by Unknown
Fairy tales combine aesthetics (sweetness) and ethics (darkness) in ways that frequently feel subversive to me; as a function of vernacular or folk culture and a genre derided as childish and ignorant since the early Enlightenment, fairy tales help regular people talk about power. Aesop was a freed slave, fairy tales are full of magic and pagans, and, as Zipes shows, dozens of cultures tell the same story about a handsome wolf who rapes girls.
JASMINE SAWERS, originally from Buffalo, received an MFA from Indiana University and now slings puppies in Lexington, Kentucky.
Once upon a time, there was a little girl who asked her daddy to read to her from a book of fairy tales every night. The book boasted beautiful illustrations that rollicked, haunting, across each page. The little girl with her stubby crayons wished she could merge with these images: cold queens in sleighs of ice, glittering trees in silver and gold, riches spun from cleverness. When her daddy was not there to see, she set her crayons to the pages and inserted herself into the book she loved so well, but only ever in the margins, the blankness, the white.
CECILY SCHULER is a 2016 MFA candidate at the Pratt Institute in Writing and Social Activism, in Brooklyn, New York. A 2013 Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference contributor in non-fiction, Cecily’s work has been published or is forthcoming in Ellipsis, Duende, and Fire Stories: Further Thoughts on Radically Re-thinking Mental Illness. Cecily is the current slam manager at Union Square Slam in the heart of every New York City Monday.
The vital lessons I’ve embodied from fairy tales are empathy, the complexity of both the individual and of relating, that risks can be worth taking, and what it can look like to persevere in the face of restraint, abuse, trial, and oppression.
IRA SUKRUNGRUANG is the author of the memoirs Southside Buddhist, which won the 2015 American Book Award, and Talk Thai: The Adventures of Buddhist Boy, the poetry collection In Thailand It Is Night, and a forthcoming collection of stories, The Melting Season. He is the co-editor of two anthologies on the topic of obesity: What Are You Looking At? The First Fat Fiction Anthology and Scoot Over, Skinny: The Fat Nonfiction Anthology. His work has appeared in many literary journals, including Post Road, the Sun, and Creative Nonfiction.
Because my parents are Thai immigrants, our fairy tales were not of the Grimm or Hans Christian Andersen variety. They were motivated by religion and power. I grew up in a Buddhist family, living in the southside of Chicago, and we often found ourselves afraid and alone. In my family’s fairy tales, however, we reclaimed heritage, a sense of control over our lives. Often, Buddha had superhero powers, this unique blend of Eastern philosophy and American pop culture. In my story, “Family,” I’ve created fairy tale-like characters but placed them in a world that doesn’t understand or accept who they are; all of them suffer from an identity crisis, as do most immigrant families.
KIM WELLIVER was born in Indiana, grew up in California and now lives in Utah with her husband and two daughters. Her work can be found in the Copperfield Review, 52Crime, 2Riverview, Presence, Wicked Alice, Sundress, and other publications.
I’ve loved and collected fairytales all of my life, finding their dark luminosity beguiling and endlessly fascinating. I have always considered the fairy tales we know to be but half-told tales. With “The Three Bears’ Lesser Known Names for Goldilocks,” I wanted to explore this story of trespass from the other side. How would the forest and its denizens characterize the invasion of the human element into their homes. Surely they would not find the intrusion as charmingly innocuous as we.
GABRIELLE WILLIAMS is currently attending The University of Nevada, Las Vegas for her MFA in poetry and received a BA in poetry from Columbia College Chicago. She is two-time Pushcart Prize nominee. She has also been nominated for Sundress Press Best of the Net Anthology. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in LEVELER, Ghost Ocean, Kind of a Hurricane Press, and Columbia Poetry Review.
Fairy tales often influence my writing in the form of surrealism. The imagery and language encountered in fairy tales can be mysterious, dreamlike, and at times nonsensical. I write through the lens of fantasy to communicate a nonlinear perspective on topics like tragedy, death, and loss of love.
ALLYSON YOUNG lives in Austin, Texas. Her work has appeared in Bluestockings and the Gaptoothed Madness.
The first stories I remember hearing were terrifying. They were “The Snow Queen” and “The Little Match Girl,” “La Llorona” and “Hansel and Gretel.” I am still interested in the skeletons of these fairy tales—in oral history, legends, and folklore, and especially in their re-tellings. A few of my favorite poets, Eduardo Corral and Marianne Moore, have re-told stories originally expressed by a third person narrator and breathed new life into them via diversity of perspective. I hope to achieve something similarly complicating. “Sedna” was born out of an Inuit myth—a young girl refuses several marriage proposals, clings to a kayak and has her fingers chopped off, one by one, by her father. She becomes a sea goddess, and her fingers, the first seals.
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