by Unknown
The fairy tales I love often begin in the natural, regular-seeming world and then something shifts, something is off. In my work, I like playing with the off-ness. With Apple Hill Farm, that off-ness revolves around death and community identity—two natural parts of life that, at times, can feel surreal. I also love how, traditionally, fairy tales are pretty gruesome. The modern-day fairy tale can serve as a way to understand and express the macabre complexities of everyday life, something I try for in my work. To me, they are necessary.
CHRISTOPHER CITRO is the author of The Maintenance of the Shimmy-Shammy (Steel Toe Books, 2015). His poetry was shortlisted for the 2015 Booth Poetry Prize, and he won the 2015 Poetry Writing Competition at Columbia Journal. His recent and upcoming publications include poetry in Best New Poets 2014, Prairie Schooner, Ninth Letter, Subtropics, the Pinch, Redivider, Salt Hill, Witness, Poetry Northwest, the Greensboro Review and Verse Daily, and creative nonfiction in Boulevard and Colorado Review. He received his MFA in poetry from Indiana University and lives in Syracuse, New York.
Today in a book of Joseph Cornell’s dreams I read: August 1, 1968. pictures of authors in a book—glossy, vivid. also snapshots of my childhood, one with a large 31 in. box like a fab. fairy theatre that I wd seem to hv had. I agree with this.
JAYDN DEWALD is a writer, musician, and teacher. Recent work has appeared in or is forthcoming from the Carolina Quarterly, december, Fourteen Hills, Poet Lore, Spoon River Poetry Review, and many others. He currently lives with his wife and daughter in Athens, Georgia, where he is pursuing a PhD in English/Creative Writing at the University of Georgia.
When I think of fairy tales, I think of flat, fast-paced, sparingly descriptive little stories in which life’s sorrows (in short, unadorned, largely paratactic sentences) are taken rather on the chin. Though I admire these traits immensely, “The Rosebud Variations” is interested in (among other things) stretching the stylistic possibilities of the fairy tale: it wants to be one that is long(er), meditative, analytical at times, at times emotional, overtly descriptive, and composed largely of hypotactic, almost overlong sentences.
ZACHARY DOSS is fiction editor for Banango Street and a fiction reader for Ploughshares. His work has appeared in, or is forthcoming from, DIAGRAM, Caketrain, Paper Darts, Juked, and others.
“The Season of Daughters” began its genesis somewhere in the Grimm story “All Fur” (or “Allerleirauh”), which is about a king who tries to marry his daughter, who resists him. I started to read a lot of fairy tales about parental—and especially paternal—relationships and became fascinated with the anti-authoritarian nature of some of the best of them. Kings and parents both seem so often corrupt or greedy or incompetent, and it’s often very poor or very young people (or both) who emerge victorious in the end. I tried to bring some of that landscape of resistance to this story.
JACLYN DWYER has published work in a number of literary magazines, including Ploughshares, Columbia Poetry Review, the Journal, Rattle, Prairie Schooner, New Ohio Review, and Witness. She is currently a PhD candidate at Florida State University.
In first grade, I read a book called No Flying in the House, about a girl who discovers she’s half-fairy. I remember wondering what secrets I might have and if I, too, might be a fairy. I spent years trying to double-joint my shoulder trying to kiss my elbow to show that I, too, might be a fairy. This book, like most fairy tales, made me believe in the impossible and made the unreal real. So much of motherhood already seems unreal. Shouldn’t our stories appear that way as well?
RACHEL EDELMAN grew up in Memphis. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in TYPO, Painted Bride Quarterly, the Southern Humanities Review, and other journals. She also writes micro-reviews for Scout Poetry. In 2015, she was awarded the Loren D. Milliman Fellowship from the University of Washington, where she is an MFA candidate in poetry and an instructor of creative writing. She lives in Seattle.
I’ve always been drawn to the way that narratives accrue new details and twists. Science and poetry are both preoccupied with such phenomena; evolution, creation, and naming take on occult tones when their tales morph from teller to teller. The shadows of new knowledge linger in the margins.
