Heather Lee Birdsong

When one thinks of the golden age of fairy tale, one inevitably thinks of Europe and the Brothers Grimm, Perrault, or Andersen. Despite this, most fairy tale writers of that age were affluent French women (i.e., L'Héritier, d'Aulnoy, Murat and Leprince de Beaumont), crafting tales in their opulent salons to subvert the constraints and expectations of their time and class, applying a patina of low origin to the tales to make them less obviously transgressive (claiming, for example, to have first heard the tale from a nursemaid). Lost princesses prove their mettle and are rewarded by escaping tyrannical arranged marriages (or untenable circumstances at home) for genuine affection, for example. Earlier fairy tales, those told around hearth fires as oral tradition in fact rather than as literary conceit, tend to be less logical, rather bawdy, and primarily driven by the narrative impulse, "And then?" (I read that somewhere and thought it very clever, but do not remember the source.) None were originally intended for children — even the first versions of Grimms' tales.

Stories from the Stone House arose from a wish for my younger self to have had narrative tropes and archetypal figures that better addressed the adversities of my own cultural and familial circumstances. I aimed to retain the flavor and speed of the stories I love, twisting things here and there as I went: the heroine saves herself more often than not with no need for a male intercessor, the wicked stepmother has become the wicked stepfather (a much more familiar circumstance in my social group), there are no marriages at all, and so on. But don't read too much between the lines: the stories are still mostly propelled by, "And then!"