The Astronomer Who Met the North Wind (2 page)

The North Wind roared, and Minka’s teeth chattered. She clenched her jaw and tucked her chin into the tatters of her scarf.

Then, in the trees, she heard the jangle of bells, and the rush of wood runners over snow. A reindeer, silver-ruffed and velvet-antlered, trotted into the clearing, pulling a wooden sleigh behind it. It came to a halt and its rider stepped off, pushing a fur-lined hood back to reveal a woman, her cheeks ruddy with cold. She gazed at Minka for a moment, then lifted her dark eyes to the sky, where the clouds were whipped into a froth by the wind.

“Knock it off!” she shouted.

The North Wind stuttered with a discordant huff, and fell silent. The woman nodded and marched up to Minka, then bent over to study the torn bag. Minka gaped at her.

“Who are you?”

The woman straightened, bag in arms. “I am the North Wind’s sister,” she said. “You are the stargazer, aren’t you?”

Minka nodded and the woman’s face crinkled into a smile. She set the bag down on the sleigh and covered it with a thick, brown pelt—moose, perhaps, or bear.

“I came to rescue you from my capricious brother,” she said over her shoulder as she worked. “But you seem to have things well in hand. I’m impressed. So is he.”

Minka snorted and gripped her father’s telescope tighter. “I didn’t come out here to impress either of you. I came out to see a comet.”

“So you did.” The woman turned to face Minka, and her eyes sparkled like stars themselves. “Look up, then, and see what your tenacity brought you.”

As Minka watched, the woman looked up and blew a cloud of breath with a soft whistling noise. The branches shivered and a mild breeze tickled the hair on the back of Minka’s neck. She looked up and gasped—the clouds coiled and pushed against each other, breaking up so patches of sky showed through. The North Wind’s sister blew again, and the clouds rolled away, revealing stars as far as Minka could see. She peered through the telescope’s eyepiece, and saw the same magnificent stars, illuminated and magnified. And in the center of her telescope’s view, she spied a blip only a bit brighter than the rest, its color a little different, its light a little strange. Minka fumbled with the telescope, focusing on that bright point, squinting to see its form more clearly.
What does it look like up close
, she wondered? Visions of a blazing star flickered through her imagination, its long tail cutting an arc through the sky, and her cheeks ached with her widening smile.

“That’s it! Oh, I bet that’s it!” She waved one hand at the North Wind’s sister, the other cupped around that blurred light smudge. “Could you bring me some dry paper? And a pencil?”

One of her father’s notebooks appeared in her line of vision, a pencil tucked into its folds. A pair of fur mittens and her missing hat followed them. The North Wind’s sister saluted her, then sat in the snow and leaned back to look up at the sky. The whole clearing gleamed.

Minka unfolded the notebook to a blank spread. She stuffed her hands into the mittens, breathless with excitement, bowed her head, and got to work.

The North Wind’s sister accompanied her home, several hours later. Minka lugged her father’s bag through the front door, only to be pulled off her feet by the astronomer and spun around.

“My girl!” He wept with relief. “My beloved girl!”

He ushered them into the kitchen and fed them slices of birthday cake. “Never do that again,” he said. “You could have been killed!”

“But I wasn’t,” Minka said. “I told you, this is what I want to do. And look what I found.” She pushed her sketches and notes across the table and waited while he read them. At last, he looked up at her, eyes wide.

“This is excellent,” he said. “Truly, it is. I’ll need to watch it a while longer to ensure—”

“We,” Minka said.

The astronomer paused, then nodded. “Yes. We. We will need to go out and monitor its progress.”

Next to her father, the North Wind’s sister winked at Minka.

They named Minka’s discovery the North Wind comet. She and her father went out every night, charting its trajectory until it passed out of sight, then documenting other phenomena, together. And no one ever again suggested Minka wouldn’t be an astronomer.

W
hat makes a fairytale?

I asked myself this question repeatedly as I started what eventually became
The Astronomer Who Met the North Wind
. What classified a story among the likes of “Sleeping Beauty”, “Jack and the Beanstalk”, “Puss in Boots”? Lots of stories have magic in them, or fairies. Lots of stories have princes and princesses. Many stories start “once upon a time” and end with a “happily ever after.” Almost all stories have a message. But not all of those stories are fairytales.

