Fairy Tales for Writers:
Sleeping Beauty
© June 2007 Lawrence Schimel
A Midsummer Night Press
[Image: "Am I Dreaming" © 2007 Brian Morrison and used with permission]

There are many who yearn to be frozen
while their youth is at its peak,
to stretch out that ephemeral time
into a hundred years.



There are others who seem not to discover themselves
until late in life, following sundry other paths
until they stumble upon a true vocation, such as writing.
We call them sleeping beauties, these authors
who blossom in a later season, their measured, mature prose
a welcome antidote to the youthful brouhaha
that's all the rage in the marketplace these days.

But far too many are the true sleeping beauties,
who at a tender age find a harsh critic
who belittles their talent and their fantasies
with a verbal barb sharper than the nib of any fountain pen
that silences the stories, poems, daydreams
they might have written.

Be it from parent or teacher, sibling or spouse,
just one tiny prick of criticism is all it takes sometimes
to put a burgeoning writer to sleep
for a hundred years,
for a lifetime
for so long that no princes are left
to hack through the brambles,
or if one is, he can't imagine that he should bother.

Lawrence Schimel is an author and anthologist, working in many different genres and forms. His short stories, poems, and essays have appeared in numerous periodicals — including The Wall Street Journal, The Saturday Evening Post, The Boston Phoenix, Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, Physics Today, and others — and in more than 140 anthologies including The Random House Book of Science Fiction Stories, Best Gay Erotica 1997 and 1998, The Mammoth Book of Fairy Tales, Black Thorn, White Rose, The Sandman Book of Dreams, Weird Tales from Shakespeare, Gay Love Poetry, and The Random House Treasury of Light Verse. He is a regular lecturer at Princeton University, Yale University, Brown University, Rutgers University, and Wayne State University. His most recent work, Fairy Tales for Writers, will be released in June 2007.

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