Guest Post with Joy Preble, Author of Dreaming Anastasia!

Influence of Russian folklore/fairy tales in writing

Dreaming Anastasia
by

Joy Preble,

Dreaming Anastasia, Sourcebooks, September 1, 2009

To quote http://stpetersburg-guide.com/, one of the sources I consulted while I was writing Dreaming Anastasia, “Baba Yaga is the arch-crone, the goddess of wisdom and death, the bone mother. She brings wisdom and death… and through death, rebirth.”

So when you’re writing a story that is in part the fantasy re-telling of the disappearance of Anastasia Romanov – probably Russia’s most famous princess – it shouldn’t go unnoticed that her name means ‘resurrection.’ After that, well, using Baba Yaga as part of my fantasy elements was exactly the perfect fit.

In the Russian fairy tales, anyone who ventures into Baba Yaga’s forest does not return exactly the same. Sometimes the change is for the better – like in the well known fairy tale Vasilisa the Brave, where Vasilisa, sent to Baba Yaga’s by her cruel stepmother, gets to live happily ever after once she’s managed to outwit the witch with help from her magic doll. For others – well, the story doesn’t turn out as nicely. Baba Yaga chews them up and eats them for her supper. In Dreaming Anastasia, their bones line her hut like a fence.

Writing a novel is part hard work, part inspiration, part crazy miracle. I honestly think that the muse knew more than I did because if I told you in this post that I saw all the connections between Baba Yaga and my characters and my creative process, well, I’d be lying. Only when the novel was complete and I was doing revisions, did I sit back and say, huh! Lookie there! (Full disclosure – this happens to me a lot. I bumble along and sometimes I find my path in ways that just surprise the crap out of me)

But I will say this. Lots of characters in Dreaming Anastasia go into that forest – both literally and metaphorically. (Here I’d like to pause and thank my Northwestern college professors, who must have stuffed something into my brain while I was sitting in class doodling and occasionally regretting my excesses from the night before) And no one in the story comes out the same.

Fittingly, neither did I.

Let’s see if I can talk about this some more without being too spoilery. Anne thinks she’s an ordinary girl with a somewhat broken family. Ethan’s got all sorts of choices that have come to haunt him. So does Anastasia. Anne’s BFF, Tess, definitely has issues about a certain former boyfriend who has done her wrong. And even the crone herself, Baba Yaga, has allowed some things to happen that she is definitely regretting. Every single character in this novel – like most of us in this world -wants a do-over for something. I guess that’s kind of universal, isn’t it? I don’t know anybody who doesn’t have at least a few regrets. Who didn’t make some mistakes along their path at some point. (Okay, I actually do know some people who tell me they don’t regret anything. But sometimes when they tell me this, I want to stick a pint of Ben and Jerry’s Chunky Monkey in front of them and say okay, start here. Then I’ll help you work up to the big stuff. At least then you’ll have stories to tell your grandchildren someday)

In any case, here’s the thing about confronting Baba Yaga. In Russian fairy tales, you just never know. You can do all the right things and appease the heck out of her and she still might choose to open that huge iron-tooth mouth of hers and take a bite out of you. Definitely a little different from the Grimm’s Brothers morality tales. And I loved that. I loved the uncertainty of it. We might come out of the forest better. We might not. We just have to take the journey and hope for the best.

Like trying to save a princess everyone thinks is dead. Or writing your first novel. Maybe the witch will be kind to you. Maybe she won’t. But once you’ve begun the journey, there’s no going back.

Joy Preble grew up in Chicago, Illinois, listening to her Russian grandmother tell tales of the old country, most of which ended with the equivalent of “We were all very poor and it sucked so I came here.” Joy began her writing career at age seven with a Thanksgiving play that consisted mostly of the Pilgrim women washing clothes after a long journey. Since then, she has learned to give her female characters, and herself, better things to do. (Not that clean laundry is a bad thing. In fact, she likes it very much. She just prefers someone else to do it.) She is married and has one son and lives in The Woodlands, Texas, where -when she’s not teaching high school English (and sometimes when she is) -she continues to write.


DREAMING ANASTASIA combines Joy’s love for folklore, history, feisty female characters and hot looking guys who may or may not actually be bad and is her first novel.