Carolyn Turgeon’s appearance evokes an otherworldly elegance effusive with joy. With her long dark hair, complete with shiny streak of navy blue, red lipstick, and big blue eyes, Carolyn Turgeon seems herself to be a high priestess, the kind of magical creature who would be right at home in her sumptuous fantasy worlds.

Turgeon learned to love reading as an escape from her shy, dislocated childhood. She says, “I loved being alone in my room and reading.”

By chance, Turgeon’s mother brought home a book from the Betsy-Tacy and Tib series once by accident. These books by Maud Heart Lovelace had a tremendous impact on Turgeon’s development as a writer. Protagonist Betsy grows up in a small Minnesota town, reading as much as she can, climbing trees, and hoping to become a writer. Turgeon reflects, “I wanted to do that!”

Soon, Turgeon was well on her way. Though she majored in Italian Literature at Pennsylvania State, Turgeon was lucky enough to enter an honors Creative Writing workshop taught by Paul West, uncharacteristically offered to undergraduates for the first time. Insists Turgeon dreamily, “It was the most amazing class I took in college.”

Turgeon simultaneously took a class in Italian Literature, where she read three versions of the famous three-ring story cycle. Her first novel, a short story about a fantasy town called Rain Village, began as a modern variation of this story. Initially, the tale focused primarily on developing the setting and did not have a clear plot structure. Explains Turgeon, “I had no idea how to write a novel, so that’s why it took ten more years!”

The story began as a day in the life of a female protagonist who lived in Rain Village. Turgeon began to develop the story into a five-part sequence with five different narrators. One of the sections contained a “throwaway” line about watching a trapeze artist perform in a carnival setting. Turgeon found this girl interesting, and she began to develop the story of how the girl became a trapeze artist.

Turgeon was able to meet with an agent in 2002 who was part of her network. The agent had many positive things to say about Turgeon’s brilliant writing, but he told her to rewrite the book from a first-person perspective, that of the trapeze artist, and to include more plot. Although this is the kind of book Turgeon prefers to read, she says, “I didn’t know how to write that.”

She put the story aside in order to enter a Ph.D Literature program in 2005 at UCLA, the year after she graduated from Pennsylvania State. She took a summer off grad school to write but, she says, “I didn’t write anything.” From here, Turgeon dropped out of the Ph.D program in 2009, realizing she was “never going to write the novel magically.”

She explains that the novel took so long to complete because she “made lots of mistakes.” Among them was her belief she had to write the novel in chronological order, instead of skipping around and allowing it to come together organically. She also did not find a writer’s community or plot out the book before writing it. When Turgeon submitted the novel to editors, their feedback was primarily that “this is really beautiful but it’s too quiet.”

She debated whether to continue sending the book out, and began working on her second novel, Grandmother. Though frustrated, Turgeon took the brave step to enter a workshop with author Jennifer Belle. Here, Turgeon learned that her work had a “lulling, pretty feel” but that she was “not writing in scenes.” Turgeon began to rewrite the novel to become “so much more active,” and took it back from her agent while she paid Belle to work through it and help Turgeon reconstruct it into individual scenes.

From there, Rain Village was accepted to be published in 2008. It’s a first-person account of Tessa, a tiny young girl growing up in a dusty village with parents who devalue her mind and a father who eventually begins to sexually abuse her. For years, her only hope lies in her close relationship with the town’s female librarian, Mary, a brash and beautiful woman with a tragic past involving the trapeze, a lover’s death, and a place called Rain Village. Mary teaches Tessa the trapeze as well as the skills necessary to survive, then abandons Tessa through suicide. Tessa takes Mary’s lessons, the money she has earned working for Mary, and her own new skills, and sets off to take Mary’s place as the trapeze artist at the circus that Mary once fled. In spite of a new and lasting love, Tessa continues to be plagued by thoughts of Mary. Given the opportunity to understand her mentor’s life and sudden, heart-wrenching death, Tessa steps into one of the fables Mary told her and goes to visit the place of Mary’s origin, Rain Village, for herself.

After Rain Village, Turgeon began to work on a series of fairy tales retold in the modern world and from a feminist perspective. She says, “I wanted a story that would be easier and more pleasurable to tell—although it really wasn’t!” She chose to focus on retelling fairy tales because “I grew up with Disney and the old stories. They’re imprinted in our cells.” Turgeon hopes that writing about them will allow readers to “inhabit their skin in a new way—there’s something exciting about that.”

