Fairy Tale Review: The Emerald Issue #10
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In the Emerald Issue, new stories, poems, essays, and artwork is inspired by the themes of "emeralds" and "Oz". In Frank L. Baum's introduction to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the author indicates that his story "aspires to being a modernized fairy tale" in opposition to the "historical" stories with all their "horrible and blood-curling incident".
Kate Bernheimer
Kate Bernheimer has been called “one of the living masters of the fairy tale” (Tin House). She is the author of a novel trilogy and the story collections Horse, Flower, Bird and How a Mother Weaned Her Girl from Fairy Tales, and the editor of four anthologies, including the World Fantasy Award winning and bestselling My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales and xo Orpheus: 50 New Myths. She is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Arizona in Tucson, where she teaches fairy tales and creative writing.
Read more from Kate Bernheimer
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Fairy Tale Review - Kate Bernheimer
FAIRY TALE REVIEW
The Emerald Issue • Tenth Anniversary
FOUNDER & EDITOR
Kate Bernheimer, University of Arizona
GUEST CO-EDITOR, THE EMERALD ISSUE
Timothy Schaffert, University of Nebraska–Lincoln
MANAGING EDITOR
Laura Miller, University of Arizona
ASSISTANT EDITORS
Thomas Mira y Lopez, Erin Zwiener
University of Arizona
ADVISORY BOARD
Donald Haase, Wayne State University
Maria Tatar, Harvard University
Jack Zipes, University of Minnesota
EDITORIAL ASSISTANTS
Katelyn Canez, Sylvia Chan, Anne Doten, Garrett Faulkner, Colin Hodgkins, Adam Kullberg
University of Arizona
ORIGINAL PRINT DESIGN
J. Johnson, DesignFarm
COVER ART (INSIDE FRAME)
Kiki Smith, Born
COURTESY OF THE ARTIST
LAYOUT
Tara Reeser
FAIRY TALE REVIEW
www.fairytalereview.com
Electronic edition © 2015 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without formal permission. Manufactured in the United States of America. Originally © 2014 by Wayne State University Press.
The Emerald Issue (2014) 978-0-8143-4179-7
FAIRY TALE REVIEW is devoted to contemporary literary fairy tales and hopes to provide an elegant and innovative venue for writers working with the aesthetics and motifs of fairy tales. How can fairy tales help us to go where it is we are going, like Jean Cocteau’s magical horse? We hope to discover. Please know that Fairy Tale Review is not devoted to any particular school of writing, but rather to original work that in its very own way is imbued with fairy tales.
Baum invented escapism without escape.
—John Updike
FAIRY TALE REVIEW
The Emerald Issue • Tenth Anniversary
ANNOTATED TABLE OF CONTENTS
KATE BERNHEIMER AND TIMOTHY SCHAFFERT
Editors’ Note
In L. Frank Baum’s introduction to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the author indicates that his story aspires to being a modernized fairy tale
in opposition to the historical
stories with all their horrible and bloodcurdling incident.
ANDREA BAKER
Excerpt from The Incredibly True Adventures of Me
CHRISTOPHER BARZAK
Dorothy, Rising
Dorothy, rising, looks out the window and gasps. There are trees out there in the open air, their roots twirling through the sky like tassels.
GRACE BAUER
The Rhetoric of Oz
At least part of what made Glenda good
was the spell she cast in speaking—
the alliterative tap dance of Toto too that touched
Dorothy’s sentimental heart and sent her
packing back to black and white Kansas.
MARTINE BELLEN
A Thousand and One Gretels: Alone in the Wood
What we’d do not to be
Alone in the wood
CARRIE BENNETT
Ghost Plants
The grandmother thought it was time to take the child to see the ghost plants so she drew an elaborate map of where they would find them deep in the forest.
ANAT BENZVI
Preface
Nevertheless—
nevertheless
the bureaucracy creates
what it could have used
but also does not like.
JAYDN DEWALD
American Fairy Tale
Dorothy tapped her heels together & woke up in Kansas again. Once, at the height of winter, I hitchhiked from Athens, Georgia, to New Brunswick, New Jersey, coughing up little blood-flecked pebbles of I don’t know what—my heart?
