Totality 🌑, Fairy Tales 🧚♂️, and a Taxidermied Merman from China 🧜♂️
A very merry mystical week at Writing Atlas.
Hello from Hot Springs, Arkansas, where the Writing Atlas team experienced totality as part of a well-timed wedding on April 8, 2024! Arkansas had three plus minutes of totality.
Writing Atlas came prepared with some hefty camera equipment, which is why we were able to capture solar prominences (not to be confused with solar flares!) from behind the moon. The results were worth lugging a 600mm lens across the country.
Not all of us had epic camera equipment, so this is one we captured with an iPhone 15 just as battery was going to run out. The branches give it a Japanese vibe.
One of our team members was extra excited about this celestial event because of this well-worn YA novel by Wendy Mass called Every Soul a Star, which she read somewhere in the range of 15-20 times as a child. The novel follows three teens brought together unexpectedly by a total solar eclipse—and the ways in which the experience changes their lives. Even having read this book many times and being familiar with what would occur during an eclipse, nothing could have prepared us for those three minutes of totality 😱.
Another friend of Writing Atlas, Daniel Huang, put together this cute little film of totality in Vermont, which we think perfectly captures the wonder of this eclipse. Not pictured here: the 4 am wake up call to drive up from NYC, as well as the 11 hour drive back in, which included an hour long wait for a Tesla charger as well as many gas stations (our friends visited FOUR!) which were entirely out of gas.
Just as spectacular as the total solar eclipse is our curation this week from Vicki Xu, a student at Harvard University studying Computer Science and Math. Her curation is about fairy tales! We found it fitting to run her piece now, during the week of the total solar eclipse since there just something magical about getting to see the sun blackened for even just a moment. In line with the mystical and supernatural qualities associated with an eclipse, Vicki brings a curation of fairy tales and the fantastical worlds they come from.
Vicki Xu’s Fairy Tales
I’m bringing you four fairy tales to put our meager existences into perspective. Some are more fantastical than others, but all will open you to the ways in which our existences may shift in our realities.
“Robert Greenman and the Mermaid” by Anjali Sachdeva (full text here)
In “Robert Greenman and the Mermaid” by Anjali Sachdeva, the titular main character—Robert—sets off on a cod-fishing trip and spots a mermaid, who is chasing a shark. The mermaid begins consuming his thoughts, to the extent that he can’t live normally once he returns to his home in Portsmouth, Maine.
The story fractures between Robert’s perspective and the mermaid’s. One of the most difficult things about writing nonhuman characters is pinning down their sensibilities, and Sachdeva nails it in the way the mermaid chases after the shark, follows Robert’s ship, and later, explores Robert’s body. There’s a great tactility to the way the mermaid moves about the world, and she’s a deeply believable character for her callousness. The prose is gorgeous, and full of yearning. Sachdeva touches upon the particular uneasiness of the way in which we center our own in-groups in understanding others’ relations to us—and, more broadly, the pain of an enamoration that may not be reciprocated.
“The Devourings” by Aimee Bender
In “The Devourings” by Aimee Bender, a human woman marries an ogre, who is tricked by a human girl into eating his half-breed children. Heartbroken, the woman sets out on a journey alone, meeting many characters along the way.
I loved the shifting points of view in this piece. It starts with the human woman, transitions briefly to the ogre, and ends in the point of view of the magic, self-regenerating cake the ogre gives the woman.
In your typical fairy tale, of course humans are the protagonists (think “The Frog Prince,” “Hansel and Gretel,” etc.)—but Bender flips that notion on its head. In this story, humans are, largely, antagonists: the human woman finds that her kin are wily and cruel, sometimes unnecessarily so. When fantastical species act in self-defense, often in fairy tales we see it as antagonism; here, by flipping the roles, Bender forces us to think about who we root for in a story. And who is to say the fable lens can’t be applied to all the characters of a story—including would-be inanimate objects? The final third of the story, which deals with the regenerating cake’s interactions with the invisible cloak (another gift from the ogre) and the birds, grass, and nature that interact with it, completes the story’s interrogation of our anthropocentric ways of thinking.
One of the main themes of the story is transience. A story can be told about anything, from anyone’s perspective. By abstracting away from people, Bender returns to, at its core, what fairy tales are: stories that give us perspective on where we are in the world, and in the process, help us make sense of it.
