Deby Fredericks is the  author of a number of fantasy books, including The Grimhold Wolf, a Gothic style werewolf novel and Seven Exalted Orders. She also writes children’s fantasy as Lucy D. Ford. She has also collated a collection of short stories from twenty authors including Beth Cooley, who writes here about her view on the nature of fairytales.

The Sweet, Subversive Wildness of the Fairy Tale

by Beth Cooley

I generally consider myself a truth-teller, a seeker of facts and, for most of my career, a writer of realistic fiction and creative non-fiction. Even my poems are rooted in the “reality” of my life, past and present, or germinate from some compelling historical or scientific fact I picked up randomly.

Plunging into speculative fiction for the first time a few years ago, I wrote a story for Lilac City Fairy Tales, and anthology edited by Sharma Shields, whose own fascinating fiction is decidedly not grounded in fact. My story was about a Centaur adopted by a ranching family who falls in love with the girl next door. I wrote the story as a challenge, just to see if I could, and because writing a short work of fantasy sounded like fun. It proved to be both, and more. The story showed me a new way to think about what I do as a writer, and it freed me from the factual to consider the very real emotions involved in mothering an unusual child, in letting that child go, and in watching him fall in love with a less than acceptable partner. There seemed to be less at risk for these unreal characters when I began, and this allowed me to discover that there was, in fact, more.

This is what fairy tales do for those who write them and for our readers. They free us from the confines of fact and allow us to see truth in a different light. They give us permission as writers to express what we might be reluctant to say in “real” terms. They allow us as readers to experience psychological and emotional truths we might admit only in  a world that is slightly askew. And they do more. Fairy tales allow us to dispense with our socially required moral judgment and simply experience, in the safe world of speculative fiction, the unacceptable: a little girl’s glee at the old woman burning in the oven, a woodcutter’s violence, a parent’s ridiculous bargain with a strange little man, the unacceptable attraction between a beauty and a beast. The ethics of the fairy world are questionable, the actions inexplicable. And yet we can safely dive into this world without the need for clear, factual explanations to buoy us up. And without the ethical constructs, the life-jackets, that are necessary in reality, but which can be so constraining in the world of imagination.

There is a sweet wildness in the fairy tale which we’re drawn to because it’s not the wildness of “reality.” We experience and enjoy this delicious, subversive wildness as we read and as we write with a liberating disregard for what we know to be factually, or even morally, right. We know the tales aren’t real, but we also know (or perhaps feel) that despite their mutinous, rebellious quality, they are true.

About Deby Fredericks

Deby Fredericks has been a writer all her life, but viewed it as just a fun hobby until the late 1990s. Her first sale, in 2000, was a children’s poem under her byline Lucy D. Ford. Deby writes for adults, while “Lucy” is oriented to young readers.
Fredericks has long been involved in SF fandom, including running and writing for fan clubs, hosting anime viewings in her home, and helping run conventions. She also has volunteered as RA and ARA for the Inland Northwest Region of SCBWI, International.

Find Deby on her blog, website and on Amazon

Wee Folk and Wise:

A Fairy Anthology

Edited by Deby Fredericks

 A World of Enchantment

All over the world, fairy tales are told. There are big fairies and little fairies. Ugly fairies and pretty fairies. Wise fairies and silly fairies. Sweet fairies and scary fairies.

Twenty authors share their own fantastic fairy tales in this magical collection. What kind of fairy will you meet here?

The Grimhold Wolf

by Deby Fredericks

Cursed by Demons

When Madeline heard that her lover, Alexander, was a demon summoner, she took her young son, Charlie, and ran. But Alexander caught up with them, turning her into a wolf and stealing their child to be raised in the mansion, filled with demons, dark mages, and peril.

Lost and alone in the Grimhold forest, Madeline searches for her son. Only, there is another peril far more dangerous than feywights and willy-wisps. When the demons stole her son, they murdered two innocent women at the inn. Now the priest, Brother Thomas, an exiled Holy Defender of the Order of Talicus, searches for the monster that slaughtered the two women, and suspects that a werewolf did it.

A prisoner in his father’s mansion, Charlie soon learns that becoming a dark mage is dangerous and frightening. If he succeeds in his training, he’ll become as evil as his father; and if he doesn’t, a worse fate awaits him…

Aunt Ursula’s Atlas

By Lucy D. Ford

On a high shelf, in a hidden library,
There is a book of unknown wonders.

Open its pages. Explore mysterious lands.
See for yourself what lies within
Aunt Ursula’s Atlas.

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