CATE FRICKE
Tin Girl
My mother was already passed away, and my father, having fixed the old Ford truck at last, had driven with brother Benny to the Piggly Wiggly that morning. So the house on Monroe St. contained only myself the day they came knocking to tell me that my sweetheart Nick was dead.
MOLLY GILES
Kansas
The couch glitters, the coffee table glitters, the rug glitters too. Julia pushes the vacuum cleaner around the living room, sucking up every speck of dime-store sparkle that the late afternoon sun points out to her. Fairy dust, Kari calls it.
MICHAEL HURLEY
Uses for Birds I
I.
In New Orleans
when oil leeched its way onto the Gulf shore thirty, then forty days after the spill,
they named it Earl.
ROCHELLE HURT
Dorothy Poems
Dot, you won’t know what you’re in for
here until you’re choking on it, straw-
throated, and all those mistakes
KIM KYUNG JU
Translated by Jake Levine and Jung Hi-Yeon
On the Window Someone Taps and Leaves the Night
I turned off the light and lay down in my room
on the window, someone taps and leaves
Why tonight with no light on the window
does someone knock?
Is there someone who lived here who hasn’t yet left?
CYBELE KNOWLES
Reverie
I turned from the brink
and grew very tall.
Entering a forest
I brushed with my fingers
the soft spire of every uppermost leaf.
SARAH KORTEMEIER
Expatriate
I lack this courage: to walk barefoot in a nightgown
through the grass. To stand in my own
garden and think, I planted this. Tomorrow, we will eat.
SU-YEE LIN
White Snake, Green Snake
The grass that covers the hill pricks us with two pronged seeds, dagger-like, and the path is stone and long-fingered grass. We weave through alleys with broken glass atop walls. The secret garden is a hill of tea, flowers fallen, but the haze makes the city hard to see. Next door, a pharmaceutical company, all big-barreled wind turbines and the smell of nail polish. Climb the brick well, feet on rusted rings, and feel like you’re on top of the world.
LINDSAY LUSBY
Dorothy
Be the green sky.
You are a particle in motion
reflecting tall-cloud blue
reflecting low-sun yellow.
KATIE MANNING
No Place Like
A few months after
the storm, Dorothy asked
to paint the farmhouse
emerald green.
Her aunt and uncle
chalked this up
to her head injury
KAT MEADS
Flight of the 40 Crows
In a different story . . .
The crows defy the witch.
MATTHEW MERCIER
What Margaret Hamilton Means to Me An Essay
Mother—staunch feminist, veteran of the ’80s anti-nuclear protests, a blue-ribbon Peace Mom—does not allow war toys in the house. No G. I. Joes. No model B-52 bombers. And certainly no plastic guns—not even a water pistol.
CARRIE MESSENGER
Children in the Time of Dust
Once it was dirt. It was in the ground, it was the ground, it stayed at our feet. Now we call it Dust. It’s in our hair, our eyes, our lungs, coating the house in film, whistling at the door for us to let it in. It lives in the whorls of our fingertips.
STEPHANIE NASH
After the Wind
They find her barefoot in the stubble of the cornfield, listing like a drunk, her feet bleeding and her hair dripping with the rain.
DANIEL A. OLIVAS
The Last Dream of Pánfilo Velasco
One Monday evening, as he walked home from his dreary job making things nobody needed, Pánfilo Velasco saw two coffins that floated just within his peripheral vision.
BRENDAN PARK
Seeds
All morning it smelled like rain but I continued to defer mowing my lawn. I sipped my coffee and pored over a medical journal which had been sitting on a chair in my parlor for weeks on end while incessant house calls occupied my reluctant attentions. A seventy-three-year-old man’s broken rib, a high school athlete and his jock rash, a young mother inordinately worried over her toddler’s runny stools. Only twenty-six years old and already I was the only practicing physician within miles of our humble Kansas town.
SARAH SARAI
Anxieties
What do monkeys worry about
their imaginations grown dim?
