Jen Fawkes’ latest collection Tales the Devil Told Me (Press 53 2021) is a funny, big-hearted, and at times magisterial reimagining of 11 classic stories, from folk tales like “Rumpelstiltskin” to Shakespeare’s Hamlet and J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan. Literary retellings of classic stories aren’t new; what is exciting about Fawkes’ collection is her attention to not just the stories that could exist between the lines of the originals but her careful tethering of these tales to the act and experience of reading itself. “We are none of us originals,” notes the narrator of “Dynamics,” a story occurring early in the collection, “We read. We borrow. There is no helping the cross-pollination of ideas.” Like these characters, each of whom must struggle to reassert their humanity against a literary canon that has made them uncomplicated villains, readers of Fawkes’ collection find themselves grappling with a literary inheritance that, at times, has reduced both heroism and villainy to something more received than considered. And with each re-telling, Fawkes shows how new versions of old stories can heighten reader appreciation—both for the original masterpieces as well as for the complications and nuances of storytelling itself.
Tales the Devil Told Me, winner of the Press 53 Award for Fiction, is Fawkes’ second published collection. Her first, Mannequin and Wife (LSU Press 2020), was nominated for a 2020 Shirley Jackson Award. A story from that collection, “Possible Wildlife in Road,” was published by storySouth in 2019. You can read it here. I recently caught up with Fawkes over email.
EVAN FACKLER: This collection was written as your MFA thesis. What inspired the project? Why return to these stories?
JEN FAWKES: When I started my MFA, I was sure I would emerge with a brilliant novel as my thesis project, but I was still very much learning how to write fiction at the time, and by the end of my first year I realized my thesis would not, in fact, be a novel. I decided instead to write a story collection that retells The Odyssey – a formative text for me – from the point of view of the characters Odysseus encounters during his travels. So a story about the Lotus Eaters, one about Circe, one about Polyphemus, etc. The first story I wrote was “A Moment on the Lips,” about Polyphemus, but when I presented it to the workshop, I learned of a book that did the same thing and had come out the previous year (The Lost Books of the Odyssey by Zachary Mason). But I loved my Polyphemus story, so I searched for another container that might hold that piece and others. At some point, I lit on the idea of a collection that reimagines popular/well-known tales from various eras in English Lit, only re-centered on the tale’s villain. I love variety and surprise in a story collection, so I planned to use a variety of approaches, modes, and narrative styles. I made a long list of potential texts to re-imagine, and the ones in the book are those that made it. Before beginning each piece, I first re-read and studied the text(s) that inspired it. I can also trace this book’s inspiration back to an undergrad course I took at Columbia University, Forms of Popular Fiction. In that class, I first read Rebecca, and two Sherlock Holmes books, and a couple of other texts that I reimagine in Tales.
FACKLER: Were there any stories or retellings that didn’t make it into the collection?
FAWKES: Oh my yes! My original list was long! I thought at first that I would tackle both Dracula and Frankenstein, but I didn’t manage to get to them (though I did write a Frankenstein story some years later, which appears in my first book, Mannequin and Wife (LSU Press 2020). And there were two stories in the original version of Tales that I ended up removing. One was a reimagining of Othello in which Othello and Iago were recast as female door-to-door cosmetics salespeople, told from the collective POV of the saleswomen who worked for this cosmetics company. The other story I ended up removing was a reimagining of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe in which Mr. Tumnus has become a laudanum addict, and Narnia is falling to pieces some years after the death of the White Queen. That story was told from the POV of a young female faun with whom Mr. Tumnus is having an illicit love affair. Crazy, I know!
FACKLER: You bring up another biographical tidbit I wanted to ask you about. Your debut collection, Mannequin and Wife, came out last year and was nominated for a Shirley Jackson Award, which makes Tales your second book-length publication in as many years. That’s a good string of success in what has otherwise been a bummer of a few years! What’s it been like, first getting that first book out there, and second, experiencing these milestones amidst a pandemic?
FAWKES: Not gonna lie; publishing not one but two books during the pandemic has been difficult. To be honest, I don’t see myself as successful in any way, but it’s kind of you to say so. The thing is, both my collections have been ready to go for a long time. Tales has been finished since I completed my MFA in 2010, and almost all the stories in Mannequin and Wife were written two to ten years before it came out in September of 2020. So I’ve been sitting on two completed books for years, holding onto the vain hope that I would manage to write a novel that would get me an agent, who would then sell my novel and collections in a multiple book deal. When I was working on my MFA, this is the way we were told it went.
