Curtis Lance hates Ellie Tapper. Isn’t the world a funny place? Not in the ha-ha sense, of course.
Anika Bloom sits in that cubicle. Last year, while reviewing quarterly reports in a meeting with Barry Hacker, Anika Bloom’s left palm began to bleed. She fell into a trance, stared into her hand, and told Barry Hacker when and how his wife would die. We laughed it off. She was, after all, a new employee. But Barry Hacker’s wife is dead. So unless you want to know exactly when and how you’ll die, never talk to Anika Bloom.
Colin Heavey sits in that cubicle over there. He was new once, just like you. We warned him about Anika Bloom. But at last year’s Christmas Potluck he felt sorry for her when he saw that no one was talking to her. Colin Heavey brought her a drink. He hasn’t been himself since. Colin Heavey is doomed. There’s nothing he can do about it, and we are powerless to help him. Stay away from Colin Heavey. Never give any of your work to him. If he asks to do something, tell him you have to check with me. If he asks again, tell him I haven’t gotten back to you.
This is the fire exit. There are several on this floor, and they are marked accordingly. We have a Floor Evacuation Review every three months, and an Escape Route Quiz once a month. We have our Biannual Fire Drill twice a year, and our Annual Earthquake Drill once a year. These are precautions only. These things never happen.
For your information, we have a comprehensive health plan. Any catastrophic illness, any unforeseen tragedy, is completely covered. All dependents are completely covered. Larry Bagdikian, who sits over there, has six daughters. If anything were to happen to any of his girls, or to all of them, if all six were to simultaneously fall victim to illness or injury—stricken with a hideous degenerative muscle disease or some rare toxic blood disorder, sprayed with semiautomatic gunfire while on a class field trip, or attacked in their bunk beds by some prowling nocturnal lunatic—if any of this were to pass, Larry’s girls would all be taken care of. Larry Bagdikian would not have to pay one dime. He would have nothing to worry about.
We also have a generous vacation and sick leave policy. We have an excellent disability insurance plan. We have a stable and profitable pension fund. We get group discounts for the symphony, and block seating at the ballpark. We get commuter ticket books for the bridge. We have direct deposit. We are all members of Costco.
This is our kitchenette. And this, this is our Mr. Coffee. We have a coffee pool into which we each pay two dollars a week for coffee, filters, sugar, and Coffee-mate. If you prefer Cremora or half-and-half to Coffee-mate, there is a special pool for three dollars a week. If you prefer Sweet’N Low to sugar, there is a special pool for two-fifty a week. We do not do decaf. You are allowed to join the coffee pool of your choice, but you are not allowed to touch the Mr. Coffee.
This is the micro wave oven. You are allowed to heat food in the microwave oven. You are not, however, allowed to cook food in the microwave oven.
We get one hour for lunch. We also get one fifteen-minute break in the morning and one fifteen-minute break in the afternoon. Always take your breaks. If you skip a break, it is gone forever. For your information, your break is a privilege, not a right. If you abuse the break policy, we are authorized to rescind your breaks. Lunch, however, is a right, not a privilege. If you abuse the lunch policy, our hands will be tied and we will be forced to look the other way. We will not enjoy that.
This is the refrigerator. You may put your lunch in it. Barry Hacker, who sits over there, steals food from this refrigerator. His petty theft is an outlet for his grief. Last New Year’s Eve, while kissing his wife, a blood vessel burst in her brain. Barry Hacker’s wife was two months pregnant at the time and lingered in a coma for half a year before she died. It was a tragic loss for Barry Hacker. He hasn’t been himself since. Barry Hacker’s wife was a beautiful woman. She was also completely covered. Barry Hacker did not have to pay one dime. But his dead wife haunts him. She haunts all of us. We have seen her, reflected in the monitors of our computers, moving past our cubicles. We have seen the dim shadow of her face in our photocopies. She pencils herself in in the receptionist’s appointment book with the notation “To see Barry Hacker.” She has left messages in the receptionist’s Voicemail box, messages garbled by the electronic chirrups and buzzes in the phone line, her voice echoing from an immense distance within the ambient hum. But the voice is hers. And beneath the voice, beneath the tidal whoosh of static and hiss, the gurgling and crying of a baby can be heard.
In any case, if you bring a lunch, put a little something extra in the bag for Barry Hacker. We have four Barrys in this office. Isn’t that a coincidence?
This is Matthew Payne’s office. He is our Unit Manager, and his door is always closed. We have never seen him, and you will never see him. But he is there. You can be sure of that. He is all around us.
This is the Custodian’s Closet. You have no business in the Custodian’s Closet.
And this, this is our Supplies Cabinet. If you need supplies, see Curtis Lance. He will log you in on the Supplies Cabinet Authorization Log, then give you a Supplies Authorization Slip. Present your pink copy of the Supplies Authorization Slip to Ellie Tapper. She will log you in on the Supplies Cabinet Key Log, then give you the key. Because the Supplies Cabinet is located outside the Unit Manager’s office, you must be very quiet. Gather your supplies quietly. The Supplies Cabinet is divided into four sections. Section One contains letterhead stationery, blank paper and envelopes, memo pads and note pads, and so on. Section Two contains pens and pencils and typewriter and printer ribbons, and the like. In Section Three we have erasers, correction fluids, transparent tapes, glue sticks, et cetera. And in Section Four we have paper clips and pushpins and scissors and razor blades. And here are the spare blades for the shredder. Do not touch the shredder, which is located over there. The shredder is of no concern to you.
Gwendolyn Stich sits in that office there. She is crazy about penguins and collects penguin knickknacks: penguin posters and coffee mugs and stationery, penguin stuffed animals, penguin jewelry, penguin sweaters and T-shirts and socks. She has a pair of penguin fuzzy slippers she wears when working late at the office. She has a tape cassette of penguin sounds, which she listens to for relaxation. Her favorite colors are black and white. She has personalized license plates that read PEN GWEN. Every morning, she passes through all the cubicles to wish each of us a good morning. She brings Danish on Wednesdays for Hump Day morning break, and doughnuts on Fridays for TGIF afternoon break. She organizes the Annual Christmas Potluck and is in charge of the Birthday List. Gwendolyn Stich’s door is always open to all of us. She will always lend an ear and put in a good word for you; she will always give you a hand, or the shirt off her back, or a shoulder to cry on. Because her door is always open, she hides and cries in a stall in the women’s room. And John LaFountaine—who, enthralled when a woman enters, sits quietly in his stall with his knees to his chest—John LaFountaine has heard her vomiting in there. We have come upon Gwendolyn Stich huddled in the stairwell, shivering in the updraft, sipping a Diet Mr. Pibb and hugging her knees. She does not let any of this interfere with her work. If it interfered with her work, she might have to be let go.
Kevin Howard sits in that cubicle over there. He is a serial killer, the one they call the Carpet Cutter, responsible for the mutilations across town. We’re not supposed to know that, so do not let on. Don’t worry. His compulsion inflicts itself on strangers only, and the routine established is elaborate and unwavering. The victim must be a white male, a young adult no older than thirty, heavyset, with dark hair and eyes, and the like. The victim must be chosen at random before sunset, from a public place; the victim is followed home and must put up a struggle; et cetera. The carnage inflicted is precise: the angle and direction of the incisions, the layering of skin and muscle tissue, the rearrangement of visceral organs, and so on. Kevin Howard does not let any of this interfere with his work. He is, in fact, our fastest typist. He types as if he were on fire. He has a secret crush on Gwendolyn Stich and leaves a red-foil-wrapped Hershey’s Kiss on her desk every afternoon. But he hates Anika Bloom and keeps well away from her. In his presence, she has uncontrollable fits of shaking and trembling. Her left palm does not stop bleeding.
In any case, when Kevin Howard gets caught, act surprised. Say that he seemed like a nice person, a bit of a loner, perhaps, but always quiet and polite.
This is the photocopier room. And this, this is our view. It faces southwest. West is down there, toward the water. North is back there. Because we are on the seventeenth floor, we are afforded a magnificent view. Isn’t it beautiful? It overlooks the park, where the tops of those trees are. You can see a segment of the bay between those two buildings over there. You can see the sun set in the gap between those two buildings over there. You can see this building reflected in the glass panels of that building across the way. There. See? That’s you, waving. And look there. There’s Anika Bloom in the kitchenette, waving back.
Enjoy this view while photocopying. If you have problems with the photocopier, see Russell Nash. If you have any questions, ask your supervisor. If you can’t find your supervisor, ask Phillip Spiers. He sits over there. He’ll check with Clarissa Nicks. She sits over there. If you can’t find them, feel free to ask me. That’s my cubicle. I sit in there.

