Quick Questions with Cosbrarian: Fairy Tales Are F*cked Up

Thanks for joining us today, Cosbrarian! We’re so excited to talk about your book, but we’ll get to that in a minute. For those of the Cannonball Read community that are new, would you please tell us how you found us and how long you’ve been participating?

I was invited to join Cannonball Read when I was a more active Facebook member on the Pajiba community group. That was back in 2019. I have participated for several years, though I took some time off around 2021-2022 because of a giant reading slump.

You’re TikTok famous! I had no clue until I started checking out your profiles on social media to prepare for this interview. Is it your favorite social media platform? What is it about that platform that really appeals to you? Did you set out to be TikTok famous or did it just happen?

Becoming TikTok famous initially happened by accident. I joined the platform in 2020 like many of us did, being bored and stressed. I wasn’t posting too much, mostly following others. Randomly on February 26, 2021, I saw it was “National Tell a Fairy Tale Day,” and my favorite fairy tale is a lesser-known Brothers Grimm tale that I love to share because it’s got such an appalling premise: A king is widowed, and promises his queen on her deathbed that he will only marry again if the woman is as beautiful as she is, with the same shade of golden hair. When the king realizes his daughter is the only comparable woman, he makes plans to marry her – so the princess makes plans to get the hell out of there! And she does, with the help of three celestial gowns and a cloak made of one thousand furs. There’s a Jim Henson’s Storyteller episode based on this tale that imprinted on me when I was very young.

I shared this fairy tale on TikTok pretty casually – and an audience grew! I do love TikTok, I especially love the community of followers I built there. Unfortunately, like every other social media service, it’s become a real chore in recent years, especially with all the made up government drama and a lot of algorithmic interference. But when I started there, it was my favorite platform. The app had so many fun ways to create videos on the fly. During the early pandemic, it was so easy to build an audience and to connect with people with similar interests and sense of humor. I especially appreciate it for how I got to know parts of the world and the people in it that I knew nothing about – it’s a great empathy and knowledge builder. Though I do have a soft-spot in my heart for the square Instagram photo days of old (I am an elder millennial, after all).

Your new book, F*cked Up Fairy Tales, sounds absolutely bonkers and I’m here for it! It’s up next on my TBR. What is your favorite fairy tale that you’ve included? What makes it your favorite?

This is such a tough choice! I think my favorite just on the merits of the fairy tale is “Till There Was Mew” which is an adaptation of “The White Cat” by Madame d’Aulnoy. D’Aulnoy was a fascinating woman from a fascinating era of fairy tale history . She coined the term “fairy tales!” (I highly recommend Jack Zipes’ translation of The Island of Happiness for her stories and a short bio.) “The White Cat” is a more feminist Beauty and the Beast on steroids, with a girl cat as the beast and a very soap operatic second half. But my favorite to write and research was “Mule Be in My Heart” from Tunisia (known more commonly as “The Donkey’s Head“) because there are so many different versions of the story (which has a Cupid and Psyche narrative) and I had a lot of fun mixing and matching pieces to make my perfect version.

After all of the fairy tales you’ve read from around the world, is there one that took you by surprise? What was it about that one that made it so unique?

I was very surprised to discover the large swath of dirty folk and fairy tales. One of the tales in my book, originally recommended to me by a follower, has an extremely vulgar punchline involving ejaculation. After I read that one, I went down a rabbit hole of other types of saucy folklore. A lot of it doesn’t age very well (many old dirty jokes come at the expense of the women in them). But that discovery really opened my eyes to how expansive storytelling is, how fairy tales truly encompass a broad range of experiences, how fairy tales have lessons for people of ALL ages (not just kids), and how modern comedy is connected to the oral tradition of folklore. If anyone wants to read into that, there are a few good collections: Pissing in the Snow and Other Ozark Folktales by Vance Randolph, One Hundred Merrie and Delightsome Stories, collected by Antoine de la Sale, and Erotic Folktales from Norway by Simon Hughes. 1001 Nights has some saucy stuff too.

During one of your TikToks, you mentioned that you made use of Beta readers, specifically with an eye toward avoiding racial stereotypes while appreciating and sharing stories of cultural significance from other countries. Did you find this helpful to your writing process? Was it hard to accept the critique and use it to improve? What is the best piece of advice you can offer to writers telling a story from a different culture?

