Haley Stewart, author and the managing editor of Word on Fire Votive, joined R.J. Sheffler to discuss Sheffler’s new book for young readers, Past Watchful Dragons: Biblical Stories Made New.
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Haley Stewart: Your new book is a collection of fairy-tale retellings of biblical stories. Tell us about what got you interested in fairy tales.
R.J. Sheffler: I’ve written novels, short stories, and even a few (terrible) poems, but fairy tales are unlike any other form of storytelling. They have “room,” so to speak, for the big ideas we all grapple with—good, evil, beauty, truth, and purpose. And yet they are deceptively simple and easy to approach. You can read them again and again, and still find more in dusty corners. I think it was this aspect of fairy tales—the feeling of deep, hidden truth—that keeps going and going, that first interested me.
At first, it might seem odd to choose to retell Bible stories in a fairy-tale setting. What inspired this project, and why do you think it’s an effective way to communicate the Gospel?
I was raised in a Protestant household where the Bible took center stage of our religious lives and practices. I was so saturated in these stories I can’t remember not knowing about Adam and Eve or King David or the birth of Jesus. When you know something so well, you can easily miss some of its beauty and truth. I have a vivid memory of sitting in my husband’s office, reading through the story of the Tower of Babel. Something about the story—some word or sentence—struck me as deeply heartbreaking and sad. I had never noticed how tragic a story the Tower of Babel was before that moment, despite having read it dozens of times. I asked myself if there was a way to tell these stories again so people could encounter them in a way that was unfamiliar and thus reap the benefits of new discovery. I decided on fairy tales because the tone of fairy stories is at once otherworldly and enchanting, familiar and comfortable. They draw you in, allowing for magic and mystery, without needing to explain too much of what’s happening. The Bible deserves a stage that allows for its full potency, and I felt fairy tales could accomplish that.
Tell us about one of the stories in this collection and how you structured its retelling of a Bible story. What was your writing process like?
One of my favorite stories in this collection is The Mountain Boy and the Ocean of Fire, which is a retelling of the life of Christ. I began considering which parts of Christ’s life I wanted to highlight, knowing I couldn’t cover them all. It’s also important to remember these tales are not one-to-one reconstructions of the Bible story. You have to be flexible with the “story line” of the original story. That can be tricky. The Mountain Boy and the Ocean of Fire is about the son of a king returning to his kingdom to reclaim the throne of his father and save his people—like Christ does for us—from the oppression of a terrible monster. I spent a lot of time thinking about how the story might go, working out a skeleton plot in my head. I wrote the initial draft by hand using a pen and a spiralbound notebook. This method is effective because you just write—and as you write, more ideas come, some good, some stupid. If I didn’t like where a paragraph or a sentence was going, I crossed it out and kept going. There’s a flow to the writing that unlocks all these ideas. I think the first draft took about two to three weeks. Then I let it sit in a drawer for a while before I transcribed it digitally. Each step, the story continued to develop and shift. I worked on one story at a time until I thought it was done. There’s a feeling of “rightness” I can’t quite explain when I know a story is finished. I was particularly pleased with this one, and I was even more pleased after the edits with Word on Fire.
As a mother, what kind of books are you excited to share with your children?
This is such a hard question. As a book person (as well as a mother), I want them to read everything—the books that fill the soul with goodness, truth, and beauty; books that help them to “live a thousand lives and yet remain themselves” and become more themselves by reading. So, I suppose I’m excited to share the books that captured me most as a young child and then as a young woman, knowing that great books always lead you “further up and further in.”
What kind of reader do you hope this title reaches? How do you hope this book inspires him or her?
This is a children’s book, and yet I think it’s as much for the adults reading it to their children as for the children. My prayer and hope is for this book to find the reader who needs to feel loved—the person holding onto faith by their fingernails, waiting for a spark of wonder, of awe, of love, to burst into flames. Because at the center of each of these stories is love. I want them to be inspired by that divine love that is the center of our Catholic faith and to feel the wonder and awe of truth filling their everyday lives with the extraordinary.
You can get your own copy in the Word on Fire Bookstore now.
