The Wistful Wild: Creating a Book from Seed to Bloom
Muse Monday post featuring Stephanie Ascough
Guest Post by Stephanie Ascough
Today, I welcomed Stephanie Ascough to take over my Substack to share her thoughts about publishing the fairy tale anthology I was fortunate to participate in. This is a bit different from my typical Muse Monday features. I hope you enjoy!
Publishing an anthology is not something I’d ever thought to do. As you may understand from your own experience, growing up felt like standing on the outside looking in. I wanted so much to be a part of something, especially with those my age, but there always seemed to be some code I couldn’t understand but was forever breaking. To say I saw myself as a leader in any capacity would be as far from the truth as Pluto is from the sun. My inner world offered the most solace, along with stories and nature, so that is where I spent much of my time.
Somewhere along the way I found fantasy stories. Those in turn led to fairy tales. In 2019 I took a brief online course on fairy tales from a New Zealand university and felt a spark of something flare to life in my bones. In the three years since, I’ve devoured fairy tales like a hungry traveler. I found bazaars and fairy festivals where folklore scatters tales and images like gemstones or ripe fruit. They beckoned, and I followed the trail. And I haven’t stopped.
The journey has been long and convoluted. There have been hairpin turns in the path, wolves cloaked in sheep’s clothing, promises of treasure that led instead to nightmares. But folklore and her cousin, fairy tales, have appeared to whisper aid when I least expected it. Dewdrops on a spiderweb, a tooth of the moon reflected in a puddle–glimmers of places and beings who led me by the hand through lands of shadow to other dreamers and misfits like me. And the most amazing thing might be that I recognize this path. I have always followed it, before I knew what folklore was, before I found the courage to scale the moss-slick stone tower or climb into the maw of the deepest cave.
Now, closing in on my fourth decade of life, I still treasure solitude, stories, and nature, more than I did in childhood and adolescence. The liminal spaces of life feel no longer like exclusion, but like home, possibility, and delight. And folklore sparks an ever-expanding picture beyond the realms of my imagination.
While living in a place of isolation, I wanted meaningful interaction with other writers, dreamers. If I couldn’t find it where I lived, there were small ways to make it. So, I took out a handful of fairy tale poems scribbled over the years. An idea took shape. I reached out to a handful of internet friends scattered across the globe, saying I wanted to create a fairy tale poetry anthology, and would you like to join? To my delight, most of them agreed with a level of enthusiasm that made my heart soar.
It turns out that the word leader still doesn’t fit me, and it doesn’t have to. Creating The Wistful Wild was a delightfully collaborative effort, “artistic communication in small groups” (Dr. Dan Ben-Amos’ widely accepted definition for folklore). The foreword I wrote for this anthology compares this project to a boiling cauldron into which many people add their own ingredients and let it simmer into something magnificent and smoky, lucid and bittersweet. But you could also liken it to a community garden. We shared the tender shoots of our new poems with one another. We watered, pruned, coaxed, weeded, and protected. We went to far-off places and returned laden with gifts of the past and present, our knees scratched and our eyes swimming with visions terrible and true, and all these things we pressed into damp soil with tears and sighs and drops of blood. What emerged from our labors became The Wistful Wild: fairy tale poems of longing and ferocity.
I don’t know if I will publish another anthology anytime soon. What I do know is that folklore and fairy tales offer an always-expanding gift: treacherous, beautiful journeys that enrich both my inner world and the world around me. What I do know is that I will keep eating forbidden fruit, swimming in the deepest seas, and searching in the slow blink between purple dusk and the inky black of sleep. And I want to keep looking for those who watch from the edges.
Those on the edges understand thresholds, and every threshold is just a journey waiting to begin.
Author Bio
Stephanie Ascough is the author of middle grade fantasy, numerous short fairy tales, and is the editor of a fairy tale poetry anthology. When not exploring nature with her family or ignoring housework, she works with books. She is currently working on a NA romantic fairy tale and lives with her husband and children near the Appalachian mountains of Tennessee. You can connect with her on Instagram @author.stephanieascough and on her newsletter, purplevale.substack.com, or find out more about her books here.
Thank you, Stephanie for sharing your story. To my readers: if you are interested in guest-posting to my newsletter, send me an email with your idea. Have a lovely July, friends!
with lots of fairy godmother magic,
Caitlin Gemmell
Thank you for offering me this collaboration, Cait! I appreciate being able to share more about how this wonderful anthology of ours began.🤍
I asked for this book for my birthday, so it's now in my lovely glossy birthday stash :)