RACHEL CONTRENI FLYNN was born in Paris and raised in a small farming town in Indiana. She is the author of three award-winning collections: Tongue (Red Hen Press); Haywire (Bright Hill Press); and Ice, Mouth, Song, (Tupelo Press). A graduate of the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers, Rachel co-edits the Beloit Poetry Journal and teaches at Colby College.
I grew up in a wonderfully eccentric house at the edge of a small town and was free to ramble the acres (miles!) around it: abandoned farms, forests, cornfields, bomb shelters. I believed my siblings and I were enacting fairy tales as we encountered apiaries overtaken by bittersweet, deeply reclusive neighbors, and cryptic notes stuck in road posts. I write poems out of the intersection of the domestic and dark, the homey and scary, and for that I thank my hometown and my brothers and sisters.
KRISTEN GLEASON lives in Athens, Georgia. Her writing has appeared in a number of print and online publications, most recently Fence and the Gettysburg Review.
That this story is a field emitted by the impossible-possible object of the disembodied hoof makes it a fairy tale (to me).
RODNEY GOMEZ is the author of Mouth Filled with Night (Northwestern University Press, 2014), winner of the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Prize, and Spine, winner of the Gloria Anzaldúa Poetry Prize (Newfound, 2015). His poetry has appeared in various journals, including Denver Quarterly, Barrow Street, Blackbird, Salt Hill, Drunken Boat, and RHINO, where it won the Editors’ Prize. Born and raised in Brownsville, Texas, he earned an MFA from the University of Texas–Pan American. He has been awarded residencies to the Atlantic Center for the Arts and the Santa Fe Art Institute.
I draw freely from the fairy tales I heard as a child growing up in deep South Texas, especially those involving brujas, El Diablo, and other creatures of the borderlands. There are no clowns in those stories, but there is always a patch of dark. It’s the dark I especially like. There is always room for stories there.
KAREN GREEN is an artist and writer whose Bough Down (Siglio, 2013) received the Believer Poetry Award. Her visual work is collected by individuals as well as institutions, including the Yale Beinecke Library and the Whitney Museum of American Art special collections. She exhibits with Space, a non-profit arts center in Los Angeles, and Calabi Gallery in Northern California. She lives in California and New York.
LAURA GROTHAUS hails from Cincinnati, Ohio, but currently lives in Baltimore, where she works as a custom framer, artist, and educator.
My work is connected to fairy tales through feminism and queerness, the tension between witch and maiden, the power and agency exhibited by villains and victors. But at a young age, fairy tales also gave me poetry. The diction and syntax of their direct and lyrical lines (which rang in my ears with the same intonations as religious texts I received on Sundays) gave my writing texture and purpose. They taught me that language could convince us of our own courage and goodness, our ability to persuade the world into being just. You say there is a coffin made of glass and there is a coffin made of glass. And always I knew, was comforted by knowing, when we pulled the clothes off the wolf, it would be just an animal again.
KELSIE HAHN has a chapbook, Responsibility, available from Lit House Press. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Passages North, Caketrain, Cartridge Lit, NANO Fiction, and others. She holds an MFA in fiction from New Mexico State University and lives in Houston, Texas.
Fairy tales are given to summary, a flatness of detail that relies on the implication of a larger world—a world that exists around and beyond these briefest of stories. The beyond may be a “happily ever after” where the good are rewarded and the evil punished, or events may not conclude so neatly. This sense of a larger world is vital to very short fiction in creating meaning and response. I think of “Trackways” as a fairy tale or parable of sorts,
a meditation on perception, its ability to control that larger world and shape the endings of our tales.
CARLEA HOLL-JENSEN was born on a Wednesday. Since then, her fiction has appeared in Shimmer, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Underwater New York, and Queers Destroy Fantasy. She holds an MA in Folklore from Indiana University Bloomington, and an MFA in Fiction from the University of Maryland, College Park. She is also a co-editor of the Golden Key, an online journal of speculative writing.