lesson planning for my creative writing class...

“it suggests a morality but offers no moral” –Janet Burroway

“Literature is never only about ideas, but about the experience of ideas” –John Ciardi

“Telling the truth by telling a lie.” –Janet Burroway

“The writer of fiction should not try to solve such questions as those of God, pessimism, and so forth. What is obligatory for the artist is not solving a problem but stating a problem correctly” –Anton Chekov

“Negative capability is when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries and doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” –John Keats

“A story then speculates on a possible truth. It is not an answer or a law but a supposition, an exploration. It offers no ultimate solution.” –Janet Burroway

“The greater the work, the more it refers us to some permanent human impulse rather than an easy slogan or a given institutional embodiment of that impulse. Fine writing expands our scope by continually presenting a new way of seeing, a further possibility of emotional identification.” –Janet Burroway.

“Not all experience reveals, but all revelations come through experience. Books aspire to become a part of that revelatory experience, and the books that are made in the form of fiction attempt to do so by re-creating the experience of revelation.” –Janet Burroway.

From Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft  -Janet Burroway

from flavorwire

Creating Nostalgia

I'm doing a project on Nostalgia and Beauty...Sepia evokes different emotions than regular photos. Pretty proud of my photoshopping skills...

BAM! my full master's thesis, or, longest thing I've ever written in my life...

Reading Fairy Tales With Children: An Exercise in Imaginative, Reflective, and Moral Thinking

Children have been read the Grimms’ fairy tales since the 19^th century. Adults usually read to them in order to instill finger-wagging lessons. Don’t misbehave. Listen to Mother. Wander into the woods alone, and bad things will happen. What most people don’t know is that today’s Grimms’ fairy tales are sterilized, moralized, cleaned-up versions of their original selves. Usually more violent and ribald, the original tales were also thematically more complicated and literarily more fantastical. In this essay, I argue that children should be read the original versions of the tales because they exercise children’s imaginative, reflective, and moral thinking. Specifically, as scholar Bruno Bettelheim argues, these stories touch on themes that are psycho-developmentally relevant to children’s own growth, offering them a space for empathy as well as psychological connection. Children should also be given the historical, contextual tools to navigate some of the more bizarre and confusing plot and character elements. As scholar Maria Tatar shows, a lot of the stories reflect and were influenced by a medieval European way of life. Children, given the space to imagine and the context to critically reflect, are then capable of deeper exercises in thought about greater themes of morality. However, a thinking child begins first with a thinking adult, and it is the teacher who can pedagogically combine both the psycho-developmental approach and the critical contextual approach that will be able to effectively read fairy tales with children.

