An Irish Christmas at Kylemore: Spinning Yarns: Fairy Tales, Textile Art, and Story Structure

The second session in the Irish Christmas at Kylemore Abbey series featured Betsy Cornwell, an accomplished writer and novelist who has published five novels, as well as various essays and articles on literature and other topics. Lisa Caulfied, the Director of the Notre Dame Global Center at Kylemore Abbey, moderated the event. Their discussion centered around the work that Cornwell has done both as a writer and as a textile artist. Her passion for recreating the classic, yet timeless works that she has adored throughout her life shone through at every point. As an artist, she sees value in the old and beauty in the process of pouring her adoration and frustration into transforming it.

Cornwell began her presentation by highlighting her lifelong love for books and reading. As a young girl, she read fairy tales and classic stories, learning many life lessons from them. But, as she grew, began to find frustration in the fact that they seemed to require only one ending. Her talent in descriptive writing led her to dedicate her talents to recreating fairy tales and other classic works. Wanting to add something to the conversation on these stories, she questioned where they could be changed to fit a modern perspective. In her novel “Mechanica”, she focused on the story of Cinderella. Instead of being transformed by a fairy godmother and falling in love with a prince, her character Nicolette is a mechanic and an inventor who creates her own happily ever after. Throughout the novel, she combines the feminine concepts of fairy tales and textiles with the masculine concept of mechanics to craft a female heroine who is independent and in control of her story’s ending. Her motivation for recreating these works stemmed from her childhood spent reading fairy tales and her desire to write the stories that she would’ve enjoyed as a young girl. Throughout her presentation, she emphasized the importance of opening the dialogue of older stories and questioning their story structures, illustrating the fact that their popularity does not establish their perfection. She has also rewritten the stories of Robin Hood, Snow White and Jane Eyre.

Cornwell then moved on to discuss her work as a textile artist. Though they do not at first seem related, she described the similarity between writing and creating textile art as both being repetitive, physical actions that result in the creation of an intricate product. She views garments and yarn in the same way that she views the story structures of the classic works she recreates: as valuable pieces that deserve to be transformed and given a new purpose. Her latest project has been renovating an old knitting school and factory to make not only a home for her and her son, but a future art retreat for other single moms. The art that Cornwell creates displays a dedication to seeing the beauty and potential in what has stood the test of time, a value that runs deep in the core of both her work and her life. To conclude her presentation, Cornwell posed a rhetorical question to the participants: What are the stories that have been compelling for you and how might you add to them?

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