Issue 35: A Sea Tale by Deborah Stein

"I have always wanted to make a children’s book, but stories for children don’t seem to come these last few years. Perhaps because I am a thousand years in and cannot remember what innocence is...."

Jul 23, 2024

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Deborah Stein, *La Noche*, watercolor, gouache on paper, 12 x 16 inches, 2024. Courtesy of the artist.

A Sea Tale by Deborah Stein

Prologue

I have always wanted to make a children’s book, but stories for children don’t seem to come these last few years. Perhaps because I am a thousand years in and cannot remember what innocence is. I’d have to work harder at clearing the wreckage out of my turtle-heart to open it for that kind of business.

I’m trying to learn and unlearn so many things, yet each attempt to write or even adapt stories for little people ends up a fable for old people who feel the weight of the systems they are stuck in, the opposite of innocence.

And so is my adaptation of a short children’s story called The Fisherman of Cefalú by Italian educator and storyteller Gianni Rodari from his 1962 book, Telephone Tales (republished in English by Enchanted Lion Press). It begins with a Sicilian fisherman who catches a tiny sea creature and a tiny sea creature who begs the fisherman not to throw him back.

In my version of Rodari’s tale, the sardine-like creature promises to make the fisherman rich if the fisherman will feed and care for him. The fisherman takes him home, packing the tiny creature in with his other hungry children. The tiny sardine-sized thing eats and gets strong and goes on to make the fisherman rich, so rich that the fisherman forgets all that the tiny magical creature did to help him. And when the sea creature suggests the now wealthy fisherman might better the world, the fisherman becomes annoyed, shuts the little creature in a clam shell and throws him back to the sea. Finally the fable flips its eventual ending into a perpetual beginning. Also, I added a mermaid….

Read A Sea Tale.

Deborah Stein is an artist and writer who lives between New York City and Northern New Mexico with her partner James and their little dog Pablo. Her second solo show, VIBRANT MATTER is at LDBA Gallery in Santa Fe through May 19, 2024. Deborah was a fiction fellow working with Sabrina Orah Mark at the Under The Volcano residency in Tepoztlán, Mexico in January 2023, and was in residency at The Fine Arts Works Center in Provincetown, MA in May 2023. Her art and writing has appeared in Khôra, Rowayat, The First Person and in collaboration with Here Projects. When she isn’t working on her art she’s writing, each is part of the other for her. Both enter into the classes she teaches and her practice lends support to the artists she strives to encourage and inspire through her rogue art school, The StoryCamp Disco.