Folklore Influence in the Novels of Will Alexander

One night, in a hotel room in Vietnam after a long day of digging dirt and making concrete, I cracked open Will Alexander's Goblin Secrets. When I finished, I said, "Man, does this guy know his folklore!" Will and I met up at Convergence, and I heard him read an excerpt of Ghoulish Song (I'm getting there!) and I thought, "Man, does this guy know his folklore again!!!!"

So, Will was kind enough to answer some questions about folklore in his writing. And here they are!

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Tamago: So, how'd you get to know so much about folklore anyway?

Will: This is probably my mother’s fault. She’s a gifted reader of bedtime stories—she does all the voices—and most of those early, formative stories were folk and fairy tales of one kind or another. I built on that foundation by reading more of the stuff whenever I could.

Even when I wasn’t seeking out such material deliberately, I notice, looking back, that most of my favorite books and authors draw from folkloric source material. There’s Tolkien, obviously. Jane Yolen is known as America’s Hans Christian Anderson. Ursula K. Le Guin often writes from an anthropological perspective. Peter S. Beagle’s The Last Unicorn is a metafictional fairy tale, even more so than The Princess Bride, and it includes inside jokes on the study of ballads. Lloyd Alexander and Susan Cooper both make magnificent use of Welsh and English lore. These are the authors that helped shape my young brain, the ones I sought out to help me decide what sort of person I wanted to become.

Later I studied folklore, theater, and theatrical lore at Oberlin College. That helped, too.

Tamago: Folklore can be a little spooky, and yet you are using it in children's books. Why do you think your younger readers can handle it?

Will: I find that kids can handle this particular kind of unsettling story far better than adults. As adults we fool ourselves into thinking that we understand the world, how it works, and what we can reasonably expect as we move through it. Kids know better. They are more practiced at coping with things that they don’t understand, and at intuiting rules no one has yet articulated. They have to be.

Kids also need unsettling stories as vaccinations against unsettling events. They’ll be defenseless otherwise. We have a responsibility to tell them unsettling stories. (Tamago: My favorite quote in this article!)

I’m with Sherman Alexie on this. Here’s a quote from his WSJ editorial on the #YAsaves controversy (which similarly wondered whether young readers are too steeped in dark material): “I write books for teenagers because I vividly remember what it felt like to be a teen facing everyday and epic dangers. I don’t write to protect them. It’s far too late for that. I write to give them weapons… that will help them fight their monsters.”

Patrick Ness said much the same thing: “If you read what teenagers write, it’s much, much darker than anything a young adult author would publish… I don’t think that’s a bad thing. That’s the age you’re reckoning with stuff. And I think that if you’re a YA writer who isn’t engaging with that on some level then you’re leaving them to fend for themselves.”

I’m not a YA writer. My audience is younger. But the principle is the same. Middle Grade readers haven’t hit puberty yet, but they can see it coming. They need to gather resources for the transformations ahead. Stories help.

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Mirrored from Writer Tamago.