Looking for inspiration, I went back to my favorite tale,
The Princess Who Met the North Wind
. As a child, I liked this story for a number of reasons: the princess reminded me of a real person, stubborn and a little spoiled, who didn’t always get along with her well-meaning parents; the North Wind wasn’t pure malice like some fairytale baddies, but more of a mischief-maker. I experienced the same satisfaction about those things as I reread the tale, and then I experienced the same sense of aggravation I also felt as a child when I came to the end: the princess, alone, cold, and weeping, is saved by the North Wind’s son (who was a human—of course. And a prince—of course) and whisked away to her happily ever after. It was here that I hit on what about the story, about fairytales in general, bugged me: the rescue.

A fairytale, in many ways, is a story of a protagonist getting into trouble over and over again, requiring magical intervention to make it to the ending. While exceptions definitely exist across all cultures, the “accepted” canon of fairytales (read: European) suggests protagonists are rarely active, and even when they are active, they are usually too inept or naive to manage their own welfare without help. This, to me, signified a fairytale. And it signified reams of possibilities to turn that reality on its head.

What if the protagonist doesn’t need help? What if the danger the fairy godmother, the talking cat, the deus ex machina “here to save the day” is there to remove, isn’t a danger at all? Can a fairytale be a fairytale if the fairies aren’t needed?

In
The Astronomer Who Met the North Wind
, people are out to save Minka from the danger of being a girl who wants to go into a STEM career, from the danger of being a child who thinks she knows what she wants to be when she grows up, from the danger of getting cold, or dirty, or discouraged while being female. To them, these are real dangers from which she needs protecting. And when it becomes clear she won’t listen to her human guardian, fairytale logic requires that the issue be escalated to a magical being, traditionally the vehicle to "save" the protagonist. But even the North Wind can’t dissuade her, because if Minka needs saving from anything, it’s from all the people (and now forces of weather) telling her she can’t know her own mind simply because of her youth and gender. And she’s well on her way to saving herself from them, too.

But the bones of a fairytale are present: she still does go on adventure. She, like the princess of the original tale, strikes out on her own and learns something about herself. She seeks—and finds—something wondrous. She experiences magic. And in the end, she finds happiness.

Ultimately, I wanted to adhere closely to a standard European fairytale structure, while challenging what seemed to me to be the genre’s central theme: that an individual isn’t capable of managing her own future without magical help. I wanted to make a statement, yes—about what it is to be a kid, especially a little girl, told by the world of adults that they don’t really know what they want to be when they grow up, particularly if that thing they want to be doesn’t mesh with gender norms—but I also wanted to make readers wonder, make them go back to their childhood favorites and ask themselves, “But is that really what the protagonist wanted? Did the fairy godmother get it right? What if she didn’t?”

I hope those questions are asked. And I hope you enjoy the story.

The Astronomer Who Met The North Wind
is a retelling of
The Princess Who Met The North Wind
by Wendy Eyton—a modern fairy tale with a very old fashioned “lesson.” What made you choose this specific fable to retell? Are there any particular themes in this story that you wanted to explore and subvert in your version?

The Princess Who Met the North Wind
was my favorite tale as a kid, in part because the princess to me felt like a real human and in part because she went on a proper adventure, rather than falling asleep or waiting to be rescued. The ending always let me down, though, because after the adventure she still ended up getting rescued, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that, really, she didn’t want to be swept away by a total stranger after enduring so much taunting from said stranger’s father. It was this theme of the obligatory rescue (which, once I started thinking about it, seemed pervasive in most fairytales) that I wanted to explore.

Fairytales tend to start with the assumption that the good guys with the magic are the ones who know what’s best (the fairy godmother in “Cinderella”, the good fairies in “Sleeping Beauty”, the enchantress in “Beauty and the Beast”), but what if they don’t? How can a complete stranger, even a magical one, know your own head and heart better than you? This led me to a more real world issue, that of well-meaning adults asking kids “What do you want to be when you grow up?” and then telling them (young girls in particular) that they don’t actually know what they want if their suggestion is too daring, too unusual, too anything. This is again a type of rescue, an attempt to protect the child from disappointment, or from things the adult deems “too hard” or “dangerous” for them. But again: whose head is this? Whose life? The scenario, both in real life and in the realm of fairytale, seemed ripe for challenging.

