The workshop was nearly over when we began to tell the last story. For almost two hours, fourteen teen girls had talked about the first folktale of the evening, shared and discussed writing from the previous week, and done some more writing. Now they had reassembled, back in the circle we created to begin every workshop, to listen to one more story, Seven Ravens, from the Grimm collection.
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| Julie, Paula. and the Oasis teen girls |
The setting was Oasis, A Haven for Women and Children in Paterson, NJ. We met there with a group of girls, ages 14 to 18, for six weeks in January and February. On Fridays from 4:00 to 6:00 p.m. The last class on the last day of the school week. We met to talk and write about old stories – folk and fairy tales – and to learn how they relate to the stories of our lives.
In fact, we believe that the stories we told them arethe stories of their lives. Through metaphor and symbolic language, the old tales make concrete the abstract truths of human existence, and at the center of our work as teachers and storytellers is the core belief that hearing, writing about, and discussing folk and fairy tales help students understand and organize their responses to life experiences.
On the first week, the girls were a little shy. They didn’t know what to expect and most of them hadn’t ever heard a professional storyteller. We formed our circle of chairs and asked everyone to tell her name and something about herself. We gave a quick description of our workshop plan and then we told stories. One of us told Rapunzel; the other told Old Rinkrank, both tales from the Brothers Grimm. The girls were mesmerized. They listened with great focus and, afterwards, were eager to discuss the stories. We followed the story discussion with a poem, Rapunzel Explains the Tower, by Jeanine Hall Gailey and asked the girls to write – about themselves, the stories, the poem, or whatever was on their mind.
Some of the girls, like Lisa (we aren’t using the girls’ real names), used a line from the poem to begin.
“So she came at me with scissors and turned me out into the world. It was blinding. In the desert, I heard her words, that no prince would be my rescue.” When I read this part, it reminds me of the time when my dad left. He told me he was going to Mexico 3 years ago and just like that he turned me out into the world. And it was definitely blinding.
Others, acknowledging the metaphor of Rapunzel’s tower and the glass mountain in Old Rinkrank, wrote about feeling trapped. Angel wrote:
I have a fairy tale story also, though this time it doesn’t have a happy ending. I’m like Rapunzel trapped in a tower. My wicked witch is the emotions I carry within, and this time there is no prince who is willing to end it all.
And Yvonne:
Sometimes I feel trapped in my own mind. As in with feelings. Like you’re not able to express yourself or how you feel because you’re scared on how people will treat you or you’re just scared in general. Sometimes you feel like you can’t show how yourself or express your point of view or opinion to someone cause you can’t know how they might take it.
Candace found her own truth:
First, I like to start off by saying I don’t want to compare myself to the characters or heroines. I just wanna be me. Besides, there is only one me in this world. Sometimes I stare at the wall wondering what life was like on the other side of it. I believe that we humans live by what we were told or what our brains think to do. Not me. Nooo way. I live by what I believe, no matter what.
As the weeks went by, the girls greeted us enthusiastically each day when we arrived. Their eagerness for stories and talk and sharing ideas electrified us. We began to think of those Friday afternoon workshops as the jewel that crowned our busy work-weeks. On the evening described at the opening of this piece, the girls listened intently to Seven Ravens, the story of a little girl who goes in search of her lost brothers. The boys had been turned into ravens on the day their little sister was born, and she felt, somehow, responsible for their fate. The girl travels impossible distances in her search. At last, she is set on the right direction and given a key to the glass mountain that has become her brothers’ prison. When she finally arrives at the mountain, however, she finds that the key has been lost, that she has made her long, hard journey to no avail. In a flash of insight, she realizes that her finger might be a substitute for the key but, to use it, she must cut it from her hand. She makes the sacrifice, the prison is opened, and her brothers are released from their curse. At the end of the story, all eight children return home together.
The girls’ first words about the story were about the little girl’s sacrifice.
“She actually cut off her finger?” they exclaimed, “Why?”
We reminded them that objects and events in fairy tales are often metaphorical and turned the question back to the group. The girls began to talk, some of them looking for meaning in the girl’s actions; others still puzzled by the idea.
Until Angel said, “She was the key.”
We gave a collective sigh of recognition and appreciation. Then it was six o’clock and time to pack up and go home.
When we were back in the car, Julie said, “’She was the key’. Why have we never thought of that?” We shrugged and laughed, amazed and delighted that, at this late phase of our careers, we are still meeting students who provide us with a key to the stories we thought we knew by heart.
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