Fairy-tales and gothic tropes…
The Curlew’s Eye draws on fairy-tale and gothic tropes to explore the haunting impact of the past. What drew you to this particular genre or style? [Rita Horani, NT Writers Centre, Off the Leash. See full interview at ,https://www.offtheleash.net.au/features/books-film/2021/09/karen-manton]
I’ve always been interested in stories with uncanny or supernatural aspects. Both gothic stories and fairy-tales have such an interesting relationship with the unconscious – how it seeps into our conscious world.
Dreams and nightmares intrigue me – what are they trying to tell us? They toy with our imagination just as fairy-tales and legends do – embodying dread and imagination to shape perceptions and create passageways into our minds and hearts.
Distortion, vision, metamorphosis, shift-shaping – they’re surreal aspects of story and yet they interpret, explain and present reality to us with uncompromising truth.
While this book isn’t ‘traditional gothic horror’ (the only vampires are dress-up ones!) – I do use aspects of that genre, especially the uncanny, to weave an unsettling story-scape.
I love stories where the surreal enters routine life; or a nightmare creeps into the day with a message. My mother used to say when I was little – Don’t be afraid of nightmares, they’re trying to be your friend.
As for the fairy-tale The Six Swans … It enters this book like a mirror, most obviously for Joel’s family, but with connections to Greta too. It’s part of the puzzle, helping her work out Joel’s hidden story. The shift-shaping and transformation in the fairy-tale seeps into Greta’s experiences. Only by this blurring of the conscious and unconscious does she come to grips with her own story and the one Joel hides.
There are many different variations of The Six Swans – Wild Swans, The Seven Ravens and others. While we have no swans here in the Top End, the fairy-tale plays an important role in my book as a story imported from another hemisphere, that doesn’t fit the landscape, weather or seasonal cycles. But people cling to it, retelling it and relating it to their lives.
I often refer to other texts in my writing. I like the idea that ‘there are no new stories.’ We’re in the company of many, many storytellers who enrich and impact us.
Boy with swan wing, kmanton sketch, notebook for The Curlew’s Eye
Wonderings…
How do dreams and nightmares speak to you?
Do you have a favourite book where the surreal and the real go hand in hand?
Or a re-interpretation of a fairy-tale?