Turgeon focused on the fairy godmother from the Cinderella story in order to focus on a character who had a freedom of movement that Cinderella, stuck up in her room and then in the castle, would not. She chose this story because she “wanted to retell a really simple story and make it lush and fully realized.”

Originally this story just followed the fairy godmother’s journey as she flew around the kingdom and surveyed the story’s events. When Turgeon submitted the story to the writers in Jennifer Belle’s workshop, though, they noted that the writing was “sensual and lush”, but they were not fans of fantasy and did not respond to the more fantastical elements. Says Turgeon, “I wanted to win them over, and not just write genre fiction.”

She engaged in the intricate work necessary to develop the complicated plot of this story and eventually developed the question, “what if something happened, and she was banished from that world?” Godmother came to focus on just that, becoming the story of an elderly woman recalling her life as Cinderella’s fairy godmother before she ruined the story by stealing the prince for herself. Ever since, she has roamed the Earth with wings but no fairy sisters, alone and haunted by the story she longs to set right. Turgeon set out to “suck in all these people who don’t like fantasy or fairy tale.”

Indeed, Godmother became an all-too-human tale of human frailty, the boundaries of reality and fiction, and the role of fairy tales in the modern world. It was eventually accepted to a larger publisher, Random House, who immediately demanded similar books.

From there, Mermaid and The Fairest of Them All were born. Mermaid, in fact, sold before it was even written, to an editor in the U.K. The editor bought the U.K. rights to Godmother as the novel was in its final stages. When Turgeon showed them a short story she was working on about a mermaid, the editor asked Turgeon for another “big, sweeping, dark fairy tale about this mermaid.” Her United States editor required an outline before she would accept Mermaid. Having created the outline, says Turgeon, “I had a road map, so it was much easier to write that way.”

Turgeon’s advice to young writers mostly involves useful tools like this one, as well as suggestions to avoid her own mistakes. She insists on the importance of “finding a community of writers who get you,” and “don’t take advice from everyone.”

She also believes in the value of a diversity of skills. While working on her novel, Turgeon worked for a non-profit and engineering firm as a writer, but says she often did not have enough time or energy to work on her own writing because she was doing it professionally. She wishes she had taken the time to develop non-literary skills to help her find an unrelated full-time job while struggling to complete her first novel.

She has come a long way from writing grants to pay the bills. Turgeon is currently hard at work on her novel about Dante’s circles of Hell, in which Dante himself will be a character. This novel, pushed onto the backburner for years, has been a long time coming.

Writers Turgeon describes as “luxurious and lush, beautiful and magical” are her favorite. From Allende to Hoffman to Winterson to Marquez, the writers who most inspire Turgeon emphasize setting and create a magical, otherworldly tone in which witches mingle with shopkeepers and magic is always right around the corner. Yet, Turgeon rarely opts for the happy ending common in today’s Disney-esque fairy tales. Perhaps that is to be expected for a woman who felt, when writing Mermaid, that she “had a relationship with Anderson and was living in his world.”

As Turgeon herself points out, Anderson wrote The Little Mermaid in a time of significant grief, lost in his own loneliness and sense of isolation over his homosexual identity. In his wake, Turgeon’s fairy godmother reveals herself to be an elderly woman under the influence of dementia who cannot forget the loss of her younger sister to gang-rape and suicide, a loss she blames herself for and later re-enacts upon her own body; Rapunzel sleeps unknowingly with her half-brother to fulfill her mother’s wish for revenge.

The mermaid herself has spawned an entire mermaid blog that reflects Turgeon’s extensive research about and obsession with mermaids which, she says, followed her around while she wrote the book. This includes interviews with personalities like Tim Gunn about how mermaids have influenced their lives, and engages with mermaid conventions and other reflections of the feminist/queer representation and its impact on the modern world.

Despite Turgeon’s own happy ending, Mermaid itself is an exploration of pain—the pain of love, the pain of duty, of responsibility, of sisterhood, of sacrifice. The prince sleeps with the mermaid herself, who gives birth explosively and swiftly to a half-human child whose presence still cannot entice the prince from his duty to marry the princess. Yet on the day the mermaid is to die, the princess slices open her arm and, unflinching, uses her blood—since they are married, her blood is also the blood of the prince—to free the mermaid from the spell. The princess loses her hope for a truly romantic union with the prince who she loves, the mermaid loses the prince and her own child, and the prince loses his beloved to magic he does not understand. The halfling child remains among humans as a symbol of loss, and of love, and of the magic that sacrifice can give.

Though seemingly merely fantasy, her fairy tale worlds embody the Anderson quote that almost became the title of the book: but it will hurt.

– Ariadne Wolf