“Fable” by Ethan Rutherford (full text here)
Anna and Nils, a couple, are having dinner at their old friend Sasha’s place. They don’t know Karen, his third wife, but they make her acquaintance. Karen is invited to tell a story, and she reluctantly agrees. She tells a story about a fox, a wolf, and a woman—and a child.
On the surface, “Fable” takes place around a dinner table, but the emotional journey in it carries echoes from deeper in the past. Dinner parties are things that I’ve begun to attend more often—as my friends and I move into real adult life—and these are typically joyous occasions, full of laughter. But in this story, tension builds to a piercing frequency. This is a dinner party gone skew, giving us a glimpse of the darker side of merrymaking.
The story-within-a-story framing also thickens the unease. Karen challenges the clear-cut “children’s story” nature of a fable by delivering an ambiguous, and just this shade of disturbing, tale of desire. By blurring the emotional—and to an extent, experiential—boundaries between the story Karen tells and the story Karen is in, Rutherford shows us how stories can be realer than we think.
“The Graveless Doll of Eric Mutis” by Karen Russell (full text here)
In this story, a group of four troubled boys who term themselves “Camp Dark”—Mondo, Gus, J.C., and our narrator Larry—discover a scarecrow in their suburban New Jersey park that very much resembles Eric Mutis, a boy they took turns bullying.
This one isn’t quite as fairytale-like as the other three, but there’s a Roald Dahl-esque spin on what is a pretty magical-realist tale that I loved. The story uses the scarecrow to dive into . The rate of revelation in this story was just breathtaking: Russell knows how to parcel out information. The story is less in what happens after the boys discover the scarecrow, and more in the memories and guilt that the scarecrow dredges up.
Also, it’s always a joy to read Karen Russell’s writing because she just nails the voice of her characters. Consider:
“It bothered me that we were so poorly informed about the oak’s first purpose that we did not even have the option of forgetting it, using our patented June 1 method, whereby we expulsed a year of school facts from our brains in spasms of summer amnesia. (Harriet Tubman — did he invent something? The War of 1812 — why did we fight that one? For tea? Against Mexico or Sicily?)”
And as for Larry’s childish contrition, which unfolds delightfully over the scenes … you’ll just have to read the story.
Vicki’s Favorite Wikipedia Page: Cave of Swallows
One of the largest cave shafts in the world hosts birds that fly out in concentric circles every morning and dive back in every evening, like something out of a fairy tale. Even though it’s called the Cave of Swallows, most of the birds are actually white-collared swifts and green parakeets. It’s located in Aquismón, San Luis Potosí, Mexico.
Vicki’s Favorite Emoji(s): 😎
Any face emoji can be paired with other emojis for maximal storytelling. For instance, 😎👍, 🤙😎, 😎‼️, etc.
Vicki Xu is a writer from San Francisco. She enjoys cozy mornings and a good pastry.
A Merman 🧜♂️ in the Arkansas Alligator 🐊 Farm & Petting Zoo
Speaking of mermaids in fairy tales, one of the local attractions in Hot Springs other than the famed hot springs is a taxidermied “merman,” who was purported to be “a member of the species Herbivorous Cetacea, one of the rarest inhabitants of the sea.”
The “merman” on display at the Arkansas Alligator Farm & Petting Zoo, a family-owned enterprise that has been open since 1902 (and is notable enough to have an extensive Wikipedia page).
The specimen on display was supposedly captured in the Gulf of Tonquin, about 500 miles from Hong Kong, and was purchased from the National Museum of China, through the San Francisco firm of Fook Woh & Co. It comes with its own postcard, on sale on eBay.
Writing Atlas was curious about how much work the ampersand was doing in the Alligator Farm & Petting Zoo. Could you actually pet the alligators, or are you farming alligators but petting other animals? (Turns out the answer is both, you pet various animals and also can hold the baby alligators, pictured above.) They bask under with heat lamps because apparently they hate the cold in Arkansas this time of year.
We, at Writing Atlas, hope that you got to also catch a glimpse of the total solar eclipse too from wherever you’re reading from! We know that you all come from places far and wide, and we imagine that the total solar eclipse must’ve looked different to everyone. It’s still, of course, the same sun and moon. No matter where you might be, you’re a part of us here at Writing Atlas. If you ever would like to curate stories, or share quirky photos, foods, cool places to visit or roaming stuffed animals with the community, please let us know by leaving a comment or otherwise reaching out to us! As always, keep visiting our Writing Atlas homepage as we keep rolling out exciting changes and updates!
Sincerely,
Your Writing Atlas team