The publishing history of the Grimms’ Children’s and Household Tales is one of continual revision. The first 1812 edition expanded to six more in the brothers’ lifetime, not counting, of course, numerous contemporary anthologies. The early editions were not aimed for an audience of children; in fact, the brothers were primarily concerned with the scholarly preservation of the German Volk, viewing themselves as “patriotic folklorists, not as entertainers for children” (O’Neill). They wanted to document German oral tradition, folklore that mirrored a medieval world view with all its “stark prejudice, its crudeness, and barbarities” (O’Neill).

Jacob and Wilheim talked with, listened to, and wrote down 40 something persons’ oral rendition of various tales, most of them from women. Many of the tales resembled Charles Perrault’s earlier French Mother Goose Tales, and others can be traced back to even earlier Italian versions. What became clear is the cultural migration of these stories across geography and time. It is in roadhouses, barns, and especially spinning chambers that medieval women told these tales as a form of entertainment to escape work drudgery; as the stories traveled from one mouth to another, from one country to another, elements were added, deleted, exaggerated, reduced.

By coincidence, the Grimms’ first published collection dovetailed with the flowering of children’s literature in Europe, and so for financial reasons, the brothers began to reedit their tales to suit a new younger audience; Wilhelm Grimm says that “there is much to be improved and added---something that will also prove favorable for sales,” as he took more literary freedom with writing the tales as well as deleting scholarly footnotes from the first edition (Tatar 12). Thus each edition underwent more revision, usually resulting in the deletion or softening of themes of incest, violence, pre-marital sex, and the injection of explicit condemnation of deviant behavior (Tatar 12).

Parents began reading these tales to their children because “they approve of the finger-wagging lessons inserted into the stories: keep your promises, don’t talk to strangers, work hard, obey your parents” (O’Neill). No longer reading for its scholarship, parents of 19^th and 20^th century Europe and America used the stories as cautionary tales of morality for their children. Furthermore, the link with morality tales has “fallen prey to ideologues and propagandists” (O’Neill). The Third Reich read Little Red Riding Hood as a symbol of the innocent German people and the Big Bad Wolf as Jewish. At the end of World War II, Allied commanders banned the tales’ German publication because they believed that the stories contributed to Nazi savagery. In the 1970s, college campuses in Europe and America condemned the tales as espousing a sexist point of view.

From individual parents to historical leaders to scholars and students, the link between the tales and childrens’ morality is assumed. As evident in parents’ use of them as cautionary tales and in the Allied commanders’ assumption that the stories may have influenced German character to be cruel, many people believe there is a link of causality. The censoring of these stories began with the Grimm brothers themselves (as they prepared for the sale of each new edition) and moved on to being abridged, excluded from school reading lists, and further sterilized through picture books and movies. The ultimate sterilization is with Disney, who sweetens the material by giving the dwarfs (once peculiar and fantastical) names like Sneezy and Happy (O’Neill). Today’s audience knows not about the incest and violence of the original Snow White but rather see only the happily-ever-after cute Disney version.

Is there still merit in reading the original 1812 publication? I, along with scholars Bruno Bettelheim and Maria Tatar, argue that it is crucial to do so. The original text not only opens up a fantastical world of characters and events but also enriches our knowledge when read through literary, historical, psychological, and cultural lenses. Specifically, I’m interested in re-evaluating the way fairy tales are read, taught, and culturally handed down to children; often simplistic, moralistic, and black and white, these stories in their original form, and through contextual knowledge, are anything but. When read to and guided by parents/teachers in the right way, children exercise their imaginative, reflective, and even moral thinking through original readings of fairy tales.

Bettelheim (1977) focuses on the fantastical and magical element of fairy tales and how they can help exercise children’s imagination in guiding them to deal with and grow through various psychological stages. Tatar (1987) focuses on the importance of unveiling the historical, socio-cultural background of the tales, the Grimms, and the women who told them, as a way to contextualize the central themes in the stories and to critically analyze various strains of censorship that the tales have undergone. Both authors lead us back to the original for very convincing reasons: the importance of childrens’ imagination and personal connection for mental growth through reading of stories, as well as the need for critical, analytical scholarship to historicize stories that morph with various cultural milieus.

I argue that a combination of these two approaches is best. Children who read the original versions of the tales can dwell in the imaginative land of growing protagonists, helpful creatures, and defeated antagonists, a space that draws empathy and psycho-developmental connection with their own lives. Meanwhile, an adult/teacher who provides immediate, relevant, and thought-provoking context to specific stories opens the child’s reflective and moral mind. An open discussion of how the child makes sense of the story and the context is a fruitful exercise in thinking about not only the story land but also the real world. As a specific example, in the final section, I will analyze through the psycho-developmental, as well as the critical contextual lens, the tale of Snow White. By reading the original story while providing certain contextual information, an adult/teacher is able to have the child think about relevant themes like violence, gender, beauty, and labor.

Is there a link between reading the stories and morality (for good or for bad)? For Bettelheim, perhaps, but not in the conventional link of causality that reading of violence will cause people to do violent things; rather it’s about opening the door of imagination and thought in children, so that the tales act as a guide and a resource to how moral situations are handled. Tatar is more cynical about that link; what she does do is expose how the purpose and reception of the tales change with culture, time, and people, thereby showing ultimately that society reads into the stories its own moral values and judgements. Combining the two scholars in a pedagogical approach to reading fairy tales to children, I argue that these stories open the door to reflections and conversations about morality, and a reflective conversation with various perspectives and ample context is the best place to start.

