Glorious Stories

Hello, Readers! In my last post, I promised one more entry in my celebration of poetry this month. As such, I bring you my latest addition to my collection of glorious stories–a fairy tale retelling called The Maiden and the Stranger.

But what does this have to do with poetry, you may ask? Well my friends, I’ll tell you; this new story is told entirely in poetic verse. That’s right, it is a poem of epic proportions, ending up at a little over 4,500 words!

The Maiden and the Stranger started out as a fun little exercise I began for myself about five years ago while working at summer camp. Taking on long solitary shifts in the craft shop, or waiting at the zipline for campers to make the fridge up the hill for their ride, left me with a lot of time on my hands. So I started telling myself a story, and the rule was it had to rhyme.

If you’ve followed me for a while, you may know that I am particularly fond of the fairy tale East of the Sun and West of the Moon. I can never get enough of it, and I’m always hunting down new retellings or alternative versions to consume. With that in mind, I used this fairy tale as the basis for my own little story, spinning verses in my spare time and jotting them down purely for fun.

But the rhymes kept coming, and coming, and the story got longer, and longer… Until a little story it was not.

At the end of the summer, I finally penned the last line and transferred the poem from my notebook to a Word doc, and was stunned when I saw that the word count had climbed nearly to 5,000.

“No one is going to read this!” I explained. “Who wants to read a poem that long?”

So I sat on it. For like, five years.

But I never could let it go. The experience had been too meaningful, too rewarding. Penning by hand that much poetry to tell a single story was only part of it–the story itself had come to life, touching on emotions and thoughts I hadn’t known I needed to release until then. It was a story for trust and hope, love for wounded hearts and courage against pain and loss. It was a fairy tale, yes, but the best kind of fairy tale.

At least, in my opinion.

So this year, when I decided to celebrate National Poetry Month, I resolved to release The Maiden and the Stranger for the first time. What better way to celebrate poetry, after all, than to share an epic that was my passion project all those years ago? Maybe no one will read it–I certainly don’t know–but you can!

It’s no Beowulf, but it is a story of courage, pain, loyalty, and most of all… Love.

Just the kind of story I like. Maybe you will too!

–Emmarayn

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1. Images used to create this cover taken from The Young Shepherdess by William Adolph-Bougereau, The Sleep of Endymion by Giovanni Antonio Burrini and Canadian Rockies (Lake Louise) By Albert Bierstadt. Images are in the public domain. ↩︎