Kim Batchelor

Writer of magical realism and other imaginative fiction

Myths, Folklore and the Child who Melts into the Night

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Flying Girl copyBefore writing my book, The Island of Lost Children, several times I read the book that inspired it, Peter Pan. One of the sections in J.M. Barrie’s book that intrigued me most was Peter’s explanation of how the lost boys came to be:

“They are the children who fall out of their perambulators when the nurse is looking the other way. If they are not claimed in seven days they are sent far away to the Neverland to defray expenses.”

I’m not a scholar who has examined the work in the context of its times. Still, I have a theory that Peter’s explanation is in response to conditions during a period when infant mortality was still quite high. This was a time when children died of all sorts of illnesses like influenza and diseases prevented by vaccinations which didn’t exist at the time. Barrie’s explanation of lost boys disappearing and being spirited to a magical land might have been a comfort as well as a simple explanation for curious children.

I wondered about how stories from folklore in other times and settings might have served the same function. In the folktales of many cultures, mythical creatures steal babies or young children and leave a sometimes deformed creature in its place. In Irish mythology, for example, faeries substitute a child with a changeling, a less than perfect version of the baby it replaces or even an old faery brought from the Otherworld of the sidhe to die on the human side.

After recently writing about the myths of Chiloe, a group of islands off the coast of Chile, I encountered the story of the invunche. The invunche is a first-born son fewer than nine days old who has been kidnapped or sold by his parents and who eventually ends up in the hands of witches or warlocks and guards their caves. The story is quite gruesome: one leg is broken and his foot attached to the back of his neck, and he’s fed on black cat’s milk, goats, and even human flesh. You know, what every parent wants for his or her son.

As disturbing as these stories are, I’m always fascinated about how the human mind conjures up explanations in the most creative ways. These tales in the oral traditions of the past, or in a popular book like Peter Pan, are testaments to our eternal search to try to understand. To convince ourselves that there’s some way to make sense of what may be incredibly difficult to accept.

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Pan, the Movie: Stunning Scenes, Lots of Action, Some Flaws

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Pan MovieNeverland: Where the girls are strong and the boys are awaiting their destinies. These are the main themes of the new movie Pan which debuted this weekend.

The buzz before the movie’s debut focused on the non-American Indian Rooney Mara playing Tiger Lily. In J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, the character of Tiger Lily is the chief’s daughter and “princess” of a tribe resembling that of a Native American group, and in the new Pan movie, she’s a prominent member of a diverse tribal group that seems to include African and Caribbean characters. I tend to agree with the concerns that the character wasn’t played by an actor of color because it’s a missed opportunity, and the controversy detracts from the fact that in the new movie, TL is a warrior, skilled in sword play while balancing herself on narrow wooden beams high above the ground and trained by another female character. I’m also ambivalent about the romantic tension between her and James Hook, the man who will eventually become Peter’s nemesis.

Setting aside the controversies, I’d rather focus on what I liked about the movie—the visual power of many of the scenes and the creativity found in the narrative of this Peter Pan origin story. The scene of the ship soaring through space after kidnapping the orphans, including Peter, is stunning, especially when Peter flies through the starry skies tethered only by a rope to the flying pirate ship. When the ship ascends to the island, the images within giant bubbles provide a beautiful visual. And one of the most impressive moments came when a giant crocodile arced over the floating trio of Tiger Lily, Hook and Peter.

In the original work, Peter was found as a baby by fairies who then took him to Never Neverland. Like Peter and the Starcatchers and the Syfy Channel’s Neverland, the movie begins with the assumption that Peter grows up in an orphanage. The orphan boy then searches for the woman who left him as a baby in a basket at the door of the orphanage. The pirate Blackbeard acquires children to labor in his mines through collusion with the nun who heads the orphanage.

The story of Peter Pan has provided fertile ground for reimaging the story in different forms. Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson did it with the Starcatchers series; Jodi Lee Anderson reimagined the characters in her novel Tiger Lily; and two books in a series by Heather Killough-Walden explore the more grown up characters for a young adult audience. Full disclosure: I’ve done the same myself with my modern take, The Island of Lost Children. There is much to recommend this current version, in spite of some of the criticism. If nothing else, it provides another opportunity for fans to fly through vivid scenes that many of us look forward to in our dreams.

Plenty of legroom on these trips without the hassles of carry-ons and baggage fees.

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Why Can’t a Girl be Peter Pan?

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Peter Pan Live! - Season 2014I wanted to fly. I wanted adventures. I wanted to take to the night skies, skirting clouds under the full moon.

When I was a child, I wanted to be Peter Pan.

As news spread about the upcoming “Peter Pan Live” production by NBC , there have been a lot of tweets and comments questioning the decision to have Peter Pan played by a female; in this production Allison Williams of HBO’s “Girls” is Peter. For some children, especially girls of a certain age, Peter Pan has always been a girl, starting with Mary Martin in 1954.

Historically, from the beginning of Barrie’s play, females were cast in the role of Peter for practical reasons related to the theater of the time. (Aisha Harris in Slate Magazine wrote about this in an article, “Why is Peter Pan played by a woman?”)