A Pyscho-developmental Approach to the Grimm’s Fairy Tales

Bruno Bettelheim argues for children to be read the original versions of fairy tales because they offer a greater space for imaginative thinking as well as the working out of various psycho-developmental stages in a child’s life. The original earlier versions of these tales have “poetic qualities and enchantment,” where “true meaning and impact of a fairy tale can be appreciated” (19). Interest in the types of stories should be left to the child, not the parent; it is “always best to follow the child’s lead… if a child does not take to the story, this means that its motifs or themes have failed to evoke a meaningful response at this moment in his life”(18). For Bettelheim, coming from a psychological developmental perspective, children are drawn to certain tales because those stories offer greater personal meaning; stories help illustrate, elucidate, or illuminate various issues concerning the child’s mental state consciously and unconsciously.

The structure of the original fairy tale is set up in a way that “possess[es] a multifarious richness and depth that far transcend what even the most thorough discursive examination can extract from them” (19). He says that “the child’s need for magic” can be found in the otherworldliness of fairy tales, a place where deliberate vagueness (once upon a time…) offers a space for the child to insert her own imagination, being a part of the story-making process (62). Bettelheim is not  concerned by the gratuitous violence, declaring that children think animalistically until puberty. What is meant here is that children animate the inanimate. Bettelheim cites and example given by Ruth Benedict in his article “Animalism” in Encyclopedia of the Social Science: when a door slams on a child, the child pushes the door back because she thinks the door did it to her on purpose (49). I’m not sure how believable it is to argue that all children think animalistically all the time, because it’s easy to imagine a scenario in which a child (or adult) pushes the door back simply because she is angry; however, it is plausible that children are prone more to animalistic thinking than adults. This animation of the inanimate maps on well with the talking beasts, helpful birds, and intentional animals found in the Grimm’s tales.

            Another psycho-developmental phase Bettelheim argues maps on well with fairy tale themes is the tendency to think and act in extremes, another part of what he calls animalistic thinking. Children are polarized in thinking the world as either good or bad, beautiful or ugly, without comprehension of “intermediate stages of degree or intensity” (74). This, Bettelheim argues, occurs in the Oedipal period of the Freudian stage between 3-7 years old. Children see the world as chaotic and are trying to deal with their own fledging ambivalent emotions like love and hate, desire and fear.  Bettelheim says it’s not a coincidence that children are drawn to the fairy tale world where “figures are ferocity incarnate or unselfish benevolence…essentially one-dimensional” (74). This one-dimensionality is not limiting to the child because “‘presenting the polarities of character permits the child to comprehend easily the difference between the two, which he could not do as readily were the figures drawn more true to life…ambiguities must wait until a relatively firm personality has been established on the basis of positive identifications. Then the child has a basis for understanding” (9). Thus, the educative focus for the child is the working out of the concepts themselves. What are the characteristics of good? What are the characteristics of evil? What is the difference between the two? Bettelheim believes that learning about ambiguities should happen after the Oedipal stage, where children have already made solid concept identifications.

            Here again, is a point that can be contended; solid identification of concepts need to happen, yes, but that does not mean children cannot comprehend shades of gray or be probed to think about the spectrum between two extremes. According to Bettelheim, children would naturally think a character is evil, evil being a permanent character trait rather than an action. It’s important to think about the role of the parent who is reading the stories to the child. It is not good for the child if all the parent does is wag her finger and teach the tales as cautionary morality stories. Likewise, I see a problem with wholly letting the child interpret what she wants in a tale without the parent guiding the child to think, talk, and discuss about what’s happening in the stories and in the child’s own interpretations. Bettelheim argues for the organic unfolding of understanding by the natural mapping on of children’s psycho-developmental stages with themes in the tales. He leaves it to the child to draw conclusions based on what he read (influenced by what psychological stage he is in). This sole dependence on reader reaction to a text is problematic because there is a lack of critical thinking and varying perspectives. If children naturally see the characters as black and white, then moral values and actions are also either/or. The child may also already see the story a certain way because her familial, cultural, and peer influences tint her perception. I believe that this is when the role of the parent as teacher and guide comes in. A parent can ask a child about her interpretation and opinions of the plot and characters without making value judgements. More about how this type of guided thinking can happen through story-telling will be discussed later in the final section.

Maria Tatar’s Critical and Contextual Perspective

Germanic scholar Maria Tatar agrees with the imaginative mapping on of Grimm’s themes with children’s (as well as adults’) psychological realities and fantasies. However, she does worry that some tales lend themselves more explicitly to moral value judgements than others. When “undesirable traits like deceitfulness, curiosity, insolence come to a bad end,” the transgression/punishment pattern “can instill fear in children rather than confidence (192). This is where Tatar and Bettelheim differ: instead of Bettelheim’s more optimistic belief that children’s psychological state will guide them to certain stories that will in turn guide them through specific psychological issues, Tatar is more cautious and pessimistic about this type of guidance being a good thing or effective at all. In other words, these stories, whether solely interpreted by children themselves (via psychological curiosity) or interpreted for children by adults (via cautionary finger-wagging) both have the possibility of misconstruing and reading into the text what was originally not there.

In The Hard Facts of the Grimm’s Fairy Tales, Tatar sets the facts straight about these stories that have been linked with teaching morality to children. In fact, the original intent of such tales was not meant or linked to any type of moral or pedagogical purpose at all. Nor did medieval people, the original disseminators and consumers of the stories, read into them in those ways. Tatar historicizes the tales to reveal not only the original context of the stories but also how various societies and groups have taken liberal liberty with interpretation, resulting in convenient morality specific to a certain socio-cultural context.

