Fairy Tale Review: The White Issue #4

By Kate Bernheimer

“All great novels are great fairy tales,” wrote Vladimir Nabokov many years ago, and Fairy Tale Review continues to believe that all great literary works owe everything to fairy tales. In this issue you will find work represented that draws from the spectacular, old tradition of fairy tales in brilliant new ways. An increased understanding of the precise and incredible fairy-tale techniques, so wonderfully elucidated by the scholar Max Luthi, but expanded, in the aesthetic of Fairy Tale Review, to contemporary literature across the styles and genres, may help resolve the unfortunate schisms that sometimes arise between so-called mainstream and avant-garde writers and critics. In this issue you will find work across so many such borders; some of the writing refers to specific fairy tales, but much of it simply feels like a fairy tale; and how it feels like a fairy tale is through language, through form. Please spread the word that fairy tales are the newest and oldest aesthetic; and they give our lives fearful, beautiful shape. Form is fairy tale, fairy tale is form.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wayne State University Press
• Release date: Jun 10, 2015
• ISBN: 9780814341735

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.

Book preview

FAIRY TALE REVIEW

THE WHITE ISSUE

EDITOR

Kate Bernheimer

ASSISTANT EDITORS

Christopher Hellwig

Andy Johnson

Sarah McClung

WEB EDITOR

J. Johnson, DesignFarm

ADVISORY BOARD

Donald Haase, Wayne State University

Lydia Millet, Tucson, AZ

Maria Tatar, Harvard University

Marina Warner, University of Essex

Jack Zipes, University of Minnesota

COVER ART (INSIDE FRAME)

Kiki Smith, Born

COURTESY OF THE ARTIST

DESIGNER

J. Johnson, DesignFarm

LAYOUT

Meike Lenz

Tara Reeser

English Department’s Publications Unit, Illinois State University

A co-publication of Fairy Tale Review Press and The University of Alabama Press

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 © 2008 by Fairy Tale Review Press and published by the University of Alabama Press.

The White Issue (2008) 978-0-8143-4173-5

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.

Darkened rolling figures move through prisms of no color.

Hand in hand, they walk the night,

But never know each other.

Passioned pastel neon lights light up the jeweled trav’ler

Who, lost in scenes of smoke filled dreams,

Find questions, but no answers.

—The Monkees, from Daily Nightly

Performed on The Monkees, Episode No. 48, Fairytale

FAIRY TALE REVIEW

THE WHITE ISSUE

ANNOTATED TABLE OF CONTENTS

KATE BERNHEIMER

Editor’s Note

All great novels are great fairy tales, wrote Vladimir Nabokov many years ago, and FAIRY TALE REVIEW continues to believe that all great literary works owe everything to fairy tales.

IVY ALVAREZ

Auto/biography, or so I was tolde

she pickes mye foote up by the heele

dragges hir fingre padde

along myn arche

& seith unto me

thow hath a noblewoman’s foote

(tho I was but a chylde)

PHILIP BEIDLER

America’s Fairy Tale

A character tries to escape civilization by journeying into nature, where he falls asleep in the past and wakes up in the future. For that character, history becomes an unbounded present where all things are possible.

MARGO BERDESHEVSKY

Window

She hated Saint Valentine’s day. A woman in a garter belt.

And a moth who feeds on spice.

ANN FISHER-WIRTH

Variations on the Robber Bridegroom

What use, mother, the sunlight and new milk, the lambs with bobbing tails, even these violets, blue as sleep, without his body?

TONY FRIEDHOFF

Three Poems

A man becomes tied to the ground. Other than the growing of grass, there’s nothing much, but I never realized how rhythmically this can happen, and all the wild animals teaching him to dance in the movements of one who is tied to the ground, in the movements of one who is being eaten. Who is being kind here?

ARIELLE GREENBERG

Four Poems

This is the folk tale version in which you ride out to sea on the back of a turtle and it feels like moss on the backs of your teeth. You hang a clock in the sun.

You are the folk-tale virgin.