Speaking of fairy tales, are you a fairy tale enthusiast? Do you have any favorites you’d like to share with our readers? Conversely, do you have a least favorite fairy tale (you must also tell us why, of course).

I do love fairytales, but have always had issues with them. My least favorite is probably “Sleeping Beauty”, because it seems like Exhibit A in what I would call “stupid plot”—that is, the plot relies entirely on a stupid decision made by the characters, one that flies in the face of the story’s logic. In no version I have found, have I ever seen the princess’s parents sit down and say “You know, this spinning wheel thing is going to be a problem. We should tell our daughter about this curse so she can be wary of them.” The princess never knows WHY she has to stay away from spinning wheels, but if she did, there wouldn’t be a story. It annoys the heck out of me.

By contrast, one of my favorite fairy stories was one I found in my school library in Ohio when I was about eight. It was called “Tatsinda”, and was about a little girl who came beyond a fog veil to a community of people who all looked the same. It’s a lovely story, with all the trappings of a fairytale, but turns a lot of the usual tropes sideways, which made it a rewarding read. I also really enjoyed “The Adventures of Amanda Greenleaf”, which was a collection of stories with fairytale elements that nearly every child in 1980’s-90’s Newfoundland (where my family is from) knew.

My true love is folk stories and there are some more modern retellings that I absolutely love:
The City of Dragons
by Laurence Yep,
The Snow Child
by Freya Littledale,
The Girl Who Loved Wild Horses
by Paul Goble, and
The Polar Bear Son
by Lydia Dabcovich to name a few. The art in these books were what caught my attention as a child, but the stories are also beautiful.

Tell us a bit about your experience writing short stories: what would you say are the advantages and potential pitfalls of writing short fiction?

I used to joke that I could never write a short story, that my ideas required too much page space. In fact, I just took too long to get to the point. I learned a lot about story craft and short story craft in particular when I went to Odyssey Writing Workshop in 2013, and since then writing short stories has been challenging, but really rewarding! I’ve been lucky enough to have a few stories published (including “The Scrimshaw and the Scream” in
Women Destroy Fantasy
, “A Visit From the Hag” in
Crossed Genres
, and this story here at Book Smugglers!) and while I’m continuing to work on longer projects, short fiction has become one of my favorite vehicles for storytelling.

There are so many advantages to short stories. Short fiction is one of the great vehicles for communicating ideas to people, to engaging in a conversation with society about things we take as “normal” or “the way things are.” A lot of punch can live in a small package! The potential pitfalls I think are true across most written forms: wordiness, losing sight of the theme, plot/character arc going to pieces. The unique challenge of a short story, though, is that you have far fewer words to work with, so any holes or weak joints in the narrative will show more. You can’t bury them under more words! You need to know what you want to say right from the start, and you need to check in with your story throughout to make sure it’s still saying those things and hasn’t wandered off on a beautifully-worded, but useless, tangent.

What are you working on next?

I have a few projects I’m working on in tandem right now: a couple of short stories (some planned, and one which attacked me as a plot bunny while I was in the dentist’s chair a few days ago), as well as a novel project which is currently in the late revision stage. It’s exhausting and crazy, and I love every second of it.

Finally, a question we ask all of our interviewees: We Book Smugglers have faced threats and criticisms concerning the sheer volume of books that we purchase and read – hence, we have resorted to “smuggling books” home to escape scrutinizing eyes. Have you ever had to smuggle books?

Threats and criticism? Fie on them, I say!

Not only did I sometimes resort to smuggling books home (backpacks over purses to this day, my friends. You can get so many more books in a backpack!), I often smuggled books to places I probably shouldn’t have had them: class, for example. I was known by my teachers as the girl who hid novels inside her textbooks more often than not. My partner and I travel a bit too, and he has revoked my suitcase-packing card because I kept going so far over airline weight restrictions on the bags. What can I say? It’s a long flight—I can get through three or four books each way. I have an e-reader now, and I love it, because I can carry hundreds of books everywhere with me, and no one knows!