Interview with Scott Thrower
Scott Thrower is a Toronto-based author and the creative mind behind the podcast Fairy Tales for Unwanted Children. Each episode of the podcast features a new and original fairy tale, penned and narrated by Scott himself. This month saw the release of his second collection of stories, Darkness, which features a series of tales involving the eponymous Darkness—an anthropomorphized reimagining of the phenomenon of the same name. Ironically, Darkness has quickly become one of the podcast’s shining stars.
Where did your obsession with fairy tales begin? Did you have a favourite fairy tale growing up?
I have always been obsessed with fantasy, from the Dragonlance novels to a childhood obsession with Terry Brooks’s Shannara series. I even have a vivid memory of finding my first Terry Pratchett book on the shelf of a short-lived bookstore in my home town. (We could support 7 Tim Hortons, but couldn’t keep a bookstore afloat.)
My interest in fairy tales came late in life. After shutting down my first podcast, a panel discussion show with Toronto comedians, I was looking for a new project. I wanted something I could do solo, that would give me the opportunity to hone my writing, and something that could hook a listener.
It was at this point that I finally saw the Meryl Streep version of Into the Woods. Admittedly, as a gay man, I came to that musical late in life, but it hit all of my fantasy buttons and stuck with me. The title of Fairy Tales for Unwanted Children came to me almost immediately, and within a few days I had three episodes written and the overall feel for the show--things were going to get dark.
Fairy tales give you so many beautiful common touchstones that help accelerate storytelling. My episodes are short. I just want to get in there, tell a story, make the listener feel something, and get out. Those touchstones give me a fantastic way to do that.
What made you decide on podcasting as the most appropriate medium for carrying on the fairy tale tradition?
Storytelling started with people gathered around a fire, listening to a voice. There’s a reason why reading to kids is still an important part of their development, and it hits something primal in us. I’d already loved the medium of podcasting since there was a very low barrier for entry. It’s increasingly becoming dominated by celebrities looking to make a buck, but there’s a strong underground because it is so easy to do (and even to do well) without much cost. In the beginning, I was looking to shake off my writing rust and hopefully attract a publisher, and I stuck to that for a long time before I realized the difference between vanity publishing and self publishing. The industry has come a very long way.
There’s something about being a voice in someone’s ear that creates a more intimate connection. My soundscapes are often on the subtle side, lulling you in and making everything feel just a bit more real. Audio gives me a great way to normalize things so that the darkness feels that much more immediate.
Fairy tales are often associated with childhood. Would you say there’s still something to be gained from fairy tales once we’ve outgrown our childish fancies?
I think we’re in a world where we hunger for simplicity. Things are dark and scary enough, so we’re looking for escapes. There’s a reason that superheroes are dominating movies right now, and just a few years ago people would have called those children’s stories, but that just means that we’re predisposed to seeing them done well. We grew up with them, so seeing them grow up with us helps keep us invested as consumers. Another example is the Harry Potter novels--those books grew up with their readers.
We all experienced fairy tales as children, and a lot of us even went deeper than Disney, finding out how dark the original stories were. In many cases, they were even completely nonsensical. But they’ve endured because they access something in us--a want for something fantastic to break up our everyday, a fear of the forest, our anger at injustice. We don’t outgrow those.
At the end of each episode of your podcast, you encourage listeners to look for a moral. Do you always have a clear moral in mind when you begin writing?
There are times I go in with a clear moral, and others when I just want to tell a story. But I think any story has a moral to it, really, and I don’t think that’s always determined by the author. It’s some sort of alchemy that happens between the reader and the text. The morals people present sometimes are well outside of my intentions, while others are spot on. Both are right. This is why I avoid trying to tell people the moral I found in any given story. It’s no longer mine to say.
My favourite story from the collection, hands-down, is “Onions”. It’s not often your stories end on a note that could be considered positive or uplifting. Are happy endings overrated?
I haven’t completely banned the show from having happy endings, but I feel they really have to be earned. The story lives in the grey, unlike what Disney has done to fairy tales where they cut away so much of that to spoon feed happiness. That’s not the real world for me, nor is it the overall goal of fairy tales historically. If anything, they were often warnings to children. They were written in dangerous times when parents couldn’t helicopter, so good parenting in those times involved a lot of scaring your kids halfway to death so that they’d survive another year. Stay on the path, avoid dark water, don’t trust strangers. That’s the breed of fairy tale that interests me.
Let’s talk about Darkness. One of our oldest fears is that of the dark. You’d usually expect a character with that name to be menacing, but your Darkness is anything but. What inspired you to characterize Darkness as you did?
Darkness came into being out of curiosity, and to me, that’s stayed central to the character. A lot of the time, I’m playing against expectations as I’m building the stories, but these things need to be earned. If Darkness had a reason to be evil, then so be it--but the podcast doesn’t have many instances of people being evil or menacing. They’re people who want things, and I find that more interesting, particularly when those wants run counter to the wants of others.
Darkness is a gentle soul, one who is deeply confused and curious. I don’t think the world is necessarily kind to that sort of person, but the character’s empathy has so far led it into situations that haven’t forced it to be anything else. Yet.
Were there any challenges you ran into developing the character’s arc over a series of loosely connected stories?
The challenge for me was that Darkness evolved a lot faster than I thought it would. The character seems to have transitioned into a wise, if naive, person very quickly, and I sometimes want to go back and make that arc more incremental, though I’m not sure it would be fair to do so. The new challenge is this--if Darkness has become a kind, helpful, empathetic character, how does it not try to become Superman? How does it drift by any situation in which it could be useful? That’s what I’m trying to figure out now, and it’s a difficult ethical question that the character needs to answer. The key seems to be its curiosity. It’s seen humanity at its worst for so long, but it has stopped to interact when its curiosity is piqued.
Can we look forward to future collections based on the Fairy Tales for Unwanted Children podcast?
Absolutely. The first book was a single story told over several episodes. The second followed a character. I have a few other large story arcs that could be collected, though I’m thinking of a looser collection of fan-favourite episodes for the next one.
Thanks for taking the time to chat with us! Is there anything else you’d like to let our readers know before we finish?
Stay tuned. In the next year, there are a lot of new fairy tales to come, as well as an urban fantasy novel set in Toronto during World War 1. I’m not running out of steam any time soon.
Visit Scott at the Fairy Tales for Unwanted Children website.
He can also be found on Twitter @periodicallypod and on Facebook.
Join the Fairy Tales for Unwanted Children Facebook discussion group.
Still craving more? Check out this cool mini-doc some Ryerson students put together!