I love the sense of wonder in fairy tales. Anything can happen there, but that enchanted realm is never very far removed from the ordinary world, if at all. Fairy tales allow us to see our lives as if we’ve just stumbled into them from elsewhere and, in doing so, discover things we might not otherwise have noticed. As both a reader and a writer, I’m interested in stories that capture the world at its most surprising and strange, that look on in awe.
COOP LEE is a pizza cook by day and a wordsmith by night. You can find his work in Paper Darts, Specter Magazine, and Midwestern Gothic. He lives and writes in Portland, Oregon.
For me, fairy tales are not of princesses and goblins. Unless the princesses are homecoming queens and the goblins are demons buried so deep in the family trees of the neighborhood, it takes much more than sons and fire to forget. Fairy tales are matters of fact and fiction left to stroll through time and inspire us. Folklore, like a colorful loom around our cultures, move us to love or destroy. First with a story heard bedside by grandma’s old tone, then with the movies watched in cineplex-temples, these are our truths and our terrors. They are the stuff of dreams and/or nightmares. But more than just stories. Tales.
MURIEL LEUNG is from Queens, New York. Her writing can be found or is forthcoming in the Collagist, Coconut, Ghost Proposal, Jellyfish Magazine, interYrupture, and others. She is a recipient of a Kundiman fellowship and is currently an MFA candidate in creative writing at Louisiana State University. Her first book Bone Confetti is forthcoming from Noemi Press in October 2016.
In our reading of fairy tales, we accept that ghost cockroaches, headless lovers, and acidic rain can exist in a world simultaneously as physical manifestations of our emotional and psychological turmoil. Somewhere in this strange world, we recognize the complexity of both humans and non-humans through their combined attempts to continue with as much normalcy as they can muster to fight, to love, and to form unions when all the material disasters of their world make all of this impossible. In this sense, the fairy tale permits us a heart that recognizes how haunting, disaster, and tenderness are sometimes one and the same.
LINDSAY LUSBY has poetry appearing or forthcoming in North Dakota Quarterly, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Third Point Press, Sugar House Review, and elsewhere. Her chapbook Imago was published by dancing girl press in 2014. She is the Assistant Director of the Rose O’Neill Literary House at Washington College, serving as assistant editor for the Literary House Press and managing editor for Cherry Tree.
One of the most curious aspects of fairy tales, to me, is how the violence is often so clean and neat, remaining perfectly contained within the remarkable flatness of the characters. In the Grimm tale “The Maiden without Hands,” after her father chops off her hands, the girl weeps over her stumps all night and they are miraculously closed up and clean of blood in the morning. No stitches or bandages required. It’s this freakish cleanliness that makes the initial act even more gruesome.
CARMEN MARIA MACHADO is the author of Her Body and Other Parties, forthcoming from Graywolf Press in 2017. She is a Shirley Jackson Award and Nebula-nominated fiction writer, critic, and essayist, and her work has appeared in the New Yorker, Granta, the Paris Review, AGNI, Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy 2015, and elsewhere. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers’ Workshop, and lives in Philadelphia with her partner.
When I was young, I discovered a volume of stories by Hans Christian Andersen on my bookshelf. His original version of “The Little Mermaid,” complete with its severed tongue, agonizing transformation, and tragic ending, distressed and haunted me—a child who’d grown up on the neutered Disney adaptation. Ever since, my obsession with the grittiest and most horrific of fairy tales, like Giambattista Basile’s “The Old Woman Who Was Skinned,” has only grown.
REBECCA MACIJESKI is a Doctoral Candidate in Poetry at the University of Nebraska and holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She currently serves as an Assistant Editor in Poetry for Prairie Schooner and Hunger Mountain. She has attended artist residencies with The Ragdale Foundation and Art Farm Nebraska, and is the recipient of a 2012 Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Poet Lore, Nimrod, Sycamore Review, Potomac Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Rappahannock Review, Border Crossing, and others.
