Once Upon a Time in Vancouver...

The last thing first-year university students expect to study in an English course at Simon Fraser University is a fairy tale. After all, having just recently been promoted from adolescent to young adult, shouldn’t they be given a chance to demonstrate their brilliance with a more mature text? Pauline Johnson disagrees with this outlook. Her short story “The Siwash Rock” is, after all, a typical fairy tale. It is complete with a Once Upon A Time (“it was thousands of years ago” [16]), a beautiful, brave and admired prince (“handsome boy chief… an excellent warrior… courageous man among men” [16]), a lovely girl that becomes his wife, and a seemingly-impossible triumph for a good cause. The story even ends with the couple living Happily Ever After: “from everlasting to everlasting” (18). This fairy tale must not be confused as fiction; for the two are distinctly separate: works of fiction provide insight to our own identities, whereas fairy tales do not possess the same appeal. I came into English 101 expecting to focus on fictional texts, not fairy tales, and for this reason Pauline Johnson’s “The Siwash Rock” is my least favorite addition to Vancouver Short Stories.