EMMA SOVICH
I Must Beg You to Restrain an Imagination Which, Having No Brains, You Have No Right to Exercise
Within Tip a girl. Some days she feels old
and tall. Some days she climbs up to look out
Tip’s left pupil.
BETH STEIDLE
From the West An Essay
That summer thirteen funnel clouds touch down in televised wheat fields. Like Japanese ghosts, pale and legless. At the diner, my mother murmurs doomsday. The waitress asks if we’re ready.
LINDSAY STERN
The Great Forgetting
On an autumn morning in Year 20, the people of Lüz awoke to find Memory reversed. Recollections of the day to come wafted into their conversation, their morning jokes. History loomed, swept of images. The future, meanwhile, fell into view.
ANCA L. SZILÁGYI
More Like Home Than Home
The sleeves of her grandmother’s overcoat dangled low in the honeyed sunlight, a fuzzed cuff brushing the little girl’s knuckles.
GABRIEL THIBODEAU
Paint Chips
I want to kill my father but know my mother will miss him, so I turn him to stone and put him in the garden. It’s quite a task to drag him across the kitchen floor—you can still see the parallel grooves cut into the hardwood, one for each of his feet. I don’t mind the work.
CAROLYN TURGEON
The Sea Witch
They call me the Sea Witch. The one the others come to for curses and cures and spells. For transformation. Sometimes, those who come to me dream of the upper world. I can give them a potion that will wrench tails apart, reveal soft skin underneath the glittering scales. But there’s a price.
LEE UPTON
Oz Aphorisms
1. When a scarecrow disappears from a post a poor family endures a hard winter.
2. A city should be most beautiful from a distance.
3. A green city is a city of many greens: jade, algae, pine needle, sofa the cat lies on, unripe star fruit, dusk over tobacco leaves, lichen, horses, fire escape mold.
KATIE WUDEL
Halves and Wholes
It may seem now like it’s been ten-thousand thousand years, but those terrifying times are not so far behind us. It was a miracle then to make it to your deathbed still attached to all the parts you were born with.
CANDICE WUEHLE
Spectrum in Black and White
Dream girl, dizzy messiah. Gingham, garland, poppy, prayer: I
wand to be a good witch but I am in the gale
ABIGAIL ZIMMER
from Fearless As I Seam
She wants me to sip. Her lips salt crusted. These nine men are stories now. She sways, dress strap sliding off shoulder.
Contributor Notes
EDITORS’ NOTE
Timothy Schaffert: In L. Frank Baum’s introduction to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the author indicates that his story aspires to being a modernized fairy tale
in opposition to the historical
stories with all their horrible and blood-curdling incident.
Modern tales don’t require a moral, he argues; therefore, children’s fiction need only entertain. And yet, what has always thrilled me about The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, from my childhood on, is its horror and mystery—not only its witches and their vicious, deadly rivalries, and all the threat lurking in Dorothy’s journey, but also in the less obvious anxieties—Dorothy is without parents, but somehow her bravery seems explained by her orphanhood, as does her maternal nature in gathering her odd collection of traveling companions. Her trusting nature is both comforting and terrifying, somehow.
Kate Bernheimer: The New York Times review of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz announced, in 1900, it will indeed be strange if there be a normal child who will not enjoy the story.
This emphasis on the normal, cheery appeal of the book strikes me as an outlandish fictional lens, but I guess it worked. For me—and I was not a normal child—this book fit right in with all of the mysterious fairy-tale books I encountered. I don’t know that I differentiated at all between it and the Andrew Lang series, the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen volumes—these were all fairy-tale collections, serial, authorless works that existed together in a whole universe. As a reader in childhood I did not wonder why the Oz books had a primary hero, Dorothy, while other books (of fairy tales) had many heroes. They were all interchangeable for me; that was their beauty. I read the series as you did—as a child hungry for adventure, mystery, and consolation. However, maybe there was a slight difference, which I’d like to pinpoint. It’s not that this was a modernized fairy tale precisely; I knew nothing of that. But I do think that the primary sensation I got from Baum’s writing, as I did from Lewis Carroll’s, was more tilted toward dread than consolation. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz scared me so much more than the Grimm fairy tales (which didn’t scare me at all)—I remember being especially distressed by an exchange about Toto, wherein Dorothy’s asked, and I paraphrase here to get the essence of this: Is that a meat dog?
