Fairy Tales: The Wild Wood

I’ve been working on some feminist erotic retellings of traditional fairy tales about women who love women (and sometimes fairies and shape-shifters and other creatures).

This is my blog to talk about the ideas I’ve explored while writing them. First up: the wild wood.

I’m calling the collection Into the Wild Wood because woods reoccur so many times in fairy stories. They are the places we much not stray, for fear of wolves or bad spirits or monstrous feminine creatures (of which more later), for fear of discovering things we ought not and learning to stick to the path set by our parents. Forest even spring up, unbidden, invading safe interior spaces, as in ‘Sleeping Beauty’. But in subverting the wild wood, and celebrating love and sex, woods have the potential to become a site of exploration, curiosity, adventure, self-discovery and possibility.

When writing my stories, I want the wild wood to keep its wildness, and even some of its danger, because that sort of wood has much more erotic potential. Writing fairy stories that are over-sanitised is impossible—they are stories defined by the leaking all over of a particularly gothic sort of desire. If they’re not, then they’re not really fairy tales at all. But I’m reclaiming the wild wood for all those good things too: for sexual adventure and self-realisation, and a whole world of possibilities.