On retold stories and folklore

Illustration from The Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm, retrieved from Wikipedia commons

I’m in between BIG, EXCITING publication news, so I thought I’d blog a little something on the subject of retold stories and folklore, which has sort of become my métier.

Alright, I actually do have some exciting but super early news to share that relates to the subject. Late this year, most likely late fall, NineStar Press will be publishing a collection of my short stories, which are based on world mythology and folklore. The contract is signed, and I am busily getting each one of them ready for editing and production.

Yeah, I’m really happy about that, and if you’re curious, you can get an exclusive preview of some of the stories at my Patreon page. I’ll be talking up that project a lot more as we get closer to the release date. 🙂

For those of you who are new to my world, well first off: Hi! Thanks for stopping by. I’m Andrew J. Peters. I principally describe myself as a fantasy author, and then, a little more specifically as a gay fantasy author. Then, even more specifically, I tend to write heroic fantasy, which means action-adventure, typically taking place in an olden world type of setting, and based on classical legend, which usually follows the structure of The Hero’s Journey.

For example, my first two novels were a two-part series about two boys who led survivors to safety during the destruction of ancient Atlantis (The Seventh Pleiade and Banished Sons of Poseidon). In a similar vein, Poseidon and Cleito explores the trials of Atlantis’s founders. And I wrote The City of Seven Gods (the first book in The Lost Histories series), which has two men struggling for survival in a treacherous world inspired by Classical, Egyptian and Mesopotamian cultures.

They’re all hero stories. Well, the latter is a hero story on a smaller scale, though still taking place in an epic, old world setting.

I’ve also written a contemporary, paranormal series Werecat, and most recently, I published Irresistible, a contemporary gay-rom com of all things. That might be starting to sound eclectic, a nicer way to say all over the map. I make the case there’s a common thread in the stories that inspire me. You can call it loose for sure, but even the modern tales I’ve written came from fantasy ideas.

Werecat of course is a variation on werewolf lore, and more than that founded on a mythology drawn from pre-Columbian Amerindian sources. Irresistible is a retelling of an ancient Greek novel (Callirhoe), whose premise is a young woman is so gods-blessed with beauty, her true love can’t keep hold of her because everyone betrays him to steal her for himself (I queered the story up and made the two leads guys).

I haven’t always written retold stories. I credit one of my very favorite authors Gregory Maguire for turning me on to the fun of taking classic lore from a new point of view. Some of my work is far derived from a specific myth, but myths, fairytales and folkore are mainly where I find my ideas. My upcoming collection has stories drawn from classical mythology, The Arabian Nights, Hungarian folklore, the Brothers Grimm, a classic opera, Amazonian jaguar mysticism, and African and Japanese sources. I really wanted to celebrate stories from around the globe.

People ask me sometimes what’s my favorite fairytale or legend. That’s hard for me to answer because I love so much of it, and I’m discovering new stories all the time! I love the drama and imagination of Greek mythology, epic poems and plays. I love the humor and magic of The Arabian Nights, and I’m a fan of Shakespeare and gothic horror from the 19th century.

More recently, I discovered Japanese folklore, which is fascinating because it comes from such a different perspective both in tone — a lot of irony and absurdity — and in its ideas about magic.

So how to choose just one, or even two or three? I can’t and won’t I’m afraid. 🙂

I think another reason I’ve been drawn to retelling stories from classical lore is to give voice and visibility to gay experiences. Of course, one doesn’t need classic lore to do that, but when you take a familiar story and ‘queer’ the characters, swap genders, I feel it makes the story enjoyably subversive and surprising.

For example, with Irresistible, casting the tragic beauty as a man created opportunites for me to show gay desire in its many variations: triumphant, obsessive, heartbreaking, and comically absurd, while also broadening the scope of eroticism. Everyone falls in love, or lust with the lead Callisthenes: young and old, men and women, declared gays and others who are confronted with buried fantasies. The premise of the classic novel provided the opportunity to explore love and lust in greater depth.

If you’re looking for some queerly retold stories (until my anthology comes out) 🙂 I’ll point you to two of my favorites: Jeremy McAteer’s Fairytales for Gay Guys and Lawrence Schimel’s The Drag Queen of Elfland and Other Stories.       

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