The idea of a meat dog weirder to me than the Grimm Brothers’ hedgehogs and ogres; I had a meat dog. Maybe the Oz books were more representational, which I’ve always experienced as a technique laden with dread.
TS: And at the time of my first reading the tales of Grimm, Andersen, and Perrault, I hadn’t any geographical reference for them; they all seemed to take place in a vaguely ancient and distant land, where even the moral conflicts were cloudy and foreign. It seemed to me the heroes and heroines were doomed from the get-go, their tragedies predestined. But The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was close to home. Dorothy’s Kansas was just across the state line, and the Wizard’s balloon promoted a fair in Omaha. And though most of the story takes place in Oz and surrounding fantasy lands, there are agrarian influences throughout. I could see the Tin Woodsman in the scrap metal out back on my own farm, and we resorted to all sorts of scarecrow-like decoys in the garden and barns. And if I remember right, the movie played on television every spring, just before tornado season. I don’t know if all that necessarily contributed to that dread you reference (which I felt too), but it certainly sharpened the tale’s edges, and made them a bit more jagged and rusty.
KB: At the time of my first reading of the European fairy tales, they seemed close to home, very real—I grew up in a house that sat next to a woods. The Grimm tales sometimes mentioned town names (Bremen, for example) and I lived in a town called Waban, and I could imagine it in an old fairytale book. The Grimm tales made my everyday world feel more magical to me. And the setting of Kansas
had an even more abstract and mystical effect on me as a reader—Kansas
could just as easily have been Alpha Centauri.¹ I could not even imagine going somewhere like Kansas, or Oz, and that was part of the attraction. It was a place that only seemed to exist inside of a book. My mother loved the movie and even has the Andy Warhol print of the Wicked Witch hanging in our dining room. My primary memory of the movie is frantically running out of the room whenever the flying monkeys entered a scene. The movie and the book series were very disparate for me from each other. I loved Ozma of Oz and Queen Zixi of Ix so much. Did you have any favorites?
TS: The landscapes of fairy tales did feel familiar to me too, even if I couldn’t quite place them on a map. Contrarily, whenever I read anything as a child, I often pictured the story taking place in a world I’d encountered nearby—I could easily picture the baby Moses set adrift in the irrigation creek that crossed through our pasture. And somehow the Oz of the book felt less fantastical than the Oz in the movie, largely due to Denslow’s illustrations—they were a mix of grit and whimsy. In the movie, the wicked witch, with her green skin and black dress, seemed a horror-show invention, while the witch as illustrated by Denslow looked like a bedraggled carny in a thrift-shop costume—someone who might pass through your town any day of any summer, and linger until she was rustled out. The Patchwork Girl (her story was among my favorites of the Oz books) impressed me similarly (as illustrated by John Neil)—she was like no rag doll I’d ever seen, and yet if I did ever see one, she’d look exactly like that, I was certain.
KB: That is the feeling I remember getting from so many magical books as a kid—they seemed exactly as I imagined. I also loved The Patchwork Girl—really the whole series, from my favorites to my least favorites, and of course there were books in the series I was more indifferent to than others. In a way that was part of the whole adventure—that duller book is necessary, its disappointments and obstacles to the next enlightenment pretty lifelike I guess. On the whole I just wanted more. To enter Oz was like mind reading—very occult. I am re-reading the series right now along with Fairy Tale Review’s Assistant Editors, who worked so hard on this issue, as we explore connections between each volume and a discipline within the various colleges at our university for our annual Night of Fairy Tales
reading this spring. We’ve found fascinating connections to Economics, Border Studies, Philosophy, Physics, Film, Gender Studies, Literature of the Sublime. It’s amazing to revisit the whole confounding series together. We each have our own Oz, we are finding. Did you re-read the series as we gathered the work for this issue and as you completed your newest novel, The Swan Gondola, with its Baum themes?
TS: You’re much more patient with the duller
books than I’ve ever been—I’m no Oz scholar, so I’ve abandoned a few