The Grimm’s fairy tales, their earliest versions, were oral stories peasant women shared with one another while working (usually spinning the loom) long hours. There is no way to know where these tales originated from or whether they’re based on reality due to its oral nature, but what’s important to note that each new teller of the tale had the liberty to embellish and subtract from the stories as they see fit. These stories were told for entertainment, to pass the time away while manually laboring. They were also tied to a specific class---working peasant women. Both these factors directly and heavily influenced the content of the stories. Originally, the “graphic descriptions of murder, mutilation, cannibalism, infanticide, and incest” were not only issues that directly mirrored real life in a certain class of the medieval social and economic structure, but also the stories’ graphic and bawdy descriptions were primarily experiences of entertainment and spectacle (preface XIV). Much like how contemporary horror films are for the purposes of entertainment rather than moral pedagogy, ribald and grotesque fairy tales were told for the same pleasurable diversion.

However gratuitously violent or sexual the original oral stories were, they were based on certain feudal realities. There was child abuse. There was incest. There was paternal and fraternal cruelty. There were plenty of pre-marital pregnancies and inequalities for women. The stories are rife with examples of how the medieval worldview is reflected in certain reoccurring plot structures. For example, there’s a significant group of stories that begin with parents abandoning their children (i.e. “Hansel and Gretel”) due to economic hardship, which Tatar describes as “wholly realistic for premodern social conditions” (49). Cast out children or stepmother child abuse were not uncommon. There are also a group of stories that deal with mothers or stepmothers being jealous of their daughters because of a sexual father-daughter attraction; the original Snow White had an evil mother, not stepmother, who was jealous because Snow White’s father was attracted to her (24). The motif of spinning and imagery of the loom (“Sleeping Beauty”) directly reflects “spinning as a woman’s destiny” (49). Although the tales do not faithfully record reality, there are significant points documenting the cultural climate of when these stories were told (56).

Tatar then does something very valuable in her book, which is to trace the changing cultural climate with the changing way of telling and interpreting the stories. The most obvious shift is the stories transitioning from multiplistic oral form to singular written documentation by the Grimm brothers’ collection. The women who told them the stories, some contributing more than others, had significant say in the plot, characters, and pace of the tales, and then the brothers themselves took small literary liberties to stylistically tie the stories all together. Thus, the moving oral nature of the stories became frozen by a specific lens of written documentation.

Furthermore, after the first edition was published in 1812, the Grimm brothers decided to capitalize on the lucrative nature of a flowering children’s literature market, thus began the extensive editing out of unsuitable scenes, injections of straightforward moral values, greater literary liberties, and picture illustrations. From the first to the second edition, Tatar notes that “rather than allowing various figures of the tale to reveal their traits through their actions…Wilhelm Grimm felt obliged to stamp the tale’s actors with his own character judgement and thus shaped his reader’s views of them” (30). His preconceived notions of sex and class were influenced by the milieu of his time; likewise, Christian symbolism and character values were infused into the texts. For example, Wilheim “seized every opportunity for virtue of hard work, correlating diligence with beauty and desirability” (29). All these 19^th century German cultural values contributed directly in morphing the tales.

After the Grimm’s death came the creative and convenient interpretation of the tales by various political and ideological groups. As mentioned in the introduction, Nazi Germany saw the stories as national tales of purity, interpreting the innocent children in the tales as the good German folks facing corruption by the big bad Jew. Later, Allied forces forbade publication and public school teaching of the fairy tales, fearing it contributed to a violent and grotesque German character formation. Tatar stresses the double-edged sword that is the fairy tales: “the simplicity of fairy tales allows interpretive pluralism to reign supreme” (51). Reduced to its essential components, each fairy tale “mounts a struggle between any two entities with competing interests,” so this can be parent versus child, aristocracy versus peasantry, master versus slave, or nation versus nation (51). The imaginative subjective possibilities are endless, which is its most alluring as well as dangerous aspect.

Thus Tatar agrees with Bettelheim that children probably do see themselves in the stories as the child heroes, who usually possess compassion, naïveté, and courage at the same time (children’s characteristics). Likewise, in fairy tale world, the least successful becomes the most successful; stories of the underdog winning again map on to children, who perhaps see themselves as the underdog among ruling adults. However, Tatar argues that although children may be able to draw sympathy with the texts and find comfort and growth in successful heroes, there are other elements of the text that may have not so optimistic repercussions. The hyperbolic nature of fairy tales, in which a single false step is inflated, in which missed opportunities are overstated, could instill excessive fear and caution in children.  For example, the heroine in “Bluebeard” was told not to open a forbidden door, and once she did, she saw excessive carnage--- “the bloodbath is simply too sensational a spectacle for so minor a transgression” (164).

Tatar cautions against any interpretation of moral direction in the tales, whether by parent, child, or ideologue. What “originally functioned as a motor of the plot and as a means of introducing villainy becomes a general behavioral guideline” (166). Likewise, what was once burlesque gratuitous violence for comedic effect has been morphed into an extreme violation/punishment interpretation. History has shown that oral stories of gossip and entertainment can be changed into children’s cautionary tales and even nationalistic symbols of character. Teaching and interpreting the tales with a specific moral bent or intention is ultimately doing a disservice to both the truth of the tales themselves as well as to the reader/interpreter who is now only seeing the tales through one type of lens. For children, this singular lens might be interpreted by the parents for the children or by the children themselves (as they are old enough to be influenced by other ideas in their environment that will influence their own interpretation of the text). Personal reactions can be moral, or psychological (Bettelheim), but if they do not include or take into account the knowledge of the history and context of the tales and their subsequent changes, then the stories have not been understood completely in their rich and troubling complexity.