EVAN HARRIS

The Future of Despair

The future is a low stone wall obscured by mist. It runs the far end of an untended meadow that grows in weak scrubby patches, pale cover, and high tannish grass. Above the wall, mist gathers white gray, softly opaque. The stones of the wall mass, edges meeting and missing according to shape, order of placement, angle of balance. Gaps form buffers between unmatched solidities.

MC HYLAND

Bird, how beautifully you sing!

O makes a hole in the firmament & we treble through.

Under cover of high notes, the skin slips under covers. The wolf hiding.

LESLEY JENIKE

Three Enter the Dark Wood

It’s the one about the bears and their blonde:

In their many beds I left many cells

called my multiple personalities down

their faces to the sky

a slide show of cheap reference, chanteuses

orphaned by a wave of bear.

Life should have piano accompaniment—

KAMILA LIS

Two Poems

That first time I saw myself miraculous, we baked swan-fat into bread when Satan whispered, I can’t think of anything that can make me smile like you can and although you are perfect you have come too early and are here where something laughing will be shaped deliberately, ball of a palm pressed into moist clay.

ASHLEY McWATERS

Seven Poems

I weave a train its nameless tracks

late and claimless, scumbled thimble

for blessing. No owl or bright bride

I weave myself to lace, to let in air.

BARBARA JANE REYES

The Duyong Series

At midnight, the old men gather with oil lanterns aboard their fishing boats. With rosaries in hand, they stab the water with machetes. Their sons say, Do not be foolish. There are no more mermaids here. It is the crocodiles who are stealing our young ones.

TIMOTHY SCHAFFERT

The Young Widow of Barcelona

Suicide note? the minister asked, and Eve thought of music, remembering, listening for wilting notes of suicide in snippets of her late husband’s voice.

KURT SCHWITTERS

Translated by Jack Zipes

The Swineherd and the Great, Illustrious Writer

A swineherd was tending his pigs and playing his flute at the same time: Tweet, tweet, tweet, tweet, tweet, tweet, tweet.

KELLIE WELLS

Rabbit Catcher of Kingdom Come

One sudden spring, when trees and flowers, bamboozled by warmth, began budding in January, the prematurely honied air flatly refusing to chill again until late December, the town of Kingdom Come, Kansas, was beset by a plague of black-tailed jack rabbits that were not only many but jumbo, bigger than great danes they were, gargantuan rabbits, suspiciously well-fed, slavering over the zoysia, plump middles heaving, back feet long and brawny as a sailor’s forearm and ears you could fan a fainting princess with.

DARA WIER

The Wizard

At dawn and at dusk I leave the house to graze in the meadow beyond the river. There’s a trail I’ve covered with straw to follow and a convenient string of boulders I can use to make my way across the water. I sleep all through the day and work through the night.

IMANTS ZIEDONIS

Translated by Bitite Vinklers

Two Tales

The sun, like a bright golden egg, gleamed in the sky. There was life within the sun: baby chicks, all light yellow, descended to earth along the sun’s rays. Later on the chicks will strut about in other colors, but they all arrive a sunny yellow.

