Guest Post, Adura Ojo, winner of the December Challenge, The End is the Beginning.

Hello friends!

Welcome to a new year of WEP! It's wonderful to be back and to anticipate writing to prompts every two months. Check the list in the sidebar, or go to our CHALLENGES 2018 page if you haven't already checked what we have in store for you.

Come February, we sign up for In Too Deep, which should get your creative juices flowing. However, before we launch our first challenge of the year, we hear from our winner of the December challenge, The End is the Beginning, poet Adura Ojo.

If you haven't read Adura's winning poem, you can read it HERE.

Adura has been traveling and is still on the road, but managed to get her guest post done at the eleventh hour.

Thanks for participating in WEP again, Adura, now it's over to you!

The End is the Beginning: Why Cinderella Needs a new Song

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The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue but they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story - Chimamanda Adichie

Narratives exist for a reason. Stories are said to be as old as time, itself. For as long as we have existed as humans, we’ve been telling stories shaping our own realities. Sometimes these narratives run like a factual script in our lives, almost like an existential script that cannot be altered. Cinderella is one of those classic tales. A girl meets the man of her dreams and lives happily ever after. And why shouldn’t she? Love endures in just about every human experience that we can think of - be it happiness, pain, joy, sadness, war and death. Therein is the mystery of love as one of the most complex of emotions to grace the terrain of humanity. With the incredible endurance of love comes the danger of the single story. Cinderella became that single story.

Over centuries the existence of love between two people irrespective of class, gender or status became one of a single story of love between a man and a woman as exemplified in Cinderella. In a TED talk in 2009, Nigerian writer Chimamanda Adichie highlighted the danger of a single story. The danger of a single story is that it ignores, and in fact, denies the existence of other realities.

Many girls and indeed boys grow up believing that they will find love with someone of the opposite gender. The story of Cinderella as heart-warming as it is, inherits the danger of a single story. We want to see boys and girls embrace their individual realities. It is time for Cinderella to find love with a princess in part two of our human love story.

Thank you Adura. You've given us food for thought with your guest post. I've always loved the Cinderella story, and have lost count of the number of versions I've read. Yours was certainly different and challenge the traditional story in a unique way.

More about Adura: 

You can check out her book of poetry by emailing Lafia Publishing: lafiapublishing@gmail.com. 

Check out her beautiful blog HERE.

Adura Ojo is a British-Nigerian poet and writer. She is Pomosexual and embraces the anti-discriminatory principle of non-categorization. Her poems have appeared in Panorama: The Journal of Intelligent Travel, Acumen, Dryland, Sentinel Literary Quarterly, The New York Times and The Poetic Pinup Revue. A 2017 Pushcart prize nominee, Adura’s poems document what her diary once kept in a secret place. Her collection, Life is a Woman Breaking Eggs, was published in April 2017 by Lafia. 

So on February 1st, only 4 days to go Australian time, our new challenge will go live. Will it be you writing next month's guest post?

 Denise, for the team -- Yolanda, Olga and Nilanjana!