Fairytales, transgression and chasing waterfalls with Season Butler

**Season Butler** (0:00)
Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh.

**Oriana Fox** (0:05)
Hello, I'm Oriana Fox. Thank you for tuning in to Multiple Os, the spin-off podcast for my talk show, The O Show. The O Show is a live performance piece that minds the conventions of daytime TV talk shows for all that they're worth. It features artists and other experts who have no difficulty spilling the beans about their lives and opinions.
And I guess you're going to particularly love this episode, I think, because it doesn't have just one American ex-pat, but two. My guest is Season Butler, an American ex-pat who divides her time between London and Berlin, and she is an artist and an author, a very talented and articulate and thoughtful person. And I'm very excited to share this interview with you. Before I share the interview with you, I just want to say that I had the pleasure of speaking with Season Butler previously on the O Show live edition at Mimosa House London's Instagram. And if you'd like, you know, of course you're welcome to listen to both interviews. I've put the details in the show notes. A link, a quick link, if you want to have a watch. Just to give you some teasers, in that discussion, Season Butler and I spoke about the racial empathy bias, climate change and Bill Cosby, which have all played a part in Butler's work. We also spoke about her debut novel Signet, published in 2019 and the paperback came out in 2020 The protagonist of her debut novel Signet is a adolescent on the cusp of adulthood, a young woman who has been left on an island off the coast of New Hampshire by her parents. She's waiting for them to return and the island is inhabited only by elderly people, older people who have formed a separatist retirement community on this island. So she is very much an outsider on the basis of her age. And the other main character in the novel is, of course, the environment itself, which due to climate change is eroding the very foundation of the home of her grandmother's house that she lives in. And when I say grandmother's house, it is rife with associations with the fairy tale, which is very much part of the book because, and a part of Season Butler's wider oeuvre insofar as she likes to make reference to, among other authors, Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tales, such as The Little Mermaid. And Signet is, of course, based on the ugly duckling. So yeah, in our discussion last time on Instagram, we spoke about many topics, but we didn't touch upon this fairy tale theme, which I'm really interested in because I grew up, I'm the similar age to Season, and I grew up loving anything to do with mermaids because of The Little Mermaid and Splash. They were among my favorite films. In fact, I watched Splash like every day for a year, thanks to the technology of VHS. Oh, one other thing I need to say is that Season Butler was a guest on a podcast by another artist called Deborah Pearson, called The Whole Darn Thing, and Pearson invited artists to tell the whole plot line of something they'd seen or read. So Season has been on a podcast talking about The Little Mermaid at different versions of The Little Mermaid. So we kind of start out talking about that podcast. So I just need to give you that little tiny bit of background information so that it makes sense. So without further ado, here is the interview.

**Season Butler** (4:26)
I'm interested in how we're kicking off with talking about The Little Mermaid because I've been thinking and talking about it again recently when it's not been on my mind so much for a few years and then lately it's been coming up in conversation. And I don't know, I find that kind of a funny serendipity. So the Disney Little Mermaid, which I really like and I really highly rate, it seems like there's a sense of really valorizing, like, I don't know, persistence, but also there's like, like one of the fun things about Ariel in the Disney version is, she's such a geek and she gets, she like really geeks out on the, you know, sort of like human mythology and like dorky particularities of human culture and goes for it and really gets there. And the Anderson version seems to be about, actually, I want to revise that, the Danish folk tale that Anderson recorded and also had a take on. Yeah, it seems to be much more about boundaries and like the pain of boundary crossings and sometimes the impossibility of transgression, like real transgression. So but I'm not sure if if that was the same line that I drew between the two of them. When I talked about it with Deborah Pearson years ago.