ORIGINS
The idea for my novel, The Broken Rainbow arose out of a calamity toward my own writing, but what I soon discovered was the potentiality of pooling this sense of ‘broken’ self (of not feeling good enough) into a new vision of, ‘America’s greatest homegrown fairy tale,’ L. Frank Baum’s novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. I instantly pictured a young man trying to engage with his senile grandmother in a Psychiatric Hospital. His frustration and despair. And just what if that grandmother was ‘Dorothy Gale’?
Dorothy’s mental state became in-part a premise to the title, exemplifying a starting point of something that is broken. Setting the tone for the reader of what may come. Despair, conflict, but also a hopeful resolution of something being - fixed. The inclusion of ‘rainbow’ in the title (not in the original story) reflects the inspiration of the Hollywood adaptation and what Maria Warner coins the ‘mythological furniture’ (such as the ‘ruby slippers’) we now connect to this story.
I re-imagined a darker fairy tale world, placing adults (the original audience of fairy tales, though obviously not Baum’s) as the intended readership. I also wanted to show that whilst this piece was both tributary to Baum and fairy tale, it is a metamorphic, progressive fantasy story.
L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (New York, USA: George M. Hill, 1900).
SUGGESTED FURTHER READING:
L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (New York, USA: George M. Hill, 1900).
Laura Barett, ‘From Wonderland to Wasteland: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the Great Gatsby, and the New American Fairy Tale,’ Questia Trusted Online Search, 2006. https://www.questia.com/library/journal/1G1-146958136/from-wonderland-to-wasteland-the-wonderful-wizard.
Maria Warner, ‘Over the Rainbow,’ The Guardian Online, 2008. http://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/books/2008/jul/19/fiction6.
Michael Patrick Hearn, ‘Introduction,’ The Annotated Wizard of Oz: Centennial Edition (New York, USA: W. W. Norton & Company Inc, 2000) 13.
Jack Zipes, The Irresistible Fairy Tale: The Cultural and Social History of a Genre (Princeton, USA: Princeton University Press, 2012).
Stephen Benson, Contemporary Fiction & The Fairy Tale (Michigan, USA: Wayne State University Press, 2008).
Jonathan Gottschall, The Storytelling Animal: How Stories make us Human (Boston, USA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012).
Neil Gaiman, ‘Once Upon a Time,’ The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Non-Fiction (London, UK: Headline, 2016) 431-437.
Julius E. Heuscher, A Psychiatric Study of Myths and Fairy Tales: Their Origin, Meaning and Usefulness: Second Edition (Illinois, USA: C.Thomas, 1974).
Christopher Vogler, The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers, Third Edition (California, USA: Michael Wise Productions, 2007).
Joseph Campbell, The Hero with A Thousand Faces: Collected Works of Joseph Campbell, Third edition (Canada: New World Library, 2008).
Maureen Murdoch, ‘The Heroine’s Quest.’ Maureen Murdock, 2017. http://www.maureenmurdock.com/articles/articles-the-heroines-journey/.