Bonnie M Hennessy - Retelling a Fairytale With a Twist

Bonnie M Hennessy - Retelling a Fairytale With a Twist
author of the day

In a time when 80% of American families don't buy or read books, Bonnie Hennessy works as an author and English teacher, inspiring young people to become more interested in books. While reading a bedtime story to her daughter one night, Hennessy was inspired to write the real story of Rumpelstiltskin. As our Author of the Day, Hennessy reveals why she decided to retell the famous fairytale, talks about her work as an English teacher and why she had to reshape the Duke's character three times.

Please give us a short introduction to what Twisted is about

An old tale tells the story of how a little man named Rumpelstiltskin spun straw into gold and tricked a desperate girl into trading away her baby. But that’s not exactly how it happened.
The real story began with a drunken father who kept throwing money away on alcohol and women, while his daughter, Aoife, ran the family farm on her own. When he gambled away everything they owned to the Duke, it was up to her to spin straw into gold to win it all back.
With her wits and the help of a magical guardian, she outsmarted the Duke and saved the day.

Well almost…
Her guardian suddenly turned on Aoife and sent her on a quest to find his name, the clues to which were hidden deep in the woods, a moldy dungeon, and a dead woman’s chamber.
This is not the tale of a damsel in distress, but a tenacious, young woman who solved a mystery so great that not even the enchanted man who spun straw into gold could figure it out.
Not until Aoife came along.

What inspired you to write a story based on the famous fairytale?

While putting my daughter to bed one night, I read the tale of Rumpelstiltskin from the yellowed pages of my childhood book. The first page’s illustration showed a demur girl bowing her head dutifully before a king who pointed his jeweled finger at her and, as the story goes, ordered her to spin a whole room full of hay into gold - all because the girl’s father had bragged that his daughter could turn anything she touched into gold. While she was left alone to cry over the futility of her task, a little man with magic showed up and said he would help her if she promised to give him her first born child.

After I put my daughter to bed, I kept thinking about this poor girl in the story who had been cornered and tricked by every man she came across in her life: Father, King (eventual husband), and magical little man. Every feminist bone in my body was annoyed, and I found myself imagining all the comebacks I would have said to these men if I were her. You know, the kind of stinging rebuttals you always think about after the argument is over.

Like an itch in my brain that I couldn’t quite reach, this girl’s predicament kept nagging at me until I got out of bed at 5:30 the next morning and snuck past my two little kids’ bedrooms and out the door to a coffee shop with my laptop under my arm. I spent every Saturday and Sunday morning getting up at the same un-Godly hour to drink coffee and figure out what really happened to this girl until the last page was written and rewritten and rewritten again and again.

As an English teacher, how do you get your students to also enjoy the written word?

I just heard a startling statistic that 33% of high school students will never read a book again after high school. In the same study, they found that 80% of American families did not buy or read a book in the past year. These types of realities guide how I teach my classes. It is important to work on the basics of reading comprehension and writing skills, but what is paramount to me is that whether it is the ancient stories of Gilgamesh or The Odyssey or current fiction like Gary D. Schmidt’s Orbiting Jupiter, my students realize that these are good, entertaining stories. If today’s youth are not entertained by what they read, they are going to opt for Twitter and Instagram, which are barely intelligible forms of communication. In my Reading classes where I have the highest numbers of reluctant readers, we read aloud a lot, stopping to talk about the characters and what they are doing as if they are people we know, rather than words on a page. In a few weeks I’m taking my high schoolers to an elementary school to read to 1st graders to allow them the opportunity to create a positive reading experience for young children. I want them to remember what it is like to enjoy the act of storytelling in an environment that is non-threatening. Although some of them say they are a little afraid of 1st graders, they definitely agree that 1st graders are less scary than a reading comprehension quiz! Just last week, my 9th graders took to the school auditorium to perform excerpts of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet For many of them who have never performed in a play, this was an exciting experience. With only their peers in the audience, many of them were able to perform, laugh, and have a good time with Shakespeare. These types of experiences give me hope that my students will not be a part of that 33% of students who never read a book after they leave high school.

Are there any other fairytales that you would consider retelling?

I have several old books of fairy tales that belonged to my mother. I know retelling old fairy tales for kids is all the rage right now, but many of these tales are stories I rarely see in my kids’ books. They carry the creepiest plot twists like Madame d’Aulnoy’s “Bluecrest” and the Russian tale of “Finn, The Keen Falcon,” just to name a few.

Your book is based on a well-known story, yet you keep your readers wondering what is going to happen next. How do you pull that off?