To compare and contrast Tatar’s critical approach with Bettelheim’s psycho-developmental one, both writers argue for the reading of the original edition of the Grimm’s fairy tales. For Bettelheim, it is here that the stories are the most fantastical---a place where children can insert their own imaginations. For Tatar, the original edition comes closest to the stories’ oral tradition, a place where the medieval socio-cultural and economic structure can be best seen and traced. Both authors agree that a great element of the stories is their flexibility to interpretation. The imaginative world of the stories provides manifold ways in which readers can sympathize with or read into the text. However, here is where the authors disagree. Bettelheim takes a more optimistic view in which children’s own conscious and unconscious psychological stages will guide them towards certain stories that will in turn guide children through their own lives. Bettelheim’s view can be argued to extend to adults as well: literature and texts are sites for observational learning and empathy.

Tatar does not discredit the power of the tales to guide children, but she does worry that such guidance may be too subjective or may backfire and have deleterious effects. In other words, two concerns arise when children interpret their own texts based on psychological feeling/psycho-developmental drive. 1. What if the text instills fear instead of confidence due to its fantastical nature and transgression/punishment pattern? 2. What if the child just interprets the text through the lens of whatever environment she is in that holds influence over her (parent’s opinions, their schooling, the dominant culture they live in)? It seems that these are the questions that Tatar would ask Bettelheim if they were in conversation with one another. Tatar’s extensive research uses history to unmask the layers of politicized and convenient revisions the stories have undergone. Ultimately, she argues that interpretation of the tales alone, without context, is likely to be erroneous because current values of judgement and morality are different than those of medieval times from which the tales originated from.

Combining Bettelheim and Tatar: A Pedagogical Approach to Fairy Tales

           

            Both authors argue convincing points of why fairy tales should be read in a certain way. Bettelheim’s psycho-developmental approach brings to priority the naturally pedagogical relationship between child and text, specifically the text as a site for empathetic feeling and (conscious and unconscious) observational learning. Even if the ideas read don’t immediately map on to a child’s psychological state, Bettelheim believes that “these ideas…become available when the time is ripe for the child to build his understanding on them” (Bettelheim 120). In other words, a seed is planted in the preconscious mind and will ripen when certain psycho-developmental stages progress. Tatar’s critical and historical approach prioritizes reading and interpreting the text through contextualization---socio-cultural, economic, biographical, and political. Depending on the version/edition of the text a person is reading, a certain intention may be put in by the author/editors; likewise, a certain intention may be brought by the reader herself because she is reading a text through a specific ideological/moral/cultural time.

            A reading that combines these two approaches would greatly benefit the reader as well as do justice to the text. Specifically, for children, psychological intimacy as well as critical, contextual knowledge can be felt and learned at the same time. This is where the role of the adult comes in. The teacher, either parent or schoolteacher, can guide the child to read and think about the text in both these ways, without injecting finger-wagging morality. One can imagine picking a story that a child is drawn to (as Bettelheim stresses to let the child’s interest guide the reading), letting the child interpret the story her own way, then asking why she read the plot or characters in a certain light. The teacher can focus on key points of the text that may be contentious/open to interpretation and probe the child on her view of them---this offers valuable insight into how the child is reading the text or what psychological stage or state the child may be going through that influences her interpretation. The teacher needs to be keenly aware of opportune moments to ask the child why she interpreted a story a certain way. Since a child thinks and feels based on her own past experience, chances are it is personal experience that has influenced her thinking (Bettelheim 49).

            By making the link between the text and a child’s personal experience obvious, the teacher exposes the child’s own thought patterns and psychological state. Verbalizing the link and, more importantly, having the child herself see it, is bringing into consciousness the empathetic connection between child and text. Here, Bettelheim’s connection between textual and psycho-developmental is made, and as an extra step, the teacher and child have talked about the connection, resulting in not only the organic mapping on of psychological state but also in the creation of a reflective perspective of having the child think about why that is.

            The next step is to bring in Tatar’s contextual and critical critiques. The teacher can explain to the child that not everyone has interpreted the story this way. In fact, here are several other possible interpretations of characters and situations. The teacher can then go on to try to have the child put herself in the shoes of characters other than the protagonist, even in the shoes of the villain. What motivated the villain’s actions? Some stories lend themselves to obviously evil and ridiculous villains, while some others are less clear. Depending on the story, having a child try to trace the psychology and actions of the villain, or other characters, can be a valuable exercise in reflecting on other perspectives. Ultimately it’s about problematizing any black and white morality conclusions the child may come to generalize without contextual help.

            Finally, Tatar’s historical context may help the child understand in a new light the actions and motives of certain characters. Telling them about the poverty during Hansel and Gretel’s time may help them gain greater understanding of why the characters were abandoned rather than sit in fear or anger at the idea of horrible parenting. Telling them about the inequality between men and women may help them understand why Bluebeard’s wife was exposed to visual carnage, why female curiosity was linked with punishment while in other fairy tales, male protagonist curiosity usually lead to fortune. Even gratuitous violence can be honestly explained to the child in terms of real types of violence in medieval times as well as violence functioning as humor in the text. Offering apt context, especially at points where the child interprets things as certainly one way, helps the child reflect on the multiple and layered meanings of the text, creating a richer, more nuanced understanding of fairy tales rather than a pure visceral reaction to textual events and characters.

Snow White

            “Little Snow-White,” in its first 1812 publication, is a rich text to guide children through both Bettelheim’s psycho-developmental approach and Tatar’s historical contextual layout. I will split the text into several plot sections and explore how a child may react to and interact with different parts of the story as well as provide some ways to pose reflective, provocative questions through contextual knowledge. The goal here, is for the adult/teacher to recognize what parts of the story deserves attention and background knowledge, what parts are conducive to reflective and moral thinking.

