Notes from a Shady Path: Fairies, Frogs, and Little Boys

“Would you like to see me climb a tree?” said Max in a friendly way, and of course I did, so I paused my walk and watched while he carefully placed one small foot on a low branch and the other foot on a higher branch and then swung himself into the tree and sat down, giving his feet a couple of big swings back and forth.

I didn’t really know Max yet, but he looked like the sort of boy who might be interested in frogs, so I asked him if he and his dad would like to join me at the stream where I often see frogs swimming in the water or snuggled into the mud.  “Sometimes I don’t see the frogs at all,” I said, “but I can hear them when they jump from the grass into the stream.”  “Plop, plop,” said Max.

Together we walked slowly towards the bank of the stream, and sure enough: “Plop, plop, plop,” there were the frogs.  We crouched down and looked into the shallow water; I could see the mud at the bottom, scattered with small stones and little plants; three long-legged spiders stalked the surface, but none of us saw any frogs, even though we knew they were there.

We said goodbye, I walked down the shady path towards home, and soon I was thinking of fairies.  Because like the frogs, the fairies were there in the woods, too, even though I couldn’t see them.

One thing that makes Alice and Fay different from many other fairy books is that its fairies don’t live somewhere else, in a magical place called “fairyland”; they live here, where we live, in the woods near my house, in the garden outside my window, in the world of frogs and lizards and crickets and snails and little boys named Max. The garden creatures of Alice and Fay are neighbors; Alice is a lizard who lives in the stony wall of my garden, and Fay is a fairy who lives under a rose bush, and they are friends.  When someone needs help they hold a meeting and make a plan.  They worry and celebrate together.

The fairies in Alice and Fay represent (to me) the animating spirits of Nature, not “supernatural” beings but hypernatural beings, more natural than anything.  They are as real to me as frogs, spiders, wind, rain, and little boys. They do have magical power, and Fay does use her magic wand to save the tadpoles, but fairy magic is the magic of the natural world, available to us all (more on “Magic” another time).

Once Alice and Fay was written and I decided to publish it, I knew it needed to be professionally illustrated. The story originally included photos I had taken myself, but there were obvious problems with illustrating a book using snapshots taken on my phone, and also…the fairies. Despite the many advances of modern photography no one has succeeded yet in taking pictures of fairies, although many people have tried.

I needed an illustrator who would be willing to work with me to create a place and characters who suited my ideas about fairies and Nature.  Partly because of this, I chose to publish Alice and Fay myself, and contracted Stillwater River Publications in Pawtucket Rhode Island to work with me on the project (www.stillwaterpress.com).  They suggested a young but experienced illustrator of children’s books who had worked with them on several publications before: Chris Hilaire (https://chrishilaire.wixsite.com/driftingpalette). From his first sketches of Alice, the lizard, and ending with his final full-color scene illustrations, Chris worked with me to create fairies who are both human and not, (their green colors, their viny hair and froggy feet) and animals who are a little bit human in their expressions, but also faithful to nature (Peggy the snail whose eyes look out from the end of her stalks, and Edith the cricket, who looks exactly like a …cricket). Along the way Chris added fun details I had never imagined, so the book, Alice and Fay, owes a lot to his patience with me and our successful collaboration.