I have to tell you I am surprised how many people do not know the story of Rumpelstiltskin. However, when I wrote it I did so under the assumption that most people did. I think because the story is much more detailed and starts almost immediately with Aoife’s father being an alcoholic who frequents a brothel, it’s hard not to feel like Twisted is different from the original. With those kinds of boundaries being pushed, the reader can’t be sure of anything. Once Rumpelstiltskin admits that he does not know his mother’s name, which is a departure from the original, all bets are off. It is now not a matter of tricking Aoife, which is the plot of the original, but of solving a riddle so great that a man with his magical abilities can’t even solve it.

Which character did you find the most challenging to create?

The Duke, Ronan, was really tricky. He was always supposed to be a deeply wounded character who acted out in awful ways and caused a lot of pain for those around him. However, it took me several drafts to get him where he is now. Initially, my beta reader told me he seemed like a villainous caricature who she expected to have a creepy mustache and rub his hands together. After a redraft, I was told that I made him so ‘nice’ that the reader thought Aoife was obnoxious for rebuffing him the way she did. My third draft, like the Goldilocks effect, I’m told was just right. Ronan had finally become flawed and difficult, but definitely capable of redemption.  

Do you have any interesting writing habits? Favorite writing spot? Best time of the day to write?

Quiet. Tea. View.

I have two kids and a dog so finding a quiet space where no one can bark for pancakes or a walk is paramount. This is a huge part of why I get up around 5:30 in the morning to write. I even fill my ears with hemisync music just to drown it all out. Ear buds + music = no breakfast or walks from mom.

Whether I’m sipping my tea, holding it, sniffing it, or warming it in the microwave, I’m sinking deeper into the zone, the zennish zone from which ideas come to me. I have been accused more than once of having the bad habit of leaving half-finished cups of tea all over the house. I would counter that by saying I leave half-filled cups of ideas all over the house that are waiting for me to pick them up again!

Looking out the window at the leaves, admiring my Christmas tree on the other side of the room, or watching my doggy sleeping next to me are all signs that I’m working. These focal points also function somehow as blank canvasses upon which I imagine my stories.  

The book contains quite a couple of twists. Did you plan them all out before you started writing?

I knew that Rumpelstiltskin was not going to know his name and I knew there would be parentage issues (I don’t want to spoil anything for those who have not read!), but I definitely did not have the details worked out. I usually sketch 1-3 chapters ahead of where I currently am so that I have an endgame in mind for the current chapter I’m writing. I need to know where I need to get to next. Those future chapter outlines often change, especially the details that create the plot twist, but I at least have to have a little bit of a road map. The twists, however, are tricky because you can’t leave holes in the plot or then the reader is just going to think they are cheap tricks. They have to be imbedded into the plot in such a subtle way that afterwards the reader think, “Oh, yea!” That takes a lot of rereading and redrafting. A lot!

Who are some of your favorite authors in fiction and why?

In regards to fairy tales, Gregory Maguire is the king. I picked up Wicked years ago, thinking it would be a light read. Boy was I mistaken! I never thought that a fairy tale retelling could probe so deep into religion, politics, and economics. At the time I was not thinking about writing a fairy tale retelling, but I think getting hooked on his books is what gave me the courage later to write Twisted. After reading Maguire, I felt self-assured that fairy tales were not child’s play.

Like so many other readers, Anne Rice will always be the queen of dark tales. Her description, the eloquence of her language, and the nuanced characters she creates set her above the rest. I read The Witching Hour at 17, never having read anything but the classics that my Catholic school education fed me, like Dickens and the Bronte sisters. Reading the classics was invaluable, but I devoured The Witching Hour, shocked that my very Catholic mother read those pages and was allowing me to read them, too! She had not allowed me to see Pretty Woman, but my mother was letting me read Anne Rice! I never looked at her or books the same again. I realized there were a lot of writers exploring things outside of drawing rooms, arranged marriages, and proper English manners.

What are you working on right now?

Right now I’m almost done with a middle-grade story about a girl from Manhattan who gets in trouble and is forced to go stay in a mysterious house with a round tower-like turret in Ireland. She discovers a boy up in the tower, but he’s not from 2017! She begins an adventure with him that crosses our typical understanding of space and time. It grew out of a bedtime story I used to tell to my daughter. Each night came a new installment. One night she pulled her thumb out of her mouth and said this is a good one. You better write it down. So I did! I also have a retelling outlined for a monstrous character from Greek mythology.

Where can our readers discover more of your work or interact with you?

I have fought social media for a long time, but now that I’m in the business of selling books, there are oh-so many ways to connect with me. I am available through all the many channels, which I have listed below. I have this idea that I would also love to skype into people’s book club meetings. Drop me an email through my website or Facebook if your book club decides to read Twisted, and I will try to find a way to make the meeting!

My Website: https://www.bonniemhennessy.com

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/twistedthebook

Twitter: @bonniemhennessy

Instagram: @bonniemhennessy

Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/bonniemhennessy/

This deal has ended but you can read more about the book here.