Meet the Fairytales & Myths Guest Judge: Elisabeth Sharp McKetta

Welcome back, Elisabeth Sharp McKetta!

Read on to discover some tips and tricks from the guest judge of our Fairytales & Myths Competition to write the best version of your entry.

Your doctorate degree (PhD) focused on the use of myths and fairytales to structure life writing. Can you tell us about that concept?

My PhD explored how an American writer—Zelda Fitzgerald, better known as the glamorous and combustible wife of her more famous husband F. Scott—used fairy tales to write her own life story. Zelda was a test case for a writing theory that I had been developing since I was about 19 years old. At that time, I had two extraordinary teachers: Maria Tatar, who taught me fairy tales, and Hope Hale Davis, who taught me memoir. I kept sparking the two genres together, trying to understand why the life stories we write all follow the same mythic plots—basically forms of birth, love, death—and why fairy tale characters are left so deliberately blank. 

My answers continue to evolve and shape the writer that I am, but through my research, I came to believe that the characters in myth are left blank so that we can imaginatively inhabit them and ask: What would I do in this situation? What do I, ordinary human, know about this sort of universal story? The myths last because they deal with the ordinary crises of the ordinary human soul, and I believe that most of us can look to moments in our lives when we can identify with the challenges, triumphs, failures, and aches in any one of the great myths. Myths are about gods, and folktales and fairy tales are about humans (and often magic), but they’re all essentially about what it means to be human. To be “folk.” The details change—the plots are the same.

 Your 2021 novel about motherhood, She Never Told Me About the Ocean, invokes Greek mythology, while your current work-in-progress explores the experience of sisterhood through the lens of the Arabic folktales collection The Thousand and One Nights. How do you choose which myths to work with? And do you come up with the story theme first and then identify the mythologies that you want to use, or the other way around?

Each myth that I write with (and nearly all of my books have a myth at the center) is something that magnets to me, just where I am in my own journey. As humans, we are always perched at some point in a story—the story of our own life’s journey. Depending on how we see ourselves, we are at a beginning, a turning point, or an end. The thing about myths is that they meet us where we are. The oceanic myths from She Never Told Me About the Ocean caught my attention through a myth a midwife told me about birth. I was pregnant at the time, and the myth she shared combined my impending fears about motherhood with my childhood experience being a daughter of a mother who grew up by water. The myth became the turning key for me to explore why this idea sparked so much feeling in me and flooded me with so many memories and imaginings. Same with The Thousand and One Nights story. I learned in an evening class in graduate school that Scheherazade has a younger sister, Dunyazad, to whom she tells all the stories that cure the mad king. The little sister risks her neck to sleep 1,001 nights under her big sister’s bed! I am a sister, and this story became a turning key for me to wonder at power dynamics between sisters: sisters who tell stories and sisters who stay quiet, and how these relationships are impacted by patriarchal societies, where the whims of an angry king can put all women in danger. A fairy tale or myth opens the door for me to ask hard questions of what I know of life, and ask: what if? 

Once you’ve picked the myth/fairytale/folktale, how do you go about immersing yourself in a mythology or fairytale tradition, particularly if it’s not one that you belong to? 

When I stumble upon an old story that catches me, I allow myself to be omnivorous: to follow my curiosity, my hunger to understand something, anywhere it takes me. That’s how creative writing differs from scholarship. In scholarship, we have to be correct. In creative writing, we can simply be curious. Many of my students are currently exploring selkie stories: stories about women who are half-seal, who have to face the dilemma of choosing between a life on land or a life beneath the waters. There is no single happy ending to a selkie story, just a hard choice. A cost, no matter what she chooses. 

For writers curious about these stories, I’d say start anywhere in myth and fairy tale databases, literary journals (I especially like this one), and anthologies (ask librarians and booksellers for recs!). And you can also look for these stories in everyday life. A selkie story is, at heart, about a life juncture where someone must choose between responsibilities—sometimes dry and predictable—and the uncharted waters of what the soul wants. Everybody lives this story at least once in their life. Be curious about people and about yourself. That’s where these stories live most of all.

You once wrote that fairy tales offer “protection” for writers by giving them the liberty to “not tell the exact factual truth.” Can you explain what exactly you mean by “protection,” and how writers can use non-truths as a way to bravely expose parts of themselves?

Our lives, as living writers, are open books—not over until we stop living. That separates life writing from fiction, which has a definite ending. When we write about our lives (whether in memoir, poems, or some other genre), we must keep in mind that whatever happens, life goes on. Fairy tales can help writers isolate a period of life—with a definite beginning, middle, and end—and write that story confidently, with the authority of seeing a true personal story run its course. 

 Once we write with the “container” of a borrowed form of a myth or fairy tale, we can turn experience into art. We focus less on our feelings or vulnerabilities about what happened, and more on what wisdom the experience yields or how the story works. They can help us figure out which images we can use to tell a “reflective” story—one in which our reader will see themselves. Thinking with fairy tales as we write can also help us curate truths, not get mired in facts, such as transcribing an entire conversation or writing someone to be identifiable in real life by readers. Instead, we can focus on composite characters that reflect the story’s main dilemma and theme (which also protects the living people in our lives).

In short, by tapping into the essential stories that humans have always told—versions of heroes on journeys, or humans facing monsters, or experiencing rises (comedies, happily ever afters) and falls (tragedies, rebirths)—we tap into the universal stream of story. Our own life details become less about us, and more about the human condition. We see our lives on a different scale, both bigger and smaller. We become braver through the writing.   

Whatever the genre, I think every reader loves writing that feels surprising and true. This is what I look for. Writing that tells important, universal, deeply human stories, using details that bear the mark of a person who pays close attention—who is a writer upon whom nothing is lost. In short, I look for the universal in the specifics. Tell an old story the way YOU see it, with everything that makes up your own experience, your boundaries, your fears, your sense of humor, and your idea of the beautiful. Expand my world-view an inch or two. Show me what it is to be you.