The same children who grew up with Mary Martin also grew up with a boy Peter Pan in the classic Disney film.  Still, I have to admit that when Robin Williams appeared as a live action male Peter Pan in the movie Hook, it seemed a little odd to me. The only other boy Peter Pan before him had been a cartoon.The years after Hook have featured Kathy Rigby in what seems to be a never-ending traveling production of a female Peter Pan on stage while Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson’s boy Peter Pan is a popular character for young children for the last decade in the Peter and the Starcatchers series.

So Peter started out as a flying girl and became a flying boy and in the upcoming movie, Pan, he’s a boy again. Why does it matter? Look at the great photo of Allison Williams dressed as Pan and you know what the character means to girls as well as boys. Girls want to fly like boys, to have adventures, to live perpetually as a child.  Just as boys want to swashbuckle and fly and live perpetually in those early years of wonder. Or maybe both males and females just don’t want to let go of that essence of childhood.

So let’s put our hands together and clap, to bring back to life the idea that any child of any sex can inhabit the character who does all the things he or she wants to do. If we just believe…

You can own a copy of a modern re-imagining of the story of Peter Pan and Wendy Darling. Click here to find out more about The Island of Lost Children.

 

 

 

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Cody and Summer: An Autism Story

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The Island of Lost Children, a modern retelling of the story of Peter Pan and Wendy

Not long ago, Cody, who is on the autism spectrum, asked my name.

“Kim,” I told him as he looked directly at me, his face beaming.

With his sky-blue eyes clearly fixed on me, he asked me again. “What’s your name?” I happily repeated my response. He seemed happy to have received it again.

Cody CroppedCody’s engaging me represented a transformation, a grace-filled connection. A connection to a little boy who not that long before ran through the halls of the church immersed in his own private place. Now he is a teenager who seeks out others. Wherever he is, it’s hard to miss that head of red hair.

For the past ten years or so, I have watched both Cody and his older sister Summer grow up. When they both were younger they seemed inseparable, especially those times Cody climbed into Summer’s lap during children’s time. She accompanied him to the altar and often held him while the minister spoke to the gathered group. He nestled into her lap, until his attention and curiosity often caught on something unrelated to the remarks.

Summer (2)The relationship of Summer and Cody inspired the Wendy and Michael characters I developed for my contemporary Peter Pan retelling, The Island of Lost Children. Wendy, while inspired by Summer, is not exactly like Summer. She is responsible for not only her brother Michael but also a rather challenging middle brother John, or JJ. Wendy’s busy and economically stressed parents have little time anymore for Michael, so Wendy steps in to do the work to engage him and improve his skills, even when she struggles with feeling disconnected from the family:

Wendy Darling did not belong with anyone. Not with her parents, who argued all the time. Not with her brother John, known in the family as JJ, who crashed and thrashed like a thunderstorm. And not with her youngest brother, Michael, who one minute fixated on the crackle of a candy wrapper against his ear and the next minute tore through whatever room tried to hold him. There were times when he slipped into Wendy’s lap and they came close to belonging with each other, but those times didn’t happen often enough.

The “crackle of a candy wrapper against his ear” came from my spouse, Ron, who worked with special needs children prior to getting a masters in special education.

It takes a village to make a character, as well as a child. I’m grateful for all those who contributed to Wendy and Michael’s development, especially a brother and sister I know. Those sibling relationships are so valuable and too infrequently explored. I continue to be inspired. Summer demonstrates on a regular basis how a caring older sister can be. As he grows more independent, Cody shows everyone how far he has come.

 

Purchase a copy of The Island of Lost Children by clicking here. And sign up for my monthly newsletter by completing the form on the right.

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Characters Go From Bossy to Brave

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BossyEarly in my book, the Island of Lost Children, the Peter character comments on how Wendy has become less “bossy”—he really hates to be told what to do. And sometimes Wendy in her role as the caretaker of her two younger brothers resorts to ordering them around, often without much success in achieving what she wants. Once on the island, and with her brothers less dependent on her, Wendy finds ways to creatively work with the other children. She helps them organize into teams and has the younger children who can’t read act out letters instead of using rote methods of teaching. At that point, Peter is pleased to see that she’s no longer “bossy.”

Recently, Facebook CEO Sheryl Sandberg, along with former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Girl Scouts USA CEO Anna Maria Chávez, started a campaign to ban the word “bossy” (#BanBossy), especially when used with girls. Beyoncé has made similar case. These women believe that the adjective is synonymous with being “aggressive, political, shrill, too ambitious as women” and hampers girls as leaders, causing them to remain silent when there’s a lot of pressure for them to be “liked.” Granted, the word bossy is often used to describe a particular behavior that results in others feeling controlled and crowded out, but too often the term extends beyond that to negatively describe when a girl or woman asserts herself.

So if I had to write the book over again, would I have dropped the word “bossy”? Maybe not. There’s a contrasting moment that makes it worthwhile for me, a moment that’s one of my favorites in the book. This is a spoiler, but late in the novel, after an epic battle with the pirates in which Wendy takes part, Peter no longer calls her bossy. He uses the word, “brave.”

I may not be a fan of banning most words, but what I would be in favor of is that we agree to retire those that are demeaning or hurtful.  When these four women bring attention to those little messages that keep girls from realizing their full potential, I can only stand up and cheer.

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