Featured Writer: Norman G. Lock

Concerning the Tale

Slow to admit my delight in the tale--especially the intellectually despised fairy tale, I now discover in it a stylized theatre in which the movements of the unconscious, of desire and terror, are made manifest. For me, tales are fictional representations of the world at its most out of joint. Grotesque illustrations of the life that lies always behind the visible--baleful and beguiling, both.

In the fairy tales that were read to me as a child, are intimations of forgotten attitudes toward the world--its dangers and forbidden pleasures. Of a secret, sometimes terrible knowledge. To be lost in the forest, to be abandoned, to be hunted and ravished, to be changed utterly--these are the terrors of childhood we suppress as men and women. The childish things we put away. But they will not be put away,
not entirely. Like the dream, the tale, in its grimness as it writes its text on the page, registers the psychic disturbances of its author, who disappears behind it, wishing to remain anonymous. Hopefully, his tale will resonate with the reader whose unconscious mind will be, in a like manner, disturbed. It is very much his intention in writing *Grim Tales* to disconcert. To astonish. To dismay.

Norman Lock has published fiction in leading journals in the U.S. and abroad. He was awarded the Aga Kahn Prize in 1979, given by The Paris Review. His stage plays have been performed internationally. The House of Correction was voted one of the Best Plays of 1988 and (for its revival) of 1994 by the Los Angeles Times. It was also called "the best new play of the [1996 Edinburgh Theatre] Festival." It is published by Broadway Play Publishing (www.broadwayplaypubl.com). His radio dramas are broadcast by WDR, Germany. He is the author of a script produced by The American Film Institute. The work published here is from an extended prose sequence: Grim Tales. Two other prose sequences--Émigrés and Joseph Cornell's Operas--are published in one volume by Elimae Books (www.elimae.com).