Halfway through my PhD pursuit, I was forced to move home to Arkansas to take care of my mom, who was diagnosed with early onset Alzheimers in 2011. Then my father, who lived outside Seattle, died, and though we were estranged, I had to deal with his estate, which took about a year and a half. Once I fought my way through all that, I finished my PhD remotely, got myself a teaching job in West Virginia, and decided it was time to start submitting my books for small press publication, to stop vainly waiting around for an agent to take me on. Both books were finalists in several collection contests for publication with small presses. I love both books so much, and I’m happy they’re in the world, but I really do wish they’d come out during any other two-year period in human history.
FACKLER: The narrator in your story “Dynamics” is a young girl when she is given a book whose ideas she seems to grasp “in an a priori fashion.” It’s an incredible story about, as I take it, the experience of being a reader who feels themselves touched by a story and becomes, in a way, an author or co-author of that experience. And of course it seems to speak to your own relationship with the stories Tales reinhabits. In reflecting on the “thin, flimsy, easily-torn” pages readers dedicate themselves to, the narrator thinks, “What a thing to have built my life around.” I’m interested in that line because I can see it being read in multiple ways—as a kind of wonder or a kind of despair. How do you understand it?
FAWKES: Wow; I’m so thrilled to hear this! I haven’t gotten much feedback on Tales, especially from other writers, and your reading of this story – perhaps the most pointedly metafictional piece in the book – is wonderful! I wrote “Dynamics” not long after I read Pale Fire for the first time, and I was thinking hard about Charles Kinbote when I created my female mathematician. At the time I was thinking deeply about the reader-writer relationship, how the meaning of any/every text is made in what I see as a 50/50 split between writer and reader. The book/film remains the same, yet we each read/view a different book/film. I love how Kinbote can be read as a madman, but that in another light, he’s just one of us – a reader, reading passionately and participating in the meaning-making of Shade’s poem.
The answer to your specific question is that I read the line in both ways you suggest simultaneously – as a kind of wonder and a kind of despair. I love the specific words you’ve chosen, and I would in fact say that the line I walk in my work, not to mention in my life, is bookended by those very forces – wonder and despair. Though they pull against each other, they also bolster each other; one couldn’t exist without the other. As I see it, when the mathematician delivers that line, she’s vacillating between wonder and despair, a place I myself know too well. Also, I’ve just remembered that as I was working on Tales, I imagined for a time that “Dynamics” would open the book. I ended up shifting something more potentially “attention-grabbing” up front, but “Dynamics” is and always will be near and dear to my heart.
FACKLER: Speaking of hearts, let’s talk about anthropophagy, which recurs with great frequency in these stories. Polyphemus eats Odysseus’s men, the crocodile eats Hook’s leg, the old woman from “Hansel and Gretel” eats children, etc. Was this a theme of particular interest to you before you started work on Tales?
FAWKES: The short answer is yes. I’ve long been fascinated by transgressive human behavior, and cannibalism is, you know, pretty close to the top of that list. Though we may not like it, or it may terrify us, cannibalism has been practiced throughout our history, and occurs throughout our texts. There are plenty of reasons – Cronus ate the Titans so they couldn’t overthrow him, the Aztecs ate enemies to gain their strength and power, the Donner party and that Uruguayan soccer team ate each other to survive, yes, but in most modern instances of anthropophagy – Jeffrey Dahmer, let’s say – there’s no ready answer. Dahmer wasn’t starving, he wasn’t brought up in a belief system that required him to participate, and I’m eternally interested in why a person who has a choice and knows it’s “wrong” would eat another person. Because they are crippled by loneliness? Out of some strange love – horrifying and misguided, but love all the same? I don’t have the answer, but I’m drawn to the question, and for a time, I kept trying to work it out in my fiction. I’ve moved on from cannibalism, somewhat, as a theme at this point, and to be crystal clear: I would never eat another person. Ever. Not even a small taste. I would volunteer to be eaten first, if it came down to it. Just FYI!
FACKLER: It’s funny to me that you feel the need to clarify that so forcefully! But really, I totally get the fascination. Not necessarily with Dahmer, but with cannibalism as a symbol of some kind. Rampant consumerism within global capital markets, for instance. But also, and most weirdly, as a form of intimacy and knowledge. I mean, there’s something utterly heartbreaking and true feeling about Polyphemus’s lament in “A Moment on the Lips”: “If I let the men go, they would never get the chance to know me.” Doesn’t every reader want that? To feel known? And his solution is to ingest the men so that they can share that absolute, intimate knowledge with him—I suppose both of life/death, and also of sustenance, of sustaining and being sustained.