            The story starts off with the queen validating her beauty in a magic mirror until one day the mirror declared her daughter Snow White to be the most beautiful. The queen became “pale with envy and from that hour on, she hated Snow White” (Grimm). She orders a huntsman to kill her in the woods and bring back her lungs and liver, parts she intends to cook and eat with salt. In this first section, the child will have naturally felt fear and maybe hatred towards the queen and sympathy for Snow White. Bettelheim will argue that the prominent child-hero versus adult-villain theme found in fairy tales naturally reflect children’s view of family power dynamics; children are helpless and inferior to adults who have power over them. Psychologically, the child may have naturally put herself in Snow White’s shoes, sympathizing with her being forced under the power of the queen. It is here also that some of Tatar’s approach of contextual knowledge can offer children a more complex way to think about the theme. First, asking the child whether it makes a difference if the queen is the mother or step-mother can broach the topic of familial love and responsibility. Then, informing the child about the Grimm’s subsequent changing from mother to step-mother in later editions helps her think about why such a change may happened and talk about the nature of motherhood. This contextual knowledge of mother versus step-mother is a great conversational starting point for children to think about the mother-child bond, the nature of family, and familial obligations and transgressions. In other words, children are invited to engage in reflective and moral thinking.

            Another topic to bring up is the violent nature of eating Snow White’s internal organs. The adult should ask how the child naturally feels and thinks about such an act (probably disgusted, curious, scared…) and then later inform the child about the relevant historical point of view: in the spirit of Tatar contextualization, medieval societies have held beliefs that one can acquire characteristics of what one eats (Bettelheim 207). In this case, Snow White’s lungs and liver represents her being, her beauty; thus, since the queen wants to be the most beautiful, eating her organs actually has a purpose beyond cruel violence or gloating victory. For children to ruminate over this medieval medicinal point of view is to complicate what is on the surface considered graphic gratuitous violence and dig deeper into the queen’s psychology.

            Moving on to the second session of the tale, the huntsman “took out his hunting knife to stab her” when she began to cry and beg, so he “took pity on her because she was so beautiful” (Grimm). He thought that wild animals would kill her anyway, and was glad he didn’t have to do the deed. Snow White then ran afraid in the dark forest, tripping over stones and thorns until she came to a little house.

In this section, in the spirit of Tatar, children can be guided to think about why the huntsman took pity on Snow White. The text reads “because she was so beautiful,” but what if Snow White was ugly or average looking? Does beauty engender more pity? Also, the question of allegiance/responsibility arises: the huntsman works for the queen and disobeys her orders. Does that make him irresponsible, a bad person? Dealing with the themes of killing, duty, beauty, and choice, the huntsman episode poses a moral dimension for children to reflect on.

            From the Bettelheim viewpoint, children, who see themselves as Snow White, feel scared to be attacked and relieved to escape. Bettelheim would argue again that the attacking huntsman and ensuing dark forest can unconsciously map on to symbolic forces or obstacles the child is dealing with. Controlling adults, growing up, self-responsibility are all psycho-developmental stages that map on well with this part of the narrative. Bettelheim also interestingly interprets the huntsman as a weak father-figure who “neither does his duty to the queen nor meets his moral obligation to Snow White to make her safe and secure” (206). For children, the huntsman may represent a father who tries to placate both mother and daughter, like in the case of the queen and Snow White. He is conflictingly both a threat and a protector. Here, the topic of the missing father, or the missing male figure in the story can be discussed---would the plot be different if a re-imagined father was present?

            In the third section of the story, Snow White enters the little house hungry and thirsty. She sleeps in one of the dwarf’s bed until she wakes up and sees seven of them. They take pity on her story and tells her “if you will keep house for us, and cook, sew, make beds, wash, and knit, and keep everything clean and orderly, then you can stay here, and you’ll have everything that you want. We come home in the evening and supper must be ready by then” (Grimm). Here, Bettelheim’s psycho-developmental point of view interprets Snow White’s stay with the dwarfs as a pre-oedipal latency period. The dwarfs as miniature men, stunted, non-sexual, and child-like. In the symbolic unconscious, Bettelheim argues that the child recognizes the dwarf’s place as a safe space of childhood. But even childhood comes with certain responsibilities, and it is the requisite and introduction of work that will give Snow White her right to stay. This exchange of labor is the first time Snow White learns to work for her food and shelter, a precursor to adult responsibilities. Contextualizing this section with the historical and cultural responsibilities of women will make the child understand in more detail the nature of such a labor trade off. The adult should inform the child about female household obligations like cooking and sewing as the historical norm. The topic of labor responsibilities, especially their difference along gender lines can be broached in this way. Again, it is a point of discussion for children to both historicize the story as well as consider greater socio-cultural trends.

            In the next section, the queen finds out Snow White is still alive and disguises herself as a peddler woman to knock at her door. She sells her first a bodice lace, then a poisoned comb, then a poisoned apple. Three different times she comes back. The dwarfs save Snow White the first and second time by cutting open the bodice lace and removing the comb but could not do so the third time. What’s important to note here is that Snow White was drawn to tools of vanity and womanhood. Laces and hair combs show her need to maintain her own beauty. Bettelheim argues that Snow White’s inability to resist temptation shows her growing sexuality. The final apple, especially the red part, can be interpreted as sexuality and the loss of innocence (213).  Snow White tells the disguised apple-selling queen she cannot accept anything because “the dwarfs don't want me to" (Grimm). It’s not because she herself was afraid or learned anything from the first two near-death experiences, but rather she didn’t want to disobey the dwarfs. Bettelheim would argue that this episode is symbolic of the tensions of growing up: childhood, loss of innocence, sexuality, adulthood; psycho-developmentally, Snow White is progressing through these stages.