Fairy tales let us experience bigger and wilder versions of ourselves; our imaginations, in stories, let us make meaning in ways reality too often denies us. Storytelling endorses curiosity and deep listening—two habits of mind the human species needs to continue cultivating. My poems have done what I want for them if they inspire readers to discover what is heroic, noble, or wondrous about themselves.
CHRISTOPHER NELSON is the author of Blue House, published in the New American Poets Chapbook Series, and Capital City at Midnight, recipient of the 2014 BLOOM Chapbook Prize. He is editor of Under a Warm Green Linden, an online journal of poetry founded in 2008.
In tracing the word fairy backward through time, we find that it has, for centuries, suggested the possibility that the world that meets the eye isn’t the whole world, that beneath the apparent there is Other: other truths, other beings, other stories. Go back far enough, though, and this inherent strangeness, this Other, becomes synonymous with the very act of speaking, as if the first and ultimate Other isn’t God or death but the very self we know yet don’t exactly know. In writing I try to keep this mystery close, to let it guide the pen.
MARTA PELRINE-BACON uses cut-up pages of her writing in her art. Her work has been published in Cabinet des Fees and the short-lived Onomatopoeia Magazine and featured in online journals such as 7 Impossible Things before Breakfast, Hand/Eye magazine’s Out of Context, and St. Edwards’ New Literati.
I grew up in Florida where my dad convinced me a witch lived in the woods and wolves watched from behind the house. When I was ten, I received Dean’s A Book of Fairy Tales. The stories and art captivated me, instilling a desire to create stories and images as compelling. I love stories (told with words or pictures) that reveal inexplicable, magic characters and realms with hints of darkness. I hope my own work evokes similar feelings.
REBECCA PEREA-KANE is a recent graduate of the University of Virginia’s Creative Writing MFA Program in Poetry. Her work has been awarded a Bullock Poetry Prize from the American Academy of Poets and Williams College and she was a finalist for the Joy Harjo Poetry Contest in 2013.
I’m interested in the way fairy tales manifest metaphor and reveal truth through the fantastic. As Louise Glück writes in her poem “Circe’s Power”: “I never turned anyone into a pig. / Some people are pigs; I make them / look like pigs. / I’m sick of your world / that let’s the outside disguise the inside.”
AIMEE POKWATKA received her MFA from Syracuse University. Her work has been published in the Literary Review, the Greensboro Review, Redivider, Hunger Mountain, and elsewhere.
This piece was loosely inspired by both “The Robber Bridegroom” and a sentence from Kelly Link’s Contributor’s Note from 2005’s Best American Short Stories: “Sometimes I think all good short stories function as ghost stories, in which people, themes, events that grip an individual writer occur again and again like a haunting.” This grew out of the idea that repetition—in fairy tales and in my own writing—might function as a kind of spell-casting.
RACHEL RICHARDSON is from Tulsa, Oklahoma, and currently lives in Spartanburg, South Carolina, with a large dog, a small dog, and a midsized man. “The Bear’s Wife” is one o
f fifty pieces that comprise her manuscript “STATE,” currently seeking a home.
I wanted “The Bear’s Wife” to be an amalgam of history and myth, so I borrowed the actual names of the Hatfields and McCoys and used their notorious feud as a backdrop to retell Goldilocks and the Three Bears. From there, the piece did what it wanted, and Nancy went from victim to survivor to feral bear queen. I most admire fairy tales for their brevity and resonance, and I hope “The Bear’s Wife”—though, not happily—lingers ever after in readers’ minds.
BROC ROSSELL is the author of a long poem, Festival, published by the Cleveland State Poetry Center in 2015, and co-editor of the forthcoming critical anthology ‘After’ Objectivism: Reconfiguring 21st Century Poetics and Praxis. His writing can be found in 1913, Canadian Literature, Fence, Harvard Review, jubilat, Los Angeles Review of Books, Poetry Northwest, Volt, and elsewhere. A graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop and the University of Denver, he lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, where he teaches in the Department of Cultural and Critical Studies at Emily Carr University of Art + Design.