FAWKES: “A Moment on the Lips” was the first story I wrote for the collection – the genesis of the whole book – and I’m happy to learn that all that comes through clearly in the text. As for my forceful clarification, I get asked about anthropophagy a whole whole lot! It’s a terrifying concept for many folks, I’ve learned in the last year, and I just want to assure people that I am absolutely positively never thinking about eating them.
FACKLER: Another recurring trope in Tales is therapy. Sometimes, the patient-therapist relationships seem productive—I love the therapist in “Tiger’s Don’t Apologize,” a story about Mowgli’s relationship to his son, who is given that great perspective-shifting line “What if your son has grown up thinking he’s a boy, when he’s actually a Bengal tiger?” At other times, and here I’m thinking especially about the therapist in “As You Can See, This Makes Dating Difficult,” there’s a considerable amount more… I guess I’d say suspicion of the therapist by the writer. Is there a critique here about how we learn (or fail to learn) to inhabit stories?
FAWKES: If I’m reading you right, you’re equating being in therapy with learning to inhabit your own story, which is an interesting way to think of it! And yes, there is absolutely a critique of anything that purports to “teach” humans how to live our lives in my work, for sure. Like most writers, I’m pretty neurotic, and I probably should have been in therapy from a young age, but I grew up thinking therapy was for the weak – which was the default 20th century take, pretty much. On one hand, I was/am fascinated by the work of Freud and Jung, by psychoanalytic theory in general. I think the fathers of psychotherapy were really insightful about human beings and why we do what we do, what motivates us. On the other hand, I find the notion that being able to point to/name your problems enables you to deal with them/make them go away pretty laughable. The truth of the matter is that nothing ever goes away for most of us (until the blessed fog of dementia descends, that is). We’re all living the past as we live the present. What happened to us as kids is still happening to us, and will always be happening to us, for as long as we live (or can remember). I’m afraid that no matter how badly we want it to be, time is not a line. I guess my current take on therapy is that everyone alive would benefit from having an uninvested outside observer to talk to, someone who can support them unreservedly. In terms of my fiction, I like the removed, clinical perspective a therapist character gives me on my other characters. Psychologists and fiction writers are basically doing the same thing – one with made-up people, one with real people. I am now in therapy myself, FYI, and it’s helpful.
FACKLER: Okay, yeah, so I wanted to ask you if you saw your role as writer reinterpreting these classic stories as sort of putting yourself in the therapist’s chair? And we readers—sort of the representation of the Western Literary Psyche, maybe—as your patient. Which would make this collection some kind of Literary Cognitive Behavior Therapy. What insights or questions or new relationships to these stories do you hope readers walk away from this collection with?
FAWKES: I’ve never thought of it that way, but yes, as I said above, I do believe that both therapists and fiction writers engage in analysis of patients/characters. I think what I’d most like readers to walk away from the book with is a sense that even stories we think we know by heart are so much larger than they seem. I’d like to provide a sense of the expansiveness of storytelling, of how elastic a story is, of how it spills beyond its apparent borders. Well-known or classic works, in particular, seem to most of us fixed – hermetically sealed – but in truth, there are always stories within stories within stories. People outside the “A” story are taking the bus, making spaghetti, playing cards, drinking too much, leaving people and being left, fighting to survive. This gives me a particular sense of hope, and community, and connectedness; a sense that my own story isn’t a closed circuit – that the world is opening, not closing – and I hope to share that feeling with all those who read this book.
JEN FAWKES’s debut book, Mannequin and Wife (LSU Press) was a 2020 Shirley Jackson Award Nominee, won two 2020 Foreword INDIES (Gold in Short Stories/Honorable Mention in Literary Fiction), and was named one of Largehearted Boy’s Favorite Short Story Collections of 2020. Her second book, Tales the Devil Told Me, won the 2020 Press 53 Award for Short Fiction. Her work has appeared in One Story, Lit Hub, Crazyhorse, The Iowa Review, Best Small Fictions 2020, and many others, and has won numerous fiction prizes, from The Pinch, Salamander, Washington Square Review, and others. The recipient of the 2021 Porter Fund Literary Prize, she lives in Little Rock, Arkansas, with her husband and two kittens named Tessio and Clemenza.