Recs: Women Creating Their Story

[rachelmanija]

This is for a possible Sirens presentation. The theme this year is "retold tales."

Can you recommend to me fantasy media or myth in which female characters, in some sense, alter reality by telling stories about it?

This "altering reality" doesn't have to be magic in itself; the ultimate example is Scheherazade, who changes the world by telling stories. There's also Martha's world-changing storytelling in Doctor Who.

The other examples I thought of were magical: Paperhouse (girl creates spooky new reality by drawing it), Fudoki (a dying princess of the Heian court writes a story about a cat who becomes a woman; she may or may not create a reality in which the story is true), The Secret Country (kids create a fantasy world, then travel to it and find that it is and isn't as they imagined), The Tricksters (characters from a girl's lush fantasy narrative show up, again not exactly as she pictured them), Voices (Annals of the Western Shore) (spoilery but sort of fits), Witch Week (the entire climax depends on a girl telling a story which alters reality.)

Can you think of others? Especially, examples from myth and folklore, and examples which aren't about white girls?

ETA: If you rec something, please explain how it fits.

Comments

[justice-turtle.livejournal.com]

This seems like kind of an edge case to me, and also I can't think of a good example, but how about the "wise old woman tells the protagonist a story that then has a crucial influence on the book's climax" story type? Oddly, most of those I can recall in detail have male storytellers (Cornelia Meigs did several books on this plan, all with male storytellers iirc) - except Elizabeth Enright's (non-fantasy) Gone-Away Lake and Return to Gone-Away, both of which feature a male and a female storyteller leading the child protagonists to explore their hidden town and eventually open it up to outside influence again.

(Whoa. I didn't realize the Gone-Away books would sound so mythical when I tried to describe them in terms of storytelling. Wow.) Anyway, the second book fits the pattern I just described more closely, iirc.