Contributor Notes

Acknowledgments

Announcements

EDITOR’S NOTE

Form Is Fairy Tale, Fairy Tale Is Form

All great novels are great fairy tales, wrote Vladimir Nabokov many years ago, and FAIRY TALE REVIEW continues to believe that all great literary works owe everything to fairy tales. In this issue, as with all previous issues, you will find work represented that draws from the spectacular, old tradition of fairy tales in brilliant new ways. Fairy tales. When I use this phrase, I imagine, you sense in the term a unique form we still recognize and name fairy tale even after many centuries of manipulation to its discrete techniques. The form survives these mutations—in stories, novels, poems, essays, music, and art. It is also adaptable to a diverse range of stylistic narrative modes, as evidenced in the wide array of work in this very issue. Fairy tales magnetize writers who identify themselves as realists as much as Surrealists and Dadaists and modernists and fabulists and existentialists, not to mention romance novelists and greeting card authors and tabloid headline writers. Yet in writerly conversations an appreciation of their very classical form is often sublimated to an appreciation of their obvious wild and strange moments. That many writers do celebrate the dark-fantastic cosmos of fairy tales is wonderful, but I would also like to see an increased appreciation for the artistic dexterity and diversity at hand over the centuries. I believe, along with Nabokov and others, that fairy tales work on all of us as authors and readers; they’re so ubiquitious. Yet a critical under-appreciation of the precise art of fairy tales sometimes leads to the misinterpretation of these beautifully deliberate gestures as dream-like, somnolent moments; and (like so much writing associated with women, which fairy tales undeniably are) to fairy-tale writing being considered gem-like and of small importance, unless it reaches a mass-market reader. Instead of looking at how they’ve been disparaged, however, I want to take this tiniest moment to briefly celebrate their form, which resides beautifully in flatness, abstraction, intuitive logic, and normalized magic.¹ An increased understanding of these precise and incredible fairy-tale techniques, so wonderfully elucidated by one of my heroes, the scholar Max Luthi, but expanded, in the aesthetic of FAIRY TALE REVIEW, to contemporary literature across the styles and genres, may help resolve the unfortunate schisms that sometimes arise between so-called mainstream and avant garde writers and critics. In this issue, as with every issue of FAIRY TALE REVIEW, you will find work across so many such borders; some of the writing refers to specific fairy tales, but much of it simply feels like a fairy tale; and how it feels like a fairy tale is through language, through form. With me please spread the word that fairy tales are the newest and oldest aesthetic; and they give our lives fearful, beautiful shape. Form is fairy tale, fairy tale is form. Here, I seek to give them a magical home.

Kate Bernheimer

Tuscaloosa, AL

Note

1. A vastly expanded version of this Editor’s Note, with the same title, will appear in The Writer’s Notebook (Tin House Books, 2009).

IVY ALVAREZ

Auto/biography, or so I was tolde

Mye foote

she pickes mye foote up by the heele

dragges hir fingre padde

along myn arche

& seith unto me

thow hath a noblewoman’s foote

(tho I was but a chylde)

see how hit curveth so highe

thou wylt never be poore

thou wylt never stay hiere

& by thise frekkle hiere

thou wilt travelle far

from these mowntaynes & skyes

hir naile dyde scratche myen lytel skynne

so myn foote didde curle & shrinke

lyke a worme evicted from the earthe

she dyde smile my mother’s mayde

myn owne nurse

who didde worke for hir keepe

theire is no plas to go

unless t’were

the bottom o’ the worlde I thoghte

I wolde remaine stedfast hiere

but the mayde was righte

& I was wrong

Ant hilles

‘dare never thro stonnes at ant hilles,’ I was tolde

tharto dryed mudde slops dyde rise from the grounde

theyr shadows floatynge aboven the dirte

‘dally not where dwarffes live

they’rt bolde enoghe to fynde ye

& takke ye for theyr owne

& ye wil never bene founde agayn’

Chokke

I was a sea-childe surrownded by watere

I et sea-snayles, oystres, shrimppe, prawnes, anchoffyshe & squidde,

mudfyshe, catfyshe, dogfyshe

I have swallowde a crele of fyshe

I loved moste the melkfyshe swymminge

in a brothe of ginger & herbes served with rice or potatose

but ware thou be for fyshe are fickle thynges, I was tolde

wyth bonnes that canne chokke a yonge throate

I was taughte a tricke, a four-fingerde scoope

a smale ball of rice to pushe downe & thumbe

dyslodge the bonne past tyrs, feare of chokkynge

mayhaps live to eat fyshe anothern daye

PHILIP BEIDLER

America’s Fairy Tale

A character tries to escape civilization by journeying into nature, where he falls asleep in the past and wakes up in the future. For that character, history becomes an unbounded present where all things are possible.

We know the title of this story. It is the great American fairy tale called Rip Van Winkle.