Featured Guest - Meet Maggie

The Mindset to Write Our Own Fairytale 

“I’ve been an introverted observer all my life. I’m content to just sit and be in someone’s company. I don’t have to talk. And I don’t need the other person to talk. As a child, all that sitting back and being quiet helped me to learn about people. Now I see profound things in books, in the words of my Mom, or in just one sentence one of my professors might say. There must be themes in the back of my mind because I see significance where others might not. For example, I’m sure writers don’t intend for their every word to hold significance, but I sub consciously find it. I think all artists tend to do that. 

I’ve been working on my senior thesis, rewriting children’s fairytales. It bothers me that there’s not more regard for the potential that children’s literature has to impact their lives. When you’re young, you can read a book and it sticks with you the rest of your life. That’s usually not true with adult literature. So when the secondary lessons within a children’s story imply you have to be a pretty princess or you need to wait long enough for someone to come and save you, it gives children wrong messages. I’d like to change that. 

Since high school, I feared that I couldn’t do what I wanted to do because my passion scares me all the time. I mean, what if my ideas are not original enough? What if what I hope to do doesn’t work? So I try to talk to myself with logic and I pray a lot. When good things have happened at unexpected times, I try to hold onto that. I tell myself that the next good thing to happen might be just around the corner.”