Apologies in advance for another LONG answer!

The feedback I got from my beta readers was immensely helpful. Most of the feedback I sought was for cultural sensitivity. All of literature has suffered from the privileged co-opting people’s stories, but folklore is especially damaged by this practice because the craze for “exotic” folklore grew directly from colonization. Such folklore was collected as a way to “understand” the cultures that were being abused, but that understanding often came with fetishization, perversion, or censorship. On the flip side, this interest led to a lot of Asian, indigenous American, and African folklore being recorded for the first time so it had a benefit (and some collectors, like Verrier Elwin, were very thorough and sensitive in how they recorded local lore). Storytellers are in an awkward position, because we want to keep these stories alive and introduce our audiences to folktales outside their own sphere, but we are also aware of how much representation is lacking – and how much richer a story is from a person who knows the context.

Some things to keep in mind: first to make sure the source material is credible, and preferably collected by members of the community it represents. I only ran into one issue in this regard: I was hoping to include some Indigenous American folktales, but the approved method for that is very specific: it’s best practice to get permission from a representative in the tribal government, and that proved very difficult (though the people I spoke with with were immensely helpful and happy to be included). We couldn’t verify one of my sources, so that tale was cut (and timing didn’t allow me to dig into an alternate). Once the sources are nailed down, hire multiple sensitivity readers if you can afford to do it. I was lucky to get a traditional publishing deal, so I could budget the huge number I needed (surprisingly, the publisher does not cover this expense beyond the author’s advance). You can also hire beta readers for psychological issues (I hired someone for a tale that features an act of sexual violence) and other issues of identity. As a last effort to share the microphone, I asked to share the audiobook narration with some narrators from the communities whose stories I told.

I am in a weird position of being a very white-presenting person of Filipino descent (my grandfather Gotauco emigrated to the US from Manila). I hear a lot of misguided talk from white people about Asian communities who don’t realize I am a part of one; but on the flip side, I have benefited from being, for all outward appearances, a white woman. So I even got a sensitivity reader for the Filipino folktale I included, because I wasn’t even sure I could view my own heritage without western bias. Hurting people would be one of my worst nightmares, so while it is difficult to hear when I’ve missed some kind of bias on my own account, I’d rather do everything I can to prevent that. And even with all this work, I’m sure some people will think I overstepped by telling so many cultures’ stories in my own voice. I get it!

If you could go back and give your younger self the opportunity to do any one thing, what would it be and why?

I think I’d tell my younger self to take my dad up on a trip to the Philippines. I always had reasons not to go (mostly I was a busy theatre kid), but I think I was truly just nervous that I’d feel out of place, even though my extended family has never once given me reason to feel that way. And now I don’t know if I’ll ever go just because of money and work and the world falling to pieces!

And now we’ve reached the part of the interview perfect for an author of a book of fucked up fairy tales. Usually we play Kiss Marry Kill with the cast of a pop culture property. For you, my friend, we’re playing Cinderella Death Match. You have Cinderella, Charming, and the Stepmother from Ever After and from the 2015 live action version in a Thunderdome style cage match to the death. Who walks out alive? There can be only one.

I love this question, and it’s not very easy to answer. (I really like both movies, though Ever After is definitely my favorite.)

Unfortunately, I think 2015 Cinderella would be knocked out immediately, she’s just too sweet and Cate Blanchett is just too scary. Henry and Danielle would be busy fending off Anjelica Huston together, which leaves 2015 Prince (I literally can’t remember what he looks like) to avenge his Cinderella’s death. I expect at that point he’d jump in on Huston (if she has survived so far). Unfortunately for 2015 Prince, Henry and Danielle immediately annihilate him. Henry then turns to Danielle and tries to be like Peeta and Katniss: “Let’s go down together, darling.” But Danielle recalls what an asshole Henry was when he rejected her at the ball for being poor, and realizes he isn’t worth it. She kills him, and her and Leonardo da Vinci go off and invent a bunch of cool stuff together. The End!

Cosbrarian, it has been an absolute pleasure speaking with you today. F*cked Up Fairy Tales is the book and out now!

You can order it wherever you most like to buy books! The audiobook is narrated by me along with Deepti Gupta, January LaVoy, Kyla Garcia, Lameece Issaq, Nadia Verde, Zura Johnson, Vaneh Assadourian, Sneha Mathan, and Dominique Franceschi.