INTERVIEW
The girl who grew up not needing a prince
A baby left in the forest, a shape-shifting sorceress, a lovestruck prince —the familiar fairy-tale ingredients are there, starting with “Once Upon a Time.”
But the “happily ever after” is turned upside down and inside out in “The Goat-Faced Girl,” a whimsical feminist update of a 17th century Italian folk tale by Buffalo illustrator Jane Marinsky and her daughter Leah Marinsky Sharpe and just published by David R. Godine ($16.95).
“I used to love reading fairy tales when I was younger,” says Marinsky Sharpe, 29, a City Honors graduate who is now a doctoral candidate in conservation biology at the University of Minnesota. “I would go to the library and check out those giant fairy tale collections by Andrew Lang and work my way through them.”
As a teenager, she entertained her babysitting charges with her favorite fairy tales. “They used to like it when I told them stories as opposed to just reading the stories,” she said.
Sometimes, alterations were required.
The original “Goat-Faced Girl” tells of lazy, beautiful Renzolla, who is set to marry a king when her lizard-godmother curses her with a goat face for her ungrateful ways and the king locks her in a tower with tasks to perform so he won’t have to marry her. (The most shocking moment may be when Renzolla throws a puppy out the window because she is too lazy to take care of it.) At the end, the king is happy to marry her when she is beautiful again.
“I would tell it different ways, depending on the mood, but the general theme was that after the prince spent the entire time treating her badly, she never ended up with him,” says Marinsky Sharpe.
In this mother-daughter update, the lazy young woman, renamed Isabella, is cursed with a goat face and then rejected by Prince Rupert, but in doing the tasks he requires –planting turnips, cooking a meal and sewing
a ballgown –she discovers the joy of taking care of herself. No puppies are thrown out the window, and there is no “happily ever after” for the prince.
This is the first book for Marinsky, who has taught illustration at Daemen College for about 15 years and done editorial illustrations for many magazines and newspapers, including The Buffalo News. Her oil paintings and process sketches for “The Goat-Faced Girl” will be displayed in the Fanette Goldman- Carolyn Greenfield Art Gallery at Daemen, starting with a reception from 6 to 9 p. m. Friday, and she’s working on a PowerPoint presentation tentatively titled “”Creating a picture book and how to get the damn thing published.”
The PowerPoint shows the work that went into the project, starting with the first pencil sketches on hotel stationery for an assignment for her master’s degree in illustration at Syracuse University, the blocking out of the story, reference materials including photos she took for her illustrations, and revisions she made along the way.
Friends, family and students served as models. A friend’s young daughter posed with her teddy bear. A trip to Amvets produced a bathrobe and a gown for one photo shoot. Her husband, Dan Sharpe, stood in for the prince, wearing biking pants, moccasins and their daughter Anna’s swimming medal.
The book is set in “the age of fairy tales” and “the land of magic,” Marinsky says, and not meant to represent a particular time period or place, which gave her some leeway. “I did a lot of research on carriages and made up my own,” Marinsky said.
Other reference materials included her daughter Anna’s American Girl baby doll –“I pulled it out of the basement” –along with photos of babies, turnips, a cracked egg, spilled flour, a chipmunk, butterflies, and of course, pictures of goats and lizards.
The goat face was a problem.
“That was one thing that David Godine asked me to change because he thought she looked too scary,”Marinsky said. She ended up gluing the friendlier goat face, with more delicate beard and curly eyelashes, on the original painting.
Her long campaign to find a publisher involved sending out handsome packets with stamped, self-addressed postcards, a sampling of illustrations and a checklist of three book choices to as many as 30 to 50 publishers.
In a telephone interview from Boston, Godine said the story appealed to him because “I have a very lazy daughter and no magic charms to cure her.”
While he receives “tons” of book submissions, he was impressed both by the quality of Marinsky’s paintings and by her daughter’s story. “Generally the text comes in by somebody and you like it and then you have to find [an artist]. I was delighted that the daughter was as good a writer as the mother was an artist.”
As a publisher, the story also appealed to him, he said, because “books play a part in it. She has to learn how to cook, she actually buys a book to learn how to do it. This is a family that is still using books as reference tools.”
Godine was also impressed by Marinsky’s attention to detail. “The endpapers are the scales of the lizard –she’s very good about repeating that motif. Her shawl has lizard scales on it. Those are the little things that really make a great book. It’s not just slapped together,” he said.
Marinsky is justifiably fond of the endpaper painting, but adds: “I’m not framing that for the show.”
Busy now with the business of promoting her book, Marinsky muses that it would be cool to have a lizard cape to wear to storytelling sessions. “I need to find a seamstress who could do that. I should have one done for my daughter, too.”
e-mail jwestmoore@buffnews.com
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