Metaphorically speaking

“The Wild Swans” by Hans Christian Andersen has long been one of my favorite fairy tales. Some of this is simply because I have a love for bird transformation stories, and have even written a couple of these myself, my own new tellings of old tales. Some is because one of the editions of “The Wild Swans” I read as a child had an absolutely beautiful illustration of the story’s final moment of transformation - the sibling swans flying to the rescue, the nettle shirts flying through the air, the flames rising. It was magic and power and it was beautiful.

I’ve been thinking a lot about that story recently, for various reasons, but one of them is the nettle shirts. I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, and stinging nettles grew there. I knew what it was to be stung, to have the welts rise. Being a child who was obsessed with fairy tales, I once tried to see how many I could pick without crying out. I’m pretty sure it was not enough to make even one sleeve, much less a shirt.

I think of the metaphor of the shirts, of turning pain into art, and art into transformation.

To be clear, I think the idea that you need to suffer for your art, or that you need to suffer in order to make art in the first place is bullshit. I think that’s something that’s made up by people who have no interest in taking the action that would actually alleviate someone’s suffering, so they tell themselves that the person’s suffering was worthwhile, because look what they got out of it.

But for me, one of the things this story does is tell me that it’s possible to take pain, and live in that pain, and transform it. To make something of it, and to find power in that.

One of the reasons that I am drawn to read and to write in the fantastic is that fantasy can literalize metaphor. You don’t need to spend words and pages establishing that high school is hell, you can just put the high school on a hellmouth and let the monsters crawl out. Not everyone who reads “The Wild Swans” will see what I do in it. Some may see a cautionary tale about the dangers of secrets and silence. Some may see a story of the power of virtue and selflessness. None of us are wrong.

“Tell all the truth but tell it slant - “ as Emily Dickinson wrote in a poem with its own metaphoric language. For me as a writer, the fantastic is a tool to get at that slantwise truth. To speak the things that don’t work as well when said directly, to offer the flexibility of multiple interpretations, to give the reader the space to find what they need. It is a spell of transformation, a shirt woven of nettles, flying through the air.

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