            It is also here that finger-wagging to children in order to teach them not to open doors to strangers comes at its strongest. Parents need to resist interpreting for the child certain moral lessons. Instead, an open question of what the child thinks about this section will let the parent in on what is going on in the child’s mind. The greater topic of curiosity, or attraction to beautiful things, or the use of disguise can be reflected on without concluding the simplistic cautionary tale of ‘don’t talk to strangers.’ It is the opening, complicating and graying of ideas that is needed, not a straightforward answer of what this fairy tale is supposed to teach. This section offers a springboard for children to begin to think about greater themes very relevant to their own lives (as mentioned above), and keeping those topics on reflection and discussion mode is ultimately the most beneficial to a learning and thinking child.

            Finally, in the last section, a prince stays with the dwarfs for shelter one night and sees Snow White in her glass coffin. He begs the dwarfs for him to have the coffin because “he could not get enough of her beauty…he could not live without being able to see her, and he would keep her, and honor her as his most cherished thing on earth” (Grimm). The dwarfs “took pity on him” and gave him the coffin with dead Snow White (Grimm). The prince couldn’t go anywhere without her, so he had servants carry the coffin around wherever he went. The servants were disgruntled by such a task and opened the coffin; one hit Snow White on her back. The apple was dislodged and she and the prince were together. On their wedding, the queen came and saw it was Snow White. She was forced to put on a pair of burning iron shoes “and dance in them. Her feet were terribly burned, and she could not stop until she had danced herself to death” (Grimm).

            From a psycho-developmental point of view, marrying the prince represents full adulthood. Children who consciously or unconsciously relate to Snow White’s growth will view life with the prince as a new hopeful beginning. The deep sleep she was in lead to rebirth (Bettelheim 214). Bettelheim also notes that children have a strong sense of retaliation when wronged, so they may find the final death scene with the queen satisfying. However, some children may find the violence too graphic and painful. Writer Kay Stone’s own five-year-old son didn’t like the cruel ending and changed the story himself, an ending that had the queen sleep 100 years and “wake up a nice lady” (Stone 61). Indeed, the spectacular aspect of dancing, burning feet may cause fear in children. This is exactly what Tatar warns about violence in stories. The graphic nature in fairy tales could be due to medieval concepts of torture or the entertaining value of violent revenge, but taken into contemporary culture, it can seem gratuitous and out of place. Asking children what they thought of the ending or if they would do anything to revise it provides a space for reflection and imagination like in Stone’s son’s case. The adult can tell the child about the nature of medieval violence or violence as entertainment during peasant women story-telling times. Historicizing violence or seeing it as a literary device can make the ending less shocking or grotesque for children.

Conclusion: Towards a More Reflective and Thoughtful Childhood

            As seen above, fairy tales like “Snow White” can open up greater reflective, contextual, and moral thinking for children on a vast array of complex themes. However, the key is in the efficacy and sensibility of the adult teacher. The adult not only has to be knowledgeable of the context of the stories, she also needs to be keenly aware of the psycho-developmental happenings of the child. Then, nuanced awareness of how the child and the stories can be linked together in various and interesting ways will guide the types of questions and contextual knowledge provided while reading the stories.

            History shows too vividly bad examples of how the stories have been manipulated by parents and ideologues alike for morally convenient purposes. From the flowering of 19^th century children’s literature morality to Nazi Germany’s political uses of the Grimms’ fairy tales, the stories continually are further removed from their original peasant, working women, medieval source. Ignorance of context as an adult leads to a similar ignorance and tinting of the tales for the children they read to. Bettelheim calls for an almost adult-free reading of the tales, where children select the ones they want to be read to based on interest, where insights and lessons come from unconscious psycho-developmental forces that map on to similar tales. Tatar goes a step further in being a proponent of exposing adults and children to the political, economic, socio-cultural, and literary forces that influence the events and characters in the stories. She warns against finger-wagging morality as well as letting children completely interpret stories on their own. Critical and contextual knowledge can be taught to children, and with a fuller grasp of what went in to the making of each story, children and adults alike can begin to fully and fairly interpret the story.

            Reading fairy tales to children this way exercises their imaginative, reflective, and moral thinking. When guided in a fruitful way, children are open to critically and analytically seeing not only the world of the story but also the reality around them. Here, I will stress again the element of guidance. Without an informed and perceptive adult who is able to pedagogically lead and open up discussions on the text, children will not be able to gain insight from the rich context of each story nor re-evaluate their own interpretation or judgements. Even though Bettelheim and Tatar write about how children should read fairy tales, implicit and crucial to their arguments’ success is first the education of the adult. Without a teacher who is cognizant of psychology and the historical, literary context, who is able to fuse the child’s life and mind with in-depth knowledge about fairy tales, the opportunity for reflective and moral thinking is lost or greatly reduced. A thinking child begins first with a thinking adult; the psycho-developmental, critical and contextual approach to reading fairy tales not only benefits children, but is just as relevant for the adults who are reading to them.

Works Cited

Bettelheim, Bruno. The Uses of Enchantment. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977.

Grimm, Jacob, Wilhelm Grimm. “Little Snow White.” trans. D.L. Ashliman. Snow-

            White and Other Tales of Aarne-Thompson-Uther type 709.  1998. University

            of Pittsburg. 11 June 2012. <http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/grimm053.html>.

O’Neill, Thomas. “Guardians of the Fairy Tale: The Brothers Grimm.” National

            Geographic. Dec. 1999: pages 102-129. 11 June 2012.

             <http://www.nationalgeographic.com/grimm/article.html>

Stone, Kay. “Three Transformations of Snow White.” The Brothers Grimm and

            Folktale. Ed. James McGlathery. Champaign, Illinois: University of Illinois

            Press, 1988.

Tatar, Maria. The Hard Facts of the Grimm’s Fairy Tales. New Jersey: Princeton

             University Press, 1987.