When I was a kid, I read The Fairy Rebel and loved it. I would read these old tales and remember, “Oh, yeah! The trope of the talking animal,” which I incorporated into the story “Death and the Woodwife.” Or I’d recall the image of the metal forest in “The Twelve Dancing Princesses,” which I’ve had in my head since age six, and knew I needed to include. It’s like the magpie thing, taking little trinkets from other tales, combining the details from your head and dreams, and then making it all tick with fairy tale logic.Įvery writer is a catalog of every book they’ve read, so I immersed myself in the sparer classic tales that I grew up with, as well as retellings. But, when it came down to it, I just felt my way through. When I set out to write the stories, I considered that there is a catalog of tale types, that I could sit down and learn about the building blocks and then structure the stories that way. In your opinion, what makes a captivating fairy tale?

When my wonderful editor Sarah Barley gave me the opportunity to create the entire collection, it was this high-dive feeling of could I? Should I? The chance to create original fairy tales using the building blocks of existing myths and tropes combined with the mythology created for The Hazel Wood was too delightful to resist.

So, I had dipped my toe into writing the tales for those two books and I often heard from readers that those elements were their favorite part of the books. Then, when I wrote The Night Country, I included a couple more tales, including “Ilsa Waits.” In the novel the story is told through the mouth of Ilsa herself, which was such a fun writing exercise, especially when I got to go back and write it again from the perspective of a storyteller. I sat down and wrote “The Door That Wasn’t There.” It was so fun and people ended up having a great response to it. Originally, The Hazel Wood included only a truncated version of “Alice-Three-Times,” but when my agent set out to sell it, she felt I should write one more tale. As a writer, you always want to find that balance of giving glimpses of the culture, but not so much that the reader’s imagination doesn’t fill in the gaps. One of my favorite things as a reader is invented culture. It was a very daunting idea because, in The Hazel Wood, the book of stories is not only a cult collection of fairy tales, it’s an actual magical object it has world-dissolving capabilities. When I was first working on The Hazel Wood, I knew that I wanted to weave in glimpses of the tales, but I never anticipated sitting down to actually write them. How did you come to write this companion work, and at what point did these stories take shape outside of the novels?

Melissa albert the night country