Julie Della Torre and I resumed our work with teen girls at Oasis this month. We worked there with a teen girl group for six weeks last winter and it was a blast. This year we have funding for an eight-week program. In the group are some girls who participated last year, others whom we met when we worked with them as sixth graders two or three years ago, and still others who are completely new to storytelling. We meet on Friday afternoons for two hours after school. The girls, between 14 and 18 years old, are open-minded, enthusiastic learners. They listen to us and to each other. They engage in deep discussion about issues raised by our stories, issues which they can often relate to their own life experiences. They also write in every workshop and share their writing with the group.
Because Julie and I want the content of our workshops to be as relevant as possible to the girls, we let them choose the direction of post-story discussions. We open talk with a question and allow the girls to take it where they will. Then, we make story choices for the next week based on the topics the girls were most interested in discussing and writing about. This year we began our program by telling three variants of Little Red Riding Hood: a 17th Century French folktale, and the Perrault and Grimm versions of the story. Before telling any of these variants, we asked the girls to tell us the story of Little Red as they knew it. There were sixteen girls in the group that afternoon and most of them had heard some version of the story. They enjoyed starting, stopping, and contradicting each other.
“Wait, what happened to the grandmother?”
“The wolf ate her.”
“No, I think the grandmother hid in the closet!”
“The way I heard it, she gets eaten.”
“And Little Red Riding Hood got eaten, too.”
“I thought she was rescued by a hunter or something.”
And so it went.
Then the girls listened to our stories. We gave them the opportunity to talk in between each tale. We also gave them some social and historical context for each variant. At first, conversation focused on the “lessons” they found in the stories: Don’t talk to strangers, Don’t let your daughters go walking alone in the woods… But as the discussion continued, the girls began to question some of the story motifs.
“He (Perrault) makes it seem like it’s the girl’s fault that she got killed.”
“Why does Little Red Cap have to be rescued by a man? Girls always need a man to rescue them in fairy tales.”
“But in the first story, the girl got herself away from the wolf.”
“And in the second part of the last (Grimm) story, she learned from experience that wolves can be dangerous.”
In the end, their conversation focused on two main themes: Little Red’s naivety and consequent helplessness in the face of danger, and the wolf’s indifference to the girl’s suffering in the face of his own desire.
As, Tiffany wrote:
All I wanna know is, in what world are those wolves raised in where they’re just out her trynna eat up little girls? Like what had to happen in this wolf’s life where he’s at the point where he could see a li’l girl minding her business and automatically think, “ Damnnn, y’all, wha that? That look like lunch to me.”
To further explore the wolf’s motivation, Jayceleen, Ashley, and Catherine rewrote the story from his point of view. Here is part of Catherine’s story:
So, I was in the woods with my homies and all of a sudden a girl dressed all in red with thick curves, curly hair, pale pink skin I don’t know why, but I felt the need to hook up with this girl.
So I go up to her and I’m like, “Ayy yo, Shortface. You looking real fine and nice. Where you think you going.”
She responds to me, “I’m headed to my Grandma’s house… why?”
I said to her, “Cause I wanna get to know you.”
I’m guessing that made her sort of like me cause the next thing you know she out here communicating telling all about her Grandma and where she live.
And in Yadary’s version, Little Red’s mother recognizes her daughter’s inability to survive alone in the woods and rushes out to protect her.
“Mom, what are you doin here?”
“I forgot to give you the soup for your granny.”
“So you make me walk through all that… just for you to end up going, too?”
“Don’t whine!”
We finally made it to grandma’s house. But the door was open. Oh Heck hah! This is a sign from God telling me to get out of here. “Mom, let’s get out of here. Let’s call dad to check this out. I don’t think it’s safe.”
“No. We ain’t need no man.”
Mom literally went in and I trailed behind her.
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| Oasis teen girls creating a story tableaux |
Every girl wrote something inspired by the stories or their discussion of the stories. Afterwards, they all shared their writing with the group. As Julie and I packed up to leave at the end of the session, the girls were still talking about Little Red. I think it’s going to be another good year at Oasis.
